Controversial Opinion: Jordan Peterson won the Jubilee Debate

[Scholar]

I think he basically was superior in most exchanges, ironically the interlocutors had no way of even interfacing with the depth of what Jordan Peterson was describing, given that they were mostly bad faith.

But the central points are accurate: His framework of describing worship in terms of human prioritization is excellent, his idea of human beings striving towards higher unity, even if unknowingly, is correct. His point about science requiring morality (priorization and value hierarchy) is also correct.

All of these points go completely above the head of the interlocutors because they are all playing cheap semantic games. Instead of actually engaging with Jordan Petersons understanding and arguments (a lot of which are accurate and have more depth than most of the intelocutors can muster), they are basically just attacking a strawman.

 

Now, Jordan Peterson himself is overly attached to Christianity so there is a dishonesty and avoidance in the way he engages in these interactions. If he was entirely intellectually honest and did not hide behind some of the semantic structures he establishes, it would be revealed that Christianity in and of itself is not some sort of magical document that contains all human wisdom. 

 

It's funny how Jordan Peterson is in this situation. He is basically just an insightful but flawed professor with terrible takes on politics who because of his personality found himself as a phenomena of the contemporary outrage culture. It's funny how he might end up as a historical intellectual because of this.

 

 

I think Peterson actually did great damage to Christianity, precisely because he was not able to overcome some of his personal flaws. Instead of having given rise to a new form of Christianity that did give individuals meaning and purpose, and oriented them towards higher Love and Unity, he made it about his little egoic qualms, which now taint the future of this movement. He is like a conservative version of Dr K.

It's sad because given how helpful his advice will be for many individuals, it will entrench entire generations of mostly men into ignorance and backwards thinking.

Edited June 7 by Scholar

[Leo Gura]

JP exploited culture war politics to gain mega fame and wealth.

He is a master of milking woke drama.

Which is quite disgusting.

Edited June 7 by Leo Gura

[Scholar]

2 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

JP exploited culture war politics to gain mega fame and wealth.

He is a master of milking woke drama.

Which is quite disgusting.

I don't believe that to be the case. It does not fit the way he acted, given he seems to be genuinely standing up for his principles on pain of his career.

Over time of course, with his kind of ego, he would get corrupted. But I think this is mostly a function of the amount of resistance he is facing, which is just causing a blind reactivity (because of his underdeveloped ego). I don't suspect that he is intentionally milking drama for money.

 

Progressives need to learn one key lesson, or we will get war: What you resist, persists.

Conservatives ironically also do not realize that. But the more you attack someone for their identity, the greater that identity will grow. It will learn to defend itself, replicate itself, just to survive. If you had just let it be and done your own thing, promote and grow instead of attack and diminish the other side, you would have never created this monster in the first place.

Edited June 7 by Scholar

[Leo Gura]

10 minutes ago, Scholar said:

given he seems to be genuinely standing up for his principles

Of course from his POV it all feels organic and authentically motivated.

But he is slyly milking the drama and the culture wars.

He sees himself as genuine crusader. But he took the opportunity to perfectly align his crusading with mega fame and wealth.

It's all very convenient for him despite his crocodile tears. Each crocodile tear earns him $1 million dollars.

This cannot go un-called-out. His tricks may fool himself and his audience, but they ain't fooling me. He's a highly crafty devil.

Edited June 7 by Leo Gura

[Razard86]

4 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

Of course from his POV it all feels organic and authentically motivated.

But he is slyly milking the drama and the culture wars.

He sees himself as genuine crusader. But he took the opportunity to perfectly align his crusading with mega fame and wealth.

It's all very convenient for him.

But it isn't done in an unethical manner. The only issue I see with him is the issues he is close minded on.

[Leo Gura]

17 minutes ago, Razard86 said:

But it isn't done in an unethical manner.

That can be argued.

He spreads a lot of misinformation to his audience as he got audience captured. His ideology-spreading is harmful to his audience and if he wasn't so blinded by the fame and success, he could be more truthful.

Getting as audience and algorithm captured as JP has is unethical in my opinion. He's profitted a lot from stoking culture wars, which is harmful to democracy. As a mature doctor he has a responsibility to not stoke the culture wars. He abandoned that responsibiliy to maximize his fame and success.

That's what I find disgusting.

Edited June 7 by Leo Gura

[Deziree]

His attachment to Christianity is somewhat weird. But I get it. His wife's health was worsening. Yet most of his points are valid, I mean no doubt he won. 

[koops]

JP has some great points, but main, some things are painful to watch (just the first 20 seconds. Talking about offended snowflakes. As a 60 year old man, a 20 year old triggers you that badly? Come on).

Whats the point of this beside NPC junk entertainment?

 

[zurew]

No, he did horrible.

He dodged many hypotheticals and questions. For example the one where even if he perfectly follows God's moral code, he is still guaranteed to end up in hell - which is a great point showing the scenario where objective morality goes against your own values and interests you wont have any motivation to abide by those moral rules (even if they are objective).

He said multiple things that are wrong: He said people cant have different conceptions of God (yes they clearly can)  , he said the definition the dude gave is circular(even though it wasn't), he said to end up in a situation where the best choice is to lie,  that would indicate that one must have done morally bad things beforehand - which is an insane and clearly wrong claim, his claim about Cardinal Newman defining God as conscience was also wrong.

 

He was bad faith multiple times . Its peculiar, that he understood what other people meant by the Christian God (when he tried to run defense for God making the command to slaughter children in one case) , but in other cases he plays the "I have no clue what you mean by believe and God"

Most of the things that you mentioned that he is right about are trivial things that almost no one disagreed with in the firstplace, its just that he redefines terms in a way that misleads everyone. The only thing that was informative and novel and substantive to some atheists is his comment about "purpose and morality cant be found in science". But even thats not as a heavy hitter as he thinks it is, because that doesnt rule out objective morality and purpose being true under atheism and even if he could establish that , that wouldn't be anything more than a pragmatic argument for theism at best.

 

Edited June 7 by zurew

[Scholar]

3 hours ago, zurew said:

No, he did horrible.

He dodged many hypotheticals and questions. For example the one where even if he perfectly follows God's moral code, he is still guaranteed to end up in hell - which is a great point showing the scenario where objective morality goes against your own values and interests you wont have any motivation to abide by those moral rules (even if they are objective).

He said multiple things that are wrong: He said people cant have different conceptions of God (yes they clearly can)  , he said the definition the dude gave is circular(even though it wasn't), he said to end up in a situation where the best choice is to lie,  that would indicate that one must have done morally bad things beforehand - which is an insane and clearly wrong claim, his claim about Cardinal Newman defining God as conscience was also wrong.

 

He was bad faith multiple times . Its peculiar, that he understood what other people meant by the Christian God (when he tried to run defense for God making the command to slaughter children in one case) , but in other cases he plays the "I have no clue what you mean by believe and God"

Most of the things that you mentioned that he is right about are trivial things that almost no one disagreed with in the firstplace, its just that he redefines terms in a way that misleads everyone. The only thing that was informative and novel and substantive to some atheists is his comment about "purpose and morality cant be found in science". But even thats not as a heavy hitter as he thinks it is, because that doesnt rule out objective morality and purpose being true under atheism and even if he could establish that , that wouldn't be anything more than a pragmatic argument for theism at best.

 

Sure, I would say Jordan fails in his defense of Christianity, but succeeds in his critique of atheism and his defense of some of his deeper underlying thoughts.

Of course he said a lot of dumb things. When he was confronted about the lying to save the jews, that was a dishonest move on his part, although the interlocutor failed to even understanding Jordan's points (which Jordan then failed to defend given he is not that great at debating).

His problem is that he ties his philosophical thoughts up with Christian ideology, which forces him to engage in mental acrobatics.

 

Some exchanges he definitely lost, but most he won in terms of the particular prompt at the time in my view. I think you underestimate some of the underlying thoughts he has been giving in terms of his understanding of what morality as a cognitive phenomena is in the first place. 

 

 When he asks "What do you mean by believe?" or "What do you mean by God?", this is a genuine question which is a result of his framework and not really a result of him being bad faith. I think the reason why he poses those questions like that in the beginning is because it clarifies he is engaging in Hermeneutics not a literalist, strawman version of whatever most atheists attack when they attack Christianity. The way he defended the genocide I think was a little clumsy, but really the entire line of questioning is just silly given Jordan Peterson's hermeneutic approach. This should be even more obvious when he says that he simply believes Christianity to be the most accurate account of God or "archetypical truth" he so far has found.

But people simply would not engage him on that level, because that would require actual engagement with the ideas. When such engagement did occur, the interlocutors were basically confused and had to be educated about Petersons views, which is already a failure given they are debating him and should know what his stance is. 

 

Now, Peterson in general is not a great debater, which is why he stumbled even with the more basic literalist critiques. His conversation style is not that suitable for propositional debates, but he also comes off as silly often times because his bias towards Christianity, which he himself is in denial about, is fairly obvious to people. But either way, that is not really of substance to me. 

Let the old Christian man be an old Christian man. In the end he could find himself a definition of what it means to be Christian that will be perfectly valid, albeit idiosyncratic. It's not as idiosyncratic as people think given the history of Hermeneutics, but it most likely still will be perceived as dishonest.

What is happening psychological to Peterson is obvious, he wants to remain open to the possibility of Christianity as a genuine artificat of ultimate divine expression. But that's besides the point and will be hard to argue against in terms of a simple propositional debate like this, so it's basically of no substance.

 

When you say that it would prove pragmatic theism at best, I again think you are not quite engaging with Petersons framework. He rejects the idea of propositional truth being the ground of reality, he would be more in line in saying that actionable manifestation is what truth basically is, so it's much more of a funcitonal notion of truth than a propositonal one. I don't think you can simply pretend he is talking of propositional stances when in reality his metaphysics is basically incompatible with that.

Edited June 7 by Scholar

[zurew]

1 hour ago, Scholar said:

When you say that it would prove pragmatic theism at best, I again think you are not quite engaging with Petersons framework. He rejects the idea of propositional truth being the ground of reality, he would be more in line in saying that actionable manifestation is what truth basically is, so it's much more of a funcitonal notion of truth than a propositonal one. I don't think you can simply pretend he is talking of propositional stances when in reality his metaphysics is basically incompatible with that.

I dont know what it would mean for propositional truth to be the ground of reality.

I dont think I need to presuppose a specific notion of truth in order to make the point I made there. But lets grant that its a functional notion of truth, im not sure what and how that changes things in terms of implications and substance.

The point I was making there is just that from him establishing that under atheism there cant be objective morality and objective purpose doesnt follow that atheism is false. Sure you can object there and say "look, you are using a special notion of truth there, but under Jordan's functional notion of truth the sentence 'atheism is false'  means something completely different" - okay so what does he mean by that? Would he mean that atheism can't provide actionable manifestation? Okay, under that notion sure atheism would be false - but thats substantially the same as what I said , when I said that it would only give a pragmatic reason for people to adopt Christanity. It doesn't matter which frame is used, the substance is the same - we would just use different terms to communicate the same thing.

At that point though why even use terms like "true" and "false", when most people will be misled by it? Just insert "actionable manifestation" when something is true and insert "no actionable manifestation" when something is false. Then no one needs to get bogged down in truth semantics and everyone can follow and understand what he is saying and he would lower the probability of anyone strawmanning him.

Edited June 7 by zurew

[Razard86]

12 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

That can be argued.

He spreads a lot of misinformation to his audience as he got audience captured. His ideology-spreading is harmful to his audience and if he wasn't so blinded by the fame and success, he could be more truthful.

Getting as audience and algorithm captured as JP has is unethical in my opinion. He's profitted a lot from stoking culture wars, which is harmful to democracy. As a mature doctor he has a responsibility to not stoke the culture wars. He abandoned that responsibiliy to maximize his fame and success.

That's what I find disgusting.

I think you are creating that. Lack of ethics has to do with an intent to deceive which I do not see in JP. JP is self-deceived, but he isn't purposefully trying to deceive others. But if you think I am wrong you are welcome to give an example.

[Carl-Richard]

I like how your entire post is you making assertions and expressing feelings without concrete facts or argumentation.

This is what Jordan Peterson's problem is: when asked by Alex O'Connor (paraphrasing) "but don't you think people will misunderstand you and think you mean Jesus literally arose from the dead", he answered "I don't care". He cares more about his expression of his ideas, not whether they land or not. There are pros and cons to that, but it's at this point an undeniable character flaw.

Had he been able to empathically adjust his framing to the particular person he is talking to, he would not spend so much time and energy calling atheists religious, not accepting people calling him a Christian, regularly asking "what do you mean by belief?" not as a genuine question but as a defensive preamble to unpack his own views, telling fifty stories instead of putting it in brief terms; generally fumbling with communicating what he means all the time.

Edited June 7 by Carl-Richard

[zurew]

5 hours ago, Scholar said:

When he asks "What do you mean by believe?" or "What do you mean by God?", this is a genuine question which is a result of his framework and not really a result of him being bad faith

No I reject this, he is bad faith , I have seen enough content from him to determine that he perfectly understands what the term "God"  and "believe" means outside his framework. Its not like its opaque to him - this fucking guy has read the Bible more than most Christians and pretends that he doesn't have any understanding of those terms.

He can stick to his notion of truth as much as he wants, but he should be able to engage with other notions and step inside other frameworks for the brief second of answering a question. There is no excuse for not doing this (unless the goal is to be bad faith and dodge the question).

23 minutes ago, Carl-Richard said:

This is what Jordan Peterson's problem is: when asked by Alex O'Connor (paraphrasing) "but don't you think people will misunderstand you and think you mean Jesus literally arose from the dead", he answered "I don't care". He cares more about his expression of his ideas, not whether they land or not.

Yep, exactly. "Thats not my problem"

 

Edited June 7 by zurew

[Nilsi]

1 hour ago, zurew said:

No I reject this, he is bad faith , I have seen enough content from him to determine that he perfectly understands what the term "God"  and "believe" means outside his framework. Its not like its opaque to him - this fucking guy has read the Bible more than most Christians and pretends that he doesn't have any understanding of those terms.

He can stick to his notion of truth as much as he wants, but he should be able to engage with other notions and step inside other frameworks for the brief second of answering a question. There is no excuse for not doing this (unless the goal is to be bad faith and dodge the question).

Yep, exactly. "Thats not my problem"

 

I wouldn’t call it bad faith. When Peterson says “that’s not my problem,” it’s a pretty clear gesture toward Foucault. I’ve said it before - I think he’s basically a closeted Foucault guy.

What he’s doing in that moment is refusing the framing of the question. That’s what Foucault calls problematization - not answering a question, but asking how that question became possible in the first place, within a certain historical and discursive setup. So he’s not responding to whether Moses literally split the Red Sea. He’s going after the conditions that make that question meaningful. He’s not saying „I don’t care“ - he’s saying „this isn’t the kind of problem I’m working with.“ That’s a precise move. It’s not evasion - it’s a redirection.

But the difference is, Foucault uses that gesture to open things up - to loosen the structure, to let new ways of thinking or being emerge. Peterson doesn’t do that. He just replaces one rigid system with another. He drops empirical-scientific realism - or whatever name you want to give it - and swaps in something else (Jungian hyperrealism?). Archetypes, mythic structures, symbolic patterns. The myth doesn’t represent the real - it becomes the real. At a certain point, it’s pure simulation. It’s Baudrillard: hyperreality, sign detaching from referent, meaning circulating on its own.

He’s using postmodern techniques - deconstruction, reframing, symbolic exchange - but just to land back in something fixed. That’s the thing. He doesn’t stay in the open. He wants to get back to certainty, just not through science - through myth. So maybe that’s what he is: a postmodern structuralist. I’m not sold on the term, but it fits. He deconstructs just long enough to reconstruct. He doesn’t break the structure - he retools it.

And that pattern’s everywhere. Some people call it metamodernism, or some stage in Spiral Dynamics, or post-ironic sincerity, or a return to mythic-membership modes - whatever. I don’t find that kind of framing very interesting. It’s totalizing. People throw around the word empathy, and then turn around and reduce everything to a label. It’s the same maneuver as Peterson.

It’s easy to say he’s doing it because it’s easier to market - and yeah, maybe - but that’s a vulgar take. Not wrong, just vulgar. It flattens everything into commerce, and that’s not enough. This feels deeper, more obsessive. He comes across as genuinely neurotic. And for whatever reason, Christianity is the thing he’s latched onto. Not in a casual way - it’s compulsive. It orbits him. He loops back to the same images, the same stories, again and again. It’s a fixation. A fetish. Not as insult - just structurally.

Maybe it’s instability. Maybe it’s ego. Maybe he wants to be the one who understands. The therapist. The father. The voice of reason in a collapsing world. Maybe he just wants to be heard. Could be any of that. Could be all of it.

And fine - people have fixations. That’s not a problem. But this one has scaled. It’s become cultural. He’s pulling large groups of young men into this symbolic-moral framework and using that to shape real-world discourse. That’s the part I can’t just ignore. If he’d read Foucault more seriously, I don’t think he could do that so easily. Or at least not without some hesitation.

Edited June 7 by Nilsi

[zurew]

38 minutes ago, Nilsi said:

He’s going after the conditions that make that question meaningful. He’s not saying „I don’t care“ - he’s saying „this isn’t the kind of problem I’m working with.“ That’s a precise move. It’s not evasion - it’s a redirection.

It would be a non-evasive and honest move if the question wouldnt be intelligible to him, but it is. I could understand a move where one says "look given this context and frame , I have no clue what you are asking" , but this is not the case here.

Questioning the motive of the question instead of answering the question is a clear evasion on my view.

He explcitly said in his convo with Alex, that the reason why he doesn't answer is because he doesnt want to reduce the Biblical stories down to only empirical facts, but this is a false dichotomy that he created in his mind - by answering the empirical question , there is no entailment that there is no truth to the stories in the mythical sense.

You can say that those stories don't have any empirical basis and also say that they are perennial patterns - there is no contradiction there and there is no need to obfuscate.

Edited June 7 by zurew

[Carl-Richard]

4 hours ago, Nilsi said:

Because what he’s doing in that moment is refusing the framing of the question itself. That’s what Foucault calls problematization - when you don’t accept a question at face value, but instead ask how it came to be posed in that way, within a particular structure of thought or discourse. So Peterson’s not engaging with whether Moses literally split the Red Sea. He’s more interested in why that question is being asked at all, and what kind of truth someone is trying to stabilize by asking it. He’s not saying “I don’t care,” he’s saying: that’s not the kind of problem I’m working within. That’s a very precise move. It’s not evasion - it’s a shift in the terrain of the conversation.

Yes, he is a superb monologist, where you don't get to challenge his framing, where you don't get to speak back and respond. He is a terrible conversationalist. Look at all his interviews, the memes in the comment sections are all about it.

It's not that his style of framing things is purely without substance. It's that he sucks at inviting people into his frame. Because you have to be able to partially concede your frame to others to do that. Peterson only does that when forced down in a chokehold like with the Alex O'Connor clip or the Piers Morgan clip above, and with great resistance and tiptoing around.

Peterson is brilliant to listen to when you extend divine levels of charity and openness, not so much when you question him on anything he says, which also makes him a great cult leader.

Edited June 7 by Carl-Richard

[Nilsi]

2 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

Yes, he is a superb monologist, where you don't get to challenge his framing, where you don't get to speak back and respond. He is a terrible conversationalist. Look at all his interviews, the memes in the comment sections are all about it.

It's not that his style of framing things is purely without substance. It's that he sucks at inviting people into his frame. Because you have to be able to partially concede your frame to others to do that. Peterson only does that when forced down in a chokehold like with the Alex O'Connor clip or the Piers Morgan clip above, and with great resistance and tiptoing around.

Peterson is brilliant to listen to when you extend divine levels of charity and openness, not so much when you question him on anything he says, which makes him a great cult leader.

Yeah, I agree.

It’s kind of funny - he’s actually a lot like Žižek in that way. But the difference is, Žižek knows he’s a neurotic mess who talks too much and doesn’t really care about the other person’s perspective - and he admits it. And even then, he still manages the basic decency of not interrupting when someone else is speaking. Honestly, I think underneath all the chaos, he’s actually a really attentive and empathetic guy.

Peterson, on the other hand, tries to present himself as this beacon of virtue, but he can’t even do the bare minimum.

[Leo Gura]

5 hours ago, Razard86 said:

I think you are creating that.

Yes. I am creating a high ethical standard because I care about epistemics.

If we don't set the bar high then we end up with epistemic scoundrels running amok on social media.

Edited June 7 by Leo Gura

[Ulax]

23 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

JP exploited culture war politics to gain mega fame and wealth.

He is a master of milking woke drama.

Which is quite disgusting.

I think this is unfair. Maybe he done than to a degree. 
 

But I also think he has a sincere commitment to expressing his true personal beliefs on things. And that has drawn controversy which he hasn’t backed down from and that is rare. 
 

Plus I think he has genuinely cared to be a guiding voice for young people in the past.

Im not for being toxically positive but also I’m not for being toxically negative.