The wide popularity of Jordan
Peterson, a once-obscure
Canadian clinical psychologist and university professor who has become
beloved of the alt-right, is a proof that the liberal-conservative “silent
majority” finally found its voice. Peterson, who has said that the idea of
white privilege is a "Marxist lie" and theorised that
"radical feminists" don't speak out about human rights abuses in
Saudi Arabia because of "their unconscious wish for brutal male
domination", is fast becoming a mainstream commentator.
His advantages over the
previous anti-LGBT+ star Milo Yiannopoulos are obvious. Yiannopoulos was witty,
fast-talking, full of jokes and sarcasms, and openly gay – he resembled, in
many features, the culture he was attacking. Peterson is his opposite: he
combines a “common sense” approach and (the appearance of) cold scientific
argumentation with a bitter rage at a threat to the liberal basics of our
societies – his stance is: “Enough is enough! I cannot stand it anymore!”
It is easy to discern the
cracks in his advocacy of cold facts against “political correctness”: not only
is he often relying on unverified theories, but the big problem is the
paranoiac construct which he uses to interpret what he sees as facts.
"Facts are facts," he likes to say, before going on to say that
"the idea that women were oppressed throughout history is an appalling
theory" and that to conceive of gender as a social construct is "as
bad as claiming the world is flat".
Jacques Lacan wrote that, even
if what a jealous husband claims about his wife (that she sleeps around with
other men) is all true, his jealousy is still pathological: the pathological
element is the husband's need for jealousy as the only way to retain his
dignity, identity even. Along the same lines, one could say that, even if most
of the Nazi claims about the Jews were true (they exploit Germans, they seduce
German girls, and so on) – which they are not, of course – their anti-Semitism
would still be (and was) a pathological phenomenon because it repressed the
true reason why the Nazis needed anti-Semitism in order to sustain their
ideological position. In the Nazi vision, their society is an organic whole of
harmonious collaboration, so an external intruder is needed to account for divisions
and antagonisms.
The same holds for how, today,
the anti-immigrant populists deal with the “problem” of the refugees: they
approach it in the atmosphere of fear, of the incoming struggle against the
“Islamification” of Europe, and they get caught in a series of obvious
absurdities. For them, refugees who flee terror are equalised with the
terrorists they are escaping from, oblivious to the obvious fact that, while
there are probably among the refugees also terrorists, rapists, criminals and
so on, the large majority are desperate people looking for a better life.
In other words, the cause of
problems which are immanent to today's global capitalism is projected onto an
external intruder. Anti-immigrant racism and sexism is not dangerous because it
lies; it is at its most dangerous when its lie is presented in the form of a
(partial) factual truth.
Unfortunately, the liberal,
left-wing reaction to anti-immigrant populism is no better. Populism and leftie
“political correctness” practice the two complementary forms of lying which
follow the classic distinction between hysteria and obsessional neurosis: a
hysteric tells the truth in the guise of a lie (what it says is literally not
true, but the lie expresses in a false form an authentic complaint), while what
an obsessional neurotic claims is literally true, but it is a truth which
serves a lie.
Populists and PC liberals
resort to both strategies. First, they both resort to factual lies when they
serve what populists perceive as the higher truth of their cause. Religious
fundamentalists advocate “lying for Jesus” – say, in order to prevent the
“horrible crime of abortion”, one is allowed to propagate false scientific
“truths” about the lives of foetuses and the medical dangers of abortion; in
order to support breast-feeding, one is allowed to present as a scientific fact
that abstention from breast-feeding causes breast cancer, and so on.
Common anti-immigrant
populists shamelessly circulate non-verified stories about rapes and other
crimes of the refugees in order to give credibility to their “insight” that
refugees pose a threat to our way of life. All too often, PC liberals proceed
in a similar way: they pass in silence over actual differences in the “ways of
life” between refugees and Europeans since mentioning them may be seen to
promote Eurocentrism. Recall the Rotherham sex abuse scandal, where the race of
the perpetrators was downplayed in case anything in the case could be
interpreted as racist.
The opposite strategy – that
of lying in the guise of truth – is also widely practiced on both poles. If
anti-immigrant populists not only propagate factual lies but also cunningly use
bits of factual truth with the aura of veracity to their racist lie, PC
partisans also practice this “lying with truth”: in its fight against racism
and sexism, it mostly quotes crucial facts, but it often gives them a wrong
twist. The populist protest displaces onto the external enemy the authentic
frustration and sense of loss, while the PC left uses its true points
(detecting sexism and racism in language and so on) to reassert its moral
superiority and thus prevent true social change.
And this is why Peterson’s
outbursts have such an effect. His crazy conspiracy theory about LGBT+ rights
and #MeToo as the final offshoots of the Marxist project to destroy the West
is, of course, ridiculous. It is totally blind for the inner antagonisms and
inconsistencies of the liberal project itself: the tension between liberals who
are ready to condone racist and sexist jokes on account of the freedom of
speech and the PC regulators who want to censor them as an obstacle to the
freedom and dignity of the victims of such jokes has nothing to do with the
authentic left.
Peterson addresses what many
of us feel goes wrong in the PC universe of obsessive regulation – the problem
with him does not reside in his theories but in the partial truths that
sustain them. If the left is not able to address these limitations of its own
project, it is fighting a lost battle.
