1/ I do like and agree with much of what Peterson says, but when he speaks of being a “good man” (as an aspiration for us) I think he’s lost. What does that mean? We don’t literally believe in God and haven’t for a while...philosophy doesn’t tell us the good life....
4/...and what does any of this have to do with “goodness”. Why is surviving good? I suspect he would reply, “Because that’s what we do as animals.” He’s then open to the usually questions, if we’re just survival & reproduction machines doing what’s expedient to survive...
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5/...what’s wrong with killing yourself once your children have grown, what’s wrong with genocide, if it’s expedient for your survival? The state, armed with nuclear weapons, is primed to do this. And that is the lawful order he supports...
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6/...that is not necessarily bad. I’m not saying we should reject his thought because it leads to these conclusions. But I get the impression that’s not the type of conclusion he’s reaching for with “good”, even though that’s where it goes...
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7/...I think what he means by “good” is sort of what a wish washy Church of England vicar means, effectively being nice and polite to people and everyone getting along—though sometimes we’re a bit rough (not as ruff as those awful Russkies & Nazis though).
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8/ And here the left (and the hard right) have a point. What is this “awfully nice” liberal, Church of England sort of system based on? Well, it’s based on what every system is based on in human history: mass murder, military expansion, etc.
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9/ Now the left says, we’re fine with the mass murder but we want a different set of people in charge. And we reckon if we kill enuff people we’ll never have mass murder again (untrue). The hard right says, it’ll always be mass murder. Protect your own...
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10/...and the Devil take the hindmost. It really is liberals like Peterson who are stuck, as Marxists rightly point out, as hypocrites saying, “No, no. We work by dialogue and laws and being decent and we make little improvements.” But liberals, from Iraq back to British India...
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11/...have always used the murderours and grotesque methods human societies have always used. Taken as a whole, it’s not even clear that liberal capitalism and her empires didn’t kill as many as Nazi Germany and the USSR.
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12/...when Peterson says that hierarchies of a liberal meritcoratic sort have led to great improvements in living stands etc., he is not different to the Soviet commissar saying that industrialisation and electrification was worth a few million deaths.
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13/ My point is that liberalism is inconsistent and ultimately cannot defend itself against the left, which is why...you get fascism which is, to an extent, classical liberalism in a state of emergency.
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14/ It’s only the non-liberal left and the hard right who are consistent in this matter, although the left promises what it cannot deliver (an end to all murderousness).
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End of conversation
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