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   From: patriot1@protonmail.com   
      
   Pity Jordan Peterson. Can a giant lobster analogy ever replace a sense of   
   humour?   
      
   The leading member of the self-styled intellectual dark web likes to think   
   he is ‘locked out’ of the mainstream media. Which makes his interview in   
   this month’s GQ all the more revealing   
      
   The nights have drawn in, the rains have come, and it is time to start   
   unveiling some of the lines in the Lost in Showbiz Winter Collection. Let   
   me say right now that one of our absolute key pieces will be Jordan   
   Peterson.   
      
   Quite how it’s taken this column so long to alight lovingly on the   
   winningest public intellectual of our age is unclear, but please now   
   consider me officially very into him. This week, I read Jordan’s most   
   famous book, 12 Simple Rules For Dating My Teenage Daughter, and found it   
   an absolute scream. Forgive me – the opus is actually called 12 Rules For   
   Life, but it certainly forced me to tear down every other thought leader   
   poster peeling off my bedroom wall. I am highly excited to get around to   
   Jordan’s only other published book, some kind of vast theory of everything   
   which took him 12 years to write. Oscar Wilde wrote The Picture of Dorian   
   Gray in about a fortnight, so imagine how much better Jordan B Peterson’s   
   Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief is going to be.   
      
   But we race ahead. Are you even familiar with Peterson? A University of   
   Toronto psychology professor, his raging stage show involuntarily reminds   
   me of that incredibly moving speech from The South Park Movie: “This is   
   aboot dignity. This is aboot respect. [Laughter] This is aboot – [More   
   laughter] What’s so goddammed funny?” Anyway, you may simply know Jordan   
   as “the lobster guy”, after his most famous proposition/abstraction: the   
   idea that lobsters and their serotonin levels explain why human   
   hierarchies exist and are good. But were better in the 1950s. Put simply,   
   you’re really doing this wrong if your first thought on seeing a lobster   
   is: “I’d like to eat this thing, not surrender my abortion rights to it.”   
      
   Owing to his sell-out speaking tours, huge YouTube following and   
   multimillion book sales, Peterson is frequently described as a “Pied   
   Piper” of angry and disaffected men – though my understanding of the   
   original Pied Piper was that he took all his followers away into some kind   
   of mountain from which they never returned. Yes please! Except, how come   
   Peterson’s followers continue to wander around our metaphorical Hamelin,   
   explaining stuff like there is no patriarchy because of crustaceans? Can   
   we try DynoPest instead?   
      
   Anyway, Peterson is also a leading member of the arseoisie, or the   
   “intellectual dark web”, as they prefer it. Again, are you familiar with   
   the “intellectual dark web”? I do hope not. It’s a self-styling by a loose   
   group of soi-disant intellectuals you’d cross continents to avoid having a   
   pint with (although they didn’t go with that tagline in the end). There   
   isn’t space for a full passenger manifest, but they include Peterson,   
   talkshow host Dave Rubin, Newsweek columnist and perma-pundit Ben Shapiro   
   and a bunch of other people bizarrely obsessed with what students do, even   
   though we’ve known since time immemorial that students often act like   
   idiots, and mostly grow out of it unless they’re Hamlet or whatever. Think   
   of the intellectual dark web as a very whiny superhero team. Marvel’s A-   
   Whingers. Guardians of the Galaxy Brains. The League of Extraordinarily   
   Fragile Gentlemen.   
      
   Like the rest of the gang, Peterson apparently imagines himself “locked   
   out” of the mainstream media, despite having sold 2m books and being   
   interviewed every 10 minutes by actual international media outlets. I   
   can’t help feeling that Jordan is “locked out” of the mainstream media in   
   the same way that Justin Bieber is “locked out” of pop music.   
      
   As I am given to understand it, all these chaps ply their trade in the   
   “marketplace of ideas”, which largely seems to be grown men shrieking “Not   
   the face! Not the face!” at their detractors. Truly, to watch their online   
   arguments is to clamber inside the Athenian agora simulator.   
      
   I’m not even being sarcastic. A lot of those guys who hung around the   
   ancient Athens debating society (while helpmeets of one sort or another   
   took care of their day-to-day shit for them) were quite clearly   
   insufferable edgelords. Come on – Diogenes lived in a large urn and would   
   absolutely have been into bitcoin. In some accounts, the Oracle told him   
   to deface the currency, which seems not entirely Delphic of her, though he   
   found a way to make it so and decided she meant he should deface the   
   currency of prevalent ideas. Arguably, then, Diogenes is the Jordan   
   Peterson analogue, as he was the agora’s leading NoFapper. Hang on, that’s   
   wrong – he was the agora’s leading scourge of pleasure-seeking. But I’m   
   pretty sure he’d have been one of the senior thinkers in today’s anti-   
   masturbation movement.   
      
   If you need a further Peterson catch-up, can I recommend a video posted by   
   GQ magazine this week, in which Jordan is interviewed by the New   
   Statesman’s Helen Lewis. It’s hard to pick my favourite moment from the   
   nearly two-hour-long encounter, but I very much enjoyed the bit where   
   Lewis reasons: “Lobsters don’t get depressed. I think you’re   
   anthropomorphising to a ridiculous degree. These are creatures that   
   urinate out of their faces.”   
      
   Then again, it must be said that Peterson spends most of the interview   
   looking like he’s about to urinate out of his face. In the entire   
   exchange, he smiles about once, at some perceived irony in something   
   wistfully arch that he has just said. One’s primary takeout is not: here   
   is a man who can laugh at himself. Which is such a missed opportunity. I   
   am reminded of the time when Jeffrey Archer told Dame Edna Everage that   
   “the most important thing is to be able to laugh at yourself”. “You’d have   
   to do that,” came the deathlessly sympathetic reply, “otherwise you’d be   
   missing the joke of the century.”   
      
   Other takeouts from the GQ interview? Peterson dresses and looks like the   
   third Gruber brother from the Die Hard franchise. As all world cinema fans   
   will know, the first brother to lose to Bruce Willis’s grubby-vested cop   
   was played by the late great Alan Rickman in Die Hard, while the second   
   was played by Jeremy Irons (himself blue-vested) in Die Hard With a   
   Vengeance. Peterson very much presents as the third sibling that Mother   
   Gruber kept at home because he was “chesty” – though without the self-   
   knowledge to accept he is a character actor rather than a leading man.   
      
   Perhaps it might be kinder if his agent or publicist helped him to come to   
   terms with this? As things stand, each of the several times Peterson   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)