Delusional Denial of Jordan Peterson and ARC
Peterson continues his quest for a better world aboard his new ‘ARC’, while unwittingly contributing to the planet’s destruction in the process and taking thousands of people along for the ride.
The ‘Alliance for Responsible Citizenship’, ARC, has some positive aims, but look below the surface and it’s little more than a dangerously flawed climate change denying quasi-religious cult.
Peterson means well, but he is a psychologist, not a scientist, and knows nothing about climate change and its implications. ARC sees a world of doomers scared about climate change and blames these people for spreading negativity. ARCs proposition is that (fossil fuel) energy together with free markets equals abundance and we need more of it. If we were all just better citizens then climate change would somehow magically disappear and it’s not man-made anyway so don’t worry about it.
The ARC website lays bare Peterson’s hyperbolic thinking, which needs reading a couple of times just to make sense of what he’s actually saying:
“ For our sins, so the story goes, the horsemen of the apocalypse are to be loosed upon us-and justly so. The ultimate Malthusian nightmare is about to be realized: the planet is unsustainably and unforgivably overpopulated; there is simply too much fundamentally pathological human activity; plague, political anarchy and starvation await us all. It is, in consequence, high time to repent, and change our errant ways; to admit in defeated shame that our current social and industrial enterprises are corrupt and unsustainable; to radically revolutionize all traditional forms of conduct and governance; to question even the propriety of bringing new devouring mouths into this world; to accept, without resistance, the limits to growth and opportunity made increasingly mandatory by a coterie of concerned and hypothetically expert elites.”
When put in to plain English what Jordan is saying that the planet is not overpopulated, there are no limits to growth and all the scientific consensus telling us we need to act is wrong.
The ARC Website says “ At a time of anxiety where the prevailing narrative is one of decline, we are committed to developing a better story and a hopeful vision for the future. Those who present a vision of inevitable catastrophe in the absence of severely enforced material privation are not wise seers of the inevitable future, but forlorn prisoners of their own limited, faithless imaginations”. Peterson is in denial of climate change, saying “ I think the dangers of carbon dioxide are somewhat overstated” and has described net zero as a “ conspiracy run by narcissistic poseurs while they pretend to be planetary saviours impoverish the poor and worsen environmental conditions “.
ARC has recruited a range of supporters including Paul Marshall who is a main shareholder of GB News. Colin Brazier, who “is currently working towards the establishment of what would be Britain’s first think-tank dedicated to the study and promotion of ‘procreativity’ — the positive case for pronatalism”. Paul Morland and Philip Pilkington are also population growthers.
Judeo-Christianity is not explicitly mentioned at ARC, though the symbolism is there throughout. The cause is a religious one, a belief. The acronym ‘ARC’ gives the game away from the beginning, symbolic of the original Ark, the lifeboat for good Christians and the rest can go to hell, the binary option. This is presented as a dichotomy, whose side are you on? Are you a Judeo-Christian soldier or a devilish environmental doomer? In Peterson’s world, ARCers are the chosen ones on a mission. It’s ironic that with this version of the Ark there is no mention of saving the rest of life on Earth, instead just human supremacy and the more people there are, the better.
In person Peterson can be aggressively persuasive and confrontational, with a scarily passionate, almost demonic self-belief and delivery. The Five Stages of Grief are Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance. In relation to climate change, Peterson is suffering from Denial and Anger. By bringing a band of deniers along with him in The ARC project, Peterson has entered Third Stage of Grief, Bargaining, and in doing so he is refusing to confront the final two stages, Depression and Acceptance.
Rational people have have Accepted, acted upon and continued with their lives rather than living a lie in a haze of troubled denial as with Peterson. The doomers he decries have Accepted climate change is real and are in the Depression stage of grief. Lacking anyone with charisma and vision to counter the ARC narrative, we have to turn to past visionaries for positivity like, erm, Bob the Builder.
With positivity and a catchy song you’re on to a winner. At least Bob knows that there is something that needs to be fixed in the first place. Given the choice between Bob and ARC, Bob would win by a landslide. Okay, we might not actually be able to fix everything, sea levels are set to rise no matter what we do, but let’s give it a go and fix what we can.
An optimistic vision of the future can accept climate change for what it is and aim for a greener and cleaner future. We can have an abundant world and alleviate poverty without relying on fossil fuels. We can have a leadership that promotes the preservation of the beautiful for future generations. We need a more positive outlook, but with twits like Peterson trying to fix it, we need to let Bob take charge instead.
ARC is dressed up with weak academic papers to give legitimacy but the whole exercise is a straw-man argument. He’s a snake oil salesman using linguistics to create a story which sounds wonderful to the naive but is ridiculous disinformation to everyone else. We like feel-good stories and Peterson is the latest in a long line of hokum peddlers preying on the minds of the vulnerable, which is what makes ARC dangerous. He’s a smartly dressed charlatan, a climate denier, anthropocentric in his fervently religious belief of human supremacy while the rest of life on Earth suffers.
He’s not being held accountable for his misinformation and is getting away with it in broad daylight, and taking thousands along for the ride.
Hopefully Peterson will sit down one day with a friendly and patient climate scientist or ecologist who will explain how the ecosystem actually works and what we’re doing to it. He needs to listen instead of preach for a change. No matter how well-meaning you are, hopium, denial and misinformation won’t fix society or the planet. It’s good to have the courage for your convictions, but it’s also important to be right.
by Jon Austen
Originally published at https://populationnews.wordpress.com on November 21, 2023.
