Takin’ Over By Imposin’ the Positive
Having never read a self-help book before 12 Rules For Life, I decided to check out Takin’ Over by Imposing the Positive! by Brandon (Lil B) McCartney for comparison. Peterson once commented—with the pent up fury of every anti-onanist—that no one is ever proud of having masturbated. As with Ben Shapiro’s public admission that his wife does not naturally lubricate during sexual intercourse with him, this statement reveals more about Peterson’s own sexual inadequacies than his moral virtue. McCartney, on the other hand, once described in detail in a Vice interview how he turned his own masturbation into an expression of self-love via an almost Paganistic ritual complete with scented candles. It’s actually sort of sweet.
In stark contrast to 12 Rules for Life, Takin’ Over by Imposing the Positive is full of joy and curiosity. Nowhere is there a sense of crippling despair even though McCartney has struggled with depression, nor does he see fit to project his own fear and failures on to others. McCartney regularly refers to his grief at having grown up fatherless (Peterson who grew up with his father present doesn’t seem to find much value in him outside of tax returns), his negative experiences with drugs and juvenile delinquency and his fear of bugs and spiders!
Rather than every point he makes being a reference to another thinker, he speaks about his joy in reading, and even manages to present clichéd thinking in an original manner. For instance, he describes how he once tried to help a friend struggling with loneliness by taking him to a bookshop and instructing him to buy several books—at first his friend was nonplussed, but McCartney explained to him that through reading these books, all their authors would become his friends!
In spite of his difficult childhood, he never indulges in self-pity, nor is his advice self-righteous. Significantly, he always links his sense of self-accomplishment and his achievements with the help that his mother and his teachers had given him in his childhood. Peterson, on the other hand, though a staunch traditionalist who believes moderns are not thankful enough to ancients on a macro and a micro level, at no point details how his parents, friends, or even Western Civilisation have helped him achieve what he has.
Lil B is even happy to be explicit when his own desires and goals conflict with what he perceives to be liberal. He states openly that he would like to be the leader in his romantic relationships, with no sense of shame; nor does he beg for outside validation! Peterson, on the other hand, is too afraid to speak explicitly about what he means when he complains about recent changes in the relationship between the sexes.
Indeed, Peterson’s understanding of the world is horrifically myopic. The anecdotal depictions of other people, even family members, exist merely as metaphors to demonstrate his profound understanding of human nature, and beyond the harrowing description of the suffering caused by his daughter’s pain, at no point does one get the sense that he is ever moved by the successes, failures, joy or grief of the people around him—nor that he even conceives of them as being as complex and actually existing as a conscious being in the same way that he believes he himself is. Much like Ayn Rand, he reserves the bitterest vitriol for people whom he believes are misanthropes or nihilists; yet in what virtues of humanity, in what worldly or unworldly joys, does he himself believe in? Even his theological argument is purely utilitarian! At least Ayn Rand worshipped mammon, and without shame rejoiced in the traditional understanding of rationality: justification for genocide and the starvation of the poor; for Peterson, traditional virtues such as these are politically incorrect.
Whatever Ayn Rand may be criticised for, she is intellectually honest—even if she wasn’t intellectually competent: from the amphetamine-fuelled Fountainhead onwards her writing and logic steadily declined.
Conversely, the vision of Western Civilisation in which Peterson believes whitewashes the material, philosophical, political, and cultural contributions of colonised peoples to the institutions which define Western Civilisation; at least Rand includes the appropriation of their property!
Peterson’s vision of Western Civilisation also presents the Anglo-Saxon, Teutonic and even the Christian traditions of egalitarianism as somehow being alien to Western Civilisation, and contributing nothing to the wealthy and “free” society in which he lives as well as the visionary achievements of revolutionaries; for Ayn Rand, this degeneration against which she fights is not alien—nor is she afraid of glorifying the plunder and genocide and the starvation of the poor in the name of freedom.
A tradition that can bear to love itself must be built on a truthful history, no matter how complicated and disturbing that may make things seem: if we are to love another being, we must love them while acknowledging their faults—if we cannot do this and choose instead to deny that they are flawed, we cannot love them at all; for we are all sinners! (Ayn Rand, an atheist, was well aware that this Christian virtue and ethical pillar of Western Civilisation was in direct conflict with Western rationalism; yet Peterson, a self-proclaimed Christian, is not.)
Still, as grim as Peterson believes life is, the strangest thing about comparing An Antidote to Chaos and Takin’ Over by Imposing the Positive, is that the former offers a vision of the world which, while a paranoid delusion, is not as chaotic or as frightening as the world of Takin’ Over by Imposing the Positive. Even if we believe that a cabal of Cultural Marxists are trying to destroy Western Civilisation with no-fault divorce, women in the workplace, and the indoctrination of our children, for the average person just trying to cope with being alive, growing up without a father, dealing with the loneliness of self-awareness or the degradation of drug addiction and petty crime in poverty-stricken neighbourhoods—or simply being frightened of a co-habiting daddy long-legs—is facing more meaningful and difficult crises to navigate than Cultural Marxist oppression! Considering how much Peterson rages against people indulging in politics, one might expect that it is these sort of problems he’d confront—without linking them to politics; yet this is McCartney’s vision of the world, not Peterson’s. For Peterson, even personal problems like the erosion of parental authority and the decline in playground etiquette (there just aren’t enough bullies to go around these days) are part of the Cultural Marxist’s despicable plot—the personal is political, after all!
With that in mind, what are McCartney’s solutions to personal problems in a world of both petty and profound tragedy?
Be corny! Tell your mother you love her, read a book, love yourself, and never stop learning.
All that Peterson can offer up outside of a censorial political ideology: Pat a cat when you encounter one on the street.
Unless that cat is a Cultural Marxist, of course.
Then you should probably kick it.
Ultimately, Jordan (B.) Peterson is not so much alt-right spook, as he is himself spooked, and he has allowed his paranoia (as well as the rewards of giving in to it) to pollute what was once an interesting, if unoriginal, life dedicated to prophecy.
Incidentally, something no self-help book will tell you—even McCartney’s!—is that while fear is the mind killer, killing your mind by embracing your fears can be a very successful way of achieving public recognition and personal success. Don’t think about whether your anxieties are paranoid or rational, don’t think about what might be causing them, but instead latch on to whatever cultural or moral panic is popular, and internalise this as the cause of your own fear. Once you have convinced yourself that this is true—there is no one more authentic than a charlatan who actually believes in their own quackery—then you need only present yourself to the public as anxious and fearful as you really are, while violently denouncing the scapegoat that you have divined the public has lingering on the tip of their collective tongue. This is what it means to be the voice of the people, whether you are Adolf Hitler…or Spider Jerusalem.
Forgive me for this aside, but how delicious is it that Spider Jerusalem, one of the great symbols of America’s deranged faith in journalism, is essentially a Fuhrér-like figure, with The New Scum being his Volk—yet somehow we’re meant to believe that this sort of theology is what will save the American political religion from descending into fascism, rather than be the conduit through which it will flow?
One of Peterson’s central dogmas is the concept of ideological possession: this is his way of describing someone who subscribes to a theory he does not. It is hard to take this criticism as anything more than projection, for if he is not possessed he is, at least, haunted. Outside of Maps of Meaning which is an incoherent rendering of Jung’s anthropological mysticism updated (to its detriment) to include snippets of cherry-picked and even misrepresented psychology and biology as well as factually incorrect analyses of the Soviet Union and the Third Reich, most of his ideas are flimsy regurgitations of other thinker’s ideas to which he has contributed nothing, whether he is making use of Nietzsche, Solzhenitsyn or Dostoyevsky.
(Stand on the shoulders of giants, sure; but when you’re up there, try to build on their work, rather than simply taking a piss in their pocket protectors!)
And his ideological enemies, from Marx and Lenin to Foucault, are all ghosts, too.
Literally.
In my first [LINK] ramblings about Peterson, I commented that in spite of his incompetence, he has probably helped a lot of people. This remains true. But by now, it’s also pretty obvious that he has inadvertently used his fame to build something of a cult. It’s impossible to criticise Peterson without being accused by his followers of misunderstanding his genius. This, too, is rhetorical projection: learnt from the master. If one does understand the message of 12 Rules of Life, it is unclear what would motivate one to slavishly look for critics of its author so one can debate them in the comment section.
Unfortunately, Peterson has polluted his religious prophecy with his fear of failure, love of money, and pathological hatred of socialism, resulting in a career that began with a message from a God he doesn’t believe in dissolving into an endless stream of vitriol aimed at the imaginary demons he does believe in, teaching his followers to recite dogma about free thinking and open debate while uncritically reciting others’ thoughts and approaching open debate as a post-modern performative invocation of McCarthyism.
But this is the tragedy of dogmatism and palmistry.
Dogma is the blunt instrument with which a culture is maintained. There’s no reason for a boot to be stomping on a human face forever, because it’s much easier for us to remember this line and the image it evokes instead, and just as effective, too. Yet the imaginary can be used to elucidate or to occlude, just as it can be used in the justification of both good and evil.
(Principles cannot so easily save us. Would that they could!)
Palmistry can inspire and comfort us: a skilled palm reader knows as well as a skilled psychologist humanity’s basic anxieties and desires—but just as a psychologist can use these tools in exorcisms for the possessed, so too can they use them to convince atheists to believe in Satan.
The two together are the idle left and right hand with which the devil uses reason as a tool of genocide, Marxism as a tool of imperialism, liberalism as a tool of class warfare, and democracy as a tool of empire.
Peterson, during the Munk tag team debate, did not accept the answer that “violence” was when “the left went too far”, but naiveté is the only weapon we have against the mysticism of cynicism, for if we are to confront one form of mysticism with another, one form of cynicism with another, we cannot avoid justifying our own evil in denouncing our enemy’s evil relative to our own; nor can we resist the temptation to disbelieve in our own principles as fervently as we disbelieve in our enemy’s. And yet even such naiveté must at times be dispensed with—or we could not relieve the suffering of the injured and the diseased through the surgeon’s scalpel or the poisons of medicine: so perhaps naiveté is just as worthless as cynicism if we are not aware we are naïve! Worse still, maybe someone who is conscious of their own naiveté is, by definition, cynical?
Well then, if our conclusion is that Peterson is merely a paranoid quack with delusions of grandeur, why is he worth writing about?
That he can lead us over 7,000 words of nonsense from alchemy to anal would be reason enough, but every prophet is worth taking seriously, because even if you do not, someone else will. For this reason it is doubly important to take heed of the prophets who have fallen prey to spiritual corruption and mammon. It is from such prophets we can also best learn that the danger of revolution is not original sin, but that we might so easily forget original sin was itself a revolution.
Eve in her curiosity and disobedience—or, according to Peterson, her vagina—may have condemned humanity to suffer, but Adam in his idleness would have condemned humanity to never exist. Even Peterson’s reactionary theology was, before he was seduced by mammon, revolutionary; albeit a revolution which he hoped would return man to a more natural state—but all revolutions have been reactionary in this goal since the Jesuits first encountered the heathens and were taught by them the good news of Christ.
Indeed, we should be thankful to France’s revolutionaries hoping to return man to a more natural state that someone like Peterson is not tortured until he is willing to denounce his blasphemous theology then burnt to death; and we should be thankful to the October revolutionaries hoping to return man to a more natural state that he enjoys free healthcare, holidays, limited working hours, freedom of speech and accusations of sexual harassment at work. Indeed, surely the mutually-beneficial relationship between the Soviet Union and American Empire should be something for any Jungian thinker to laud: it was this very dualism, this open and pragmatic embracing of the dark side of one’s own self, and the consummation of the anima and the animus, that propelled both the communists and the capitalists (and therefore humanity as a whole—notwithstanding those members of humanity who were not considered to be wholly human) out of hell and into a veritable heaven on earth the likes of which we have been nostalgic for ever since!
Of course, we can ask if these luxuries are worth lopping a few heads off and starving a few peasants—but only if we ask if stopping them is worth giving up these luxuries, and more likely than not lopping a few heads off and starving a few peasants anyway! If we are willing to ask such questions, perhaps we could build a conservatism that dares to love the object which it claims to protect.
And, if the feminine does symbolise chaos, then we should be thankful that Eve succumbed to the ideological possession of the serpent, had the courage to piss off God, and thus gave to humanity knowledge of itself, in spite of all the difficulties this has resulted in! Or, to put it in terms on the level of Peterson’s vulgarity, what traditionally masculine man isn’t thankful for rather than envious of the attraction of the vagina and satisfies with joy his curiosity rather than suppressing it with fear?
Vive le Revolution!