The Left Is Actually Afraid Of Jordan Peterson Because He’s Leading A Revolt Against Their Corruption, by Joy Pullman.
“A parallel culture of ideas has emerged [such as by Jordan Peterson] to replace a corrupted system,” [Caitlin Flanagan] writes later. What’s the corrupted system? The political and cultural left that “currently seems ascendant in our houses of culture and art, has in fact entered its decadent late phase, and it is deeply vulnerable.” Identity politics, she says, are one evidence and cause of this corruption.
Flanagan does not delve into why identity politics is a cause and result of corruption, but I have a suggestion. It’s because identity politics, and so much else of what passes for politics and culture today, is largely an elaborate system of virtue signaling. Indeed, scholar William Voegeli has shown in great detail that the left’s entire political program is wasteful, utterly ineffective virtue signaling.
Virtue signaling, of course, is essentially to present the appearance of virtue without its substance. It’s a dressy lie, a form of self-corruption. Its polar opposite is “dangerous” competence, and it is this that Peterson preaches. It’s deadly to the left because the left is anti-comptetence, and pro-corruption. Identity politics is merely the most visible proof of this reality.
In Aaron Renn’s email newsletter The Masculinist, he writes: “Populism is not our problem today. Our problem is that the American elite, of which many of us could be considered members at some level, is corrupt and inept. There are many good individuals and leaders in this group, but collectively our elite is bankrupt and has failed.” …
At precisely the most credentialed moment in world history, we have a competency crisis, due to running things according to politically convenient lies rather than accuracy, competence, and efficiency. …
We the people are well aware that we have to pay for a fat layer of incompetents to pretend to serve us atop the costs of doing things right ourselves. …
Whatever you think of Peterson, he is clearly competent. His command of general and expertise-specific knowledge is instantly evident, and earns him credibility and authority. …
Clearly many in the West have not been introduced to their own inheritance. Many are orphans with no knowledge or only faint knowledge of their own intellectual and spiritual ancestors and homes. This is a source of the alienation, the hunger, and the loneliness that mark our age.
It is not that there is no home to go to, either. Western history is rich with sustenance for mind and soul. Its longevity, richness, and vibrance are proof enough of that. It is that the people who consider themselves our leaders now deliberately strip America’s young of their roots.
Peterson and many others note rightly that most of our universities, and the other cultural institutions they gatekeep such as media and public schools, are anti-education, anti-culture, and anti-American. They gain power by separating people, by not only refusing to cultivate the capacity for self-government, but also actively cultivating intellectual, economic, and spiritual dependency.
Intellectual and moral war against our corrupt PC elite:
The phenomenon he’s sparked cannot live upon YouTube videos alone, but requires those ideas incarnating into thousands, even millions of people consciously choosing a lifetime challenging themselves with the rigors of true service to and friendship with wives, husbands, children, neighbors, and God himself. This is what it means to be human, to be fully alive.
That aliveness is a challenge to the deadness of political correctness and the mentally enslaved habits it demands and enforces. The PC zombie shock troops take it as a declaration of intellectual war, and it is.
