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

[Bob Kelso]

The chaos from femininity talk is particularly off putting. Even as an allegorical device.

Well, he is pretty clear about minimizing that as a symbolic reference, and it's not his own idea. It goes to both Apollo vs. Dionysus, Yin/Yang, and also to the writings of some of the authors he's mentioned a lot, like Jung and Nietzsche.

Except that he continuously references it... Standing behind the notion resolutely. Like in a New York Times article:

”You know you can say, ‘Well isn’t it unfortunate that chaos is represented by the feminine’ — well, it might be unfortunate, but it doesn’t matter because that is how it’s represented. It’s been represented like that forever. And there are reasons for it. You can’t change it. It’s not possible. This is underneath everything. If you change those basic categories, people wouldn’t be human anymore. They’d be something else. They’d be transhuman or something. We wouldn’t be able to talk to these new creatures.”

Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/18/style...e.amp.html

Even in just normal speak, we can all identify personality traits that we'd acknowledge as generally feminine or masculine, without investing in stereotyping.

For example, I'd say that a caring instinct, especially for small helpless things, is generally a feminine trait-- wouldn't you? That doesn't mean that all women are caring or that no men are caring-- it's just acknowledgment of a pretty easily-observed gender difference overall.

This is not what he’s doing. He didn’t make use of an old symbolistic reference for no reason.

Can I ask you who you think his target audience is? I think it’s blatantly obvious, given enough consideration.

The problem is that some parties will immediately trigger-- talking about how I'm imposing a patriarchal view, or how gender expression is a rainbow, or whatever else their personal world views require hysterical shouting about.

I rarely find myself on the side of the easily triggered, in fact I tend to disagree with the current left about a lot of things. That said, Peterson’s views got a reaction from me and not without reason.