I’ve been watching Doctor Professor Sir Daddy Jordan Peterson, current darling of YouTube, who claims he isn’t right-wing, but says a lot of right-wing things. I actually find some of what he says very astute. A lot is very banal, but wrapped in so much academese to obfuscate it that at first you assume it to be astute, simply because you can’t understand anything he’s saying. But you whack through the tangled verbiage and it’s just truisms, that, yes, aren’t incorrect, but aren’t exactly insightful, either. Most of his writing falls under this category - which of course left-wing academics do all the time as well. And then some of his stuff is outright insane. His Judeo-Christian values and belief in a post-modernist neo-marxist plot to undermine the West and his weird obsession with not calling trans people by their preferred pronouns (although, yes, I understand that he will do so in his everyday life, but he refuses as a principle in public discourse to prove that he can’t be compelled by law - which, again, yes, I partially agree is an encroachment on the freedom of language). And his deeply ingrained sexism that manifests in his theories about the nature of the essential God-energy of the universe being masculine, and the over-valuation of anything masculine, and the under-valuation of anything feminine. And on. Three good videos from ContraPoints regarding this stuff: the JP one, the pronoun one, and the West one.
I’ve been watching Ben Shapiro, who also refuses to use preferred trans pronouns, believing that it is the first step to the utter degradation and dissolution of… you’ve guessed it... Judeo-Christian values. Shapiro is Jewish, but JP is fairly Christian, so they like to say “Judeo-Christian values” and that way they can maintain a united front against… post-modernist neo-marxist social justice warriors. By which I think they mean black and trans people. And women.
Shrugs.
I’ve been watching more Steven Crowder, who I childishly referred to as Steven Chowder the last time I wrote about him. Crowder - whose name, if you squint, looks a bit like “Crowbar” - which coincidentally is a blunt tool that forces its way into places it doesn’t belong, causing extensive harm on the way - likes to think of himself as a comedian.
But I guess he and I must have differing opinions on what constitutes comedy, because for me it is a weapon used to skewer the powerful and reveal hidden truths that excite us and liberate us and draw us into a primal, spiritual state… and for Steven Crowbar it is a way to make fun of teenage rape-survivors so that lonely white boys will feed his ego on the Internet.
Shrugs.
Anyway, a common thread I’ve noticed running through these right-wingers’ world views is a reliance on the importance of facts and logic. “Facts don’t care about your feelings,” is Shapiro’s catchphrase. Big Daddy JP often discusses the necessity for cold facts when cutting through unwarranted compassion. And Steven Crowbar likes to purposefully anger and traumatise young college students who disagree with him and then when they start yelling at him calmly tell them that he’s not wrong, he’s telling the truth, he’s not wrong.
The thing is, there’s a huge error in thinking here. Facts and logic are not in opposition to feelings and emotions. Feelings are factual. They aren’t imaginary. They aren’t illogical. In truth we exist primarily as emotional beings at least as much as we exist as logical beings.
What they’re really talking about is different types of attention we can bring to the world. And these types of attention draw out different attributes of the world, manifest different realities.
Imagine you’re in a dark room with a torch with a very bright but narrow beam. You sweep the darkness and you see a world of glinting tusks, of trunks, of stomping feet and flaring nostrils.
Now imagine the same room but you have a lantern with a low but diffuse light that bathes the scene. You see two elephants clashing with one another.
Maybe the elephants are fighting. Or maybe they’re mating. In the diffuse light, you can see - because you have context. The narrow torch beam wouldn’t give you this, in fact without the prior context of seeing elephants in diffuse light you wouldn't have any way of knowing they were elephants. All you’d see would be unconnected individual details.
But perhaps one of the elephants has a damaged foot. Or an infected tusk. The torch beam would be very good for spotting this, because it blacks out everything around it, and focuses you on one small space. The lantern on the other hand, in this analogy, simply emits too dim a light to make out such details. You see widely with the lantern, but precisely with the torch.
Human attention is like this. We have two different modes of attention, each grounded in one of the two hemispheres of the brain. The left hemisphere pays close attention to pieces, to what it sees as discrete, mechanical parts, while the right pays broad attention to the gestalt, the overall picture. (I'm aware I'm rushing through this. Go look up Ian McGilchrist's work to see current thinking on hemisphere competition in the brain.)
We have evolved to require both. Sometimes it matters that we see the individual tusks. Sometimes the whole elephants. Sometimes we need to see the trees, sometimes the wood.
I would argue that the right-wingers I’ve been watching - and I don’t mean to imply this is a problem with right-wing thinking, but a problem with these specific people who have millions of followers on YouTube and are influencing, poisoning public discourse in large part because it gets them followers and strokes their egos - these people have placed far too high an importance on the first mode of attention, the narrow beam, to the detriment of their overall intelligence.
To the man with a hammer everything begins to look like a nail. And to the YouTuber who overuses their narrow beam of attention, the world begins to look like it is comprised of facts.
It is not - nor is it comprised primarily of feelings. This is the opposite problem, exhibited by some on the left.
In truth facts and feelings are attributes that manifest from the same reality, depending on how you approach that reality.
Facts and logic and the scientific method are great tools for navigating through life at the micro level. But they don’t come instinctively and habitually in the way that feelings and emotions do. At the macro level in fact all of us, right and left wing together, navigate via feeling and emotion far more than Shapiro et al would like to admit. We first glance at the unknown with dim lanterns to get a vague idea of what we’re dealing with - ahh, it’s two elephants in a room - and we engage the narrow torches to make adjustments or to notice details once we're situated in context.
The Shapiro/Crowbar method is I would say to shine their torches on everything they dislike - left-wing politics, fair pay for women, chosen pronouns for trans people, Black Lives Matter - to the extent that they see only mechanical pieces, and to highlight the pieces that don’t align, and to point and scream about these as if they invalidate everything their opponents say, while missing the overall picture. They point to, for example, the odd gap in logic in sexism debates - which is inevitable, because we’re feeling our way through this, we’re making halting progress - and they miss the fact that generally it’s a better world when women get paid better, have more voices higher up in hierarchies, and when black people aren’t systematically murdered by the police, and when we afford trans people respect that helps them a great deal and hinders us barely at all.
Or they enter college campuses - Steven Crowbar, I'm talking to you - shouting about the little model they have made of the world by assembling the bits they have seen in their narrow torch beams - that statistically rape is punished when it is reported, that statistically rape victims are believed when they have proof, which proof is a prerequisite of all law, otherwise how would we arbitrate anything, therefore rape culture doesn't exist - and what they fail to see is what is abundantly, startlingly clear in the dim lantern light: that they are hurting people, causing them pain, by saying this stuff. They have lost context, appropriateness; they cannot see the wood for the trees.
And one final thing. We all navigate, as I said, on the macro level with our dim lanterns more than our narrow beams. And this is true for Shapiro and his gang as well. And this means that there are no end of left-wing videos on the Internet making these guys look supremely ridiculous by pointing out all the times they themselves do not follow logic, the times they act like snowflakes, make ad hominem attacks, equivocate, talk from the gut, do all the things they hate so much when they see on the left.
Because that’s another thing with the narrow beams. We tend to be really good at shining the beams in places we want to go - at the people we hate, to “dismantle” and “destroy” them, as the YouTube argot goes - and really bad at shining them into the black scary places inside into which we fear to tread.
So that’s my jumbled analysis of right-wing YouTube. There are elements that are elucidating. Shapiro and JP and Crowbar have all said things that I found difficult, and ultimately necessary, to hear. But too often they fail to use their unquestionably bright torches on themselves, and in that darkness inside them I sense monsters growing.
I’ve been watching Ben Shapiro, who also refuses to use preferred trans pronouns, believing that it is the first step to the utter degradation and dissolution of… you’ve guessed it... Judeo-Christian values. Shapiro is Jewish, but JP is fairly Christian, so they like to say “Judeo-Christian values” and that way they can maintain a united front against… post-modernist neo-marxist social justice warriors. By which I think they mean black and trans people. And women.
Shrugs.
I’ve been watching more Steven Crowder, who I childishly referred to as Steven Chowder the last time I wrote about him. Crowder - whose name, if you squint, looks a bit like “Crowbar” - which coincidentally is a blunt tool that forces its way into places it doesn’t belong, causing extensive harm on the way - likes to think of himself as a comedian.
But I guess he and I must have differing opinions on what constitutes comedy, because for me it is a weapon used to skewer the powerful and reveal hidden truths that excite us and liberate us and draw us into a primal, spiritual state… and for Steven Crowbar it is a way to make fun of teenage rape-survivors so that lonely white boys will feed his ego on the Internet.
Shrugs.
Anyway, a common thread I’ve noticed running through these right-wingers’ world views is a reliance on the importance of facts and logic. “Facts don’t care about your feelings,” is Shapiro’s catchphrase. Big Daddy JP often discusses the necessity for cold facts when cutting through unwarranted compassion. And Steven Crowbar likes to purposefully anger and traumatise young college students who disagree with him and then when they start yelling at him calmly tell them that he’s not wrong, he’s telling the truth, he’s not wrong.
The thing is, there’s a huge error in thinking here. Facts and logic are not in opposition to feelings and emotions. Feelings are factual. They aren’t imaginary. They aren’t illogical. In truth we exist primarily as emotional beings at least as much as we exist as logical beings.
What they’re really talking about is different types of attention we can bring to the world. And these types of attention draw out different attributes of the world, manifest different realities.
Imagine you’re in a dark room with a torch with a very bright but narrow beam. You sweep the darkness and you see a world of glinting tusks, of trunks, of stomping feet and flaring nostrils.
Now imagine the same room but you have a lantern with a low but diffuse light that bathes the scene. You see two elephants clashing with one another.
Maybe the elephants are fighting. Or maybe they’re mating. In the diffuse light, you can see - because you have context. The narrow torch beam wouldn’t give you this, in fact without the prior context of seeing elephants in diffuse light you wouldn't have any way of knowing they were elephants. All you’d see would be unconnected individual details.
But perhaps one of the elephants has a damaged foot. Or an infected tusk. The torch beam would be very good for spotting this, because it blacks out everything around it, and focuses you on one small space. The lantern on the other hand, in this analogy, simply emits too dim a light to make out such details. You see widely with the lantern, but precisely with the torch.
Human attention is like this. We have two different modes of attention, each grounded in one of the two hemispheres of the brain. The left hemisphere pays close attention to pieces, to what it sees as discrete, mechanical parts, while the right pays broad attention to the gestalt, the overall picture. (I'm aware I'm rushing through this. Go look up Ian McGilchrist's work to see current thinking on hemisphere competition in the brain.)
We have evolved to require both. Sometimes it matters that we see the individual tusks. Sometimes the whole elephants. Sometimes we need to see the trees, sometimes the wood.
I would argue that the right-wingers I’ve been watching - and I don’t mean to imply this is a problem with right-wing thinking, but a problem with these specific people who have millions of followers on YouTube and are influencing, poisoning public discourse in large part because it gets them followers and strokes their egos - these people have placed far too high an importance on the first mode of attention, the narrow beam, to the detriment of their overall intelligence.
To the man with a hammer everything begins to look like a nail. And to the YouTuber who overuses their narrow beam of attention, the world begins to look like it is comprised of facts.
It is not - nor is it comprised primarily of feelings. This is the opposite problem, exhibited by some on the left.
In truth facts and feelings are attributes that manifest from the same reality, depending on how you approach that reality.
Facts and logic and the scientific method are great tools for navigating through life at the micro level. But they don’t come instinctively and habitually in the way that feelings and emotions do. At the macro level in fact all of us, right and left wing together, navigate via feeling and emotion far more than Shapiro et al would like to admit. We first glance at the unknown with dim lanterns to get a vague idea of what we’re dealing with - ahh, it’s two elephants in a room - and we engage the narrow torches to make adjustments or to notice details once we're situated in context.
The Shapiro/Crowbar method is I would say to shine their torches on everything they dislike - left-wing politics, fair pay for women, chosen pronouns for trans people, Black Lives Matter - to the extent that they see only mechanical pieces, and to highlight the pieces that don’t align, and to point and scream about these as if they invalidate everything their opponents say, while missing the overall picture. They point to, for example, the odd gap in logic in sexism debates - which is inevitable, because we’re feeling our way through this, we’re making halting progress - and they miss the fact that generally it’s a better world when women get paid better, have more voices higher up in hierarchies, and when black people aren’t systematically murdered by the police, and when we afford trans people respect that helps them a great deal and hinders us barely at all.
Or they enter college campuses - Steven Crowbar, I'm talking to you - shouting about the little model they have made of the world by assembling the bits they have seen in their narrow torch beams - that statistically rape is punished when it is reported, that statistically rape victims are believed when they have proof, which proof is a prerequisite of all law, otherwise how would we arbitrate anything, therefore rape culture doesn't exist - and what they fail to see is what is abundantly, startlingly clear in the dim lantern light: that they are hurting people, causing them pain, by saying this stuff. They have lost context, appropriateness; they cannot see the wood for the trees.
And one final thing. We all navigate, as I said, on the macro level with our dim lanterns more than our narrow beams. And this is true for Shapiro and his gang as well. And this means that there are no end of left-wing videos on the Internet making these guys look supremely ridiculous by pointing out all the times they themselves do not follow logic, the times they act like snowflakes, make ad hominem attacks, equivocate, talk from the gut, do all the things they hate so much when they see on the left.
Because that’s another thing with the narrow beams. We tend to be really good at shining the beams in places we want to go - at the people we hate, to “dismantle” and “destroy” them, as the YouTube argot goes - and really bad at shining them into the black scary places inside into which we fear to tread.
So that’s my jumbled analysis of right-wing YouTube. There are elements that are elucidating. Shapiro and JP and Crowbar have all said things that I found difficult, and ultimately necessary, to hear. But too often they fail to use their unquestionably bright torches on themselves, and in that darkness inside them I sense monsters growing.
I deeply admire you watching something that doesn't reinforce your world view.
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