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The 'debate of the century': What happened when Jordan Peterson debated Slavoj Žižek

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  1. co3d
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    I'm not a Jordan Peterson fan, rather the contrary, but isn't this pretty shoddy journalism? I could excuse this kind of sentence from an article in the opinion section, but that's not where this...

    The size and scope of his fame registers more or less exactly the loathing for identity politics in the general populace, because it certainly isn’t on the quality of his books that his reputation resides.

    I'm not a Jordan Peterson fan, rather the contrary, but isn't this pretty shoddy journalism? I could excuse this kind of sentence from an article in the opinion section, but that's not where this was published as far as I can see.

    [Zizek's] remarks were just as rambling as Peterson’s, veering from Trump and Sanders to Dostoevsky to the refugee crisis to the aesthetics of Nazism. If Peterson was an ill-prepared prof, Žižek was a columnist stitching together a bunch of 1,000-worders.

    Did anyone really think a debate between Zizek and Peterson of all people would be anything but a ramble fest? They're both notoriously verbose stream-of-consciousness ramblers.

    They needed enemies, needed combat, because in their solitudes, they had so little to offer. Peterson is neither a racist nor a misogynist. He is a conservative. He seemed, in person, quite gentle. But when you’ve said that, you’ve said everything. Somehow hectoring mobs have managed to turn him into an icon of all they are not. Remove him from his enemies and he is a very poor example of a very old thing – the type of writer whom (...) have promised simple answers to complex problems.

    I can indeed see very well how Peterson (and, to a lesser extent, Zizek) draws most of his appeal from his confrontation with his supposed enemies. Without a looming threat of 'social justice warriors' and 'postmodernists' taking over academia and plunging society into chaos, most of what he has to offer seems pretty stale - and at the very least undeserving of the celebrity status he currently enjoys.

    Both of these men know that they are explicitly throwbacks. They do not have an answer to the real problems that face us: the environment and the rise of China as a successful capitalist state without democracy. (China’s success makes a joke out of the whole premise of the debate: the old-fashioned distinction between communism and capitalism.) Neither can face the reality or the future. Therefore they retreat.

    That's why I find thinkers like Yuval Noah Harari much more intriguing than either of these two. They're obsessing over 20th century questions using 20th century terminology and 20th century frameworks.

    And that was the great irony of the debate: what it comes down to is that they believe they are the victims of a culture of victimization. They play the victim as much as their enemies. It’s all anyone can do at this point.

    I'm so utterly tired of this. David Fincher's film Gone Girl had some posters here in Germany with the subtitle "The Perfect Victim". The film is in large part about the dynamics of victimisation narratives in the media, their effects on notions of justice as well as culture at large. And it does feel to me that public debates around justice and values comprise their strategies almost entirely of contests in presenting oneself (or one's constituents) as the "perfect victim".

    10 votes