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this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2023
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the_dunk_tank
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It's the dunk tank.
This is where you come to post big-brained hot takes by chuds, libs, or even fellow leftists, and tear them to itty-bitty pieces with precision dunkstrikes.
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"It's not true, but it basically is true because that's how I already felt about gommunism vuvulzula gorillion dead!"
This is gonna sound like it's a bit and that I'm just parodying Peterson's way of speaking in vague hand-wavey style but I promise you that it's not and I'm legitimately making an argument here...
To Peterson, the historicity of The Gulag Archipelago is irrelevant to him because it represents a higher order, metaphorical truth.
When you grasp this about what is important to Peterson's approach to truth then it becomes very obvious that he plays fast and loose with facts because he's not concerned with mundane truths that are the domain of historians and scientists, in fact he holds them in contempt especially when they run counter to his understanding, because he sees his purpose in uncovering and elucidating the metaphorical truths that structure our existence.
If this sounds like a bunch of nonsense woo then you're right. If this sounds like the attitude of an aspiring prophet then you're right.
But if you want to really understand how Peterson's brain works and why his avid followers seem largely immune to facts then this is the mentality that you need to wrap your head around. Pretty much everything that Peterson does is a sort of exegesis on this higher order, metaphorical truth that he's both attempting to understand himself while attempting to articulate it to his audience at the same time.
There's a quote from him that really illuminates his belief about his "mission". I'll try to find it and if I do I'll edit it into this comment.
I know he'd argue that. He's on a very special personalized level of solipsism with The Secret characteristics.
And to add on to your comment, I think Solzhenitsyn himself sort of takes this approach in writing. I’ve heard Gulag Archipeligo described as “campfire stories about the gulags”, and I think that’s very apt. It’s not factual information, it’s just him gathering stories he hears from others. Whether or not those stories are true isn’t relevant. Solzhenitsyn saw it as his mission to bring down the USSR (and replace it with some Christo-fascist authoritarian state) and whatever stories he needed to pull out of his ass to make that happen was fine by him.
I'm totally picking up what you're putting down here, yeah these people love subjectivr metaphorical truths, it gives them a spiritual charge. Its like they live in a world of pure signifiers, like they exist in a fog of metaphor and allegory and symbolism (they fuckin love their numerology too). It's like they're hoping to reach some kind of existential truth by tunneling through nonsense. It's ironic that theyre the ones who bang on and on about "facts and logic" because they have neither. They use the concepts as ritual fetishes, invoke their strange bile and wave around an ornate little doll called Facts and Logic. They present themselves as unassailable, because they have the doll on their side, but as soon as you assail them it crumples.
"Well the fact that I could believe it really says something about society"
"He could have been simply brave for speaking truth to power, but instead he was braver for speaking untruth for power"