I am inclined to recommend binge-watching him on YouTube over reading his books.

He is better in the original Canadian.

That’s the ugly truth. And if everyone recognizes the ugly truth, or at least it’s clear to everyone that high status elites believe the ugly truth (e.g., in a “God is dead” pseudo-empiricist society), then the possibility of social grounding disappears, but then the possibility of a society where any kind of truth prevails contrary to desires of the powers that be also vanishes.

So one have have philosophical perfection and finds oneself in the philosophically unfortunate but unavoidable position of having to perform “constrained optimization” and having to choose which unjustifiable claims to tolerate as the least harmful and most noble lies.

But you need every influential person in the society to consistently pay lip service to those noble lies, even if they know better, and to follow The Basic Social Rule of rewarding cooperators and punishing defectors.

But the Catch-22 is that this rule can’t be discussed in public, because that would “break the spell.” So one has the problem of how, in a free society with semi-open ability to speak on any topic, how to get all influential people on board with the lip-service / no-criticism-or-demands-for-justification rule, and to let them all in on the inside joke and get them to obey, without intimidation, threats, terror, or overt penalties for heresy and blasphemy.

Well, it probably can’t be done, so one has to make other compromises or accept that there is no alternative way to approach it except with evasions, inconsistencies, and “strategic ambiguities” (like the Fed’s communications philosphy) and in more intellectually loose and sloppy manners.

Of course it helps if the very fact of a society going through the early stages of an increasingly severe ideological nervous breakdown is sufficiently upsetting to enough of your audience that they immediately and instinctively grasp that the story you’re telling serves as a good-enough potential rallying point that “basic social rule” protective instincts kick in about it, and also about the “prophet” giving the sermons.

Peterson’s real trouble is that he is trying to do this in the midst of a progressive social order in which volunteer auxiliary thought police patrol the streets and corridors of every mass medium and are extremely sensitive to any potential threat or new focal point of opposition. They are most certainly on his case, and he is savvy enough to understand his very delicate task in tactfully avoiding all their attempts at personal ruination, while at the same time not alienating his core project recruitables.

Oh, this is satire! Bravo!

Actually, evil does not exist. There is only the illusion of evil.

[Quote]
“Evil does not exist; once you have crossed the threshold, all is good. Once in another world, you must hold your tongue.”
—Franz Kafka
[End Quote]

Incidentally, Kafka was Jewish. He wrote these words in the full knowledge of the past suffering of the Jewish people.

People can be divided into atheists and believers. Believers can be further divided into deists and occasionalists. Evil only exists in the minds of atheists and deists. For occasionalists, who see the Hand of God in everything, there is only good.

[Quote]
“Occasionalism is a philosophical theory about causation which says that created substances cannot be efficient causes of events. Instead, all events are taken to be caused directly by God. (A related theory, which has been called “occasional causation”, also denies a link of efficient causation between mundane events, but may differ as to the identity of the true cause that replaces them. The theory states that the illusion of efficient causation between mundane events arises out of God’s causing of one event after another. However, there is no necessary connection between the two: it is not that the first event causes God to cause the second event: rather, God first causes one and then causes the other.”
—source: Wikipedia
[End Quote]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaqiXDgi0QU

Sounds like college is good at preparing students for corporate life! To be successful at corporate life you have learn when to conform and when to bully.

I agree more with Josh Barro, that Jordan Peterson is mostly states Self Help 101 and there is far worse things than Self Help 101. In terms of Jordan speaking, he really does sound a lot like someone corporation pay $25K to give a 90 minute speech to their Sales Meetings to get them to sell and negotiate better.