Jordan Peterson and globalism

"Virtue signaling" is a necessity for the corrupt elite, but not the true driver

[If you are familiar with Jordan B. Peterson and his background, do skip the first part until the “globalism” headline. You’re welcome.]

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Dr. Jordan Peterson is struggling. All the time. It’s his general attitude towards the world. He is thinking about it, obsessively. He is working hard to find the right concepts, and words, in order to understand people, as individuals, as groups. Society. What’s going on with human beings … and then speak about it. Making sense for many. He became famous for asking people to maybe clean up their own room before they start to re-arrange the world at large as political activists.

Coming out of nowhere, as a seemingly random Canadian clinical psychologist, he became notorious almost over night, lectured before crowds of thousands all around the world, fell deeply ill for a long time, recovered under much pain and distress. Nobody can ignore, that for him, struggling became very real, physically and personally, with what he had to endure as a father and husband and himself suffering greatly with severe illness. How he managed to come back, and then some, does warrant awe and offer inspiration.

Taken on board by the “Daily Wire” enterprise, he has left his humble domicile with a semi-amateurish webcam, from which he previously held public conversations, long form, with an assortment of partly inquiring minds. Jordan is now doing the conversations in super high production value settings, and sporting outfits that sometimes border the extravagant, even dandy-like, while sometimes going beyond that.

In his pretty special way, Dr. Jordan Peterson is undoubtedly an outstanding figure with a lot of notoriety, presumably an inkling of wealth, and a sizable sway over public opinion and discourse in parts of Western society. For the advancement of his convictions, he has also brought to life his “ARC” initiative, about the first big conference of which a year ago I have written. Addressing and rallying “responsible citizens” who won’t any longer get pushed around by some establishment narrative based on deranged ideologies, coming out of the neo-Marxist / post-modern delusions.

On the other hand, Peterson is an intellectual, not a populist.

Jordan’s distaste for the MAGA rubes
(and their champion)

Although he has teamed up, in a way, with “Tommy Robinson”, the British tough-edged underdog with street fighting pedigree who helped exposing the Pakistani Muslim rape gang industry of his country, for which he is being treated by his regime like an utter criminal. Yet Peterson found it hard to really publicly come out in favor of Donald J. Trump and MAGA … a movement that in his perception seems to be a collection of not so smart rubes who cannot be trusted to run a complex system like America, as a political enterprise.

Jordan Peterson first gained fame by opposing mandated speech, in terms of “pronouns” for transgender people, an extreme and exotic form of “political correctness”. But Donald J. Trump had already run his 2016 campaign partly based on the notion of strictly opposing such PC and e.g. insisting on “merry Christmas”, instead of “happy holidays” or any such non-Christian Ersatz terminology.

The core MAGA supporters knew in 2020 … after the sham impeachments and the fake news agitprop and the crazy censorship around the China virus … that the system was substantially rotten, but many moderates still saw Trump as an obnoxious outsider and intruder who didn't need to wonder why the establishment needed to get rid of him. That includes Dr. Peterson, to a significant degree.

To the leftist dogma he was of course opposed, but populism he didn’t want either.

I’m writing this up, summarily, because when it started I was quite fascinated by Jordan’s insights and theories and followed him quite closely; then when he returned to public political life roughly around the 2020 US elections, he dismissed any potential for the outcome having been manipulated and rigged: outright, and somewhat down his nose, in conversation with Douglas Murray, whose disdain for the MAGA rubes was even more palpable and expressed in a smug elitist way that only a highly educated Englishman is quite capable of. So from that arises the question how a person whose own experience and natural instincts – as a victim of the leftist thought-control machine – should make him sympathetic to the populist movement manages to instead keep that much distance.

Globalism = virtue signaling?

More generally, Jordan is strongly and outspokenly opposed to a lot of what the globalist establishment and their academic foot soldiers have been forcing upon Western societies, much to the latter’s detriment: the “climate” hoax, for instance, and all of the DEI crap, including mandated speech and “transgender” insanity, a topic where Dr. Peterson has become quite radical in his condemnation, not mincing words, contrary to his general habit.

And then he is contemplating – hypothesizing – why Western “elites”, e.g. in the UK, where they currently run AMOK in the Starmer government, as delusional and antihuman (let alone unpatriotic) as ever, on levels surpassing even Justine Turdeau’s in Jordan’s home land, are behaving that way, politically, abusing their peoples and destroying their countries, which is a pretty otherworldly manner of acting, for a “democratic” government, isn’t it.

And what’s his theory? As offered to his recent guest Matt Goodwin, a political expert who is now aligned with Nigel Farage’s “Reform UK” party: It is about “virtue signaling” by the ruling credentialed class. They want to look tolerant and caring (empathetic, not xenophobic) so they favor mass immigration; also they want to be “saving the world” by way of pursuing “net zero”. All that they force upon society without really themselves paying a price for it: they don’t live in the quarters where migrants destroy the social fabric and commit crimes; they can also afford higher energy prices.

These rulers and their claqueur cronies claim that they are the good, morally superior people, but actually it’s all being done in some mixture of egotism and narcissism, in pursuit of a higher social reputation that in turn translates into personal biographical advantage, as a matter of statistically proven correlation from a psychologist’s perspective, based partly on evolutionary theory.

So that, or roughly something like that, seems to be Dr. Peterson’s current understanding as to why the London-based UK political elite is acting the way they do. For someone so conscientiously motivated by and struggling with “deep” levels of analysis, that theory seems somewhat shallow and superficial, frankly.

[Caveat: I don’t mean to straw-man, as the expression goes, Jordan’s argument. But I’m presumably simplifying it to a degree, focusing on what I see as his core point of both analysis and attitude. I guess he would agree on much of what I’m going to say, at least not outright dismiss it, were we to have a conversation.]

Watch the whole conversation with Dr. Goodwin (right) HERE

The power point

Ideology is powerful, no doubt, but it’s also only the surface of what it covers, especially when it’s so utterly absurd and detached from reality, both in terms of truly scientific knowledge and of common sense, as all of the leftist agenda is, including “climate” and DEI etc. … Meanwhile Dr. Peterson has for a long time discussed how the postmodern narrative has claimed that all that happens in society, politics, public discourse, is in the end only an expression of power, or the pursuit thereof.

That was of course a confession by projection on the postmodernist / neo-Marxist side. Actually, their ideology was an excuse, a rationale for their very own pursuit of power and control. Just as Marxist ideology – pretending to be some kind of “scientific” expertise – was a pretense for the self-appointed “Avantgarde” supposedly acting on behalf of the working class to assume dictatorial power, and they were not even shy about the term “dictatorship”, because they claimed it was one of the proletariat, when actually it wasn’t, only the tyranny of the activists.

There have been tyrants who don’t care much for decorum, or some pseudo-philosophical facade, and they didn’t need to either, because people were used to being serfs of some overlord and didn’t know any better, before enlightenment took over, in the West. But in modern times, tyrants and self-enriching rulers, like the communist overlords in Soviet times, hid their lust for power behind their ideology: because who wouldn’t want to be seen as a good person improving the world, and it also helped keeping opposition down by propagandistic means.

In today’s Western countries, where there are officially democratic self-government, free discourse and all that good stuff, where societies and economic systems are also highly complex and a challenge to manage and keep going, at least a semblance of individual freedom and agency, room for inventors and entrepreneurs are a bare necessity. Between that and the lust for power of an “elite” group of people, there is some discrepancy, and this gap gets filled, as it were, with the prevailing ideology, a narrative structure, a common zeitgeist.

The globalist establishment and its leftist ideologically driven allies in the (academically) credentialed classes increasingly hollowed out what were supposed to be democratically controlled governments, free market systems and sovereign nations freely cooperating, and this development really took off and gained momentum after the Soviet imperium had collapsed. The take over and perversion of the free West was of course incremental; in America it went into overdrive during the Obama administration, and it all became highly visible with the clash that was caused by one Donald J. Trump interrupting the chain of succession that was supposed to make HRC leader of the free World … that was in fact no longer really free but the citizens of which had only to some degree already understood this exact point.

Because the establishment had obviously for decades cultivated a way of speaking about politics and all sorts of issues that made it look like the system was just right, maybe with some minor need for correction here and there. What the RINO side of the Uniparty did not understand was that their “Democrat” partners “on the other side of the aisle” had practically decided to assume control over the country for good, no longer sharing power, and as is their natural inclination as leftists, they have no restraint, AND they were by now no longer tied to the classical tenets of America as an exceptional nation. They had instead aligned themselves with the globalist endeavor that has no respect for national sovereignty, let alone the special brand of Christian identity typical for the regular citizens of the US.

Which is exactly the point where a competing (and deeply corrupt) system of morality and crypto-religious zeal came in, with all of the post-modern neo-Marxist talking points and indeed “virtue signaling”.

It was needed because a ruling establishment that couldn’t tolerate pre-existing (Christian) culture and American Exceptionalism had to tell everybody what their “new morality” and set of rules for personal behavior and political pursuit was. BUT the case that I want to make is this:

What we have come to understand to be (political) virtue signaling is not any sort of isolated, self-sufficient phenomenon and has no sociological basis outside of the usurpation of power by the credentialed classes, and the ongoing fortification of that power against opposition.

I’m fully prepared to acknowledge: how an ideology functions as a framework and set of rules, how propaganda works as a means of streamlining and control, the exact mechanisms of groupthink and good old opportunism … there’s a lot of room for detailed analysis and there is absolutely some inner momentum on intermediary levels of sociology (and social psychology) worth looking at.

Yet it still does not make much sense to single out “virtue signaling” as a … let alone THE … crucial explainer for what the globalist machine has been doing and how it achieved control over all of the Western nations.

Borderless unaccountability

What the UK government has been doing under the supposedly conservative Tory party and is now doubling down on under Labour-functionary Starmer is in no significant way different from what happened to the US under Obama and Biden, to Canada, Australia, Germany, France. The driver and original source for all of that is surely not virtue signaling.

The driver, and I’m obviously simplifying things, is the rise of a globalist technocratic cabal that increasingly amassed political power. The power-hungry types in the credentialed classes, among them the neo-Marxist resentful and presumptuous academically trained “elites”, abused what international bodies and platforms existed for their political gain. They introduced issues and supposed political necessities, all loaded with morality and “scientific” righteousness, on a global level, that enabled them to get ever more control.

Maybe there was some innocent curiosity and concern here and there, but mostly it was scam artistry on the highest levels. As Dr. Patrick Moore, co-founder of “Greenpeace” has asserted, the “eco” movement has morphed into a racket early on, after whales had been saved and rivers cleaned up.

Multinational corporations were natural allies in the global busybody circus, and the Chinese Communists seeking to undermine Western nations, and the deep state and Wall Street, but I partly repeat myself. The resulting globalist cabal would undermine whatever stood in their way, was an obstacle to their ever-increasing world-wide control of agenda and institutions.

Once such a globalist technocracy exists, outside of any democratic control and accountability, who can stop them?

Democracy is not possible on an international level. The nation is the most abstract level where it can function. So that’s why nations and their sovereignty must be subdued. Also, nations have specific cultures and value systems. Another obstacle that must be dealt with.

Globalism is THE perfect way of getting rid of democracy and accountability. Without that, the road to endless control and enrichment is wide open, for the technocratic cabal.

Power and money, it’s always hand in hand. “Climate” / “net zero” and the scamdemic both were designed to maximize control over everybody up to total tyranny, and to enrich the globalist establishment.

DEI is a somewhat strange bed fellow in terms of issues, but it did greatly help with undermining traditional ethics,

• diverting attention from other topics,

• dividing societies over fringe topics,

• confusing the hell out of regular people,

• punishing all common sense opposition and

• disenfranchising them out of the public debate.

That’s what it’s meant to do, and it worked like a charm, still does in the UK, in terms of state power turned rogue / fascistic. Also, again some money is to be made, for the DEI-implementing academics, with partly astronomical salaries.

Mass migration and open borders are pretty obviously meant to dissolve nations and the social fabric of their societies; they also lower wages, enrich the handlers and do-gooders and make it possible for China to practically murder swaths of American people with impunity. For such a demonically evil scheme, of course you need some pseudo-moralistic cover story and agitprop facade: virtue-signaling. Again, it’s not a driver, it’s an excuse.

Combine the issues and the described mechanisms of gaining power, by dismantling the sovereign nation states and disenfranchising their peoples, and there you have an explanation for what the UK establishment has been doing, just like the establishment of every other significant Western nation. There may be some British peculiarities, like the Pakistani gang rape industry, but by and large, it’s hardly discernible from the development in other nations. And while I find some people somewhat obsessed with what the British monarchs have been doing, or allegedly so, there is little doubt that King Charles has been a champion of the globalist ideology for a long time.

Richi Sunak, Billionaire globalist and last Tory Prime Minister of the UK, installed by the London-based Financial elite after they got rid of Liz Truss (elected by the Tory party base shortly before), and Keir Starmer, current Labor PM: birds of a feather, ideologically speaking

The “elite”: detached, and corrupt

The ruling establishment in the UK is not fundamentally different, as a sociological body and a class phenomenon, from their counterparts abroad. So why would they behave differently? Of course they wouldn't. Politicians are about power, and they don’t mind being with more (in both senses) powerful people and entities, to the contrary, and some enrichment on the way is always welcome. The globalist establishment offered them just that, like no other pathway could.

“Power” is of course a pretty abstract term. For a person close to it, it translates into being important, being paid attention to, being deferred to and more, having an impact etc. … which is exactly what lures people into the world of politics, and yes, it does have a lot to do with “social status”, the same thing that JBP offers as a motivation that might be causing the “virtue signaling”, but what he seems to miss is that the latter is only one ingredient, as it were, of the whole meal.

The social status attainable by politicking has been there long before anyone has conceptualized of virtue signaling as we know it since not even a decade, as an explicit item in public meta-level discourse. The thugs that now get exposed by DOGE are not fundamentally different from corrupt mobsters in previous eras, only they have brought the corruption to whole new levels in terms of both scope and shamelessness. Leftist virtue signaling helped with that, no doubt. But if you believe that people become corrupt because of sought-for virtue, we have a disagreement. Wrong order, I dare venture. The lust for power and control comes first.

Now where exactly do I differ, presumably, from Dr. Peterson’s perspective? There’s some overlap between his hypothesis and mine, but he does seem to believe that politicians are tempted to buy into the globalist ideology because the fake morality appeals to them (as being legitimate!). That’s not necessarily entirely wrong, but again: it’s also misleading in that it does somehow eclipse or eschew the more fundamental motivations that attract people into the world of activist politics in the first place.

It also bears repeating that what people, in this case politicians, believe to be their motivation may very well be only a rationalization, in one’s own favor. Also, there’s a substantial difference between what they believe about themselves and what they will pretend in front of peers, or (again differently!) before a general audience.

Classes of people do exist. It is not necessarily a Marxist perspective, but plain general sociology. The academically credentialed classes today are mostly parasitical. Many of their individual members have not much talent (and if they had some it might have been educated out of them in favor of indoctrination) but still want to have a nice entitled life with self-respect and material comfort. That’s where the virtual signaling is especially potent, as an Ersatz for traditional merit. Bureaucracies and the NGO universe are their natural habitat, where they get lavishly alimented by taxpayers who don’t even know just how generous they are, involuntarily, towards their self-appointed hyper-moralistic overlords and nannies.

When a certain amount of control is established, by a ruling class, the recruitment is handled such that little opposition will come up through the ranks. And that includes who might be able to run to represent a constituency as a Tory candidate in the British House of Commons. Add to that the Uniformity of public debate generated by a powerful state-owned (for all practical intents and purposes) BBC broadcaster and the rest of the media being either screaming tabloids or more of the elitist culture, centered in the world metropolis London, with its heavy preponderance of the Financial Sector as a core globalist structure.

The folks in Westminster were all entangled in that web, together with their aides and the civil service and lobby groups and experts and everybody else in the capital they would speak to. There was hardly a way to escape the overwhelming groupthink and the ubiquitous influence of the globalist agenda, and even less of an incentive.

I’m not saying that virtue signaling as a psychological agent of sorts had no role in it, but it’s surely not an explanation for why the Tories in the UK abandoned their own voters and their national interest. Angela Merkel did it in Germany, maybe even more brazenly. She was not innocently motivated by wanting to be a good person. If you believe that, you can also believe that the DemonRats in America are basically good innocent people, instead of power-hungry self-enriching parasites selling their own people to China or whoever would pay most.

These are evil, deeply corrupt people, and until five minutes ago they had assumed power and near-total control all over the Western world. Not least by teaming up, as a class, across nations and shifting power to international bodies and entities that have no connect to regular people and cannot be held accountable by anyone. The agitprop sheet and sheen covering and enabling all of that is exactly the “substance” of the virtue signaling or what it’s based on.

The “virtue” is exclusively defined by full allegiance to the globalist agenda that in turn is justifying the hostile takeover of nations and authoritarian disenfranchisement of their peoples, and exploitation of their wealth (and destruction, there’s a lot of nihilism involved).

“Net zero” is a screamingly prototypical scheme in that mold, equally the scamdemic program in global lockstep, equally mass migration.

If you allow for some sarcasm: Adam Smith’s “wealth of nations” was turned into “wealth above nations” or rather “wealth by dismantling nations”.

With a portion of the ruling establishment, there’s also resentment, and arrogant disdain for the regular people who are dumb enough to go each day and do some hard work for almost nothing.

Power and money,

power and money, more power and more money. That is what motivated them. That’s how people are, at least the cunning political types who succeed in corrupt systems. Some of them may still appear nice enough to have a cup of Darjeeling with. Evil lies in the soul of a person, but it also lurks in the dynamics of an existing system of power management, as a constant temptation.

As a political class, the UK Tories were part of the globalist cabal, or coalition, and corresponding zeitgeist, or ubiquitous agitprop ideology. It’s just the default option. And they will not change their mind, as Peterson’s guest Matt Goodwin has asserted, with certainly closer insight into the Westminster personnel than I could ever dream of as an onlooker from Germany with only internet podcasts to glean information from. The Uniparty rulers are who they are, with their biographies and sociological backgrounds and entanglements with the corrupt system.

You can expose them for what’s morally wrong about their “virtue signaling”, but mostly you have to just expose their crimes and corruption, and take power away from them, and return it to the people whom they betray and exploit.

Which is what Nigel Farage with “Reform” is attempting to do and MAGA has mostly achieved already. It is, surely in the eyes of the ruling class, a revolutionary endeavor. Which is why they are gaslighting, censoring, criminalizing, intimidating and incarcerating all opposition as if their continuing grip on power and money depended on it. Because it does.

Maybe Dr. Peterson is close to diagnosing it that clearly. I sure hope so.

Virtue signaling is not the cause, nor is it the main motivation. To the contrary.

It is a cover-up mechanism for a rotten system and its profiteers, culprits and beneficiaries.