If I may quote myself from the latest book thread: Peterson wrote, basically, a book-length Hallmark card. If it sounds true enough, people will find meaning in it.12 Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson. No, I did not read this because of the lobster thing, mostly because I didn't even know that was a thing until today. I did find that a weird and unconvincing part, but that doesn't really matter in the context of the book itself. It reads, and should be read, entirely as a long Sunday sermon buy a pastor who goes on unscientific tangents every now and then. Meaning, science and I disagree with most of what he says, but there are pieces of advice in there that are just what some people need at some moment in their life, which is what redeems it. I would not recommend the book, but might send some passages to people some day.
On a lobster related note, my grandfather would occasionally lament that my family would act like lobsters in a bucket. According to him, many trapped lobsters in a bucket work competitively and keep every single lobster in the bucket. Many would be able to escape, if only they would operate in a cooperative manner. One lobster crawls upright, another crawls over it's back, and so on making a bridge so that all but two or three crawl to safety. Instead though, the lobsters tend to pull one another back from the success of crawling out and not one ever leaves the bucket. My family has definitely been stuck in several buckets before.
Like the current Islamic terror movements, and any communist/fascist/nationalist movement in the past. Peterson is not at all "alt-right." Not at all. He is a traditional 1950's religious traditionalist that thinks if a lot of these young men go back to church all will be better. Harris is also not "alt-right" either. He is on the left of the US political spectrum, or was when I was following him before I got sick of the online atheist communities. I have been called "alt-right" because I did not vote for Clinton in the primary, and I am a Sanders-supporting borderline-socialist lefty. The word "alt-right" is being thrown around like the word racist, nazi, terrorist etc because we no longer have arguments over politics in the West any more. We have two fundamentalist radical religious groups vying for ideological purity being very loud and the people on either side being drug along with them. I want to go somewhere with this, but I have to go to work then teach an astronomy class today and don't want to get into an argument over who is the biggest shitheel in society right now (hint all sides are shit).I can see why young men who lack direction in life would follow a charismatic leader
I also kinda wonder if anyone's done a case study in why so many regressive alt-right types like Peterson or Harris self-identify as liberal.
Jon Stewart, in about 2001, said "politics tends to be dominated by the extremes because the people in the middle have better shit to do." You really have to have an axe to grind to want to imbibe Sam Harris very often. If your ideology is relatively stable, and if you get along with most people, the stridence wears you out and you go smell the flowers.
I had no idea who Jordan Peterson was until recently, he just came out of nowhere.
I first saw people talking about him on 4chan a while back, right about the time he was starting to rise. Then he was on a Joe Rogan podcast, 2ish years ago. He's blown up on the internet of late mainly due to the god-awful, terrible, just horribly bad interview he did in the UK.