XPost: alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, rec.arts.tv, talk.politics.misc
XPost: talk.politics.guns, alt.atheism

Pity Jordan Peterson. Can a giant lobster analogy
ever replace a sense of humour?

The leading member of the self-styled intellectual
dark web likes to think he is �locked out� of the
mainstream media. Which makes his interview in this
month�s GQ all the more revealing

The nights have drawn in, the rains have come, and it
is time to start unveiling some of the lines in the
Lost in Showbiz Winter Collection. Let me say right
now that one of our absolute key pieces will be
Jordan Peterson.

Quite how it�s taken this column so long to alight
lovingly on the winningest public intellectual of our
age is unclear, but please now consider me officially
very into him. This week, I read Jordan�s most famous
book, 12 Simple Rules For Dating My Teenage Daughter,
and found it an absolute scream. Forgive me � the
opus is actually called 12 Rules For Life, but it
certainly forced me to tear down every other thought
leader poster peeling off my bedroom wall. I am
highly excited to get around to Jordan�s only other
published book, some kind of vast theory of
everything which took him 12 years to write. Oscar
Wilde wrote The Picture of Dorian Gray in about a
fortnight, so imagine how much better Jordan B
Peterson�s Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of
Belief is going to be.

But we race ahead. Are you even familiar with
Peterson? A University of Toronto psychology
professor, his raging stage show involuntarily
reminds me of that incredibly moving speech from The
South Park Movie: �This is aboot dignity. This is
aboot respect. [Laughter] This is aboot � [More
laughter] What�s so goddammed funny?� Anyway, you may
simply know Jordan as �the lobster guy�, after his
most famous proposition/abstraction: the idea that
lobsters and their serotonin levels explain why human
hierarchies exist and are good. But were better in
the 1950s. Put simply, you�re really doing this wrong
if your first thought on seeing a lobster is: �I�d
like to eat this thing, not surrender my abortion
rights to it.�

Owing to his sell-out speaking tours, huge YouTube
following and multimillion book sales, Peterson is
frequently described as a �Pied Piper� of angry and
disaffected men � though my understanding of the
original Pied Piper was that he took all his
followers away into some kind of mountain from which
they never returned. Yes please! Except, how come
Peterson�s followers continue to wander around our
metaphorical Hamelin, explaining stuff like there is
no patriarchy because of crustaceans? Can we try
DynoPest instead?

Anyway, Peterson is also a leading member of the
arseoisie, or the �intellectual dark web�, as they
prefer it. Again, are you familiar with the
�intellectual dark web�? I do hope not. It�s a self-
styling by a loose group of soi-disant intellectuals
you�d cross continents to avoid having a pint with
(although they didn�t go with that tagline in the
end). There isn�t space for a full passenger
manifest, but they include Peterson, talkshow host
Dave Rubin, Newsweek columnist and perma-pundit Ben
Shapiro and a bunch of other people bizarrely
obsessed with what students do, even though we�ve
known since time immemorial that students often act
like idiots, and mostly grow out of it unless they�re
Hamlet or whatever. Think of the intellectual dark
web as a very whiny superhero team. Marvel�s A-
Whingers. Guardians of the Galaxy Brains. The League
of Extraordinarily Fragile Gentlemen.

Like the rest of the gang, Peterson apparently
imagines himself �locked out� of the mainstream
media, despite having sold 2m books and being
interviewed every 10 minutes by actual international
media outlets. I can�t help feeling that Jordan is
�locked out� of the mainstream media in the same way
that Justin Bieber is �locked out� of pop music.

As I am given to understand it, all these chaps ply
their trade in the �marketplace of ideas�, which
largely seems to be grown men shrieking �Not the
face! Not the face!� at their detractors. Truly, to
watch their online arguments is to clamber inside the
Athenian agora simulator.

I�m not even being sarcastic. A lot of those guys who
hung around the ancient Athens debating society
(while helpmeets of one sort or another took care of
their day-to-day shit for them) were quite clearly
insufferable edgelords. Come on � Diogenes lived in a
large urn and would absolutely have been into
bitcoin. In some accounts, the Oracle told him to
deface the currency, which seems not entirely Delphic
of her, though he found a way to make it so and
decided she meant he should deface the currency of
prevalent ideas. Arguably, then, Diogenes is the
Jordan Peterson analogue, as he was the agora�s
leading NoFapper. Hang on, that�s wrong � he was the
agora�s leading scourge of pleasure-seeking. But I�m
pretty sure he�d have been one of the senior thinkers
in today�s anti-masturbation movement.

If you need a further Peterson catch-up, can I
recommend a video posted by GQ magazine this week, in
which Jordan is interviewed by the New Statesman�s
Helen Lewis. It�s hard to pick my favourite moment
from the nearly two-hour-long encounter, but I very
much enjoyed the bit where Lewis reasons: �Lobsters
don�t get depressed. I think you�re
anthropomorphising to a ridiculous degree. These are
creatures that urinate out of their faces.�

Then again, it must be said that Peterson spends most
of the interview looking like he�s about to urinate
out of his face. In the entire exchange, he smiles
about once, at some perceived irony in something
wistfully arch that he has just said. One�s primary
takeout is not: here is a man who can laugh at
himself. Which is such a missed opportunity. I am
reminded of the time when Jeffrey Archer told Dame
Edna Everage that �the most important thing is to be
able to laugh at yourself�. �You�d have to do that,�
came the deathlessly sympathetic reply, �otherwise
you�d be missing the joke of the century.�

Other takeouts from the GQ interview? Peterson
dresses and looks like the third Gruber brother from
the Die Hard franchise. As all world cinema fans will
know, the first brother to lose to Bruce Willis�s
grubby-vested cop was played by the late great Alan
Rickman in Die Hard, while the second was played by
Jeremy Irons (himself blue-vested) in Die Hard With a
Vengeance. Peterson very much presents as the third
sibling that Mother Gruber kept at home because he
was �chesty� � though without the self-knowledge to
accept he is a character actor rather than a leading
man.

Perhaps it might be kinder if his agent or publicist
helped him to come to terms with this? As things
stand, each of the several times Peterson intones
�life is suffering�, all I could think about was how
very much hotter it was in The Princess Bride, when
Cary Elwes�s character Westley goes to Robin Wright:
�Life is pain, highness. Anyone who says differently
is selling something.� I mean � I�ll take that sort
of line off Westley all day long. But this guy? This
56-year-old adult in the steampunk-lite outfit who
cries on stage at his own rightness? I am � how to
put this tactfully? � not feeling it in quite the
same way.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)