The life of an editor can be a painful and miserable hell. Especially when you have to publish the second part of a book that has sold more than five million copies in a couple of years. A real drama. Any publisher’s nightmare. How happy they would be, I don’t know, publishing haikus written by the foot of a stuffed monkey, or editing that fool Justin Trudeau’s complete works in sign language. But no. Life is cruel. The guys at Penguin Random House have been lucky enough to publish psychiatrist Jordan Peterson’s new book. Thank God, Vice is around to bring us the human drama behind this overwhelming story. The magazine reveals that Penguin Random House’s decision to publish this psychiatrist’s new book has brought tears to the eyes of several employees, but it is still not clear if they are tears of joy, from the extra money to be made in the midst of the pandemic thanks to this new bestseller.
Crybabies complain that the author is xenophobic, a tearophobic, and transphobic. I guess they didn’t like Peterson’s story about the male lobsters, and are angry about having to compete with each other for mating privileges with the more desirable females, instead of dressing up as female lobsters, wearing “Editors’ Lives Matter” T-shirts and dancing flamenco, which is what all decent animals do when they know they are being closely watched by a psychiatrist armed with a notebook and pencil.
If I may be so bold, today I am coining the term silicone thinking. It refers to those people who allow themselves to be emotionally impacted by a frivolous and sentimental argument, which permeates while still soft, only to solidify inside them, becoming the new foundation upon which their life will be constructed. Modern society is full of silicone minds. Within, there is nothing more than an immense forest of weak and malleable ideas that have artificially solidified, and that can be cut with a simple pair of scissors, that are incapable of resisting even the slightest test of temperature, but that take up immense amounts of space and prevent the good ideas from taking root. This silicone is a silly slogan, a sentimental newspaper headline, or a Kamala Harris rally where she talks about how badly she has done in life because she was born a woman, and not a man, like Joe Biden.
All Jordan Peterson has done is take a pair of scissors, prune this silicone forest, and start building a series of ideas using the usual ingredients: the history of philosophy, the classics, the actual real life experience of psychiatric practice, his own life, and natural law.
In the old days, before illiterate Twitter philosophers started spouting “happiness only depends on you,” “you deserve everything,” and “if you want it badly enough, the universe will give it to you,” any normal person based their thinking on the same foundations as the Canadian psychiatrist. But I guess it’s easier to put a heart shaped sign over your bed saying, “Don’t regret anything, you are the best thing that ever happened to you” than to read The Divine Comedy, and remember that there is a hell, smoky and tasty, waiting for exactly those same idiots who go through life regretting nothing. The attempts to censor Peterson are nothing other than an act of moral laziness: if you don’t ask yourself questions, you will never need answers.
The unconsolable sobbing at Penguin Random House’s editorial meetings over the upcoming release of Peterson’s book only proves that the company needs to overhaul its recruiting department and get older employees who can pass a psycho-technical test without pouting. The kind of people who moan about publishing a book are the same kind of people who might cry their eyes out over a steak and potatoes while thinking, “Poor little cow. What will her mother think?” Peterson should pencil them in for an appointment at his office …
Somehow I wish I could say that Jordan Peterson is a brave man because he stands for extreme and extravagant ideas in which he firmly believes. But that would be a lie. Everything he says is incredibly normal. Everything he stands for is natural. Everything he explains can be touched with our own hands because it exists in the real world, that same real world that the friends of cultural Marxism, those who live offended 24/7, and other unicorn hunters, never dare to put a foot on.
It is no coincidence that the Canadian is featured in my new essay on sadness (jokers like myself are actually horribly melancholic), Everything was going well. In particular, I gave him voice in a chapter entitled “Let the Children Be Sad,” to explain that in a child’s education, if you want to avoid conflict, there must be conflict. And I develop the thought with the help of these words from the psychiatrist: “Children are damaged when those who should take care of them, for fear of any conflict or discord, no longer dare to correct them and leave them without any guidance.” “Is Peterson a monster? No,” I conclude in the book, because at the end of the day, “We are raising unbearable children and throwing idiot adults into the world beyond our own damn means.”
In the end, no mature and mentally balanced person should be surprised by Peterson’s thesis on how to educate children. Just as no one in their right mind should bawl their eyes out over the kind of things someone like Jordan Peterson says — on the other hand so polite and respectful — whose most aggressive and violent sentence against his grieving readers is “make your bed.” Pure fascism.
