Jordan Peterson doesn t understand George Orwell

Jordan Peterson doesn’t understand George Orwell
George Orwell is frequently cited as an authority on power and truth. However, citation does not equal understanding. When his work is filtered through modern ideology, its meaning shifts. The result is confidence built on a misreading of the text.

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What Jordan Peterson gets wrong about George Orwell
In using Orwell to defend Western values, Peterson flattens the radical political edge of Orwell’s writing. This video re-contextualizes Orwell’s work through his life, politics, and the Cold War worldview that shaped Peterson’s thinking.

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Jordan Peterson misrepresents George Orwell’s position on Socialism from Road to Wigan Pier
J
ordan Peterson frequently brings up George Orwell’s observations from The Road to Wigan Pier on how many socialists Orwell encountered were more motivated by distain for the rich rather than compassion for the poor. He also cites this book as one of the things that convinced him to abandon socialism. Here’s JP in an excerpt from Maps of Meaning:

*“*My college roommate, an insightful cynic, expressed skepticism regarding my ideological beliefs. He told me that the world could not be completely encapsulated within the boundaries of socialist philosophy. I had more or less come to this conclusion on my own, but had not admitted so much in words. Soon afterward, however, I read George Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier. This book finally undermined me—not only my socialist ideology, but my faith in ideological stances themselves. In the famous essay concluding that book (written for—and much to the dismay of—the British Left Book Club) Orwell described the great flaw of socialism, and the reason for its frequent failure to attract and maintain democratic power (at least in Britain). Orwell said, essentially, that socialists did not really like the poor. They merely hated the rich. His idea struck home instantly. Socialist ideology served to mask resentment and hatred, bred by failure. Many of the party activists I had encountered were using the ideals of social justice to rationalize their pursuit of personal revenge.”

What JP fails to recognize is that The Road to Wigan Pier was a critique of socialists, not of socialism as a theory. “The Left” is not monolithic, and many leftists are highly critical of the socialist governments of the 20th century as well as specific ideological sects of socialism/Marxism. In Wigan Pier Orwell makes his critiques in an effort to strengthen the case for socialism, not to denounce it, which is why I find it really strange the JP cites it as so pivotal in the “undermining of his socialist ideology.” Consider what Orwell writes immediately following his critiques:

*“*Please notice that I am arguing for Socialism, not against it. […] The job of the thinking person, therefore, is not to reject Socialism but to make up his mind to humanize it…For the moment, the only possible course of any decent person, however much of a Tory or an anarchist by temperament, is to work for the establishment of Socialism. Nothing else can save us from the misery of the present or the nightmare of the future […] Indeed, from one point of view, Socialism is such elementary common sense that I am sometimes amazed it has not established itself already. The world is a raft sailing through space with, potentially, plenty of provisions for everybody; the idea that we must all co-operate and see to it that everyone does his fair share of the work and gets his fair share of the provisions, seems so blatantly obvious that one would say that nobody could possibly fail to accept it unless he had some corrupt motive for clinging to the present system. […] To recoil from Socialism because so many socialists are inferior people is as absurd as refusing to travel by train because you dislike the ticket-collector’s face.”

I think that last sentence is extremely important in relation to modern discourse. Too frequently we see people straw-manning arguments or making monoliths out of ideologically diverse groups, or engaging with the lowest level of rhetoric put forth by abrasive individuals. There are going to be malicious or uniformed people from any ideology, so instead of denouncing entire schools of thought because of someone’s angry tweet, we should move past the noise and seek out the legitimate and well-formulated arguments. To support my point with a JP quote (from the second night of his Vancouver debate with Sam Harris):

“If you ever want to think about something that’s exactly what you have to do. You want to take arguments that are against your perspective and you want to make them as strong as you possibly can so that you can fortify your arguments against them. You don’t want to make them weak because that just makes you weak.”