Two lengthy pieces in the NY Times have gotten a great deal of (deserved) scrutiny lately. One is the "Intellectual Dark Web" piece by Bari Weiss, the other is Nellie Bowles' profile of Jordan Peterson (and yes, Peterson is also part of the Weiss article).
I recommend reading these pieces consecutively, one right after the other, as a way of limning the broader cultural landscape before us right now, and how the tectonic plates beneath are shifting, more rapidly than the ability of most to keep balance. This is also true, of course, of the plates supporting the political landscape, and obviously there is a ton of overlap here that all of us are just beginning to get a real sense of.
One weakness of Weiss' piece is that her group is a "group" only as characterized by the squelching of free speech that they all apparently feel. (And yet they are covered extensively by the nation's longstanding newspaper of record, and here we are, out the wilderness of the blogosphere. To be fair, Weiss does acknowledge the ideological disparity among the individuals within the profiled group.)
They may commiserate over the shared terror of being disinvited to a university speaking gig, but other than that, I don't really see much similarity between most of the subjects. They are mostly theorizing on different ideas, and meet primarily at the point where they feel entitled to spread potentially noxious ideas without any sort of challenge.
Secondly, the handy "IDW" appellation bestows a "renegade" status on these people that I don't think is entirely earned. Despite the protests of some liberals, there doesn't seem to be anything particularly horrible about Peterson's thesis, although elements within are at least objectionable, and he is nothing if not a preening, insufferable douchebag.
Having said all that, they're not entirely wrong, either. The husband-and-wife academics Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying have a right to feel aggrieved at being chased out of their jobs by self-righteous campus scolds, simply for showing up to work. Sam Harris and Ayaan Hirsi Ali are not wrong in lamenting the inability of mainstream Islam to do anything about the more extreme movements within, even if they're unrealistic in expecting that they can actually do something.
(NB: You want to drive extreme, violent Islam into the ground, where it belongs? Stop using oil. Period. More specifically, if everyone gets energy-independent to a sufficient degree that fonts of Islamic extremism, especially Saudi Arabia and Nigeria, but obviously several other gross violators, are divested and disempowered, the sooner the terrorism bankroll dries up. Who the hell do you think has kept ISIS and Boko Haram and the Syrian rebel militias in business all this time?)
Peterson, due to his popularity, is clearly the most "disruptive" of the bunch, which is the way he wants it. But with that comes the most scrutiny to some of his more unfortunate tenets and phrases. There is no risk in putting forth safe bromides such as "clean your room" and "stand up straight" as rules to live by, though those specific strictures might best be imparted to a first-grader.
But Peterson's rise to popularity began with his public frustration at the type of bien pensant legal frippery that rankles culturally conservative folks, makes them feel as if they could someday be potentially compelled, under threat of legal and/or financial sanction, to indulge in the neologisms of gender pronouns and preferences. It's possible to understand the frustration and still dismiss the paranoia.
Peterson has found his audience and momentum in the wild kingdom of social media, where anything can become viral, and there are enough socially maladjusted people to resonate with and endorse even the most toxic ideas, if they arrive dressed up prettily enough. Again, some of his more obvious sentiments are harmless and incontestable, but when he starts lobbing problematic phrases such as "enforced monogamy" and "sexual redistribution", no one should be too surprised when there's pushback, especially from women who might justifiably feel like this sort of bunkum gets used by "red pill" doofi to commodify sexual mores and expectations.
There's no getting around the fact that both men and women are conditioned in this culture to objectify and commodify women's bodies. Women are programmed early on that there is always something wrong with them that needs fixing, whether it's cellulite or wrinkles or hair or breast size or any number of other things. This is supported and promoted by a multi-billion-dollar industry geared toward selling them the disease and the cure. It is self-reinforcing among women as well, as it is a cliché that women are either judging each other, or fearing that they're being judged and compared with or by other women.
(Of course, men receive some of the same conditioning, mostly revolving around their physical and sexual adequacy. But we also get cut some slack on our "dadbods" and such.)
Men are programmed to covet women's bodies and sexuality, and the longer that goes unrequited for a certain unfortunate demographic, the worse it gets for them. If you feel daring enough to peruse these various outlets for their red-pill/MRA (mens' rights)/PUA (pickup artist) musings, you might get the impression that the longer they go without female contact, the more they get the notion that that contact is being "withheld" from them.
There's a warped sense of entitlement that pervades these subreddits and assorted fora. It basically seems to boil down to some variation on these bitches won't fuck me, but they'll fuck everyone else, without managing to wonder why, and even if that assertion happened to be true, what their own role might be in all that.
This is partly the fault of the aforementioned PUA types, whose stock in trade is to use principles of NLP (neuro-linguistic programming, used by marketers to craft words and phrases to stimulate specific purchasing actions from the target) to "get" women to do what they supposedly already want to do. Apparently these tactics are easier for some of the socially-inept types than maybe embarking on a moderate regimen of diet and exercise, upgrading one's wardrobe, and just generally doing the mid-effort things that most responsible adults just do as part of life.
The real NLP is being performed on these socially inept men, by convincing them that their inability to get their entitled woman-trophy is entirely the fault of the object of their affections, for just not getting how awesome they really are or something. Someone recently tweeted that if The 40-Year-Old Virgin were made today, it would be significantly darker, and that seems ineffably true in this weird, toxic culture we find ourselves in.
Two mass killings in recent weeks (as well as others in recent years) should draw attention to the entirely foreseeable effects that this sort of asexual internet immiseration is likely to have as a logical conclusion. The idiot who mowed down a bunch of people in Toronto in his rental van was one such person, as was the kid who shot up his high school in Texas the other day, starting with a girl who had spurned his advances.
I'm not saying that Jordan Peterson is directly responsible for these people, not at all. But when he and other "deep thinkers" start tossing around (again) loaded phrases like "enforced monogamy", and talking out loud about some sort of managed approach to the distribution of sex, there shouldn't be much surprise when an already troubled individual extrapolates such concepts to their (to him, and it's always a him, isn't it?) logical conclusion.
When we talk about capitalism, we're talking about a specific mode of production, distribution, and consumption. Mathematically, it has always worked out to severe inequalities for some, even for the basic elements of life -- money, food, shelter. Let's face it, there should be no starving people, no homeless people. There is enough food produced for everyone, and there are enough empty houses to give everyone a place to live, even if some of them might have to double or triple up in some houses.
There's even enough money to go around, to a certain extent, if we're willing to crunch the raw numbers. There's at least enough to where half the world shouldn't have to live on five bucks or less per day. But the practical reality of forced total redistribution of such things has already proven to be disastrous. Churchill wasn't wrong about capitalism being the worst system, except for all the others.
Thinkers from all points on the political spectrum include sex in the list of basic essentials of life. And they should -- again, mathematically, there should be enough to go around, within the usual parameters of sexuality. For heterosexual men, the ratio should be fairly optimal, unless you're in China or India, one of those dumbass countries where they kill enough of their girl children to cause a demographic imbalance. But in the Western world, there are still more women than men.
But within those subsets, it is simply a fact of life that men with more money do better with women than men who don't have money. Obviously, more money means a better car and restaurant and opportunities. But, this has less to do with the standards that women might apply to potential suitors (contrary to the MRA guys' shared belief that chicks are gold-diggers), and more to do with the fact that success breeds success, that once you get laid a few times and see what works consistently, you simply adapt and do more of that.
It's not rocket science, people, unless you've spent too long steeping in the troubled virtual waters of pent-up sexual frustration. Because the corollary to success breeds success is that failure breeds failure. Because instead of just cleaning up a bit and hitting a singles bar, or just setting up a Tinder account to get a few easy ones out of the way and find some rhythm, they get over-committed to this idea of Saving Western Civilization One Pussy at a Time. It's just sex, guys. Stop overthinking it.
Since the odometer flipped eighteen long years ago, much has changed, and the delta has steadily increased, and it's left a lot of folks behind, and they don't know what to do about it. If they're old and white, they blame immigrants for taking all the jobs white people didn't want in the first place, and cast their lot with the insane clown posse. The disaffection of the younger crowd takes different forms, depending on their socioeconomic status, but some of it has been culminating in these incoherent episodes of rage.
There are some true things said by the IDW types, that there is a paucity of ideas in general, that there are instances of overt political correctness in our public schools that go directly against their stated principles of free expression of thought. But there is a toxicity across the spectrum in play here, yet the IDW only recognize their own oxen being gored. And they act as if the public repudiation of professional assholes like Ann Coulter and Milo Yiannopoulos, while the scumbag-in-thief wipes his ass with the US Constitution for all to see, is the ne plus ultra of high crimes against a free and open society. It's not like conservative universities (and they do exist) are known for inviting liberal guest speakers.
Most of us are old enough to recall, should we choose to do so, a variety of things that didn't used to be a problem. We can remember a time when paranoid white women didn't reflexively call the cops every time they saw a non-white person in a public place. We can remember a time when the president read books. We can remember when Christmas didn't come pre-loaded with the retarded kabuki of grown adults pretending to be persecuted for celebrating it. We can remember when watching a football game didn't constitute a political act. And on and on. Things have become very ugly very quickly, and the only question is if it is a change, or simply an unveiling of what was always there.
The delta is increasing, and there are simply some folks who can't handle it, and that manifests itself in a variety of ways. Fortunately, this class of persecuted deep thinkers is savvy enough to monetize the discontent, because if there is one constant in our endlessly changing world, it's that it is morally wrong to allow suckers to keep their money.
I recommend reading these pieces consecutively, one right after the other, as a way of limning the broader cultural landscape before us right now, and how the tectonic plates beneath are shifting, more rapidly than the ability of most to keep balance. This is also true, of course, of the plates supporting the political landscape, and obviously there is a ton of overlap here that all of us are just beginning to get a real sense of.
One weakness of Weiss' piece is that her group is a "group" only as characterized by the squelching of free speech that they all apparently feel. (And yet they are covered extensively by the nation's longstanding newspaper of record, and here we are, out the wilderness of the blogosphere. To be fair, Weiss does acknowledge the ideological disparity among the individuals within the profiled group.)
They may commiserate over the shared terror of being disinvited to a university speaking gig, but other than that, I don't really see much similarity between most of the subjects. They are mostly theorizing on different ideas, and meet primarily at the point where they feel entitled to spread potentially noxious ideas without any sort of challenge.
Secondly, the handy "IDW" appellation bestows a "renegade" status on these people that I don't think is entirely earned. Despite the protests of some liberals, there doesn't seem to be anything particularly horrible about Peterson's thesis, although elements within are at least objectionable, and he is nothing if not a preening, insufferable douchebag.
Having said all that, they're not entirely wrong, either. The husband-and-wife academics Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying have a right to feel aggrieved at being chased out of their jobs by self-righteous campus scolds, simply for showing up to work. Sam Harris and Ayaan Hirsi Ali are not wrong in lamenting the inability of mainstream Islam to do anything about the more extreme movements within, even if they're unrealistic in expecting that they can actually do something.
(NB: You want to drive extreme, violent Islam into the ground, where it belongs? Stop using oil. Period. More specifically, if everyone gets energy-independent to a sufficient degree that fonts of Islamic extremism, especially Saudi Arabia and Nigeria, but obviously several other gross violators, are divested and disempowered, the sooner the terrorism bankroll dries up. Who the hell do you think has kept ISIS and Boko Haram and the Syrian rebel militias in business all this time?)
Peterson, due to his popularity, is clearly the most "disruptive" of the bunch, which is the way he wants it. But with that comes the most scrutiny to some of his more unfortunate tenets and phrases. There is no risk in putting forth safe bromides such as "clean your room" and "stand up straight" as rules to live by, though those specific strictures might best be imparted to a first-grader.
But Peterson's rise to popularity began with his public frustration at the type of bien pensant legal frippery that rankles culturally conservative folks, makes them feel as if they could someday be potentially compelled, under threat of legal and/or financial sanction, to indulge in the neologisms of gender pronouns and preferences. It's possible to understand the frustration and still dismiss the paranoia.
Peterson has found his audience and momentum in the wild kingdom of social media, where anything can become viral, and there are enough socially maladjusted people to resonate with and endorse even the most toxic ideas, if they arrive dressed up prettily enough. Again, some of his more obvious sentiments are harmless and incontestable, but when he starts lobbing problematic phrases such as "enforced monogamy" and "sexual redistribution", no one should be too surprised when there's pushback, especially from women who might justifiably feel like this sort of bunkum gets used by "red pill" doofi to commodify sexual mores and expectations.
There's no getting around the fact that both men and women are conditioned in this culture to objectify and commodify women's bodies. Women are programmed early on that there is always something wrong with them that needs fixing, whether it's cellulite or wrinkles or hair or breast size or any number of other things. This is supported and promoted by a multi-billion-dollar industry geared toward selling them the disease and the cure. It is self-reinforcing among women as well, as it is a cliché that women are either judging each other, or fearing that they're being judged and compared with or by other women.
(Of course, men receive some of the same conditioning, mostly revolving around their physical and sexual adequacy. But we also get cut some slack on our "dadbods" and such.)
Men are programmed to covet women's bodies and sexuality, and the longer that goes unrequited for a certain unfortunate demographic, the worse it gets for them. If you feel daring enough to peruse these various outlets for their red-pill/MRA (mens' rights)/PUA (pickup artist) musings, you might get the impression that the longer they go without female contact, the more they get the notion that that contact is being "withheld" from them.
There's a warped sense of entitlement that pervades these subreddits and assorted fora. It basically seems to boil down to some variation on these bitches won't fuck me, but they'll fuck everyone else, without managing to wonder why, and even if that assertion happened to be true, what their own role might be in all that.
This is partly the fault of the aforementioned PUA types, whose stock in trade is to use principles of NLP (neuro-linguistic programming, used by marketers to craft words and phrases to stimulate specific purchasing actions from the target) to "get" women to do what they supposedly already want to do. Apparently these tactics are easier for some of the socially-inept types than maybe embarking on a moderate regimen of diet and exercise, upgrading one's wardrobe, and just generally doing the mid-effort things that most responsible adults just do as part of life.
The real NLP is being performed on these socially inept men, by convincing them that their inability to get their entitled woman-trophy is entirely the fault of the object of their affections, for just not getting how awesome they really are or something. Someone recently tweeted that if The 40-Year-Old Virgin were made today, it would be significantly darker, and that seems ineffably true in this weird, toxic culture we find ourselves in.
Two mass killings in recent weeks (as well as others in recent years) should draw attention to the entirely foreseeable effects that this sort of asexual internet immiseration is likely to have as a logical conclusion. The idiot who mowed down a bunch of people in Toronto in his rental van was one such person, as was the kid who shot up his high school in Texas the other day, starting with a girl who had spurned his advances.
I'm not saying that Jordan Peterson is directly responsible for these people, not at all. But when he and other "deep thinkers" start tossing around (again) loaded phrases like "enforced monogamy", and talking out loud about some sort of managed approach to the distribution of sex, there shouldn't be much surprise when an already troubled individual extrapolates such concepts to their (to him, and it's always a him, isn't it?) logical conclusion.
When we talk about capitalism, we're talking about a specific mode of production, distribution, and consumption. Mathematically, it has always worked out to severe inequalities for some, even for the basic elements of life -- money, food, shelter. Let's face it, there should be no starving people, no homeless people. There is enough food produced for everyone, and there are enough empty houses to give everyone a place to live, even if some of them might have to double or triple up in some houses.
There's even enough money to go around, to a certain extent, if we're willing to crunch the raw numbers. There's at least enough to where half the world shouldn't have to live on five bucks or less per day. But the practical reality of forced total redistribution of such things has already proven to be disastrous. Churchill wasn't wrong about capitalism being the worst system, except for all the others.
Thinkers from all points on the political spectrum include sex in the list of basic essentials of life. And they should -- again, mathematically, there should be enough to go around, within the usual parameters of sexuality. For heterosexual men, the ratio should be fairly optimal, unless you're in China or India, one of those dumbass countries where they kill enough of their girl children to cause a demographic imbalance. But in the Western world, there are still more women than men.
But within those subsets, it is simply a fact of life that men with more money do better with women than men who don't have money. Obviously, more money means a better car and restaurant and opportunities. But, this has less to do with the standards that women might apply to potential suitors (contrary to the MRA guys' shared belief that chicks are gold-diggers), and more to do with the fact that success breeds success, that once you get laid a few times and see what works consistently, you simply adapt and do more of that.
It's not rocket science, people, unless you've spent too long steeping in the troubled virtual waters of pent-up sexual frustration. Because the corollary to success breeds success is that failure breeds failure. Because instead of just cleaning up a bit and hitting a singles bar, or just setting up a Tinder account to get a few easy ones out of the way and find some rhythm, they get over-committed to this idea of Saving Western Civilization One Pussy at a Time. It's just sex, guys. Stop overthinking it.
Since the odometer flipped eighteen long years ago, much has changed, and the delta has steadily increased, and it's left a lot of folks behind, and they don't know what to do about it. If they're old and white, they blame immigrants for taking all the jobs white people didn't want in the first place, and cast their lot with the insane clown posse. The disaffection of the younger crowd takes different forms, depending on their socioeconomic status, but some of it has been culminating in these incoherent episodes of rage.
There are some true things said by the IDW types, that there is a paucity of ideas in general, that there are instances of overt political correctness in our public schools that go directly against their stated principles of free expression of thought. But there is a toxicity across the spectrum in play here, yet the IDW only recognize their own oxen being gored. And they act as if the public repudiation of professional assholes like Ann Coulter and Milo Yiannopoulos, while the scumbag-in-thief wipes his ass with the US Constitution for all to see, is the ne plus ultra of high crimes against a free and open society. It's not like conservative universities (and they do exist) are known for inviting liberal guest speakers.
Most of us are old enough to recall, should we choose to do so, a variety of things that didn't used to be a problem. We can remember a time when paranoid white women didn't reflexively call the cops every time they saw a non-white person in a public place. We can remember a time when the president read books. We can remember when Christmas didn't come pre-loaded with the retarded kabuki of grown adults pretending to be persecuted for celebrating it. We can remember when watching a football game didn't constitute a political act. And on and on. Things have become very ugly very quickly, and the only question is if it is a change, or simply an unveiling of what was always there.
The delta is increasing, and there are simply some folks who can't handle it, and that manifests itself in a variety of ways. Fortunately, this class of persecuted deep thinkers is savvy enough to monetize the discontent, because if there is one constant in our endlessly changing world, it's that it is morally wrong to allow suckers to keep their money.
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