Thread by @davereaboi

I’ve been a fan of @jordanbpeterson, and have spent a considerable amount of time watching his lectures and trying to get a handle on the JBP phenomenon—because it’s absolutely one. I saw him tonight in DC at the Warner Theater. Some thoughts: (1)

First, the big thing: smart friends who care about politics and ideas have asked me, “who is this guy?”

The best way I can respond is, “he’s a guy whose 2 hour lectures about Jung and Dostoevsky and living a good life get 800k views on YouTube.”

They’re alway stunned. (2)

What’s clear from anyone who’s ever heard JBP speak is, he says nothing someone transported from back in time as recently as 2005 would find shocking. Yes, it’s deliberately archetypal (the Jung influence), but you really don’t have to go that far back. (3)

Something happened in our culture fairly recently, though. It’s been building for decades (or longer), but it broke through pretty recently. IMO, the Kaitlyn Jenner thing will come to be seen as a colossally important event in our culture. A media class made that happen—(4)

The enormity of that change happened so quickly and, from the standpoint of the media, the New Truth was enforced on the American public with a vengeance. You really had no choice to opt out; the Social Justice Train would knock you out of polite society if you’d object. (5)

The people who made that happen in the culture felt powerful. They also felt they had the wind at their backs and the obligation to keep pushing, keep pushing—and to shame and ostracize any dissenters. Normal people started feeling like things had changed & they were right. (6)

Little by little, people started waking up. First little bits of dissent, always whispered or in hushed tones. They began to realize the divide and the hostility that greets you if you oppose the SJW orthodoxy. (7)

I don’t think it’s at all an accident that @jordanbpeterson became famous talking about his resistance to a law that would *criminalize* the use of (“wrong”) pronouns. People are pretty easy-going, but it didn’t take a genius—or a conservative!—to see where this leads. (8)

Another thing the Trans issue gave us: It’s becoming clear to millions of people in the West that we have (at least) two common cultures now, with contradictory understandings of the most basic human things. Even biological things. (9)

Another way to put this: we now have two divergent understandings of what it means to be human and to have fruitful and successful life.

The Progressive vision we often call, derisively, SJW. But it’s as much a real culture—with all the trappings and signifiers—as any. (10)

The other vision doesn’t have a name, but it’s very close to our prior civilizational understanding. Classical liberalism? Enlightenment? Conservatism? It could be any of these things or a collection of some of them. But they’re all more similar to each other than to SJW. (11)

Interestingly, the SJW Culture is transmitted and propagandize literally everywhere—yet few live according to its logic (outside universities).

The values of the Prior Culture is transmitted almost nowhere—but millions live or try to live according to its basic concepts. (12)

Enter @jordanbpeterson. All he’s doing is very articulately making the case for the common culture. He’s very bright and non-threatening. He’s telling you, basically, how humans from a variety of civilizations have known how to live a good life. (13)

So why the fuss? Why the constant sniping hit-jobs from a media that nearly completely overtaken by evangelists for the SJW wing? Well, I think that question answers itself. (14)

I do think JBP is being sly in a Straussian way when he says that his lectures are “non-political.” It may be true in a literal sense, but the smarter SJW crowd understands very well that the popularity of a well-articulated Prior Culture will simply shred any SJW gains. (15)

Once a non-SJW-indoctrinated “normal” listens to JBP, the absurdity of the SJW nonsense is so apparent, it’s like finally turning on the subtitles to a film in a language you don’t understand. “Oh, this movie is actually a comedy?!” (16)

What @jordanbpeterson presents in his lectures is deep, yet so basic, it’s indicative of how we need to start, essentially, from scratch in putting back together the best of this Prior Culture because—other than JBP—we’ve got nobody else with a platform who’s doing it. (17)