The Road To Hell

What pains me a lot, is that in this age wherein information is readily available at our fingertips still so many people are comfortable in their ignorance. There are a lot of reasons for this, one of them being that misinformation is equally available and that this misinformation is spread by prominent public speakers who wrap their misinformation in the language of scientific objectivity and "facts".

_{Image by geralt - source: Pixabay}

"Fascism" is the hell many western societies are marching towards. "The road to hell is paved with good intentions" is a proverb that says that good intentions, when acted upon, may have unintended bad consequences, or that wrongdoings are masked by those good intentions. For example, a soldier goes to war for the good of their country and ends up in the hell of post-traumatic stress disorder (or literal hell if the soldier is a believer and actually dies in that war). Likewise, our collective road to fascism is paved with the good intentions of millions of people who think they're consuming legitimate information, when they're actually internalizing the misinformation spread by academics like Jordan Peterson and members of the so called intellectual dark web.

Let's take the example of Jordan Peterson's self-help book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. I've written in the past how I think that self-help books in general are a bunch of BS; they're written not to help you, but to make money, and consumers of those books fool themselves into helping themselves when they're actually accepting the help of the writer who they believe is an authority on their personal lives. Peterson's book in particular, partly because he is a clinical psychologist and a professor of psychology, has become a bestseller and I don't want to take away from the fact that many people have benefited greatly from reading it. However, Peterson is also known for his willingness, one might even say eagerness to also publicly comment on political and social issues, things that are outside his field of expertise; having listened to countless hours of his speeches, debates, interviews and lectures, I can confidently state that he's grossly misinformed about those social and political issues. He doesn't know the first thing about socialism, communism and Marxism, to give one example, and he also doesn't know a lot about fascism or the Nazis to give another.

The problem, and the reason why the road to fascism, white supremacy and "race realism" is paved by his self-help book, is that his misinformed opinions on social and political issues is embedded in the advice he gives to his readers. Peterson is a social and economical conservative who's opposed to any form of collective action and idolizes individuality. So, when he gives the advice to "set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world", often given in the short hand "clean up your room first", he actually suggests that you don't have the right to criticize imperfections in society as long as your own life isn't perfectly in order. That's a straight admonishment against collective action and protests; if everyone lived by that rule, social progression would have long ago grinded to a halt. Peterson actually is the living example of this rule, because he individually protested against the now famous bill C-16, an amendment to the Canadian Human Rights Act that adds gender identity and gender expression to the list of prohibited grounds of discrimination. Unfortunately this lonely protest also serves as the first indication that he doesn't act in good faith, as it was based on a dishonest (or misinformed) reading of that bill; he became a modern hero of free speech by protesting against a giant straw man of "compelled speech" when there's no such thing.

Besides his love for individuality and individual action as well as individual achievement, Peterson has a huge problem with with any notion of collectivism and he rants against socialism, communism and Marxism on a regular basis. In his public appearances he loves to point out how communism is responsible for more deaths than fascism under Hitler. It's as if he has a blind spot caused by his adversity against collectivism that prevents him from seeing the truth, namely that those deaths weren't a consequence of communism, but rather the result of a violent and authoritarian regime, just like any other violent authoritarian regime, socialist or otherwise. He's also blind for the fact that capitalist imperialism has been and still is responsible for far more deaths. And he repeats the common misconception that the Nazis were socialists, when in fact the Nazis were as opposed to socialism and communism as Peterson himself; the first concentration camps and the first deadly victims of the Nazi regime were the socialists and the communists. It's striking, to say the least, that Peterson fights against what he calls "Cultural Marxism" as fiercely as Hitler fought against Cultural Bolshevism. This Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory, supposedly originating from far left academics in the Frankfurt School, is a talking point used by many people from the far-right, white nationalists and neo-fascists. When Peterson's asked why so many of his followers are found in those circles in interviews or during Q&A sections of his speeches or debates, he's suddenly very defensive and usually says he has no idea why that's the case. The same happens with Ben Shapiro when he's asked why he is mentioned in the manifesto of alt-right terrorists who commit mass-shootings, or why he's on top of the list of most viewed YouTubers of those same terrorists.

Proto-fascism refers to the direct predecessor ideologies and cultural movements that influenced and formed the basis of fascism.
_{source: Wikipedia}

Well, I hope you understand better now that the reason is that those academics and intellectuals pave the road to fascism by covering their far right and grossly misinformed opinions with the language of scientific and factual objectivity. The fact that these proto-fascists have gained such popularity, and that America elected a proto-fascist as their president, is the pain I referred to in the introduction of this post. Below I've linked a conversation of almost three hours long; I know that's a lot of time, but it is such a perfect example of what I'm talking about here. If you want to hear Peterson actually apologize Hitler's holocaust, just watch the twenty or so minutes starting at the 46:20 minute mark; yes he actually twists and molds commonly known historical facts to make it seem as if Hitler's hate against Jews was somehow shaped by how the German public reacted to his speeches and the fact that antisemitism was already alive and well when he came to power. I'm not saying that anyone should stop listening to the likes of Peterson, Shapiro or Stefan Molyneux, just that you should always be on your toes when you do, and not simply agree with them because they sound so smart or intelligent. Peterson should stick with clinical psychology, that's where his expertise begins and ends; unfortunately that wouldn't make him nearly as much money as the spreading of his misinformed political opinions, so he won't...

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