WaPo | Ontario has been hit hard by the ravages of global economic policy and
should be a prime location for emerging, radical action. Instead,
Canada’s most populous province has produced the English-speaking
world’s most controversial, right-wing surrogate dad: Jordan Peterson.
Peterson cloaks his anti-progressive opinions in
folksy, common-sense advice. He is a master at inventing an enemy and
offering young men a solution to various straw men. Peterson has
perfectly tailored his self-help style to the individual, no doubt a
holdover from his days as a clinical psychologist, which he mentions a
lot when he talks.
Self-help alone isn’t
dangerous, but it becomes dangerous in the way that Peterson uses it as
the solution to the myriad problems that young people face. He argues
that the left is dangerous and destructive because of the emphasis it
places on “group identity.” In a trailer for a video called “No Safe Space,”
to be released in 2018, Peterson argues that “group identity” is really
what killed tens of millions of people under Stalin’s Communism and
Hitler’s Nazism and then, remarkably, concludes, “and I’m concerned
because the universities are so overwhelmed by this, that I can’t see
how they can extract themselves from it.”
Therefore, supremacy of the individual is the only way to stop global war and mass murder.
Peterson’s message fits perfectly with the prevailing ideology that has
driven public-policy debates in North America since the 1980s: People
should be able to succeed on their own, without help from the state.
This message intentionally erases systemic barriers that perniciously
remain and instead demonizes anyone who understands that collective
advancement is the key to improvement.
