Jordan Peterson, the Last Liberal on the Right.

The Intellectual Dark Web was an interesting sort of club while it lasted. One of the more “controversial” figures within it is Dr. Jordan Peterson, who rose to fame by resisting compelled speech legislation in Canada. This was in opposition to the trans lobby whose breadth and depth of political influence has only become even more apparent since then. He was given the typical smear and cancellation campaign. But Peterson was a clinical psychologist, and that gave him an edge over most of the people attempting to sully his name. He countered his critics with measured but passionate breakdowns of the ideas being discussed in increasingly popular videos and media appearances.

During his well attended book tour, his wife began treatment for cancer, and the combined stress of the two situations led to Dr. Peterson getting a prescription for benzodiazepines. He developed a dependency, or possibly an allergic reaction, and when he went to get off of the pills it led to a two year ordeal in and out of clinics, including a trip to a Russian treatment facility when options in the US and Canada had been exhausted. His recovery was slow but he began to put out content again as his health improved. During this period of absence his podcast continued, mostly using recordings from the book tour.

I had listened to his podcasts and lectures for a while but these particular podcasts were interesting for a different reason. During the tour Dr. Peterson would give impromptu lectures, in which he would publicly explore ideas that he had been privately working through. Some of them were repetitive because Dr. Peterson had given similar lectures on the same subject to different audiences. He often reused stories and examples in different contexts for different lectures. But in exploring the same subjects over and over one could find the re-occurring questions that motivate Dr. Peterson.

In no particular order, he is concerned with loss of meaning, especially among young men, in our modern society. Another issue he is concerned with is the rise of radical leftist movements and the historical anti-human conclusions reached by these policies in places like the Soviet Union. Despite being labeled far right by the corporate press, he has equal and passionate disdain for Nazism. He also gives considerable time to discuss differences between men and women from a psychological perspective. He discusses all these problems in both psychological terms and in the language of Jungian archetypes, often bringing discussion of mythology and the Bible into the lecture. There’s several questions Dr. Peterson repeats through his lectures as areas of concern and I will make my best effort to fairly present the problems and what I see as their mistaken conceptualization.

When does the left go too far?

Dr. Peterson appears to have already answered this question, though not in a way he appears to be satisfied with. When asking “When does the left go too far?” Dr. Peterson is largely referring to the 20^th century being replete with examples of leftist governments coming to power and immediately perpetuating genocides or mass starvation. To the surprise of useful idiots everywhere these initial purges never result in the leftist paradise. Even through modest reforms of these states mass violations of human dignity and privacy continue on. The system either collapses from economic mismanagement or, more extraordinarily, these governments simply give up as the leaders who eventually inherit such systems are themselves finding their maintenance to be too costly with none of the benefits they see other nations enjoying.

These systems can only be maintained by continual injection of capital from outside of them. The Soviet Union leveraged forced labor to sell goods to western Europe. Maoist China avoided collapse by opening itself up to western trade, keeping in place all other forms of totalitarian control except those that generate profit for the state. North Korea has starved its people to gain international aid, which only furthers the control of the state in determining who lives and who starves. It’s also found an economic partner in the newly prosperous China which maintains North Korea as a buffer state. Cuba suffered under Castro for the lifespan of the Soviet Union’s support due to its strategic value and modest reforms only began after the USSR’s collapse. Communist Vietnam has survived in much the same way as China through western trade.

Venezuela went from the richest country in South America to starvation and humanitarian crisis in less than two decades of leftist dictators. Western leftists, such as Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn had nothing but praise for Venezuela as its dictators seized private property, jailed political opposition, and disarmed the people before turning the guns of the state on protesters. Now these apologists find themselves blaming sanctions for the condition of Venezuela, if they can be forced to talk about it at all. Sanctions only deny a nation of the capital of other nations and as such condemning the sanctions alone is actually an explicit admission that such leftist systems cannot sustain high quality of life for all, no matter how prosperous the land used to be under other rulers. For these ideologues the grass is always greener, but never green enough to move there when the people are eating grass to curb their hunger pains.

These obvious states of failure have another curious phenomenon attached to them. In much of the west it is explicitly illegal to deny the Holocaust, the Ur-example of fascist genocide. Yet in the west praise for the leftist states which are far bloodier find either dismissal, or more worryingly praise. Soft power in the west always moves to diminish, deny, or defend communist genocide as necessary even after collectively reaching an order of magnitude higher death toll than can be attributed to the Holocaust. Dr. Peterson notes this as a positive, that we in the West have strictly defined bad right wing governments and that we have cultural means to put people who talk about racial superiority or ethnic cleansing in a box and ignore them. The flaw in this conception is that such conversations are indeed forbidden, but only when they come from the right. The left has enjoyed no such scrutiny for its openly genocidal takes on many issues.

Bill Ayers as the leader of the Weather Underground, was responsible for some 10,000 bombings in American cities through the 60’s and 70’s and he has never even been arrested. He once mused that if his leftist acolytes got the changes they sought they would still have to kill 20-30 million Americans before they were done. Such people wouldn’t “get with the program” and so he feigned reservations as he enthusiastically fantasized about one day killing 15-20% of the nation at the time. This is the “mentor” Barrack Obama sought to announce his bid for presidency with, making the announcement for his candidacy in the 2008 presidential election from Bill Ayers living room.

Susan Rosenberg, who had similar communist aspirations, went to prison for participating in the bombing of the United States Senate. Her sentence was commuted by Bill Clinton. She was hired by academic institutions and now sits on the boards of “charities” which help to fund groups like Black Lives Matter. Louis Farrakhan and other black civil rights leaders have famously advocated purging Jews and Whites while still being well received by the corporate press, academia, and government officials. Andrea Dworkin, the radical lesbian feminist, experienced no hiccups in her career when she declared that 90% of men should be culled, with the remainder relegated to concentration camps to be kept as breeding stock. When people insisted she was joking, she rebuked them. On social media one can be banned for disparaging any race, except White people. It is not just leftist trolls that gleefully type “Kill all white people” safe in the knowledge they won’t be punished for it either, no even members of congress and New York Times editors engage in this casual genocidal musing.

While it would be easy to dismiss this one directional morality as mere politics. There is ample evidence that something else is going on. Tied up in this discussion is Dr. Peterson’s take on how politics are informed by personality. Dr. Jonathan Haidt deserves special mention here for his work on the moral foundations of politics outlined in his book “The Righteous Mind”. In as much as the political division of right and left map to anything it appears to be far more rooted in personality rather than philosophy. This entire line of thought gets attacked by people who believe that measuring personality isn’t even possible, so it’s worth discussing the methodologies here.

The history of personality tests are admittedly sordid. In the early 20^th century they ran the gamut from being thinly veiled tests of race, party loyalty, or trivia. The famous Myers Briggs personality test was developed in the 1920’s by a sociologist and her mother. The institute that manages the test does not publish its results nor submit itself to third party double blind testing. Four axis of human personality were arbitrarily picked by the duo and they’ve been officially painting targets around wherever their arrows land ever since.

By the 1980’s however statistical analysis on large sets of data were computationally possible for the first time. In truth the technology had been around for a while, but psychology was fairly low on the hierarchy when it came to universities handing out access to expensive computers before that. The 80’s were when the resources were cheap and available enough for the social science and psychology departments to get their turn. It was the ability to do this rigorous statistical analysis that allowed psychology to add some hard data to a century of theorizing and clinical practice.

The method for investigating personality came through a fairly ingenious analysis of language. Within language are innumerable descriptors of behavior which people use to communicate the mental state or disposition of themselves and others. Whatever a persons inner life may be like we can only gauge personality by traits and actions that we notice and then describe. So several groups of independent researchers elected to do factor analysis on language to gauge the grouping of words, and hopefully by extension behavior and disposition. Subjects were given simple word association tests and asked to rate how related, unrelated, or opposite words were. It emerged that words like “tidy” and “organized” were highly correlated, words like “organized” and “agreeable” had not much correlation, and words like “organized” and “messy” had high negative correlation. This may seem obvious in any given example, but the pattern of data that emerged as every descriptor was compared to everything else proved useful.

Five clusters of words emerged, each with their own axis. The axis that held “organized” and “messy” at its opposite ends became known as conscientiousness. The other four were openness (curious v. cautious), agreeableness (friendly v. critical), neuroticism (sensitive v. confident), and extraversion (social v. solitary). With these phenomenon now having names and working definitions a huge amount of research was launched into the mutability, heritability, and developmental nature of them.

What was found is that personality largely becomes set by the age of seven, with repeated tests of the same individual rarely yielding large changes even over very long periods of time. Personality appears to be far less inherited than behaviors like alcoholism or domestic violence (even in studies done on adopted children these worrying trends still emerge). Mutability is mixed, with some traits like extraversion proving very had to change, while conscientiousness could be improved for those with low organizational skill by the strict training of habits. Various forms of psychological or physical trauma often yield significant personality changes. Psychopharmacology also began to take note of how their products produced personality changes. Some psychotropic substances have been found to bring about permanent personality changes, most notably increasing openness.

When and how personalities change is not an indictment of the idea of personality tests unless you’ve made an unnecessary assumption that human beings have some crystalline immutable nature from birth to death. Personality defined by behavior may not let you read a mind, but it gives a great deal of information on the incentives, desires, fears, and preferences that a person responds to even as those things change throughout a persons life. Social phenomenon can easily be described in these terms. The least agreeable individuals make up a decent portion of the prison population. The most agreeable individuals tend to find themselves in abusive or exploitative relationships and jobs. This nicely illustrates that the names given for these axis are just single word approximations. It’s worth remembering that a huge variety of words describe theses concepts and the clustering of the behaviors is what reveals the complex behavioral associations and interactions.

Dr. Haidts work investigated the connection between personality and political disposition. What he found is that the left is largely defined by high degrees of openness and lower levels of conscientiousness. The right is reversed for both. The right likes borders clearly defined, the left doesn’t think much of boundaries or constraints. The left is willing to try new things and explore, while the right likes to stick with what they know.

This phenomenon can be observed in the life cycle of corporations, especially in the fast paced world of silicon valley. Most companies grow slowly because most businesses are fairly well constrained by existing markets; there are lots of ways to run a restaurant badly but there are only a few bushiness models to operate one successfully. Entrepreneurship traditionally favors conservatives for this reason, they know what they have to do in an existing market and have better dispositions for executing that business plan over long time frames. But due to the rapid changes in technology, tech companies tend to work a little different.

Silicon valley tells people to iterate, fail fast, and sometimes even warns founders that an idea is too early because the tech to make it work doesn’t actually exist yet. Founders of tech companies tend to be left leaning because the environment is chaotic and uncertain while also being full of new opportunities, just the sort of domain that entices a leftist disposition. It’s not that the left pays no cost for this creativity either, as most companies fail.

However the left’s openness means they will always be willing to try again, with some of the more motivated founders in silicon valley not getting a big win until they were on their third or fourth company. But if the company succeeds and grows the founders usually desire to move on to other projects or are pushed out for not managing it well. A large well established company doesn’t need an explorer constantly crashing onto new shores. It needs a steady, and usually right leaning, hand to keep the shipping routes on time and profitable. Almost every major tech company has a story of this sort of transition occurring within its management structure. The rare men who can manage both the growth and stability arcs of a tech company’s journey are the super stars of the industry that have become common household names.

So to get back to Dr. Peterson’s question “when does the left go too far?” well the answer is never, if you ask the left. There’s a reason it has become a meme that “real communism has never been tried” and it’s because leftists actually believe that. No matter how many communist revolutions are won, no matter how many Dictatorships of the Proletariat get set up, no matter how high the body count climbs, the left will, like a monstrous gambler, always be willing to try again. When you try to constrain them to their past failures, they reject even that boundary and use word games to weasel out of the death and destruction caused. Contrarily if you tell the right wing “hey this fascism stuff is off limits” and they agree to the boundaries of your definition, they will dutifully enforce it.

It’s easy to forget, with the frequent reckless labeling of everything as Nazism these days, that accusations of fascist sympathies used to be far more common on the right than they were from the left. While left wing terrorists got pardons from the President, right wing thinkers got destroyed by National Review. Clever leftists were often able to get the conservatives to destroy their own prominent figures by slinging such fascist accusations around. A tactic they have overused to the point of parody today.

Dr. Peterson has talked about everything I’ve written here on personality. Yet his very question “when does the left go too far?” reveals a flaw in thinking. Dr. Peterson is asking a high conscientious low openness question about the establishment of boundaries to a low conscientious high openness group. A question they are dispositionally opposed to honoring. The left does not set boundaries for itself, as evidenced by the casual disregard they have for the genocidal aspiration of leftist despots contrasted with the pearl clutching accusations of fascism they make over conservative moderates.

They do not have one standard for all and are only concerned with whether or not they are enabled or resisted in their desire to push boundaries and try again. This leads to a very uncomfortable conclusion for the liberal that believes in a pluralistic society; that the excesses of the left must be defined and enforced by the right because no one else is going to do it, least of all the liberal. The right is going to have to forbid things in culture and policy, and the left is going to have to “explore” somewhere else.

This is the difference between right wing culture and liberal ones. A right wing culture still needs people to push boundaries, because the world is an ever changing environment and sometimes new modes of doing things are actual improvements on the old ways. The leftist is both attentive to and proud about defying the established boundaries that harm people. Contrarily, just because a boundary hurts, doesn’t mean the person hurt was behaving in a pro-social way, as any home invader corrected with a shotgun quickly finds out. A leftist, enabled by some measure of liberal freedom within a right wing culture will push boundaries and where their explorations expose genuine problems in need of fixing the right wing will build solutions. But in a dominant liberal culture, there are no boundaries that stand for long. Liberals, who typically value freedom more than structure, are inclined to support every group of leftists wishing to smash boundaries until the process accelerates out of control.

The place we are at now was inevitable if the liberal has to be relied upon to set boundaries for the left. If the right and left are extremes of personality disposition then the liberal represents the vast middle, and historically experiences a pull towards sympathy for the leftist complaints in the name of the dispossessed. The liberal also experiences a push away from the duties and obligations of the right’s civilizational maintenance. Some right leaning liberals take up that maintenance job though, we call them conservatives. This is appropriate since the relationship between the culture and the conservative is akin to the relationship between the owner of the factory and the maintenance team. They’re not ambitious enough to build, but necessary and useful because they keep things running for a paycheck. In any culture conservatives will always maintain whatever the boss buys, which is why in our left leaning liberal culture the conservative so reliably trails leftist demands by 5-10 years.

Donald Trump stood in front of the pride flag at the RNC, when ten years earlier the RNC were building presidential campaigns around opposing gay marriage. The conservative objects to new institutions, sure. But their complaints are easily ignored by the dominant culture and once the institutional machines are installed the conservative will start greasing the wheels and ordering replacement parts eventually. Conservatives and other liberals don’t really build, only the extremes of personality feel the drive to engage in the difficult task of creating something new. That’s not to say liberals never build. It’s simply that they require a more extreme need, whereas the right and left are always motivated by a more extreme nature to apply their fix to both minor and major problems.

The modern left likes to say the right never creates anything, because mass media has everyone overly focused on the arts and entertainment. The right largely expresses creativity in enterprise. The right wants to build useful things. Despite consuming an ever increasing variety of goods, no one on the left seems to celebrate the creativity required to make so many of them. As conservatives so frequently argue, the left complains about the amorality of enterprise by tweeting from their latest generation iPhone. That’s not to say all this entertainment and consumption are good for us as it’s pretty clear there are some bad assumptions built into the infinite growth economy, but that’s a subject for another time.

In the more right leaning culture of the 1920’s young women rebelled by bobbing their hair and wearing flapper dresses, it took to the 1950’s before wearing pants made the same change. Contrast with the very liberal 21^st century where young people on the internet have gone from an obsession with pronouns to teenage mastectomies in the name of Queer ideology in less than a decade. This is self evident in our current moment, where the leftist view on sexual mores now has children being taken to pride parades where adult men flash their genitals at them. Or on the many occasions where liberal parents have put their children into the laps of registered sex offenders at drag queen story hours. They’re now openly taking kids to stripper shows, or making kids star in them. We’ve come a long way from “consenting adults in the privacy of their own home” in a disturbingly short amount of time.

In fact some of the ways in which personality can be changed, pharmacology and psychological trauma, have if anything been weaponized to create more leftists. Anti-depressants, anti-psychotics, and anti-anxiety medication is overwhelmingly consumed by liberals and the political left. As the good doctor has pointed out himself the obsession with microaggressions, offense, and self identity found in academia and popular among therapy practitioners is designed to make people more open and neurotic. Rather than cultivating resiliency to upsetting stimuli with exposure therapy, which would push patients to being more conscientious, the entire medical industry has decided to do the exact opposite by both pills and practices.

There is no fix for all of this, argumentatively. As the good psychologist is well aware, you don’t talk someone out of their personality. Even when you can, it takes years of one on one therapy coupled with the active desire of a patient to change, which makes it a non starter for dealing with issues of personality that express themselves at the societal level. This conclusion is reputational suicide, because in the liberal discourse that Dr. Peterson occupies equality is the most sacred of cows.

Buried within the faith of equality is the notion of the blank slate, that man is both nature-less and completely mutable. People that are disposed to calling themselves classical liberals, a species of modern conservative, usually reject this blank slate conception. However for the rest of the left; left-liberals, progressives, and communists, it is very common to embrace a blank slate worldview. Dr. Peterson rejects the blank slate, yet when he transitions from talking about the personality variety of individuals to the personality distribution of groups the arguments all seem to ignore this factor. A blank slate assumption is built into the idea that you can talk a leftist into setting boundaries like a right winger.

Dr. Peterson has gotten into a great deal of trouble for saying such obvious statements as “men and women are different”. Not better or worse than each other, just different in preferences and physical constitution. The left yearns to destroy that biological boundary. Discussing the reality of the most basic of biological inequities are now off the table in what passes for leftist circles of discourse. This ongoing insanity is exposed by questions as simple as “what is a woman?” This is not a question sane cultures have to ask.

The combination of high openness and low conscientiousness means that the leftist has fun doing these things, just as much as an introvert prefers their alone time, or a disagreeable person enjoys a lively argument. This is not actually a political conversation, because politics is merely the means by which a leftist gets to transgress boundaries and deconstruct concepts. Their mirth in these endeavors is exposed daily when they pile onto the social injustice du jour, with leftists arguing in defense of every criminal, degenerate, or socially destructive act one can make a video of. Social media posts by leftists endlessly show the sheer excitement woke teachers have in confusing first graders about what a boy and girl is. Like the scorpion, this is their nature, and all that implies.

Equality demands an ideological rejection of reality. Every communist atrocity is built upon the blank slate as its foundation. When such regimes discover that, no, they actually can’t socialize men into whatever they want, the purges begin. There are boundaries and limits to men that are real. There is no way for a liberal framework that shares this equality article of faith to explore the conclusion that leftists will never stop unless they are stopped by others. A fact which is rapidly becoming apparent to every non-leftist.

That is not to say that a right wing response is guaranteed to be just. One of the consequences of liking your boundaries strongly defined is a lack of nuance. If the excesses of the left precipitates a forceful right wing response, it is unlikely to be discrete or limited. The left knows and fears this, but they have cried wolf so many times while simultaneously destroying any semblance of decent boundaries that they may not have much time before the real wolves emerge. We can no longer pretend that some kind of “national conversation” will fix large scale extremes in personality, especially as the internet allows people to self select into these extremes regardless of geographical proximity.

Who are the ordinary men?

Another topic Dr. Peterson frequently broaches is the lesson of the book “Ordinary Men”. It tells the story of German police officers near the end of World War II. The Nazi war machine was growing short staffed and so these police officers were sent into Poland to execute a plan of mass death. Many of these men were in their 30’s and 40’s and so they had lived in pre-Nazi Germany. They were not some fanatical Hitler youth. Nevertheless they did as they were told, and in no time at all these men were shooting pregnant women in the back of the head and pushing the corpses into mass graves. Some threw up, some had breakdowns, all had the ability to go home if they requested it, but none did. Through some combination of trust in their leaders and duty to each other they stuck it out and continued on with the killing of unarmed civilians.

Dr. Peterson most often presents this story as a moral lesson. That we all must maintain epistemological doubt about our own morality. That we are all ordinary men until circumstance challenges us to make a moral choice. In that regard it is a very good lesson, many modern people are not called upon to make life or death decisions and do not have to think about violence or the situations in which they would use it or abstain from it. It’s very easy to say “I would never do that” until the gun is in your hand and the weight of all your decisions and professed beliefs comes crashing down into a singular moment that may define the rest of your life. Soldiers train with their guns not just for accuracy but also to reduce the hesitancy in pulling the trigger.

Again this appears to be a question Dr. Peterson has already answered in other contexts. When discussing feminism and its effects on society he talks often about the Scandinavian models of social equality. For a long time it was assumed, by the largely leftists social scientists, that if social equality between men and women was pursued to its limit then the different proportions of men and women in various careers would evaporate. Male nurses and female engineers would realize their true selves in a utopia without bias.

That didn’t happen, as social equality increased the differences worsened. Most people pick careers based upon their disposition and interests after all, which puts things back into the realm of personality and brings with it the non-blank slate nature of men and women. Generally speaking men are more interested in things and women are more interested in people. Thus females dominated care giving, education, and social careers while males dominated manufacturing, construction, and engineering careers. Indeed, as the barrier to entry in industries were eliminated the preferences of the job seekers began to express themselves more dominantly. The social scientists had simply assumed a blank slate nature and so were precisely wrong in their prediction.

Men tend to be more risk seeking as well so they overwhelmingly take up the most dangerous jobs. Women are more risk avoidant and so are more likely to pursue economically stable jobs within the government and service economies, or they took careers that they could easily drop out of to care for children when they decide to have them. The same phenomenon creates far more male entrepreneurs than female ones. Entrepreneurship creates a small number of big winners, a few moderate successes, and many losers. Thus the male winners accumulate until there are very few women to be seen among them, while all the male losers remain entirely invisible. Since the losers are forgotten, the winners are all that is seen when comparing the outcomes over long time frames. All of this leads to vast differences in compensation. Thus the feminist boogeyman of the wage gap never really went away even though the faith in equality said it should. The social scientists still refuse to consider non-blank slate assumptions so their theories endlessly work to discover any aspect of culture or law that “tricks” women into being different from men in behavior and preference.

Broad personality differences between men and women, as well as the realities of reproduction, is what creates these different job preferences at the societal level. This same rational can be applied in reverse to the jobs themselves, in terms of who is attracted to particular jobs. Everyone is drawn to or discouraged from a career principally by their own disposition. Understanding this we can better answer “who are the ordinary men?” Well, they were all cops. Arguably, if you are a collapsing authoritarian regime cops should be one of the last groups you send to the front because your stranglehold on power is weakening. Such enforcers should stay in their domestic positions and the leadership would be motivated to send anyone else who isn’t directly contributing to the war effort. Yet when the Nazi regime needed killers on short notice they didn’t recruit school teachers and bakers, they sent cops. Cops that had been too young to fight in WWI and too far in their career to be on the battlefronts of WWII, but who found themselves as the only group left to recruit from when this murderous plan came to fruition.

It’s not as if these cops from the 1920’s were Andy Griffith either. The Wiemar Republic was tumultuous to say the least. Those police often had to enter into street fights between fascist and communist agitators armed with machine guns and other weapons of war. The poverty and economic desperation led to strikes and demonstrations. When the strikers met with police there were often body counts at the end of the day. Policing in that period of Germany had as much in common with urban warfare as it did with mere enforcement of the law. By the time the call went out for killers the only people left on the police force were the very men who had had their careers unfold in this environment. It’s not hard to imagine how many cops quit in this era, so this period created a very strong filter on an already heavily filtered profession.

This is a career where people will on a regular basis be called to engage in force and often violence against unwilling and uncooperative individuals. Even if they are part of the organization that doesn’t don’t do those tasks themselves they will have to have comradery and a sense of shared purpose with their coworkers who do. Repeated exposure to the worst elements of society further hardens these men and it is a constant struggle for police to maintain their integrity in the face of it. Most police who quit will do so in the early years of the career as the distance between whatever idealism they may have started with is shattered by contact with reality. We still struggle with these problems today as many people go about insisting that the problem of policing isn’t the police itself, just a few bad apples. Forgetting that the full aphorism is “a few bad apples spoil the bunch” and in this case it’s not even a matter of spoilage. With the wrong filters placed in police institutions it can simply be the nature of the crop that was grown.

The pandemic did a pretty decent job of conveying this reality to the last few holdouts of police reverence. Watching cops arrest pastors speaking to congregations, while the same police dutifully stood down during race riots shook a lot of conservatives of their faith in the impartiality and sense of duty they assumed modern cops possessed. The pandemic revealed the troublesome nature of disposition being tied to careers in other ways. The managerial state is composed of bureaucrats, not leaders. Leadership is about taking reasoned risks and having accountability, and as such is much better rewarded in our culture through private enterprise, sports, and, military service. Although leftist subversion is now changing the reality of even those former strongholds of demonstrated competence. Bureaucrats, above all else seek to avoid blame and socially manage their fellow bureaucrats. As often as possible they seek to outsource decision making to “experts”. Experts that occupy careers with dispositional filters as strong as that belonging to the police.

If our political class were composed of leaders they might have solicited different kinds of expertise during the pandemic, weighed the arguments and trade-off before making any decision they weren’t willing to bear the consequences of. The trade off of shutting down the economy would have had economists explaining the costs. Shutting down schools would have had education and child development experts arguing against it. Psychologists and risk assessment professionals would have debated the psychological impact of masking everyone, isolating them, and what the resultant effect would be on suicide and drug use. Medical clinicians would have concerns about how shutting down hospitals would defer treatment for other maladies and reduced screening for life threatening illnesses that don’t pause themselves just for a pandemic.

These warnings and others did go out, but the manager bureaucrats only solicited the opinions of regime courtiers who will justify anything. A number of professions edited their own criteria on these subjects in the middle of the pandemic just to conform to the narratives crafted by bureaucrats. Adversarial stances were only found on social media and rapidly censored, chastised, and condemned to exile. Thus at the beginning of the pandemic we became ruled by proxy though the pronouncements of the only experts politicians deigned to listen to; epidemiologists.

What is an epidemiologist? A doctor, who like all doctors must navigate the hurdles of academia to get the credentials necessary to do their job. Both the doctors and the academy are entirely reliant on government grants to do this research. These are doctors who rarely treat people directly. They are doctors who often have to engage in cruel animal experiments. One of the more grotesque examples of which was revealed by looking into some of the National Institute of Health’s funding experiments on beagles in Tunisia.

In these experiments young beagles were strapped to tables and had their faces locked into mesh cages where hundreds of sand flies were allowed to bite them endlessly. The researchers breed these dogs, fed them, and monitored their suffering, for science we’re told. When the beagles cries of pain became too great, the not so good doctors surgically destroyed their voice boxes so that the experiment could continue in comfortable silence for the experimenters. I was tempted to look it up and appear knowledgeable, but I honestly don’t know what these experiments actually had as their end goal. In all the conversation I saw about this story I didn’t see one single person passionately advocating for whatever benefit this research was supposed to yield, and that by itself is telling.

To give a fairer take on the animal experimentation point, I fully concede that a great deal of such medical research is begrudgingly necessary, but as the response to the beagle experiment proves there may be an extremely wide gulf between what the general public views as necessary and what a person with the disposition of an epidemiologist views as necessary. Much like the cops, even those who don’t do those experiments specifically must tolerate that kind of work among their colleagues and justify whatever involvement they have in it to themselves.

So the disposition of an epidemiologist is one who has the conscientiousness necessary to make it through the many filters of academia. A person comfortable with constantly courting regime power for funding and permission. They must be willing to go into government and academic careers that are not glamorous but very stable, so they’re not exactly enthusiastic risk takers. They are also likely to be introverted because that is often broadly true of academics but also because the job often requires long periods of time in research or mostly empty labs. For those that engage in animal experiments, they must either possess a startlingly low level of empathy, or deliberately cultivate it over many years.

If you have faith in equality you may believe that epidemiologists are just like everyone else. If I told you that we were going to let epidemiologists make decisions on policy during an epidemic that sounds reasonable, downright prudent. But if I told you we are going to let a group of introverted people, high in risk aversion, high in conscientious, high in neuroticism, low in openness, low in empathy, and let them exclusively decide whether or not everyone should be locked in their homes over an unknown level of risk for an unknown amount of time; well, the construction of the sentence explains the folly of it all by itself. There is no way the epidemiologists could have gotten it right, their choice in career was a product of their dispositions, which blinds them to all that others may see. With their new found power given to them as the designated experts they began to make their pronouncements.

Completely devoid of any discussion of risk assessment and trade offs they decreed masks were useless and then rapidly switched to say they were necessary to the point that the unmasked should face total social ostracization, and have only recently begun to admit they were wrong about that too. They shut down churches, parks, gyms, bars, restaurants, funerals, and hospital visits, excepting of course when politically powerful figures need access to those things, then they provided excuses. They scoffed at any degree of socialization being necessary for mental health or child development in the face of the strict rules they were imposing. They displayed a total lack of empathy in imposing these rules on small children who from very early on in the pandemic seemed to be virtually unaffected by the virus. This almost religious pursuit of totalizing society in response to the virus became well noted by critics. “Zero COVID” was a delusional stance that could only be maintained by fear overpowering any concern of competing trade offs more risk tolerant people are willing to consider.

Finally they displayed their utter spinelessness when political pressure mounted to justify race protests and the accompanying riots during a pandemic. 1200 epidemiologists signed their names to a letter saying that social justice alone outweighed the risk of the virus. They had no problem explicitly stating that anti-lockdown protests didn’t qualify. So your dying father in the hospital, his funeral, the welfare of your children, your business you had spent twenty years building, all of that? That could be sacrificed to a virus which by the grace of “Science” had no power to effect people looting a Target and burning down neighborhoods. The entire profession knew where the political sympathy lied and made no hesitation to genuflect to such naked abuses of power. This is not conspiracy, such coordination is naturally emergent when a shared disposition is guaranteed by selective filters. It’s no more exceptional than a crowd of sports fans cheering or groaning in unison based on which team benefited from a play.

In a baffling recent development to this sad story Boston University has announced that they have made a deadlier version of COVID in their labs, with pride. Any epidemiologist that still has some compulsion to defend their profession has to explain to the rest of society how in the hell this is supposed to help anybody, given everything we just witnessed related to this virus. The people who have designated themselves as the force that protects us from deadly viruses have a professional obsession with making viruses deadlier for a paycheck. This is perhaps the most horrific form of job security any modern profession has yet crafted for itself.

As every government eagerly demonstrated in the pandemic deadlier viruses only serve to kill innocent people while rapidly expanding government power. The idea that we must create these Frankenstein viruses in labs to analyze risks we experience from viruses of natural origins is not only dubious from first premises, but also a suicidal act of irresponsible stupidity given what we all just lived through. The entire profession of epidemiology is happy to continue to do it for more government funding. This obsession is closer in motivation and effect to that of terrorists, not respected professionals to whom policy and propriety is established by.

It is as insane to surrender all of society to the epidemiologists in an epidemic as it is to ask a car salesman whether or not you should buy a new car. But due to the nature of a society run by bureaucrats every single social and policy issue is approached with a blind benefit of the doubt offered to “experts” who are assumed to be just like anyone else when they are obviously not. Leadership is the quality necessary to differentiate between the claims of various rent-seekers, ideologues, and professionals. It is that quality which we find ourselves bereft of in the managerial state.

Owing to his health issues Dr. Peterson was not in the public eye very much during the early stages of the pandemic. However once he was in better health he started having interview style podcasts again and touched on the subject with his guests. In an interview with Michael Malice, anarchist and writer, they discussed some of the issues regarding the overreach of the state in this period and the character of government leadership that revealed itself during that time. There was a particular exchange about the nature of government leaders that is worth exploring further.

Dr. Peterson maintained that most people in government have honest intentions and, in the capacity that he has worked with them in various advisory positions, that he had found their declared motivations to be genuine. Mr. Malice maintained that politicians are psychopaths well accustomed to passing for having genuine motivations. Now the discussion amicably moved on from there, but this isn’t the first time Dr. Peterson has talked about psychopathy. He often noted in lectures that psychopaths will display anti-social behavioral characteristics as early as toddlers. He states that extremely anti-social males need to be socialized by the time they are four or five, or it seems that they don’t ever learn this particular lesson. Such individuals usually become problems for their families, make little progress in school, and start committing crimes very early in life.

This conception largely fails to explain high functioning psychopaths. Jeffery Dahmer only had a few traits as a small child that would have marked him as a problematic mind. He had an interest in animal bones that he found from dead creatures in the woods and collected them, his father encouraged the interest believing to be more of a scientific curiosity than nefarious. As a teen Dahmer started drinking, taking hidden bottles with him to school, and struggled with his attraction to men. But he was mostly known as a class clown, for pulling pranks, and being well liked. The guidance councilors attributed the eccentricities of his behavior to his troubled home life which they were aware of, but with nothing rising to the level of involving the police. His mother abused sleeping pills and was distant from the family. Dahmer was polite and smart, but had middling grades.

Three weeks after graduating high school he enticed a hitchhiker into his home by offering drinks. He smashed the hitchhiker over the head with a dumbbell and strangled him. Dahmer dissected the body in his basement, masturbated over the remains, dissolved the flesh in acid, smashed the bones with a sledgehammer, and scattered the fragments in the woods. He would go on killing for another twenty three years, accumulating seventeen victims officially, though in interviews he hinted at more.

He was even caught a few times performing other nefarious acts. For indecent exposure in 82’ he received a $50 fine. Masturbating in front of two twelve year old boys in 86’ got him a disorderly conduct conviction. Dahmer got 1 year probation and counseling for that. He then drugged and molested a 13 year old boy in 88’. Dahmer got a second degree assault charge and spent one week in jail before being let out on bail. He was later convicted for that crime in 89’ and sentenced to 12 months. While in prison Dahmer was allowed work release to keep his job at a chocolate factory, registered as a sex offender, and eventually paroled 2 months early.

Then there’s the highly disturbing incident in 91’ where a drugged, bleeding, 14 year old boy was left with Dahmer after he convinced the police that the boy was his adult boyfriend. By coincidence this boy was the brother of one of Dahmer’s earlier victims. He kept both their skulls among his trophies. It’s worth noting that the left has recently been campaigning to have those cops prosecuted all these years later. But they also campaign for the kind of sentencing leniency that allowed people like Dahmer to repeatedly commit his crimes in the first place. Activists did recently succeed in getting a Jeffery Dahmer documentary on Netflix removed from the LGBT category. So much for representation.

Dahmer is an extreme example of a disturbed mind “passing” until he was eventually caught. He wasn’t even that competent given his constant run ins with the law, which were oddly predisposed to let a repeat child predator off with such light sentences. A mind does not have to be as extreme as Dahmer’s to cause harm in a pursuit of power and domination. We know what kind of crimes some “ordinary” people can get away with for years without anyone else noticing, so what goes on in the lives of some of the not-so-ordinary people who make a career out of acquiring positions of power? Somewhere between “psychologically normal” and Jeffery Dahmer there is a spectrum of personalities that while not outright murderous are nevertheless greedy, domineering, and without empathy or remorse.

What sort of careers are such people drawn to, given their dispositions? What sort of filters exist to keep such people away from positions where real harm can be done by them through the wielding of power? Dr. Peterson’s description of the psychopath, when he talks about them, seems to only be of the low intelligence, low impulse control variety. The sort, who due to a failure of planning or understanding of consequences, are a constant problem for those around them and obviously identified as such. But what of the more competent varieties?

Psychopathy is not so strictly defined that it can be rigorously investigated like personality and the terminology has largely shifted to talking about Cluster B personality disorders instead. There are estimates that up to 5% of the population is psychopathic, but that too is a rough estimate. Just as a thought experiment let us assume that figure and say the least competent psychopaths identify themselves in obvious ways, many likely populate our prisons or get themselves killed off by constantly courting violence, so half of that estimate can be discarded. Lets say the next quartile is passing enough to find their lust for power satiated in other ways. As abusive partners, cruel bosses, and there’s enough body camera footage floating around to show that some of them are likely cops. That leaves the best passing high performer psychopaths at a little over 1% of the population.

The US has 300 million people in it. Where are these three million psychopaths? There’s only 535 people in congress. A paranoid mind understands that three million covers the leadership of most federal departments, corporations, universities, news rooms, and state governments with enough room to spare for all the guys collecting body parts in their basement too. Even if that thought experiment is wrong by an order of magnitude; what does a mere 300,000 high performing psychopaths largely hidden from society look like? Does it look like Harvey Weinstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, and Jeffery Epstein? Does it look like people who make jokes about the wars they started at the White House Correspondents Dinner? Does it look like a government and elite culture with a narcissistic worldview completely devoid of any meaningful concern for the welfare of the nation at large? Who knows? I’m just making an argument from first principles, not submitting evidence.

When the US was founded it only had 12 million people, but it also had executions for most crimes of significance and duels of honor. It’s much harder to be a psychopath when your machinations stand a reasonable chance of getting yourself hanged or having someone shoot you in a socially approved spectacle. Are the checks and balances of government formed back then sufficient to keep decent men in power now? How many lives would have been saved if such a system of justice had been applied to a man like Dahmer when he was caught violating children in public parks?

When Jeffery Dahmer was on a high school trip to Washington D.C. he allegedly called the White House and in the course of a single conversation secured a visit for himself and two friends to visit the Vice President’s office. Jim Jones and his cult were an intractable part of Southern California politics in their day. When the horror show of Jonestown was playing out leftists like Huey P. Newton and Angela Davis made supportive phone calls, telling the families trapped in Guyana to maintain their faith in Jim Jones. Those calls were made within weeks of Jones forcing his congregation of over nine hundred people, including the children, to drink poison at gunpoint.

So maybe the halls of power aren’t as well secured against disturbed minds as the good doctor hopes. Jordan Peterson warns that each of us may be the ordinary men. But I know the contents of my mind and heart better than I know that of my 300 million countrymen. We are not equal. In the dark waters of the sea of ordinary men, there be monsters.

When do you tell the truth?

This final question, is not really a question Dr. Peterson asks but rather the question he answers in the advice he often gives. In his book “12 Rules for Life” two of the sections touch on this in different ways "Tell the truth – or, at least, don't lie" and "Be precise in your speech." I won’t go into these sections in detail because once again this advice is aimed more towards individual improvement. Specifically aimed towards repairing personal relationships, avoiding self induced delusions, and with a spiritual undertone on the power of truth itself. I have no criticism in that regard.

A dedication to truth can transition from inspirational to suicidal if one is living under a totalitarian regime though. I have no doubt the good doctor would not extend to the Stasi the truth of the location of enemies of the state if he were to find himself subject to interrogations. In fact this is a core tenant of his invocation to tell the truth. If you don’t want to live in a society ruled by lies, and you have your own house in order, you should use the truth and the written word as the first weapon against a society succumbing to ideological insanity. This is also a well headed warning.

However we are no longer in civil society. The regime in most western countries has already broken down its response to every issue according to the friend-enemy distinction. Our leftist dominated governments have infinite tolerance for rioters, dangerous drug addicted vagrants, and their favorite racial martyrs. This lenience is not extended to enemies of the regime.

Kamala Harris can personally campaign for the bailout of arsonists, while trespassers invited in by police at the capitol building have been held for more than a year in solitary confinement. We are told these particular trespassers are an affront to “our democracy”. This claim was not made of the Women’s March protesters who broke into the building in 2018. Nor was it made of the leftist agitators who started fires and assaulted secret service members in Washington D.C. in May of 2020. Nor is it made of a huge variety of leftist agitators who have taken to overwhelming state legislatures for any variety of reasons. The regime excuses for contrasts like these are as endless as the undeniably selective application of the rule of law.

While police watched Kenosha burn down Kyle Rittenhouse was chased by rioters. When cornered or prone he shot three people in self defense, killing a child rapist, a domestic abuser, and wounding a man who attempted to shoot Kyle using a false surrender. Even a New York Times contributor was able to watch the ample recordings of the event a few days after they occurred and concluded that all three instances easily matched a case of self defense. Despite this, Rittenhouse’s bail was set at $2,000,000 and he was charged with multiple murder counts. A disinformation campaign was launched across corporate media to accuse Rittenhouse of being a white supremacist. This campaign was so successful that as the trial unfolded a number of liberal observers on social media were shocked to find out that not one of the people killed were black.

That same summer a caravan of Trump supporters decided to put on a parade of trucks through Portland. Aaron Danielson was among them walking the streets in a MAGA hat. He was stalked and eventually shot in the back of the head by Michael Reinhoel, a member of Antifa, with no motive beyond mere politics. Owing to the prominent black power fist tattoo on his white neck, Reinhoel was identified quickly by anons on the internet. Antifa activists assembled the next day to publicly celebrate the killing of a “fascist”. The police took three days to press charges. Despite being a wanted murderer VICE news deigned to give Reinhoel a charitable interview, before he got into a shoot out with federal agents attempting to arrest him in an apparent suicide by cop. Later that summer Democrat Congressman Jerry Nadler would tell a reporter that Antifa in Portland was a ‘myth’. Which came as a shock to the people that had been watching black clad Antifa goons continuously assault a Federal Courthouse for over a year.

In Dr. Peterson’s native Canada the Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took a knee to BLM protesters, who were upset over something that happened in America, while they destroyed Canadian statues and businesses. Earlier last year, in response to truckers protesting a vaccine mandate, he deployed mounted troops to trample old ladies and forced Canadian banks to freeze the funds of everyone involved they could identify. He called the truckers domestic terrorists, white supremacists, and Nazis as is regime custom.

One of the more baffling things for conservatives during the pandemic was when Antifa, who claims to oppose all forms of government and corporate power went full bore in defense of the vaccine mandates and lockdowns. Both of which gave government power it had never dare claim in the past and ridiculous profits for the pharmaceutical companies and online retail giants. This is only a contradiction if you believe that Antifa derives it’s behavior from principles, politics, and philosophy. The real reason they supported these things is because a sizable portion of the population, whom they regard as class enemies, opposed them. That’s it.

You made it known that you wanted bodily autonomy, so leftists moved to destroy a barrier you were establishing for your own protection. You made it known that you desired freedom, so leftists called you irresponsible while they marched and assembled publicly to tell you so. “Rules for thee, but not for me” is the only true principle the power motivated leftist operates on. Their behavior demonstrates this at every available turn, but liberals and conservatives keep arguing over their lies.

A comprehensive list of these comparisons would fill many many pages. Conservatives who still insist on complaining about “hypocrisy” at this late stage are being fairly warned by the right that they should probably be more worried about getting stood up against the wall and shot. The left does not know when to stop, they have no innate respect for rules or boundaries, and the most fringe elements of the left possess a deep and abiding hatred on anyone that might impose them. These fringe elements, unlike their ostracized right wing counterparts, find nothing but explicit support among our liberal institutions.

Leftist control of systems that maintain western civilization is nearing totality, and with it these totalitarian impulses will grow in severity and consequence. Their chief weapon in this endeavor is the endless propaganda. The bad things are not happening. The bad things are isolated. The bad things are happening and you’re racist for not liking it. The bad things already happened and there’s nothing you can do about it. In the last few years its taken an average of six months for everything concerning the malfeasance of our leftist dominated governments to go from “conspiracy theory” to cold hard fact.

Maintained throughout the propaganda is the theme that everything is normal, despite the chaos and destruction, and paradoxically that the only way to preserve our norms that matter is to hit the accelerator on every policy causing the chaos and destruction, which by the way isn’t happening. Food shortages, energy shortages, rampant crime, school failures, political persecution, manufactured financial crisis, and regime aligned corporate hegemony are our rewards for tolerating the intolerable this far. A few more years of this and the only lights left on will be the gaslights.

Whether the leftists comes by this psychopathic indifference to the harm they cause honestly or whether they cultivate it through ideological adherence will make little difference to the dead. Once you ignore the lies and look at the sum total of their behavior you can reach no other conclusion that they intend to destroy every aspect of decent society and crown themselves kings of the wastes. Dr. Peterson has observed this first hand. When news of his health troubles first arrived I’m sure he focused on the outpouring of support from his fans. He has helped a great many people with his advice and they are grateful for it. But just as loudly there was the leftist glee in his suffering. Upon his recovery many of them lamented that he hadn’t died.

These are not people who care about what is good for you on your terms. No one owes truth to their enemies, and they have declared themselves such already. “All war is based on deception” Sun Tzu wrote. The leftists understand this, which is how their philosophical leaders planned the hundred year march through institutions. They knew no group of sane people would honestly support the tyranny they seek. This deception is a core part to all their revolutionary literature from Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals” to Marcuse’s “Repressive Tolerance”.

Even the liberals who now oppose this leftward march find themselves trapped arguing about leftist philosophy and literature. Once you understand the problem has deeper and stronger roots in personality, that you will never argue the leftist out of his position, this is exposed as folly. Many of the anti-woke liberals are fearful to back down from the pointless argument with bad faith leftists, because once that step is taken they have to contend with the real problem. Leftists have cut out of liberal institutions the very procedures that would be used to peacefully expel them, and liberalism has no answer for that.

It has to be understood that at this point there is no “live and let live”. With the far left setting the social standards the transgression of boundaries becomes sport. The more the right tries to build walls, even those just for themselves, the more motivated the left is to tear them down. Whatever bonds you have with your community, your church, your family, those are just boundaries for demoralized liberals to criticize and psychopathic leftists to destroy. Nothing is sacred save their holy crusade of deconstruction and perpetual revolution. That is their nature.

Before Elon Musk took it over Dr. Peterson was banned from Twitter for saying something about Elliot Page. Everyone knows Elliot Page, the actor who played the pregnant teenage girl in the movie Juno? You’re not allowed to remember certain things about Elliot Page now that he has decreed them true about himself. In the creation of their pseudo-noble titles of pronouns and fake names the leftists have made it forbidden to talk about who and what they even are. Just as with Stalin, remembering any truth that the left demands be forgotten is severely punished by the powers that be.

If all of this sounds confusing, that’s because it is designed to be. You aren’t supposed to make sense of the nonsensical claims made about pronouns, sex, and gender because rules inhibit exploration. But pretending to have rules is great for punishing your enemies when they try to make sense of them, which is the only purpose this stuff really serves. None of these language games were designed for you to win, they exist only to punish those who refuse to submit to Queer Ideology and leftism in general. Dr. Peterson says to avoid living in a world of lies, tell the truth. We’ll a lot of people have tried telling the truth for quite a while and the lies are worse than ever, because the truth will always be a game to leftists. A game that liberals are willing to play until their own destruction by the left inevitably comes.

After the Elon Musk takeover of Twitter Dr. Peterson’s account was restored. What prevented Dr. Peterson from getting his account back was that he had to delete the “offending” tweet. Dr. Peterson believes his words matter and the leftists trivially weaponized that against him so he stayed banned rather than delete it. I hope that some day he realizes that he doesn’t owe any of these people anything, even the truth. Cast not ye pearls before swine lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you. But with the change in management he didn’t have to make that concession and returned to the platform.

I had sort of hoped that with his return Dr. Peterson might have asked Elliot Page something like “at exactly what point in your relationship did your lesbian wife decide that she wanted to be married to a straight man?” As Tony Soprano said “If you cannot defeat your enemy, annoy him.” It’s the sort of thing frog posters on the right would do, so maybe that’s beneath the good doctor. Though it does seem effective and that’s probably why so many social media platforms ban the practice in whatever way they can. The right, in its love of trolling, seems to have found that the proper way to respond to leftist language games lies in mockery. The people who disingenuously shield themselves from criticism with faux victimhood cannot endure someone confidently reminding them of their low status and how deserved it truly is. Strip the wretched sinner of his stolen cloak of virtue and lay him bare before the eyes of the Court, King, and God! Or, to put it another way, bullying works.

It’s on this subject of the right, and trolling, and anonymous culture that I run out of good things to say about Dr. Peterson. Because his return to twitter, initially celebrated by many on the right, has exposed some ugliness previously hidden. He wants to end internet anonymity, or rather segregate it into irrelevancy, and has used words such as psychopathic, narcissistic, sadistic, Machiavellian, demented, “troll demons” to describe anonymous users, repeatedly. Even tempering this characterization with an assumption on the undoubtedly huge amount of anonymous abuse he likely receives from leftist accounts, it’s very clear in these pronouncements he is just as often talking about the right, explicitly. It seems the history of leftist despots weaponizing psychology against class and political enemies is something he skipped over in his oft purported study of totalitarian societies.

This is all very odd, principally because he used to have no problem talking about the frog posters, the kekistanis, in a distant but fair tone. It actually won him a lot of benefit of the doubt from that crowd for not taking the reflexive stance of total dismissal that “respectable” people in media feel necessary to throw at them. In that podcast with Michael Malice I mentioned they discussed anonymous culture briefly without any of the above animosity. He’s also well aware of the history of anonymous and pseudonymous writing being a necessary tool against tyranny the world over, but insists that has little to do with his new found censorious demands of online expression.

That’s perhaps the most disturbing part of all this. As our society grows more leftist dominated, the revenge they seek against political detractors becomes more kinetic. Swatting, doxxing, stalking, and physical threats have been the happy domain of leftist agitators for a long time now. They even flagrantly violate federal statues to harass supreme court justices. We don’t all have book tour and Daily Wire money to shield us from the excesses of online mobs that can be summoned on short notice. But Dr. Peterson dismisses objections to his new stance with insistence that the danger of anonymous speech, which he never specifies, warrants the de-anonymization of the internet anyways. Or, again, the complete segregation of those that wish to stay anonymous.

In the light of someone making a fake video of him using AI generated audio he declared that such a thing should be prosecuted and carry a punishment of ten years in prison. Not only is this a petty tyranny in it’s own right, it seems almost blind to the world he lives in. In his home country Dr. Peterson is preparing to be dragged before a kangaroo court to strip him of his license, and for which he might be forced into a “sensitivity” re-education program in order to keep it. Does he genuinely think this is the time, or that he is in a place, where any expansion of government power should be advocated for? Where in the rank ordering of problems that exist today does “fake internet videos” fit? By my reckoning if it’s even in your top 100 you aren’t being very serious in your risk assessment.

Dr. Peterson has been called far right from the moment he opposed compelled speech, which is laughable to both him and the far right. He often describes himself as conservative, or liberal, depending on how he’s feeling. Frankly, he betrays a lot of his leftist sympathies just in how much he bloviates about setting the boundaries of his own political classification. Labels aside, he is firmly in that vast middle of Liberalism, and he may be on the right ride of that, but much of his recent behavior seems to be a deliberate desire to stake his position as the right most border of the Overton Window. He’s used the “put bad ideas in a box and ignore them” phraseology often in his lectures, but the reality is that it’s much more to do with making sure no idea outside the box of “acceptable opinion” leaks in.

Unfortunately the viable solutions to the problems society is facing may not be found in that box. The leftists have smuggled in too many concepts of their own, because several generations of liberals failed to set reasonable boundaries for them. Locking out all remaining “unacceptable” opinions at this late stage just results in the leftist system, which spent decades specifically designing an approach to undermine your liberal institutions, continuing its acquisition of power until it can destroy you. The leftists have done a real good job of making the liberal fear ideas to his right more than he fears actual gulags, even as the left enthusiastically talks about building gulags. Ideas and arguments, the domain of the intellectual, are quickly losing out to hard power that leftists have acquired in their flagrant violation of laws, procedures, and decency itself.

That’s the real problem though, for all the many things he is right about, Dr. Peterson is still an intellectual, and well earned his place in the Intellectual Dark Web. Joe Rogan, another IDW alumni, joked that it was the Intellectual Dork Web on more than one occasion and many people seemed to mock the group for Rogan’s inclusion at all given that he freely describes himself as a meathead. But historically intellectual didn’t just mean “smart guy”, it’s a class of professions. Laborers do work for money, tradesmen practice trades for money, and intellectuals express thoughts for money. As a comedian, commentator, and podcaster, Rogan earns that title as much as Peterson or any of the other members. As funny, or insightful, or useful as intellectuals are their main weakness is that, like hammers and nails, if all you have is words then every problem looks like an argument. Another very real problem that intellectuals have is a lack of loyalty and commitment.

Laborers and tradesmen are usually tied to the land. Landowners are more naturally tied as well, although in the modern age that seems to be only a lower-upper class kind of thing, since no one else can really afford land anymore. The fluidity of modern wealth has changed that reality for the mega-rich as well, who seem to have lost all of their loyalty to nation and even kin. Billionaires regularly brag about leaving their children a pittance these days, and purchase virtue with that inheritance by donating to their favorite bureaucracies instead. Which really seems like the kind of joke old money would play on new money, but that’s getting off track. On the other hand intellectuals can write their words in any cafe, or record their podcasts in any kitchen. They are only as tied to a place as they choose to be, mostly as a product of personal sentiment. Mere sentiment that’s so easily overwhelmed in the face of danger. Intellectuals make terrible leaders because they can always run. Why fight while the world still has an abundance of nice cafes?

Joe Rogan moved to Texas, and still says he would vote for Bernie “Don’t ask about Venezuela” Sanders. Dave Rubin moved to Florida. Ben Shapiro packed his operation up to Tennessee. Brett Weinstein got ran off from Evergreen University and resettled in Portland, Oregon, bless his heart. Sam Harris saved everyone the trouble of caring about where he is by destroying his moral credibility instead. Eric Weinstein held his ground for all I know, and Dr. Peterson has talked about moving, or at least his daughter has talked about them talking about moving. It doesn’t really matter. Everybody paying attention learned the lesson they needed to learn. None of these men are fighters, even the one that talks about fighting all the time only bleeds recreationally.

Intellectuals aren’t leaders, all the filters of personality and disposition they’ve built their professions and lives around could have told you that. It doesn’t matter how bad things get. It doesn’t matter if they voted for the very policies and ideas that enabled the leftist subversion of everything. They always run. The most damning thing of all is that they will endlessly advise passivity and restraint to everyone who can’t run. Despite none of the arguments working so far, they’re so certain just a few more will turn things around any day now. Such prudence is very cheaply purchased when you won’t be around for the bill collection.

We need leaders and we need fighters, the wordsmiths have been too late in recognizing the scale of the problem they helped create. Dr. Peterson often tells his audience what it means to be “good” men. He says that it doesn’t mean nice, that it means someone who is dangerous and in control of how dangerous they are. This is a laughable redefinition of good, by the good doctor. Simply look at how we use “good” in everyday language. No one says “Bill down at the office is a good guy” to mean that Bill is a killer with a heart of gold. They mean that Bill keeps his promises. Bill doesn’t rock the boat. Bill is, in fact, just a nice guy. Bill knows the difference between good and evil, and chooses good as often as he can. Unfortunately, merely choosing good is not sufficient when facing an active evil. Good men are more likely to be tricked by evil, as many liberals have. Good men often run from evil, as many intellectuals have.

The word Dr. Peterson is looking for is Righteous. It is a Righteous spirit which identifies evil, bears the moral burden of destroying it, and has the humility to atone for any wrongs committed in fulfillment of this duty. For all his discussion on religion, it’s disappointing that Dr. Peterson has the spiritual poverty to not recognize the fact that leftists do not attack religiosity because they believe it to be an “opiate of the masses”. Good men falter regardless of the various faiths they claim. Righteous men stand like pillars if given a single cause. The left subverts, deconstructs, and discourages any building of moral fortification precisely because Righteous men require it to unmake sinister works.

The right wing has been so exiled from modern discourse they struggle to identify their role, which has been hidden in plain sight of our language all this time. The men who care about the honor, decency, and dignity of their families, communities, and nations bear the Righteous spirit. The left fears this. It should. Feminine liberalism is finally getting the sense that the leftist juveniles have been playing too long and too rough, the house is destroyed, and father is coming home.

Maybe someday Dr. Peterson will tell the truth about why he turned on the anons. His only problem is that none of them care anymore. There’s another minor incident in one of his tour lectures that speaks to this moment. It’s one of the odder things to come from that series of podcasts. Dr. Peterson starts the lecture by saying he was contacted by a psychic. I’ll steal his joke and repeat it; by email, not psychically. She claimed that she had had a vision regarding Dr. Peterson. About why he was here, and what he was meant to do. The psychic told him that he was here to reawaken the divine masculine spirit. In typical Peterson fashion he added “I don’t know what to think about that”. He then moved on with his lecture. It’s the sort of thing his haters mock him for and his more recent detractors point to as an early warning sign of him cracking up.

Prophecy is a fickle thing though. In ancient stories it serves many purposes. Sometimes it exists to give the hero hope. He knows that he will face great challenges, but by prophecy and faith in the Gods he never has to doubt that he will overcome them. Other times though, prophecy is damnation, and the solemn recognition that for some men all their efforts to avoid a fate only ensures its arrival.

There are so many young men abandoned within this fallen and degenerate culture seeking out a leader. Every one that has been offered up to them eventually scorns them, cheats them, abandons them, or utterly fails them. They have learned to be discerning, patient, and cunning. If a divine masculine spirit does find them, He will not find children. Warriors with Righteous commitment are waiting for something. They know they are waiting and are frustrated by it in ways that words can barely express. There’s an ever growing tension in the background of all things, like a bow stretching to its limit accompanied by an equally ever present tightness of breath. The liberal men and women who’ve made this world, and been made weak by it, have no sense of these things. I am not psychic, but if I had to guess Dr. Peterson does not have the capacity to convince the men who have gotten their lives in order to tolerate such disorder any longer, and he knows it.