By Denis Rancourt, PhD
[This article was first published at
Dissident Voice:
LINK.]
SUMMARY: Why the industry of glib and vehement mainstream character
assassinations of clinical and research psychologist Jordan Peterson? My
examination of Peterson’s “Rule 1: Stand Up Straight with Your
Shoulders Back” suggests that it is a seminal work anchored in a
prestigious body of scientific research that should form the theoretical
basis of social science in the coming years. Peterson is simply
presenting this nascent scientific paradigm of the primacy of dominance
hierarchy directly to the people, without an institutional filter, and
using it in a cognitive therapy approach to solve the self-image
catastrophe that white males in particular are experiencing. There is no
valid basis for the attacks against Peterson, which are motivated by
establishment machinations.
I’m a world-class scientist. I’m a physicist with an
h-index
of 36 (i10-index 81). I was a university professor at 29 and a full and
tenured professor at 40. I’ve made discoveries in physics and some of
my most cited papers are in soil and environmental science. I’m not
clever in navigating society’s dominance hierarchy but I am
intellectually honest and I am damn smart when it comes to understanding
concepts and recognizing new phenomena.
Only those of my enemies who are professional liars (lawyers) have
ever dared to call me stupid: “Mr. Rancourt is an intelligent man Your
Honour”, but not repeatedly.
That is why I have been surprised to observe the deluge of strident
voices, opinion leaders of our time, who use the establishment’s highest
media venues to launch character assassinations of clinical and
research psychologist Jordan Peterson based on… nothing.
Peterson is a fascinating media and social phenomenon worth
investigating. I looked at his outstanding research record on Google
Scholar and read several of his most cited and recent scientific papers.
I watched several of his debates against said opinion leaders and
several of his pedagogical presentations.
The scientific papers are exemplary, with correct applications of
sophisticated statistical, significance and factor analysis tools. I
often find sloppy and incorrect applications to be the norm in the
medical field,
for example, but not here.
In the presentations, I find clear and intelligent statements on the
questions related to his many areas of expertise, and ya, some
exaggerations and incorrect statements in areas where his gaze has not
been objective, it appears.
For example, I don’t understand how an authentic intellectual could
read the landmark works of Karl Marx and the critiques of the said work
by the great anarchist theorist Kropotkin and not be thoroughly
impressed by the genius of Marx, and the elements of his theory that are
seminal and fundamental even if incorrectly extrapolated by Marx. I
conclude that Jordan has not actually read this stuff or he is being
irrational in his evaluation, for whatever reasons related to his
personal history.
In my evaluation, however, Peterson’s occasional stupid summaries are
entirely a result of his boldness to put ideas out there, on the fly,
in his broad and continuous interactions with the world; and they remove
nothing from the depth and rigour of his other written and spoken
words. Even Einstein wrote naïve and silly things without the
prerequisite background study: “
Why Socialism?”, 1949.
Next, I decided to get myself a copy of his record-breaking best seller
12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos.
I’m a slow reader, and I read all the notes and most of the articles
themselves that are cited. I have now finished up to the end of: “Rule
1: Stand Up Straight with Your Shoulders Back”.
I thought: “Holy crap. This guy is doing something unprecedented. He
is taking a nascent scientific paradigm and bringing it directly to the
people, with no institutional intermediaries. Brilliant.”
I’ll explain what Peterson is doing and its significance but before I do…
I next went back to the products of the character-assassination
professionals to see what the service intellectuals had said about “Rule
1”, and I looked for “Rule 1” summaries and explanations on line.
I was shocked to find the degree to which the said service
intellectuals had done their job. What a distasteful spectacle. Such
vile dishonesty. Only an assigned mission and attempts at opinion
mobbing could produce such trash, which actually hurts the brain unless
your purpose is mindless subservience to establishment spin.
What is the “nascent scientific paradigm”, which threatens key tenets
of the current social engineering complex if it is not sufficiently
buried? Let me be blunt. In the last decade or more, biochemists,
biologists, animal behaviourists and psychologists have established
proof of what some astute observers have been saying for centuries:
Dominance hierarchy rules, across the animal kingdom and over
evolutionary time. It is rooted in a primordial physiology and
metabolic biochemistry.
The metabolism of the monoamine neurotransmitter serotonin, and the
associated evolutionary biology, is the first synthesis of the new
tectonic plates theory of social science, whether social scientists are
aware of it yet or not. Period.
The metabolic biochemistry of dominance locks us in. No socialism
theory that presumes altruistic cooperation as its organizing principle
can ever work. Non-hierarchical anarchism and its libertarian cousin are
useful conceptual end-points that can never be sustainably achieved.
The best we can do is to have a responsive and optimally
(evolutionarily) beneficial dominance hierarchy that is actively
prevented from exercising pathological excess.
Jordan is spelling this out (p. 14-15):
This is because “nature” is “what selects,” and the
longer a feature has existed the more time it has had to be selected-and
to shape life. It does not matter whether that feature is physical and
biological, or social and cultural. All that matters, from a Darwinian
perspective, is permanence—and the dominance hierarchy, however social
or cultural it might appear, has been around for some half a billion
years. It’s permanent. It’s real. The dominance hierarchy is not
capitalism. It’s not communism, either, for that matter. It’s not the
military-industrial complex. It’s not the patriarchy—that disposable,
malleable, arbitrary cultural artefact. It’s not even a human creation;
not in the most profound sense. It is instead a near-eternal aspect of
the environment, and much of what is blamed on these more ephemeral
manifestations is a consequence of its unchanging existence. We (the
sovereign we, the we that has been around since the beginning of life)
have lived in a dominance hierarchy for a long, long time. We were
struggling for position before we had skin, or hands, or lungs, or
bones. There is little more natural than culture. Dominance
hierarchies are older than trees.
The part of our brain that keeps track of our position in the
dominance hierarchy is therefore exceptionally ancient and fundamental.
[Footnote 17: “Serotonin and dominance”, by Ziomkiewicz-Wichary, 2016]
It is a master control system, modulating our perceptions, values,
emotions, thoughts and actions. It powerfully affects every aspect of
our Being, conscious and unconscious alike. This is why, when we are
defeated, we act very much like lobsters who have lost a fight. Our
posture droops. We face the ground. We feel threatened, hurt, anxious
and weak. If things do not improve, we become chronically depressed.
Under such conditions, we can’t easily put up the kind of fight that
life demands, and we become easy targets for harder-shelled bullies. And
it is not only the behavioural and experiential similarities that are
striking. Much of the basic neurochemistry is the same.
Consider serotonin, the chemical that governs posture and escape in
the lobster. Low-ranking lobsters produce comparatively low levels of
serotonin. This is also true of low-ranking human beings (and those low
levels decrease more with each defeat). Low serotonin means decreased
confidence. Low serotonin means more response to stress and costlier
physical preparedness for emergency—as anything whatsoever may happen,
at any time, at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy (and rarely
something good). Low serotonin means less happiness, more pain and
anxiety, more illness, and a shorter lifespan—among humans, just as
among crustaceans. Higher spots in the dominance hierarchy, and the
higher serotonin levels typical of those who inhabit them, are
characterized by less illness, misery and death, even when factors such
as absolute income—or number of decaying food scraps are held constant.
The importance of this can hardly be overstated.
There is an unspeakably primordial calculator, deep within you, at
the very foundation of your brain, far below your thoughts and feelings.
It monitors exactly where you are positioned in society …
What the ignorant hit men against Peterson have failed to recognize
is that Peterson has summarized the greatest scientific advances of the
last few decades, which have immediate relevance to human
anthropological consciousness—not to mention representing a direct
threat to the medical establishment and pharmaceutical industry.
Peterson is doing this as part of a state-of-the-art cognitive therapy guide or companion.
How can his glib critics be oblivious to this? Simple: Their place
and the place of their bosses within the dominance hierarchy are
threatened.
Jordan goes on (p. 23-24) to explain the fundamental roles of anger
and of fighting back, both as necessary elements of personal liberation
and as the fundamental agent to prevent societal spiralling into
totalitarianism. His summary on this point is brilliant, and is as
seminal as Ward Churchill’s
Pacifism as Pathology in the geopolitical field.
The same point is also the main thrust of my 2013 book
and was made in my 2011 blog extract from the book:
There is no denying the first reality about humans. We
are social beings, first and foremost regarding the forces that
determine our lives. Our societies are hierarchical and, when not
constrained by geography or balancing natural forces, spontaneously grow
in size towards more hierarchy and fascism.
A recent antidote against the runaway excesses of Western monarchical
and religious hierarchies has been the development of an ethos of
individual freedom, spawned in the Enlightenment and anchored in
mid-layer economic independence from the top hierarchical predators. …
Peterson is not waiting for the social and medical sciences to catch
up to the paradigm elucidation that has recently occurred among
dominance-hierarchy pioneers. He is taking those discoveries as his
world view and as the foundation for his advice to the youth.
The dominance-hierarchy view of nature is powerful and compelling,
now supported by a few decades of hard science. It is a predictive model
with unlimited capacity to organize our perception of the world. It is a
dangerous truth, as is any truth about ourselves, which is not
dominance-hierarchy-given but which instead is anchored in objective
reality.
In the words of Harold Pinter:
[T]he majority of politicians, on the evidence available
to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance
of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain
in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth
of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of
lies, upon which we feed.
– Nobel Lecture (Literature), 2005
Peterson is having an impact because his important words are true and because oppressive false words have gone too far.
Goodiness is helpful in stabilizing the domestic dominance hierarchy,
but goodiness has been co-opted and used to excess by one side of the
establishment forces, the so-called “Left”. In a classic positive
feedback loop—not unlike Jordan’s explanation of alcoholism—goodiness
(political correctness) has achieved pathological levels and its
totalitarianism is spraying dead bodies all over the landscape.
Regular white males are very publicly being told to “check their
privilege” (that is, to shut the fuck up), to cower and to apologize and
make amends for a historical accumulation of “toxic masculinity”.
Privileged (professional class) non-white and non-male service
intellectuals are recruited into a deceitful industry of supposedly
fixing society by engineering language and by mounting witch hunts
against perceived attitudinal blasphemy.
Dominance hierarchy theory tells us that this is a recipe for
backlash. Self-image catastrophe is the dominant determinant of
ill-health and is accompanied by violent outbursts or self-destruction.
Jordan Peterson is furiously working to prevent and alleviate a
violent race and gender civil war, waged by competing hierarchical
exploiters, and guided by a disgusting array of careerist social
managers.
Jordan Peterson is also fighting for reason and objectivity and against ideological madness.
I mean, come on:
[T]he idea that there is no binary male/female sex divide
in humans is simply a vast overstatement of the fact that many other
things also occur in the genital and metabolic physiology of a minority
of individuals. …
That environmental factors—including culture and the violence or
authoritativeness of the local social dominance hierarchy—affect both
natural reproduction and the said set of sex-differentiating
physiological attributes does [not] invalidate the sex binary in human
society.
Jodan’s Rule-1 explanation about gender roles (pp. 15-16) is anchored
in science. His Footnote 18 is “Darwinian sex roles confirmed across
the animal kingdom”, which has:
Combining Bateman’s principles with Darwin’s conception
of eager males and discriminating females, the Darwin-Bateman paradigm
is now the most commonly invoked concept to explain conventional sex
roles (…). Specifically, it provides the conceptual framework to
understand two central manifestations of conventional sex
roles—female-biased parental care and male-biased sexual dimorphism.
What is next? Are we going to pretend that sexual dimorphism is not
real? Or postulate that virtually all animal behavioural studies are
cultural fantasies imagined by the field observers? Are we going to
throw out evolutionary biology and all of Darwin’s ideas as “male
science”? Why not discount Einstein’s theories as “Jew science” while
we are at it?
Look, white males are assholes, fine. But the “Words that Wound” industry service intellectuals are going too far.
Establishment “science” can be lethal, as is literally the case with medicine,
but that does not negate what we actually know about cell biology and
metabolic reactions. Likewise, fundamental empirical discoveries about
dominance and sex are not negated because Freud was off and psychiatry
is a horror. You cannot simply extrapolate cherry picked scientific
reports of anomalies into broad self-serving ideological conclusions.
These are the things that Jordan Peterson is responsibly questioning. Thank god.
