The Order of Chaos: An Antidote to Meaning
Introduction
A Word About Jordan Peterson
I assume that most of you have heard of Jordan Peterson? He’s hard to miss these days—a really popular guy. His new book, ‘12 Rules For Life: An Antidote to Chaos’ is a smash hit that supplanted Michael Wolff’s Trump expose ‘Fire and Fury’ from the top of the bestseller lists. He’s recently done several high-profile interviews, including one where he verbally annihilated Cathy Newman of Channel 4 News in a devastating clip that garnered millions of views on YouTube.
I’ve only recently started to turn my eyes on Peterson. I have been aware of him for a while, and the small cult growing around him, but it never seemed to warrant my full attention. Recently, however, I took a plunge. I bought my very own copy of Peterson’s book, ’12 Rules For Life: An Antidote to Chaos.’ Let’s talk about it.
I’ve made no secret of the fact that I don’t think much of Peterson. And in response to that, I was told by several people that I dismiss people like Jordan Peterson too quickly because of his ties to religion. For those unfamiliar with Peterson’s beliefs, he draws a lot of his morality from the Bible, and sees it as the founding text of Western Civilization. His belief in a literal God is doubtful, but he holds a metaphorical God in high regard, much as a LaVeyian Satanist holds the metaphorical Satan in high regard.
Peterson’s affinity for Christianity is only one facet of my profound disagreements with the man. I’d go so far as to say that if Peterson never mentioned God or the bible once in his book, the rest of what he wrote would still find plenty of opportunities to rub me the wrong way. If you can forgive me a dirty simile, his thoughts are as sloppy as a hooker’s pussy at the end of her shift.
Let me be clear on something: Peterson is a very intelligent man. There’s no denying that. He’s got a good grasp of evolutionary psychology. And a good grasp of psychology in general. No one can deny that he’s a fast-talker and a fast-thinker. No one can deny that he’s well-read, and that his academic achievements are every bit as impressive as his newfound celebrity status as a public intellectual.
Let me go back to the day I bought his book. I was at an airport in Ohio, heading back to Louisiana after a long and frustrating business negotiation. I have never been blessed enough to be able to sleep on an airplane, so I was looking on Audible for an audiobook to listen to on the flight home. And I saw Jordan Peterson’s book there, read by Peterson himself.
I thought to myself, “What the hell! Let’s see what all this fuss is about. Let’s see what’s got so many so impressed and enamored!”
Honestly, up until that point, I’d never really given the guy a fair shake. I’d dismissed him on a very superficial basis. So, I decided in that moment to recognize and let go of my bias. I went into his book with an open mind. Part of me was hoping that the Peterson sycophants were right. Part of me was hungry for another Hitchens, for another forceful and eloquent intellectual who could demolish the bullshit of the day with a wrecking ball of aggressively-dispensed insight. And indeed, that’s how Peterson has been marketed to us. That’s how he’s marketed himself.
The plane boarded, and I took my seat and began listening. I had 6 hours of travel ahead of me, including a layover in Atlanta, and I had absolutely nothing better to do: so I listened.
And as I listened, I felt an increasing sense of dread. Could the man I was listening to really be a hero to millions of disenfranchised people? Was this man really who some were championing as the new voice of reason in a confusing and bitterly embattled world?
Something strange began to happen. A transfiguration. Or maybe a crystallization. The more Peterson spoke, the more I started to see myself more clearly through the lens of my revulsion with his philosophy. It was as if everything I believed in had been turned inside out and written into a book. And I thought to myself, “I must attack this book. I must destroy this man.” It became an imperative in my mind. A need. Raw and ugly.
Only a few days after my flight, I wrote a video script attempting to do just that. MUST. DESTROY. PETERSON. That was the Mantra in my head as I wrote, but when I looked at the script a few days later with new eyes, I recognized that it was not nearly as strong as I wanted it to be, and I didn’t truly have any idea how to fix it or even a clue within my soul as to what exactly was wrong with it. So I set it aside and decided to contemplate it for a while. Sometimes an idea needs time to brew. Striking while the iron is hot is not always the wisest course of action. Sometimes it’s best to let passions cool and view things anew through colder eyes.
Weirdly enough, it was a pro-Peterson meme that I stumbled upon one day on Instagram that helped me realize the problem with the script that I had written.
This is an actual Peterson quote from a message he posted on his website a little over a year ago, in a post entitled “My New Year’s Letter to the World.” And it’s this quote, pulled by the terrible meme I showed you a moment ago, that really got me thinking about Peterson himself in a new light. He warns us that in the vacuum created by nihilism, people will gravitate towards a charismatic authoritarian who will show them the way. And I think that in this instance, Peterson was right. What he failed to realize, however—or at least failed to divulge—is that he is currently benefitting from exactly this fact.
Over the past year or so, I’ve seen many people who or were part of the New Atheist movement gravitate towards Peterson and his message. Peterson’s message, by the way, amounts to little more than a delusion of grandeuer. Peterson’s book stands before the world and proclaims: Hey, you nihilistic loser, the wisdom contained in this book can bring order to chaos! I, Jordan “The Great One” Peterson can help you cure that nasty sense of directionless malaise that’s got you down! You see, it all stems from the nihilism that New Atheism and Postmodernism has left in its wake.
Peterson has a list of 12 rules that you should follow to bring about paradise on earth by defeating nihilism and postmodernism. In other words, Peterson is a “leader, possessed by the spirit of totalitarian certainty, who promises above all, to restore Order.” He is the very thing he warns us of, but he masquerades as the opposite. He tells you: “I’m not the authoritarian who wants to rigidly control you, I’m just a guy with a book of rules that you should obey.” And you’re supposed to nod your head and pretend you see a difference.
In the past, I have primarily taken on two groups of people—the religious (both zealots and moderates) and the so-called social justice warriors (SJWs). The former group was basically dead when I got there, hanging on by a fraying thread of tradition, waning in influence, on their last legs. The latter group was so patently ridiculous that arguing against their positions felt like child’s play—more of an amusing distraction than a serious intellectual exercise. For both of these foes, I primarily employed the tactics of reductionist deconstruction and crude mockery. And those tools were more than adequate for the tasks at hand.
But Peterson and his acolytes of order are not so easily destroyed by those tools. His philosophy is dense and deceptively subtle. Direct deconstruction of Peterson’s philosophy would be a massive undertaking that would ultimately not be effective for the following reason: people have not come to Peterson because he makes sense—he doesn’t. They have come to Peterson because he is offering them something that Nihilism inherently cannot offer: purpose, a prepackaged, no-thoughts-required reason for being. And as the great James Randi once said, “Those who believe without reason, cannot be convinced by reason.”
Mockery, too, would be an insufficient tool to defeat Peterson and his ilk. He can certainly be mocked, and I’ve seen it done effectively. For instance, AIU* made a frankly hilarious video about Peterson’s inability to answer a very simple question regarding his belief or lack of belief in God. Peterson flatly refuses to answer the question directly, but instead engages in Bill Clinton level subterfuge, asking for basic words and concepts to be defined for him before he can give the answer. But AIU’s video, hilarious though it was, did not garner a war reception. Mockery of the religious and the SJWs was easy and effective. And most importantly to YouTubers like me, it was popular.
Religion is a soft target for mockery because it’s archaic and even the people who believe it don’t really believe it. It’s a vestigial meme of the past that’s too stupid to know it’s dead; just a tired, anachronistic remnant holding on by its fingernails, due only to an ever shrinking sense of obligation to traditional values that exists within certain people.
Mockery was always effective against SJWs, because they exist to be mocked. Their stupidity at this point is legendary, and despite the best efforts of nearly every form of mainstream media to push an SJW agenda, the ideas championed by social justice warriors have, by and large, not caught on with the general populace.
Peterson’s adherents are different than religious folks and SJWS. They’re not stodgily clinging to his ideas out of a sense of dying obligation, as religious devotees are. Nor are they just completely buffoonish idiots, like SJWs are. Peterson’s adherents are people who feel as if they are hopelessly adrift in a sea of existential nihilism, who felt that life had no purpose until they were passionately moved by Peterson and his ideas.
Religious people believe out of fear and obligation. SJWs believe whatever emotionally caters to their endless sense of entitlement. Peterson’s acolytes believe in his message for reasons that are far more pure: they possess a genuine passion and desire to save not only themselves, but the world. Save it from what, you might ask? From chaos, of course—the chaos of nihilism, postmodernism, atheism, skepticism, empiricism, materialism, or whatever word or words you want to use to encompass your negative feelings about the detached jadedness of our times.
And so my usual wheelhouse of deconstruction and mockery will have to take a backseat on this journey. Jordan Peterson is forcing me to do something I’ve long toyed with the idea of, but never actually attempted.
For my entire career, I have shared with you many of my thoughts, but rarely have I let you into my thought process. I have conducted myself by a very particular philosophy, but it is a philosophy that I have never elucidated directly. And that must now change.
Peterson has laid out an architecture for how you should be. He has offered you a lens through which to view your reality. He has given you a philosophy, not only in the academic sense, but in the colloquial sense as well. And so anyone who truly wants to defeat Peterson must begin by doing as he has done, by laying all of their cards on the table. He has given people a way of seeing the world, and it is not sufficient to simply say to them, “That way of seeing the world is wrong.” You must give them a different way to see it. And that is exactly what I will henceforth be endeavoring to do, in however many videos it takes.
This video represents the introduction of an audiobook that I will be releasing bit by bit to YouTube and other platforms as time allows. The title of this book, which I will eventually release in paperback form as well, is “The Order of Chaos: An Antidote To Meaning.”
And so, I welcome you all to my mind. I will give you every tool in my intellectual toolbox. I will give you every lens I have through which to look at this world and its happenings. And maybe when all is said and done, you will find no worth in any of it, and you will be as eager to criticize me as I was to criticize Peterson.
I cannot promise you enlightenment, because I don’t have it. I cannot promise you purpose, for the same reason.
All I can offer you is my honest assessment of life, and how I choose to conduct myself as a result of this assessment. I will not, as Peterson does, be prescriptive and issue authoritarian edicts. The contents of this book you will have to take or leave at your own discretion. Nothing contained herein should be perceived as a rule for living. Think of them instead as tools for being—tools that you can pick up and use, or discard with prejudice.
It’s worth noting that although Peterson galvanized my desire to write this book, it’s primary purpose is not to subvert him. It is my hope that by showing you the inner workings of my mind and giving you insight into my value system, you will gain better insight not only into my videos, but into your own lives.
It is my wish to show to all of you the profound beauty of nihilism, the freedom of it, the sheer joy of not being forever tethered to someone else’s idea of a higher purpose or to a manufactured grander meaning to life. This book is meant as an exaltation of freedom, and a love letter to meaninglessness, to hopelessness, to life without a rigidly-defined sense of purpose. I hope very much that it will bring you contentment, or at the very least stimulate you in some capacity.
Shall we begin?
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