The Pain of Feeling Ironic about Yoga: Brief Notes
October 6, 2017
Trance States and Choked Voices: Brief Notes on Charisma and Toxic Masculinity
October 9, 2017
1. I just love this photo of Jordan Peterson. It shows him in his natural element, shining in the darkness of the age. Look at that stairwell slanting upwards behind him, to parts unknown. I love that indigenous pole-thingy in the margin. It’s so primal and raw. Just look into those eyes — I’m sure you’ll feel what I feel.
2. I could be Jordan Peterson. A few different turns of the screw is all. I have always read a lot and been deeply confident in my multidimensional understanding of the big picture, and I’m not afraid to talk about it. The feminists call it mansplaining. Whatever. That’s what it takes to get that tenure, that oak-paneled office. I would have my cleaned and pressed shirts delivered there. I don’t need all that stuff of course, but I’m worth it.
3. Jordan is so badass he’s risking all his institutional security to take a stand. And what does he get in return, except overwhelming hatred from people who don’t know him personally? I don’t know him personally, but I sure feel like I do. I know for sure that he takes big risks, going against the powerful LGBTQ establishment like that. They have so much power. And just look at the hidden frustrations he tapped into. Something is being released here, and his hand is on the pressure valve. He deserves that Patreon cash. A half-mill per year is nothing to a man with big ideas.
4. Jordan Peterson doesn’t need “safe space”, and neither do I.
5. I love that he’s not afraid to cite Ayn Rand as a main adolescent influence. I also love that his scholarship focuses on the hero’s journey, and proves how the individual, no matter who he is, makes his own meaning, and his own life. It’s so radical. But it comes with grave responsibility — individuals don’t get to make up BS words like “zher”.
6. I love Carl Jung, too. If someone can lecture powerfully about Jung, I don’t care what his politics are. That Red Book, OMG. Jordan even sees Pepe the Frog as a Jungian archetype. Fuck yeah — that’s some originality right there.
7. We all have secrets. I feel both aroused and disgusted by hearing or reading the word “cuck”. It’s like that feeling I used to have about porn. But I got over that, because it’s important to face taboos. Jordan is fearless around taboos. As a side note, it’s interesting how I can test both my porn and political boundaries on reddit. They’re basically the same thing. If I can come right out and admit I love fisting videos, I can admit to loving Objectivism, too. It’s so liberating. I’d love to ask Jordan what that means. I wonder if he still has room for private clients.
8. #notalltranspeople hate him. Jordan says he has twenty-five letters from trans people who say they don’t like the negative attention that the pronoun issue has drawn to them. 25. He says twenty-five is a LOT, because that’s basically all the trans people there are! He’s so scientific. So I listen to those voices too, through Jordan’s reports on the letters he gets. There are so many opinions at play. Jordan models openness by listening to all sides. I love how he can listen to people who would force their ideas on him, and he doesn’t appear to feel threatened, even though he has so much to lose. He’s like a mystic that way – totally unaffected by the world.
9. The SJWs on the other hand are always threatened by something. I get what they’re saying sometimes, but honestly, most of them are immature. I knew a few of them in school. Marxism told them they were oppressed, but I always felt they just needed a paper route. Some of us take meds and just get on with it. Peterson’s right about them. They don’t even know how to clean up their rooms.
10. What I love about Jordan is that he’s the only human being in the world who is free of all ideologies. It goes to show that if you have a good psychology background, as well as a strong earthy connections to indigenous peoples, you can tell oppression and depression apart, and stop projecting your hurt onto abstract things like “power structures”, which you can’t even feel in your body.
11. Once I tried posting Jordan’s videos on the page of an SJW. She or they or whatever acted like they were totally incapable of hearing another point of view. So closed off! They acted like they understood me, as if they’d known me all their lives – as if the existence of myself and those like me cast some kind of shadow on them. They said their space was not for me and my blinders. But it just doesn’t make sense to me that there are spaces I can’t or shouldn’t enter. That’s not equality!
12. I practice yoga and mindfulness meditation, and I go to therapy. I spend a healthy chunk of my hard-earned disposable income working on myself, to get clear and authentic. I can’t be as blindered as they say I am. So unfair!
13. I hear what the SJWs are saying about trans pronouns. I really do. I just prefer to have long abstract conversations about free speech, the decline of civility on campus and Cultural Marxism instead.
14. You can really hear the neutrality in Jordan’s voice. He had to work on that over thousands of hours of lecturing these kids. His endless patience.
15. Jordan isn’t afraid to denounce the main problem with the idea of “white privilege” – that it makes people like us feel guilty, and deprives us of our freedom of speech by making us momentarily question the reflex to open our mouths.
16. Jordan is in the world but not of it.
17. His self-authoring courses gave me self-esteem and showed me that I’m in charge of my destiny. For a while there, I actually believed that my thoughts and attitudes and even my body were the products of social and political completely beyond my conscious control. But Jordan straightened that one out.
18. I haven’t read Bill C-16, but I don’t need to, because I’m sure that everything that Jordan says about it is true. Of course members of Parliament and the whole Canadian Bar Association can disagree with him — that’s to be expected. They’ve all been cranked through the culturally Marxist law schools of the last decades. The leftists actually try to argue the opposite — that educational and political institutions since the 1970s have steadily become the instruments of global neoliberalism. But Jordan is one of those men who can see the forest beyond such trees.
19. Jordan is a modern Stoic. The Stoics believed that having one virtue gives you possession of all virtues. But then he goes peak Stoic by showing that a slice of clinical psychology can give you expertise in human rights law, if your intentions are on the mark.
20. It might seem like saying words like “zhe” and “zher” is a small thing. But I’ve read Orwell, and I know that murderous Marxist totalitarianism starts with these tiny acts of thought control perpetrated by minorities, disguised as education. Choosing different words is not how language evolves “naturally”. I know that words flow from my subtlest and most natural impulses. I shouldn’t have to choose them — I am already free as I am! Words are inseparable from my nervous system. If I’m asked to reconsider them, I won’t know who I am. What else have I got?
21. Jordan’s got a real point about trans language confusing children. I have two little boys and I don’t what I would do if they got confused about who I know them to be. “Ze” and “zher” are bullshit words that will confuse them. Unlike “Cultural Marxism”, which is the most important, well-defined, and non-dogwhistly term you could ever teach any child.
22. I’m not that crazy about neo-Nazis showing up at his events or alt-righters sending him half a million bucks per year. I don’t like that he pals around with Gavin McInnes, who says some awkward things about Jews, and that transphobia is totally normal., But come on — at the same time, he’s connecting with deeply alienated white male youth. Who else is doing that hard and necessary work? I know how they feel. Their world is changing so quickly. Who better to bring them into the discussion, and make them feel equal again, than someone who has spent a lifetime studying the hero’s journey? Jordan is a bridge builder.
23. SJWs say that Rebel Media is like the Canadian version of Breitbart. That’s totally overblown. We’re Canadian. We’re not racist or misogynist. We’re aren’t “occupiers”. People who compare Rebel founder Ezra Levant to Steve Bannon are paranoid. The 49th parallel is a cultural wall. So when Jordan headlines an event hosted by Levant it just doesn’t have the political implications people say it does. He’s opening an important conversation for people that rarely get heard. I think it’s great that he gets on stages with Doug Ford, brother of the late Mayor Rob. I hope he can bring some healing to that poor marginalized family.
24. What I really fear the SJWs are going to do next is look into whether he’s falsely claiming to have been “inducted” into a Pacific Northwest First Nation so that he can pretend he’s spiritually legit. Look, this guy built a longhouse in his regular house! Think about that. A longhouse, meant to shelter an entire community… built in his own house… all for himself. Jordan takes man-cave to a whole new level.
25. The most important clue I have about Jordan is how he makes me feel when I see him on YouTube. I feel like myself, at home, reassured of the proper order of things, and oddly, a little bit small but also cozy. Jordan has so many videos about so many things. Sometimes I watch for hours. So while this whole thing is about free speech, it’s also so much more. The free speech thing is a way of talking about a deeper layer of protection I can’t quite describe. Jordan is defending something I can’t even see within myself.
26. I sometimes feel a confusing urge to be violent towards women I disagree with. I’m so relieved that Jordan has pointed out that this is because it’s totally reasonable to get violent with other men. In fact, we rely on it. The threat of assault actually civilizes us. So if I disagree with a man I can just cold-cock him and that’s how truth emerges. But then it’s like it’s some kind of taboo to use that same foundational principle of civilization when arguing with women. Jordan totally nails it when he says that this “terrible femininity”, unchallenged by physical violence, is “undermining the masculine power of the culture in a way that’s, I think, fatal.” No wonder we’re so frustrated as a species.
27. I had a dream where it was just me and Jordan sitting in a garden. I think it was his garden. Everything was in its place. There was no noise, no protesting. Just the June sun, and overflowing flowerpots. No weeds anywhere. The Mexican gardener was rustling behind a bush, making things beautiful. I had just shaved and gotten a brush-cut, and my chin felt braced and the back of my neck was cool. Jordan was also freshly-shaved. He smiled, and offered me tea that came all the way from China. We talked about my soul, and Jordan understood.
_____
If you enjoyed this satire, please consider donating money to the Transgender Law Centre.