Jordan Peterson’s Hypocrite Atheist Cultists

The overall impression most people who aren’t desperate to agree with Jordan Peterson find the man to be largely incoherent and obsessed with making baseless assertions in defense of his own values. For a sub-group of atheists, he’s the source of their greatest hypocrisy.

Pictured: a figure from “Maps of Meaning.” I have heard from Zen teachers that if we meet the Buddha on the road, we must kill him. If Peterson means, as is likely from the context, that this is the knowledge that the historical Buddha teaches us from his first enlightenment, then such must be the answer of the Buddhist to this.

When I first heard of Peterson, it was clear that he was a bog-standard fear-mongering anti-trans bigot. That might be the kind of response that sounds very weirdly specific, and you might wonder what the evidence is for such a claim. That he exaggerated the potential effects of a Canadian proposition to protect people from discrimination against gender and gender expression into a censorship effort that would force him to speak in a certain way. This rhetorical reframing is fundamental to transmisogyny and other anti-trans bigotries as it makes a civil rights issue of the harassment of transgender people into a free speech issue on part of the harassers. Yet, you do not, in Canada or the United States — where Peterson now finds much success — have the explicit right to harass trans people; in fact, the human right, legal right and human need of trans people to not be harassed supersedes any legal right to freedom of speech that you or our friend Jordan B. Peterson may have. As the diversely attributed quote goes, “Your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins.” Or, to cut to the heart of…