Open letter to Peterson, Carlson and co — the world is done with your groupthink

The chief architects of culture wars get it completely wrong when criticising feminist, woke and indigenous activism, writes Mark Christensen.

THE ACTIVISTS DEEMED to be clueless and anti-West by the likes of Jordan Peterson, Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson aren’t engaged in a question-and-answer argument. They are players on a shared stage, acting out a larger story that dates back millennia.

So, listen up, Jordan Peterson.

Your flawed critique of the culture wars has now lapsed into pathetic groupthink. But there’s still hope — if only you’d draw a breath and step back from the fray for a moment. Perhaps, then, you and your warrior mates – one of which recently warned Australians that their country could soon be taken away from them – might see that it’s actually uptight White males, not minorities and Left-wing activists, who are the problem.

Peterson, the Canadian psychologist, has a new book due out in November, titled We Who Wrestle With God. Yet it appears that no one – Penguin Random House, those who flock to his shows, nor the man himself – has posed an obvious question: given your documented views, in previous publications and hours of spoken material posted online, why the hell are you still grappling with him?

According to Peterson, the purpose of human beings is to have faith and to believe unconditionally in the intrinsic goodness of existence. Since created reality is hopelessly mysterious, we cannot know ahead of time if this is true. To find out, each of us must make the leap, behave as if it is, no matter what comes our way, afterwards.

‘It is this risk,’ he writes in the best-selling 12 Rules for Life, ‘that the ancients described as the sacrifice of personal will to the will of God’.

This ‘is not an act of submission (at least as submission is currently understood)’. It’s one of courage, a bold yet playful affirmation that co-authors a better future by letting things happen, allowing ‘the world and your spirit to unfold as they will’, in the here and now of divine Providence.

Nor is it a rejection of reason or knowledge, both of which have utility. It’s just that thinking can’t resolve anything of consequence. In the end, it’s either let go or don’t. Though if it’s the latter, it pays to remember that the rational faculty is highly prone ‘to glorify its own capacity and to claim that in the face of its theories nothing transcendent or outside its domain need exist’.

For Peterson, Jesus is the embodiment of genuine faith.

Here’s a man prepared to embrace his fate, who doesn’t complain about what ought to be, or the required vulnerability, save for that fleeting moment – a very human moment – in the garden of Gethsemane when he prays to be delivered from his imminent suffering.

Here’s a man who exemplifies authentic masculinity. Willing to bear the tragedies of Earthly existence – persecution, betrayal, death – he is still able to speak the truth and, in so doing, ensure his actions convey, through story, what it takes to live a meaningful life.

Peterson draws on some familiar critics to account for the corruption of Jesus’ legacy.

Nietzsche, he suggests, thought the church “lost its way when it generated the presupposition that humanity was saved in some final sense by the sacrifice of Christ”. It fostered the false hope that Jesus had already done all the hard work. Instead of the individual having to “manifest the spirit of the Saviour in the particular”, Christians could adhere to, or simply mouth, “a set of statements about abstract belief”.

Dostoevsky, one of Peterson’s favourite writers, uses a story within a story, The Brothers Karamazov, to shed light on the ruse.

Ivan Karamazov tells of how Jesus, after returning to Earth during the Spanish Inquisition, is imprisoned and berated by an old cardinal.

Your readiness to be crucified, says the Grand Inquisitor, bestowed upon mankind a terrible gift. It was incredibly naïve and uncaring of you to expect him to ‘hereafter with free heart decide for himself what is good and what is evil, having only Thy image before him as his guide’. You gave man, a weak and miserable creature, unwarranted respect. Without a stable conception of what he is to live for, he will refuse to live at all.

The church, in its mercy, exchanged the unreasonable moral burden of just-do-it faith for a risk-free, collective solution that conveniently glossed over the indeterminate nature of reality.

‘All are glad to believe our answer,’ crows the churchman.

‘And all will be happy, except those who rule over them. For only we, we who guard the mystery, shall be unhappy.’

The Enlightenment vowed to end the spiritual degradation caused by deference to superstition and religious authority. People should be free to think for themselves.

In the early 18th Century, the erudite David Hume did just that, taking unfettered rational inquiry to its logical conclusion. It is folly, he argued, to believe we can consciously make things happen. There are no immutable laws of causality involving objects or our moral conduct. Man has only impressions and knows only specific events.

Moreover, this ‘sceptical doubt, both with respect to reason and the senses, is a malady which can never be radically cured’.

His treatise, quipped the Scot, ‘fell dead-born from the press’.

The post-Christian establishment, needing to weaken church dogma with intellectual and empirical truth, could ill afford to openly admit to the limits of reason. An increasingly secularised ruling class soon forgot its destructive potential. Prone to believe that surrendering to something greater than the self must equate with passivity and servitude, rational Western man sought to improve the human condition by imposing his own will, backed by science and technology.

That 12 Rules for Life is much more popular than A Treatise of Human Nature was back in the day may well indicate contemporary society is finally ready to trade empty materialism for a take-the-leap moral revolution.

Alas, the hedge betting continues.

At the beginning of one of his Bible lectures, Peterson reads a letter from an unknown woman who, after taking a plant-based psychedelic, is told in a vision that “he is here to invoke and initiate the divine masculine principle on Earth at this time”. Okay, so why are you still wrestling with what exceeds your grasp? Why produce another contradictory book that will at some point, no doubt, argue it is essential we meet reality on its own terms, admit there is no formula for success and that we must each play the hand we’ve been dealt?

Peterson maintains that human behaviour contains much more information than we can articulate or take seriously as formal knowledge. The slack is taken up by narrative and story, their sublime qualities enabling us to connect with and make sense of life where logic and science leave us cold.

“You are in a story,” he tells us, citing Carl Jung, “whether you know it or not”.

This brings us to the spiritual cause behind the culture war.

The Grand Inquisitor highlights the challenge for any modern leader wanting to make a real difference. To avoid becoming an angry, moralising martyr, it’s not enough to merely acknowledge the absence of answers and stable conceptions. One must also live accordingly, changing the world by accepting it as it is. No provisos. No ought. No fretting over the choices, good or bad, of others.

Any man aspiring to such a Jesus-like presence can also expect to be tested, intellectually and spiritually. With God killed off and a second coming counterproductive, as it would compromise his earlier faith, the task of putting the squeeze on conceited men, ignorant of their own ignorance, has been delegated down the line.

To a progressive Canadian Prime Minister, for example. Some #MeToo feminists. Marxist academics. A transgender social media personality, perhaps.

As in the Old Testament, the ends, here, justify the means. Confusion and suffering on the part of those who can’t let go is an inevitable consequence of their wounded rational faculty presuming the provocation to be political or ideological when it’s not.

As discussed, the activists deemed to be clueless and anti-West by the likes of Peterson, Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson aren’t engaged in a question-and-answer argument. As a tragicomedy, they cannot spell out what is going on, as that would undermine its mythical purpose — like Abraham knowing beforehand that he won’t really have to kill Isaac, his son.

When the goal is unselfconscious faith, the script must rely on the implicit, the metaphoric and the allegorical.

Cancel culture and censorship aren’t about free speech, per se. Their objective is symbolic, designed to point beyond reason and language to the transcendent. The rest of the world is done with Western man taking refuge in incessant talk about anything but the inconvenient truth. It expects him to honour, after centuries of ecclesial and liberal-democratic prevarication, the all-in sacrifice made on the cross.

While it can certainly seem, at times, a little excessive, transgenderism is concerned with a lot more than body parts and definitions of male and female. Its performative aim is to reveal intolerance for the world as it is. Put under pressure to relinquish their vanity and work within God’s plan, however absurd it may appear to our feeble minds, crusading White men, lacking the composure to let things unfold as they will, fail the test.

So, yes, Jordan Peterson, existence is good.

And if you followed your own advice, took the risk and assumed the best of people, then you might notice that it is so unquestionably good that those you think are out to get you, actually have your interests at heart.

Mark Christensen has written on politics, culture, economics and religion for several outlets in Australia and online in the U.S. You can follow Mark on X @intempore_au.

Related Articles

• It's not 'cancel culture', it's audience feedback
• Don’t believe the hype: The powerful wield 'cancel culture'
• When is 'cancel culture' justified?