For the past month, I have been
struggling to make this video.
I've been struggling to make this script.  I've been struggling with the research
I've been struggling with everything.
And I'm probably struggling with editing, future Mia.
F*ck you
The subject was supposed to be about language
and how we as pseudo-academics
on the internet should use language
Or rather how maybe we shouldn't use some
kind of language.
To do this I was going
to compare and contrast different
authors to see where there are strengths
to see where there are weaknesses.
No, you can't do that in a single YouTube video
that's too much work.
So I looked for
examples of inaccessible language or
language that is laden with academic
jargon and I found one specific author
and then when I looked to find more
accessible language, language that more
people have an easier time understanding,
connecting with.
I found the same same guy
Jordan Peterson.
And you know, that sucks right?
Because so many people have already done
videos on the sweet, sweet doctor.
But I haven't and I don't really have a
perspective on the deeper insights of
Petersons ideology.
To be fair, I don't want to.
But I have yet for this video
read both 12 rules for life
and maps of meaning
which if you don't know includes
chaos dragons.
And seemingly depending on who you asked Jordan Peterson was either
a convoluted mess of ideological jargon
high in the elitist academia.
Or he was someone who spoke the common tongue so to say.
someone who could connect with
someone who hasn't read too much
academia someone who isn't
super into philosophy and that seemingly
depended on whether or not you already
agreed with the deeper ideology that
Peterson proposes.
I had a hard time
finding an answer. Was he some convoluted mess?
A confusing blob of weird
masculinity and lobsters?
Or was he someone who had just struck a chord in a society that perhaps has a crisis of masculinity?
And I've come to a few
insights in my reading because I placed
myself in the position of an interested
reader.
I wanted to learn the philosophies of the great doctor.
The first conclusion I have discovered is that literally everyone is wrong somehow.
The second conclusion I have discovered is perhaps that maybe Jordan Peterson is,
perhaps
the greatest philosopher of the 21st century
However this video isn't about Jordan
Peterson.
This video is about language.
So let's talk about inaccessible language.
By inaccessible language I mean a language that is too complex, convoluted
filled with academic jargon.
in academia this is sometimes known as academic
language
or at least it was in my university.
And before I go any longer I would like to give an example of what inaccessible language could be.
So the
first of dr. Peterson's well-known
published books "Maps Of Meaning" begins
with this line:
"The world can be validly construed as  forum for action
or as place of things."
Which, ok, that's not the most sentence  in the world to
start off the book with
but let's see how dr. Peterson explains this sentence:
"The former manner of interpretation more
primordial and less clearly understood
finds It's-- the.. "
"The former manner of interpretation-more primordial and less
clearly understood-
finds is expression in arts or humanities in ritual drama
literature and mythology the world as
forum for action is a place of value a
place where all things have meaning this
meaning which is shaped as a consequence
of social interaction is implication for
action or at the higher level of
analysis implication for the
configuration of the interpretive schema
that produces or guides action."
What?!
Now I cited this as an example of
academic inaccessible language but I
don't do it illustrate why it's a bad
thing.
Other people have already talked about how Peterson is somehow incoherent
sometimes.
But this block of text?
It's very academic.
Look at the quote again.
I don't understand what's there.
But then again I'm not a clinical
psychologist.
Now, Maps Of Meaning is a boring academic book.
and it's made for boring academic people.
I sometimes feel that it's a bit
unfair to criticize map of meaning of
being elitist or inaccessible or overly
academic when it's made for elitist and
inaccessible and overly academic readers.
I say this because one of the points I am making
in this video is that language
should be clear, well understood, accessible.
But it doesn't all have to be
that way.
Sometimes it's fine to have very specified language
or language that
might not reach everyone.
And sometimes that's actually fine as long as there is alternatives.
Which brings me to 12 rules for life
*Demeaning voice* Ah, but hasn't this video already been made if you're gonna talk
about 12 rules full life, Mia?
Haven't
other people already deconstructed 12
rules enough haven't they already talked
to too much into Peterson's deeper ideology.
Yes.
In the description, you'll
find plenty of videos talking about
postmodern neo-Marxism, the 12 rules for
life and Peterson's deeper ideology.
The reason I'm making this video and the
reason I'm talking about Peterson specifically is:
I think twelve rules of
life is potentially one of the best books I've ever read.
But I should say
that I don't agree with it at all.
Twelve rules for life is filled with bad
ideological standpoints,
weird assumptions about hierarchies and how human psychology works
However it was very easy for me to understand
and you
may say: "Duh, you're an academic.
You probably get his academic jargon"
And to a point that's true.
But Twelve Rules For Life has been translated into multiple
languages
and has become a best-seller.
It's not popular just among people like
me.
But rather 12 rules for life is written in a way
that is very easy to
comprehend and digest.
It's a work where you don't need to have a prerequisite
knowledge of philosophy
or psychology or any type of political ideology.
You can
come in completely blank and completely understand everything
that Peterson is
saying in 12 rules of life.
I think that many people make a mistake
criticizing Jordan Peterson.
They dig right into the deeper ideological mess
immediately.
That's the first thing that they do
and when you do that, yeah, the
ideology looks odd,
weirdly shaped together, contradictory: "Postmodern neo-Marxism"
But that's not where most readers start
off.
Most people who maybe have heard something about Jordan Peterson
and want to be interested in whatever he has done,
they don't begin with maps of
meaning.
They don't begin with the lectures.
So 12 rules for life comes out
in January of 2018 and it's one of the
biggest bestsellers around the world, for
a short period of time anyway.
It brings Peterson up to a new level of mainstream fame.
He's no longer exclusively a weirdo on
the internet but he is now actually a
household name.
People in my family talk
about Jordan Peterson sometimes.
He's in the news, he's in the local paper
sometimes.
Also the book is translated into multiple languages
and has
basically bankrolled Jordan Peterson to
the point where he doesn't actually have
to work as a clinical psychologist anymore.
He can focus on being a public
persona talking about lobsters.
As I began my research into dr. Peterson I
realized that I hadn't actually heard
all the twelve rules.
And that's despite
watching many people critique him,
both journalists and video essayists on
YouTube.
And despite that I hadn't actually heard all of them and I thought that was a bit weird.
Because from the perspective of a newcomer,
from the
perspective of someone who wants to learn
the philosophies of dr. Peterson
that's the first thing that they encounter.
And so if you are like me and
you haven't actually heard all the rules,
the "12 rules" for life. Well, here they are:
Number one: Stand up straight with your shoulders
back
Number two: treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping.
Number three: make friends with the people who want best for you.
Number four: compare yourself to who you were yesterday,
not to others today.
Number five: don't let your children do anything that would make you dislike them.
Number six: set your house in perfect order before it
criticized the outside world.
Number seven: pursue what is meaningful,
not what is expedient.
Number eight: tell the truth or at least don't lie.
Number nine: assume the person you are listening to knows something that you don't.
Number ten: be precise in your speech.
Number 11: do not bother children when
they are skateboarding.
Number 12: pet a cat when you encounter one on the street.
Now I could dig into what that means in
a deeper sense, how that connects to his
deeper ideology.
How that connects to his ideas on hierarchies and nihilism
but I don't have to, do I?
Just by reading the titles you kind of already know the gist of his ideas.
and that's a theme that follows throughout the entire book.
And that is kind of key to Petersons entire ideology.
There are gaps and it lacks
specificity ironically.
But it is specific enough for people to get what
he means when he says it.
I think Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek
put it best in a recent debate.
Slavoj zizek: "You designate your, under quotation-marks, I'm not characterizing, enemy
or what you are
fighting against as sometimes you call it
"postmodern neo-Marxism".
I know what you mean.
All this from political correctness, this
excessive of whatever, spirit of envy
and so on and so on. I know what you mean.
Mia Mulder: "I know what you mean."
Zizek later goes on to criticize
Peterson for the thing that many other
have already criticized him about.
That postmodern neo-Marxism is a bit
contradictory and doesn't really make
sense in the traditional meaning of those words
but that doesn't change the
fact that the people who follow Peterson,
the people who adore Peterson's work and
the people who have really connected to
12 rules of life and his lectures and
his online persona
they know what he means when he says it
and at a certain point
isn't that's more important than the traditional meaning of it?
And so I think
that actually the writing in twelve words of life is actually kind of
brilliant.
I don't agree with any of it!
I don't agree at all with anything that
Peterson is doing practically at all actually.
I think everything Peterson
stands for I don't.
But I could at least understand it.
Sometimes when I read
academic books I don't get it.
Honestly sometimes when I watch YouTube videos by academics I don't get it either.
You know, I pretend that I'm pretty smart but I know my field and that's
basically all I know.
And I think it's kind of unfair to assume that everyone
is gonna get what you're talking about
because you're using a language that's
very established.
That's not necessarily true.
However the deeper you dig into Petersons ideology the more specific it
becomes
The more elitist and jargon filled and more academic it becomes.
And that's a gradual process, obviously.
And that's genius isn't it?
When I think about other philosophers
and I'm gonna classify
Jordan Peterson as a philosopher for argument's sake
but when I think about
other philosophers I have a hard time dealing with the question:
"Where should I
start?"
Like where should I start if I were to read Marx for example?
Should I start with the Communist Manifesto?
Should I start with Das
Kapital?
Should I start reading other philosophers perhaps as an introduction
because much of Marx's early work is a
critique of other philosophers.
I don't have that about Jordan Peterson.
When I read Peterson
I felt that I got everything I needed just from the book.
Just from the 12
rules of life.
I didn't have to do homework to deal with it.
And I think this is a big part of his appeal.
Because while the deeper layers
of Peterson's ideas and academic jargon
is very elitist and very complicated all
the stuff,
there's a very clear pipeline.
You can start easy. There's an
introduction.
Even though it's in Peterson's language instead of
established academic terms.
Instead of talking about hierarchies in relation to
classical liberalism or conservatism or whatever
Peterson offers a simple
alternative: Lobsters.
"Look for your inspiration to the victorious lobster
with its 350 million years of practical wisdom.
Stand up straight
with their shoulders back."
And that's part of the genius of Peterson's work too.
Because he has replaced traditional jargon with his own,
that is more easily
accessible to people who might not have
a deep education into any academic field.
If I want to talk about hierarchies I don't have to go looking for different
philosophers take
I don't have to read about conservatism or
liberalism
In Peterson's work I can talk about lobsters that's pretty easy
in comparison.
That's very forgiving too.
And of course many people have mocked
the lobster, so have I,
but if you look past the ideological clusterf*ck of it
all
because, well. It's bad, folks.
If you look past that then you can find a
vocabulary and a language that many
people can connect to.
And it's not really something that I can find an equivalent of anywhere else.
Postmodern
Neo-marxism might be contradictory in traditional terms sure
and that might
sound silly to people who actually connect to language
that is postmodern
or Marxist or both.
But it doesn't to them.
To the people who
*do* think about sjw's for example
post-modern neo-Marxism might sound
pretty good!
And isn't that kind of what meaning is at least in a linguistic
sense?
Iman Amrani: "What I find really interesting is all those things that you've listed,
I feel like women have been saying that for a while
and Peterson coming on and
said "make your bed in the morning"
and I've had so many guys, they see me
reading the book on the tube, wherever
they come over and they said "Jordan
Peterson like, that whole "making your bed in the morning", it really changed my life
and I'm like didn't your mom didn't tell you to do that"
and I'm like, what is it
about Jordan Peterson saying that that
is so different and actually gets more
of an effect then that being said from time for like teachers.
Neil Smedley: Your mom telling
you to tidy your room is in case the
neighbors come around and she want to show the
house off.
Jordan Peterson telling you to tidy your room, he goes on
and adds the
context of that. If you can't govern your
immediate surroundings don't expect to
be able to govern anything else in your life.
It's naivety. We have so many men that do not have the most basic elements
of their life in order and I included me in this for a long time
and now we live in
a culture that we wanted we want to go
from step one to step six and miss out
steps one to five.
You know so your mom telling "clean your room" or you teacher
doing it
it doesn't have the same emphasis a man saying:
"yeah, no, you do this
because it leads to everything else that you're looking for in your life".
Mia Mulder: sure, Peterson's work might not complete a full ideology
it's not really consistent
with itself and it doesn't really
sometimes connect with more mainstream
ideas of ideology and philosophy
but does it have to do that?
I'd argue that it doesn't.
Sometimes ideology can be very few disconnected ideas held together by Lobster ideas.
And to many people who subscribe to
many established ideologies, especially on the left
that might sound silly. But for people who feel lost?
For people who don't relate to anywhere on the
political spectrum,
who feel that maybe their role in society has changed in a way that they did not really agree with.
Maybe they find meaning there?
And isn't that why Peterson has garnered success?
Isn't that his demographic?
And importantly twelve rules for life is not written for other academics.
So when
academics take a very academic look at 12 Rules For life and deconstruct it
and kind of tear it apart then there will be inconsistencies
and there will be very
weird stream of consciousness flows in the book.
That's true the book isn't very
well written.
Sorry Jordan. But, come on. Chapter four? Come on!
And comparing 12
rules of life with for example maps of meaning
you see a sharp contrast in both
style and writing.
They are written for very different types of readers and
that's fine.
It's just that the one of them talks a lot about chaos dragons
and the other one talks about making your bed in the morning
in order to
eventually fight the chaos dragon.
And that brings me to the response that I
often see.
So after watching this video you can probably assume that my point is that we should use more accessible language.
That maybe we shouldn't demand
that everyone reads Kropotkin.
And that's true that is my opinion.
And sometimes this is voice in social media too but the response that I see to
that is somewhere often in the lines of
"You don't respect common people. You
think that common people are stupid
and you don't think they will get it and by
dumbing down the ideology,
by dumbing down the discourse we are actually
helping the opposing side
because our side
won't actually learn as much."
And, I think, this is bad!
That's a bad take, friend!
That's a bad take!
And the reason for this I think is pretty evident when it
comes to twelve rules of life.
It's not that "normal people" can't read
highbrow levels philosophy.
it's that no one can!
I'm sure I could probably plow
through Chomsky, if I wanted to.
I would have to read other books to compliment
my reading as I went along.
But I don't want to.
I don't have time.
Unless you are
really, really into philosophy or do it as a job
then most people don't have
that luxury to do that.
Most people just want to live life and if it takes half a
life to even get into philosophy then
it's kind of inaccessible isn't it?
So Peterson hasn't "dumbed down" his ideology for twelve rules of life.
If anything he's just made it them more accessible
and considering that his sales figures
rose a lot and that he is still significantly popular
it worked didn't it?
But I'm not saying that we need to do
all types of discourse in this way.
I'm just saying that there should always be this way available to everyone
so that if you don't want to dig in into a discussion about the Spanish Civil War
you can at least start somewhere.
Generic language is useful if nothing
else to grab the attention of more
people and then slowly drag them into
the deeper ideology as Peterson has done.
The solution to exclusionary language in
academia for example isn't to make all a
language simplistic or accessible just
that there should always be options
12 rules of life still contains the gist,
the large part of the ideology that
Jordan Peterson subscribes to.
And because of the language that it uses and
the accessible
of it it can reach far more people than
maps of meaning ever could and because
of that more on people than ever
subscribe to Peterson's ideology.
And sure they might not know everything 
about chaos dragons
but it they get
enough at least enough to subscribe to dr. Peterson.
At least enough to believe
what dr. Peterson is saying when he
talks about hierarchies and makeup.
So back to my original point then
Is he one of the greats?
is he one of the greatest philosophers of the twenty-first century?
No? Adoi.
I tricked you to watching the whole video, ahoy.
Now I wouldn't call him one of the greats
because well he's wrong much of his
philosophy is wrong much of the things
that he would write about in 12 words of
life is just wrong and he's just
incorrect.
He's factually incorrect about many
things.
However so were many of the greats when it comes to philosophy.
It depends, doesn't it, where Jordan Peterson ends up?
Because it could be a
fad that is currently being kind of
ignored that is currently falling out of
fashion.
Or he did it tap into something
when it comes to insecurities.
Especially among men.
I have many male friends who
have read the things that dr. Peterson
was written and have actually found help
in it and found support in structuring
up their own lives.
Some of them have also gone on to actually subscribe to
the deeper ideology behind that and I think that's sad.
But he still connected with millions of
people and we can't really ignore that
can we?
So the question of "Is he one of the
Greats?" is "Will his impact last or not?"
Will his impact in the public zeitgeist
actually matter in the long run and of
course I can't answer that.
It all depends.
It should be said that the way he promoted his ideology
wrong as it may
have been worked.
Maybe we should learn from that instead
of just dismissing everything that
Peterson is doing.
And that is why many
people are both right and wrong about
dr. Peterson at the same time.
Sometimes he is contradictory and jargony and
academic and elitist in much of his
writing.
But at the same time for many
other people who don't see that part of
Peterson, he is coherent.
He's logical. He is pretty good
And so in the end what do we value more?
Do we prefer academic
language or do we open up a bit?
At least here Peterson knows what he's doing
and literally nowhere else.
Thanks for
watching that video
Sorry that I was fairly late I've been going through some
things
this video was a bit shorter than usual,
I'm gonna have a I'm gonna
have another video up fairly soon to to
make up for being late and also I want
to I want to do more videos in the future
so maybe soon you know?
In a in in a few short weeks there will be more content
I want to say
special thanks to all my patrons I love you all that you allow me to do this is
a job it's it's it's mind-blowing really
I do want to give special thanks to
Alice
Amelia Fletcher
Argi Konu
Christopher Steinmuller
Cu-Fu-Lin
dirty computer
Eggs_Box
Emil Rutkowski
Emma (not) Goldman
Foxxcant
Garret Gutierrez
Ibrahim Aldridge
Jørgen Danielsen
katarzyna JJ
Kim
Linus2Punkt0
Llaren Sagan
Marcin Serwin
Nicholas Trevino
Phobos2390
Rosie
Ryan Kolak
Sam the Kelly
Vindr
William
Pietri
Wrex
and Yukino
This list is getting along now that's a good problem
to have but it's a long list now thanks
again for watching the video I hope you
liked it it's it's a it's a bit
different from what I usually do it's a
bit calmer it's a bit chill but I hope
you liked the video bye
but, and this is a pretty big but
not my
butt my butt is small
