This is outstanding, explains the trouble I've always had with Peterson.
He talks a lot without ever actually saying anything, and when he does make points they are often so obvious we would assume everyone knew that already.
"Again: it’s not that he’s wrong when he says that law has a disciplining function, or that too much law is stifling, while not enough is anarchy. But all this stuff about “intrapsychic spirits” and “the flow of spiritual water” is just
said, never clearly explained, let alone proved. If you asked him to explain it, you would just get a long string of additional abstract terms. (Ironically,
Maps of Meaning contains neither maps nor meaning.) Sociologist C. Wright Mills, in
critically examining “grand theorists” in his field who used verbosity to cover for a lack of profundity, pointed out that people respond positively to this kind of writing because they see it as “a wondrous maze, fascinating precisely because of its often splendid lack of intelligibility.”
glad you liked it. its the best one ive read to date also. there was another but i cant find it anymore. it was an interview with one of his colleagues at university explaining why he grew mistrustful of peterson over time.
this is hearsay but i feel it matches peterson and what i can make of his personality. peterson has had some kind of spiritual awakening (these are common and legitimate regardless of their true nature) but it turned peterson into a bit of a zealot which is also common it turns out. he received complaints for making baseless claims in his classes and defended himself with colleagues as having come to a profound insight that is life changing and that people who criticize him just do not understand. over time he became increasingly immune to any criticism from faculty.
he also told this colleague that he was on a kind of a mission to save the world from communism and this mission came through dreams.
for me this maps perfectly with what i experience from peterson. he is a smart guy (at least by my estimation) but his convictions run deep emotionally and he sees himself as special.
i have an interest in spiritual experiences. i have read a great deal about them from william james, jung, ken wilbur and many others. when a person has their first spiritual experience, and if it is a radical one, they often make a leap forward out of some kind of suffering and much of their attitude and outlook upon life is transformed for the better. the problem with this is that the new outlook is falsely thought to be worth a hell of a lot more than it really is and is usually received by the person in a way that makes them feel special, better, and different than others.
i see peterson, the way he talks, the mini emotional outbursts that often accompany his language, and that lead men to so many supposed misunderstandings of his speech, his arrogance in speaking of things outside of his wheelhouse but with great authority, his notion that he has seen something that nobody else has seen (as he told his father) his immunity to criticism through
spaghetti speak and aggression, his feeling "chosen" and his general fragility and instability as symptomatic of a person who has had a singular awakening and is making too much of it and of himself.
this tendency is common, even normative, (just look to the early jewish peoples revelations about being the chosen people as an example from history, or modern evangelicals for a contemporary one) but usually a person has a spiritual director to keep their feet on the ground but peterson lacks this help.
peterson is a person with a lot of personal suffering and problems who has found something that helped him but he is not very far along towards stability, does not see his awakening in context historically and is making way too much of it for his or anyone else's good.
as often as not his type gets far worse over time but conversely his type can often mature and deepen and grow in humility and become tempered and less fragile and opinionated. i hope to see the latter from peterson over time.
