you should consider listening to him. His opinions will stretch your thinking even though you may be uncomfortable. But there’s no growth without some discomfort.
People who love Jordan Peterson see him as a champion of conservative values and personal responsibility. They love that he confronts inconvenient or politically incorrect truths. They overlook or sometimes revel in his confrontive, combative style. Peterson is needlessly provocative. He frequently calls people names or asserts they are mean, stupid, fat, or ugly.
Listening to Jordan Peterson can be challenging in two ways. You may be uncomfortable with his ideas, his style, or both. Both have gotten him in trouble. But it’s possible to speak hard truths without calling people names.
Gerontologist Louise Aronson is gentler, less confrontational, and less well-known. She is a physician and professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). She’s known for challenging society’s and the medical community’s approach to treating the elderly.
Dr. Aronson has received many accolades for challenging our assumptions about aging. Her book, Elderhood: Refining Aging, Transforming Medicine Reimagining Life, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.
Her style is different, but she bravely tells her tribe they have made self-serving choices and let down their clients, students, and patients. Professionals used to pledge (“professo”) not to use their secret knowledge to disadvantage the uninitiated. Both academia and medicine have slipped from that aspirational pledge.
Both Jordan Peterson and Louise Aronson have prodded me to think more deeply about vital topics that would be easy to ignore. Candidly, I’m mildly uncomfortable seriously considering the view of the people “on the other side.” Yet my side is wrong more than I like. The other guys get it right once in a while.
When we pay attention to both sides, we are more likely to make better choices. Plus, we can learn to empathize with people we don’t agree with.”
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What’s your experience? Do you actively seek ideas that stretch you, but make you uncomfortable?
-o0o-
Terry Moore, CCIM, is the author of Building Legacy Wealth: How to Build Wealth and Live a Life Worth Imitating. Read his “Welcome to My Blog.”
Have loved Jordan Peterson since his first book, maps of meaning. Continue to love him and have observed with delight his evolution through his work on jungian archetypes and the Old Testament characters…the interviews he has done in the last two weeks with Catholic journalists talking about his wife s coming into the Church at the Easter vigil have moved me to tears…such is the love he has for Tammy and the application he has for her spiritual pilgrimage.
I can’t wait for his next book on the NT gospels to be released later this year, but in the meantime will watch as many videos of his on a huge variety of topics….
Mr Moore, I did business with you in the recent pre-covid past and found you to be a very interesting and thoughtful person, as well as very skilled in your profession. Your posts have been interesting and thought-provoking. You pursue people with varied viewpoints who also are thoughtful and perceptive. You seem to hunt for others with positive outlooks and try to incorporate the perspectives that enhance interpersonal outcomes and personal success. Essentially, it appears that you want to learn from the best in others, which a find admirable. I will admit that you are probably significantly more successful than I in those endeavors.
I listen to and read from a broad spectrum of media and personal perspectives and am drawn to those I find to be thoughtful, well studied, and have some significant breadth and expertise in their field of focus. I feel that I am a social moderate, a fiscal conservative, an independent thinker, and an “understander” rather than a “believer”. My academic background is in medicine and scientific research.
I found your post interesting in mentioning Jordan Peterson. He is a Clinical Psychologist and was a well-regarded professor. He appears to be very well-read in many areas and very thoughtful in his perspectives. I agree that he emphasizes personal responsibility for the betterment of the individual and society from his perspective. He is accosted directly in most media interviews for calling out the current progressive/woke/DEI agendas as being divisive and not being supportive of the individual or society. Most of the interviewers questions are to provoke ad hominem arguments which he quickly calls out. Because of this, I find your characterization of Jordan Peterson, “his confrontive, combative style. Peterson is needlessly provocative. He frequently calls people names or asserts they are mean, stupid, fat, or ugly”, as surprising since I have seldom seen him respond in-kind to verbal attacks. Instead, he typically points out and exposes the fallacies in the arguments used.
I have listened to many “controversial” figures on many side of many issues. I gravitate to those that speak carefully and thoughtfully regardless of the issue. I find that being “uncomfortable” with thoughtful speech is the signal that I should be listening even more carefully to see why I am uncomfortable (as opposed to those that use ad hominem arguments).
Throughout the recent social and political spectrum, I find that the words used to identify a position are carefully tailored to evoke a particular viseral response while the intent behind the words can be quite different. “Pro-life” vs “Pro-choice” for anti-abortion vs abortion comes to mind, but there are so many others.
I very much appreciate your approach to behavioral ethics, and look forward to hearing more.