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Jordan Peterson's Insidious Assault on Language [1]
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Date: 2025-05-27
Thesis: It is evident to me that Jordan Peterson has invented an entirely unfounded religious Jargon for the sole purpose of coyly reapplying the Breitbart Doctrine, in which Politics is downstream from Culture which is downstream from Language, to religious discourse so that he might kneecap the progress of the Post-Theists by reopening the questions settled by the New Atheists likely to peddle far-right political agendas.
The New Atheists are best known by the 4 Horsemen: Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett. They set out to change American and European society by unequivocally proving through logic and science that God both did not exist and may not have even been moral if not outright evil in the religious literature and in history. It is perhaps worth noting that the New Atheists basically accomplished their goals by providing the language for people to deconstruct and criticize religion scientifically and then reach the conclusion of Atheism.
They did not however provide any alternative or community, simply the destruction of what was there and newfound appreciation for the sciences. In the wake of the New Atheists, younger generations have criticized their lack of building and attempt to have more fruitful discussions on the role of religion perhaps in an atheistic/agnostic/non-theist perspective. This includes the voices of Alex O'Connor the Cosmicskeptic , Joe Folley of Unsolicited Advice , Rainn Wilson on Soul Boom and my personal favorite Dr. Justin Sledge of the channel Esoterica who recently pronounced himself as a " Post-Theist " or someone so disinterested with whether or not God exists but rather interested in what aspects of religion (Dr. Sledge described himself in the same video as religious but not spiritual), spirituality (Rainn Wilson has describes himself as spiritual but not religious ) and philosophy (O'Connor and Folley have described themselves as neither religious nor spiritual to my knowledge but as a philosophers and theologians) are still useful after the conclusion of the New Atheist's irrefutable proofs via 'The God Delusion' and 'God is not Great' as to whether or not God (in the Abrahamic sense) exists (which he doesn't).
This review is necessary to understand the current discourse surrounding atheism and religion especially in the online and public spheres: the New Atheist movement dominated largely unmatched and the Post-Theists are now parsing out what in religion philosophy and spirituality are still useful to the non-theists of the world. We must also turn for a short time to the political discourse in which we exist. Andrew Breitbart, the far-right conservative pundit, coined the phrase "Politics is downstream from Culture" now known as the Breitbart Doctrine . This doctrine has, however, been in use in US policy since at least the 1970s when Neoliberal conferences determined that their political agendas (centralizing power in a single individual, rolling back religious rights, repealing civil rights, cutting taxes for the wealthy and destroying the institutions of the post-war period designed to benefit the working class) were so untenable that they would never win in open discussion and so more duplicity would be required.
If the politics were not strong or sound enough to win in the marketplace of ideas, then the marketplace, not the goods, must be changed. Thus, if one can change the culture one can change the politics. The Breitbart Doctrine is a political tool of mass destruction whereby war is waged on the modern culture in order to reshape it into a twisted parody if itself that would be more akin to accepting the political agenda that undermines the working class for the sake of the oligarch and elite.
In the 70s and 80s, billionaires, in accordance with the doctrines espoused in the Powell Memorandum , funded think tanks to publish false or misleading research that pushed forward the idea that tax cuts, less education, less healthcare and less regulations would somehow be better rather than worse for society. The result was that in the 80s Reagan's Chief Economic Advisor was that hack Milton Friedman whose ideas were so bad that when they were given free reign in the Chilean US-backed Fascist dictatorship of Auguste Pinochet they resulted in a 20% unemployment rate, a bankrupt banking industry, a debt crisis and economic collapse that only stopped when Pinochet fired the group of young men directly educated by Friedman (The Chicago Boys) and then proceeded to turn far left in his economic policies.
Reagan undertook these policies and after him, think tanks and alternative media sites (rocketing in popularity with the widespread adoption of the internet) have tried to wage the Culture War in an effort to push society and politics ever further to the right to the point that Charlie Kirk has called for repealing the Civil Rights Act and Curtis Yarvin (who has inspired the politics of Peter Thiel the billionaire who bankrolls JD Vance ) has called for the unabashed dictatorship of one man over America and the destruction of American Democracy.
One of the Chief armies on the culture War is the Daily Wire and their audience, a far-right propaganda outlet chiefly concerned with what only in the most abstract sense can be called "cultural critique" but is more often by their own admission simply "owning the libs" and more accurately called crying about leftists in public.
Michael Knowles is one of their more outspoken content creators and in partnership with PragerU creates the 5-minute video: " Control the Words, Control the Culture ." It is exactly what it sounds like, through the moral panics, dog whistles and ignorance, it is a conservative call to action to refuse to use the words society has deemed appropriate and to instead use more inflammatory words in order to retake the culture. This is another piece of the Breitbart Doctrine but somehow even more fundamental and Insidious.
Jordan Peterson himself is a Jungian Archetypal psychologist who believes that by constructing archetypes and applying them to reality we gain a deeper understanding of the world. His self-help books and lectures have had largely positive effects on the world, but his biology claims and social tractates largely pegged him as a psychologist occasionally peddling Neoliberal propaganda. In June 2022, Jordan Peterson signed a contract with the Daily Wire and instantly lost his credibility as a somewhat renegade albeit prominent psychologist and instead a keystone to the alt-right pipeline.
At last we can see the intersection between modern political and religious discourse. It is evident to me that Jordan Peterson has invented an entirely unfounded religious Jargon for the sole purpose of coyly reapplying the Breitbart Doctrine, in which Politics is downstream from Culture which is downstream from Language to religious discourse so that he might kneecap the progress of the post-theists by reopening the questions settled by the New Atheists.
I found this truth to be on full display when I saw Jordan Peterson on Jubilee's video: ' Jordan Peterson vs 20 Atheists ' (the original title for which was ‘one Christian vs 20 atheists’ but due to obvious reasons was changed within hours of being posted). With this background I'd like to simply point out some of the blatant moments in which Peterson put forward words, to which the clearly New Atheist inspired participants were obviously not unfamiliar, only to then obfuscate their true meaning by supplementing his own definitions (in reference to his own work or in-the-moment pivots) in a blatantly duplicitous attempt to muddy the waters and get his opponents to agree to that which they clearly did not.
(0:45) Jordan Peterson's first claim he intended to defend was "Atheists reject God, but they don't understand what they're rejecting." Most respondents, including a man who originally studied to be a catholic priest, tried to explain how what they rejected was a classically defined God who is omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, omnimerciful and omnijust or is the masculine being who literally did the actions attributed to him in the Torah, Bible and perchance Quran. Peterson would call this reductive and then say that God is actually an amorphous concept that either literally cannot be defined or (the one definition he tried to give) is more akin more to consciousness rather than a being (15:50). He was not, however, intellectually honest enough to then say that when some Atheists accepted that they might believe in a God who is consciousness (like Spinoza's God) to then say that they did know what they were rejecting; instead he berated them and said that rather than call themselves Atheists and reject God they must rather accept this definition, no longer be Atheists and be known as God believing Christians which at another point he defines as anybody who sacrifices for reward in the face of adversity.
(8:06) Another man asked if Peterson rejected the Polynesian God Lono without understanding it fully in an attempt to show how one can in fact reject something they do not fully understand simply by the nature of that thing in that they know it cannot be or that it clashes against what they already know. This is pulled directly from the New Atheist concept of going "One God Further" as even Christians do not believe in the thousands and thousands of deities that have existed and so there is nothing special about this one to warrant belief in it. This is also derived from Hitchen's Razor which states that arguments made without evidence can be dismissed without evidence (i.e. no evidence exists for God so no evidence is needed to not believe in him). Peterson simply does not engage. He says the argument presupposes that Peterson does in fact dismiss that which he does not understand and that whether he believes in Lono is irrelevant given that presupposition. He answers neither whether he does understand Lono nor if he believes in Lono, but from his own arguments one must conclude that likely does. Here it is evident he is engaging with ethos of the New Atheist movement but refuses to engage with it unless the person with whom he discusses use only his terminology (God is Consciousness, Christianity is Sacrifice, Atheism is Ignorance) at which point they will have already ceded the entire discussion according to the Breitbart Doctrine.
Jordan Peterson in this discussion almost exclusively engaged with New Atheist talking points and made claims as if he were in those same early 2010s debates against Hitchens and Dawkins, but the new arguments he brought to this conversation do not exist. Jordan Peterson is using some strange amalgamation of the Loaded Question and Motte and Bailey Fallacies so as to obfuscate the discussion and win not on the merits of his arguments or soundness of his logic, but on the language he chooses and then forces both sides to accept.
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