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Jordan Peterson, who has sold one or two books. Photo: Getty
The bullies of the era do not come shouting foul epithets and derogatory names. They do not come proclaiming their strength. Ever since victimhood triumphed over heroism, the bullies of our world have instead come proclaiming the language of the hurt and upset, of weakness and suffering. It’s become such a tried and tested tactic we barely even notice it anymore.
Where once a person would have assaulted another person, verbally or otherwise, to win in the era of “oppression” the would-be victor must claim that they themselves are the ones who have been assaulted. Where once the loser would have wept, today the would-be winner must weep: very early, very fast and as insincerely as occasion necessitates.
This was the case with the attack on Suzanne Moore, whose stupendous account of her fall-out with the Guardian is a fine reminder of the laws of modern combat. The people who edged her out of her place of work did not do so firstly by calling her derogatory names; they did so by pretending — falsely — that she had used such names of them. They pretended that she had been “transphobic” against them. They lied about what she had written and they pretended that her words even made them feel endangered. In doing so Moore’s accusers got their victimhood in early.
As Moore narrates, the crunch point came when a trans employee at The Guardian announced her resignation, despite having already left weeks earlier, claiming that Moore had made them feel “unsafe”. It is a clever little trick, because of course there is nothing in any Suzanne Moore column that could make anyone at the paper feel unsafe. Unless the Guardian was a well-known hotspot for gangs of volatile thugs looking to beat up trans people, which seems unlikely. The suggestion is clearly insincere or deluded.
But the trick works, because so few adults want to call bullshit on the bully-words of our time. Not just because the bully-words are the words of the oppressed, but because they come cloaked in this language of impossible-to-disprove suffering. Who are you to say that the other person does not feel “unsafe”? How can you prove they don’t?
Suzanne Moore’s testament of what it feels like from the inside to deal with these latter-day Torquemadas would be familiar to many working in publishing, too.
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SubscribeWhat a bunch of pathetic human beings.
All performance no truth
1) try growing up on building site from the age of 17 and try to act like that!
2) thank your lucky stars you have a job
3) you are an employee, it’s not your firm
4) shut up and do your job
5) if you are really that outraged, resign
Lots of adults seem to belive they are special and the world should bend around them, is that not the belief of a 2 year old?
Pathetic really does not seem a strong enough word but it is descriptive
Another good article by Douglas Murray, a sane voice in a world gone mad
Could probably apply to the Home Office as well
Yup, that pretty much covers it.
Can you imagine what you will be accused of doing to them?
You don’t cave in because of your toddlers tantrums. You ignore it as they just want their own way. Apparently these snowflakes were not disciplined and imagine life is a bowl of cherries.
They sent countless death and rape threats to JKRowling, who was objecting to the firing of her friend Maya Forstater, (fired for tweets). It’s not just about ignoring it, because some of these people are unstable, dangerous lunatics who are laying siege to writers and artists and getting people fired from their jobs.
Naughty step calling….
I have been working since 17, mostly hard work with my hands which have a nice feel like leather from holding materials and tools. Being mid 60s I despair of the young, not that I know any well, but what a bunch of weakling whiners they seem. Is there a future for the Westerners? The young just seem so utterly useless.
I’m 70, and I know a bunch of younger people. However, that’s because I have 2 sons and, even more importantly, 13 siblings, so I’ve got probably over 40 nieces and nephews. None of the one’s I know very well are as weak and pathetic as these whiners, but then they aren’t involved in publishing or academia (except for one whose married to one of my nephews. But she doesn’t fit this mold either. So take heart, these are outliers in publishing, which is part of the media.
Bit of a sweeping statement! There are dicks in every generation.
I would have invited the tearful complainants up to the front and asked them to read out the passage from Peterson’s 12 Rules that they find so distressing and so potentially harmful. These people are frauds and should be exposed as such.
I have a different tack: “We are a publishing house. Not everything we publish will be in accord with your personal beliefs. I can understand that some people find Dr. Peterson’s writings objectionable. But, if this book trips your emotional circuit breaker I can understand it if you no longer wish to be employed here. I wish you success in your future endeavors elsewhere.” Then I’d dismiss the ring leaders from the firm on the simple argument that their personal beliefs are incompatible with their duties.
The only honourable thing for them to do is to leave.
Such as these have no concept of the word ‘honourable’. These are the brainwashed ‘righteous’; were it not for the fact that they do not have one decent, rational, brain to share between them. This is horrific. Are there no sane, enlightened adu;ts left in the world? Those of my generation who recognise we have experienced Orwell’s ‘1984’ need to move on and work out a defence. We are currently ‘living’ Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ where only sensation, personal comfort, vacuous entertainment and obscenity are valued. This is rule by the intellectually retarded.
Or as Frankie Goes To Hollywood also succinctly put it: ‘Are we living in a land where sex and horror are the new gods?’
Good article, suggest the publisher should invite all complainers to tender their resignations as demonstrations of strength of feeling. We all need to stand up and condemn the woke thugs, they are collectively bullies and criminals willing to damage individuals and society with their whimpering and black arguments.
It begs the question ” why hasn’t the publisher asked them to resign or taken some other action to renounce this selfish, immature and mis-guided approach to life?” My concern is that it is because our government together with public & private institutions are now mostly governed by people who are either too afraid to speak out or are of the same mindset. Unfortunately the majority of decent, hardworking folk have very little voice these days so they cannot be heard over the cacophony of drivel that is broadcast and published.
God forbid anyone gets fired these days……unless of course they are on the wrong side of the fence and expressed an opinion. Employers are already telling employees what they need to become and it’s not what the majority of people in this country would consider is part of becoming a better person.
Oh people do get fired. Usually practising Christians who truthfully state their opinions.
Yes because sadly they are on the wrong side of the left wing fence.
Perhaps Christians are deemed to be alt-right.
Well, most people are.
As a youth I toyed with Trotsky, as it were. I had been told that all the best looking girls were Trotskyists. It wasn’t even true. I wonder if I should be classified as proto-alt-right.
Did you bother to read Douglas Murray’s article above?
Is it the place of a group of minor employees to use their alleged hurt feelings as justification for an attempt to dictate what product the firm can and cannot put out?
Perhaps you really would want to live in a world where this was the case ““ as long as their demands were in harmony with your own view of the world. But if on the other hand…. [try the obvious thought experiment. Self criticism is good for the soul]
If you took the time to read Douglas article above you might notice that the snowflakes were trying to tell their employers to become better human beings ““ by not publishing books which made said snowflakes and their pals feel unsafe (allegedly).
Again, do try reading Douglas Murray’s article above.
Bullseye
That world is already here. Employers have to police the workplace for racist/sexist/transphobic/homophobic words and conduct and employees are now accountable even outside of the work place.
Really? Isn’t that precisely what the complainants are asking for? That their employer should be telling not only its employees but also those whom it publishes that they should be “better human beings”. according to the lights of those same employees. We already live in a world where you can lose your job because someone else decides that you aren’t a good enough human being. i.e because you don’t subscribe to their world view. It’s OK for the crybully employees to demand that Peterson is “fired” but not OK for them to receive the same medicine is it? There’s a name for that. Hypocrisy I think.
Absurd Daniel.
They are publishing books and someone will be offended. Employees that chose (freedom and all that) to work for a publisher (media in general) should put Freedom of Speech above anything else – including their personal feelings.
The complicated part is that they don’t think it’s purely personal, or just their opinion, they think they’re ‘representing’ some group or ideal. And anyway, they’ll parrot, ‘the personal is political’. Sadly many young people have also naively inferred that free speech is now exclusively right-wing territory (simply because a few brainless blowhards have claimed it) and so want nothing to do with it.
I read and commented on Suzanne Moore’s article. I suggested that she too was claiming to be a victim, which was ironic and undermined her argument. This led to at least two comments (I stopped reading them) where I was chastised for not supporting the original argument she’d made, even though I’d not posited any view on it.
To restate the problem Douglas describes: if you’re not with us, you must be against us. In other words, if you don’t consistently and shrilly scream from the rooftops in full support of a cause (heaven forbid, you attempt to enter a nuanced debate), then you’re seen to be wholeheartedly rejecting all and everything that has been proclaimed. It’s like a religion, except with no teleology. Maybe switching off from the frenzied echo chamber that is Twitter, engaging people in discussion (possibly starting with family members from a different generation) and gaining some perspective would be a start.
I hear you, for what it’s worth. The way she was treated was clearly wrong. But the gist of her article was, “how dare they claim to be victimised by me, after my long and distinguished career of talking about how victimised I am by the evil men!” You can sympathise with the wider moral issue while still thinking that she’s a bit of a hypocrite.
The impression I got from reading her article is that she just wants to be allowed to say what she thinks.
Which is ok, but she has to take responsibility for writing/saying what she thinks.
She encouraged these people for 20-30 years by saying/writing what they wanted to hear, and when they turned on her she positioned herself as the victim. Which is absurd.
And go all around the houses with it too…
Ditto
She has, frequently and still does. Better edited versions of her piece in unherd have appeared in Spectator and elsewhere. She’s not been cancelled. She’s taken herself off to work with people who she thinks will like her more.
Yes I would agree there. As a long term former Guardian reader I have read a fair bit of Susan M.
It is almost with grim humour that we see a lot of feminists today who are coming unstuck by their own methods. Moore, Rowling, Greer, Bindel – we are watching the scales fall from their eyes.
However it seems as though few of them realise this fully and (Bindel particularly) want to double down on their own victimhood in response.
Wonder if Mrs Rowling sees any irony in her line “You dare use my own spells against me, Potter”?
She wasn’t very nice about Mr Peterson’s recent travails, I seem to recall, but she would never have suggested that his book be blocked from publication.
Read so much you can’t even spell her first name?
Boo hoo – but good spot – points still stand.
I thought it was Susan Sharandon for years. Although that might make me a sloppy reader, does it mean I’ve not actually seen her in any films?
Greer is a good deal more intelligent than Bindel, and you feel that her real objection is to being asked to agree to something she thinks is patently untrue.
Bindel is different. Her trans hating just looks like man hating in a new guise. So far as she is concerned trans women are just men and she can’t understand why she can’t just hate on them like the rest of their sex.
She doesn’t hate them because they are trans, she hates them because they are men. But it’s a bit late to start calling her a bigot now.
I don’t agree with cancel culture – but in Bindel’s case it does have a kind of grim entertainment value.
Don’t disagree on this – was talking in the general context of her articles, and other similar traditional feminist writers over the years. Moore has come across as confused at time.
I have liked quite a few of Moore’s articles, but disagreed with just as many.
She’s a bit of a ranter. And having grown up working class, I find her ostentatious working classness a bit irritating. Not all working class women are loudmouths – but I get the idea it appeals to middle class guardian readers.
In what she says she’s a bit hit and miss but I guess columnists often are.
I’m also not sure she’s bothered about the free speech issue. Just about SM being able to say what she likes about trans issues.
A very neat and true summary, Daniel.
I have just read that comment. To me the point is not that she got singled out by 322 anonymous people, but that the “management” failed to support her, even if they disagreed with her.
The question, if you like, is how can you resign if you are not staff to begin with…
I have sympathy for her but she was in a way hoisted by her own petard
foisted, not hoisted.
Foisted? Hoist, surely.
Hoisted. It’s from Hamlet.
Hoisted is past tense. Hoist is correct in this context.
‘She was hoisted’. Past tense. What am I missing?
The original in the context of the Hamlet quote is hoist by his own petard.
But hoisted is acceptable in modern use, thus the confusion.
No, it’s “Hoist”.
I’m not sure what manner of English classes were foisted upon you during your education.
Hoist is correct (Hamlet: ‘For ’tis the sport to have the enginer [sic] / Hoist with his own petard.’) In other words, it’s amusing to see the explosives expert blown up with his own bomb. Poetic justice…
But what if Shakespeare had a terrible grasp on the English language, and the only reason we think he didn’t was because his crap writing got incorporated into the language we use today?
Think about it; “methinks”. Me… Thinks. “Me thinks me writes real good”. He’s practically the Hulk!
“Me thinks” doesn’t mean “I think.” It’s a remnant of the Old English verb thyncan (spelled with the letter þ, called thorn), which meant “to seem,” whereas thencan meant “to think.” The two later merged into “think” but the original meaning of thyncan survived in Early Modern English in the frozen expression “methinks” which means “it seems to me.”
Never let your education get in the way of having a laugh at something clearly intended to be absurd.
Good point!
I know hoist is correct, hence my comment. Unless you were trying to reply to Kelly Mitchell and got me by mistake?!
Nice one
How do you foist someone with a petard, their own or otherwise?
it’s hoist.
Erm..its hoisted.
‘…engaging people in discussion (possibly starting with family members from a different generation)… ‘ Sorry; that’s about to be outlawed in Scotland – and in the rest of the UK too if the current Law Commission recommendations are adopted by Parliament.
If that happens I’m going to go around picking arguments just to see whether they dare to prosecute me, and whether any jury would convict.
You certainly won’t be alone in that regard!
The “if you’re not for us, you’re against us” mentality is certainly a key symptom of the sickness that is affecting parts of society
well – as DM points out in his recent book – the leftist thinker is so sure of their rightfulness, that by definition, if you are not with them, you are the enemy. And the ends then justify any means. Taken to extremes by Mao, Pol Pot etc….
Closer to home, the lazy painting of conservatives as Tory Scum, BLM insisting on this knee thing are further examples along the same spectrum.
At some point there will be a ditch some of us need to die in to stop this… the trick will be picking the right battle
It’s worse than that; These ‘activists’, the most devout of the Fundamentalist Church of Gender Spirits, have moved beyond-
“If you aren’t with us, you’re against us”,
and are now firmly dug in at:
“If you aren’t us, you’re against us”.
And crying all the way to the
bankcrowdfund/grant applications desk.I think that it is necessary to discern between fake victims and real victims. In this case, she is a real victim of the leftist “purge.”
As someone who knows her writing from the Guardian, “Hoist with his own petard” keeps popping up when ever I hear of her travails.
The pro and con division regarding Peterson seems to be mostly generational.
For people of a certain age the ’12 rules’ are common sense items that were pretty much standard learning in childhood.
The world can be mean and unfair.
Well duh!
Those unfortunates that were indulged and coddled eventually got their cold bucket of reality, usually when they left home for college or when they joined the workforce.
But what happened in the last couple of decades or so?
Every child gets a prize.
Anecdotes from teachers about parents demanding grade changes.
The ‘if not one then none’ cancelling of activities.
Op-eds from parenting ‘experts’: “If your child is unhappy – You’re doing it wrong”
Safe spaces in schools.
Sensitivity training at work.
It’s no surprise we are where we are.
Kids simply were allowed to became adults without ever having to grow out of the ‘Terrible Twos’ and there doesn’t appear to be enough sober adults left in the room willing or able to apply the tough love they so sorely need.
And so we get companies like PRH opting instead to let the little darlings electronically toss their toys out of the pram without at least appreciating that these kids aren’t actually two years old and that these tantrums are significantly more dangerous.
Well quite. I read the 12 Rules book because it seemed to have whipped up a storm, and its a mash up of a bit of Freud, a bit of the Bible, a bit of Nietszche and some anecdotes from his clinical practice. Nothing very startling but he writes in an engaging way and was clearly saying something which people want to hear. The idea that he is some kind of Fascist monster is just absurd.
But that’s the problem isn’t it?
if you’ve been raised under the doctrine that it is incumbent upon a just society to ensure your happiness – that it is the natural way of things that there will always be someone who will change that D to an A – the “clean your own room” narrative of Peterson’s is indeed a threat of fascist proportions that hardly bears thinking about.
It’s no wonder that the mental health industry reports being overwhelmed by the numbers of nervous, unconfident and distressed young adults that went straight from the womb to reality completely unprepared to deal with it.
For many, the answer is simple.
We need a new improved reality.
The terrifying fact being that these young adults are moving into leadership positions and now controlling the levers of power.
Indeed – all institutions from the police to universities are staffed by disciples of wokerati – the image of cops taking the knee in London will stay with me for a long time
Excellent appraisal – I have a friend who works in a school – he is bombarded with emails from the pupil support unit – kids have had a spat at break time and x or y is upset – can he reorganise his seating plan so they don’t sit together because they’re no longer friends – can he closely monitor them because one is feeling sad because they’ve been left out of a friendship group – it is constant yet the irony is the schools new buzz word is resilience- he has lost count of how many times a kid says ” I am offended by that ” it doesn’t bode well for the future of these snowflakes
Arguably, consumer “culture”, promoted explicitly and insidiously through Orwellian-dystopian volumes of “advertising” (aka thought control, brainwashing, manipulation, coercion) has successfully replaced the more complex, realistic amd mature approach to life’s desires and wants embodied in delayed gratification with the simple, basic, even infantile desire or need for instant gratification. Perhaps much of the immaturity in many adults and their corresponding behaviours and reactions to anything that impedes or threatens that bred sense of entitlement stems from that ubiquitous emotional disfunction.
As a gay socialist — both a member of the LGBTQ panoply and one of the Marxists Peterson loves to crap on — I’ve been unable to find one comment Peterson has made that’s hateful. What’s happening at Penguin, the Guardian, and in so many institutions is a kind of mass psychosis. The fact that Peterson of all people, who’s quite brilliant in many regards, is the token on which these people want to hang their grievances, speaks to a frightening regression in our society. Penguin also carries books by Bush and Obama, people with actual power who have dropped bombs on millions of innocent non-white Muslims — these employees could make their leftist case for quitting there, if they so desired. But instead they go after a guy whose only power is to fill the occasional stadium with young white males and tell them to make their beds and tuck in their shirts. They only selfishly care about their own feelings.
Sensible comment. How odd that you should be a Marxist – utopianism never works, and in the nastiest way.
Marx simply critiqued capitalism. The mistake many make (including Peterson and Murray) is thinking that Marx formed a political movement. He didn’t. I’m also a capitalist, in that I know competition breeds innovation. But that doesn’t stop me from admiring how well Marx predicted capitalism’s current sad state. Like any theory, it informs my perspective, helps me see the other side of the coin.
Well you could not study the other philosophy of horror which killed much less than Communism, I mean Fascism, Communism’s sister. That would not be allowed, although I have a hard time telling the difference between them.
This is rather puzzling. Is it possible to be a Marxist-capitalist? It sounds like you appreciate Marx’s analysis, but I don’t see how that makes you a Marxist. Doesn’t that term imply that it’s your guiding philosophy?
You make a good point, though “Marxism” has evolved into something more than economic theory and it must be remembered that all the insanity we see today in our society flowed from the campaign to normalise homosexuality through legislation. That was the real Great Re-set which determined that nothing, no matter how dangerous , cruel, or against natural law could be made to seem harmless or even beneficial if enough of the “useful idiots” could be pressed to the cause by media, celebrity or bent politicians.
“Marx simply critiqued capitalism.” As do the student rioters and their ilk (BLM, Occupy, et al). I visited “Occupy” encampments in California and D.C., There were top of the line 4-season tents, thousand dollar bikes, all the best laptops and smart phones…From Marx’s father: “As though we were made of gold my gentleman son disposes of almost 700 thalers in a single year, in contravention of every agreement and every usage, whereas the richest spend no more than 500.”
This is what we need more of. People appreciating, learning from or at the very least tolerating, people they disagree with. And putting their own pet beliefs at risk by reading people they disagree with.
The irony, of course (re SM), is that feminists pretty much invented this trick – as is well documented by Christina Hoff Sommers and others.
It worked initially because women (unlike men) were socially sanctioned to make arguments from a position of weakness and vulnerability. It was society’s job to protect them from harm, and men felt it difficult to simply dismiss their supposed suffering.
Now everyone has jumped on the bandwagon. Even men are no longer embarrassed to do it – and if you put on a dress it works a treat.
Hi David Morley. I too was ‘conflicted’ (woke word) by Suzanne Moore’s article. One of the reasons some of us women shy away from calling ourselves ‘feminists’ is because it has victim/oppressed connotations. It makes men the oppressors, and patriarchy the fault of men (when the ‘fault’ is really biology). Gay people are expected to ‘identify’ with trans people, when many don’t, because they are all ‘victims’. ‘Feminist’ women who identify as victims should therefore empathise with trans women; this is why SM, at the Guardian for heaven’s sake, has fallen foul. Even JK Rowling felt the need to identify as a victim to calm the lynch mob. And SM herself resorts to claims of ‘bullying’. Women who say trans women are not women like themselves need to drop the victim story and refuse to be ‘bullied’.
Some messes are a lot easier to get into than they are to get out of, and I think this is one of them.
When feminists started claiming that art works, jokes, pieces of writing, scientific theories, speakers etc. made them feel unsafe, or created a chilling atmosphere or were part of rape culture, I don’t suppose it occurred to them that the same tactics would one day be used against them.
But we can’t turn the clock back. What do we do? Collectively we need to start calling out this rubbish. If someone refers to criticism of trans or feminist ideology as “online violence” we need to call them out. But we’d better do it soon before these things become enshrined in legislation.
So many of us are constrained, in public, by our occupations. I’m a psychotherapist who was told, by an ‘expert’ colleague, that a gay medic client of mine was a Terf (because she didn’t identify with trans women). I’ve been strongly discouraged by my GP brother from seeing young clients, at the request of their parents, who are pursuing gender reassignment as a ‘solution’ to their problems. Both of these young people are on the autism spectrum (which is a field I have qualifications in). If you aren’t terrified of being professionally ruined, you perhaps should be?
I wrote a much longer post, but have just deleted the rest of it…
I added to my own post “but who has the courage to do it”. Then deleted it. And of course we don’t. We sit quiet and hope the tide will turn. I’m sure that many, me included, are hoping that this is that moment, but it may not be.
SM, like many of the feminists of previous waves, just missed the latest boat. She just can’t quite understand that her own version of gender oppression didn’t reign forever at the guardian or elsewhere.
She’s like a hippy revolutionary post punk who can’t quite see why she is now an old fart.
Peterson is feared and despised among sections of the modern left because he’s popular, and because he challenges the foundational tenets on which fashionable left ideology rests.
He believes in evidence and the scientific method.
He thinks humans have something like a nature, to which it is possible to be untrue.
He thinks biology matters; that there are male and female, for instance, and that these categories have implications.
Most of all, he sensed early that fashionable left, ideological scholarship was a scam, and a power grab.
You missed his comments on Communism, and being invited to write the foreword to the new Vintage Classics edition of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s ‘The Gulag Archipelago’.
Most people, out of necessity, have to accept some element of the operation of their employer that doesn’t sit well with them on an ideological basis; things that cannot readily be changed because they are inherent in the product made or the service provided. Publishers publish books, and you might not like or agree with all of them. If you really cannot accept something that your employer does, then you always have the option of resigning. That takes courage, especially in the current climate. The problem with the likes of the folk complaining at Penguin, is that they aren’t really that bothered about Peterson’s book, it’s just another lame cause to add to their Twitter feed social justice CV. If they were truly and seriously concerned, they would tell their employer to stick it and go and find another job.
Absolutely! If you find yourself working for or a member of an unethical organization the only path is to raise the issue in its specifics, and if the response is unsatisfactory, quit.
At this stage I cannot identify a single bright spot in any Anglosphere society. Weakness, stupidity and cultural degradation is all I see. I try to be the amused spectator, but it’s just not funny.
This same process of falsely claiming hurt is playing out in my tiny uber progressive town. After the George Floyd killing 2,000 miles away from my virtually all white village, some of my townspeople started clamoring to defund our police. These were white people clamoring to defund a tiny police force that has never done anything remotely racist, but they said they were afraid to go outside because of the Floyd incident. As the author says above, that calls for those people to get mental health help, not to eliminate our police. I proclaimed that as a left handed person I was scared that the right handed townspeople were out to get me, But when I demanded they stay inside so I could feel safe walking the streets, I was ignored.
How big is your town and how many are clamouring to defund the police ? I have a neighbor who thinks her phone calls are being bugged and her computer reprogrammed by secret agents, but I don’t draw any conclusions about society from it.
Sorry I just saw this. It’s about 5,000 people. We’ve got a vote at the annual town meeting in 2021 to defund the police, so that will give a better idea of the magnitude of the movement. But in the meantime, the town council has established a working group to study how to restructure the police force, established another working group to improve race relations and desegregate our zoning (difficult because at the latest census the town is 98% white) and to atone for past colonial and racist sins.
I would like to comment on this article, but I am sooo upset I don’t think I can.
My imaginary friend, is even more upset, he/she/it has decided to commit suicide, although he /she/it might go home to Mummy/Daddy or is it Daddy/Daddy or Mummy/Mummy first.
A little credit perhaps to PenguinRH for publishing Peterson; but how many unknown authors will have their books rejected because they may upset the cry bullies? The threat of violence has, since the Rushdie events and beyond, already closed down meaningful discussion of Islam; the list of taboo subjects has simply been growing ever longer since. The intolerant modern ‘left’ cannot persuade by rational debate or win elections, but are exercising huge power and influence through a raft of institutions and the anonymous howling of social media: aided by the timidity of politicians who have been elected but are too scared to stand up to this.
No credit due, or perhaps only the trivial credit for making the right commercial decision.
Look at what’s happening. A small group of people are trying to stop the publication of a book because they don’t like the author’s opinions. Murray’s ire is not the stereotypical resentment the middle aged feel toward the young, it’s the defence of a basic democratic principle.
No they’re not. They had an emotional outburst, (something we are completely familiar with at this point) then their employees gave them their ear and proceeded to publish the book. It’s literally a nothing situation. Probably 5 or 6 girls spent 1 hour maximum crying and now every Dad on the internet is telling us how left wing academia is turning us into Stalinist Russia. All you Dads have been so hillariously baited. Christ.
Was it only the girls then?
That’s hilarious. You got every fact about the incident wrong, and you’re saying I’m overreacting.
Go on enlighten me dad
smarmy idiot.
It;s not my job to enlighten you. And why on earth are you calling me “dad”?
FYI I wrote a fair and reasonable comment about how this article is bait reactionary nonsense about 5 hours ago and it’s not been published yet. Why have I been censored and do you have any spare kleenex?
You were probably censored because Murray had an eye on the comments and would be sensitive about the word ‘clickbait (the man has to eat!). I saw this same story in Vox a couple of days ago where they tried to put a better spin on it. But to be honest I couldn’t get past the crying part as being pathetic any way you describe it.
you’re a fool whose eyes are shut and thinks they have 20/20.
There is nothing virtuous about being hypocritically as extreme as these young professionals you deride. Calling for them to be fired is a form of censorship. Using this isolated incident to opportunistically reduce complex political phenomena into a “adults” vs “children” binary is so anti-intellectual I don’t even know where to begin…
then don’t. I find your ignorance of the anti-democratic nature of their antics — if only said antics were confined to one workplace — not only anti-intellectual but anti-reality.
You don’t have the foggiest what democratic means you fool. You’re probably one of those arbeit mach frei conservatives that refuses to condemn corruption at the establishment level because it would render your “im alright jack” world view untenable. You see a bunch of performative acts as indicative of radical left politics but you know deep down that this is just lowest common denominator bait for populist conservatives. You probably think Peterson is a “heavweight intellectual” too like most people that have never opened a referenced piece of academia. Pop intellectualism has conned so many of you impressionable yes men in recent years. It’s quite frankly scary.
I’m curious about what you think is at stake here. You seem to object to people on here objecting to an effort by dozens of staff, reportedly, to stop their employer, Penguin Random House Canada, publishing a book by Jordan Peterson.
You do this first by mischaracterising what actually happened in order to downplay it, and then by impugning, without evidence, bad or malign motives, and stupidity, in the people who dislike what Penguin staff did.
It’s a stance that feels to me both angry and averse to evidence. So I’m wondering what’s at stake, as you see it.
As I’ve said countless times this is pure opportunistic bait for Murray to make a quick buck. It’s perfectly reasonable to assume this has been leaked by Penguin as a marketing ploy to boost sales of the book. Of course I’m against censorship (Some of my comments have genuinely been censored on this article so make of that what you will). The point is about the damaging effects of populism – right and left wing. They’re fundamentally anti-intellectual media products which utilise pre-existing tropes to reinforce already held positions. If there was an issue with Peterson being censored here then I would jump to defend him on principle (even though he’s a massive fraud who made a career out of rehashing Jung and then stepped into a field of which he has no credentials), the fact of the matter is that this entire criticism rests on the assumption that “an employee should not have an opinion in the work place and should just do the work for their master” – this is a very corporate model of the work place, and I’m sure it applies in the corporate workplace. However, Penguin is a creative workplace, and I can tell you from experience that participation in company values and being an opinionated employee are pretty fundamental qualities of those in the creative industries. Why don’t we have many right wingers working in the creative industries? Probably because of lib censorship right?
What is at stake is the false consciousness of people who buy into reactionary populism – there’s really no difference between. Look at how predictable all the responses are to this article: “god these little children…”, “wow murrays the only sane voice left in the world”, “wow I’m glad someone is speaking up and defending western civilisation”. Cmon man you can’t seriously buy into this bullshit? The right completely lack an intellectual framework for criticising capitalism, so have to fall back on lowest common denominator culture war nonsense. The right are only interested in “social politics” rather than “economic politics”.
Thanks for responding. I think I understand. You see the hullabaloo over Peterson’s book as another crisis confected by the right to perpetuate the culture war, which itself is just a distraction from the right’s failure to put forward a plan for a more just and equitable political and economic settlement.
If I’ve understood your point of view correctly, I’ll say that I sympathise, and that I see it has having merit. But I’m not convinced this situation is the right place to apply it.
I say that, first, because your stance still mischaracterises what happened at Penguin, this time by offering a conspiracy theory, namely that Penguin leaked the affair, which isn’t what happened, that I can see. Instead, concerned employees went to Vice to describe what happened in order to draw public attention to their concern. So it looks to me like an attempt was made to censor Peterson; it was a phenomenon.
Second, Murray ““ whom I don’t regard as a saviour or a hero ““ correctly links that phenomenon to a similar phenomenon, that of the opprobrium heaped on the Guardian columnist (I think saying her name consigns a comment to the limbo of “pending”) for breaking with the current orthodoxy, the same orthodoxy motivating the attempt to censor Peterson.
So, I’d argue that something is indeed going on, and I object to it.
My favourite fact from this discussion is that Penguin publishes Mein Kampf and nobody has objected.
Didn’t know much about Peterson – deliberately, from what I read he got a lot of real biology wrong.
Watched a doc on Sky recently – the Rise of Jordan Peterson.
I still don’t know much about Peterson and saw nothing to persuade me to climb on his bandwagon.
So while he seems quite unobjectionable to me, he is a touchstone to others.
However, he also appears to have helped a lot of people who are not alt-right and therefore I cannot see why a publisher should not publish another of his books.
Don’t like him… don’t buy his work. Don’t like your employer publishing his book… find another employer. As someone else has said, the world does not revolve around you (in fact, it doesn’t even care about you – deal with it).
I’ve watched a few of Peterson’s videos but I’ve often struggled to extract a coherent message. The words all sound good, but I don’t know what he’s actually saying. I’ve heard him described as a walking inkblot test ; you can see whatever you want to in Peterson. It would explain why he’s so popular with the alt-right while believably disavowing them.
That aside I can’t disagree with anything that Murray says here. The far left is spinning out into lunacy.
The alt-right is a figment of your imagination – it doesn’t exist – it’s a bogeyman.
Peterson is interesting on Nietzsche, Dostoevsky and Freud
Self help books are not my thing but I can imagine that some people might find them helpful..
Yes, I think that is a reasonable assessment of Peterson. His main value probably lies in the fact that he has the courage and the personality to stand up the orthodoxies that are destroying the West.
Do you think you might know a bit more about Peterson if you actually read something by him? You seem to know enough not to be persuaded to “climb on his bandwagon” but not enough to have actually read his work. Perhaps if you did you would be able to offer your own criticism instead of someone else’s.
I first encountered Jordan Peterson on the Joe Rogan Experience during the initial time became the target of hate from the woke for not supporting gender pronouns. If you are a podcast fan it was probably one of the best podcasts id ever heard up unto that point. I think its episode 877. The interesting parts of the podcast are about jungian psychology and religious symbolism and meaning.
As the song goes:
You’ve got to be taught
To hate
And fear
You’ve got to be taught
From year
To year
Its got to
Be drummed in your dear little ear
You’ve got to
Be carefully
Taught
And boy, do they teach our Good Little Girls and Good Little Boys in their dear little ears to hate and to fear these days.
The offended employees are clearly itching to be fired and nothing less will help them achieve victimhood nirvana. This creates an interesting set of choices for management. Of course, people like this have no business in serious publishing and should be sacked, but management certainly knows if they do this they will have to endure a requisite witch trial. In nearly all recent situations like this, management, editors and university administrators have folded, capitulated and cowered. So now it’s a stand-off and the only question is whether anyone at Penguin is up for the very necessary fight.
I feel unsafe in a world where writers and artists can be vetoed on the basis of their ideas or works making some glorified interns feel unsafe.
And history tells me that I am indeed unsafe in such a world.
you’ve made an absurd, unthinking analogy between the 60s generation and what’s going on today. The 1960s were about freedom and progress, even if it didn’t always turn out that way. The identitarians now want to muzzle democracy. Yes, it’s exactly the same thing.
I hope Random House said to their staff – there’s the door, please free to use it
Doors are violence. Doors are borders. They don’t have doors at Random House.
Canada used to be a country of magnificent landscape and a rather dull but quietly prosperous society. When did it change to become the crucible of this idiocy?.
Hard to say when and where it started (communists and socialists in universities and running our schools?), but when and where will it stop…that’s up to each of us.
it isn’t the crucible, but it is right in there.
You don’t encounter many labourers, or farm workers who complain that their job necessarily involves them in soiling their clothes, which (pause for tears) makes their special friend feel upset.
The mockery here doesn’t do a thing to negate Murray’s points, I don’t blame the mocker, Murray’s points are inarguable, forcing this identitarian to play the man. The ball, apparently, is beyond his ability or even comprehension.
Suzanne Moore’s experience this year will help crystallize polite but firm resistance amid society at large against the overweening ambition of the trans-rights lobby.
The crackpot ideologies fueling the trans-rights lobby and other grievance-based activism have been stewing and metastasizing in the pseudo-scholarship of university humanities departments for a few decades now.
Social media carries it out to impressionable young minds. For instance, a friend told me yesterday that her 10-year-old daughter is boycotting JK Rowling because Rowling is a “transphobe”.
We need to resist, as Peterson and Moore are doing, which is why the hatred and vitriol against them are so strong and sustained. They are daring to say the emperor is actually naked.
Just read 12 Rules for Life – late to the party, I know – and find it hard to imagine what would get people so worked up about Jordan Peterson.
All the best to him. Looking forward to the next one.
Book burning before publication.
What’s of concern is the obvious and damaging effect that this has had on his health. A near fatal addiction to medication that ended in a kill or cure rehabilitation, resulting in a frailer looking, thinner man.
He is a truly heroic character, doing this out of a sense of duty and ethics ““ he clearly doesn’t need the money, not after the success of his first book. A near lone voice in an increasingly savage wilderness, he deserves our support. So, buy his book (and petition/boycott Random House if they do not publish it) and be vocal with your support ““ message him, tell him he is not in it alone.
Some of us were alive ( and indeed teenagers!) in 1956. I’ve taught teenagers since 1968. Believe me they are so very unhappy now compared to back then. Ghastly peer group pressure and fads which can’t be escaped due to 24/7 social media. We have really lost the plot I think.
I recall an anecdote that should have currency: a benefactor was asking of a university president whether they were still teaching toxic Marxism at his university. The reply: Yes, and, cancer in the medical school, too.
I am not a fan of Peterson’s output but I am one of a growing number of adults in the room, including Mr. Murray. I can tell he sees the virtue of talking to these children in a firm but friendly way. And may there be many more such events on Unherd.
” Who are you to say that the other person does not feel “unsafe”? How can you prove they don’t?”
You probably can’t, but I think it would be worth pursuing exactly what it is that they’re afraid of. I’d like to watch the lying, whining bastards wriggle as they try and answer without looking even more pathetic and dishonest.
May seem a bit random, but how does this sit with workplace democracy and stakeholder capitalism. Would one of the downsides of such approaches be that the workforce (or the activists within it) really could shut down voices and stop books being published? Not to mention the whole affair being hushed up on social media.
Sounds like there is an opening for a new publishing house, let’s call it Free Speech Books. The contract of employment could include a clause promising to oppose censorship and to support the publication of material with which the person disagrees.
The problem is not the cowards who make their objections anonymously or whose with so little conviction they won’t stand up for their principles by moving job. The threat to free speech is not at the stage of publication. It is the attempts to control the distribution of books helped by Amazon’s developing monopoly and the marketing of books through media such as TV and radio stations.
I guess Charlie Hebdo has taken that spot?
Note that not a word was raised about the content of Dr Petersons book in the campaign to cancel its publishing .This is the usual contrived manufactured outrage /crying of the left progressive mob posturing as victims/ self righteous saintly guardians in the act of hatefully maliciously muzzling canceling defaming degrading dehumanizing punishing harming hurting and destroying a non compliant citizen , the real oppressive tyranny they have systemically inflicted on the peoples of the free democracies of the west to any and all dissenting persons .
This deluded hypocritical left progressive faction is verifiably guilty of everything they falsely accuse.
I am amazed that such a truthless myopic faction could form and grow in size and influence and control in a free democracy , but some how they have.
The mounting harms and damage they inflict on humanity is well documented and revealed ,as Dr Peterson , Douglas Murray and many other brave ,mob attacked citizens have eloquently shown.
The question now is, what do we do about it?
The British voters electing a non left govt is one thing.
The Penguin management and Rowlings publishers standing up for free speech and the woke progressive crybulliy mob extortions and demands to ostracize , muzzle , boycott and destroy a politically non compliant author and client was a good prudent brave move.
The woke Subway staff who refused to serve police officers on a break in a left mob ravaged state in America in support of the Defund The Police of the BLM police hating campaign were fired,as is should any staff who mistreat customers usually, especially for intolerant political bigotry.
We have prevailed over entrenched oppresive truthless dogma driven tyrannies before, and can against this one.
The reason they behave like this is simple; it is successful. While it is fun to imagine tearing them off a strip, the fact is that their employers did not do that. The took their fantasy complaints seriously, and generally capitulated fully or in part.
So what are they, the employers, the people in charge – what are they up to? Motivations may include fear, desire for a quite life, a hope that this will all go away. But the incursion of wokeness into the high and low corners of our culture is astonishing to behold. From the last few days
o the Bank of England redecorates a building in favour of trans rights
o The British Legion seeks to appoint a diversity advisor on £50K pa, a lot of poppies
o It is announced that Ted Hughes is an imperialist because an ancestor was involved in the slave trade.
Wokery is popular because it is the great new moral and intellectual snobbery of our age. Material signifiers of superiority have been largely democratised. Now, to join the enlightened, you must condemn, to an unlimited degree, all the icons of a common past.
As someone who reads, deeply, widely, broadly within this genre, I find it difficult to understand the hysterical hatred Peterson appears to trigger.
While he leans toward a more religious approach, than my spiritual bent, and conservatively so, I find him in general adept and insightful at weaving together psychology, mythology, theology, anthropology and many of the various systems which study human behaviour.
It is very difficult to see how he could trigger such loathing in a remotely sane individual.
As to the position of Random House, as the above article attests, he makes millions so of course they will publish him regardless. If they did not, someone else would or he would self-publish and keep the millions for himself.
What is most troubling is that a once-great publisher employs the sort of people that it does, clearly those who have no interest in or capacity to define good writing and worthwhile reading. Although to be fair, publishing has long been about money with good writing irrelevant in the main.
To understand the backlash against Peterson you have to understand the evolution of the ideologies animating the people who hate him, because that explains why they feel he is such an existential threat. It also explains the hatred against Suzanne Moore and others for falling foul of the new, totalising orthodoxy.
Developing the theories of postmodern thinkers like Foucault and Derrida, this orthodoxy holds that oppression and injustice are baked into our language and the habits of thought our language perpetuate. So, categories such as male and female are merely oppressive constructs. Accurate, objective analysis of phenomena is impossible. Evidence is meaningless. Rationality itself is a fiction invented and sustained by white, European men.
This orthodoxy fetishises the power of words because, if nothing is objectively true or real, words have the power to construct new, more desirable, and more just realities. In other words, the orthodoxy is free to make any old shit up if it furthers the cause, such as the assertion that biological sex is meaningless. Any discourse that doesn’t further the cause is evil, so Moore is cast out for saying ‘Hang on, I’m a woman, and that really does mean something’.
Peterson is super evil because he uses words so effectively to defend reason, and to demand evidence, coherence and intelligibility, and he’s popular, which means he’s an existential threat to the orthodoxy.
If you want to look into this more, there’s a great new book out called Cynical Theories, by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, which is a really useful field guide to the orthodoxy, and a defence of liberalism.
To understand the backlash against Peterson you have to understand the
evolution of the ideologies animating the people who hate him, because
that explains why they feel he is such an existential threat. It also
explains the hatred against those who fall foul of the new, totalising orthodoxy.
If you want to look into this more, there’s a great new book out called Cynical Theories, by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, which is a really useful field guide to the orthodoxy, and a defence of liberalism.
As someone else has put it, rather well, he is *kryptonite* to the identity-politics ideology that a minority of Leftist zealots are working hard to impose on Western society. The determined way in which some interviewers (incl. Cathy Newman and Helen Lewis) have attempted to discredit him and his message tells you quite a lot – he is like the star player whom the opposition want to take down. It is desperately unfortunate that he has been so ill for so long. We need his wisdom.
Thank you to Douglas Murray for being a rare voice of sanity in this insane age! “What we see is a new generation of people … (who) genuinely haven’t grown out of the stage of development where it is appropriate to cry if you do not get your way.” Exactly.
Surely those weeping whingers cannot be productive? I would invite them in, one by one, for a short chat in which I would point out the realities of life and work and invite their resignation before close of business.
I am going to start a consultancy called “The Adult in the Room.” Among the minable gold in this article is this; “But the trick works, because so few adults want to call bullshit on the bully-words of our time.”
My consultancy will work on the same basis as Quint in Jaws. I will bring a little blackboard with me. After about 20 minutes of silently listening to sniveling complaints such as described at Penquin Canada, I would walk over to the blackboard, and scratch it like Quint does until everyone shuts up. Then I would point out the infantile untrue and stupid claims they are making, tell them they have no idea what the difference is between real harm and potential harm
As part of my service, I would offer management the opportunity of having me fire the lot of them. In many industries these folks don’t get fired; the term used is either “run-off the job”, or simply “skidded.” For this I would proactively do what the tech companies do. I would unilaterally change the terms of their employment and in big block letters I would spell out that they work at the pleasure of management and if they didn’t hit the agree button, I would assume they had quit.
This would also work in various government departments, which generally are a fount of bad and stupid ideas.
I would would leave and then send the company a bill for about 10 grand. Time is money and 10 grand is a reasonable amount to pay for an hour of work that management is too chicken-poop to do themselves.
Douglas Murray for PM!!
How wonderful to read this and find included a beautiful defense of Suzanne Moore. I wrote my own blog about this earlier in regards not only to Peterson but also the relentless attempts to get actress/athlete Gina Carano fired from her job for “transphobia” (and to a lesser degree, Rosario Dawson, for the same reason) which Vanity Fair just wrote about. I also am appalled that so-called TRA’s or trans rights activists are doing everything they can to effectively ban the book “Irreversible Damage” by Abigail Shrier from major retailers and anyone else who will listen. They recently got the retail chain Target to drop the book, and when Joe Rogan, who recently interviewed Abigail Shrier on his podcast, moved to Spotify, the interview with Shrier was intentionally buried due to objections from trans staff at Spotify and is not being made available for streaming.
Shrier’s book talks about Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, which means your daughter comes home from school in the seventh grade and wants to be a boy without ever having had misgivings about her gender before. Most parents would just dismiss this but unfortunately courts are intervening with the result that large numbers of teenage girls are being given double mastectomies and being pharmacologically sterilized permanently. One of these young girls, Keira Bell recently sued the clinic who did her surgical and hormonal drug transition now that she is “de-transitioning”; some of theses girls are having to crowd-fund their reconstructive surgeries. Worst of all, a statistically questionable number of these young girls with ROGD are autistic.
PRINCIPAL, adjective: main, most important.
PRINCIPLE, noun: guiding rule of behaviour.
Please master this distinction, Spectator writers!
Can you be more percific? 😉
Aren’t they pilchards
In the Pacific?
isn’t that idspific?
We seem to be loosing the thread of this discussion.
Cut some slack here. “principle/principal” is probably the most commonly mixed-up word pair in English. As an editor myself, we made the same mistake recently in our magazine, from the writer down through three copy editors and another two rounds of proofreading.
I have just read Cynical Theories.
It is an interesting book. Perhaps it is bit too wordy.
There is a typo on the cover. It took me about week to notice, now I can see nothing else. The human mind… an enigma.
It’s precisely because the two words are so commonly mixed up that I thought it was worth giving a nudge in the right direction. The more people mix them up, the less awareness there is of the difference in meaning, resulting in a loss of clarity and accuracy of communication.
This isn’t The Spectator.
Okay, what have I missed?
everybody’s an editor.
They feel “unsafe”? They should be set home immediately, and invited to seek psychological counselling, and only to return when their petulant pseudo-paranoia no longer interferes with their ability to work.
Perhaps they feel unsafe because they know the entire transgender theory is built on sand and is inherently unstable. And from reading Peterson I have never encountered hatred of this group, just simple statements of biological and psychological facts.
“the trick works, because so few adults want to call bullshit on the bully-words of our time. Not just because the bully-words are the words of the oppressed, but because they come cloaked in this language of impossible-to-disprove suffering. Who are you to say that the other person does not feel “unsafe”? How can you prove they don’t?”
Well put. But also not quite right, I think. Given their outlook on life, these people probably *do* feel unsafe (in their own terms). They’re not pretending. Or at least not all of them. They’re locked into a worldview that makes that true. So you can’t “prove they don’t”. They do.
Sadly many CEOs are cowards – someone should stand up and ask the weaklings to get up and leave the company.
This suggests to me that the publisher is not hiring a sufficiently diverse workforce. There is clearly an element of groupthink taking place. I have dealt with publishers before and junior staff often appear to be drawn from English Literature graduates who are merely frustrated authors at heart. It hurts their fragile egos to be asked to edit and handle manuscripts by people who they feel are inferior to them and who have neither the right nor the skills to be a writer. In some ways, Mao was right in sending certain intellectuals to the countryside for re-education. It’s certainly what he would have done with these snowflakes.
Murray – truly an international treasure.
Oh my- what I would give to have a job at Penguin – To see grown up people crying over a comment would have me pissing myself with laughter!
Who the F**K interviews these pathetic morons.
Me too. I can’t imagine how much fun that would be.
fun fact mentioned by Gad Saad is: they name and shame Peterson as in he is a racist, sexist, homophobic hitler, little do they know that Hitler himself still has books in circulation that you can buy today on amazon. No person in their sane mind would want those books not published. Books are the most important part of our history, and that includes White Fragility. Douglas’s first paragraph summarzies these little toddlers in a perfect way: Where once the loser would have wept, today the would-be winner must weep: very early, very fast and as insincerely as occasion necessitates.
Couldn’t agree more. The whole ridiculous offended culture needs to be finally finished off, and these last 10 or so years be remembered for the idiotic period of drivel that it is.
Then we need to look at how our education system works, to have given rise to such stupidity and intolerance.
It needs to be stamped upon hard and fast.
“right side of history” my **s*.
Our MPs need to be far more courageous than they are, show a bit of gumption, and stop thee lunacy that leads to men being women, no platforming, and the constant line of dreadful threats levelled at women if they don’t toe the line.
FGS, what sort of society have we built here?
The offended employees of PRH should be given time off with a copy of ’12 rules for life’ to read. That’ll learn ’em.
Jordan is one of the most misunderstood people on the planet. Go watch a couple JRE episodes with JP on the podcast. That’s how you get to know who he really is. Not a monster/buggyman lol
Well said – just a nice sincere guy who likes to make people think and loves human beings. I think he’d a have a great and warm conversation with just about anyone if they just gave him a chance
I have recently retired from the faculty of an east coast engineering school that has, sadly, now completely caved in to the DVI philosophy. While I was on the faculty (for ~ 30 years) I taught an undergraduate seminar for freshman to provide individual faculty engagement and other ono-on-one interactions. I 2018 I provided each student (class was small-6-7 freshman) with a copy of 12 Rules for Life. I was pretty certain that the students either set it aside or got rid of it. Well-not so as it turns out for at least one young lady. I recently received an e-mail from this young lady in which she informed me that yes-she HAD set the book aside. However, now, as a senior, she had been going through some tough times. She picked up the book-DA!!!! Revelation-in her words. She opined that the Peterson’s words/advice had provided her (and now still provide her) with a lifeline through her difficulties. Yes-even in the east (left coast) there are rays of hope.
Well as a Toronto-dwelling Canadian, a book-lover of good books, a dedicated free-thinker and sceptic of the first order, I’m disgusted with my fellow citizens, although I can’t say I’m all that surprised.
I’m well aware of the fact that Dr. Peterson (yes, he actually is in fact, a doctor) has helped innumerable people in all ways necessary to coping with our latest greatest stages of modernity.
For shame – that all those who clamor for recognition, support and respect for the divers’ examples of pathologies from which they suffer – but would deny this to non-identitarians on political grounds?
Alphabet people, along with all the ick and ism spewers ad nauseum, perform one thing in society above all others that raises a critical eyebrow. And that is the glorious upswing, yea, a veritable growth industry – of divisiveness. Which is bad enough, though eventually even more unforgiveable due to the intense hypocrisy that comes with the package. Literally reeking of anti-social and inhumane indoctrinated cruelty (which was what cancel culture was invented for, truly.)
The helping profession asks for no credentials. To be human, to suffer, and to require help, is all that matters.
This is a moral measure.
Why it appears to matter so very little, is the story of our times.
The cry bullies, as you call them, are not even part of the problem. They are simply children who have been allowed to inhabit the bodies of grown men and women. Weird, but we should have got used to it by now. The fault lies, not with them, but with the adults who indulge them and so permanently infantilise them. Children are usually intolerant of dissent from groupthink, and part of growing up is to be forced to understand that toleration and balance are better ways of living a life. Still, I expect Random House will make the mistake of caving, and pulling Peterson’s book. Anyone who has even a passing familiarity with children will know what happens next.
Voltaire was right. Wokes are Nazi thinkers.
I’m thinking I should write a book called Uncle grandpa, or Daddy Is My Mommy, to cash in on the PC movement of teaching kids bullshit. Why not.
As for Peterson, I may be the one radical feminist on this planet who 1) actually read his first book, and 2) really liked it.
And believe me, I’ve been taken to task and ostracized for saying as much publically. I’ve had people in the middle of a debate on PC politics suddenly just ask if I like Peterson, apropos of nothing, and then write me off as a fascist. And I’m the most left leaning long term radical I know these days. I reject most people’s claims of being anywhere near radical or left of spectrum. It’s mostly a mainstream movement calling itself that, and what they want is for the government to coddle them, pay them to exist, allow them to legally force their fantasies on everyone else while simultaneously rejecting all religious people’s right to do the same bullshit, and they want special rights and privileges I’ve never wanted or asked for.
It is my opinion that the radical left wants to be as untethered to the government as possible. We want to be free to live without being beholden to a system that forces us to do such things as pretend we believe in other people’s dogmatic beliefs, and we generally don’t ask the government for much of anything.
These new so-called radicals are ten feet up governments ass, and they love systems and beliefs and forcing others to be and love a certain way. They are not radical in any way but rather are simply dogmatic cultists. Much like Mao’s cultural revolution, they want to murder intellectuals and people who’ve attained a certain quality of life so they can appropriate what is earned and have it for themselves without challenge. Ironically, they are guilty of doing the same thing Trump is doing in America right now. Stamping his feet and crying and rejecting reality by brute force. And it’s possible that he only got as many votes as he did because of the women on the center or right who are terrified of the PC cry bullies and their trans cult. I know I fear them. The fact that they’ve made mental illness a badge of honor and call it “brave” is shocking and horrifying to me.
The only thing about Peterson I find offensive is his occasional sexist ideas about how women are supposed to be in the natural order of things. He says some silly shit but it’s easy to breeze past it and take what is useful. And I’m used to men on the left being as sexist as anyone else, so it’s hardly shocking.
Crybullies are like crybabies. They cry. When they get bored they stop
But not until some poor sap has lost his job.
I agree with Mr. Best. Well said.
Do you cry Mark?
I was young, once.
Still have the hair, though I keep it short now.
Wore jeans.
But I didn’t cry.
I have to say this is pretty pathetic from Douglas – lost a lot of respect for him here, he usually comes across much more measured and classy rather than throwing bait into the culture war discourse. This is clearly a bias reinforcing hack job, the only intention of this article is to frame “left vs right” as “children vs adults” – if you’re biting on that then you’re a fool and you’re seeing what you want to see. Peterson wasn’t censored, this is a nothing issue. This is laced with pathetic pleads to authority and ad hominem attacks. What has anyone actually learnt from reading this? Nothing. Your opinions have just been reinforced. UnHerd my arse.
As a lad in the 60s I worked on a pig farm, when the foreman once argued with the farmer he got punched. In the 70s I worked in the music business and heard worse language than down on the farm. I can’t imagine the bosses reactions to me breaking down into tears because I disapproved of sausages or the Leo Sayer album.
Of course, it’s a good thing that workplaces have cleaned up their act and you needn’t fear being knocked out but this level of sensitivity is risible.
There are huge numbers of industries where employees will object to the product they are being asked to make (guns, McDonalds, fags, cars, the Daily Mail) but they get on and make them because they need a job.
/end
I hope Suzanne Moore’s experience this year will help crystallize polite but firm resistance amid society at large against the overweening ambition of the trans-rights lobby.
She makes a simple point, which gets lost amid all the noise, that misogyny is built in to radical trans activism because it’s founded on the idea that biological sex is meaningless, merely a construct built to oppress others.
This appalls feminists because the liberation of women has been all about removing historic injustices pertaining to the biological facts of womanhood, such as their rights over their bodies, and to not be raped.
The crackpot ideologies fueling the trans-rights lobby and other grievance-based activism have been stewing and metastasizing in the pseudo-scholarship of university humanities departments for a few decades now.
Social media carries it out to impressionable young minds. For instance, a friend told me yesterday that her 10-year-old daughter is boycotting JK Rowling because Rowling is a “transphobe”.
We need to resist, as Peterson and Moore are doing, which is why the hatred and vitriol against them are so strong and sustained. They are daring to say the emperor is actually naked.
‘Principal’ in the last paragraph
The article and the comments here give hope. The good fight is worth fighting.
Bully!
I’ve just discovered unherd, and thrilled about it. Douglas Murray tells it like it is (or how it ought to be) very well. The Madness Of Crowds is a must read for any free thinker. As for this piece, all I keep thinking is how long are we going to let the tail wag the dog? Is this dam of insanity going to stand, or collapse? Kudos to Penguin for holding as firm as they did. Hopefully you told the crybabies in a very gentle manner, so as to not make them feel even more unsafe, that the door is right over there, and don’t let it hit you in the arse on the way out. But it’s doubtful they did…
Shorter version of article: “Shut up,” I explained.
Shut the f–k up always works wonders.
Despite my extensive experience dealing with woke lunatics, I just can’t understand how a compassionate, erudite and brilliant man like Peterson can be accused of being a bigot. Even in the barking mad world we live in now.
Better to call them thumb-suckers. These people are not really adult in any meaningful sense, so what we are dealing with really is arrested development.
A child blames others for his upset. He lacks the capacity for self-examination and is ruled by his feelings. His feelings are not his responsibility, because he has no capacity for self management, so if he is not to blame, others must be.
“Now look what you made me do” is often the cry of the abuser, and what is an abuser but an infant in an adult body? These victim-bullies are infants. They cannot accept responsibility for their own mental and emotional wellbeing, they are in a state of constant discord because their need for gratification is not being met 24/7, so they lash out at those who are supposed to supply them with that gratification but don’t.
This is the preferred way to operate for all oppressed minorities, to such an extent that those who are not oppressed at all go looking for a minority to join so they can get free stuff – whether that is money, a job or emotional support.
The problem with it, apart from its contribution to the general malaise, is that the genuinely oppressed are shoved out of the spotlight, which roves to and fro seeking out those who shout and wail loudest.
how do we stop this cancerous cancel culture and victimhood after the capitol riot? Huge fan of DM
I can see why a publisher might want to publish Peterson’s stuff. A blend of Gorgias (without the same commitment to principle) and Samuel Smiles (but without the same deep human empathy), he peddles bite-sized chunks of the trite, the opaque, and the downright mendacious. He avoids argument by the kind of cheap rhetorical tricks pioneered by his intellectual (well, you know what I mean) ancestors, the Sophists. This kind of stand-up maxim-vending is, obviously, what Mr. Arthur Daley termed a nice little earner. But as an offering by a reputable publisher? Jamais de la vie!
That’s not my experience, reading and listening to him, but you threw in a French phrase, which is very clever, so you must be right.
It is also my opinion that Peterson is vastly overrated. But you threw in a
quip which is more than enough to invalidate mine and Tim’s opinions, without
the need to bring any arguments to the discussion.
With deference to your intellectual superiority I must unfortunately bow
out.
Oh, don’t be like that. Tim’s comment was showy-offy, dismissive, and also ignored the point of the article, which is not whether Peterson’s work deserves its popularity, but whether Peterson or any author deserves to be censored.
very good.
Your “arguments,” and that of the original poster, have the same characteristics.
Very different from the hundreds of other self-help books that get published every year without a peep of protest, then? So why the different response?
I don’t like the way Peterson tends to dominate any debate in which he is involved. He can be bit of a drama queen and sometimes i have no idea what he is on about. But he still talks more sense – even when merely stating the obvious – than just about everyone else out there.
I think he can be opaque and arguable trite in places. Mendacious I’m not sure, can you give an example?
“I can see why a publisher might want to publish Peterson’s stuff”
That’s right Tim, publishers publish. Radical!
Never accuse someone of mendacity unless you can prove your case. Even more radical!
what a crock of horsesh*t, without a single iota of evidence to support the churlish claims.
I keep bumping up against people who are nearly evangelical about Peterson. Reading through these comments you get a sense of it also. There’s a cultish feeling about it. Something of the Trumpian ‘he tells it like it is’ schtick. It’s partly why you’re getting berated here, you’re besmirching an icon. I find him innocuous enough, a smattering of common sense about personal responsibility mixed with a dash of psychobabble to make it sound ‘wise’. I don’t know enough about him but I think ‘mendacious’ might be a stretch though. He gives the impression that he enjoys his own cooking as much as his fans do.