A Rebuttal of a Rebuttal - TJ Kirk VS Jordan Peterson

Unfortunately I think TJ’s disagreements with Peterson are just a misunderstanding of Peterson's assertions. It feels a bit like TJ had obsessed himself with the subtitle of Jordan’s “12 rules for life; an antidote to chaos.” He has made the huge leap of logic that Peterson is talking about the literal definition of chaos, i.e, anything that’s not expected.

“I would say a lot of the time I’m chaos, but I do everything I can to put things in order. But I’m going to answer that in a deeper way, because, first of all, everything and everyone is chaos at the same time. I don’t mean that in a trite sense, I mean it in a technical sense, which is, order, technically speaking in my way of viewing the world is order is that domain you inhabit when what you’re doing is producing the results you want to happen. That’s a pragmatic perspective, from a philosophical perspective.” - Jordan Peterson, April 2018 Q&A

And that’s the biggest hole in TJ’s argument here; he doesn’t actually understand where Peterson is coming from and he’s arguing with what he thinks Peterson is saying. Peterson never claimed to rid the world of chaos or that it was always a bad thing or something we must avoid at all costs. But generally speaking, chaos is the realm of the unknown and if you have a specific goal in mind, you don’t want to be in chaos. If you’re trying to make order out of your life, chaos is not helpful, as TJ seems to understand but he won’t even reach a single hand out to Peterson to try to understand where he’s coming from.

“It simply means that order and chaos are terms that can be defined subjectively or objectively depending on the context.” - TJ Kirk, “The Order of Chaos: An Antidote to Meaning”

Yes, TJ, they are subjective concepts. Do you think that in trying to “nail down” what you think Peterson means, you might have actually simplified what he was trying to say? (On top of criticizing his ‘infantile’ view of the world that you might have misrepresented a little bit)

“Order equals goodness and stability, chaos equals badness and uncertainty. He makes occasional exceptions to this otherwise rigid dichotomy, but the prevailing narrative is one of simplistic caveman logic: Order good. Chaos bad.” - TJ Kirk, “The Order of Chaos: An Antidote to Meaning”

“I think you’ll find that this proposition is a great deal more difficult and complicated than just laying the blame for everything bad that happens in your life at the feet of chaos and crediting everything good to order, as Peterson too often does.” - TJ Kirk, “The Order of Chaos: An Antidote to Meaning”

By Peterson’s own pragmatic, philosophical definition of those words, yes, chaos is bad and order is good. But that’s because his definition allows you to decide what is order for you and chaos for you. My order could be chaos to TJ, and TJ’s order could be chaos to me. That’s how subjectivism works. And he’s not saying objective chaos is bad, he’s saying your own subjective definition of chaos is bad, every person on the planet gets to decide what their subjective chaos is.

“It sounds so reasonable, doesn’t it? Too bad it’s completely wrong. The people throughout history who have made an impact, who have changed the world, for better or do worse, have never done so by cleaning their room, but by messing it up.” - TJ Kirk, “The Order of Chaos: An Antidote to Meaning”

If MLK wore tattered clothes and spoke poorly, the people at the time would have torn him to shreds trying to tell the rest of America how to live their lives. Obama never would have been elected if his education, charisma or his tailor were absent. The “clean your room” statement is literal and metaphorical, meaning you should clean your room, but you get to define what ‘clean’ is, within the bounds of reason. You get to decide what your order is, within the bounds of reason. The entire point Jordan is trying to make here is that everyone already knows what their problems are, they’re simply paralyzed by laziness, or lack of hope, or lack of meaning or some combination thereof. They know what the proper way to dress is, they know what the proper way to speak is, they already know what they should be doing, but they’ve been told to reject it. Or they’ve lost themselves along the way. His ‘pragmatic’ message is to get back to what they know they should be doing. And making sure that your room is clean enough that you can functionally use it and not have it impede you on a daily basis is something that is objectively good. It will make your life easier, every day of your life easier. You wake up and go to bed in the same place every day, there’s no reason you can’t put it in order to help yourself. And if you somehow can’t manage that, then you shouldn’t be criticizing the world. Not when there are things within your control right now that you ‘just can’t bother with’. It’s like, you think that attitude is gonna go away when you’re granted all that political power you’re so desperately grasping for?

“And they didn’t change the world by making sure their rooms were clean and by being respectful to order. They changed the world by causing havoc, disruption, chaos. Their rooms were dirty.

“But TJ,” you are now perhaps saying, “You’ve missed the point of Peterson’s statement. He wasn’t necessarily saying that a person who is opposed to the order of the day cannot work to change it, he was essentially saying that a person must have their own life in order before they attempt to start changing the world.”

Well, Martin Luther King Jr. may have been a great champion for civil rights, but he was also a plagiarist who was not at all faithful to his wife. The extent of his plagiarism and his infidelities is unknown, but few argue that they didn’t happen. Imagine if Martin Luther King Jr. had said, “Well, I’m a flawed person. I’ve done some bad things. My life is not in perfect order, so how can I presume to lecture the world? How can I presume to change the world when I can’t even change the bad things about myself?” Imagine if he’d taken that tact. Maybe black people would still be drinking from separate water fountains in places like my home state of Louisiana.” - TJ Kirk, “The Order of Chaos: An Antidote to Meaning”

Having personal flaws as a human being is not the same thing as ‘not cleaning your room’. The ‘clean your room’ statement refers to things that are easy to reconcile, things that would take minutes to do but provide infinitely more beneficial perks. Changing the core flaws you have as a human being is a rigorous, lifelong process that almost everyone never achieves. I’m sorry to say but you’ve just misrepresented everything Peterson has ever said about this.

“Jordan Peterson’s directive to see to it that you have mastery over yourself before you attempt to change the world is not an antidote for chaos as all, but a paralytic agent that places you at the mercy of chaos.

Chaos is not your enemy. It’s your friend. Even when it hurts you, it is often reshaping your world in ways that history will ultimately deem were for the better. To wish for an antidote to chaos is to wish for a static world, an inert world, a world that cannot change. To think that you must be a perfect being with perfect knowledge before you can seek the change the world is not an idea supported by even the most cursory glance throughout history.” - TJ Kirk, “The Order of Chaos: An Antidote to Meaning”

As Peterson says, you define what your chaos is, and you’re almost always in it, trying to improve yourself. To say what you define as the problems in your life as “your friend”, as you’ve put it TJ, is some real self-harming bullshit that people who like Jordan Peterson are straight up sick of. Peterson talks a lot about burning off parts of you that aren’t really you, that you’d be better off without, but people don’t like to do it because it’s painful, but they’re more afraid to find out that 90% of them needs to burn. I don’t think he would call those parts of yourself ‘order’, and the fire burning it away ‘chaos’. I think you’ve got it exactly opposite, Bucko.