The Journey Right: The First Domino
One of the earliest influencers in my journey towards conservatism was Professor Jordan B. Peterson. I first discovered Jordan Peterson in May 2017; very early in my journey right. At this time he had not yet become the influencer and global phenomenon; he was just a psychology professor at the University of Toronto. He came to prominence in 2017 when he opposed the Canadian Bill C16. This bill it a human rights violation if an individual failed to use the proper pronoun for an individual. Contrary to the narrative that Jordan Peterson was some “transphobic individual”, the issue he took in regards with the bill was government telling people what they can and cannot say — a slippery slope to tyranny. This writing isn’t so much about Jordan B. Peterson — the person — but more about his influence. But if would invite you to watch the first video (that probably brought him into the public eye) and then watch his testimony in front of the Canadian Congress. He also has hundreds of hours of his class lectures available including his podcast. So what was Jordan B. Peterson’s influence on me?
The first was to start asking, “What do you mean by (fill in the blank) precisely?”. As I wrote in my previous Journey Right story, I was typically agreeable to vague terms like systemic oppression, white privilege, or “justice”. After all, who is against justice? It encouraged me to distill what exactly people meant and what exactly they were trying to say. The second was to point my attention to some of the darkest atrocities committed by humans. Jordan Peterson brought to my attention The Cold War and the tyrants of that era. Lastly, he helped me uncover the ideological roots of today’s social justice movement. By uncovering the roots, I started asking questions. Processing those questions and these three things shook the foundations on which the social justice movement laid on.
The Cold War seems to be an overlooked period of history and conjures images of a nuclear arms race or the space race. The Cold War as much more than just a race of arms and technology, it was a war of ideologies. The Cold War is believed to have started at the conclusion of World War II and did not end until the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. The battlefields of this ideology took place on many fronts including the Korean War and the Vietnam War. These competing ideologies were between Marxism/Communism and Democracy, the Collective and the Individual. As I learned, the results of Marxism were truly horrendous.
Marxism unleashed tyranny, poverty and inequality on its citizens. Marxism produced the world’s bloodiest butchers and its body count is in the hundreds of millions. In the Soviet Union, Stalin killed around 20 million of his own people — some death estimates put the number at 30 million dead. In Communist China, led by Mao Zedong, an estimated 65 million Chinese perished during the Great Leap Forward. To give perspective on these numbers, 55 million people perished during World War II. And the Holocaust, the atrocity committed by Hitler and the Nazis, killed six million Jews. When comparing the Holocaust and to what occurred in the Soviet Union and Communist China, Ravi Zacharias said, “It makes the Holocaust look tame.”
Perhaps the most visible evidence of this ideology was the divide of Germany after World War II. In 1961 The Berlin Wall would divide the country to Eastern Communism and Western Democracy. During that span, thousands of East Germans risked their lives to cross the wall. Over the years East Germans trying to escape to West Germany would be shot and killed in their attempts. Nearly 350 East Germans killed in their attempts. In contrast, no West Germans were ever shot attempting to cross over to East Germany. One of the most iconic moments at the Berlin Wall was the capturing of an East German Soldier hopping the fence to West Germany.
Unfortunately we haven’t escaped the “specter of communism” nor its cousin, Socialism. At the heart of Marxism is group conflict. It’s the elimination of the individual for the collective. During that time of revolution the groups were the bourgeois (the haves) and the proletariats (have nots). More recently, the groups have been named as the oppressed vs. the oppressors, privilege vs. unprivileged, the 1% vs everyone else, those who are a part of the “Patriarchy” and so on.
Like the communist and socialist movements of old, the current social justice ideology has sown intolerance and a “soft” tyranny, while espousing catch phrases like equity, privilege, power and peddling identity politics. We see this in how it polices speech (the use of “politically correct speech” and trying to define “hate speech”), de-platforms speakers who have different ideas (this is particularly true for conservative speaker on college campuses), the practice of “cancelling” or “shutting” people down, mandated implicit bias trainings, and the use of mob like tactics to harass, shame and infringe on individual liberties.
As I listened to Jordan B. Peterson speak and did my own researched, I couldn’t help but see the same parallels to today. It is paralyzing sometimes when I see these similarities manifest at the workplace, among friends, online and in the public square. I don’t doubt that there are good intentions behind the social justice movement, but there is a famous proverb warning us that the pathway to hell is paved with good intentions. And to be clear, I’m not drawing a straight line correlation between groups and individuals of today to Stalin or Mao, but the ideologies and beliefs share the same roots. And as the saying goes, history has a tendency to repeat itself.
