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This is Undaunted Life, a man's podcast. I'm your host Kyle Thompson. Let's get into it.
0:45
Okay, guys, today's episode is about Jordan Peterson, recalling it the Jordan Peterson effect.
0:50
So some of you may not know who Jordan Peterson is. He's actually kind of just risen to fame and
0:55
renowned just in the last several months, especially, but really in the last couple of years. So
0:59
for those of you who don't know who he is, I'm going to go and bring you up speed a little bit. So
1:03
he's a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto currently. And he's also a clinical
1:08
psychologist with over 30 years of experience. So pretty boring dude, right? I mean, it's not
1:13
exactly a profile of a gangster, but this dude, especially if you've listened to him or paid attention
1:18
to him for any length of time, he kind of is a gangster. So really, this guy has been railing
1:23
against kind of this political correctness culture that so much of us see now, but he's been railing
1:28
on it since the 1990s. And so he's especially been railing on it how it's manifested itself in
1:34
universities in the West. So he's talking about North America and Europe and those types of things.
1:38
So he spent a lot of time warning people and really anyone that would listen of kind of the
1:43
dangers of Marxist and communist thinking. And also the issues that you can run into with identity
1:49
politics, or really the whole post modernist movement. And so this stuff is just now coming into
1:55
vogue, really, especially if you pay attention to stuff on the political right, you're seeing a lot
1:59
of that really in the last several years. But this guy's like, Oh, gee on that, like he's been on
2:02
this for like 30 years. This is not really a thing that has been lost on him. So he's worried a lot
2:08
of us of the dangers also of focusing too much on fascism, fascism, and like Nazism, and not really
2:16
giving enough focus to Maoism and Stalinism. And so he's certainly not claiming that fascism
2:22
and Nazism or things that shouldn't be looked at and be warned about. But Mao and Stalin combined
2:28
killed so many more people than even what happened in Nazi Germany. And that's just by way of
2:33
comparison. I'm by no means saying one was better than the other. But he's that's why he's really
2:38
focused on the other two. So, but when most people started to really know who Dr. Jordan Peterson was,
2:43
was whenever he became one of the most vocal opponents of the bill C 16 in Canada. Okay. So
2:52
if you're not familiar with Bill C 16, what it actually stands for, it's an act to amend the
2:58
Canadian human rights act and the criminal code. Okay. So just for any of you that don't know,
3:03
because I'm assuming most of you listening to this podcast or Americans, the Canadian Human Rights
3:07
Act was something that was set up in the 70s and the late 70s. And it was really set up to protect
3:11
the rights of Canadians and provide equal opportunity to minority groups. So minority Canadians. So,
3:18
and they define, you know, minority groups as, you know, basically depending upon your sex,
3:21
your sexual orientation, your race, your creed, you know, your age, your religious beliefs,
3:27
kind of all those different things. So Bill C 16 became law on June 19th of 2017. So not even
3:36
a year ago. And I want to give everyone the summary of what Bill 16 did, because basically it was
3:41
adding to the list of things that I was talking about earlier, like the list of the different
3:45
groups that are protected by the Canadian Human Rights Act. So this is a legislative summary of
3:50
Bill C 16. So I'm just going to go ahead and read that to you now. The bill is intended to
3:55
protect individuals from discrimination within the sphere of federal jurisdiction and from being
3:59
the targets of hate propaganda as a consequence of their gender identity or their gender expression.
4:05
The bill adds quote gender identity or expression unquote to the list of prohibited grounds of
4:10
discrimination in the Canadian Human Rights Act and the list of characteristics of identifiable
4:15
groups protected from hate propaganda in the criminal code. It also adds that evidence that
4:20
any offense was motivated by bias prejudice or hate based on a person's gender identity or
4:25
expression constitutes an aggravating circumstance for a for a court to consider when imposing a
4:31
criminal sentence. So that's the summary of Bill C 16. So essentially it's adding the the group
4:38
of gender identity and expression to that group of minority or underrepresented people that could
4:44
be could be harmed in some way. So so basically just, you know, to kind of take all that kind of
4:49
judicial language and put it into layman's terms, you can be charged in Canada, you can be charged
4:55
with the human rights violation crime for infringing on the rights of people that believe
5:00
they're a different gender than what their biology would suggest. Okay, so so what this bill is really
5:06
doing, it's allowing for compelled speech. Okay, so if I were to say that instead of my name being
5:12
Kyle, that my name is actually Katie, and that I'm a woman, even though biologically that is
5:17
ridiculous, you would have to refer to me as Mrs. Or Miss Thompson. Okay, so I'm not Mr. Kyle Thompson,
5:25
I'm either Ms or Mrs. Katie Thompson or whatever. Okay, so the thing is, is if you refuse to do this,
5:31
if you refuse to call me by my preferred gender pronoun, you could be charged with a crime. Okay,
5:37
so as ridiculous as that may sound, there's actually a lot of people in Canada that were
5:41
very, very supportive of this bill. So one of the people obviously that was not very supportive of
5:46
this was Dr. Jordan Peterson. So he came out extremely, extremely vocally in opposition to Bill C 16.
5:53
And he even spoke at a Senate committee meeting against the bill, about a month or so before it
5:58
was eventually ratified into law. And so usually when people say they've heard of Jordan Peterson
6:02
for the first time, they usually saw the clips of him talking about Bill C 16 in front of that
6:07
Senate committee. But here's the interesting thing about Jordan Peterson and all this is one of the
6:12
biggest misconceptions here is that Jordan Peterson's opposition was to the use of pronouns, right?
6:20
That if a student were to come up to him and say, no, I'm not actually this sex, I'm another sex,
6:24
or using one of the other pronouns that he would have been against that. But the thing about that
6:29
is at the time, and so many times since then, he has repeatedly said that he would work with a
6:33
student that wish to go by a different pronoun. Like that he would absolutely do that. His issue
6:38
with Bill C 16 was that it was compelling speech, thus infringing on free speech rights, which,
6:45
you know, in Canada, they don't really have free speech, especially not like we have here
6:50
pretty much completely in the United States. So one thing that was interesting is he was asked if
6:55
he would comply with the request of a student to use a preferred pronoun. And this was actually
7:00
Peterson's response, he said, quote, it would depend on how they asked me. If I could detect that they
7:06
there was a chip on their shoulder, or that they were asking me with political motives,
7:10
then I probably would say no. If I could have a conversation like the one we're having now,
7:14
I could probably meet them on an equal level, unquote. Okay. So in he went even more specifically
7:20
into his opinion, he actually wrote an op ed for the national post. And this is what he said there,
7:24
quote, I will never use words I hate, like the trendy and artificially constructed words,
7:29
Zay or sir, those are the pronouns that people have made up in the transgenderism were a world.
7:34
Okay, back into the quotes. These words are at the vanguard of a postmodern radical leftist ideology
7:40
that I detest, and which is in my professional opinion, frighteningly similar to the Marxist
7:45
doctrines that killed at least 100 million people in the 20th century. I have been studying
7:50
authoritarianism on the right and on the left for 35 years. I wrote a book maps of meaning,
7:55
the architecture of belief on the topic, which explores how ideologies hijack language and belief.
8:00
As a result of my studies, I have come to believe that Marxism is a murderous ideology. I believed
8:05
its practitioners and modern universities should be ashamed of themselves for continuing to promote
8:10
such vicious, untenable and anti human ideas and for indoctrinating their students with these beliefs.
8:16
I'm therefore not going to mouth Marxist words. That would make me a puppet of the radical left,
8:22
and that is not going to happen. Period. Unquote. Okay, so here's the thing, because of his viewpoints
8:28
and opinions and him being so local about them, many of the issues that we've already discussed
8:32
up to this point, he's been really erroneously categorized as a lot of the things that you would
8:37
expect from people that kind of fall on that kind of radical political left. So just the fact that
8:42
he said anything like these things that you've read, no matter how based in logic they are or not,
8:46
he's been called a racist, a sexist, a transphobe, a homophobe, and he's even been called alt-right,
8:52
which if you know about his background and you know anything about him, the fact that he's called
8:57
alt-right is just kind of hilarious. That's, I guess, kind of like a catch-all term for people
9:01
that you don't like if you're on the left, you just call them alt-right, which is ridiculous.
9:04
And even after some of these comments came out, there were some protests against him on campus,
9:09
and there was a little bit of violence but not really much to speak of. But the thing about this
9:13
that was so interesting is because of all this hubbub kind of surrounding him and all this drama,
9:19
people that are on the other side of these issues have been completely enamored with Peterson's
9:25
viewpoints. I mean, because he's somebody that kind of falls more so on the political right,
9:31
but he's coming out things from a much more kind of balanced philosophical and intellectual
9:36
perspective, and it's kind of a breath of fresh air when you have people that are completely
9:40
ridiculous on that side of the aisle saying just absurd things. So it's really refreshing.
9:44
And so back around this time, he began a YouTube channel and he started uploading a lot of his
9:50
lectures, right? And some of these lectures, guys, I mean, they're two or three hours long,
9:54
like these are not your normal 45, 50 minute lectures that you may have had in undergrad.
10:00
These are incredibly dense philosophical and psychological lectures that he was putting up.
10:06
And these videos have gotten millions and millions of views. And I mean, all of them,
10:13
like there's some that are short form, but a lot of them are long form. And so as of this recording
10:18
that I'm doing right now, he has over 800,000 subscribers to his YouTube channel.
10:24
This guy is he's a psychology professor for goodness sakes. Like that that is essentially
10:28
what he does. And he has all this attention, right? Even last year in 2017, he did over a dozen
10:34
lectures over the Old Testament biblical stories and their psychological and archetypal importance
10:40
to overall life. I mean, and you want to talk about a very, very dense subject. And each one of
10:45
those has hundreds of thousands, if not millions of views. And back in May of 2017, he was on Joe
10:50
Rogan's podcast, which his podcast is one of, if not the consistently the biggest podcasts out
10:56
there. And so he was on there on episode 958. And Joe Rogan, at the very beginning of that episode
11:03
before it went into the recording of his interview, he said it was his favorite podcast he had ever
11:07
done his favorite interview. This is a guy that at that point had done almost a thousand of those.
11:12
And he was like, this is by far the best conversation I had ever had. So some people really found
11:17
Jordan Peterson around that time. And so recently, you may have heard him in the news again,
11:22
because he's kind of had a lot of different memes put out there. But he did an interview
11:26
on channel four in the new, which was a new station in the UK, where he pretty much
11:31
shellacked this interviewer named Kathy Newman, who was really just continuously trying to catch
11:36
him in a bunch of gotcha questions. And just watching him take down this interviewer, but not,
11:44
you know, with verbal barbs, necessarily, but just by being incredibly precise with his language,
11:48
and being very specific and how he was answering things, and understanding what was what was actually
11:53
happening there during the interview, it was just impressive to watch. It was a 30 minute interview.
11:57
So it wasn't like these sound bitey interviews you get on like Fox News or CNN or MSNBC.
12:02
It was a long form interview where they could really dig into some stuff. So and for me,
12:07
I become a fan of Jordan Peterson. Since I heard about him during the Bill C16 stuff,
12:11
he was just an incredibly interesting guy. I've listened to a bunch of his interviews on YouTube
12:16
and other podcasts that he's been on. I've listened to actually all of the biblical series lectures
12:21
that he's posted up to this point. And I think this year he's actually going to go even further.
12:24
He spent most of last year just going through Genesis. And he's going to be going through Exodus,
12:30
I believe this year. And so it's just incredibly dense material by this guy. But it's so, so interesting.
12:37
And some of these podcasts, or sorry, yeah, the podcast he's posted, but the live lectures that he
12:41
did on the biblical series, some of these were like three hours just to go over a verse or two
12:46
of Genesis. So it's just incredibly, incredibly cool stuff. So, but the thing is, I kind of took
12:52
for granted that most people in this space, you know, people that would be interested in, you know,
12:56
say this podcast, that they all knew who he was. And so I kind of got a realization that that's not
13:02
the case. A couple of days ago, I got a text message from Brandon scath. He's one of the guys
13:07
that runs dead men stuff. So they've got a podcast and they've got a website that I've written one
13:12
article for before. But he sent me this fan Fathom article. It's so like an online magazine. And it
13:20
was entitled the voice evangelical men wish they had how Jordan Peterson is the father and pastor
13:26
of thousands of young Christians. And so this was an article that was posted on February 12th of
13:31
2018. And it was written by a guy named Anthony Bradley, who's a author and a professor of religion,
13:37
theology and ethics at King's College in New York City. So obviously the title was incredibly
13:42
catchy for someone who's a Jordan Peterson fan, but also someone who's interested in Christian
13:46
manhood and those different things that really caught my attention. And I read the article and
13:50
it was really, really solid. And so I'm going to do something right now because this was not
13:55
the plan for this week's podcast, but I just wanted to make sure since, you know, Jordan Peterson is
13:59
still in the news and this article is making the rounds a little bit, I'm actually going to read
14:03
the entire article to you. Okay. And that's something I would not normally do on this podcast. I know
14:09
I read sections of things from time to time, but I'm just going to read the entire thing to you.
14:13
It's not going to take me very long. But the thing about it is I want to read it so that you can hear
14:18
the entire thing, right? Because I have a tendency to skim things when I read them. Some people
14:23
struggle with reading like my reading comprehension is not very good. So sometimes I don't get every
14:27
bit of it. But when I listen to it, I seem to get a little bit better. And so I just don't want you
14:31
to skim through this and miss some details because I'm going to go into detail on this article after
14:36
I'm done reading it. But I'm just going to go ahead and read the entire thing now. So here we go.
14:41
For about a month now, I've been trying to sort out why so many of my male students, Christian guys
14:45
in their 20s, are such huge fans of Jordan Peterson. By the end of chapter two of his new book, The
14:51
Twelve Rules for Life, I Had My Answer. Peterson understands something about the world of men that
14:55
evangelical pastors seem to have been clueless about for almost 30 years. It is simply this,
15:01
since the 1980s, young men have been shamed and emasculated in a culture determined to destroy
15:07
the archetypal masculinity of figures like Jesus Christ. Evangelical pastors and leaders have been
15:13
exegeting the culture of men from an outdated mid 1960s cultural playbook, a playbook that often
15:19
reduced men to lustful sinners who think too highly of themselves and need to be tamed by
15:23
someone reminding them of their destined to poverty. Exqueriating men then is what sensitize
15:29
men to the gospel. The builder generation taught the approach to baby boomers who taught it to
15:34
Gen Xers who taught it to emerging millennial leaders. What did they miss? Perhaps because of
15:40
a non-biblical fetish within the "culture war" or lusting after access to power by
15:46
syncretizing Christianity with the politics of the Republican Party, many evangelical leaders paid
15:51
too much attention to the social disintegration of archetypal masculinity that pervaded American
15:56
society in the 1970s and the 1980s instead of the masculinity implosion within the walls of
16:02
their own churches. In the early 1990s, however, poets and psychologists influenced by psychologist
16:08
Carl Jung were sounding a loud alarm. Jungian influenced poets like Robert Bly and Jungian
16:15
psychologists like Robert L. Moore and Douglas Gillette with books such as King, Warrior, Magician,
16:21
Lover, Rediscovering the archetypes of the mature masculine were key figures in what became the
16:26
1990s quote "men's movement." While Jungian's post liberal Protestants like Sam Keene and Roman
16:34
Catholics like Patrick Arnold in his book Wild Men, Warriors and Kings, masculine spirituality
16:39
in the Bible, borrowed heavily from the Jungian archetypal discourse on masculinity. Evangelicals,
16:45
with their aversion to secular social scientists, were excited instead by promise keepers,
16:50
which launched in 1990. The well-intentioned promise keepers movement, in part, set out to save men,
16:56
retrieve biblical manhood and put them in accountability groups that would restrain their
17:01
masculinity from growing sinfully out of control. While evangelicals were directing men to pledge
17:06
their allegiance to moralistic promises, Jungians were trying to help men recover their hearts and
17:11
souls. Jordan Peterson is retrieving the Jungian archetypal discussions for the disintegrated,
17:17
shame-driven, emasculated lives of young men for the 21st century. Evangelicals were not reading
17:23
psychiatrists like Andrew P. Morrison or historians like Christopher Lash, both of whom saw the narcissism
17:28
brewing in American life increasingly valued people on the basis of performance. A narcissistic
17:34
and performance-oriented culture eventually becomes a culture characterized by perfectionism.
17:38
A perfectionist culture sets up every man to be destroyed by the shame of not measuring up
17:43
to his idealized self. The world that nurtured millennial and Jin Z Min is that of exaggerated
17:49
and romanticized versions of masculine success aimed at winning the validation and affirmation
17:55
of others. In this perfectionist world, you never measure up, which forces you to think there's
18:00
something ontologically wrong with you. Toxic shame then leads men to self-assess as pathetic,
18:06
weak, worthless, stupid, cowardly, foolish, inadequate, insufficient, or never good enough.
18:11
Boomers and Jin Xers continue to browbeat, berate, and shame millennials and Jin Z-teens for trying
18:17
to numb their shame with drugs, alcohol, video games, sexual promiscuity, pornography, and so on.
18:22
The shame that young men carried was reshamed by ministry leaders who wanted these men to feel
18:27
low enough for the gospel. What they didn't understand was that these men were acquainted
18:32
with lowliness. A large percentage of men born after 1990 already felt weak, beaten down,
18:38
and worthless. Young men needed empathetic pastors to build them up to be the men that
18:43
God created them to be. Jordan Peterson is the prophet who understands this reality.
18:48
As an observant Jungian and college professor, Peterson knows that 30 years of raising men in
18:53
a culture that destroyed the archetypal, aspirational Jesus needs the antidote of empathy, encouragement,
18:59
and practical day-to-day imagination to help men recover their souls so that they can live
19:04
a life that means something. Evangelicals tried. In the early 2000s, John Eldridge attacked men's
19:10
shaming by addressing the father wound in Wild at Heart. But his paradigm ultimately missed the
19:15
mark because he focused too much on fathers and not enough on the other issues men face
19:19
with other people in their lives. Eldridge also reduced masculinity to outdoor living in the west
19:24
which inadvertently isolated urban and suburban men. The Genex leaders of the Young, Restless,
19:30
and Reform, the YRR movement, also gave it a try. But taking cues from their boomer pastors,
19:35
many bearded, beer-drinking, flannel shirt-wearing Calvinist pastors berated guys for not having
19:40
good theology, for playing video games, for being single, for struggling with porn and sexual
19:44
addictions for not "manning up" and so on. They did this without a drop of compassion for the shame
19:51
they already had. To make matters worse, many of them falsely believed that throwing 500-year-old
19:55
theological propositions at men's shame would magically free them of their emasculation of
20:00
never measuring up to their own expectations. But they didn't measure up enough for God.
20:04
Associations like Acts 29 and Acts 29 like non-denominational Geneximalennial leaders
20:11
gave a valiant effort. But many of those mega-churches were just a shame berating as
20:16
emasculating culture at large. Men were destroyed in the YRR context because "real preaching" is
20:24
making guys feel like losers for the shame they already had. Moreover, young men were yelled at
20:30
to stop wasting their lives. Upper-class young men were told that their lives were pathetic models
20:35
of idol factories that needed to be destroyed so that they could become domesticated, humble,
20:40
friendless, nice guys. For empathy and encouragement, more and more young Christian men have turned
20:45
to Jordan Peterson. He is the father and pastor that thousands of millennial and Gen-Z men have
20:50
needed for nearly 30 years. With Peterson, young men get the truth-telling sage who empathizes
20:56
with their suffering, compassionately cares about their hearts, invites them to greatness instead of
21:01
niceness, and calls them to hope and humility without shaming. As long as young men's shame
21:06
receives no empathy and encouragement from evangelical parents and leaders, young men will
21:11
continue to seek help elsewhere. In the end, if you want to know where the young men are in
21:15
your church or school, they are likely at home listening to Peterson on YouTube because he is
21:20
giving them the encouragement and challenge they really need, and they're doing it with the other
21:24
750,000 subscribers. So that wraps up reading that. Again, that goes a lot of different areas,
21:32
so it's not a super long article, but it goes really in a bunch of different directions and it's
21:36
going to be just impossible for me to get a thorough podcast in if I look at every single detail.
21:42
But there are actually five quotes that I wanted to pull out of that and talk a little bit more
21:46
about. These are in chronological order as to where they appear within the article. The first
21:53
quote I want to pull out is this. "It is simply this, since the 1980s, young men have been shamed
21:59
and emasculated in a culture determined to destroy the archetypal masculinity of figures like Jesus
22:04
Christ." Yes, yes, yes, like so much, yes. That is so early in the article and that is such
22:14
a huge statement. I'll read the last part again. "Young men have been shamed and emasculated in a
22:18
culture determined to destroy the archetypal masculinity of figures like Jesus Christ."
22:23
Again, guys, we live in a culture where being a pussy is celebrated. That's exactly where we
22:28
live right now. I mean, unless you fail to protect someone weaker than you, at which point you're
22:32
branded as a coward. I don't know if I've ever brought this up in the podcast before,
22:36
but there was a news story. I believe there was a little cruise liner ship of some kind. I think
22:42
it was off the coast of Italy. This was several years ago where these men and women and children,
22:48
they were all kind of going down. The ship was going down, right? And so as a lot of people hit
22:53
the water, there was kind of some chaos around who had life-ess or not. And there were reports of
22:58
men that were ripping life-ess out of the arms of women and children and risking their lives
23:03
in the process. And these were people that were universally branded as cowards, which is kind of
23:08
interesting because you have a lot of these biological evolutionists that, basically, that's
23:13
survival of the fittest, but we can't really talk about that. But we live in a culture that
23:17
has tried to emasculate manly men, right? And then the church as its own self has tried to
23:23
emasculate Jesus. We've talked about that a lot. I mean, if you go back to episode four of this
23:26
podcast and, you know, when I've done interviews on other people's podcast, I talk a lot about how
23:31
the church has declawed the lion of Judah. I mean, that, and again, I mentioned in that podcast that
23:36
the church is one of the few places where being a weak and effeminate men is okay, if not being just
23:42
all out encouraged, right? So when we look at that statement talking about how society has tried to
23:47
basically destroy the archetypal masculinity, archetypal masculinity, like guys like Jesus Christ,
23:52
Jesus is the ultimate archetypal man, right? And really society has destroyed that and the
23:57
church has basically stood by with their thumb up their butt and just watched it, right? Because
24:02
we've looked at this guy, Jesus Christ, who is the lion of Judah, and we only talk about the lamb
24:07
of God. And it's just like, that's all we want to talk about because the lion of Judah is way too
24:10
scary to talk about. So Jordan Peterson and his, his idealism around certain things and truth
24:16
is really leading us back in the other direction. So that's one of the first quotes. The second
24:21
quote I wanted to bring up was this quote, the well intention to promise keeper's movement in part
24:25
set out to save men retrieve Biblical manhood and put men in accountability groups that would
24:30
restrain their masculinity from growing sinfully out of control. While evangelicals were directing
24:34
men to pledge their allegiance to moralistic promises, youngians were trying to help men
24:38
recover their hearts and souls. Jordan Peterson is retrieving the youngian archetypal discussion
24:43
for the disintegrated, shame driven, emasculated lives of young men for the 21st century. So here's
24:49
the deal is I was born in 1986. So obviously when when promise keepers was launched, I was like
24:54
four years old, but I grew up in a family that didn't go to church at all. So I'm not sure I've
24:58
ever even heard of it while I was young. I have really heard about it when I was older. But I've
25:01
talked to a lot of men that were around whenever this was really at its height. And apparently it
25:06
was like incredible. Like it was amazing. Like they would do these meetings at different places
25:11
in the country. And they would like literally fill football stadiums with people like just men,
25:16
right? So these were men's events. And if you look at it in the modern Christian context,
25:21
I mean, think about your church. First question is, does your church have a men's ministry?
25:25
And the answer is most likely no. And okay, guys, if your church like twice a year does like a
25:31
an eight a.m. Saturday morning prayer breakfast for dudes, no, your church does not have a men's
25:36
ministry. But guys were coming out and drove to watch speakers and to be a part of these
25:42
accountability groups. But like many other things in this space, it eventually petered out.
25:47
And I think it was probably because of the goal overall, because again, the big win for
25:53
promise keepers was yeah, getting you to come to a promise keeper's event. But it was getting
25:56
you into these accountability groups. And to be honest, I've talked to other ministries,
26:00
especially some some big ministries here in the Oakland City area for men. And I've asked some
26:04
of the guys like, what's your big win? Like what's your main thing that you want guys to be able
26:08
to accomplish with your ministry? And they all say they want to get guys and accountability groups.
26:12
And I've never really understand understood why. Like, like we've talked about before,
26:17
women tend to do well in circles, but men want to be shoulder to shoulder. Again, that's an
26:22
oversimplification, but it's the truth. Most men want to accomplish things and do things with other
26:27
men. They don't want to just sit around and talk. And there's nothing wrong with sitting
26:31
around with a group of guys. But at the end of the day, like most guys want to get out and do things.
26:35
So, um, and here's the deal. We know this to be true. If a man recovers his heart and soul,
26:40
this is going back to the quote, don't you think they will be able to better control
26:44
their sinful desires? I mean, just think about yourself. If you recover your heart and soul,
26:48
right? As if it's something that you've lost or something that you don't understand. But then
26:52
you dial it in. Don't you think you'll be able to better control your, you know, wanting to drink
26:58
alcohol whenever you're kind of an alcoholic or wanting to look at porn and jerk off whenever
27:02
you know that's like a big problem for you. So those are just things that we need to constantly
27:07
remind ourselves up. All right. So let's go into the third quote here. Here it is quote in the early
27:11
2000s, John Eldridge attacked men shaming by addressing the father wound and wild at heart.
27:16
But his paradigm ultimately missed the mark because he focused too much on fathers and not
27:20
enough on other issues men face with other people in their lives. Eldridge also reduced masculinity
27:25
to outdoor living in the West, which inadvertently isolated urban and suburban men. So obviously,
27:30
we're big fans of the book, while at heart, it's on the 100 books that every modern Christian man
27:34
should read list on our website. Now, I disagree with the author of this blog, going after Eldridge
27:41
for the father wound. I think, I think he kind of missed the mark in his criticism. It was a
27:47
little bit unfair. And now here's the thing is, John Eldridge would be the first one to tell you
27:51
that his father wound thing was an incomplete description of the problem, because he fully
27:55
described the father wound, but he didn't really go too much into a mother wound or a brother wound
28:00
or a best friend wound. But the thing was, is obviously the father wound is a huge wound that
28:05
has really truly affected men over it's a generational thing, right? So, you know, the father wound is
28:11
incomplete when you just talk about it by itself, but Eldridge's overall synopsis isn't wrong. So,
28:15
now here's the thing with John Eldridge. And again, we like his stuff, especially that book.
28:21
But he does come off as a very empathetic guy. So, I'm wondering why the author
28:27
of this blog kind of put John Eldridge out there and just basically mentioned him for like three
28:31
sentences and essentially just put him on blast. He really should love this guy because this whole
28:36
article really talks about empathy. Now, here's the thing, John Eldridge, if you've ever seen him
28:40
present live or any singing of his videos, he comes off as a little bit fake. You know, I can see how
28:46
you would you would be able to say that he's kind of a frail guy. He's a smaller guy. And so,
28:50
some of the things he says, you're just kind of wondering if he even means it. And you know,
28:53
even some things like in some of his life things, he kind of cusses in rooms full of men. But it's
28:59
just for no reason. It doesn't really add anything to the story. It's just like he feels like he has
29:03
license to do so. But I will say the quote at the end here, the commentary on outdoor living,
29:09
I thought that was spot on and something I've actually never really thought about until I read
29:12
this article that yeah, if you didn't live in the West and you weren't attached to nature and you
29:16
didn't go on hikes all the time, I could see I mean, if you're just a dude that lives in in Philly or
29:21
New York City or Boston or something like that being like, bro, I don't even understand that.
29:24
I remember last time I've seen a leaf much less like walked out and just like pulled pine needles
29:28
off a tree. So it's just it's just kind of one of those deals. I thought that was a fair criticism
29:32
there at the end. And it never really thought about how that book may have missed some guys
29:36
because of that exact quote. So let's go to quote number four here that I wanted to pull out. So
29:40
here it is quote, men were destroyed in the YRR, the young restless and reformed context because
29:46
quote real preaching, unquote, is making guys feel like losers for the shame they already had.
29:52
Moreover, young men were yelled at to stop wasting their lives. Unquote. Okay, I got a lot of problems
29:57
with the author putting this in there because isn't this kind of the point, right? Like you're
30:03
not going to hear me be one of the guys railing against why I are why are our people for real
30:08
preaching? Because it's kind of what helped get us into this mess of this modern malaise
30:13
that we have in modern Christianity. It's it's all the fluffy TED talk with the Bible verse
30:18
preaching that has really allowed men to operate in this way. So I don't really like the criticism
30:23
there of people that are are preaching in that way because the thing is is I kind of get the
30:28
sense that the author of this blog is a little bit soft, maybe a little bit of a sensitive guy.
30:32
And so that's why he seems to focus on empathy a lot and he doesn't really focus at all on discipline.
30:37
And here's the deal is sometimes guys should feel like losers, right? I truly believe that guys
30:43
sometimes need to wallow in their failure to where they can realize what's on the other side if they
30:48
really kind of step up, right? So if you're a guy and you're fat, you need you need to feel
30:52
yourself get to the top of a flight of stairs and be out of breath, right? So that you can
30:56
know you need to fix something, right? If you're dumb, like you should feel that when you're in a
31:01
situation that requires you to have some mental resilience, right? And you can't really drum it up.
31:06
Excuse me. And you can't really drum it up. That's something that you should really look at, right?
31:10
If you're weak physically, it's something you should fix. If you're lazy, it's something you
31:13
should fix. If you're an absentee father or husband, it's something that you can fix, right? So I
31:19
really don't like that that quote from from here because it's really kind of letting some guys off
31:22
a hook. When I really think for the for the most part, a lot of these guys really need to kind of
31:27
sit in their own shame a little bit at least. So let's go ahead and get into the fifth quote here,
31:31
the last quote, and here it is quote, with Peterson, young men get a true telling sage who empeth
31:37
empathizes with their suffering, compassionately cares about their hearts, invites them to greatness
31:42
instead of niceness, and calls them to hope and humility without shaming. So here's the thing,
31:48
I'm not sure if the author of this blog has really listened or read much of Peterson's works.
31:52
Now, here's the deal. Peterson definitely uses some empathic methods, right? He was obviously a
31:58
clinical psychologist for 30 years, but he doesn't really allow people to wallow in that. So in the
32:04
first part of that quote where he talks about empathizing with their suffering and compassionally
32:09
cares about their hearts. Yes, but he does it in a very specific way. So I recently heard him talk
32:14
about in an interview about this guy he was working with that had like an unbelievable fear of needles.
32:20
Okay, everyone's got their fears. This guy's fear was of needles. So it went back to a point in his
32:25
childhood where he was actually held down by six dentists so that they can give him a shot in his
32:30
mouth so that I'm assuming to get a cavity filled or something like that. So obviously a fairly
32:34
scarring experience to be held down while you're sentient and just have a needle jammed into your
32:39
mouth. But the path he went through with this guy was not just being empathetic, right? He wasn't
32:45
just saying how much he understood and all those different things and kind of aligning of a certain
32:49
things in his life. He wanted to work this guy to where he could operate in a setting that had needles
32:55
in it, right? So he took him down a path at first. He just talked to the guy about needles. That was
33:02
all he could get to get the guy to do was to get him to talk about needles. And then in, you know,
33:07
these are all kind of over a bunch of different meetings over I'm assuming several weeks or months.
33:11
But in one of the later meetings, they would look at pictures of needles. So Jordan Peterson would
33:15
hold out a picture of a needle and this guy would have to hold it in his hand. And he would have
33:19
to talk about the pictures of the needles, right? And then at a later meeting, there was a needle
33:24
that was hidden in the room somewhere. And so Jordan Peterson just said, Hey, you know, there's a needle
33:28
in this room just want to let you know I'm not going to pull it out. I'm not going to show it to you,
33:30
but there's a needle in this room, you know, getting the guy closer and closer, right? Then he put the
33:35
needle on a shelf at a later meeting and had the guy go towards the shelf and just look at the needle.
33:40
And this was a needle with the cap on it and everything. And then that was that meeting. And
33:44
this guy could leave at any point and say, Hey, this is too much. Then he had a needle on the table
33:49
in between them and it was under a tissue. So the guy knew that the needle was there. And you know,
33:53
it just wasn't going to jump up and bite him. And you know, the eventual thing I'm kind of going
33:57
slow in the story. But eventually I was the thing is this guy was able to kind of overcome his fear
34:00
of needles. But it wasn't just because Jordan Peterson was being empathetic. He was challenging
34:04
the guy. He was pushing him in a certain direction, right? And so the author somewhat
34:09
inaccurately brands Peterson as kind of the ultimate empathizer. But he is spot on and branding him
34:15
as the guy who is demanding that men strive for greatness instead of niceness, right? Because
34:21
that's the one thing that you get with with a lot of people is when you're being empathetic,
34:24
you sometimes leave things on the table. And that's one of the great things that I think most men
34:28
are attracted to with Jordan Peterson. So those are the five quotes I wanted to bring out. But real
34:33
quickly, I I wanted to kind of go through as I was thinking through this article and thinking
34:36
through the things that I know about Jordan Peterson that I'm a fan of is why is Jordan
34:40
Peterson so popular amongst young men, including Christian men, right? That's a story that I've thought
34:45
of or a thought provoking idea that I've kind of been thinking a lot about. And I came up with three
34:51
things that I think is why so many people are attracted to him, especially young men and Christian
34:56
men. And the first reason is that he doesn't allow room for excuses. He just doesn't. He's a guy
35:03
that calls balls and strikes. Okay. So if he sees something that is wrong or intellectually dishonest
35:10
or intellectually inconsistent or psychologically false or something like that, he's going to call
35:15
it out. And so for a lot of guys, you know, think about the needle guy, what if the excuse was just,
35:20
oh, I just can't be around needles, like that's not a good enough excuse, right? It's affecting
35:24
your life and it's affecting your family, your fear of these needles. It's something that you
35:27
need to get over, right? And so he doesn't allow room for excuses. And so I think instinctively
35:33
men are attracted to that type of an idea. Okay. So the second reason why I think he's so popular
35:39
amongst these young men is he's incredibly complicated and thus incredibly interesting. Okay.
35:46
So this is a guy that is so unbelievably precise in his language, but he still leaves some room for
35:51
ambiguity at times, which seems like a contradictory statement, but he really does. He was asked during,
35:57
I think it may have even been on that first Joe Rogan podcast, if he believed in God. And it was
36:02
one of those things where most of us just think that's a binary answer, right? Yes or no. But his
36:07
answer was so dense and deep. Like he was like, basically, what do you mean by that question?
36:12
Which seems like a crazy response to do you believe in God? But he's so complicated in his
36:19
thought processes are so high and so much higher than most people, definitely me that it's just a
36:25
very, it makes him very, very interesting. Okay. And the third reason why I think he's so popular is
36:29
because he's definitely open to being proven incorrect. He's open to that. And he says that
36:35
all the time, I mean, at least once or twice in every speech or interview that I've seen him give,
36:40
he's open to being wrong. And so you sometimes you get this from, you know, Calvinist people or
36:45
the super theology people or, you know, people that have, you know, two or three degrees, they
36:49
just can't be wrong. Like they will go way down the rabbit hole of intellectual dishonesty. And
36:55
they just will never admit that they're wrong. He's a guy that's definitely open to that. And so
36:59
again, he doesn't allow room for excuses. He's incredibly complicated, thus incredibly interesting.
37:04
And he's definitely open to being proven incorrect. So this is just a guy that I really think if
37:09
you're not paying attention to him, it's someone that you should be paying attention to. This guy,
37:13
I'm not elevating him above some of the men in the church. I'm not elevating him in terms of
37:18
importance. I'm not saying that he's never done anything wrong in his life. You know, again, when
37:21
you live as much of a public life as he has, you know, for the last year or two, eventually some
37:26
things are to come come out about him that we're not all super proud of. But this isn't some sort
37:31
of alt-right hero that, you know, is kind of doing these crazy things under the table. Like,
37:35
he seems like a pretty straightforward guy. And he's definitely open to revealing things about
37:40
himself. So I would suggest that everybody begin to start paying attention to Jordan Peterson and
37:45
really getting in touch with the Jordan Peterson effect that is going on in our culture right now.
37:49
So before we leave out, we're going to do a quick resilience boost. So as every one of you,
37:54
to this point, probably know we are a men's ministry and our mission is cultivating
37:57
mainly resilience. And specifically, we do that by providing content that forges spiritual,
38:01
mental and physical toughness. So today, I'm going to focus on mental and spiritual resilience.
38:06
And I'm going to throw out a bunch of suggestions of things that you should
38:09
read and watch and listen to from Jordan Peterson. This will give you a very good primer as to who
38:15
this guy is, what his philosophy is. And it might lead you in a few different directions,
38:19
because I'm assuming that a lot of things that he says, and a lot of his theological
38:25
things that he goes into and the underpinnings and psychology are going to be kind of coming
38:30
through in this podcast, especially over the next several months. Okay, so a few things I'm
38:33
going to throw out to you. So the first thing is to read this article that I read today. I would
38:37
just go back and read it on your own, read it in your own way. And that is the voice evangelical
38:42
men wish they had. And on all these, I'm providing the links to all these things
38:45
in the description of this episode. So you don't necessarily have to pull over and write all this
38:49
stuff down. So first, read the article that I read today. And the second is to read his new book.
38:55
So his new book came out just, you know, two or three weeks ago. It's called 12 rules for life
39:00
and antidote to chaos. It was number one on Amazon for a while. I don't know if they're actually
39:05
going to let it end up on the New York Times list because they kind of keep that list separate in a
39:10
lot of different ways. But an incredibly popular book, I just started the book. So I think I'm two
39:15
chapters in or something like that. So I'm going to be reading it. And as soon as I get done,
39:18
I will very likely do an episode over that book. So I would definitely pick that up and read it.
39:23
The third thing is to watch his interview with Channel 4 News. That was the one I made mention
39:28
of at the beginning of this episode. But it was a 30 minute interview with somebody who was being
39:32
incredibly antagonistic and just watching him work his way through that interview was incredibly
39:37
impressive. Okay. The next thing is to listen to his first appearance on the Joe Rogan experience.
39:41
All right. So that's Joe Rogan's podcast. I think he's been on there twice now, maybe three times.
39:45
But I want you to listen to that first interview. And so that is episode 958. So I think you can find
39:51
that on iTunes and I'm going to provide the links to all that as well. Or you could watch it on
39:55
YouTube. I'll put the link in there for that as well. And the last thing is I want you to listen
39:59
to his first lecture in the biblical series. Okay. So his first lecture, again, I think he did 12 or
40:05
13 of those lectures last year. This one was an introduction to the idea of God. Okay. And again,
40:11
I'll provide the link to the podcast that he put that up on on his YouTube channel that he put that
40:17
up on. But I really think if you watch and let or listen to that first one, you'll be incredibly
40:22
interested to listen to the others. And like I said, these are unbelievably dense things that he
40:26
puts out there. But if we're going to be mentally resilient Christian, then I think this is something
40:30
that we can do to definitely challenge us definitely challenge ourselves in these areas. Okay.
40:34
Guys, as always, thank you so much for listening to this episode. Please subscribe on iTunes,
40:38
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40:43
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40:48
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40:52
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41:02
You can check out our free devotionals on the U version app. Just search undaunted life under
41:06
plans. And as always, we would like to thank August Burns read for allowing us to use their music
41:11
library for our content. The intro outro track on this podcast is our song King of Sorrow,
41:16
which is off their latest record entitled Phantom Anthem and the links to all that are in the
41:19
description. I'm your host Kyle Thompson. Remember, keep cultivating manly resilience,
41:25
keep forging spiritual, mental and physical toughness, keep seeking the lion of Jesus.
41:41
[Music]