Jordan Peterson Is Correct About Psychopaths Taking Over the Right

Do you think the Right is in danger of being taken over by psychopaths? Jordan Peterson does – and he’s not wrong about that:

Here’s a bit of what Peterson said from the transcript:

The problem is that 4 to 5% of the population, something like that, is cluster B, that's the DSM-5 terms, histrionic, narcissistic, anti-social, psychopathic, and they have dark tetrad traits, they're Machiavellian, they're sadistic. That's about 4%. Okay, so the question is how do these people maneuver? And the answer is they go to where the power is, and they adopt those ideas and they put themselves even on the forefront of that. But the ideas are completely irrelevant. All they're doing is they're the Pharisees, they're the modern version of the Pharisees, they're the people who use God's name in vain, right, as they proclaim moral virtue.

Doesn't matter whether it's Right or Left or Christian or Jewish or Islam, they invade the idea space and then they use that, those ideas as false weapons to advance their narcissistic advantage. And so, then you have the problem, and the Right's going to face this more and more particularly, as false weapons to advance their narcissistic advantage. And so, then you have the problem, and the Right's going to face this more and more particularly because the Left had to face it when they were in power. How do you identify the psychopathic parasites, 4% of the population, who are clothed in your clothing and waving your flags, but who are only in it for narcissistic benefit?

The people who studied the dark triad, these were people who originally studied psychopaths, and they moved into ordinary personalities, so to speak, on the fringes. They showed that the non-criminal psychopaths, so the fringe cases, are Machiavellian. They use their language to manipulate. They're narcissistic. They want unearned reputation, that's what a narcissist wants, and they're psychopathic, which makes them predators or parasites. Okay, that's pretty bad, those three things. But they had to expand the nomenclature after a while because they found that they were also sadistic, which implied that if you're Machiavellian and narcissistic and psychopathic, you develop a sufficiently bad view of your fellow man that their undeserved pain is a source of pleasure to you.

And that's what's being enabled online. See, because we've evolved real specific mechanisms to keep such things under control in face-to-face interaction. Lack of anonymity, for example, within a community. Psychopaths in the real world, they wander. They have to move from place to place because people figure out who they are, and they're held responsible. They're particularly held responsible by men. But online they escape from that protective, they escape from that.

And the issue is how do you identify the psychopathic pretenders and it's even worse now and then make a barrier right now the Right was calling for the Left to do that for decades right and they didn't and they couldn't and the Left is not good at drawing barriers....temperamentally the Right is somewhat better but there's no shortage of monstrosity there and so then the question is how do you draw the line? And that's kind of what I was because I've been watching these right-wing, they're not right-wing, these psychopathic types manipulate the edge of the conservative movement for their own gain.

So, what is he really driving at here? Well, to truly explain it, we have to go into a little more detail on what has happened to the media over the last couple of decades.

First of all, the media used to have gatekeepers.

Gatekeeping has gotten a bad rap in recent years, but it’s not a bad thing per se. In actuality, gatekeeping is a societal tool, like a gun. It can be used for good or for evil.

To make it easier to understand what I mean by that without getting it polluted by the experience all of us have had with the media in recent years, let’s go to the world of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. The closest thing to royalty in that world is the Gracie family. They didn’t invent Jiu-Jitsu, but they popularized it and had a lot to do with crafting it in its current form. There are a number of Gracies that are famous in the world of martial arts, but the most famous one is Royce Gracie. Royce Gracie won UFC 1, 2 and 4 almost exclusively using Gracie Jiu-Jitsu. Royce Gracie is arguably the only living person who can fairly say that they revolutionized martial arts:

So, if you had a question about Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and you had a choice between getting it answered by Royce Gracie or me, someone who was a one-stripe white belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu before they moved on to Muay Thai years ago, or, some random guy who has never practiced martial arts at all, but who has watched Kung-Fu movies, who is your go-to source?

In a world without gatekeeping, all three of those sources get treated like they’re equally valid by an awful lot of people, but in an ideal world, one with proper gatekeepers, the answer is Royce Gracie.

That’s what gatekeeping SHOULD BE. It’s getting your information from highly informed, extremely knowledgeable sources that you believe are telling you the truth. You don’t have to do your own research about a thousand different topics because you ask a trustworthy specialist in that area what’s happening, and they tell you the unbiased truth.

In the media, we never really had that. Not exactly.

For a long time in America though, we did at least have a media full of knowledgeable people who genuinely cared about APPEARING to be unbiased, truthful, and getting their stories right. Did they have biases? Did they get it wrong sometimes? Did they put their fingers on the scale a bit? Yes, they did, but not too much because they genuinely cared about at least APPEARING to be what a journalist is supposed to be.

When the mainstream media became so corrupted and leftward leaning that they could no longer be trusted to fulfill their role as gatekeepers, things started to change fast. Bloggers came along and basically said, “We may be amateurs and have an open ideological bias, but we can still do a better job of putting out honest news than you from our living rooms.” The fact that this often turned out to be true helped cripple the authority of the mainstream media, but the real death blow to the gatekeepers was SOCIAL MEDIA because it completely transformed WHY people watched the news.

Originally, the news was about… well, news. The most important news. The news you needed to know in order to be informed. Over time, as the gatekeepers were destroyed and people didn’t really know who to trust, people started seeking out news for different reasons. For many people, it became just another way to be entertained while getting a hefty dose of viewpoint reinforcement at the same time. If people got some real news during that process, great, but the public made it clear that they weren’t willing to stick around if it was boring or challenged their viewpoints. In other words, we had gatekeepers, they did a bad job, and the scale swung wildly in the other direction. Now, we’re starting to get an idea of the value of gatekeepers because we’re living in a world without them.

In this sort of media environment, psychopaths, sociopaths and people with a generally loose relationship with the truth will thrive.

Why?

Well, for one thing, without gatekeepers, there’s no definitive, trusted sources to say, “You’re full of crap.” Even if you are full of crap, will anyone remember it next week when everyone can see you were full of crap? Even if they do see it, will they care? As we’ve seen over and over and over again, including among conservative media sources, the answer to that question is mostly, “no.”

Furthermore, if everything is judged by the entertainment value, how well it reinforces people’s beliefs and popularity, think about what the news ISN’T really being judged by anymore. It isn’t being judged by how truthful, newsworthy, responsible, wise, or important it is. You can lie to your audience, spread conspiracies, dabble in racism or anti-Semitism, say radical things, or be utterly immoral, and often PAY NO PENALTY FOR IT with your own audience as long as you’re entertaining and spend most of your time telling them that what they believe is true. If anything, the controversy from saying ludicrous things MAY BENEFIT YOU because the more attention you generate, the more the social media algorithms push you. True? False? Evil? Good? Sane? Insane? Whatever. If it gets people engaged, social media and the large media outlets that pay attention to it will reward it heavily. 999 times out of 1000, a toxic lunatic with two million followers will be pushed, promoted and amplified over a moral genius with 50,000 followers. It’s not who’s right and who’s wrong, it’s who gets to sit at the table with the popular kids, even if they’re horrible human beings.

Does that mean everybody in the media is a scumbag? Is everyone a psychopath? Not at all, but the media, including the conservative media, is getting more dishonest, conspiratorial, radical, and toxic every year. Know why? Because WE – and by we, I mean you, me, the Left, the Right, and the American public, have unintentionally created a system that has turned morality, human decency and a desire to tell the truth without favor into handicaps that have to be overcome.

Since psychopaths don’t have those handicaps, they have a huge competitive advantage right now in the conservative movement and everywhere else in the media. Any ideology, political party or even a country that turns psychopaths into stars will soon come to regret it.

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