Jordan Peterson

He's more of a fan of Big 5 than MBTI.
That perhaps makes sense given his academic training and background, and almost certainly because the Big 5 has been clinically verified, whereas MBTI has not.

Thanks for the vids.

Cheers,
Ian
 
Jordan Peterson is quite fascinating for any people-watcher who can withstand the way his personality sucks you down the smelly pit of immediate, reactive value judgements. It's very entertaining seeing him often run rings around his debating opponents using logic, regardless of whether he's right or wrong. But that's on the surface - everything he says comes coloured intensely with a veritable flood of vehement feeling judgement, a clarion call of Oughts with a capital 'O'. I could well believe he's INTJ, but with a very powerful tertiary Fi.

I find that listening to him is a bit like watching a guy down a hole in the ground excavating an alleged blocked drain with the noisiest pneumatic drill in the world. No matter how intriguing, after a while he overwhelms my Se and I have to retreat. I often agree with him, but that's not what feeds my ultimate reaction to what he says - I'm repelled by the stellar-intensity subtext of what I ought to accept, regardless of whether I'm actually for, against or indifferent.
 
Ace comment, @John K

Nods,
Ian
 
He urges us to abandon ideologies and to stand up against the ideologies of the left. I never hear him say anything that's not straight out of the ideology of the right.

Maybe he contradicts himself (is it really possible to abandon all ideology?) but what is this ideology of the right that you speak of?
He condemns both the extreme left and extreme left, and upon inspection I don't think his views would be very different from those of founding fathers or classically trained people of the 19th century.
 
I get the impression that he's not only aware of the dialectic tension he's generating, but is very deliberately setting out to amplify it in order to try and get people with dogmatic political beliefs to bring both thinking and feeling logic to them. I'm not at all sure this is an effective tactic and it's more likely to end up polarising viewpoints - people are rarely argued out of a belief and just end up angry and frustrated, and back into a corner or resort to using ridicule or ad homo attacks if they haven't the debating gifts and knowledge to overcome such arguments.

I do think he may have a different sort of problem which definitely would be a sort of lack of self awareness. Those of us who are INFJ are probably aware of how we can overcommit emotionally - whether to a needy individual, or to a community we belong to. We set off with noble saviour intentions and it goes well at first, but eventually we can run out of emotional energy - it can take us by surprise when this happens and we end up a mess inside. We either withdraw feeling bad, anxious and defeated, or if we can't, we can end up with an emotional breakdown. The point where this happens is like a cliff edge in the dark, and some of us only find out where it is after we've gone over it at least once.

INTJs have a similar problem. They can be drawn in to trying to solve the world's problems in the round - they pull on a bit of string and the Moon and all the stars are on the other end. Trouble is that it's a New Moon and pitch dark, and often they only find out about it when it hits them in the face and overwhelms them. They are driven by the righteousness of their vision and their moral world falls apart when they encounter their own finiteness at the bottom of that cliff edge, just as can happen for INFJs. I've seen this happen. I fear JP lacks the self-awareness that is needed to stop this from happening to him - his more recent video shots show him looking pretty haunted and if he is INTJ, he maybe needs to back off and recover.

By the way, I think it's always a mistake when someone who is recognised as a highly qualified public figure in a particular field chooses to talk as an expert in a completely different area of expertise as a way of championing their inner vision. JP can't be all the things he's genuinely expert in, and also he an expert climate scientist as well, etc. That sort of thing opens up weak spots where you can be obviously wrong, and that matters if you are emotionally vulnerable at the same time. We see this sort of problem with Richard Dawkins' attacks on religion - he is an undisputed expert in biological sciences, but seems to be a bit of a child in each topic when he talks about the relationship between physics, cosmology and spirituality. That really spoils the points he's making because we are much less forgiving of a public expert when they flounder around in these things than when it's just pals discussing them over a pint or two. Not that Dawkins seems to be under emotional stress from where he's taken his public persona, but then he's a different type to JP - I think the points he makes could be very much better expressed than he does it.
 
After that 'up yours' video, I think he seems like someone who has had or is having some kind of breakdown.

I also think he is very clearly a type one, not a five.
 
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Quite possibly. INFx at the very least.



I've a few reservations, although in terms of peoples' sources of self-help, psychological cultivation, etc. I have a whatever works philosophy. But he buys into some dubious evo psych stuff (the lobster thing is trivially true or substantively false, depending on how far you read into his inferences) and his hostility to the left is distressingly conspiratorial—see, neo-Marxist Postmodernism. He can also be uncharitable, such as his unwillingness to debate Marxists after falsely claiming (ignorantly or not) that they wouldn't debate him. Indeed, he has a poor understanding of the radical left, but pontificates on it freely such as by falsely claiming Marx believed in 'equality of outcome'.

I have a friend who's a bit into JP and we go back and forth with this stuff. I'll grant the guy this much, he's tapped into a genuine gap in public discourse about things like the good life. And JP likes Jung, on which I'm in agreement.
I think you presented a reasonable depiction of Peterson. I suppose I am more adamantly opposed to the guy. I commented because I find it hard to understand how an INFJ could find themselves immersed in anything right wing these days.
 
I think you presented a reasonable depiction of Peterson. I suppose I am more adamantly opposed to the guy. I commented because I find it hard to understand how an INFJ could find themselves immersed in anything right wing these days.
Follow the money. Especially after a life of academia.

Cheers,
Ian
 
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