Who Is Teaching Your Kids?

Jun 10, 2018

Dangerous people are filling the heads of young people with dangerous nonsense. Who are these people? They are what Jordan Peterson calls “the post-modernists:” neo-Marxist professors who dominate our colleges and universities. And here’s the worst part: we are financing these nihilists with tax dollars, alumni gifts and tuition payments. Time to wise up.

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Study Guide

If you're a taxpayer or paying for your kid's liberal arts degree, you're underwriting radical ideologues in control of college campuses.: College campuses have become increasingly influenced by ideologues who believe there is no objective truth and have fully embraced identity politics.
View source; Most of the professors dominating academia are post-modernists who have Marxist roots and reduce claims of meaning to simplified notions of the struggle for power.
View source; Leftist academics teach that Western imperialism is the primary cause of Third World problems and Western civilization is fundamentally flawed.
View source; Related reading: “Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief” – Jordan B. Peterson
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The radical agenda pushed by leftist professors produce the mobs that violently shut down campus speakers in the name of “diversity.”: The radical left in academia believes that in order to push its agenda, it is acceptable to silence free speech, one of the most essential rights in civilization. “There is nothing in the absence of freedom of speech but tyranny and slavery,” warns Dr. Jordan B. Peterson.
View source; Freedom of speech is necessary for the betterment of society and civilization in part because it allows us to see and recognize bad ideas before we act on them. It allows us to fail abstractly rather than literally.
View source; The Left has come to define “diversity” by groups — race, ethnicity or sexual identity — rather than by a broad range of opinions, skills, and ideas or differences within groups.
View source; WATCH: “Free Speech, Psychology, Gender Pronouns” – Jordan B. Peterson
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Radical leftist professors are teaching students to label those doing comparatively better “oppressors” and those doing worse “oppressed.”: Leftist thinking took hold in Western universities in the 60s and 70s, when the true believers of the radical left became the professors of today. The goal of this ideology, according to Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, is to “define those doing comparatively better as oppressors of those doing comparatively worse.”
View source; Related reading: “Yale ‘decolonizes’ English dept. after complaints studying white authors ‘actively harms’ students” – The College Fix
View source; WATCH: “The Real Purpose of Universities” – Jordan B. Peterson
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The Left has come to define diversity by monolithic groups rather than by a broad range of opinions, skills, and ideas within groups.: The Left has come to define diversity by groups — race, ethnicity or sexual identity — rather than by a broad range of opinions, skills, and ideas or differences within groups.
View source; To a post-modernist, you are not an individual, you are the product of the society around you that has constructed your identity.
View source; WATCH: Jordan B. Peterson on diversity
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For the Left, the laudable goal of equality of opportunity has been replaced by the radical goal of equality of outcome.: For the Left, equity is no longer the laudable goal of equality of opportunity, but the insistence on equality of outcome. This means businesses must be staffed by 50% men and 50% women, regardless of the difference in preferences of individuals.
View source; The foundation of this fundamentally flawed goal of equality of outcome is Marxist materialism, which pervades the teachings of leftist academics.
View source; WATCH: “Saving Society by Saving the Individual” – Jordan B. Peterson
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Leftist professors vilify capitalism, despite the free market repeatedly proving it can lift people out of poverty better than socialism.: The leftist professors heavily influencing American universities refuse to acknowledge that capitalism allows us to do more with less. Capitalism has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty so that they can for the first time in history afford food, shelter, clothing, and transportation.
View source; The poor living in the United States are for the first time in history able to meet their basic needs and live better than those in higher social brackets in other countries.
View source; Venezuela — formerly prosperous and the poster-child of Marxists and the Left — has become a failed state that cannot even provide toilet paper for its citizens.
View source; WATCH: Jordan Peterson on capitalism and markets
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American academia has increasingly embraced identity politics, treating people as members of groups rather than individuals.: Identity politics embraces the postmodernist concept that you are not an individual, you are the product of the society around you that has constructed your identity.
View source; Leftists in academia promote the concept of viewing people as members of groups — racial, ethnic, gender and sexual orientation groups — and universities are increasingly promoting this anti-individual perspective.
View source; Related reading: “12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos” – Jordan B. Peterson
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Leftwing academics encourage students to view themselves and others as either victims or oppressors.: Leftwing academics encourage students to view themselves and others as either victims or oppressors. Oppressors are always those that are doing comparatively better than those around them.
View source; According to Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, promoting a victimization mentality is dangerous because it “puts us back in a tribal situation and will produce conflict.”
View source; In its current form, the modern American education system often does more harm than good by discouraging self-directing and free-thinking individuals.
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Despite Marx’s radical theories failing miserably when put into practice, leftwing academics continue to promote his flawed ideas.: Karl Marx viewed the world as a continuous class struggle: the bourgeoisie against the proletariat, the grasping rich against the desperate poor.
View source; Wherever his ideas were put into practice — in the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, and Cambodia, to name just a few — whole economies failed, and tens of millions were killed.
View source; The ideas of Marx are now back in vogue culturally, predicated on false notions and shallow interpretations.
View source; WATCH: “What Marx Got Wrong” – Jordan Peterson
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You may not realize it, but you are currently funding some dangerous people.

They are indoctrinating young minds throughout the West with their resentment-ridden ideology. They have made it their life's mission to undermine Western civilization itself, which they regard as corrupt, oppressive and “patriarchal.”

If you're a taxpayer—or paying for your kid's liberal arts degree—you're underwriting this gang of nihilists.

You're supporting ideologues who claim that all truth is subjective; that all sex differences are socially constructed; and that Western imperialism is the sole source of all Third World problems. They are the post-modernists, pushing “progressive” activism at a college near you.

They produce the mobs that violently shut down campus speakers; the language police who enshrine into law use of fabricated gender pronouns; and the deans whose livelihoods depend on madly rooting out discrimination where little or none exists.

Their thinking took hold in Western universities in the ‘60s and ‘70s, when the true believers of the radical left became the professors of today. And now we rack up education-related debt—not so that our children learn to think critically, write clearly, or speak properly, but so they can model their mentors' destructive agenda.

It's now possible to complete an English degree and never encounter Shakespeare—one of those dead white males whose works underlie our “society of oppression.”

To understand and oppose the post-modernists, the ideas by which they orient themselves must be clearly identified.

First is their new unholy trinity of diversity, equity and inclusion. Diversity is defined not by opinion, but by race, ethnicity or sexual identity; equity is no longer the laudable goal of equality of opportunity, but the insistence on equality of outcome; and inclusion is the use of identity-based quotas to attain this misconceived state of equity.

All the classic rights of the West are to be considered secondary to these new values. Take, for example, freedom of speech—the very pillar of democracy. The post-modernists refuse to believe that people of good will can exchange ideas and reach consensus.

Their world is instead a Hobbesian nightmare of identity groups warring for power. They don't see ideas that run contrary to their ideology as simply incorrect. They see them as integral to the oppressive system they wish to supplant, and consider it a moral obligation to stifle and constrain their expression.

Second is rejection of the free market—of the very idea that free, voluntary trading benefits everyone. They won't acknowledge that capitalism has lifted up hundreds of millions of people so they can for the first time in history afford food, shelter, clothing, transportation—even entertainment and travel. Those classified as poor in the US (and, increasingly, everywhere else) are able to meet their basic needs. Meanwhile, in once-prosperous Venezuela—until recently the poster-child of the campus radicals—the middle class lines up for toilet paper.

Third, and finally, are the politics of identity. Post-modernists don't believe in individuals. You're an exemplar of your race, sex, or sexual preference. You're also either a victim or an oppressor. No wrong can be done by anyone in the former group, and no good by the latter. Such ideas of victimization do nothing but justify the use of power and engender intergroup conflict.

All these concepts originated with Karl Marx, the 19th-century German philosopher. Marx viewed the world as a gigantic class struggle—the bourgeoisie against the proletariat; the grasping rich against the desperate poor. But wherever his ideas were put into practice—in the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, and Cambodia, to name just a few—whole economies failed, and tens of millions were killed. We fought a decades-long cold war to stop the spread of those murderous notions. But they're back, in the new guise of identity politics.

The corrupt ideas of the post-modern neo-Marxists should be consigned to the dustbin of history. Instead, we underwrite their continuance in the very institutions where the central ideas of the West should be transmitted across the generations. Unless we stop, post-modernism will do to America and the entire Western world what it's already done to its universities.

I'm Jordan Peterson, Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto, for Prager University.

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