(Part 2) Top products from r/JordanPeterson

Hello, I'm a bit late to this parade (I just heard Dr. Peterson's podcast with Joe Rogan yesterday) but I wanted to weigh in here.

There are a lot of good sources from a variety of Christian viewpoints. Many of the ones already listed are very good, but I don't see anything from my own particular version of Christianity (Eastern Orthodoxy), so I wanted to suggest two resource for you from that perspective as well as another from C.S. Lewis whose words are held dear by most Christians.



The first is a lecture by Fr. John Behr, the current dean of St Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary. He holds Masters of Philosophy and Doctor of Philosophy from Oxford University. This one is on YouTube and is 1.5 hours in length. It is called Death, the Final Frontier.There are a couple of minutes of fluff at the beginning but it starts to really roll into something I think Jordan Peterson fans would enjoy at the 3-minute mark. It is ostensibly about death, but it is a great critique of modern western culture viewed through the lens of liturgical Christianity.

This second is a recording of a lecture provided by a former dean of the same seminary that I think cuts to the heart of what Christianity actually means. It is called "The Word of the Cross" by Rev. Dr. Thomas Hopko and is around two hours total and has been broken into four individual sections by an Orthodox podcast publisher:
Part 1
[Part 2] (http://www.ancientfaith.com/specials/hopko_lectures/the_word_of_the_cross_part_2)
Part 3
Part 4

Lastly, I would direct you toward the writings of C.S. Lewis. When I was a young teenage atheist, his arguments were very persuasive for me and have been very popular amongst most Christians. I know many Protestants, Orthodox, and Catholics who have all found their first theological footing in Lewis' work. Mere Christianity is probably the best source to steer you toward, but I think his best ideas can be found in The Abolition of Man, The Great Divorce, and Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold. Since you've professed a preference for audio content, I will point you toward a YouTube playlist of the series of BBC radio broadcast lectures that C.S. Lewis gave during WWII that were the core of what later became Mere Christianity.

I'm tempted to also suggest that you read Thomas Merton, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Kirkegaard, Dostoyevsky, St. John Chrysostom, St. Thomas Aquinas, and many, many others. Enjoy your journey!

Edit/response: Your comment has corrected a factual error I have made. I'm not Canadian and thus I spoke from assumption based upon a shared British tradition. In this case, it's not the courts being stripped of power, but rather the bill is too vague and divests interpretation to the existing provincial policy. It is these existing provincial policies that are incoherent and ideologically driven. I think parts of my my point still stands thou, this is not a bill that empowers and strengthens marginalized people, it feels more like a token gesture to make politicians look like they're doing something.

As for "cultural elite", my line of thinking was influenced by Harris and Murry's conversation based on Murry's work in Coming Apart, where the experiences of those making decisions are so far removed from the realities of life for the masses that they find it impossible to see society through any ideological lens than their own.

I would also like to say I'm one of these ignorant "cultural elites", privileged with a educational opportunities that my peers missed out on. After a worrying rise of nationalistic/anti-immigration sentiments in our Australian election followed by Brexit than the US Elections, I was lost and confused. The education I received was failing in its translation and the utopia I though should occur never materialized. It was only though a chance encounter with Peterson's JRE #877 that I got the first big "Ah ha!" moment since I read "The GNU Manifesto" and "Manufacturing Consent" as an impressionable highschooler decades ago.

Peterson's lecture series on Personality and Maps of Meaning presented a nuanced, high resolution explanation for our current chaotic cultural and the forces behind them. He then presents a powerful set of steps that the individual can take that are grounded in practical psychology, evolutionary biology and mythic symbolism. For example, after almost two decades of education I have never heard anything as power as his explanation on why students should be taught to write.

Anyway, sorry for the long edit and thank you /u/Statistical_Insanity for braving the down-votes in this partisan sub-reddit. I hope you join /u/yahooyellow in subscribing and continuing to contribute. Lively, honest (and sometimes messy) intellectual debate is truly what the world needs more of.

You might want to actually learn about CS Lewis.

In Mere Christianity, Lewis bluntly states, quote, that “a Christian society would be what we call Leftist.” His references to capitalism (competition, profit, the accumulation of wealth, marketing, inequality, self-interest) are always critical, often hostile. He insisted that “If you are a Christian you do not have to believe that all the other religions are simply wrong”.

He also routinely criticized British Imperialism, the continuing effects of slavery, and critiqued glorified notions of “the family”. His buddy was crypto-commie George Macdonald, and he was surprised that the United States did not have a “socialist” English-style National Health Service, which he treated as common sense.  On more than one occasion - and in print - he called for economic equality.  When Churchill, in the reactionary 1950s, wanted to award him a “CBE”—Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, Lewis turned it down, because he did not want to be associated with, quote, “anti-leftist propaganda.” He was also a friend of Edith Nesbit, the friend of Karl Marx’s daughter and repeatedly condemned fascism and the far right (especially in Spain) and detested conservatives like Evelyn Waugh. His attitude toward nationalism is especially revealing; he opposed the, quote, “fanatical Nationalist who tells me to throw away my scruples about universal justice and benevolence and adopt a system in which nothing but the wealth and power of my own country matters.”  “Universal justice and benevolence” are basic liberal values he explicitly said on more than one occasion. He even consigned two of England’s hero-sized nationalist monarchs—Henry V and Henry VIII—to Hell.  He also was buddies with the great English Marxist, William Morris, and notice how often the theme of social revolution turns up in Lewis’s books for children. 

And, though he has a reputation in America as a kind of evangelical Christian, Lewis abhorred mixing religion with politics.  “Of all bad men religious bad men are the worst”.  His language is blunt.  “Theocracy is the worst of all governments” and he openly called his beliefs “liberal” and “humanist” and expressed sympathy for the socialists hauled up before the McCarthy hearings, which he did not approve of. Up until he death, he expressed that humanity needed a new economic democracy, and his much touted "Mere Christianity" (perhaps his most popular book in the west) has surprising things to say about capitalism:  “Moses and Aristotle and the Christians agreed in forbidding interest. . . . three great civilisations had agreed in condemning the very thing on which we have based our whole life under capitalism". In a Christian society, he said, “There will be no manufacture of silly luxuries and then of sillier advertisements to persuade us to buy them. A Christian society would be what we now call Leftist”.

But of course, like Orwell (and numerous civil rights leaders), CS Lewis is whitewashed in the west.

Finding a good book is a great way to sort out a reading issue. I got HOOKED to Stephen King during my first tour in Iraq. I later would become my captain's driver, and he would joke about how I would read more books in a two week training exercise than he did during his four years of college.

If you like this sort of book, I may suggest Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin. I had a hard time with the first chapter, as I still have some things to sort out regarding my own service, but it is a fantastic book and well worth the read.

OK, it's only been happening now a couple of generations, but I'm increasingly thinking it's worth seriously addressing the proposition that intelligence in women is selected against.

Not saying this is a good thing - it's plainly not - but it is true that the more intelligent a woman is then the less children she has.

http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2010/06/25/childlessness-up-among-all-women-down-among-women-with-advanced-degrees/

https://www.amazon.com/The-Intelligence-Paradox-Intelligent-Choice/dp/0470586958

Where that goes is speculation, but as there is a selective pressure we would expect some outcome - and these things can happen over a surprisingly few generations (as the siberian foxes demonstrate)

Eh, Marx was inevitable. He took the ideas of a genius, Hegel, and the idea of the historical dialectic and inverted it.

Marx made a good observation about a way of interpreting the driving forces behind human history. He was ultimately wrong (historical materialism is too simplistic), but that idea was going to happen one way or the other.

We ought to blame Marx as much as Stalin and Mao as well as everyone else who behaved like a total fuckwad when it wasn’t necessary to behave like a total fuckwad.

I recommend everyone to listen to Peter Singer summarize Hegel

https://www.amazon.com/Hegel-Short-Introduction-Peter-Singer/dp/019280197X

And Marx

https://www.amazon.com/Marx-Short-Introduction-Peter-Singer/dp/0192854054

Edit: Lots of overlap between Peterson and Hegel btw. Though Hagel was highly critical of the Classical Liberal notion of freedom.

Edit: Fixed spelling for all anal retentives

> https://www.amazon.co.uk/Imperialism-Study-J-Hobson/dp/0851247881

Talking about imperialism is anti-Semitic? That’s a new one. Lol. Btw, are you Jewish?

> united by the strongest bonds of organization, always in closest and quickest touch with one as other, situated in the very heart of the business capital of every state, controlled, so far as Europe is concerned, by men of a single and peculiar race, who have behind them many centuries of financial experience, they are in a unique position to control the policy of nations.

It’s very suspicious you don’t quote the whole thing but start literally in the middle of a sentence. It’s almost like you’re afraid to show the whole quote. Why is that?

> This is the same guy who attends Islamists celebrating the slaughter of Jews ("present but not involved" he claimed after photographs emerged).

Source.

>He calls the killers of Jews "friends".

Lol you mean Hamas. He didn’t say he’s friends with people who kills Jews. See you’re being dishonest.

>He came down like a ton of bricks against Sarah Champion (in whose constituency 1500 children had been raped by Muslims) but he interferes on behalf of antisemites in the Labour party in disciplinary investigations (c.f. Panorama).

Because those were all also shams.

>He has promoted antisemitic artwork

Which he apologized for and owned up to. I can respect that. Anti-semitism is so deeply ingrained into all of us just like all forms of racism. Unintentional displays of it might happen, but it’s whats you do with it and he did the right thing.

>and has been members of Facebook and Whatsapp groups that have among other things contained holocaust denial.

You’re a member of a subreddit where people say all sorts of awful things, like spreading white nationalist propaganda. I guess that makes you bad too, right?

>This epistemological layer does not exist and your term in neuroscience is referring how we perceive the world based on how many different types of sense data we are able to use. For example, we cannot see infra-red, so by our own senses, we will miss that part of reality. Our eyes, only retain a certain spectrum and everything outside of it is invisible to us.

The different types of sense data precisely refer to our human brain and its human perception which is different from other animals' because the type of sense data they use are different. Everything outside the types of sense data we can acquire is invisible to us so what I perceive as visible is different from what other species do. How does this not create an epistemological gap? The neuroscientist david eagleman writes in explaining this concept

>what you are able to experience is completely limited by your biology. This differs from the commonsense view that our eyes, ears, and fingers passively receive an objective physical world outside of ourselves. As science marches forward with machines that can see what we can't, it has become clear that our brains sample a small bit of the surrounding physical world

This is precisely what I'm trying to tell. We do not see the world as it is but perceive it to the extent that evolution has allowed us; and we attribute different qualities to the objects depending on our biology. Crap tastes disgusting to me but it is delicious to flies because our biologies are different. Again, how do you square this with ayn rand's objectivism which rejects this epistemological layer proven by science?

>But you can ask the same question about a colour blind person - if you see yellow, but he sees blue, then who is actually seeing reality as it is?

>The point is that your eyes are an organ with an identity and nature of their own. The colour blind person will only get the colour blue from his eyes and his brain will need to use logic and say 'hold on a minute, I see it as blue, but I know that I am missing some colours on the spectrum and other people may see those colours differently. Maybe if I used special glasses, I can see more colours'.

True but this would still mean we perceive the world differently depending on our brain. The world I perceive and the world in itself are separated by my brain. They are related of course, because if there is no physical world then I can't perceive anything at all, but they are not identical. We see the world through our brains and our brains are suited to our natural environment so different animals see the world differently. I see a cockroach and feel disgusted, and a spider sees it and thinks it is delicious. So is a cockroach disgusting or delicious? It depends on your biology.

>If you bring back in Aristotle's law of identity and apply it to sense organs, brains and consciousness itself, there is no need for all this fantastical make-belief noumena world and mystical rules.

>Kant himself, like a lot of famous mathematicians, takes some small points from reality, makes a formula from it, then applies that formula to its infinite conclusion even when it makes no sense any more.

No one says there are some mystical rules. Kant never says the categories are mystical. They are all universally true and rational tools through which we see the world. Where does kant say they are mystical? Cite the passage please.

>Put simply, when you severe reason from reality, you get subjectivity, relativity.. etc. No matter how much YOU think you are being reasonable, you have no correspondence to reality - it just 'sounds good' in your head. Perhaps you can even attach a past experience to it afterwards, to give it more credibility in your head.

>To me, reading Kant was always like reading the biography of the author of 'Alice in Wonderland' and this was later proved to me when I ran into a psychiatrist that found a strong connections between how schizophrenics view the world and Kant's work.

>https://www.amazon.com/Madness-Modernism-Insanity-Literature-Thought/dp/0674541375

No one is severing reason from reality. You keep saying this because you haven't read a proper book on kant or kant's books themselves. Kant made it clear that he was an empirical realist, that geometry, mathematics, and sciences are objectively true for all humans. Now maybe the mathematics of a dolphin is different from ours, we can't know that but what does it matter? You are a human being so whether you like it or not you have a human brain which says 2 + 2 = 4. Simple as that.

I would recommend betrand russel's book for introduction to philosophy. He isn't perfect but at least he doesn't misinterpret the whole western philosphy like hicks does.

Edit: besides I wonder, would you say aristotle was an objectivist pro reasom thinker or anti reason relativist?

IQ is actually negatively correlated with reproductive success, which on a longer timescale is all that really matters.

The Intelligence Paradox is an interesting book that goes into this.
https://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-Paradox-Intelligent-Choice-Always/dp/0470586958

I feel the same way, but I forgave my dad, and all dads who couldn't deliver the message as effectively, after reading "Under Saturn's Shadow." Check it out. It's been recommended on the sub before:https://www.amazon.com/Under-Saturns-Shadow-Wounding-Psychology/dp/0919123643

/u/Magnificrab a critique is not an ideal starting place for someone new to a subject.

PlzFadeMeBro when you are first learning about something it is best to start from a neutral position and then proceed to sophisticated supporters and detractors. To do otherwise is to risk becoming an ignorant and dogmatic ideologue.

Oxford University Press produces a series of books called Very Short Introductions that provide accessible introductions to different topics.

https://www.amazon.ca/Marx-Short-Introduction-Peter-Singer/dp/0192854054
https://www.amazon.ca/Postmodernism-Short-Introduction-Christopher-Butler/dp/0192802399

Read "Man's Search for Meaning" by Vicktor Frankl.

It's perfect for situations like that.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/080701429X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_jOJsDbAWE6XV3

You're defining this hypothetical and any other dimensions that comes along with it. I'm not sure what kind of answer your going to expect because issues of compulsion are going to be a case by case basis on real world embodied individuals.

If you looking for modern science about the gambit of addictions I might recommend When The Master Becomes The Servant I wouldn't say Powers is a "Peterson" type but his field is about this subject.

One person Peterson has cited is Frankl. You might enjoy Man's Search For Meaning very short book.

Andrew Breitbart was a leftist until he watched the left defame and destroy the reputation of Clarence Thomas as he was being nominated for SC justice. He went on to be a force for the new right. Check out his book about it. It's great: https://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Indignation-Excuse-While-World/dp/0446572837/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1538184082&sr=8-1&keywords=andrew+breitbart

The Tory vote went from 11m to 14m, Labour from 9m to 13m. The Tories got the same vote as 1994 (and under Thatcher) Labour tot the same vote as 1997. In other words these are likely "peak votes". No party will be increasing their vote at the next election, the winner will be the party who loses the least... and BoJo inspires his voter base. Corbyn's star has been fading.

And yes, he is a lifelong antisemite. The evidence is overwhelming. But if you want it in print here it is:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Imperialism-Study-J-Hobson/dp/0851247881

Corbyn wrote a forward to that book and it expressly claims the press and the financial markets are a conspiracy operated by Jews. For example:

>united by the strongest bonds of organization, always in closest and quickest touch with one as other, situated in the very heart of the business capital of every state, controlled, so far as Europe is concerned, by men of a single and peculiar race, who have behind them many centuries of financial experience, they are in a unique position to control the policy of nations.

>Does anyone seriously suppose that a great war could be undertaken by any European State, or a great State loan subscribed, if the house of Rothschild and its connections set their face against it?

This is the same guy who attends Islamists celebrating the slaughter of Jews ("present but not involved" he claimed after photographs emerged). He calls the killers of Jews "friends". He came down like a ton of bricks against Sarah Champion (in whose constituency 1500 children had been raped by Muslims) but he interferes on behalf of antisemites in the Labour party in disciplinary investigations (c.f. Panorama). He has promoted antisemitic artwork and has been members of Facebook and Whatsapp groups that have among other things contained holocaust denial.

If this was any other person in British politics on a different "team" to your you would not hesitate to call them for what they are: a racist hater of Jews.

Here's another interesting I've read and can recommend on reclaiming the father archetype for modern men: https://www.amazon.com/Under-Saturns-Shadow-Wounding-Psychology/dp/0919123643

It's less about loss and the rise of the feminine and more about the shadow of the masculine. A tough read, but worthwhile.

Have you read Literature Lost?

It's 15 years old, but I'd be interested in your assessment of it if you have.

As far as the book recommendations go, it would be good if you could qualify what kind of books you're interested in (e.g. philosophy, psychology, history, science, etc.).


Books I recommend:


Psychology (or: On Human Nature)

The Anatomy of Violence: The Biological Roots of Crime

Thinking, Fast and Slow (my personal favorite)

The Undiscovered Self

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

History

Strategy: A History

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Marxism, Fascism, and Totalitarianism

Economics

Economics in One Lesson

Basic Economics


Politics

Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government

As always, the list of books to read is too long, so I'll stop here.

I liked them, they reminded me of https://www.amazon.com/Red-Book-Philemon-C-Jung/dp/0393065677

Another thought, get a copy of this for each of your respective sons:
https://www.amazon.com/Way-Warrior-Kid-Wimpy-Navy/dp/1250151074

Has anyone read The Screwtape Letters ? Ben Shapiro has been talking about it for a while.

https://www.amazon.com/Way-Warrior-Kid-Wimpy-Navy/dp/1250151074

Read This Book.

The book is Ordinary Men.

I really cannot explain all the concepts in a quote.. nor a picture.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Ominous-Parallels-End-Freedom-America/dp/0452011175/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3ROUU99CWA6F3&keywords=the+ominous+parallels&qid=1555697098&s=gateway&sprefix=the+ominous+p%2Caps%2C128&sr=8-1

btw, this was a better explanation of what happened in Nazi Germany than the book 'ordinary men'.

Read this, and, if possible, ask that she reads it too.

https://www.amazon.com/Owning-Your-Own-Shadow-Understanding/dp/0062507540

Excuse me as I'm just stumbling about on reddit, but I came across this post's title and was intrigued enough to dip deeper. Doing this mostly to save these links for later but am up for a robust discussion on the matter.

Across all scientists in the US, only 6% identify as Republican and 9% as conservative: http://www.people-press.org/2009/07/09/section-4-scientists-politics-and-religion/

The only empirical study of evolutionary psychologists suggests that PhD students who self-identify as adaptationists are much less conservative than the general public, and no more conservative than non-adaptationists: http://www.unm.edu/~tybur/docs/Testing_the_Controversy.pdf

There is nevertheless a perception that evolutionary psychologists are coming from a right-wing standpoint: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26785604

There are well-known cases where evolutionary psychologists have published very bad science with clear ideological bias: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satoshi_Kanazawa

Published criticism of evolutionary psychology comes generally not from social psychologists, but cognitive scientists, neurobiologists, biological anthropologists (EDIT and philosophers of science):

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/adapting-minds

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=KeqiKNFa3YgC

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Getting-Darwin-Wrong-Evolutionary-Psychology/dp/1845402073

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Alas-Poor-Darwin-Evolutionary-Psychology/dp/0099283190

https://instruct.uwo.ca/psychology/371g/Smith2001.pdf

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2005.04.003

Innate sex differences in children would be a likely implication of the veracity of evolutionary psychology. However there is little solid evidence for sex differences in children's brains:

https://www.amazon.com/Pink-Brain-Blue-Differences-Troublesome/dp/0547394594/

https://sites.google.com/site/dianehalperncmc//books/sex-differences-in-cognitive-abilities

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16366817

No such thing as the far left?

https://www.amazon.com/Black-Book-Communism-Crimes-Repression/dp/0674076087

Everyone needs to read Breitbart's Righteous Indignation. You've been lied to about this guy. He's a true hero, that's why he was murdered (look into it).

https://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Indignation-Excuse-While-World/dp/0446572837/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1526992910&sr=8-1&keywords=righteous+indignation+andrew+breitbart

If you think it's still possible to expand upon what you already know, you could start here. You can even pick your favorite discipline:

* Philosophy: Stephen Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault.

* Literature: John Ellis, Literature Lost: Social Agendas and the Corruption of the Humanities.

* History: Keith Windschuttle, The Killing of History.

* Science: Noretta Koertge, editor, A House Built on Sand: Exposing Postmodernist Myths About Science.

* Law: Daniel Farber and Suzanna Sherry, Beyond All Reason: The Radical Assault on Truth in American Law.

​

Or you could just accept that one does not need advanced degrees in philosophy to study, understand, analyze and interpret it - not to mention TO philosophize - and read this: https://jordanbpeterson.com/philosophy/postmodernism-definition-and-critique-with-a-few-comments-on-its-relationship-with-marxism/

A lot of good points and excellently argued.

You may be right as regards the timeline here. Like I said, although I poke my head in every now and then, I do not follow Peterson as closely as I used to, so exactly when he realized he would have the kind of public support he has garnered, I am not in a great position to say. I take too your point about Peterson being in a somewhat sheltered academic post and I think that explains a great deal. When I see Peterson post random dregs from academic journals on Twitter with the caption "Look out biologists! They're coming for you next!" I often wonder 'what in the world is this guy on about?' I think a good corollary to the axiom 'to the man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail,' is 'to a man confronted with nails everyday, it starts to look like a pretty good idea to keep a hammer handy.' Perhaps if I was a more or less permanent fixture in the machine of academia, I would begin to feel a similar kind of overwhelm in response to the type of moral confusion of which college campuses seem uniquely capable of producing these days.

As far as the Alexander quote, I'm not sure how you wouldn't define someone feeling that 'their very right to exist is being challenged' as an activation of the underdog archetype. In fact, from an adaptive standpoint (in case you couldn't tell from my glowing recommendation of Stevens, I subscribe to the biological paradigm of the archetypes), I would argue that this is exactly what the underdog archetype was evolved for. In the environment of evolutionary adaptiveness, consider what happens to the individual that underestimates his enemy (i.e. assumes overdog status), and then to the individual that overestimates his enemy (i.e. assumes underdog status). And the adaptive advantages of assuming underdog status aren't restricted to the individual. If you want to whip up an irrational, violent mob, the standard way to begin is by convincing them that they are under attack from a bigger, stronger enemy. There is clearly some utility in feeling that one's 'very right to exist is being challenged,' as well as some dangers to not being conscious of the processes taking place. If I think a lion is challenging my very right to exist, its good to be aware of my handicap. If I think that a Professor that refuses to call me Ze or Zir is challenging my right to exist, it is the same archetype, maladaptively projected. One gets the same feeling that they are under attack but they are profoundly confused as to how dire the objective situation really is. (Or, put bluntly: they are unconscious).

Similarly, I have to also disagree with your assertion that "Nobody vocal is ever motivated by fear of their fellow man." The fear may be unconscious, but as far as I'm concerned, where there is aggression, there is unconscious fear, exactly for the reasons I outlined above.

EDIT: Re-reading your comment, that remark about Alexander being a 'creative writing visionary type' jumped out at me and reminded me of another 'creative writing visionary type' that I happen to have learned an awful lot from. I guess I'm giving away my username here but I'm assuming you already had that one figured out ;)

> Russia before socialism was a semi-feudal backward country that regularly had famines.

And after that it became a gulag-country where everyone was worse off than before.

>Yes and capitalism creates unemployment. In socialist countries there was basically 0 unemployment.

If you consider forced labor "employment", then you can opt for prison in a capitalist society as well. You get free food, free housing, and about as much freedom as you get under communism.

>Citation needed. These countries often had famine sway before socialism.

Are you serious? Have you never heard of Holodomor? Have you never heard of Mao's death toll? They surpassed previous famines.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine

>Already famous throughout Europe, this international bestseller plumbs recently opened archives in the former Soviet bloc to reveal the actual, practical accomplishments of Communism around the world: terror, torture, famine, mass deportations, and massacres. Astonishing in the sheer detail it amasses, the book is the first comprehensive attempt to catalogue and analyze the crimes of Communism over seventy years.

>https://www.amazon.com/Black-Book-Communism-Crimes-Repression/dp/0674076087

The author of that quora answer criticize James Damore for providing only a "few hand-picked papers" to make his case. I can't help but notice that she does an even worse job than he did.

Here is a breakdown of all the link she listed in her answer :

Self quote, where she quote herself... sometime on completely unrelated questions :

• What do feminists think of distinct gender roles in other species, for example, in chickens?
  
  
• Is masculine brain biologically or from an evolutionary perspective better suited to concentrate / focus than feminine brain?
  
  
• Should men care about feminism?
  
  Mainstream media article (vox, business insider, financial times etc.) :
  
  
• A Google employee was fired after blaming biology for tech’s gender gap
  
  
• Unconscious bias hinders diversity recruitment
  
  
• The Data on Diversity
  
  
• Who Blames the Victim?
  
  
• Why Self-Awareness Matters and How You Can be More Self-Aware
  
  
• Decisions and Desire
  
  
• What Is Fascism?
  
  
• There’s still no good reason to believe black-white IQ differences are due to genes
  
  Blogs :
  
  
• Picture yourself as a stereotypical male
  
  
• So, about this Googler’s manifesto.
  
  Wikipedia articles :
  
  
• Stereotype threat
  
  
• Moral foundations theory
  
  
• Moral disengagement
  
  Broken links :
  
  
• ???
  
  Books :
  
  
• Pink Brain, Blue Brain: How Small Differences Grow Into Troublesome Gaps -- And What We Can Do About It
  
  
• Sex Differences in Cognitive Abilities
  
  Scientific studies (most of which seems to be unrelated to the claims made in the Google memo)
  
  
• Power Increases Infidelity Among Men and Women Wat?
  
  
• Cuckolded Fathers Rare in Human Populations WTF
  
  
• Gender differences and bias in open source: pull request acceptance of women versus men
  
  
• Early androgen exposure and human gender development
  
  
• No relationship between prenatal androgen exposure and autistic traits: convergent evidence from studies of children with congenital adrenal hyperplasia and of amniotic testosterone concentrations in typically developing children. WTF

Ok, then I'll not refer you to a book on spiritual formation, what I think you probably need most, seeing as how it probably wouldn't be received by you well. So we'll stick with purely psychological approach. I'd say remember that there's two psychic shadows, your personal shadow and the collective uncounscious shadow. The personal shadow will appear in dreams as the same sex as the individual and is the first aspect of the psyche to be integrated in the process of individuation.

Intergrating the shadow doesn't mean finding a crative outlet for every dark impulse that it represents, its more a matter of being present with those thoughts, feelings and desires, recognizing them within yourself so you don't project their content onto others and condemn them for what you're unwilling to accept as a part of yourself.

There's a nugget of gold in the muck of the shadow that's a key to self-realization and actualization, but most of the shadow isn't that gold, something important to keep in mind. Also, the shadow of the collective unconscious is essentially the absolute evil of the Devil, the face of evil itself. Considering what you've said about your shadow it seems as though either you have a particularly dark personal shadow, or that your personal constitution is heavily influenced by archetypal patterns, in this case, the collective shadow.

I'd recommend Owning Your Own Shadow.

As far as I'm concerned, nearly the entire school of postmodernism rises from rotten soil (largely German idealism, Continential philosophy, Marxism, and phenomenology) and is thoroughly anti-rational. One of my favorite philosophy books, The Ominous Parallels examines how German idealism and postmodernism gave rise to totalitarian political philosophies (especially the Nazis) and how even post-fascism, post-modernism is still pushing people in the same direction.

In essence post-modernism argues that because nearly all human knowledge has its ultimate origin in some subjective judgment or observation about the world, therefore all human knowledge is subject to subjective interpretation and criticism. It seeks to undermine rationality (man's primary tool for making sense of the world) by declaring everything to subjective and/or a social construct - to be interpreted by the viewer in any way they see fit. As if all history is just the story we agree to tell, all science is just people's best guesses, economics how we steal from each other, and philosophy the lies we tell to justify the world being how it is.

My next big beef with post-modernism is their willful exercise of obscurantism. The term refers to the deliberate use of vague, unclear, or jargon-heavy language for the purpose of concealing the true meaning of the text, rather than just saying it in clear and understandable prose. Derrida is practically the poster-boy for this, and he learned from Heidegger the card-carrying Nazi.

At the risk of tooting my own horn, I'm one of the most voracious readers I've ever met. I'm the kinda guy who reads philosophy for fun, and I've read a lot of it. And every time I've tried to read post-modernist texts, I've walked away in frustration as I had no idea what they were actually trying to say. Their logic is invariably impossible to follow, their texts filled with bullshit and filler, and their actual ideas to be thin gruel and trivial at best, or flat out wrong at worst.

The unsophisticated and uncritical often mistake obscurantist texts for having profound deep meanings that ordinary person just doesn't understand. I consider that bullshit. To me, obscurantism is the hallmark of the intellectual fraud. The purpose of language is communicate clear and consistent meanings, not to distort, confuse, and hide meaning. Unfortunately it has a long tradition in bad philosophy - Kant was a past master of the art.

To me, Foucault is a thinly-veiled Marxist sadomasochist. Kant (the ultimately ancestor of postmodernism) an OCD-sufferer who undermined rationality in order to attempt a reconciliation of science and Church dogma. Heidegger a nihilistic Nazi. And as for Derrida, I think he's one of the biggest frauds of them all. I haven't seen a single idea of his that I think has any merit and I consider his boast that his work is impossible to criticize as proof positive that he is a fraud, and worse, a dangerous fraud.

To me, philosophy must come correct and be written for the purpose of being understood by most if not all who read it, or else it's simply not philosophy worth reading. If you can't or won't communicate the meaning behind your thoughts clearly, then you have no business calling yourself a philosopher or having your thoughts taken seriously.

> ". . . anyone who reads deconstructive texts with an open mind is likely to be struck by the same phenomena that initially surprised me: the low level of philosophical argumentation, the deliberate obscurantism of the prose, the wildly exaggerated claims, and the constant striving to give the appearance of profundity, by making claims that seem paradoxical, but under analysis often turn out to be silly or trivial."

-- John Searle on Deconstruction

First off, I don't think it's helpful to take the hard position of "there is a war on boys/men" unless you can thoroughly argue that position. A "War" implies aggressors and defenders which puts people you're trying to convince on the defensive. Even if you believe it's true, taking such a hard position without having your arguments air tight just defeats your purpose. Even if you do have your arguments on point, it's easy for people to use a strawman to say you think women are oppressing men. Even worse they will take you as saying women seeking equality oppresses men, or that you're saying men are powerless, then dismiss your claims based on that misunderstanding.

I would recommend making a softer assertion along the lines of "the well being of men has been declining in the Western world." That softer claim is much easier to defend, just look at suicide rates, incarceration rates, education stats, life expectancy rates etc. Take an approach that is closer to "we are all int his together so we should all want both men and women to do well and right now men need help." That triggers the leftist desire for collectivism and cooperation.

Tucker Carlson is running a Men in America segment every Wednesday this month about how men are in trouble these days. He provides a ton of stats and statistics on the topic. I'll edit this if I can find links to the segments.

March 7 Tucker: Something ominous is happening to men in America

March 14 Tucker: Washington not worried about male wage crisis

With any of these books, I highly recommend looking up video interviews with the authors to get more information and to see how they condense their arguments.

The war against boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men by Christina Hoff Sommers.



Men on Strike: Why Men Are Boycotting Marriage, Fatherhood, and the American Dream - and Why It Matters Paperback –
by Helen Smith PhD

Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 Paperback – January 29, 2013
by Charles Murray


The gender gap stuff has been going on since the 1970s. Economist Thomas Sowell, student of Milton Friedman, has been explaining how asinine the claim is for decades. Here he is dismantaling it back in the 1970s.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_sGn6PdmIo

[Here is another take down from more recently.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EK6Y1X_xa4
) This interview covers his book Economic
Facts and Fallacies, the chapter Male-Female Facts and Fallacies would be a good resource for you to read and take notes on concerning the pay gap myth. Here are some good quotes from that chapter.

>“History shows that the career paths of women over the course of the twentieth century bore little resemblance to a scenario in which variations in employer discrimination explain variations in women’s career progress.”

> “The proportion of women in professions and other high-level positions was greater during the first decades of the twentieth century than in the middle, all before anti-discrimination laws or the rise of the feminist movement.” Further, “There is no pay gap for full-time workers 21-35 living alone,” and, “As far back as 1969, academic women who never married earned more than academic men who never married.”

>In another study, from 2005, “Among college-educated never married individuals with no children who worked full time and were from 40 to 64 years old, men averaged $40,000 a year and women $47,000.” What, then, explains cases when the numbers tilt the other way?

Here is a transcript of the above interview. Here is a good one...

>Interviewer: Well, you're right. I'm gonna quote you again. "Among the many factors which influence male-female economic differences, the most elusive is employer discrimination."

>Dr. Sowell: Yes, that when you correct for all the various factors such as the number of hours worked, the continuous employment versus taking a few years out to have children and so on, you take all that into account, the differences between men and women become quite trivial. If you look at the academic world or as far back in 1969, women who were
never married and earn higher incomes than men would never marry. They became
tenure professor at a higher rate than men who would never marry. And then later on if
you look at the general population, if you take the women who are past the childbearing
years and they work continuously, their incomes were higher than men who would work
continuously and so on. So the difference is that not that the employer is paying them
differently, but that they have different characteristics.

>Interviewer: So, the central variable and explaining economic differences between men and
women is not employer discrimination, not the rise of feminism, it's that women--it's
child rearing, marriage and child rearing, that's the variable.

>Sowell: Yes.

>Interviewer: As that varies, a woman's arrival or participation rate in higher level occupations
varies with that, that's—

>Sowell:Absolutely.

>Interviewer: Okay. Now in principle, you note, family responsibilities could be perfectly evenly divided between fathers and mothers. But that isn't the way it has worked in practice.
Quote, I'm quoting you again. "Since economic consequences follow from practices
rather than principles, the asymmetrical division of domestic responsibilities produces
male-female difference in income." Question, what are the policy implications of that?
If we become fixed on eliminating male-female income differences, is it the case that the
only choice, the only route for doing that is to involve the government in redesigning the
very nature of the family?










The Pay Gap Myth and Other Lies That Won’t Die
By THOMAS SOWELL

Thomas Sowell takes down the gender 'wage' gap


***

Milton Friedman - Case Against Equal Pay for Equal Work - Professor Friedman explains how support for "equal pay for equal work" helps promote sexism.

This is an interesting argument but to fully understand what he is referring to you need to understand that minimum wage laws have traditionally been used as a way to oppress weaker social groups.
If there is any work where being a man or being a woman makes an individual more qualified for a job or better suited to the job, then the only power the unsuited party has is to offer to work for less money. If you insist on equal pay though you remove that one economic incentive the less desired group has to convince someone to hire them, they cost less.

This is captured well in the generally true claim "No man hates another more than he loves himself." You can be the biggest racist or sexist in the world but it's very rare for that prejudice to be motivating enough that you would see your business where you derive your livelihood and the security of your children fail just to spite someone. There are so many examples of very racist people putting their prejudices aside in order to hire minorities simply because it's cheaper to do so. Establishing equal pay or minimum wage laws completely removes the economic incentive to put your own prejudices aside. They remove greed as a motivating factor for giving people opportunity.

Economist Walter E Williams has written a book on this called South Africa's War Against Capitalism based on his study of the country during apartheid. Milton is making a similar argument against equal pay as Williams did concerning minimum wage. Williams point was that if you have racism in a society where people are irrationality predisposed not to hire a certain group, then the only power that group has to get a job is to offer to work for less. That's why white, racist labor unions have always been the ones to push minimum wage laws when confronted by a minority population competing for jobs. You saw the same thing happen in the US when black men moved North and competed with white laborers for railroad jobs. The white unions pushed for our first minimum wage laws which removed the economic incentive from employers to hire minorities.

If you take the feminist argument seriously, that there is rampant sexism in certain industries, then it makes no sense to force those industries to pay women an equal amount. Rather than hiring them despite their sexism because they can pay them less, those employers will simply stop hiring women altogether because they hate women. To me this shows the irrationality of the claims that feminist make about sexism being the cause of a lack of representation in certain fields. It's not because of sexism but because of self-selection. In countries with higher levels of gender equality you see even higher rather of self-selection in jobs. There are far more women in tech in countries that rate low on women's rights. Russia for example.

Economist Walter E Williams - Minimum Wage as a Racist Tool 2:20