The Peterson fallacy or how the world is not served by attacking a beaten enemy

 

In a world where 82% of the wealth generated goes to the richest 1%, what do you think needs to be dealt with first? The increase of inequality and pauperization of the masses together with the rise of individualisation and rise of the violent extreme right wing or the last remnants of the efforts of the extreme left to bring about a more egalitarian society?

Jordan Peterson, professor at the University of Toronto, clinical psychologist and culture critic thinks the last of the options should be our main focus.

It is not that the arguments he brings against the extreme left are wrong, I think they are ill-placed and ill-timed in a society which is experiencing a landslide towards the right wing. The left-wing and post-modernism may have been popular until and including the seventies of the last century, the last four decades it has waned into oblivion.

Of course he's a clever man, capable of winning young souls for his arguments. But what is forgotten is that by contrasting his ideas with the sometimes absurd claims of the far left, he pushes young people towards the far right.

"I'm no a right-winger", he claims, but it is difficult to discover any left-wing or middle idea in his discourse. If anything, he's pushing for social Darwinism (the 19th century philosophy that applied evolution theory to human society and was adopted by the Nazis), by stressing the differences between people.

The ideas of Peterson against extreme left are harmful, not because what he tells is true, but because it subliminally incites to increase the gaps between people in any type of stratification (class, race, gender) and it places an undue focus on a group, which is not (or no longer) a problem in today's society; The social protests of the left-wing and post-modernism have lost momentum; they are the rare remnants and last convulsions of a movement which is no longer credible anyway.  But by attacking this already beaten enemy, Peterson pushes people towards meritocracy. 

In today's society Peterson is attacking the wrong enemy. His words are not diminishing the extreme differences between people and income, but increasing them. Peterson himself says "no one likes poverty" and then incites you to enter the social arena to beat your contestants; to stick out from the grass more than another blade of grass.

Peterson claims to provide an antidote against chaos, which he demonizes, as they would be a gateway to totalitarianism. IMHO his cure, "order" has been the very foundation of totalitarian systems. The very tyranny and authoritarianism he seeks to undermine, might well be the pillars of his philosophy.

It is not that I believe that a society should be without stratifications or strive towards equity (equality of outcome), which according to Peterson is much worse than equality of opportunity. But by fuelling strife, -which he believes is a normal biological characteristic of any species- he's undermining social cohesion; he's pushing for a world where the poorer get poorer and the richer get richer; where people are naturally hostile to each other.

Peterson's meritocracy where the power is wielded by a few valedictorians from the university elite is not a world in which I'd like to live. Unfortunately, we're already living there - so it seems.

A world, which is based on competition, is not the best of all worlds. The USA is not the most pleasant place to live on Earth. Rather it has been shown mathematically and scientifically that the best outcome for most types of interactions can be achieved by cooperation (the so-called Nash equilibrium). 

"The truth lies somewhere in the middle" is a saying, but probably a big truth itself.

The world won't get any better by increasing inequality and competition, nor will the world get better if we strive for absolute equity and want to install a dictatorship of the collective. Rather, we should definitely decrease inequality of opportunity but also decrease extreme income differences, by redistributing wealth as is done in the social democracies in Northern and Western Europe. 

Peterson is fighting a no longer existing enemy. Not because he wants to beat this enemy, but because he wants to serve the interests of radical individualism. As a society we are a collective. We can't survive without rules and regulations. As much as equity is an absurd goal to strife for, so is absolute individual freedom. As soon as you live together, you have to make concessions. And our biological nature is not exclusively competitive. You don't have to be a scientist to see that care is widespread among mammals. A society which in a healthy manner finds the balance between social care and individual freedom, between competition and cooperation, is much more likely to become a stably developing fertile ground for the future, than a world of greedy competitive egoists.

You don't have to be left in order to see that the extreme right strives for a world of excluding the less fortunate. You don't have to be right to see that equity is an absurd ideal of the extreme left.

The world is not in need of glorification of the ego. The world is in need of a deeper sense of empathy and spirituality; the ability to see from the perspective of the less fortunate. Although Marxism is not the solution, neither is neo-capitalism! This world is literally starting to suffocate due to pollution, both in terms of smog and in terms of waste. Especially plastics pollution and fine dust are causing massive problems. And I haven't even started about the climate change.

If we want to be responsible citizens (as Peterson wants us to be), then it is our ecological problems, which should be dealt with first. It should be our corrupted attitude towards packaging materials, which we should change. And we should do this together, in cooperation. Not by attacking a fake enemy in the name of science, but by unveiling our real enemy, which is greed and egoism. Perhaps we should divorce from such right-left dichotomies and deal with what has to be dealt with first.