https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=1htL1TRMIds
So I’ve done a couple of videos before on Jordan Peterson and I thought it was appropriate to do another one. This is basically what his trick is, like how he gets people in. So we’re gonna talk about the audience that he’s attracting, we’re gonna talk about how he’s attracting that audience and where he’s leading them. Previously I have talked about Jordan Peterson in terms of what he’s doing at Daily Wire, right, and that’s an interesting video to sort of think about like what’s going on with this Daily Wire thing and then I had two videos before that talking about you know what what did Jordan Peterson do as in what what’s he up to, right, and that’s sort of my take on some of the things that maybe you haven’t heard before and then I had another one on what else he did, right, because there’s more stuff and I want to continue that and sort of add to it and talk about the audiences that he’s reaching, why he’s reaching them and how he’s actually pulling that off because I think people are missing some of what’s going on and to do that I’ll need to put forth some framing. So very much framed within the meaning crisis. We’ve got meaning crisis, there’s suicidality, all forms of addiction, we get new forms of addiction, it’s not just drugs now, it’s also pornography, it’s also video games, right, thrill-seeking, there’s all kinds of sort of new ways to get yourself in trouble and get reciprocally narrowed on addiction, right, we’ve got a generation or maybe two generations that are lost, right, there’s sort of sense where they don’t fit in, they don’t know how to belong anywhere, right, and all of this sort of leads to nihilism and, you know, these people tend to cast the world in a way that the world is moving them and they’re not able to do anything about it, they’re helpless, right, so it’s not even that they just that they don’t fit in but also they don’t have any agency in the world, they don’t have a way to interact with the world that’s around them so the world becomes very oppressive, and again this leads to nihilism, so Peterson’s taking these people who are otherwise sort of lost or confused, you know, bordering on nihilism or at least in danger of bordering on nihilism and he gives them a path out, now these sorts of people I think are can be roughly divided into three buckets, okay, the first bucket is people who are traumatized out of religion, so they had some religious exposure, they were in the church maybe only when they were young, right, and then, you know, they hit teenager years, they get rebellious, they get out of the church like this church is not for me, this religion is is hokum, right, they hook up with, let’s say, the new atheist movement or some similar sort of movement, humanist movement, whatever, doesn’t matter, and then Peterson reaches those people in a particular way, in a particular place using particular tools, but then I propose there’s also two other groups, there’s the NONESs, the people who I don’t identify with religion, now these people aren’t necessarily traumatized out of religion so much as they rejected it from the start, okay, so either they got out of the church younger or they got traumatized in a way that caused them to disengage with church, so even though they were going, they weren’t really engaged anymore, right, and there’s another group of people, NONESs, that don’t identify, right, no religion, who never engaged with church, no experience whatsoever with the church, they don’t know what a church is, they don’t know why they should go, they don’t see what business the church is doing, they can’t fathom the importance of it, right, it looks very flat to them, it looks sort of like, why are you playing this game, this is silly, it’s larping, it’s crazy, it’s pretend, it doesn’t do anything, and you know, that’s a totally different type of person from the other two types because they don’t have any references at all to the story, they don’t have any familiarity with the story in the Bible or the story in the Quran or, you know, any of the other wisdom texts, they don’t know what these things are for, and the way Peterson gets these different groups is, you can talk about his big draw, which seems to be the biblical series, so fair enough, we’ll give it to the biblical series, I looked at the numbers, I did a little quick quick data analysis, didn’t do anything formal because math is boring and I hate it and it hates me, so, but I’m pretty good at just looking at numbers now, and kind of like summarize them, it’s not like there’s a hundred things to look at, the biblical series is definitely ahead, although the staying power, the draw, looks to be relatively low, some of this is due to the way YouTube algorithm works, but we won’t get into that here, in that series, he’s starting from a secular frame, he’s starting, it’s called the psychological significance, right, of the biblical stories, right, so he’s saying there’s a psychological reason why you should engage with this book, that’s very different from what everybody else is doing, like if you’re a theologian, you’re gonna give a theological reason, not a psychological reason, right, if you’re a scholar, right, a literature scholar, you can give a literary reason, right, if you’re somebody who’s, you know, into symbolism, you might give a symbolic explanation for these things, right, and Peterson’s draw is psychology, psychology is really important, it’s been stressed all over the place, maybe a little too much, maybe a little too little, who knows, it could be a bad frame, I’m not a fan of the psychological frame, so that’s how he gets you in, but then what he does with that is different, so in the biblical series, he’s just sort of, you know, the Bible, and here’s why it’s important, it’s like using psychology, right, to prove its importance, and that gets some of the traumatized Christians to say, oh, well I’m a materialist, I’ve got this nice secular frame, right, or a modernist frame, or a frame of science, right, and then here’s the science, psychology, I have my doubts, but whatever, and I’m gonna use that, and get back into the Bible, and justify my faith that I previously had, revivify my faith, using the psychological framing, using the secular framing, fair enough, it seems to work, but maps a meaning, which isn’t that far behind the biblical lecture series, if you add up all the, you know, all the years, and sort of subtract out like, say, 20% for crazy people who might have watched more than one year, not me, well, maybe I did, even then, it’s pretty close to the biblical series, capturing a lot of people with maps a meaning, a lot, so what’s he doing in maps a meaning, he’s not starting, he doesn’t really mention the Bible that much in maps a meaning, he goes through some biblical stories, sure, but that’s not most of maps a meaning, it’s not even a significant part, I would say, it may have the most impact to people for various reasons, right, but in terms of coverage time, it’s very low, most of maps a meaning is a scientific coverage, but if you sort of dissect maps a meaning carefully, and look, I didn’t go back through my notes, or any of that, but I can tell you right off the top of my head, because I remember it distinctly when I was watching, maybe I saw it three times, but I remember he takes you back, starts from modern history, right, the right now stuff, says hey, here’s what’s going on, here’s some trends in media, right, here’s some psychology, here’s some trends in media, right, and then here’s sort of some psychological history, right, so we’re gonna go through the Lion King, we’re gonna go through Pinocchio, we’re gonna talk about Carl Jung, we’re gonna talk about Nietzsche, not Nietzsche’s philosophy, right, we’re gonna talk about Nietzsche’s prophecy, right, we’re talking a little bit about Carl Jung in psychology, but we’re talking about Carl Jung’s prophecy as well, we’re not talking about Nietzsche’s philosophy, not in the positive anyway, right, we’re going through World War II, like we’re going back through all this stuff, and so we’re taking the current day and linking it to the past, and how far back does he go? Well, interestingly he goes back to ancient Egypt, and I mean, look, he covers, he covers ancient Babylon, right, he covers the Sumerian stories, Marduk, Enkidu, that sort of thing, which is great stuff by the way, if you’re not familiar with the Sumerian mythology, that’s the best, but really he takes you back to Egypt every time, and then from Egypt he re-enters the story, the historical story, so we’ve gone from a sort of modernist psychological framing, right, back through, say, the psychological patterns, right, to the beginnings of psychotherapy, to the, to, to, you know, World War II, you know, bad things that happen there, right, that are wrapped up in psychology, right, and then he goes back further to the roots of psychology, right, he’s talking a lot about the psychotherapists and prophecy, he’s talking about Nietzsche and prophecy, right, and then he’s really delving into history and mythos, and tying that mythos back to modern psychology, fair enough, and in the middle he’s sprinkling a ton of science, you know, a ton of little pieces about here’s, here’s how your, your physical sight works, here’s how you know what to do in the world, that would be called relevance realization, roughly speaking, right, you know what to do in the classroom because you know you’re not the teacher and you know where the teacher is because all the chairs are pointed, right, he does this whole age and arena relationship thing rather nicely actually, but he goes to Egypt and he sort of focuses on the Egyptian mythology and the historical Egyptian archaeology, right, he actually talks about some of this stuff and then he jumps you into the Bible and you, you know, it’s interesting because the Bible and Egypt, they have a historical link, you can make that link, so you go back in history, go back in history a little, a little further, then you go back a little bit, you go forward a little bit more, right, back to Egypt, and then you’re like okay, and then you segue into the biblical story and this takes you in a purely secular or scientific path into the Bible, right, because you’ve linked the symbolism with the psychology and the rest of its historical link, its archaeology and mythos, you know, that’s, we have the archaeology for the mythos of Sumeria and Egypt for sure, but other, other, and he touches on other, you know, other mythoses as well and ties them in historically, right, and then you’re in the Bible and now you can go all the way back to Genesis, you can go all the way forward, you know, to Jesus, it doesn’t matter in some sense, right, because once you’re there, you’re there. It’s a very interesting way to get people who are NONESs, right, Nones, they identify with no religion, into the sphere of the biblical symbolism and richness of the wisdom texts, right, and so the methodology of doing that is basically giving you a materialist frame for accepting ethereal things, right, spirit, spirit based things, things that aren’t tangible in the world, like, like wisdom and virtues and values, right, and so that’s a very clever trick and not something that Jordan Peterson does, and you can see how he’s getting roughly, again, three different audiences, roughly speaking, so the people who are particularly traumatized aren’t gonna like see the Bible, the people who never had a biblical reference aren’t going to see the Bible, and, you know, I’ve told this story before on Paul Van der Kley’s channel, my first talk with him, which is well over a year ago now, you know, I went to Catholic school for a while and they made me read The Lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe, which is a wonderful, wonderful fantasy series, and I like fantasy and sci-fi, so I was all down with that, and the reason why is because I insisted at the time, it was a new law in the state of Massachusetts, I insisted that I want to take ethics and didn’t want to be taught this religion stuff because religion stuff, ha, who wants that, and I was the only one in the ethics course, they had to give it to me, they weren’t happy about that, they weren’t happy about the state law being changed, and then at the end, the teacher that was, you know, proctoring the course, and basically it was just me sitting in a room reading a book, basically, and then every once in a while he’d come in and ask me a question, but it was really honor, honor, honor, honor stuff, it was all on my personal honor that I would read the book, of course I did, it was a wonderful book, so he asked me at the end, who does the lion represent, and I was like, what are you talking about, this is a fantasy story about children and strange creatures in an alternate world on the other side of a wardrobe, and there’s a lion in it, and he’s like, yeah, but you know, don’t you see a parallel between the lion and some other story, and I was like, no, because I’d never read another story like C.S. Lewis’s Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, so I was like, no, actually, I don’t know of another story that has any of these parallels in it at all, now mind you, I’m in junior high at this point, like, this is, you know, I’m not eight, you know, so, frustrated, he finally said, well, it’s the same as the story of Jesus, and I was like, maybe, I don’t know, I’ve never read that story, and he didn’t know what to do, he didn’t know what to do, so you can’t sell the Bible to somebody like that, like, they don’t have a reference for it, remember frame of reference, why should I care, oh, there’s a psychological and historical and symbolic linkage in the Bible, oh, that’s interesting, weird, how does that work, oh, you go back through history, you kind of figure it out, Egypt, yeah, Egypt, sure, oh, Egypt’s mentioned in the Bible, oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely, right, so you can see the way in, there’s a door there for sure, and Peterson, you know, look, does he do it deliberately, does he have it all planned out, is it a maniacal mind from day one, probably not, right, things get discovered in distributed cognition with your own audience, right, he kind of talks about that, especially with respect to World War II, right, and certain dictators, right, their audience capture, they’re moved by the crowd, they see what the crowd likes, they say more of it, Peterson does the same thing in his classroom, right, over the years, so you can see the way in which this is playing out, that’s a door for those people who have, you know, little access through their childhood, right, or family connections into the Bible to get into the Bible, to find interest in the Bible, and the better question is why is Peterson the one doing this and not the churches, all right, and look, I mean, that’s, this is just a thought experiment at this point, I’m not going to even attempt to answer that question in this video, I really want to focus on Jordan Peterson and his effect, right, so he’s able to reach these people who otherwise have not been being reached at all by anyone, right, at all, he’s the only one that’s doing it, and now maybe he’s not the only one, but he’s still the most successful by far, and there isn’t a number two in the rear view mirror for him, and I hope he keeps up the good work, I know he’s reaching a larger audience, I hope he continues to do that, but it’s important to know what he’s doing, like it’s important to see all the different things that he’s doing, and that’s why I’ve made three videos of what he’s doing and one on his transition over to Daily Wire, and so I hope that this video helps you to sort of appreciate the depth and the breadth of what Peterson’s doing, what the audiences really are, it’s not just people, it’s not random people, right, there’s actual audiences here, and there have to be, right, it’s hard to give a universal signal, you can kind of do some of that, but it’s really hard, and almost nobody else is, certainly not in the religious space, so hopefully you found that helpful in navigating, circumambulating Jordan Peterson and what he’s been up to, and I just want to appreciate for a moment that you’re sticking with my videos and finding them useful and giving me the thing that I am most appreciative for, which is your time and attention.