When Lars texted me the other day from Spain, he brought up the U.S. presidential election by way of sending me a link to a video of the Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson. It was titled "Why Trump will win in 2020." He said our mutual friend Stefan had sent it to him. He wanted to know what I thought of it. Of course he disagreed with it, he said.
The video turns out to be from last November, made during the Democratic debates, which seems like a different era at this point. Back then Democrats were actually concerned about how Biden looked on camera!
But I never got the sense of what the title of the video was supposed to imply from its content, so there was little for me to comment on. I didn't get why Peterson thought Trump was going to win, other than a brief glimpse. I need juicier content than that, and I wouldn't expect it from Peterson. It's not his style to go out on a limb about politics.
But I appreciated that Lars wanted to discuss it. He is almost alone among anti-Trumpers that I know in being genuinely curious as to why we on our side believe and think the way we do.
As for Peterson, I was already familiar with his work. A couple years ago when I was doing my self-designed online college curriculum via Youtube videos, I added one of his courses---is 2017 Maps of Meaning course that he taught at the University of Toronto.---into my mix as an "elective" among my computer science courses.
I found the lectures interesting and thought-provoking. I was familiar with much of the underlying material regarding archetypes because of previous exposure to Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung. My late mother began reading Jung when I was in junior high school, and we would discuss Jungian ideas on the way down to visit her Jungian analyst in Boulder, so it became part of my worldview before I even became adult.
Like me, Peterson is a liberal but not a Leftist. Like me he is opposed to the current illiberal forms of Leftism that have taken over the Democratic Party. I share his strong opposition to Communism in this regard. In courses he is aware that his lectures may be the only voice speaking out against Stalinism that his students will hear during their college career. He does a great public service in this regard, as Communism is the de facto secular religion among many college faculty members now.
He's.a big fan of Dostoyevsky, and he brings him up in many of lectures in references to points he is making about sociology. One of my favorite parts of his course was his explanation of how Dostoyevsky foresaw the descent of Russia into violent insanity as it became increasingly godless in the late Nineteenth Century.
Ultimately, however, Peterson and I do not share the same worldview. Peterson is fundamentally a Nietzschean. I find a lot that is interesting in Nietzsche and aspire to read more of his works, but ultimately Peterson can't get beyond Nietzsche's critique of Christianity, which he calls devastating. You can see this tortures him, and it has left him in a place of depressed nihilism about the world.
As a side note, since I'm reading Atlas Shrugged right now, I must add that it is impossible to take Ayn Rand seriously in her claim that her only philosophic influence was Aristotle. Much of her attitude about the strength of individuals seems directly cribbed form Nietzsche. Even if she didn't read him, she lived in a world that was had been remade intellectually in his wake, and she should have known that.
Peterson often speaks in his lectures about the dangers of looking into the darkness of the abyss, lest one become overwhelmed by the monsters. Lately the news has reported that in the wake of his wife's illness, Peterson has been suffering from mental illness and has withdrawn from public life. He has been seeking treatment in clinics around the world, receiving forms of psychotropic medication. I do not know any details, so I cannot speculate on what is going on, but one cannot help but wonder if looking so hard at the monsters finally caught up to him. His many enemies delight in this, and use it as judgment against him.
When Lars sent me the video of Peterson talking about Trump, he asked me if I still thought Trump would win in November. He himself believes Trump will be finished off in the election. I told him that I was as confident as ever that Trump would win.
That Lars and I can have this kind of conversation at this moment of history is more than a little refreshing. His response to my opinion was not raging hatred but rather a suggestion of a friendly wager, which I am up for. If only it were this easy to get along with everyone.
One thing he told me that struck me as funny was his claim that despite our differences, 98% of us want the same things in the end. We just disagree about how to get there.
It's a nice sentiment, but I don't think it is true. It might be true for Lars and me, but we are both liberals (I am also a conservative, but that's not important here).
As for the wider scope in American politics, Lars's statement about how we all want the same things might have been true in the past, when we were talking about such things as the health care system, and how much government should be involved in it (an issue that I'm personally open to discussing many possible courses of action).
But at the moment, I can't help look at the Leftist illiberals on the other side and take away the idea that one of the things they want is for me and everyone like me to be dead (or to be silenced, shunned, re-educated, etc.).
I have seen more than a few videos, op-eds, and social media posts of Leftists saying they want to dismantle the United States as we know it. They want to institute a revolution that sweeps history clean of the toxic past, including Christianity, which they claim is a legacy of a racist and colonialist era.
But isn't this simply a difference in methods? Perhaps what we all are after is justice. Is the Leftists' desire to see me dead just a difference in how to get to a state of greater justice?
But I'm not sure what justice means to them, other than whatever it needs to mean at the moment, to make people feel good about going along with their goal of power. The criteria keep shifting and are often contradictory. You aren't supposed to ask too many questions about what it means. That's the essence of Post-Structuralism---the non-fixability of meaning.
We've seen this kind of drama play out repeatedly in history, as Peterson reminds us in his lectures---the quest for a Year Zero reset that removes all the ills of the past. It's a great way to create piles of human skulls.
Thinking about all this, I'm inclined to put Dostoyevsky on my reading list after I finish Ayn Rand. Or maybe Solzhenitsyn (another favorite of Peterson). It seems like a natural progression.
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