The Last Post I Hope to Ever Write About Jordan Peterson is Actually About the Narcissism of Small Differences

 According to google trends, as at writing JP peaked in terms of search engine popularity in Feb 2018 before a wide jagged trough of interest until achieving his second highest peak search in Jan of 2023 where interest in JP collapsed again. It's important to probably note that somewhere in there he was basically in a drug induced coma in a Russian hospital to recover from a paradoxical reaction to medication. 

But all of which is to say, JP isn't in a coma, he's just not that relevant anymore and if I had to hazard a guess, that can largely be attributed to the Daily Wire paying him to no longer be relevant.

So the diminished relevance of JP is what has me optimistically forecasting that there will be little utility in writing about this personality, whom I personally feel has for a long time been overdetermined to be of little value to listen to. Even more so since his acquisition by the Daily Wire.

Bringing me to Pangburn. Pangburn Philosophy I know as a youtube channel that by my recollection and a brief search, was also an event organizer that went bust. Sam Harris detailed it on his blog in this post. When JP was a rising star, Pangburn arranged events that put him on stage with veteran public intellectuals like Sam Harris, Matt Dillahunty etc. 

Pangburn Philosophy folded some time in 2018. But the youtube channel now releases clips from these events, I'll embed some, though I have my reservations because Travis Pangburn may still owe money to speakers he didn't pay, and refunds to people who bought tickets to events that didn't happen. He may be making ad-revenue to pay down these debts, or he may just be milking these old clips.

The important thing is, that Pangburn Philosophy now in it's thumbnails and video titles shows a clear bias towards - for example - Sam Harris and against Jordan Peterson. MOST IMPORTANTLY I embed these not because they are necessary to watch to understand the post, but because the thumbnails and video titles are important, that's why they aren't merely links. See you below ovo.

The thing is, clickbait though these thumbnails may be, they also pretty accurately reflect what actually happened. The fact was that as JP was coming up in the public consciousness, perhaps even becoming the second most talked about personality behind Donald Trump, a bunch of ostensibly straight white men absolutely manhandled him in a public forum and exposed pretty much exactly what JP was doing - advocating for entirely arbitrary preferences in obscure, unclear, frequently content-less word salads.

It was also very rare for personalities like Matt or Sam to resort to data and facts to refute JP. In the case of Sam Harris, you can also witness him climb the very steep learning curve of dealing with JP almost effortlessly. They had their first disastrous exchange on Harris' podcast then called "Waking Up" now called "Making Sense" that I cannot recall ever listening to. My understanding from hearsay was that they got stuck on the first point, which was like "what is true" and Sam wouldn't concede some definition of truth that included things that are not true for the sake of argument. Something like that.

Making almost perfect segue to the Narcissism of Small differences, in their very first exchange (80% confident) Sam Harris respondended to JP's general style by reading him a passage from his own book "The End of Faith" about reading mystical significance into a randomly chosen cookbook. Youtuber Atheist "Holy Koolaid" somewhat embellished and animated this exchange in a manner that both contextualizes and clarifies the central point. Here's a link to it here.

And here's the interesting scenario. Fairly early on in the timeline of the JP phenomena,  he sat down with a bunch of white dudes whose common thread was atheism. Peterson was popularizing a form of Christian apologetics I, in my own mental shorthand, refer to as "Wagner is better than it sounds." Because he takes something like the book of Genesis and turns it into an 11 part lecture series where going by memory his first lecture takes an hour and he doesn't get through the first sentence of Genesis 1:1, after discussing consciousness, robotics, linguistics and a whole bunch of horseshit.

To an atheist of course, innovating apologetics is like innovating anti-gravity whether it is "magna rails" or "hoverboards" the innovation isn't actually going to be anti-gravity, and apologetics no matter what form it takes isn't actually going to be a proof of God.

Here though we arrive at a problem - Atheists could, with a little discipline, manhandle JP like a baby goat that had fallen over. The exposure truly is there for anyone who wishes to see it. Matt Dillahunty's conversation took place after the critical Cathy Newman interview, made famous for her strawmanning "So what you are saying is..." and JP then sits down with Matt and does nothing but "so what you're saying is..." to claim that Matt a secular humanist is actually unknown to him, a Judeo-Christian true believer.

When JP sits down with Sam Harris, Sam consistently exposes that JP as studied and thoughtful he is as to the profound depths of sophistication to be found in "Judeo-Christian" traditions, knows critically little about any other religions.

But what if you are also talking shit? 

Well then you get shit like youtuber "Big Joel's" insightless half hour take on JP who begins with the poem "The Fisher King" to which he compares JP or JP's aspirations and it deteriorates from there.

Enter a symbiotic relationship, grounded, I feel, in the narcissism of small differences. For those unfamiliar with the term, a shallow explanation is that we tend to dislike most passionately people who remind us of ourselves. Gays and Lesbians will give more grief to bisexuals than straights. Vegans will most passionately attack the vegetarian for eating eggs, milk and cheese at a dinner table surrounded by omnivores. Protestants will fight Catholics more readily than Islam (historically speaking) who in turn are more consumed with Sunni vs Shia than Islam vs Christianity. Republicans and Democrats can both hate each other in the most public of ways while diplomatically hosting as honoured guests representatives of autocratic governments.

And so, JP using exegesis, which is a special term for using critical analysis of scripture will be most up in arms at that part of the left that fell head over heals with using critical analysis of texts to form their political positions on sex, gender and race. 

This was why for several years there, JP and the far-left formed a symbiotic relationship that likely resulted in a net transfer of wealth to JP. Big Joel gets 3.6M views plus from his videos on JP, Tom Nicholas got 1.6M views for "JP doesn't understand George Orwell" Philosophytube has racked 6M+, Contrapoints video on JP got 4.6M views. So it's not like there wasn't money to be made from JP, but I don't know how youtube ad revenue compares to the speaker fees Sam Harris got for doing 3 JP events with Pangburn Philosophy.

I'm also guessing that relative to the value of the free publicity JP got, whatever money "breadtube" as I believe it is loosely called made is comparable to that sweet sweet "The Dawkin's Delusion?" money. (using as proxy the 229 customer reviews of Dawkin's Delusion when compared to the 11k customer reviews for The God Delusion).

The Dawkin's tangent is probably worth dwelling on because it also makes the point of this post - there was a trend during the whole "New Atheist" fever to attempt to discredit or debunk New Atheists by claiming that Atheism was another religion, as dogmatic and fundamentalist as the Abrahamic religions. In my opinion none of that fightback was effective, nor could be effective because it springs forth from - they are doing what we do, but we disagree.

This is only really a sound technique for refuting the soundness of the method. So too it was with trying to discredit Jordan Peterson on the grounds that he reads into George Orwell the wrong things, whereas you read into George Orwell the right things.

Importantly, its also why JP is not a good champion in terms of fighting the woke. He likely also created massive markets for breadtube and enriched them through his own critical analysis of texts like "Frozen", "The Lion King" and "Harry Potter" both sides are basically trying to argue the other is reading books wrong.

I think it was why you got more hairpulling from these camps that the phenomenas of JP and wokeness continued whereas it was easier to just dismiss Sam Harris as a racist and be done with it. There aren't really analogues to the JP critical video essays that come 3 years too late from breadtube regarding Sam Harris, where Harris' relevance has remained more constant, where JPs clearly declined once he signed on with the Daily Wire.

Critical analysis of texts can produce interesting ideas, inspiration, content. I remain sceptical that it can produce knowledge. What knowledge analysing texts can produce would need to be tested in some way. Abrahamic scripture serves as a big data set given how long it has been critically analysed to produce testable hypotheses, of which most of these fail.

Conclusion

We are left with internet history of two camps. One camp was a debate between sound epistemologies like empiricism and rationality had between figures like Sam Harris and JP that resolved quickly and the participants largely have moved on. 

The other camp was arguments between people who think their reading of texts are correct and people (championed by JP) who think their reading of texts are correct. This was the group that via narcissism of small differences produced no resolution, engaged longer and engaged far more minds, enriched themselves at the expense of society, produced no resolution and the argument is still ongoing.

Whatever dodginess is going on with Pangburn Philosophy, it is now releasing shorts that are as conclusive as historical sports matches. JP lost, his critics won, insofar as the debates where about the soundness of JP's methods.

I guess the sad thing is, the market of people who want a way to rationalize the beliefs they hold is always a bigger market than those interested in truth, and grandiose as that sounds it needs acknowledging that it's a lot easier to be interested in truth when you are relatively speaking, on top, the West African slave trade is a lot easier to talk about than the East African slave trade, for example.