PETERSON OR O'HARE?

Jordan Peterson and Tulip O'Hare seem an unlikely pair for comparison, I admit. Unless you are totally out of the media loop, you know Dr. Peterson for his rules-for-life book and lectures. Tulip O'Hare is a fictional character in the AMC cable TV series The Preacher.

Jordan Peterson single-handedly started an intellectual/academic counter-revolution against Identity Culture, a trend in Western universities to amplify the worth of identity over quality in personhood. Social Justice movements of various kinds have used identities as their chisels to crack fissures in the foundations of Western Civilization. By handing the angry and dispossessed these identity chisels, those who control this thought-policing movement hope to collapse Western Civilization into a rubble from which they will emerge as leaders of a New (mediocre) World Order.

Dr. Peterson, a veteran academic and lauded behaviorist, is having none of it. He stood against attempts to control his ideas and speech on transgender issues in Canada. He got to the philosophical roots of this Social Justice attempt to undermine human progress in the name of Progressive ideology. He brilliantly packaged his counter-revolution, put it in print and took it on the road. It made him rich and famous.

Tulip O'Hare is another matter. She represents all that is uneducated, female, proudly non-White, violently lawless, chaotic and hapless. Her headstrong rage directs her in all the wrong directions. She sees this as the "O'Hare curse". Yet, she chooses the wrong direction consciously each and every time out of stubbornness. She is the ultimate reactionary feminist, the woman who is fed up with being told what to do or how to do it. And she loves to use a gun to prove her power over the rational.

I cannot think of two figures who better represent the polarized nature of Western thought today. Admiration and/or imitation of either does not strike me as the best way forward for our civilization. In other words, "Peterson or O'Hare" is a dangerously false dichotomy.

That seems to me to be the core problem of modern Western culture, as revealed in all forms of media. Those of us who are living real and rational lives must resist being funneled into one bin or the other in so many areas of our lives. The gender bin, the race bin, the age bin, the sexuality bin. 

The resistance  we act out to being binned is often more polarized than we would choose. I might be identified as "conservative" on social media because I assert as a clinician and scientist that there are only two genetic sexes, for example. This is not really a "conservative" opinion at all in my mind, but the polarized nature of media has made it so. Nonetheless, I will be tossed into the Peterson bin by many on social media. 

By contrast, as a person with chronic illness, I often assert the right of anyone to end his or her life while in his or her right mind. I feel suicide is a rational choice for those whose suffering surpasses the current technology of medical science. And I deeply believe our civilization is barbaric in its insistence upon denying dignified euthanasia to those who suffer in this way. Like Tulip O'Hare, I give a big "Fuck you!" to any sanctimonious religious or medical expert who disagrees.

I might be seen as "conservative" for being opposed to the idea of gay-lesbian legal marriage. But my opposition is far Left of its proponents' ideology. I feel the value of the intelligent homosexual experience in society and culture is based in its polygamous and childless freedom.

As for abortion, I believe it is in the interest of human society to prevent the birth of unwanted and unsupportable children. I do not think intelligent human societies should encourage and support childbirth by uneducated and indigent single women. Offering these women a humane clinical alternative within a short period after conception seems ethical to me from a scientific and philosophical perspective.

My support of nationalism from the perspective of fiscal common sense may strike some as "conservative". However, my stance is less politically based than it is based in my understanding of human nature as a health care provider. Greed is a universal human flaw. Looking to take something from those who have more is a natural inclination for most human beings. Like most natural instincts, it must be curbed by intelligence. That is what makes us more human, not less human. 

We are all Petersons and O'Hares. Our ability to become socialized, educated and discreet is the integration of those poles of personality. Order, intelligently melded with chaos, produces progress. Polarization by endlessly battling mobs neutralizes progress.