Peterson, pronouns, and culturalmarxism

A year ago when I read Michael D. O'Brein's Plague Journal, a dystopia whose story takes us to a Canada ruled by totalitarian gender ideologues, the main protagonist is a father who has to flee to the forest with his children because the state wants to take their children away for opposing aberrant sex education classes. As it is now common for science fiction to predict the future, I cannot imagine that the author has imagined Justin Trudeau as president to bring fiction to reality. Canada is currently the global vanguard of the new left based on gender ideology and identity politics, whose doctrines are more inclined towards painless totalitarianism.

But every action has a reaction, in Canada, a small group of intellectuals has emerged who, having faced problems with the government or having been brought to trial, maintain a strong resistance in opposition to this new type of totalitarian regime. Some young people like Lauren Southern, Lindsay Shepherd or Brittany Pettibone; others are well-known old intellectuals like Steven Pinker, Mark Steyn or O'Brien himself.

However, the Canadian intellectual who is having the most impact is undoubtedly Jordan Peterson, still a professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto. Some call him the "most influential public intellectual in the world" (it should be noted "of the Anglo-Saxon world"). Its 12 Rules for Life is number 1 in sales by Amazon in Great Britain, USA, Canada, and Australia. Many of its readers are critical of those who belong to the movements of cultural Marxism.

Peterson had already achieved notoriety by posting his classes and lectures on YouTube. It became a reference, however, when, in 2016, it publicly refused to use the new pronouns ("ze", "zir", "they") imposed by law for use by people who are not recognized in the male and female pronouns ("he", "she"). Peterson is a classical liberal who knows well the history of totalitarian systems and knows that the linguistic battle is decisive: if you accept their jargon, you are also accepting their categories, their map of reality. The new language will format the minds of speakers in the direction desired by ideologues: this is what happened in George Orwell's imaginary 1984 and in Victor Klemperer's tragically real Third Reich (which analyzed the Nazi New Language in his work the language of the Third Reich).

The ideologues of the Marxist left, social engineers, use as an excuse a supposedly vulnerable group: the so-called "transsexuals", or people who "do not feel comfortable" with the binary sexual classification (established by nature hundreds of millions of years ago: the male and female sexes are well before the appearance of the human species; before men and women, there were male and female dinosaurs). It is said that respect for such people requires that we treat them with the pronouns they choose. But the use of neopronomes hides behind it an ideological background: it implies accepting that, in effect, humanity is not divided into two sexes, and therefore it is not natural that there are only two sexes, but that there is a whole spectrum of possibilities, and that the subject is free to situate himself at any point of it, and be alluded to grammatically accordingly. There are people who demand to be called "they", not because "their name is legion", but because they consider themselves "gender fluent": basically as they wake up, they feel more or less man or woman, and they move creatively across the spectrum.

he Canadian state puts its coercive power at the service of this verbal-conceptual-social engineering: the infamous Canadian Bill C-16 includes "transsexuals" and all kinds of sexual minorities among vulnerable protected groups, and the refusal to use the pronouns of its choice is considered "hate speech" and "discrimination". This is precisely why this group of intellectuals and Peterson face legal battles with Canadian courts and universities, just as Mark Steyn was prosecuted for "Islamophobia" at the time.

Peterson explains that it is totalitarian to reform the language by decree to accommodate a tiny minority with sexual identity problems. They are not "disrespected" by using with them the pronouns used for millennia of history. On the contrary, they disrespect society when they demand that it join their peculiar fantasy. When children play, they have to negotiate their respective roles. A child who forces others to recognize a role under threat - "I'll play Spider-Man today, and that's that!" - is not properly socialized. Anyway, he's a bully.
While Peterson, Steyn and other knights-errant men are fighting for everyone's freedom, the social majority look the other way and think it's no big deal. What's the matter with someone demanding to be designated with quirky pronouns? Everyone with their own delusions!

However, at a future level, it is relevant. It means that the State imposes subjective self-perception - as hallucinating as it may be - as an objective reality on society as a whole. The government is attacking us with a grammar and an anthropology. The next frontier is the "other kins", the non-human identities: if I perceive myself as a bird, the Canadian state, instead of taking me to a psychiatric hospital, will require all citizens to treat me like a bird. Laugh? As Mark Steyn says in the following video with Peterson, "Those who matter in our society don't take this as a joke.