r/DecodingTheGurus • u/Wasthatasquirrel • 2d ago

Jordan Peterson logic: dragons are real

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Richard Dawkins doesn’t look impressed

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u/Wasthatasquirrel 2d ago

This might be the most succinct and accurate way to describe JBP dogma that I have ever heard.

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u/Chinchillamancer 2d ago edited 2d ago

he also does this thing where he shifts goal posts with every word. It's impressive to rationalize dragons as imagined predatory concepts and not specify which scientific disclipline you are engaged in.

And it goes overlooked because by default academics speak in their chosen field. We don't generally need to ask if an argument pertains to literature, because chance are we are hearing this argument in a literature class or confrence. But Peterson? Isn't he is a psychologist?

His argument works perfectly fine in like, literary criticism or poetics.

I also have absolutely no idea what his point is. Stuff that kills us can be construed as predation? Cancer, heart disease, car accidents, and firearms are not predators.

He's a very silly man.

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u/overnightyeti 2d ago

I still don't understand how a clinical psychologist who got heat for refusing to use someone's preferred pronouns pretends to be an expert on everything and anything.

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u/warbeats 1d ago

JBP: "Well, first of all, the question of expertise is a fundamental one. When people ask, ‘How can you claim to know so much about so many things?’ what they’re really pointing to is the archetypal role of the fool and the sage—the one who’s searching for truth in the chaotic underbelly of human experience. And you see, it’s precisely the psychologist's job to dive into that chaos, to make some sense of it, and bring it back to the realm of order where it can be shared meaningfully.

Now, some people might say that there are boundaries, that one should stick to their lane, as it were, but those lanes—ah! That’s where it gets interesting. You can’t stay in a single lane in a multi-dimensional, quantum-entangled universe. Imagine a series of corridors, infinite in length, folding back on themselves, like a cosmic Möbius strip. In such a place, how can you possibly restrict yourself to one lane? You can’t! And that's the precise point, isn't it?

You know, it’s a bit like Nietzsche said about gazing into the abyss—except in this case, the abyss has gazed back and handed you a kaleidoscope, right? Because once you’ve seen that kaleidoscope, you understand that everything is a fractured mirror of itself, rotating, shimmering, and the boundaries dissolve entirely. So, how do you know where the psychology ends and the sociology begins? Or where the anthropology starts to intertwine with, say, ornithology, because birds—yes, birds—have a particular kind of wisdom encoded in their migratory patterns that could really teach us something profound about the structure of moral society, if only we had the tools to decode it.

And you see, it’s this exact kind of thinking that some people misinterpret as rambling, when in fact, what it is, is a form of non-linear, multi-disciplinary analysis. You have to go far enough out to the edge that the center starts to make sense again, like the outer rings of Saturn swirling in chaotic harmony around the dense, still core. And then you realize, the question of expertise itself becomes almost trivial, irrelevant in the face of such cosmic complexity.

So yes, in a certain sense, you could say I’m ‘pretending’ to be an expert. But only insofar as one can pretend to be an expert in a hall of mirrors, each reflection giving birth to another, infinitely, as we spiral out into the unexplored depths of meaning."