I’m trying to sit with your piece and let it digest.

Honestly, it’s hard to do. There are pieces I agree with, things I think I might agree with, parts I don’t know if I can agree with, and parts I just find untrue.

Some of the difficulty is with the writing style.

The landmines of hyperbole.

I’m all for communicating in-depth well-developed ideas but your style reads rather like Peterson’s which hits plenty of psychologically polarized topics, triggers, and hyperboles while avoiding succinct communication.

Is the all-or-nothingness, the casual disregard for facts and due process, the polarizing claim that all men are predators, simply senseless provocation?

Without a doubt, continued support for victim-inspired social engineering, and its handmaiden political correctness, what comic George Carlin called “fascism pretending to be manners,” will bring Western civilization to its knees.

These already start the “left-right” war you say Peterson bypasses even when he made his name (and all the subsequent money) on political issues.

Since then he has been jumbling triggered ideas with some borrowed wisdom and poor scholarship in a mess that seems like it may be half-right half the time if he’d just cut down on adjectives.

A lack of citation and clarification.

Your following point is really good. I recognize its roots in Jung’s critiques of modern psychology and civilization.

Reductive materialism is animated by the “searching intellect,” based on factual knowledge, logic, theory, and the like. Taken together, we might call this science (concepts crucial to Peterson’s thought will be italicized). The alternative, concerned as it is with a yearning for transcendent truth and meaning, finds expression in “ritual, drama, literature and mythology.” This more instinctual way of knowing is immediate, accessible only when we’re being in the here-and-now; in, but not of, history.

The problem is there is no citation of these sources so that others can do their own reading on the ideas you present. Instead, it’s presented as fact with little explanation or evidence to support it.

This is troublesome when referring to things many people aren’t familiar with as leaves too much about your point open to interpretation.

With no previous experience of this subject, it simply reads as a list of dichotomies, leaving out a lot of subtle theory about why these dichotomies are important and how they interact and affect each other.

Peterson does this all the time. He says “I’m a Jungian,” but then he leaves out the books and texts he is getting his ideas from. This prevents people from better studying the original ideas and coming to their own conclusions.

If you read through Jung’s books you find he cites everything from other therapists and psychologists to grimoires and inscriptions on ruins.

This allows people to clarify their own understanding of subjects such as scientific thought versus mythological or symbolic thought.

Misconstrued or misunderstood ideas.

When we simply spit fire concepts without building them up or alluding to their sources it allows for misconstrued ideas.

For instance, the idea that we should simply run with “God is good,” doesn’t fit with Jung’s “Aeon” or “Answer to Job”

In “Aeon” he first highlights the dynamic aspect of God as Good and Evil, creator and destroyer throughout different European traditions. In “Answer to Job,” Jung traces the psychological development of God from your “jealous and vengeful” God of the old testament to that of the New and shows the problem with:

What’s more, playing this belief out “right to the end,” no matter what, is the only way to redeem this fallen world.

Mainly that it leaves us blind to the dark side of God and thus to ourselves. According to Jung in “Answer to Job,” this is what leads to all the damnation in Revelations, the suppression of the dark side boils up into wrath.

The more people think that Christianity is all love and light the more they act as tyrants.

Peterson’s blind spot.

Peterson’s messianic identification stems from this identification with the good and blindness to the shadow.

It’s how he and his followers can somehow think they’re playing middlemen to the left and right when consistently attacking people on the left as Nazis or “Marxists,” (neither of which makes historical sense) while ignoring the troubling acts and support of those on the extreme right.

Peterson spins this lopsided identification with the “Good” as his epic quest and myth to save the world all while offering a jumbled rant filled with incredibly poor scholarship and hinting at things that may be true and deep.

People like you deserve a lot more than that and others need leaders who can sit with the bright and dark halves of God and still speak, still think, still say things that succinct and true.

I’d like to encourage you to be one of those leaders. To clarify your thoughts so they can reach more people and to sit with the duality, to be stretched by it, so you don’t risk as many blind spots as Peterson.

As to your conclusion:

Your article raises some valuable points. It’s hard to know if I agree with them because they are still presented in a vague way.

And those who now rage against white male privilege know this intuitively. Wittingly or not, they are acting out our signature dream of social harmony and perpetual peace as best they can in the artless atmosphere of kill-or-be-killed totalizing politics. And we, with a tin ear and cold heart, counter with more empty promises, always holding something back, convinced the consequences of letting go are too dire.

If I read you correctly you are positing that minorities are simply striving for laws that create equality and that these laws of equality come from the urge for scientific thought and materially applied processes.

However, human nature requires drama, story, a struggle to survive which grows feeble if everything is leveled out with scientific ease or absolute law.

So what you get are the mobs of minorities trying to leverage a system against the white males at the top of the mountain but that system itself is made up of white males who simply try to promise things will change.

I’m going to bypass the fact that those white males are the descendants of people who used science, myth, and their ruthless ideologies to enslave and/or slaughter millions of people around the world while creating an institution that passed on the wealth they stole to their white descendants with no need to struggle or invoke their own personal myth due to the rules they tyrannically established. . . and posit the following:

Couldn’t minorities simply be living their mythic tales of overthrowing Egypt, the realm of the oppressors who have haunted their families for generations?

Couldn’t they simply be Sparticus fighting Rome or even Zeus taking on his tyrannical father?

In which case I should think that lobbying, protest, hashtags, and voting are a grace to white men when generations past this would have ended at the guillotine or sickle.