New Leftist Arguments to Use Against Jordan Peterson, a Leading Lion of the Right
Turning the pincer-like attacks of Jordan Peterson, a contemporary conservative critic, into petty verbal blather
By
David Gottfried
Jordan Peterson is one of the strongest and brightest critics of the Left. In this essay, I will prove that two of his points are dead wrong. As such, this document should be a shot in the arm for leftist polemics.
Jordan Peterson is a brilliant man. His psychological insights are nothing short of dazzling. However, his political ideas, which tend to be stridently conservative, are often quite amiss. I suspect that this is because he is a clinical psychologist, is not acquainted with the rough and tumble of business, and has an altogether too prettified and sanitized conception of what making money usually entails.
This essay will skewer and slay these fictitious teachings:
1) Peterson alleges that Leftists don’t care about the poor and oppressed and only hate the rich.
Peterson has said that leftists do not really care about the downtrodden. He says that their concern has to be affected and bogus because, he falsely alleges, most leftists did not care about Stalin’s victims. Among other things, he assumes that every fault of Stalin was a consequence of communism. A brighter historian would realize that if Stalin was brutal, it was because he was following in the footsteps of Tzar Ivan the Terrible and other Russians and Mongols and had little to do with communism (Footnote 1).
Peterson can’t cite anything Leftists did to prove his point, i.e., he can’t cite anything leftists did or said which evinced hostility to the poor and oppressed. Instead, he can only cite the omission of leftists, to wit, their failure to criticize Stalin for his alleged liquidation of many people.
Although Peterson cannot prove anything regarding the attitude of Leftists toward the poor, we can cite many things right wingers did which establishes that they often sadistically celebrate the plight of the poor and oppressed:
1) At the 1964 Republican convention, Ronald Reagan gave a speech in which he mocked the prior administration, the administration of John F. Kennedy, for voicing concern about hunger in America. (And John F. Kennedy had been killed less than a year before the 1964 republican convention.) Reagan said that of course millions of Americans went to bed hungry; they were on a diet. At this convention, right wing sadists got their political cheap thrills by mocking both the assassination of President Kennedy and hungry people in America.
2) In the early sixties, student chapters of America’s ultra conservative John Birch society hosted parties in which they deliberately and literally wasted lots of food, having epic food fights, to show that they did not care about hunger in America.
3) John Chancellor of NBC reported that at the 1964 Republican convention more than ten Republican delegates accosted a black delegate by putting out their cigarettes on the lapel of his suit jacket. The 1964 Republican convention was, of course, a convention that belonged to Dixie as its Presidential nominee, Barry Goldwater, opposed the 1964 civil rights act. The delegates to the convention, gleeful that they had taken a stand on behalf of states’ rights and fascism, just couldn’t resist assaulting a black man.
4) In the early sixties, William Buckley, the intellectual dean of American conservatism and a man reputed to possess discretion and tact, wrote that if the fight against communism led to global nuclear annihilation, it was a price we had to pay. Of course, a nuclear holocaust will kill lots of people and that evinces conservatism’s carefree attitude toward degradation and death.
5) In the early 60’s, General Curtis E. Lemay said that he wanted to bomb Vietnam back into the stone age. Vietnam never attacked the United States. Obviously, he was a man who obtained joy from the suffering of a poor and put upon populace that had almost no industry and were, for the most part, struggling rise farmers.
6) In her autobiography, one of the Reagan children wrote that on the night John F Kennedy was killed, her parents, Nancy and Ronald Reagan, hosted a party at their luxurious California mansion.
(For many years, right wingers have bemoaned the alleged excesses of leftists in the late sixties. Did it every occur to those bigoted Neanderthals that if we were enraged, it was, in part, a reaction to the Nazified attitudes of American right wingers in the early 60’s, an attitude that culminated in the contempt that right wingers happily exhibited when John F Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were taken from us.)
7) In the Nazi Holocaust, German sadists under the command of Dr. Mengele routinely butchered genitals and put bugs in victims’ eye sockets which they would then promptly sew-up. They used human pelvises as ashtrays and human skin to make lampshades. When they killed Jews, they did not do it because they thought those poor Jews were a threat to their power; they mutilated and murdered because it gave them sheer, unbounded joy.
8) In 1944 or thereabouts, a Congressman from Brooklyn, New York, Emmanuel Celler, pleaded to allow a Jewish couple, trapped in Europe, to enter the United States. Congressman Celler noted that both of their sons were in the United States military and serving overseas. He was shouted down by Congressmen who got a hearty laugh calling Jewish refugees, on their way to death camps, “refujews.” Those miserable Congressman who heckled Mr. Celler obviously obtained sadistic joy from the annihilation of the Jews.
Mr. Peterson, are you ready to concede that right wingers obtain sadistic joy from witnessing and inducing pain and suffering in poor and oppressed people.
2) Mr. Peterson has also said that inequality cannot be avoided and is perfectly natural.
(That which is natural pertains to that which exists in the state of nature, or that which exists without manmade innovations or discoveries. In the state of nature, a huge proportion of infants die of infectious diseases, many people are killed by droughts, famines and crop diseases and most people don’t have to worry about growing old because they’ll die long before they are fifty. Ergo, we must conclude that that which is natural is not necessarily good, and the alleged naturalness of inequality does not make it good.)
Peterson contends that brighter people will tend to produce more and hence earn more money. It is only fair that they make more money because they have contributed more to society.
To an extent, his allegations have some merit. After all, studies show that there is a positive correlation between IQ and income.
However, for many, many reasons discrepancies in wealth often have nothing to do with merit:
A) Wealth is often amassed by fraud. Of course, if a scientist synthesizes a compound that will fight a deadly disease, his uncommon merit warrants an uncommonly high income.
(However, very often scientists who make great discoveries don’t get shit. For example, AZT, the first compound which was able to inhibit the replication of HIV, was invented by a government scientist, in 1964, who was looking for a drug to combat cancer. The drug did not fight cancer but proved helpful in extending the lives of AIDs patients. To cut to the chase: The scientist who invented AZT received no special compensation. However, Burroughs Welcome was given the patent on AZT even though all they did was round-up guinea pigs for the clinical trials. And there’s more: Burroughs Welcome recommended an excessive dose, which caused severe neurological side effects, because a bigger does meant the sale of more AZT, and more income for Burroughs Welcome, which, as I said, hadn’t even invented the drug.)
However, as the immediately preceding parenthetical interlude establishes, very often the talented guy responsible for a valuable innovation often gets nothing. Instead, some shifty eyed son of a bitch “gray-suited grafter” (This alliterative phrase comes courtesy of a 1968 Rolling Stones Song entitled “Salt of the Earth.”) is laughing all the way to the bank.
Of course, most of the time people make money not because of useful innovations but because of chicanery and practices that should be considered illegal. For example, Wall Street condones practices, that the law generally considers illegal, and these practices have brought about at least one of the biggest crashes wall street ever endured.
Let me specific: It is illegal for me to buy fire insurance on Joe’s home. If I were to do so, I would have an incentive to burn Joe’s house down.
However, this logic doesn’t apply in the crime-condoning world of wall street. For example, how do you think the great recession of 2008 came about?
People often bought what were known as credit default swaps. These were financial instruments which enabled them to make a killing if large numbers of investors defaulted on their mortgages. More specifically, they bet that many home buyers who had obtained sub-prime mortgages (or mortgages given to people with less than stellar credit ratings) would default on their mortgages. To increase the possibility that they would default on their mortgages, they used their financial coconspirators to insert, in mortgage contracts, clauses which provided that the debt had to be paid faster if a payment was missed and other onerous clauses that would ensure that defaults would spiral out of control. Many sub prime mortgages failed and the financial hoodlums on wall street made a mint. While making a mint, they pushed the real estate market into a recession, and this led to the greatest economic contraction since the 30’s.
The banksters at Goldman Sachs, one of the biggest financial hoodlums on the street and the source of so many United States Treasury Secretaries, are very talented, and I am sure they would obtain very high scores on IQ tests. According to Peterson, their talent justifies their lavish wealth. But what are they using their genius for. Hitler, for Christ’s sake, was a genius at seducing the German people, conquering half the world and committing mass murder. I have little doubt that his IQ score was dazzling. Was Hitler entitled to luxury because he was intelligent.
B) When IQ scores surpass 140, the correlation with wealth falls apart.
When people are exceedingly brilliant, their brains very often fail to boost their pocketbooks. At a certain point, a rare and piercing intellect handicaps one’s ability to be a good, fast rat in the All-American rat race.
i) If you are exceedingly brilliant, you will often fail because you will not be understood by people with more pedestrian IQ scores.
ii) If you are brilliant, and you want to explain a thesis that has five component parts, your discussion of the thesis might delete two of the component parts because you think that the listener or reader will readily apprehend what those two components are from hearing the other three. However, more often than not, the reader will not be able to figure out what those other two component parts are, and he will not understand what you are saying, and he will dismiss you as insane.
iii) If you are just too brilliant for the common boring hordes, you will tire of using the same tired and familiar words, the same way, again and again. Indeed, Virginia Woolf, in an essay that, if I remember correctly, was entitled “To Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Blatt.” said that she enjoyed stretching and playing with the meaning of words. However, the common dreary dolts don’t understand you. I have little doubt that Woolf’s imaginative use of language played a role in making her subject to psychotic breaks.
iv) Generally, our brains assist us in convergent thinking. For example, if asked the question what is the sum of 2 plus 2, we should all converge on the answer 4. However, being creative very often by definition entails thinking in a different way, exploring new, uncharted realms. If that sounds too lofty and airy-fairy, let me give you this example cited by my Mother, recalled from when she taught in a slum school in Brooklyn, New York. She was giving an IQ test. She said to the students, “put your finger on the mouse.” (This test was being given to first graders who were supposed to put their finger on the mouse in the test booklet) One little boy got out of his chair and walked toward a little hole near the radiator that rarely gave heat. He put his finger on the genuine living rodent that had invaded the classroom.
C) Making money is often contingent on being good at selling stuff and being good at selling stuff is not a socially valuable trait:
i) When one makes money from selling, one finds a piece of dreck (Yiddush for junk or shit) worth 20 dollars and sells it for 50 dollars. This may require talent, but is this a talent we should reward.
ii) One makes money by selling the sort of stuff that most people want. The sort of stuff that most people want is the sort of stuff that is bland or stupid or insipid or moronic. I am referring to the nausea-inducing crap of our cotton candy commercial culture. I am referring to sit coms like the Brady Bunch and Petticoat Junction and the elevator-like music of AM radio. No doubt it takes a certain sort of talent to find the pulse of America since an American’s veins are often buried under an inch of subdermal fat. No doubt it takes a certain talent to churn out the sort of sugary, nauseating movies and songs that best approximate an American’s loves and hates. No doubt it takes a certain talent to give us situation comedies such as “My Mother the Car.”
iii) When one is a good ass-kisser and conformist, one may be a good seller. But do we want our children to grow up to be ass-kissing apes.
Remember the old adage: The customer is always right. This means that good sellers are very good at being insincere, ass-wipes who compliment every asinine attribute and idea of the customer. Good sellers are the sort of people who will go along with the customer’s racist and homophobic remarks because they want that customer’s business. Good sellers are the sort of people who will eventually submerge their sense of right and wrong and justice to please a customer. We should not reward good sellers because we should not reward those traits that will tend to make us base, vulgar and cowardly.
Footnotes
1) Karl Marx did not think that Russia was in any way ripe for revolution. He envisioned socialism as first coming to power in a Western European state or in Germany. He realized, as did most historians, that Russia was fixated at a much more primitive level of historical development. Whereas western Europe freed the serfs in the Middle Ages, Russia did not free the serfs until the 1860’s. Consequently, Russia in many ways was burdened with a sort of brutishness and brutality which was more conducive to violence. Also, Russia, after centuries of rule by Ghenghis Khan and his descendants, had been pulverized into a sort of grim, grave and bitter despondency. In addition, Russian violence in the 20th century was in large measure a reaction against German violence, which, in World War Two, led to the deaths of more than 20 million Russians. On 9/11, America lost just shy of 3000 people, and many Americans were ready to start a Christian jihad. I shudder to think of what violence America would have inflicted on the world had America lost 20 million souls.