The world we live in today is scarcely comparable to the humble existence led by our ancestors a few centuries ago. And it seems that we got the better end of the bargain, for the most part. We live comfortable lives, have access to luxuries they could only dream about, and know more about our human condition than any living thing that has ever walked this Earth. They had candlelight, and we have electricity. They trudged through jagged roads on horseback, and we fly through continents in a matter of hours. They had dark arts and herbal remedies, and we have modern medicine and surgery. They had great thinkers and philosophers and we… we have social media influencers and YouTube commentators. Like I said, for the most part.
I write this now thinking chiefly of one person and the influence he’s had on the world of politics and academics over the past decade, but the phenomenon itself is much larger than any one man. In fact, I don’t want to so much discuss Jordan Peterson as I want to talk about the circumstances that have formed his current identity and role in society, how it has been twisted over the years to resemble nothing but a pale shadow of what it once was, and why it’s important to recognize the slow decline of the intellectual for what it is.
To say that philosophy and social studies have never been political would be as fallacious as saying that art has never been emotional, or that literature has never reflected the times in which it was written. I once heard someone try to explain the slow decline of the intellectual by reasoning that it’s because everything is more “political” these days, but what is politics if not the cornerstone of governance, power, and ultimately, civilization itself? Plato’s The Republic was political. Aristotle has a work called Politics, which also happens to be one of his most famous and revolutionary writings. Cicero’s On the Laws. Al-Farabi’s The Utopian City. Ibn Khaldun’s Prolegomena. Thomas Hobbes. John Locke. Nietzsche. The entire oeuvre of Simone de Beauvoir. The list goes on and on.
And so, friends, the problem is not that everything is now seen through the confusing, ambiguous lens of politics. The problem is that the discourse, once the chief counsel of kings and monarchs and rulers and people, has slowly diminished into a parody of everyone shouting out their opinions and picking sides and rejecting the subtle nuances that would’ve once led to a compromise — a middle ground or a place of reconciliation if you will — where everybody is heard and nobody is dogmatically cast off.
Why has the cognitive well of humanity dried up so abruptly in recent years? Where once the cogs in the machine moved with relentless ease and brought about ingenuity and creativity to us every day, we now have to struggle to cultivate even the most diminutive grade of critical thinking in society. From Classical Greece to the Hellenistic period to the Golden Age of Islam to the Renaissance and then the slow transition to modernity, society has benefitted from great philosophers and thinkers in their droves. Now, you’d be hard-pressed to find one famous intellectual who really knows what they’re about, and that’s when you’re lucky and not dealing with a person who misrepresents what they find in those old books.
The conundrum at hand is three-fold. On one side, you have intellectuals who have lost their lifeline to the people, and are thus never heard. On another side, you have cultivated a society where reading and learning are every so slowly becoming irrelevant, and instant gratification through content is the chief solace of the population. Lastly, the entire premise works if it’s financially viable, and so, whatever form they take, the three have to come together and work together in order to exist, and such existence as they’re offering us now is only leading to shallower waters.
A bit lost? Let’s go back to Jordan Peterson, a man who began his journey toward understanding by reading Dostoevsky, Orwell, Nietzsche, Jung, and any number of other great writers and thinkers in his early adulthood. Jordan eventually got his PhD in clinical psychology and started his practice, while also beginning to teach at universities. He also did a fair bit of comparative mythology, where he came up with his so-called “maps of meaning.” Now, while I’ve always found myself at odds with Mr. Peterson over certain topics, those old lectures on these psychological and mythological topics were a delight to watch. Back then, you could tell that this man was on a mission to discern a truth hidden in the substratum of civilization. He didn’t always make sense, nor was he flawless in his reasoning, but his intellectual sparring with all these ideas was a sight to behold, inspirational and rare and hopeful.
Over the years, Jordan Peterson slowly metamorphosed into an amalgam of everything he warned us about. Now instead of giving two-hour lectures, he realized that the ticket to fame and relevancy — or if we want to be generous, “being heard” — was to do what everybody else was doing: Become a content creator, a political commentator, a con man who is always selling one narrative or another to the masses. And if you want to be particularly good at it, just align yourself with one of the two parties who are right now locked in an eternal, pointless struggle, and find a comfy place to play a part in this churning madness of human folly taking place before our very eyes.
The idea is to ride that algorithm to stardom. You can be as controversial as you’d like, but the key is to be shallow. To rouse emotions and say things that ever so slightly push you a bit further towards one extreme. Ultimately, you’ll find yourself in one of the two camps. As it happens, Peterson is on the Right-leaning, conservative side, and so one of his main points of argument is freedom of speech. The same freedom of speech that may have compelled him — or one of his moderators — to block me on X because I asked a simple question.
You see, Mr. Peterson was once again decrying the absolute tragedy of a few thousand children and youngsters who received puberty blockers by their own choice. That got me thinking; if Peterson is so concerned about the innocence of the youth, does he also shed tears for the nearly 20,000 children massacred in the Gaza Strip over the past year? Is that also a human tragedy of epic proportions in his mind? Did he know what was going to happen when he tweeted “Give ‘em hell, Netanyahu” back in 2023?
But I guess we’re getting a little too specific here. Back to the main point. What I want you to ask yourself is this: What is the wellspring of philosophical knowledge in the 21st century? It seems to me that the modern intellectual is above all else defined by the medium they inhabit. In the age of social media, in the time of ailing attention spans, mindless consumption, and the Great Big Content Machine churning out videos and reels and posts and reactions without ever stopping to catch its breath, and the hundreds of thousands of influencers and commentators and content creators and media personalities and celebrities and intellectuals vying for that limited attention — that glorious momentary spotlight — there really remains no room for intelligible discourse, profound insights, complex and multifaceted philosophies.
And so, even the intellectual who tries desperately to capture a semblance of the old wisdom is ever so slowly sucked into the whirlpool of confusion, paradox, and frenzy that defines much of our lives today. The intellectual was once known for his elaborate 2-hour long lectures that got into everything and untangled the subtle nuances of our collective inherited knowledge. Now he makes 10-minute videos on YouTube cursing the names of this person and that, and only ever utters what reaffirms his own beliefs and the beliefs of the flock he’s gathered around himself. One begins to wonder if he’s riding the algorithm, or if the algorithm is riding him.
He spends most of his time preaching the words of a holy book about compassion, mercy, understanding, and responsibility, yet that doesn’t stop him from urging a villainous murderer to commit crimes against humanity when the moment calls for it. He talks about the importance of free speech — heck, compelled speech was the reason he got famous in the first place — and yet he or his team block people who try to express their own counter-opinions on his social media page. At least that has been my experience with Jordan B. Peterson, the man with whom I didn’t agree but respected, and now a man who is only a pale shadow of his former self, neither respectable nor trustworthy in the least.
I’ve come to understand that the world of today is one of expediency and convenient narratives. It is ultimately a matter of faith, not science or experience. Even moral philosophy is a subject of tribalistic bravado. It’s not humanity itself that is at stake, but us, our side of the fence, our people, our commune. This is where such people draw their line. This is what we humans have always done. We put a graceful face on everything, even our follies, and hope that no one catches us in the lie. Such convenient falsehoods we spin around. Many don’t even realize this; perhaps it’s the most disconcerting part of the whole ordeal. People don’t even set out to lie, and they certainly aren’t actively trying to deceive you — for the most part. If you catch someone in a lie, it probably means that they’re also lying to themselves, because how else would any of us function?
So if want to make it simpler for yourself, just find a group that you relate to the most and jump on the bandwagon. At the moment, traditionalism is going up against post-modernism, and the battles of wit, the intellectual spars, and the pissing contests are every bit as juicy as you’d imagine. Never be so cynical as to assume that these people would give you anything but the truth, making valid arguments backed up by empirical evidence and sound logic. Never doubt that their statistics are infallible, their way of thinking precise, and their hearts in the right place. Most importantly of all, dare not, even for a moment, think that a system predicated on expanding the very tribalism that has been the source of all human suffering would not ultimately compel all of these intellectuals to embrace one extreme, one dogma, and one convenient way of thinking to win the war.
Don’t mistake their earnestness, their ferocious sense of duty, for pathological posturing. Nod your head when they lambast ideology and ideologues, and don’t even question it when they, too, inevitably single out a school of thought, affix to it almost every problem facing the world, and roll their eyes at this “ignorant, brainwashed generation,” designing to compare them to the worst peddlers of human catastrophe from a time not so long ago.
The complexity of this subject ties rather poetically into the decline of the intellectual at display in our modern world. At some point, the very practice of divination turns into an exercise in futility, a superfluous dance with ideas that not only fails to yield an effective solution, a reasonable compromise, but further confounds an already impossible enigma. And so, the intellectual slowly turns into a paradoxical manifestation of all the ideas swirling inside of his head, bequeathing wisdom with one hand and undermining its validity with the other. The intellectual scorns ideology, but unironically embraces it when it serves his purposes. He adheres to the laws of democracy, campaigns for free speech, and even freedom of expression for the individual, and yet when that same individual is guided by forces other than his hand to act in a way that doesn’t align with his beliefs, he raises a cry for help and uses every measure in his disposal to fight that manifestation of chaos — one of his own making — to the bitter end, even by means going against the freedom he preaches.
Tribalism blurs the lines of honor and integrity, philosophication conceals the very evil the idealist sets out to fight, and mantra invites the mind to the human-susceptible practice of self-deception and hypocrisy. What good is spending countless hours interpreting the words of a holy book, inferring the righteousness of compassion and mercy, only to spit in its face and let loose your baser instincts in the face of real conflict?
We see then, much to our dismay, the fall of the prophet, the decay of the idol, the rotting corpse of the would-be intellectual leader, succumbing — despite all of his understanding — to the same mystifying adversary that tends to manipulate the average man. And so, dear friends, history continues to repeat itself, time without end.
Published: Nov 23, 2024 03:46 pm