Category Archives: Jordan Peterson

Jordan Peterson interviews Robert F. Kennedy jr.

The "rogue" Democratic candidate

Video here. (1 h 35 min)

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Update (24/06/2023): I heard a day or so ago that Youtube has taken the video down. Indeed it has been. No problem, see it here instead.

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Noteworthy points from Kennedy’s statements in the interview:

In the US, 70% of all newsshow adverts are from the pharmaceutical industry.

The pharma industry is a “criminal enterprise”. The 4 principal companies (he mentioned Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, Merck and another one I didn’t catch) have collectively paid $35 bn dollars in criminal damages and penalties over the past decade. For lying to doctors, defrauding regulators, falsifying science and killing hundreds of thousands of people.

Pharmaceutical drugs are the 3rd largest cause of death in the US after cancer and heart failure.

Medical journals have become vessels of the pharma industry. The Cochrane charitable organisation has been an important counter-balance to this situation. [They recently debunked the myth that masks help prevent covid.] However, Bill Gates has recently started funnelling money into them, so he’s probably going to undermine them.

Kennedy thinks he has a chance as a Democratic candidate for presidency because polls show he would fare better against Trump than Biden would. However, the trick is to get this information out to the public, because the elite that control the legacy media certainly don’t want Kennedy to win (nor do they want Trump to win).

Biden won’t want to debate. Neither will Trump on the Republican side. So Podcasts and other alternative media are the way forward.

JP has this question: The Right knows where its “pathological” limits on the fringe are, and that is e.g. Holocaust-denial, racism etc. The Left does not seem to know an equivalent limit. Where does Kennedy see the limit of politics that can be countenanced?

Kennedy side-steps the answer (a bit of a red flag for me), he says he’d rather think about building bridges than disassociating himself.

JP clarifies that he thinks the left-wing idea of “equity” (equality of outcome) is pathological.

On the subject of climate warming, Kennedy says he definitely believes its happening and that man-made CO2 and methane are significant culprits. However, he is strictly against fearmongering and top-down, tyrannical solutions. He would remove all subsidies for energy and “use the free market”.

He exudes some naivete when he says that once the wind and solar farms are set up they will deliver free energy, all that is missing is a proper grid. I think he’s surprisingly wrong here. Solar panels will have to be replaced from time to time, as will wind turbines (and both will become hazardous waste).

However, interestingly he says that he is an environmentalist not out of fear for the future but out of love for nature (that chimes with me a lot).

Regarding Ukraine he says we have trapped the Ukrainians in a supposedly humanitarian mission. All we are doing is extending the war, therefore shovelling money into the US military-industrial complex.

Jordan Peterson’s ‘anti-WEF’ upstart is inundated with WEF-associated individuals

Writes Jordan Schachtel:

Celebrity Canadian author Jordan Peterson has launched The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), a new conference that he has branded as a counterweight to the World Economic Forum’s annual Davos conference.

However, there’s one small problem with Dr Peterson’s initiative.

Many of the individuals he’s recruited to join the effort are currently or formerly associated with the WEF itself! And others who are not directly associated with Davos have a record of promoting the very same disastrous ideological dictates advanced by the WEF network.

Just as Dr Peterson was slow to the draw on Covid hysteria, he doesn’t seem to understand why advocates for human freedom dislike the World Economic Forum. Sure, Klaus Schwab and the gang are freakishly unlikeable statist sociopaths, but it is their top-down model of “governance,” coupled with their dictates upon society, that makes the WEF model so nefarious.

By seemingly copying the Davos model and rebranding it as a counter WEF initiative, the counter WEF has become just another invite-only conference of hand picked “experts,” vetted by like-minded individuals, who retain elite status within their exclusive, closed off networks.

This isn’t the path forward.

Humanity certainly doesn’t need an alternative group of mutually credentialing “experts” to dictate to humanity how they should be living their lives.

Discussing censorship on Twitter

Jordan Peterson discusses this with David Zweig

Video is here.

From the description:

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson and journalist David Zweig discuss his role in breaking the Twitter Files, government censorship in society, the extent to which lockdowns were effective, how they affected children in particular, and how one renegade church would not bow to overzealous regulation.

David Zweig is a writer and journalist, with multiple books published, such as “Invisibles” in 2014 and the upcoming “Abundance of Caution” that centers on the effects of the COVID-19 response on schools and children. He was also one of the journalists who helped break the Twitter Files, focusing on the suppression of information to the satisfaction of the U.S. government and the public health establishment.

Chapters – (0:00) Coming up (1:16) Intro (1:51) The role of the media (3:25) How Zweig joined the Twitter Files team (5:02) Parameters of the investigation (6:00) Determining relevance (9:39) Why Zweig chose to tackle lockdowns (14:13) Having solid stories turned down (18:44) Bari Weiss, willing to listen (21:53) What the suppression of voices on Twitter means (26:23) Public trust in vaccines before the pandemic (30:45) The biological parallel (33:00) Overt focus on the pathogen left us blind to the side effects of our response (35:43) “Stay in your lane” (30:42) The problem of having too many options (41:58) Why we have natural, inalienable rights (47:55) Early data that was completely ignored (49:52) Weighing risk against value (53:45) An astonishing lack of curiosity (54:40) The evidence based hierarchy: where expert opinion ranks (57:30) The censorship at Twitter exposed (1:00:25) Some censorship is not unreasonable (1:01:03) Psychology of troll behavior (1:03:09) The few can corrupt the whole (1:05:22)The job of a journalist is NOT to draw the line (1:07:26) Authoritarian information control (1:13:43) Confusing a model with actual data (1:14:52) The error in “techno-solutionism” (1:18:07) The places that stayed closed and those left outside (1:22:22) Critical well being dispensed over assumptions (1:25:10) Asking questions makes YOU the pathogen (1:27:08) Spying on church members, millions in fines (1:31:50) Rapidly diminishing returns across time (1:33:30) The truly affected are those who lost their support systems

Thinking and Thanking

Are etymologically related

Listening to a discussion led by Jordan Peterson about Exodus, I heard someone point out (they were talking about prayer) that “thinking” and “thanking” are etymologically related.

I found that confirmed in the online etymology dictionary, here and here:

Old English þencan is the causative form of the distinct Old English verb þyncan “to seem, to appear” (past tense þuhte, past participle geþuht), from Proto-Germanic *thunkjan (source also of German dünken, däuchte). Both are from PIE *tong- “to think, feel” which also is the root of thought and thank.

(PIE I assume stands for “Proto-Indo-European“.)

So, maybe the first thoughts we became aware of were thoughts of gratitude.

The Bearable Heaviness of Being

Setting the mind on the things of God

Today is Good Friday.

I’ve been reminded lately of the novel “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” by Milan Kundera. I remember reading the book and watching the film, many years ago. Trying to remember the story, I realise how unremarkable it is. A doctor in Czechoslovakia, in the then Eastern Bloc, receives a lot of favours from people so that they can get treatment earlier. He loses his job because he criticises the regime and has to work as a window-cleaner, but people still come to him for health advice. The women offer their special favours, and he takes a lot of advantage of that.

The story ends with the doctor and his wife dying in a car accident, and someone remarking: Well, they were happy together so it’s good they died together, on a trip they had both looked forward to. Or something like that.

A shallow story. A nothing story. No lesson can be drawn from it, except: Life is short, so try to have fun.

Recently I’ve been watching Jordan Peterson discussing in-depth the biblical Exodus story with a number of eminent scholars (on the pay-for-use video platform Daily Wire). It’s a mind-blowing experience. Someone there mentioned the “unbearable lightness of being”.

We live in an unbearably “light”, i.e. shallow time. People just don’t want to look at the really deep, “heavy” issues pertaining to current affairs. Even when these issues stare them in the face, such as during the Covid crisis and the war in Ukraine, they just pretend that nothing is happening. They shuffle off their thinking and responsibility to people who pretend to have authority and knowledge, even though it’s glaringly obvious that they don’t. They accept measures that are obviously harmful to them. They pretend they have never heard of something like a cost-benefit analysis. They just go along to get along, and then rationalise that they are “doing the right thing”. People thus conditioned are likely to believe other scare stories, such as those around “man-made, catastrophic and imminent climate change”.

The reason for all this is that for some generations now people in the West have been guided away from God. God showed them that, in order to live, they have to “take up their cross and follow me“. Jesus, the Son of God, said this, according to Matthew, straight after Peter exclaimed that something as terrible as Him being killed “will never happen”. Jesus severely reprimanded him, saying: “Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me. For you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man.”

Psychologists know that if we avoid looking at that what frightens us, this thing will just get bigger and worse, at least in our minds. To “get rid of it”, or overcome it, or master it, or at least not allow it to govern our lives, we need to face it. It’s terrifying and difficult. In other words: it’s “heavy”. (In German, there’s a word that in English means both heavy and difficult: “schwer”.)

If we don’t face the terror that is inescapably part of a limited life in a “fallen” world (a world full of scarcity, e.g. a scarcity of doctors; a world that breeds maliciousness), our coping mechanisms are likely to be unhealthy: Drugs, alcohol, pornography, gambling, other distractions. Meanwhile, in the background, the terror just grows.

Facing the terror full on is the mark of true power and and expression of true life. That is what Jesus did on Good Friday. If we follow Him thus, we need not be afraid. For, as Matthew wrote at the end of his account of Jesus’ time on earth, He promised: “And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”

The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship

An exciting new project arising from Jordan Peterson's ideas, arguments and presentations

It’s called ARC, alluding to Noah’s Ark and the arc of a person’s life – and maybe even to the Ark of the Covenant.

Here is their launch announcement.

Quotes from that announcement:

“New International Alliance Announces Major Conference to Enhance Global Prosperity, Challenge Declinism and Revitalize our Understanding of Human Flourishing”

“The ‘Alliance for Responsible Citizenship’ (ARC) will provide an alternative to “the claim that decline is inevitable.””

“The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) is being established as an international community with a vision for a better world where every citizen can prosper, contribute and flourish.”

The website is here. At the top, it says:

We are seeking answers to some of our day’s most fundamental questions, grounded in our core belief that everyone has intrinsic worth and something to contribute, and humanity has an extraordinary capacity for innovation and ingenuity.

Jordan Peterson presents the reason and ethos of this new organisation in a Youtube podcast. Here’s the main text of what he says in written form in full: My Vision for ARC.

Excerpts:

Despite all this good news, this undeniable progress, a shadow has emerged, an adversarial challenge to this state and process of expanding abundance; an emergent crisis of meaning and purpose. God is dead, or so the story goes, and the future is uncertain. Five centuries of ascendant reductionist Enlightenment rationality have revealed that this starkly objective world lacks all intrinsic meaning. A century and a half or more of corrosive cultural criticism has undermined our understanding of and faith in the traditions necessary to unite and guide us.

In the midst of this existential chaos, the false idol of apocalyptic ideology inevitably beckons.

We find ourselves, in consequence, inundated by a continual onslaught of ominous, demoralizing messages, most particularly in the form of environmental catastrophism; the insistence that we confront a severe and immediately pending emergency of biological destruction, causally associated with our degenerate social structures and their excess and destructive industrial production.

The narrative generating these messages, quasi-religious in its structure and intensity, paints a dismal existential picture: the individual is a rapacious, predatory, parasitical consumer; society—even the little society of the family—an oppressive, tyrannical despoiler; and nature, herself, a hapless, fragile, virginal victim.

[…]

A deep, worldwide, social, economic and environmental revolution is therefore allegedly at hand; those who dare suggest otherwise are blind, if not malevolent, and must be silenced.

The results of such theories? The consequences of such proclamations?

The increasing and increasingly compelled imposition of severe, involuntary limits to material abundance and growth; the resultant artificially-inflated prices, particularly for energy, that most truly punish the poor.

The fraying of our social fabric into a chaos of alienated polarization; simultaneously, and in predictable lockstep, the extension of reach and control over even the most private details of our lives by increasingly gigantic and centralized organizations, governmental and corporate alike.

The spread, particularly among the young, of a demoralizing and socially-divisive doubt and hopelessness.

[…]

We have therefore initiated the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), a new movement of hopeful vision, local, national and international in its aim and scope, aimed at the collective, voluntary establishment of a maximally attractive route forward. The ARC will open itself up to widespread public membership, as rapidly and extensively as is practically manageable, at as low a cost as is possible and desirable, so that everyone interested can aid in voluntarily formulating this story and strategy, and to discuss how its implementation might be encouraged.

[…]

The sheer complexity of the world, and the genuine diversity of individual ability and preference means that distributed decision-making is a necessity, not a luxury: no elite technocracy is capable of knowing best and then determining how we should all move forward as individuals and communities.

It follows from this that policy requiring compulsion, let alone force, rather than the voluntary assent of the participants, is bad policy.

We offer for the contemplation of those potentially interested in our invitation six fundamental questions, the answers to which might form the basis for a vision that is voluntarily compelling, motivating, stabilizing and uniting.

  • Vision and Story: What destiny might we envision and pursue, such that we are maximally fortified against anxiety and despair, motivated by faith and hope, and voluntarily united in our pursuit of a flourishing and abundant world?
  • Responsible Citizenship: How might we encourage individuals to reflect and to act so that they adopt full voluntary responsibility for themselves, present and future, as well as their families and communities?
  • Family and Social Fabric: How might we effectively conceptualize, value and reward the sacrificial, long-term, peaceful, child-centered intimate relationships upon which psychological integrity and social stability most fundamentally depend?
  • Free Exchange and Good Governance: How can we continue to gain from the genius of unbridled human innovation and the productive reciprocity of voluntary production and free exchange, while protecting ourselves against the tendency of successful organizations to degenerate into a state of wilfully blind and narrowly self-serving authoritarianism?
  • Energy and Resources: How do we ensure provision of the energy and other resources crucial to our shared security and opportunity in a manner that is inexpensive, reliable, safe, efficient and widely and universally accessible?
  • Environmental Stewardship: How might we properly pursue the environmental stewardship that most truly serves the needs and wants of all individuals today, tomorrow and into the foreseeable future?

Concluding words

We at ARC do not believe that humanity is necessarily and inevitably teetering on the brink of apocalyptic disaster. We do not believe that we are beings primarily motivated by lust for power and desire to dominate. We do not regard ourselves or our fellow citizens as destructive forces, living in an alien relationship to the pristine and pure natural world.

We posit, instead, that men and women of faith and decisiveness, made in the image of God, can arrange their affairs with care and attention so that abundance and opportunity could be available for all.

Those who present a vision of inevitable catastrophe in the absence of severely enforced material privation are not wise seers of the inevitable future, but forlorn prisoners of their own limited, faithless imaginations. Those who scheme to lead using terror as a motivator and force as a cudgel reveal themselves by definition unfit for the job.

We hope to encourage the development of an alternative pathway uphill, out of both tyranny and the desert, stabilizing, unifying and compelling to men and women of sound judgement and free will.

Welcome aboard the ARC.

I intent to formulate my own answers to the above questions, which I will post on the ARC website survey page and on this blog.

Covid 19 Mandates: Silencing the Opposition

Jordan Peterson speaks with Dr. Jayanta Bhattacharya

From the video description:

Dr Jordan B Peterson and Dr. Jayanta Bhattacharya discuss the complete failure of the covid 19 response, the danger of handing the reins to Fauci, the proven blacklisting of Dr. Bhattacharya and others across social media (Revealed via the Twitter Files), and the continued corruption across the board regarding the pandemic.

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is a professor at Stanford University Medical School, where he researches the health & well-being of vulnerable populations. He co-wrote the Great Barrington Declaration, a focused protection alternative to lockdowns. Dr. Bhattacharya has published over 160 peer-reviewed papers on medicine, epidemiology, health policy, and public health. He holds an M.D. and Ph.D. in economics, earned at Stanford University.

– Chapters – (0:00) Coming Up (1:18) Intro (3:09) The lie in trusting the “consensus” (6:48) Solzhenitsyn, Lenin, Stalin (8:01) The enviro-cartel: motivations (9:35) Naming names, Fauci (14:04) Presidential reminders: do you love your child? (15:05) The revolving door for regulators (18:14) Disgust as a driving factor, sins of the infected (22:09) Communal understandings (24:15) Throwing out the pandemic template (25:42) The Somerville Youth Study (27:40) Fear, propaganda, ignorance (30:22) Serious attempts to follow China’s lead (31:30) The risks that were ignored (32:50) The detriment of Covid-era schooling (35:47) First concerns over the lockdown approach (38:05) The continuing catastrophe unleashed on the poor (38:50) Swine Flu, seroprevalence studies (41:50) Serious factors and the importance of highlighting them (43:37) You can’t monetize vitamin D (44:02) Shaming the healthy and saving grandma (46:10) Refuting Jayenta’s findings, abysmal treatment, and accusations (49:50) Despite innocence, Stanford demands silence (52:28) Trauma inflicted by the forces of the mob (54:40) Nothing saves but the truth (58:11) The Great Barrington Declaration (1:04:17) Being labeled a “fringe epidemiologist” (1:07:40) Limiting the reach of the GBD (1:08:30) Protecting the public in fascist Germany (1:11:40) Silenced by intimidation, living past the risk (1:15:55) The Twitter Files: blacklisting the truth (1:19:50) Visiting Elon Musk and the Twitter headquarters (1:22:03) Zuckerberg’s offer to Fauci (1:23:00) Deposing Fauci and the vast censorship enterprise (1:25:14) Trudeau, lying to the public about MAGA conspiracies (1:27:01) The ridiculous notion that information can be harmful (1:29:30) STEM, rejecting students over their DEI stats (1:30:53) The attraction of egalitarianism, be a communist at home (1:32:55) Destruction of community and the rise of individualism (1:33:40) To the 15 leftists listening… (1:37:00) Why demonetization is such a detriment to science (1:39:50) Bhattacharya now: the Norfolk Group Document

What needs to be done

With regard to the envrionment

Make sure everyone is earning $5,000 or more per year, because then people start thinking more long-term, beyond the question: “Where do I get the next meal for myself and my family from?”

That’s the polar opposite of the spiritual condition of the public discourse in the West nowadays, which is akin to an hysterical 13-year-old, says Jordan Peterson in this 6-minute clip of a discussion with Joe Rogan.

The relationship between Christianity and feminism

Louise Perry has an unusual view of this

In a recent interview with Jordan Peterson, author Louise Perry (“The Case Against the Sexual Revolution”) and, as stated in the video description, “director of The Other Half, a new non-partisan feminist think tank, and the host of Maiden Mother Matriarch, a podcast about sexual politics”, says (prompted video):

“I have a slightly unusual view of the relationship between Christianity and feminism.” While most feminists see themselves as being in opposition to Christianity, Perry says that feminism is an “outgrowth of Christianity“, because the “fundamental idea of Christianity, which is so different from other religious traditions” is that “weakness is strength, the first shall be last, there is something valuable, rather than being despicable, about being small and vulnerable.” She thinks that feminism “completely relies on that idea, which is by no means shared by all cultures and certainly not by the ancient Roman culture from which Christianity sprung.”

In ancient Roman culture, Perry explains, the idea that a woman slave could be sexually violated simply didn’t exist. It just happened because it was perceived as “normal”.

Perry continues: “Into that came the idea of sexual equality at least on the spiritual level – and the idea that women, even slave women, who don’t have male kin, are worthy of protection.” Meaning that the community shares that responsibility of protection.

My (PwG) comment: Now that some feminists are beginning to realise that the state is not their friend and may not protect them against men (if these men claim to be women) if it suits the furtherance of the managerial class in power, this is a powerful message that churches should be amplifying.