I found this essay by Matthew Pirkowski the best articulation of Petersonism so far. It is focused on a theory of tyranny as derived from an unwillingness to face the uncertainty and inevitable difficulties that arise in life.
It is difficult to excerpt, but here is a taste:
One must ally with Courage to tolerate uncertainty in all its forms: suffering, randomness, chaos, and failure — to admit to oneself that these forces exist as inevitable features of the human experience. When one discovers new explanations for mismatches between one’s beliefs and one’s current reality, it requires Courage to actually test them in the world of actions, to confront uncertainty with new and unproven strategies.
This puts me in mind of the Stoicism of imperial Rome.
What I love about Peterson is that his ideas are the kind that hide in plain sight. As I listen to him, I’m reminded of fables, proverbs, Bible verses and grandmotherly advice. He takes the essential truth of these and connects them to psychology and evolutionary biology. It is an “education in the obvious more than investigation of the obscure”, but it’s wrapped in Freudian, Jungian, Nietzschean obscurity — a serious academic sheen. So there’s something for everyone.
Writing on the cardinal virtues, Aquinas said, “[T]he principal act of fortitude is endurance, that is to stand immovable in the midst of dangers.”
Leading the 20th century philosopher Josef Pieper, in his book on the same subject, to remark: “It is almost the nature of fortitude, [that it] fights against the superior power of evil, which the brave man can defeat only by his death or injury… It is St. Thomas’ conception of the world, the Christian conception of the world, that man may be placed in a position to be injured or killed for the realization of the good, and that evil, considered in terms of this world, may appear as an overwhelming power.”
It is, I think, a lack of fortitude in this classical sense that is the great, almost defining, characteristic of the age we are living. It has largely been replaced with a utopian kind of vision, as identified by Sowell as an “unconstrained vision” where there are never trade-offs between good things, and by a rejection of any notion of natural evils, so that all suffering is the result of some bad actor or bad system which can be fixed by sufficient human effort. Voegelin reflected more deeply on the underlying religiosity of that vision and identified it as Gnostic.
Both Church and State being much enervated by the same Gnostic vision, they have abandoned fortitude so completely that the remnant of exceptions stand out not so much for their brilliance as their unexpectedness.
On the topic of inner gods in conflict, Kevin Simmler’s Melting Asphalt blog has an enlightening post called Crony Beliefs.
” unwillingness to face the uncertainty and inevitable difficulties that arise in life.”
Yes on opposition to uncertainty, but no on difficulties.
Instead, the problem of the inner tyrant is to use Control when facing difficulties. A Control with the unreasonable confidence that Perfection is Possible; i.e. that life can be controlled to eliminate the uncertainty about bad events, that bad events won’t be allowed to happen.
As mentioned by ThomasL, it is this “unconstrained vision” that is the problem, and along those lines, the idea that society can be perfected such that there are no Oppressors nor Oppressed. But this leads towards unconstrained victimization. It’s terrible.
How to stop it? The good short article mentions one must start with oneself. In other places citing Peterson, the start is: clean up your room . Not so different from cultivate your garden .