I've known many tradcons in my life and the vast majority of them have been good friends and neighbors. I don't think I've voted for the same politicians as them even once. That's fine though. I don't require or desire total political agreement with my friends and neighbors.
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Why do I consider Peterson with listening to and talking about even though I disagree with his politics in so many ways? Because politics is not 100% of my reality. It's not a litmus test I apply for ideas to be interesting or worthwhile to explore and learn from.
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Yes I do think Peterson has ideas that are worth exploring. I consider him to be an insightful synthesizer of quite a lot of the best work in philosophy and psychology from the 19th and 20th centuries. I don't find his work to be extremely original. It's a synthesis after all.
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There's immense value in synthesizing disparate ideas from the past and finding new relationships between them. There's immense value in examining ideas to understand the history that went alongside those ideas. Peterson is good at this.
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Where do I think Peterson gets it wrong (besides his tradcon politics)? I think he has identified approximately half of what's the matter with late 20C and contemporary thought. He's correct that there's a nihilistic streak in PoMo. He's correct that Marxism is a bad idea.
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That's the half he got right. He's wrong that PoMo is necessarily Marxist. That's an accident. Those French PoMos were Marxists but it's not essential. He's wrong that PoMo language deconstruction and social constructivism are dead ends. They were revolutionary ideas.
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Our culture seems to be stuck in a dead end now though and maybe the nihilistic streak of PoMo is really partially responsible here. It really has failed to build a new foundation in the gap left by the fallout of the 20C violent conclusion to Modernism.
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Peterson's tradcon politics has given him a blindspot where he has failed to fully come to terms with the new epoch we're moving in to: technological mediation, global networking, dissolution of national culture, the rise of rhizome culture. He's pre-internet and it shows.
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That's not a reason to dismiss him as a charlatan. I think it's quite worthwhile to understand what happened in 20C, to not become ahistorical and risk repeating the tragedies of our recent past. Peterson's examination of the psychology of totalitarianism is worth listening to.
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Peterson also has a much better message for alienated and disaffected young people (and young men especially) than the alternatives. Would you rather Peterson told them to "clean their rooms" or would you rather they become NazBol proto-totalitarians? Yeah, I thought so.
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Seriously, don't throw shade on the guy who specializes in directing young men AWAY from violent totalitarian movements. Every ignorant knee-jerk leftist who conflates Peterson's tradcon-ism with "alt right neo-nazism" is making a terrible and tragic mistake. He's the opposite.
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If you've stayed with me this far, thanks for reading. Concluding words: get over your tribal political commitments and listen to the man with an open mind. He has something important to say.
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