Peterson's 12 Rules for Life v2.0-- actual book discussion

[robvalue]

I have felt bad for derailing Rob's original thread-- I think at that point, we all had opinions about Peterson we wanted to express, but not that many of us had the actual book.

I've got a .pdf of it now, which means I'll be able to give quotes from the text.  I won't copy whole chapters out of respect for copyright.

I hope this thread will be more about his specific ideas as expressed in the book than about arriving at a position about what kind of person he is / isn't.

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Overture

I proposed in Maps of Meaning that the great myths and religious stories of the past, particularly those derived from an earlier, oral tradition, were moral in their intent, rather than descriptive. Thus, they did not concern themselves with what the world was, as a scientist might have it, but with how a human being should act. I suggested that our ancestors portrayed the world as a stage—a drama—instead of a place of objects. I described how I had come to believe that the constituent elements of the world as drama were order and chaos, and not material things.

Order is where the people around you act according to well-understood social norms, and remain predictable and cooperative. It’s the world of social structure, explored territory, and familiarity. The state of Order is typically portrayed, symbolically—imaginatively—as masculine. It’s the Wise King and the Tyrant, forever bound together, as society is simultaneously structure and oppression.

I give this quote because of the word "chaos."  He's establishing the struggle between chaos and order as a fundamental theme of his world view.  This is very much in accord with someone interested in early psychology, philosophy or literature: the dialectic of Apollo vs. Dionysus is one of the most common literary devices in the past hundred or so years.

But for someone looking for misogyny, we can get into this right away.  My position so far (from videos and only from this passage), is that he's probably using ideas that are considered canonical or uncontroversial among academic circles, but which appear sexist or otherwise disturbing to those outside them.

For example, and this is largely for Rob, try the following link, type the word "feminine," and prepare to rage.

http://faculty.fiu.edu/~harrisk/Notes/Ae...hotomy.htm

All I can say to that is to keep reading. As usual, he's setting up something that sounds reasonable, and will later start abusing it. He descends fairly quickly into literally assigning chaos to women, and order to men. If that isn't something that is considered sexist, if not misogynist, then I would just have to agree to disagree.

And his attitudes towards women come up very frequently in the rest of the book. So again, keep reading

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PS: I have no long-standing grudge or agenda against Peterson. I only found out he existed fairly recently, when a YouTube video brought him to my attention, misrepresenting the Canada situation for fame.