Ken Wilber, Jordan Peterson & criticism
Reaction to my JBP piece & a new interview with the Integral philosopher Ken Wilber
This is a follow up to my recent written piece, 'What Happened to Jordan Peterson?', which has created quite a reaction. I've just released a new interview with the Integral philosopher Ken Wilber that we recorded a couple of weeks ago, touching on the trajectory of Jordan Peterson and the cultural dynamics of the last few years.
There has already been an overwhelming amount of feedback to the piece, some positive and some negative. I intend to come back and address some of these points and respond in a couple of weeks when I return from my latest travels.
It was a piece that has been a while in the making and one I wrestled with a lot, given the feelings of mixed loyalties and obligations to someone I have gained a lot from and have interviewed twice. Nevertheless I am a journalist first and foremost, and try to follow an ethical code. It was clear to me that I had a sense of obligation to say something about someone I have promoted in the past and who has a huge public profile. Jordan Peterson was, and to some degree still is the one man lightning rod for the culture war and understanding the Peterson phenomenon is of huge importance.
One small note in response to Mikhaila Peterson, whose response on Twitter was to accuse me of being ‘cowardly’ and then say that I had not tried to contact her father. This response was then amplified by Newsweek.
To be clear, I have reached out for a conversation with her father on a number of occasions, most recently while I was over in Toronto in May this year. Furthermore she was personally involved in rejecting an approach in 2021 when she told me never to approach the Petersons again after she took exception to a short comment in a largely supportive video about her father by myself and Tim Lott.
The pastor Paul Vanderklay released a typically thoughtful response on his channel with a fascinating metaphor, that Peterson and Rebel Wisdom were riding the same wave, but now that wave has retreated we are all in our individual rock pools (ecosystems). I agree some aspects of his critique, with a few key disagreements which I'll detail below in the comment I just left on Paul's channel.
The reaction is an interesting test of the nature of different online ecosystems, the reaction on Substack versus the reaction on Twitter, versus YouTube.
Warping Effects
Part of the story that I've always been tracking on Rebel Wisdom, and have been even more struck by recently is how this information ecosystem is a warping effect on truth seeking. Thanks to films like The Social Dilemma and the work of Tristan Harris we are now increasingly aware of the impact of social media on us as individuals, how it preys on and rewards our narcissism, desire to be right, our tribal biases. What I think is less talked about is the effect that this has on creators.
These warping effects are even more magnified on creators, the concept of audience capture being the key one here. We're not designed to deal with the supersaturation of feedback, especially critical feedback. In our recent past it would likely have meant being cast out of our tribe and possibly even death. It hurts to be criticised, and the nature of the filter bubbles created by social media means that we all get trapped in echo chambers without realising it.
Being honest, one of the reasons for feeling it's time to wrap up and move on from the Rebel Wisdom project is these dynamics. Especially on YouTube where it seems to reward low engagement 'drive by shooting', and algorithmic capture, where you are placed into an ideological ecosystem. I can admit that I'm not strong enough to be sure that I can always speak truthfully given the nature of these media forces. I know that there have been times where I have avoided certain topics, self censored or otherwise compromised myself because of this.
It also starts to affect the kinds of guests that the channel can attract, it's very uncomfortable as a creator inviting somebody and having a conversation that you know will challenge your audience and knowing that they will be criticised. You may get more used to it as a creator, but the guests are often much less experienced.
Calibrating to the level of feedback we receive is almost impossible. It's difficult to even know who the 'Rebel Wisdom' audience is. Is it the (sometimes vitriolic) comments thread on YouTube, or is it the hundreds of people who have been part of the community, who have taken our courses, many of whom share the Integral background, or are more oriented towards personal growth and awakening than the YouTube audience. Whatever I do next in media I will be mindful of how to address these dynamics at the outset.
In my view, so many of the public intellectuals Rebel Wisdom has been tracking over the last years have been affected by this audience capture. Being attacked, and especially being cancelled, is traumatic. It affects us hugely.
There will be a number of people reading this who are pretty sure that I've gone off the rails too.
The pandemic made a lot of these dynamics much more intense, because suddenly these arguments about information took on life and death importance, especially the heated debates around vaccines or topics like Ivermectin. I wrote about the 'Uncanny Valley' between the mainstream and the alternative, where the mainstream tried to play a discredited and failing 'gatekeeping' game and failed to include enough perspectives challenging the mainstream consensus, and the alternative would host these figures but their incentive structure (clicks & likes) meant that they rarely if ever challenged them.
At the same time the fusing of the platform with the person in the alternative media has been another failure condition. It brings in all questions of personal loyalty, friendship, aligned incentives over truth seeking. None of us yet know how to navigate this.
In my view the heterodox/contrarian ecosystem merged unhealthily with the anti-vaccine ecosystem during the pandemic, and became increasingly conspiratorial, mainly due to some key figures hosting prominent anti vaccine voices and not challenging them, or even hosting other medically equipped voices to discern whether what they were saying was true. The likes of Bret Weinstein has still not hosted a single medical person equipped to challenge his narrative on vaccines or Ivermectin. Now as Covid becomes less salient, many are having to continue to follow the audience and pivoting to more extreme conspiratorial thinking, of the likes of Maajid Nawaz, whose Rogan appearance I found extremely unconvincing and analysed here.
The entire heterodox ecosystem (including myself) failed during the pandemic. It's not enough to simply host dissenting voices and accept no responsibility for what they are saying. I cannot think of a single figure who actually tried to go against the audience and host voices from ‘both sides’, let alone try systematically to interrogate truth or host dialogues that might accomplish it.
Ironically the 'heterodox' sphere ended up having a lot more in common with the postmodern wave they were fighting than they were able to acknowledge. They were a largely deconstructive force on the institutional framework, and weren't mature enough to actually do the hard work of creating alternative institutions.
I'm seeing the insurgency/IDW wave that Rebel Wisdom tracked since 2018 through Ken Wilber's integral lens model, and his concept of the pre/trans fallacy. To fully understand it check out Wilber's excellent little book 'Trump and a Post Truth World' published in 2017, but still valid for its broad analysis of culture.
The pre/trans fallacy is an observation that two viewpoints that may look superficially similar may actually come from radically different perspectives, one being "pre-conventional" and the other being "trans/post-conventional". I think this is what happened with the insurgent wave of 2016 onwards.
Wilber draws on Spiral Dynamics (originally created by Don Beck and Christopher Cowan) to see different cultural value systems being in conflict with each other. Each cultural system has part of the truth but believes it contains the only true way of looking at the world. Particularly important are Orange (scientific/rational, came online with science in the 1700s) and Green (postmodern/multiplistic, came online with the civil rights, women's movement and other new perspectives of the 1960s).
He argues that Green started as a healthy inclusion of other perspectives but reached a point of being destructive and self contradictory. Green has now degenerated into extreme relativism and narcissism, lost in a 'performative contradiction' that insists there is no absolute truth, but that *this* statement is an absolute truth.
So he argues that since 2016 there has been an inevitable and necessary backlash against this 'broken Green' hegemony in the culture, the tribalism that pretended it wasn't a tribalism, the false inclusivity.
I would argue that this rebellion against the conventional Green mentality took both a pre and a trans form. The pre was an emotional and visceral reaction against whatever the likes of Hillary Clinton represented and manifested in the US and the UK as the election of Trump and the vote for Brexit.
Peterson, and many of the other 'heterodox' thinkers (such as the IDW) were fuelled by a lot of the same insurgency energy, but at their best they were 'post-conventional/trans', with a more nuanced and articulated critique of the excesses of the culture.
The nature of the IDW was that they were free to speak against the new woke orthodoxy that had captured many of the institutions because they were not part of those institutions. We saw a near complete collapse of journalism in summer 2020 due to multiple 'woke uprisings' inside newsrooms during the BLM protests (Bari Weiss forced out of the New York Times, etc), something I covered on RW as the 'State of Sensemaking'.
But the Catch 22 of their stance was that, because they were outside the institutions they lacked a moderating force and were also dependent on audiences that still contained a lot of the more reactive, emotional 'pre'. This why the audience capture dynamics and the warping factors of the alternative media platforms is such a significant issue in the heterodox space in particular. Over time many of them became captured by these dynamics.
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My response to Paul Vanderklay's piece on my Peterson article:
hey Paul - a typically thoughtful analysis. I particularly like the idea of the insurgent tide having gone out and we are left in our rockpools - fits with the idea of this being a 'wave' that JP rode, and RW also to some degree.
A couple of disagreements. You frame this as if the main issue I have with Peterson is him getting angry at his Twitter ban. That's not the case, I'm much more disturbed by the gratuitous and borderline transphobic attacks on Elliot Page ("her, or him, or whatever") and the lashing out on Twitter, and also with his content (the latest on Russia/Ukraine for example) that he's putting forward a very partial right wing narrative (and partially true, which is what makes it particularly dangerous) and missing the balance that I felt was present in his earlier content (eg: if you are worried about totalitarianism, perhaps including what kind of a society Vladimir Putin is really running there might be a good idea, rather than framing it principally as a 'battle against wokeness/western decadence').
He has definitely changed, not only in his tone but also in his content. As I said in the piece, his initial impact and ability to win over liberals like myself was his careful and clever synthesis framework, and the tone he employed with the likes of Cathy Newman. Now he only seems to want to feed the outrage machine and preach to the converted.
Importantly, though I know you are speaking from a place of consideration, but I don't know if I particularly want a dialogue with Jordan Peterson. I tried for an interview for some time with no luck as I felt an obligation to put these criticisms to him in person given our shared history, and that was unsuccessful (Mikhaila was actually involved in that process in 2021 so I find her comments on YouTube denying I approached him/them odd). I suspect it dates back to my slightly challenging interview with Dave Rubin while Rubin was on tour with JP, I had sporadic contact before that came out and little since. Mikhaila is already seeing this in terms of 'clicks', and the gatekeeping game with Jordan, his influence over people and other people's wish not to burn bridges with someone with his power and influence has meant a lot of people who feel similarly about his trajectory have remained silent. I do not want anyone to get the idea that I'm simply trying to get him to talk to me, that's not the case.
One of the topics I'm going to return to is how these invisible hierarchies / power dynamics / obligations and weird merging of our platforms and our personalities is one of the failure conditions for seeking truth in the alternative media age.
The Rebel Wisdom Final Campfire event is happening in London on November 5th, with Daniel Schmachtenberger, Ayishat Akanbi and many more of our favourite speakers. We have secured an amazing venue and want to end the project with a bang. We’d love to see you there. Check out more details and book tickets here:
David or anyone who is up to date on Wilbur- does he ever give a practical description of what the turquoise level of integration looks like in terms of society, culture and politics? I’d like to be able to imagine the eventual good that will emerge from this current vitriolic condition we are in, esp speaking as an American. I watched all of the video except the legacy part and turquoise was only presented abstractly.
Thinking about Jordan Peterson I didn’t read the comments. Personally I feel his brain got fried by the emotional trauma and all meds n interventions he had, which obviously I have no first hand knowledge of. Having worked in ICUs it’s traumatic. His frontal lobes appear to have no brakes. His probably has shot adrenals which traditional docs NEVER test routinely which can make u cranky. No testosterone probably I could go on. He has cranky old man disease bc life is hard n he is running on empty. I recommend visiting a functional med doctor who will run tests on his hormones, adrenals, thyroid like the DUTCH test n pray he isn’t on statins. Something is going on with him biochemically but r traditional med docs r no help. The labs which are a quarter of what they use to be all roads lead to statins and BP meds. And at his age it was routine to get a B12 shot bc everyone knew you cant absorb B12 after a certain age. At least docs I grew up with ( like my dad) knew this. Something has definitely shifted I see it as physical not a character flaw. He needs a tune up and lots of love n support. He is a good man.