Jordan Peterson and his misunderstanding of Leftist Politics:

Professor Jordan Peterson, he of the great internet fame, darling of people he despises has posed a very interesting question to those on the left. In a recent talk he gave as well as a YouTube video for the Big Think he talked about how left and right-wing movements turn toxic, hostile and murderous. He made an interesting claim though: the idea that, definitionally, it is very easy to parse the parts of right wing ideology that are toxic and murderous, and that they, fundamentally, usually come down to racial superiority doctrines. In other the words the conception of and defense of the creation of ethno-states. The idea that one tribal group is genetically superior to the other. However, he has stated that what ideas and ideologies on the left produce murderous results is less clear. How there is not one thing that you can point to in leftist doctrine determines how “bloody minded” a particular leftist movement is. He also said that it is incumbent upon those in leftist circles to find a way to identify their dangerous whack-jobs in order to filter them out. This will be an attempt to do just that. This is just an initial offering it may be expounded upon later.

Peterson talked about things like diversity, inclusion, and egalitarianism as being a sort of bad cocktail for what is problematic about left-wing ideologies. However, Peterson overall seems to have a poor grasp of leftist politics in many respects. That’s fine however, this is not his political movement. These terms are more buzzwords than anything. They tend to be filled in by any person who espouses them with their own political talking points. The true source of issues when it comes to murderous leftists is something wholly at different here. If he really wants to get into these issues he needs to see that the same issue that makes left wing movements murderous is the same thing that makes right wing movements the same. The best reference point here is something that can best be described as the Purity Doctrine. This is an obsession over concepts of purity that one must conform to. Trying to be the purist version of whatever ideology they happen to ascribe to. To that end it is necessary to understand the neuroticism which comes with a purity obsession.

When a person, or group of persons, sets themselves an ideology in opposition to something; that is to say that they exist for the purpose of opposing something rather than working toward a goal for themselves this neurosis comes baked into the very substructures of the groups identity. It is this problem which then bleeds into the ideology going forward to that end it becomes murderous. This is because the offending ideology or race is treated as a contagion which must be eradicated and removed and so any taint of that idea or person must be eliminated. This was seen in the Nazis with their obsession with racial purity and the Aryan ideal. This was seen in the Communists with their persecution of any deviance from their interpretation of Marxist Orthodoxy. Critical thought was not to be tolerated and to that end must be purged from that doctrine, the Nazis did this as well, they just added a racial superiority doctrine to this idea.

I think this comes specifically to Jordan Peterson’s point and something that needs to be countered. He asked a question that was that “Why don’t the Communist doctrines of the 20^th century have the same stigma attached to them as the Nazi regime of Germany?” This is a strange question to ask because the answer is rather obvious and it has to do with their proposals and the ideal involved in the slaughter. Both regimes were equally murderous this is true. However, the reason for why the killing was done is what matters here and why the Nazi doctrine is so much more stigmatized than the Communist doctrines which crisscrossed the world. The differences in ideology are what matter here, or more accurately, the differences in rhetoric utilized by the different sides.

The Nazi’s have a proposal which was not present under Communist conceptions. The idea of an inherited racial hierarchy which defined a person’s ability to rise in society and supported an inherently unequal distribution of power and directly advocated for the elimination of whole populations based merely on an accident of birth. The idea being that who you are as a human being was defined entirely by your birth circumstance and that this was unalterable. In other words, if you were born Jewish it didn’t matter that you had lived in Germany your entire life, spoke German, had German friends and were personally loyal to the German state. You were inherently untrustworthy and underhanded and a blight on society for no other reason than circumstances which were entirely out of your control and had almost nothing to do with you. This central founding conceit of Nazi doctrine is where the inherent revulsion lies and it’s not hard to see why. The idea of a racial caste system that places a specific ethnic group as the pinnacle of human achievement, not because of any individual effort or because they have succeeded in their society, but simply due to the accident of birth is something anyone not belonging to that specific racialized group will find inherently repulsive. To quote one of the most famous fascists of the last century “It was clear that we were the superior race. But they couldn't accept that. They wanted to be treated as equals when they most certainly were not… We did not choose to be the superior race. Fate handed us our role.” The fact that the Nazis laboured and killed on behalf of making the world more unequal and stratifying society to place themselves on the top is what makes them repulsive.

Contrast this with the rhetoric used by the Communists. The Communists always stated that their goals lay in universal human brotherhood and the redressing of wrongs done by the powerful. The issue became that those principles were applied to the idea of killing those who had become successful in any system other than the workers paradise. They set themselves up in opposition to the capitalist system rather than shooting for a vision of their own and thus fell victim to a Doctrine of Purity. That any who died did so for a worthy cause which was to help bring about the socialist utopia was taken as a given. This is the difference between the regimes which should be patently obvious to anyone with competent observational skills. The point comes in sympathy for a cause that espouses ideals which seek to help the disadvantaged. This is where marketing becomes a big part of this. Communist doctrines have always been able to sell because they appeal across societal lines. They market the idea of equality to those whom have never been able to succeed in the system as it is constituted. This makes their system a lot more palatable and easy to say that if policies were just gotten right that the utopia would follow. This is the origin of the “that wasn’t real communism” comment. That if the world would just conform to their expectations of it that they would be able to create a paradise for all. This sounds very good, equality and helping others is an easily marketable idea that reaches everywhere and to that end it helps the Communists have a much better image than the Nazis. The fact that the communists laboured and killed on behalf of trying to make society less unequal and stratified and to place the idea of equality as the pinnacle of human good is what gives them a marketing boost the Nazis don’t get.   

Professor Peterson seems flabbergasted that anyone would perpetuate an idea like Communism as it has proven so murderous and horrible in so many nations in the past. But it is the philosophy that undergirds it that makes it so seductive to so many and helps with its public image in many ways. Communists have always stated that they work to help the common man by eliminating the structures that disadvantage people in society which most people agree are worthy goals. The extreme right wing on the other hand works to stratify society and place communities in boxes and judge their whole worth based entirely on their genetic makeup and birth circumstance. This is not an inherently marketable position to anyone outside of the specific group which is being touted as the superior evolved human. Communism, absent relevant historical data of the results of these regimes, sounds like a great idea and something that humans should work towards on a fundamental level. Far right philosophy on the other hand has revulsion baked into the very ideology as it openly embraces killing and removing whole groups of people. The universalizing tendency of Communism and the exclusivizing tendency of Fascism directly oppose one another but one is inherently more sympathetic than the other. This short piece should be an opening idea as to why Communism despite its disastrous results in many societies has less stigma attached to it that the Fascist regimes of other nations.