Jordan Peterson’s Sympathetic Portrait of Hitler Claims ‘People Are Not That Brave’ Which is Why He Was Not Stopped.

The way Peterson molds exactly what he says at each twist and contour in a discussion to fit his point whether he is guiding you TOWARD enforcement of desiring an authority or AGAINST a trend of perceived cultural chaos shows how masterfully he controls the narrative not in pursuit of an honest discussion but to put forward his own point.

I find people to be extremely brave, strong, but the quality lacking was a critical thinking, and especially any innate Anti-Authoritarianism. Skepticism of Authority is necessary to avoid totalitarianism. Not simply not walking down the wrong alley and suddenly finding out you’re Hitler because you ‘unconsciously’ responded to what ‘people cheered at’ in your speech, all of sudden becoming the incarnation of evil and corruption.

I do wonder if Peterson has familiarity with The Milgram Experiments. Which tested people’s concession to an authority telling them to electrocute someone, relying on their framing it as an experiment, and simply ‘asking politely’.

I see much of the retreat into the ‘agentive personality’ that Milgram called out as a way of bypassing real personal responsibility and hiding behind titles, categories, and labels in order to leverage an authority which is a claim to an outside force, perhaps nowhere present in the discussion, in Peterson’s public speaking.

When someone says ‘they’re just following orders’ they are retreating to an agentive personality. But also, when someone is forced to tell a fellow human being they can’t use the restroom unless they’re a customer, just as equally. Or when you refuse to call someone by their preferred pronouns because you take personal issue with their existence and turn the force of the law, in protest against a protective measure, toward your ‘right to free speech’ in order to avoid treating fellow human beings humanely who are members of your community.