Houston Southard
a name that looks so fake you'll care just as little to learn it's not
The Stupid Man’s Smart Man
Jordan Peterson speaks and writes in the obscurantist style that screams desperation to feign novelty. If a book appears to be about everything, it’s probably not really about anything.
What’s new in it isn’t true, and what’s true isn’t new.
People respond positively to this kind of writing because they see it as “a wondrous maze, fascinating precisely because of its often splendid lack of intelligibility.”
Obscurantism is more than a desperate attempt to feign novelty, though. It’s also a tactic for badgering readers into deference to the writer’s authority.
Nobody can be sure they are comprehending the author’s meaning, which has the effect of making the reader feel deeply inferior and in awe of the writer’s towering knowledge, knowledge that must exist on a level so much higher than that of ordinary mortals that we are incapable of even beginning to appreciate it.
His aren’t questions with answers, because they aren’t questions with meanings.
He can give people the most elementary fatherly life-advice (clean your room, stand up straight) while making it sound like Wisdom.
The harder people have to work to figure out what you’re saying, the more accomplished they’ll feel when they figure it out, and the more sophisticated he gets to appear. Everybody wins, or so they think.
Peterson’s obscurantist view on socialism role in society’s demise is a good example. As George Orwell would say:“To recoil from Socialism because so many socialists are inferior people is as absurd as refusing to travel by train because you dislike the ticket-collector’s face”
He’s popular partly because he offers adrift young men a sense of heroic purpose and offers angry young men rationalizations for their hatreds. And he is popular partly because academia and the left have failed spectacularly at helping make the world intelligible to ordinary people
“Activism is arrogant brats holding paper on sticks,” he says, a peculiar and appalling phenomenon he believes started in the 60s.
Peterson, who is apparently an alien to whom political action is an unfathomable mystery, thinks it’s been nothing but fifty years of childish virtue-signaling with disassociated statements like:“Don’t blame capitalism, the radical left, or the iniquity of your enemies. Don’t reorganize the state until you have ordered your own experience. Have some humility. If you cannot bring peace to your household, how dare you try to rule a city? … Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world”
Many lap up his lectures because he offers something resembling insight, and promises the secrets to a good life. It’s not actually insight. It’s stuff everybody already knows, dressed up in gobbledegook. But it feels like something.