Need a plate of generic, insipid platitudes with a giant helping of bad science and misogyny?
this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2023
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I used to like him. I fell for the crap. To my 16 year old brain what he said made a lot of sense. He had a handful of good points, and it made me believe the rest of the shit he peddled.
I see him now, I look back on how I hung onto his words like a lost lamb, and I can only facepalm.
I realised that the only thing he is good at is marketing, not psychology...
Being 16 is the best excuse you could have for believing anything that cretin says. You're good bro.
He has some good advice (and some batshit crazy certainly), but not anything stoics weren't saying 2300 years ago. And he sprinkles on top of that a weird religious-adjacent theories that are perhaps due to his psychedelic use. People seem to confuse that rambling with wisdom, like they usually do with cult leaders.
Still, I think it's quite probable that he was a fine psychologist and was completely capable of helping individuals in whatever their struggles were. It's his moving to a youtube stardom that caused all the problems.
As the maoral-less L. Ron Hubbard would say...
"You don't make money selling a book, if you want to be rich, start a religion"
Peterson is just running a dumb cult of generic (kinda bad for most people) advice that hinges on the shared identity of sad lonely boys.
Peter Pan in the books is sad as shit, advice to never grow up and never try to be better just makes people more lonely and miserable.
Isn't Peterson's advice exactly the opposite of Peter Pan's, though?
Meh, all of the good advice he gives you can get from some other internet guru that isn't such a grifter.
"clean your room" and "wash yourself" really aren't that profound.
I dare say that we have plenty of men (and some women) who need advice as lowly as that. If Peterson reaches them, it could be a net positive. Too bad there's a lot crap in his advice as well.
It's understandable - back in the day, he had some reasonable points and an academic veneer. If course, what he was saying tended to have a strong bias, and didn't stand up to scrutiny, but it's hard to fault a 16 year old looking for guidance for falling for it. Hindsight is 20 20 - particularly when the negative tendencies ratcheted up rapidly over time.
Since his Russian benzo coma (remember, kids - clean your room and don't criticise others or systemic issues unless your life is perfect... pay no attention to my crippling addiction as I peddle that advice), things took a hard turn. I honestly think he suffered non-trivial brain damage. He's far more erratic, bursts into tears at the drop of a hat (while trying to sell "traditional" masculinity, his takes have lost their academic veneer and are self-evidently stupid. There's a reason he may be stripped of his accreditation.
TL;DR: Peterson went from being a pseudo-intellectual preacher to a lolcow, and (to me) the benzo coma seems to have been the catalyst for that shift.
I didn't know about the benzo thing. And that was the advice from him I appreciated; the clean your room, etc.
I didn't realise he was a walking blackout the entire time.
And I think his as following grew, so did his ego, and he began to think he knew way more than he actually did.
Ah well. An oversized ego is as bad as a termite infestation - if you let it grow it'll eventually make things collapse...
Oversized ego is generally a problem with people who take it upon themselves to give advice to society in general. Sometimes you can work around it. The guy has some interesting things to say, and he's an eloquent look into the rationalization certain people give for the problematic beliefs they already have.
You just have to learn how to approach these people without thinking they have some special right to think and you don't, because a little thoughtful examination shows much of what he says for the bs it is. That ability frequently comes with age and self sufficiency, which is probably why ye targets the people he does.
Yeah - it speaks to his long-term lack of principles and integrity, but that's not on you as a teenager. I'm just glad you grew from it, acknowledged when you were wrong, and grew from it - that's no easy thing to do.
I'm still pissed that because he badly quotes and misinterprets Jung all the time, people assume Jung is bullshit by association.
I think that Jung is bullshit for reasons entirely unrelated to JBP. His ideas are interesting, but not scientifically sound.
lots of people thought Jung was bullshit way before JBP came around.
I mean a lot of Jungs work is sorta bullshit.
I didn't believe him, I believed the positive messages he send and implanted. I don't care about him nowadays, but I also don't regret internalizing certain stuff he preached. It wasn't totally bullshit of what he said, until a point where he completely drifted off.
Thankfully I stopped watching any of his stuff quite a while before that happened, so I dodged this whole mess and only saw the burning ship wrack from the distance. I understand the hard feelings of others who are more involved in this topic though.
To agree, that something someone said, was correct, isn't a bad thing. Even if the stuff that follows is off the mark.
To regret that, would also mean regretting failure, but without failure there's no progress.
I did what I did for everything, and I took it with a grain of salt. This had the unfortunate side effect of just not following others and keeping up with the latest trends. Oh well, I feel happier than ever before
But by that logic, there's a terrifying number of adults who also shouldn't vote.
How so? An adult has a fully-functioning brain, unlike a 16-year-old.
Anyone above 65 for example.
Even dementia patients still have right to vote.
And we keep that in check how? I ask because I've never seen it done successfully and sustainably - even well intentioned autocracies lead to terrible outcomes in pretty short order.
Voting age should be 25, since that's the age when your brain becomes fully mature.
I'll remind you that the GOP not only exists, but is the party of choice for a little under half of voters - MTG, DeSantis, Trump, Boebert...