Tag Archives: Jordan Peterson

The Donald Trump Movie

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Tom Palmer writes,

A common theme among populists is to empower a leader who can cut through procedures, rules, checks and balances, and protected rights, privileges, and immunities and “just get things done.”

In other words, Donald Trump is Dirty Harry. In the American collective unconscious (I have instantly become a Jungian, after watching a semester’s worth of Jordan Peterson lectures last week), there is a generic movie about a rogue cop. The bureaucrats try to use rules to hem him in, but he breaks the rules in order to stop the bad guy. Of course, there were precursors of Dirty Harry long before 1971, when the movie appeared. The hero who has to break a few dishes because the system is to corrupt to do its job is an ancient story.

Think of the election in 2016 in those terms. Think of Mr. Trump as the rogue cop, and think of the public as the audience. The press and other elites are the soft-headed folks trying to get him to play by the rules. But the more obstacles they put in his way, and the more defiant he is, the more the audience roots for him.

Consider another movie, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Again, the audience roots for the rogue, Randle McMurphy, against the representative of order, Nurse Ratched. Try that one on.

I seem to be taking in a lot of input these days from very erudite individuals whose outlook I might describe as seeing evil welling up in the collective unconscious–on the left as well as on the right. If you don’t like that phrase, I could say it in more words, as Tom Palmer does (read the whole thing). Or you could look at some data on authoritarianism among millenials (pointer from Tyler Cowen). Or you could look at Peter Turchin’s new book, Ages of Discord.

Ideology and Polarity

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Jordan Peterson says,

In a sophisticated religious system, there is a positive and negative polarity. Ideologies simplify that polarity and, in doing so, demonize and oversimplify.

That sentence really bolsters my approach in the Three Axes Model. The whole interview is interesting.

In fact, I have been binge-watching his lectures. Reviews of his book suggested that it might be inaccessible, but his lectures are very accessible, albeit with a big investment of time. If you don’t have the patience for his style, you might want to jump to lecture 5, part 1. But my view is that you should have patience for his style.

Peterson, like Jung, believes that ancient myths tell us a lot about how we are wired. In my eBook, I say that the Progressive oppressor-oppressed axis can be found in the Exodus story. I think that Peterson would locate what I call the civilization-barbarism axis in a lot of ancient myths in which the death of a king or the emergence of a terrible king leads to chaos until a hero fights the chaos and is crowned the new king.

The libertarian liberty-coercion axis may be more modern. In Peterson’s terms, government (and our cultural inheritance in general) always enbodies both the good father who provides order and the tyrant who chains people. The liberty-coercion axis sees the tyrant and not the good father. Peterson probably would find libertarian utopianism to be akin to other utopianisms. In that sense, he would view a really dogmatic libertarian as dangerous, the way that Whitaker Chambers famously remarked that reading Ayn Rand made him feel as though there was lurking a “To a gas chamber–go!” mindset.

I think that embedded in his course is a philosophy of science that is profound. I think it can be applied usefully as a perspective on economic models. I will say more about that when I finish the course.