The Canadian psychologist Dr. Jordan Peterson has painted a bleak prospect for Britain’s future if Labour wins the next election, which he believes is “highly likely”, in an interview published in the Telegraph.
In his view, a Labour win would be “catastrophic”. Speaking from Toronto, Dr. Peterson said:
You guys, you elect a Labour Government, you’re gonna be Venezuela for 20 years.
I’m terrified it would be a catastrophe if the U.K. voted [in] a Labour Government. You’re gonna be in for rough waters if you were foolish enough to do that. But yeah, it’s highly likely.
He’s less forthcoming on his reasons for that gloomy prediction, but it’s not too hard to see why he feels that way.
Peterson has no more time for his own Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, describing how there is
endless multiplication of impulsive diversity… and there’s no limit to how much fragmentation that will produce. … A culture that thinks that diversity is unity is also a culture that thinks that a man can be a woman. You can’t get more confused than that.
He admires Margaret Thatcher for having a clear purpose and vision, having disapproved of her when he was a young socialist. And he does have some optimism:
Human beings can let their stupid ideas die instead of them. And because we can learn and transform, we’re not restricted by environmental constraints the same way that other creatures are, we can always make more with less.
Peterson’s mantra is that we should live by cooperation and competition, and take responsibility for ourselves (adding that the education system fails to encourage young people to do just that):
If you’re looking for meaning in your life, take on responsibility. There’s no difference between voluntary responsibility and meaning. They’re the same thing. And boy, that’s a secret worth knowing.
He has little time for the fatalism of environmentalism:
There’s no starvation in the world [now], except for political reasons. [There is] plenty to go around.
We have hurricanes. That’s a natural disaster. But what if you prepare? What are the preconditions for preparation? And the answer to that is well, subsidiary social organisation, or distributed responsibilities. That also makes the system very resilient. So part of the subsidiary vision is that decision-making should be passed down the hierarchy to the most proximal possible level.
However, it turns out though that the piece is a plug for the forthcoming online Peterson Academy which will teach people properly, or so the claim is. And he isn’t worried about formal accreditation for the courses:
All sorts of corporations are already stating publicly that they no longer regard a university degree as a stamp of accreditation. So why the hell would I pursue that?
As ever, worth reading in full.
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