“Have the Jordan Peterson followers realized their tribalism is turning into/has

—“Have the Jordan Peterson followers realized their tribalism is turning into/has turned into a cult yet?”—

I am pretty sure that Peterson has restated Stoicism(self authoring), using cognitive science, and combined it with literary analysis as allegory to cognitive science, and produced a contender for a secular synthesis and restatement of the religions of our pagan, christian, and secular ages.

So it is possible that he’s founding a Reformation – and possibly the reformation people arguably want. And a reformation we need very much, because Marxism-Postmodernism was a false and pseudoscientific religion. And to some degree I see him as attempting to provide a scientific religion in opposition to the pseudoscientific religion of marxism-postmodernism.

I’m about the same age, and I work on the inverse of Peterson’s work – epistemology, testimony, law, politics, and group evolutionary strategy. So where he tries to provide tools of meaning to teach, I try to find tools of decidability to judge.

But I’ve come to very similar conclusions. And it is fairly hard to possess a general knowledge of the state of cognitive science, the history of evolutionary biology and psychology, the history of cooperation(economics), the history of conflict (law), and to come to very different conclusions.

So you can frame his work as education. And maybe a cult. But if you want to frame peterson’s work as a self-help cult, well, you wouldn’t be the first person to say such a thing. But then, that is the purpose of literature, myth, and religion.

I agree with him deeply on most subjects, but the difference is that in the choice between teaching mental discipline and teaching mental coping mechanisms, I place greater emphasis on the former and he the latter. Which is what you would expect from a Paternally biased Judge (me), and Maternally biased Teacher (him).

Given that we can teach by science(theoretical first causes), history(evidence of our behavior), literature(temporal analogy), myth(eternal analogy) and never claim more than analogy, my frustration is that I don’t agree that the Abrahamic cults (judaism, christianity, islam, marxism-postmodernism) that move beyond analogy to the utopian, the ideal and the supernatural, are necessary or beneficial.

I find the abrahamic religions as among the worst evils in human history, and that life prior to them, and that history tells us that life in their absence both in the far east, and in our ancient world, and in our modern world leave us little choice but to deeply question why the utopian, ideal, and supernatural produce anything except the psychological equivalent of drug addiction and addiction behavior.

So that is the ‘debate’ I think we should have. Not whether Peterson is stumbling upon a restoration, or a reformation, but whether he will improve the modern version of abrahamic cults (marxism-postmodernism), or whether he will simply perpetuate it, such that it returns in an even more virulent form.