Jordan Peterson: Kathleen Wynne is the ‘most dangerous woman in Canada

“What are the most valuable things everyone should know?”

Instead of answering in a long essay, he wrote 40 maxims that I’ve presented below.

Before you read, keep in mind that these maxims are not your ordinary list of self-help tips.

They are simple. They are short. But they contain within each of them decades of study and thought.

Jordan Peterson said in his video entitled 45 minutes on a single paragraph of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good & Evil:

Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil isn’t a book at all. It’s a series of bombs. And each sentence is a bomb. And each sentence blows things up that people don’t even know exist.

hat description is a great way to think about the sentences that follow.

Note: Jordan Peterson has a self-development program which is backed by science. It’s called Self Authoring and you can learn all about it here.

Jordan Peterson on the most valuable things everyone should know:

1. Tell the truth.

2. Do not do things that you hate.

3. Act so that you can tell the truth about how you act.

4. Pursue what is meaningful, not what is expedient.

5. If you have to choose, be the one who does things, instead of the one who is seen to do things.

6. Pay attention.

7. Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you need to know. Listen to them hard enough so that they will share it with you.

8. Plan and work diligently to maintain the romance in your relationships.

9. Be careful who you share good news with.

10. Be careful who you share bad news with.

11. Make at least one thing better every single place you go.

12. Imagine who you could be, and then aim single-mindedly at that.

13. Do not allow yourself to become arrogant or resentful.

14. Try to make one room in your house as beautiful as possible.

15. Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.

16. Work as hard as you possibly can on at least one thing and see what happens.

17. If old memories still make you cry, write them down carefully and completely.

18. Maintain your connections with people.

19. Do not carelessly denigrate social institutions or artistic achievement.

20. Treat yourself as if you were someone that you are responsible for helping.

21. Ask someone to do you a small favour, so that he or she can ask you to do one in the future.

22. Make friends with people who want the best for you.

23. Do not try to rescue someone who does not want to be rescued, and be very careful about rescuing someone who does.

24. Nothing well done is insignificant.

25. Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world.

26. Dress like the person you want to be.

27. Be precise in your speech.

28. Stand up straight with your shoulders back.

29. Don’t avoid something frightening if it stands in your way — and don’t do unnecessarily dangerous things.

30. Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them.

31. Do not transform your wife into a maid.

32. Do not hide unwanted things in the fog.

33. Notice that opportunity lurks where responsibility has been abdicated.

34. Read something written by someone great.

35. Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street.

36. Do not bother children when they are skateboarding.

37. Don’t let bullies get away with it.

38. Write a letter to the government if you see something that needs fixing — and propose a solution.

39. Remember that what you do not yet know is more important than what you already know.

40. Be grateful in spite of your suffering.

41. 
    

Australian nursing and midwifery code of conduct slammed over ‘white privilege’

LAST year nurses were asked to call women “persons”. Now there’s another furore as they’re told to acknowledge “white privilege”.AUSTRALIAN nurses are pushing back against a change that requires them to “acknowledge white privilege” before treating patients.

Nurses and midwives around the country must now adhere to a new code of conduct with a section specifically dedicated to “culture” and which details white Australians’ inherent privilege “in relation to Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islanders”.

The new code, which came into effect in March, has been labelled “eye-watering”, “cultural madness” and “unacceptable”. A peak body representing nurses in Queensland is even calling for the chairman of the Nursing and Midwifery Board of Australia to be sacked over it.

“This is eye-watering stuff,” Graeme Haycroft from the Nurses Professional Association of Queensland told Sky News host Peta Credlin.

“We’re calling for the resignation of the chairman of the board (Associate Professor Lynette Cusack) because she’s put her name to it and it’s unacceptable.”

Credlin called it “almost too hard to believe”. “Before (a midwife) delivers a baby to an indigenous woman she’s supposed to put her hands up and say: ‘I need to talk to you about my white privilege’, not about my infection control, my qualifications or my training as a midwife?” she asked Mr Haycroft.

He said that was correct, but there’s no requirement to “announce” anything. The nurses must simply abide by the new code which state clearly that “cultural safety is as important to quality care as clinical safety”.

“Cultural safety ... requires nurses and midwives to undertake an ongoing process of self-reflection and cultural self-awareness, and an acknowledgment of how a nurse’s/midwife’s personal culture impacts on care,” the code reads.

“In relation to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health, cultural safety provides a decolonising model of practice based on dialogue, communication, power sharing and negotiation, and the acknowledgment of white privilege.“These actions are a means to challenge racism at personal and institutional levels, and to establish trust in healthcare encounters.”

Mr Haycroft said the code was hastily approved with little consultation.

“It’s all of Australia. There’s 350,000 nurses and midwives Australia-wide and they’re all now subject to this new code,” he said.

“We put a little survey on our website and we asked nurses whether they agreed with the code of conduct. Just over 50 per cent of our members have said ‘this is wrong, do something about it, fight it for us’.”

The Nursing and Midwifery Board of Australia released a statement on March 1 asking nurses and midwives to “reflect on how the news of conduct relate to their practice”.

“These codes provide a foundation for safe practice and give guidance on crucial issues such as bullying and harassment, professional boundaries and cultural safety. Nurses and midwives need to meet the standards set in these codes, even if their employer also has a code of conduct,” Professor Cusack said.

Nurses and midwives fought the board in November last year when it was revealed a draft of the new code of conduct replaced references to “woman-centred care” with “person-centred care”.

“Midwife means with woman,” UniSA midwifery professor Mary Steen told the Adelaide Advertiser. “The woman is at the centre of a midwife’s scope of practice, which is based on the best available evidence to provide the best care and support to meet individual women’s health and wellbeing needs.”

Professor Alison Kitson, vice president and executive dean of the College of Nursing and Health Sciences at Flinders University, agreed.

“Retaining the ‘woman-centred’ term is important to remind us all that our care is focused on the women and the significant life-changing experience they are about to have,” she said.On social media, users called the new code “stupid”.

“To think that it will help a person with indigenous blood if nurses would acknowledge their ‘white privilege’,” one woman wrote. “This is basically labelling of victims and oppressors by race. How embarrassing for Australia.”

Jordan Peterson’s psycho-religious heresy

Mark Powellathy Newman’s train wreck of an interview with Jordan Peterson could well be one of the defining moments in how public discourse is now conducted in the West. During the interview Newman employed the question “So, what you’re saying is…” twenty-eight times—yes, I actually went back and counted. On each occasion, Peterson calmly and carefully corrected her deliberate misrepresentation of his views. Unfortunately for her, she has now become the subject of a whole new internet meme, as the following example illustrates:I was intrigued then to read Peterson’s most recent work, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (Allen Lane, 2018). And I must say that it’s 350 plus pages did not disappoint. Peterson is learned, engaging, humorous, articulate but most of all, intensely helpful in a practical, self-help, kind of way. It was a conservative breath of fresh air. No wonder The Spectator endorsement on the book’s front cover says that Peterson is: “One of the most important thinkers to emerge on the world stage for many years.”

Peterson is rightly critical of political correctness, and the pervasive influence of cultural Marxism within the major universities of the West, explaining that this has been especially negative for men. Peterson states:

The strong turn towards political correctness in universities has exacerbated the problem. The voices shouting against oppression have become louder, it seems, in precise proportion to how equal—even now increasingly skewed against men—the schools have become. There are whole disciplines in universities forthrightly hostile towards men. These are the areas of study, dominated by the postmodern / neo-Marxist claim that Western culture, in particular, is an oppressive structure, created by white men to dominate and exclude women (and other select groups); successful only because of that domination and exclusion.

Peterson demonstrates that the so-called thesis, ‘oppression of the patriarchy’, is intellectually vacuous. This is because it is not men alone that create culture, but humankind in general (males and females together, although even that is a controversial thing to say to those who view a person’s gender as being non-binary).

What interested me most though, was his novel way of understanding religious texts, especially those of Judeo-Christianity. According to Peterson, “The Bible is, for better or worse, the foundational document of Western civilization (of Western values, Western morality, and Western conceptions of good and evil.)” I believe that is entirely correct. But then Peterson employs a unique Jungian perspective, rather than a classic historic hermeneutic, to re-interpret it in a symbolic (i.e. “archetypal”) kind of way.

So, for instance, when the Bible’s opening chapters describe God as bringing order out of chaos, for Peterson ‘chaos’ is psychologically “the domain of ignorance itself. It’s unexplored territory.” Whereas, ‘order’ is “by contrast…explored territory.”  The book of Genesis though is not concerned with subconscious realities per se, but with how and why the world was created.

Ironically, Peterson is rightly critical of those who would superimpose the twentieth-century scientific method onto the Bible, but then he himself makes precisely the same error by imposing a modern psychological one. As Dr Noel Weeks, formerly of Sydney University, explains, it is a false dichotomy to posit—as Peterson does—that Genesis 1-11 addresses “what matters” (i.e. meaning) and not, “of matter” (the physical or material universe).

However, Peterson’s hermeneutical misstep is at its most serious when considering the Biblical doctrine of salvation. On the one hand, Peterson acknowledges the validity of “the strange Christian insistence that salvation could not be obtained through effort or worth—through ‘works’”. (Significantly, Peterson then places in an important footnote the Scriptural references to Ephesians 2:8-9 and Romans 9:15-16 which correctly prove that particular doctrine.)

Peterson helpfully explains that “the development of such doctrine prevented king, aristocrat and wealthy merchant alike from lording it morally over the commoner.” What’s more, Peterson goes on to further state:The society produced by Christianity was far less barbaric than the pagan—even the Roman—ones it replaced. Christian society at least recognised that feeding slaves to ravenous lions for the entertainment of the populace was wrong, even if many barbaric practices still existed. It objected to infanticide, to prostitution, and to the principle that might means right. It insisted that women were as valuable as men…It demanded that even a society’s enemies be regarded as human. Finally, it separated church from state, so that all-too-human emperors could no longer claim the veneration due to gods.

However, Peterson surprisingly then sides with the atheistic philosopher Frederick Nietzsche, believing that it was the idea that, “Christ’s sacrifice, and only that sacrifice, had redeemed humanity” which was the underlying problem with Christianity since it implied, “that the primary responsibility for redemption had already been borne by the Saviour, and that nothing too important to do remained for all-too-fallen human individuals.” As Peterson quotes Nietzsche as saying:

The Christians have never practiced the actions Jesus prescribed them; and the impudent garrulous talk about the ‘justification by faith’ and its supreme and sole significance is only the consequence of the Church’s lack of courage and will to profess the works Jesus demanded.

But Nietzsche’s objection is completely unwarranted. For how could a belief in being saved by the sacrificial act of God’s Son, cause so much social good, but at the same time remove all “moral responsibility from Christ’s followers”? That completely contradicts what Peterson himself has just acknowledged was true!

Tragically, Peterson’s psycho-religious philosophy leads back to a burdensome salvation by good works. And by denying the efficacy of the atoning death, as well as bodily resurrection, of Jesus it is nothing more than a heretical form of Christianity. Except, Peterson gives those who would follow him twelve commandments to obey—two more than was originally given to Moses on Mount Sinai. It’s worth remembering that even the Ten Commandments though were set within a context of salvation by God’s grace, as the Israelites were called to keep them only after they had first been graciously and miraculously delivered out of Egypt (see Exodus 20:1-2).

There is a lot for conservatives to admire and appreciate about Jordan Peterson. Not least his ability to winsomely engage with a largely leftist and hostile media. Peterson is especially good at critiquing postmodernism and identifying its flaws.

But his approach to religion raises some serious reservations and concerns to be put to Christians in regard to the mediatorial work of Christ and the doctrines of grace. In keeping with the current zeitgeist, the spirituality he is presenting is that of ‘therapeutic moral deism’ rather than Biblical Christianity.

The thing about a scholar like Peterson though is that one gets the impression that he is intellectually humble and personally courageous enough to sincerely engage with those questions when challenged by them. At least, I hope he is when he reads this.

Mark Powell is the Associate Pastor of Cornerstone Presbyterian Church, Strathfield.1 February 2018

5:46 PM

does this womans interviewing style seem familiar pt?