Book Review: Jordanetics by Vox Day

Jordanetics by Vox Day

Vox is a guy who probably needs no introduction. If there is some kind of controversy involving the internet and its intersection with political ideology, Vox has something to say about it. His main writing efforts have been aimed at fiction, but he also writes political philosophy, general philosophy, and economics books. His writing is prolific, to say the least, and he’s fairly bright. When I discovered he wanted to take on Jordan Peterson, I figured it would be a fun read. Regarding Peterson, I started out a big fan because he talked about the value of free-speech, tried to speak about the mythopoetic value of the Biblical stories (which is valuable for Christians and non-Christians alike), used observations from evolutionary psychology, and tried to help young people obtain some degree of future orientation (though there has been a study of the future authoring program showing smaller or no effect size).

The Good

Vox cites a great deal of Peterson’s own material to make his case that Peterson is insane, narcissistic, and ignorant. The most damning citations were from Maps of Meaning, the Peterson book I read some of first (but started in interesting sounding chapters). What I hadn’t done was read it entirely. You can find a PDF of it here. I recommend you open the pdf and search for this phrase, “compacted into something resembling a large artist’s paint-brush”. That this paragraph, recounting one of Peterson’s disturbing dreams, made it into the book past editing is crazy. That Peterson had this dream is even crazier. And that he put it into the book on purpose is just damned weird. That Vox took the time to read the whole thing is nuts. I’ve read lots of big books, but after I read 12 Rules for Life and listened to Peterson’s Bible lectures, and his podcasts with Rogan and a few others, I realized that there was more to Peterson than I had initially thought, and not in a good way. Vox provides more than enough evidence to indicate that Peterson often speaks on topics he has not sufficiently studied (the prime example is when Vox pointed out that Peterson was wrong about Jewish IQ and representation in American media and politics, even Jewish folks on Twitter said that such representation was the result of more than IQ), is mentally ill by his own admission, and tends to universalize even highly eccentric personal experiences to provide advice to the masses.

An important element of the book is Milo’s foreword which exposes a major lie of Peterson’s. It’s that kind of lie (two of them really) that makes me much more suspicious than I was. That and the Joe Rogan podcast where Peterson claimed to have been 25 days with no, literally, NO sleep, made me think that he plays fast and loose with the truth more frequently than I’m comfortable with. And I’m from south Texas. I understand tall tales, where accuracy is sacrificed to make a story faster, bigger, or more exciting. But people don’t double down and insist on the truth of their exaggerations. Peterson, when I heard him on Rogan, claimed he couldn’t debate Sam Harris (a jobber of an intellectual) effectively because of his 25-day bout of sleep deprivation. As an aside, chapter 17 has some partly positive, partly critical comments on the carnivore diet:

The good news is that Mikhaela not only survives her long battle with mental and physical illness, she goes on to marry, have a child, and even to launch a career as a dietary con woman overselling the merits of an Atkins-style meat-only diet to cure a long litany of mental and physical ills, including, but not limited to: inflammation, gum disease, rheumatoid arthritis, autoimmune disease, excess weight, brain fog, anxiety, diabetes, ankylosing spondylitis, other types of arthritis, high blood pressure, depression and fatigue.

Considering what the young woman has been through, even a hardened skeptic like myself cannot find the necessary wherewithal to criticize or condemn her. And given the current percentage of the American and Canadian publics that are dangerously obese, it can be convincingly argued that whatever the shortcomings of the Mikhaela Diet might be, the benefits it has to offer a dangerously overweight society stuffing itself on far too many carbohydrates and sugars significantly outweigh them.

There is some evidence in favor of the carnivorous diet. I have a post I’ll eventually finish attempting to answer this question, “Can a human survive and thrive on a carnivorous diet?” But in the meantime, Meat Heals, Just Meat, and /R/ZeroCarb have some good resources on the diet. It’s not for everybody, but the health benefits are real.

While I’m not entirely persuaded by Vox’s final chapter claiming that Peterson’s teaching is all tares and no wheat, I am persuaded that there are better avenues for helping young men grow up without asking them to forsake all group-identity (which is insane).  For instance, one could read Proverbs, Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, and many other great books for men.

The Bad

The book has a lot of grammar errors. But Castalia crowd-sourcing to edit ebooks before hard-copies are released. It’s annoying, but not damning. On a rhetorical end, Vox probably spends too much time connecting Peterson’s ideas to Gnosticism and the occult (not that the connections aren’t real) for the book to connect. Vox also, rightly, argues against Neo-Babelism (or globalist hegemony), but those concerns, I suspect, will seem esoteric to a larger potential audience who needs to know that Peterson isn’t as useful a resource as supposed.

His audience is so big, I suspect because he’s actually as much a media creation as Sam Harris is. Regarding Harris:

When Sam Harris first began to promote his first book (before anyone knew he would become popular) a writer for The Simpsons introduced Harris to a contributing editor at Harper’s Magazine and a longtime contributor to The Atlantic and The New Yorker. They became friends.

Regarding Peterson (from the forward to 12 Rules for Life:

The first time I met Jordan Peterson was on September 12, 2004, at the home of two mutual friends, TV producer Wodek Szemberg and medical internist Estera Bekier. It was Wodek’s birthday party. Wodek and Estera are Polish émigrés who grew up within the Soviet empire, where it was understood that many topics were off limits, and that casually questioning certain social arrangements and philosophical ideas (not to mention the regime itself) could mean big trouble…

Wodek is a silver-haired, lion-maned hunter, always on the lookout for potential public intellectuals, who knows how to spot people who can really talk in front of a TV camera and who look authentic because they are (the camera picks up on that). He often invites such people to these salons. That day Wodek brought a psychology professor, from my own University of Toronto, who fit the bill: intellect and emotion in tandem. Wodek was the first to put Jordan Peterson in front of a camera, and thought of him as a teacher in search of students—because he was always ready to explain. And it helped that he liked the camera and that the camera liked him back.

In other words, while Peterson needs to be intellectually humbled, it’s important to recognize that his audience is disproportionately large due to media efforts in his favor (this is kind of paradoxical because Peterson receives huge quantities of unfair press, especially for a guy who is basically liberal). Because of this, certain elements of his audience who needed an alternate point of view with a proposal for alternate voices won’t find it in the Vox book. On the other hand, just like pastors might benefit from reading the Peterson book, they might also benefit from reading Vox’s book to help them steer their charges in a more positive direction.

Conclusion

Overall, it was a good read. Vox is a nationalist, which is a reasonable political position, but it is much vilified. That comes up in the book, it may make it unpalatable for you, but sometimes medicine taste bad.

Appendix: Vox’s Translation of the 12 Rules

1. Stand up straight with your shoulders back.
   The First Principle of Jordanetics: Be mediocre.
2. Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping. (Why won’t you just take your damn pills?)
   The Second Principle of Jordanetics: God is the balance between Good and Evil.
3. Make friends with people who want the best for you.
   The Third Principle of Jordanetics: Leave the wounded behind to die.
4. Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.
   The Fourth Principle of Jordanetics: Your head is the only truly safe space.
5. Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them
   The Fifth Principle of Jordanetics: Do not excel, because excellence endangers the balance.
6. Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world.
   The Sixth Principle of Jordanetics: Inaction is always preferable to action.
7. Pursue what is meaningful (Not what is expedient)
   The Seventh Principle of Jordanetics: To reach Heaven above, you must descend into Hell below.
8. Tell the truth–or, at least, don’t lie.
   The Eighth Principle of Jordanetics: You can speak a new world into existence through your lies.
9. Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t.
   The Ninth Principle of Jordanetics: Dominate the conversation and control the narrative by keeping your mouth shut.
10. Be precise in your speech.
    The Tenth Principle of Jordanetics: Transcend the material world and very carefully choose the words that will alter this reality.
11. Do not bother children when they are skateboarding.
    The Eleventh Principle of Jordanetics: Heal the world by assimilating its evil.
12. Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street.
    The Twelfth Principle of Jordanetics: To lift the world out of Hell, you must be willing to accept its pain and suffering into yourself.

I’m not certain all of these are adequate translations of Peterson’s ideas. Principle 10 is accurate if you take Peterson’s definitions of truth elsewhere stated into account. That’s fairly damning. I think that principle 2 is more rescuable than Vox tries to claim, even if Peterson bungles the delivery. The Bible frequently uses the metaphor of “watching over” which is a leadership term, to speak of overseeing/watching over your own life, soul, heart, and so-on. And Vox is right about rule 3. Peterson gives no helpful advice about how to distinguish between genuine friends in a hard spot and people who just destroy you by increments. Vox supplies no solution to this, but he never claimed to. I think that the Bible, with some help from Aristotle and Aurelius end up showing us how to navigate such perilous waters. For instance, Aristotle speaks of “perfect friendship” which is friendship for the sake of growing in virtue. The Bible speaks of the kingdom of God in these terms (of Israel in the OT and the church in the NT). Jesus also says that it is appropriate to criticize others after you criticize yourself (Matthew 7:1-5), and that rebuke and potential excommunication are necessary components of church-life (Matthew 18). Paul says that corrupting influences aren’t worth the risk to your own character (1 Corinthians 15:33). Psalm 1 reminds us that it’s better to be influenced by the law than by sinners, scoffers, and such. The book of Proverbs tells us over and over that men with bad tempers make bad friends. And Marcus Aurelius reminds himself that “people are your proper occupation.” All of this is to say, one can think of Christian ways to love somebody (in the sense of wishing them well and doing them some good) without letting them influence you, waste your time, or ruin your family.