Psychologist claims there is a little Hitler and Stalin in all of us, not just in Putin (or Trump)

 

 

Things are not going that much to pot in this country, despite what some people might have you believe. If you really think about it, life has hardly changed since you were a kid. Well, a few things have changed, like the disappearance of the record and book stores you used to hang out at, mom-and-pop shops that were conveniently located, the corner food mart, the fast food restaurant that was open 24-hours-a-day, Radio Shack, Blockbuster and most frustratingly Fry’s Electronics.

What’s replaced all of that are “smart” phones which only make people dumber, with the rhetoric of paranoia and hate spread mainly from the right of the political and ideological spectrum; unfortunately the conversation amongst such people doesn’t often rise above this level:

 

While a majority of people perhaps don’t pay a lot of attention to that as being below their various levels, those on the center-left and people who never vote anyways ignore them at the risk of a way of the life they thought was sacrosanct in a democratic society.

 

It isn’t. If things keep up as they are, you might think a psychologist like Dr. Jordan Peterson, who would seem like a crackpot in normal times, deserves a second listen, since we haven’t been living in normal times since the 2016 election. He might even be “right” about where this country and Western civilization is heading.

 

Who is this man? He has written books like 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos where we are given such sage advice as “you should always pet a cat when you meet one on the street. What does the nervous system of the lowly lobster have to tell us about standing up straight (with our shoulders back) and success in life?”

So on the webpage of a far-right YouTuber who calls himself a “doctor” of something, Steve Turley, who apparently has a lot of fans for his far-right views, posted this video of Piers Morgan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4os-nOVyo68 after he fled the UK to Australia, questioning Peterson and assuming that he was going to “diagnose” Vladimir Putin as having certain psychopathic dysfunctions. Turley thought this interview “interesting” because Peterson upset “lamestream media” expectations. He willfully misinterpreted or ignored the import of what Peterson was saying as his eyes bulged out like a typical far-right fanatic; for his part, Morgan was probably as flummoxed as other viewers.

So what did we hear from Peterson? He thinks it is “foolish” to liken Vladimir Putin to Hitler or Stalin. Such people would not exist if every level of society from top to bottom either supported the totalitarian structure they existed in, and besides “there's a bit of Hitler and Stalin in everyone…why would Nazism spread the way it did? You know people think well that's all top down; it's not.”

Such a society can only exist on a system built on lies:

You can't have a totalitarian state unless every single person is willing to lie about everything all the time and you can think about that as top down because the leaders lie too and they also enforce punishments if you don't lie. But then you can also think about it that the totalitarian spirit is replicated at every level of the society, and so in a truly totalitarian state husbands lie to their wives and parents lie to their children and the totalitarian state is actually in the grip of the lie and so people will certainly go along with that.

Peterson went on “of course” Putin is going to try to freeze out the West this winter, and that his threat of using nuclear weapons is “real”: “If necessary he'll use a tactical battlefield weapon.” When Morgan suggested it could start World War III, Peterson shrugged it off, asserting that Putin has no fear of that since the West is decadent and weak, and “wouldn't respond. What's in it for us? If necessary he'll use a tactical battlefield weapon.”

Peterson admits he doesn’t know entirely what the Russians want to secure a “peaceful” solution, but “naive notions that the Russians are going to lose somehow or that we're going to win” are results he doesn’t understand why people think that will happen. “We can't win against Vladimir Putin anyways because you cannot win against someone you cannot say no to period, and we can't say no to Putin because we sold our soul for his oil and gas.”

He goes on to criticize the “foolishness” of our “moral presumption.” This includes an “environmental crisis of planetary proportions” which is something he doesn’t believe anyways; in fact Peterson even adds that he believes that environmental regulations “make the problem worse.” He also misquotes George Orwell in claiming that concern for the planet really means hatred of humanity.

Peterson then goes on to say that it is “terrifying” him that what could happen this winter because of energy prices (which only shows you how much oil company’s hate humanity), and that the World Bank predicts that 350 million people may die from food insecurity because of the West’s stand against the Ukraine invasion, and that this is far worse than the number of people were killed during the worst excesses of Stalinist Soviet Union and Mao’s China.

He then says—ironically or not—that “The planet has too many people on it anyway so you know that's just poor people” who are going to die, so who really cares about them?

Turley (a name you don’t really need to know) seemed annoyed when the conversation went “off-track” when the discussion of totalitarianism came up (I wonder why), and then quoted Noam Chomsky about how China can’t be intimidated by the barbaric West, and something about “cancel culture” and the “lamestream media”—and there are definitely problems there—which is how the far-right avoids moral and ethical questions regarding its own behavior.

 

But Peterson’s point about totalitarianism is that this is about the people who buy into the lies that allow such a system to endure, and although he doesn’t just go out and say it, the followers of Donald Trump and Republican governors like Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott have taken the first “experimental” steps in that direction to preserve Republican power, spreading lies about election fraud to disenfranchise certain classes of voters, promoting economic paranoia and attacking other groups (migrants mainly) as scapegoats, and suppressing dissent under the guise of anti-“woke” laws for schools, and "riot prevention" outside of them.

 

This represents how totalitarianism can begin. All it takes is the blind following of a “cult” both personal and ideological. A quote from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is predictably not applied to what is happening in this country: “the line separating good and evil passes not through states nor between classes nor between political parties but right through every human heart.” For the present, enough states in this country have a Democratic majority to prevent that on a national scale, but that is today, and who knows what could happen tomorrow, with so many people’s heart’s filled with a daily diet of hate and a moral and ethical degenerate's idea of what made this country "great"--and some people have more of that Hitler and Stalin in themselves than others.