One of the most surprising metapolitical events of the last year has been the rise of Professor Jordan Peterson to international stardom. In a culture which usually looks to incoherent prostitutes with butt implants for intellectual guidance, an explicitly Christian professor getting such a platform has been astonishing to many.
For a generation of young white men who never knew a patriarchal family, Prof Peterson has become a surrogate dad. What started as a faculty rebellion against the lunacy of genderfluid pronouns has now transformed into a one-man insurrection against campus totalitarianism and the neo-Marxist capture of Western institutions.
That Professor Peterson has achieved this status is both evidence of his exceptionalism and evidence of our decay. There was a time when Western societies were lit up by dozens of startlingly brilliant intellectuals, artists and scientists from every generation. Now, we’re astonished when we produce one. Soon, we will produce none.
The causes behind the obvious and accelerating decline of Western civilisation, however, is not something the good professor will address as fortrightly as ideological and cultural issues. This is because, while the professor is making a valiant and worthy stand against the coming neo-Marxist revolution, he will not address the root of its dialectic: race.
Cultural Marxism is a multi-headed hydra. The attack points which those who created and spread cultural Marxism focused on were gender and the family, faith and the patriarchy, and the legitimacy and honour of the white race. Prof Peterson should be applauded for addressing the first two. He will fall short of slaying this dragon, however, because he refuses to consider the racial component of the war for Western civilisation.
This is because, by his own frequent admission, Prof Peterson is a classical liberal. He conflates this worldview with Christianity, and his lectures demonstrate that he has crafted a highly sophisticated and elaborate philosophical defence for this position. He is an empiricist, a man of the Enlightenment, and ultimately a thoroughly modern man in his thinking and his outlook. His critique of postmodernity is ultimately that we should return to early modern beliefs, values and practices.
Unfortunately for Prof Peterson and those of his generation, the world that young whites look upon when they peer into the future will not be anything like the world of early or post-modernity. When a Gen Zer peers into their future, they see a world of Islamic and African encroachment, Asian hegemony and European despair. They see a world of tribes that those of Prof Peterson’s generation are simply unable to see, because they will be gone before it arrives.
Being a classical liberal, Prof Peterson makes much of the individualism vs collectivism dialectic. He frames these in moral terms: individualism is good and collectivism is bad. For the professor, individualism is key to the survival of Western civilisation as it places the individual as sovereign over, and therefore responsible for, the moral choices that they make. Contrary to this, collectivism is evil because it requires that individual actors subordinate their conscience to the dictates of the group power structure.
We must remember that the good professor is a clinical psychologist, and in my view his philosophy reveals this perspective. What Professor Peterson is arguing is excellent advice for an individual who is looking for guidance on how to live his life. At the political level and in the real world of competing tribal interests, however, it is simply another version of utopian leftist universalism which will only work in a society ruled and comprised of liberal citizens.
That, professor, is a society of European men.
Let us imagine for a moment that politics is a football match in which each team is vying to convince the spectators to join their team. The winner will receive a cash prize. Now let us imagine one of the teams, realising that they are not as competent or skilled as the other, decides to stop focusing on playing the game and instead starts playing the other side.
They begin rough tackling and breaking the legs of their opponents, then crying victim to the crowd when they are caught. They appeal to the referees to put handicaps on the other side, who have unfair advantages. They complain that the other team are cheaters, who should be prevented from co-operating together. They make promises to the spectators that they will spread the winnings around after they win. And then finally, when none of this has been enough, they send out recruiters into the neighbouring areas to bring in hoodlums and gangsters to the field to bolster their numbers and overwhelm the other team.
Good and decent men like Prof Peterson, playing for the superior side, would shout at their team-mates that they not stoop to such low tactics. They must play fair. They must stick to the rules.
The problem for the good and decent men on that team is that, eventually, there will be no game. There will be no rules. Just a mob ready to use violence to get their gibs at the expense of their betters.
Professor Peteron’s plea to us that we remain on the level of ideas and reject identity politics is vain idealism from a product of a dying order. Whites in the West have been rejecting identity politics for 50 years now, since the internationalists and European-style socialists used their puppet politicians to bring in mass immigration policies simultaneously around the West. We now have enclaves in our major cities which represent a counter-colonial occupation by groups who have been taught and propagandised to envy and despise us. These people do not see a world of rules; they see a world of interests. And they see that we are too timid and too brainwashed to pursue our own.
The early 19th century world which produced classical liberalism and its ideals of political equality, economic liberation and international peace is long-dead. We would not recognise it if we even saw it anymore. The Marxists didn’t kill it; war, economic tyranny, political corruption and demographic replacement have done that. It will not come back.
What the Marxists have done, though, is parasite upon the residual idealism and utopian universalism of the classical liberals and the conservative right. The Marxists were never going to play by the rules. They were never going to fight the war of ideas openly and fairly. Their objective has always been to burn the world to the ground and loot what’s left in the ashes. When they realised that class war wasn’t going to work, they decided to use race war instead.
Classical liberals and conservatives are still pretending this isn’t the case. Like Professor Peterson, they are haunted by the spectre of wartime Germany and the horrors that could ensue once the most creative, militant and powerful race on the planet decides to defend ourselves.
That day is coming, Professor Peterson, and soon. It will have to. It may herald the final battle of Western civilisation, but it cannot be avoided. Because the war started long ago. You just weren’t fighting it.
