Jordan Peterson: my message to the Jews
https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/blog/jordan-peterson-my-message-to-the-jews/
Beware your liberal values — those you see as allies are the vultures waiting for your demise, says author Jordan Peterson.
I have been watching the rising tide of antisemitism for about five years. It first appeared online, manifesting itself in the form of the ethno-nationalist trolling that allowed those who claimed to love their country to find a target for their resentment and rage in the name of patriotism. Then it crept into the so-called real world (although the virtual world is plenty real, folks) in the form of the hypocritical leftist virtue that poses a foundational threat to all that is good, true, meritorious and beautiful.
I have been in a unique position to observe all of this, for someone outside the Jewish community, because of my practical and entrepreneurial alliance with The Daily Wire, the conservative news and entertainment American communication network. The Daily Wire was co-founded by one Ben Shapiro, perhaps the world’s bestknown Orthodox Jew, and a good friend of mine.
Because of this, the antisemitic online trolls, particularly on the right, had plenty to say to me — about my subordination to the dictates of Israel, and about the hypothetical impossibility of me ever saying anything negative about the Jewish enterprise; in short, about my capture by the forces of international Jewry. This was of course accompanied with the meme-images of the positively hook-nosed shared by the scumrat cowards, always anonymous, often equipped with genuinely satanic noms de plume and monikers; always derisive, psychopathic to the core, hiding their alliance with evil behind the secrecy that enables the worst of them to spring forth and pollute the landscape of public discourse to the detriment of all. This attack has become much worse in the aftermath of October 7 — particularly when I call them out, as I have been doing on X, where the outright Nazis have been flourishing to an alarmingly increasing degree over the past few months.
I have spent much of my life studying the evils of antisemitism, obsessed as I have been by the events that unfolded in Germany in the decades prior to the Second World War, where the proclivity of the majority to turn against the eternally successful minority realised itself with the dreadful efficiency and industry that only the most advanced European state could manage. I learned plenty from such study, which was simultaneously exposure to the worst excesses of the worst part of the human psyche — mine included. What did I come to understand and realise, over those many years? First and foremost that there is plenty of the resentful and murderous spirit of Cain in each of us, friends — you included. And if you are one of those butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-my-mouth moral paragons who happen not to think so, then it is even more likely to be true of you.
Canaries To The Slaughter
What else did I conclude? That the Jews are the eternal canary in the coal mine, and that their persecution signals the downfall of a society. Why? First, the Jews are different, and identifiably so. Second — and worse — they are successful, and differentially so. Let us examine those conclusions, one at a time — but, before doing so, also consider this: any society that turns against the successful is, by definition, doomed. Those who bite the hands that feed them soon starve.
In historically Christian societies, the Jews are not our precious individual selves, and they’re not family or kin. What role does that leave for them? Many attempted to assimilate in the West, historically (as there are now). They attempted to circumvent their identifiable differences in France, Austria and Germany, among other places, prior to the Second World War. Others maintained their separate identity, most markedly in the case of the Orthodox. Both strategies had their insufficiencies in the medium- to long-term. When the tide of antisemitism rose once again in France in the late 1800s, in the form of the notorious Dreyfus affair, even assimilated Jews began to get nervous and to prepare. Hence the dawn of so-called Zionism: the request for the Jewish state that eventually became modern Israel.
The same blood-red tide of emergent antisemitism made itself known in Austria, somewhat later, in the political movements that served in part as the precursor to the National Socialist horror of Germany. Meanwhile pogroms raged in Eastern Europe and Russia. The Jews were well-integrated into German society, often for many generations, but that fact failed to protect them when the jackbooted thugs began to patrol the streets, as they are beginning to do again now.
This brings us to the core of the matter: success.
The Jews are, by any standard, successful — and, worse, disproportionately so. They serve, in fact, as the very archetype of the successful. This makes them a dual archetype, actually — first, of “the successful”, and, second, of “the minority.”
This is most famously illustrated in the case of Nobel prizes. In the 20th century, Jews garnered about 25 per cent of those awards — a figure that rose to over 30 per cent in the new millennium. This record of accomplishment exists despite the fact that they comprise a mere 0.2 per cent of the world’s population. Such success is starkly evident elsewhere, albeit in more mundane but still exceptional forms. Sixty per cent of Jews are college graduates, for example, compared to 22 per cent of other Americans. Jews earn two and a half times what is typical for Protestants and Catholics and have family net worths that reflect such disproportion in income.
What should the poor non-Jews make of such a record? Let us begin with the most relevant blunt fact: the most powerful predictor of achievement and accomplishment in complex occupations, far and away, is general cognitive ability. It accounts, conservatively, for something approximating one third of the variance in such success. The second most powerful predictor, the personality trait “conscientiousness”, only manages to account for a comparatively weak five per cent of such vari- ance. Jews do not appear to differ from other ethnic or racial groups in conscientiousness, insofar as that can be measured, but the Ashkenazis have much higher average intelligence — almost a standard deviation, or 15 points, which is roughly the difference, historically, between the average high school graduate and the average recipient of a bachelor’s degree. That difference alone is enough to account for the differential success of Jews, given the indisputable strength of general cognitive ability as a predictor of life success, which is the single best-documented finding in all of social science.
Other reasons have been evinced, including the value placed by Jews on education and attainment, the fact that their peers (other Jews) are also likely to be productive and influential, and their proclivity as outsiders for innovation, but these additional factors are unnecessary, unless it can be demonstrated beyond doubt that they add explanatory power, beyond the brute fact of increased average intelligence.
Don’t hate others’ success How should the non-Jews respond, most productively, to such a difference? Consider an additional and most practical fact. A society that is concerned with productivity and innovation does well to differentially devote resources to the minority who is most likely to be productive and innovate. This will mean that such a minority will garner a disproportionate amount of the available wealth, opportunity and attention — but it means even more fundamentally that everyone else will benefit, and immensely, from the endeavours of the productive minority. It seems an iron rule that some must be more successful, and even dramatically so, for everyone not to be permanently mired in poverty and strife. In consequence, the proper attitude toward those who are successful because of their ability is gratitude, difficult as that might be to make manifest.
There is another perspective, however, that can be adopted toward the productive, innovative and successful, other than the grateful, practical and meritocratic — one that requires less moral effort and offers a certain degree of immediate pathological gratification. It is characterised first by an overweening resentment and envy, and second by the turning of destructive impulses toward the productive and innovative minority.
What might be the leitmotif of those who hate the successful? “Property is theft” is a cliché worth considering in that regard. Terrible as such a sentiment is in its motivations and consequences, it is insufficient to summarise the state of the modern world, and its gathering ressentiment. We have moved way past such merely Marxist niceties.
The postmodernist deconstructionists have multiplied the dimensions of comparative oppression far beyond the merely economic. You can now be oppressed — or oppress — on innumerable grounds, including all those that mark any form of group identity: sex, race, ethnicity, age, appearance, physical ability and attractiveness included. We have perfected a veritable cognitive technology of victimisation, devoting much of the resources of the benighted universities, for example, to elaborating that deadly game. What are its basic rules?
Assume the starkest of dichotomies between oppressor and oppressed, victimiser and victim. Endlessly multiply the dimensions of oppression. Employ the victim/victimiser narrative, simultaneously, to explain and undermine all forms of social enterprise: marriage, family, community, business, state and nation. What is the benefit, psychologically and socially? First, all need for the difficulties of investigation and thought evaporates. When it’s all oppression and oppressed, everything has been explained. There is no need for further, or indeed any, effort in economics, sociology, political science or politics — even for psychology. All mysteries are solved, in relationship to situation and causality. There are those on top. They have stolen all they have from those on the bottom. The pathway forward, furthermore, has become clear: revenge. It is no small matter to be provided with an explanation of infinite range, conveniently applicable when any complex mystery beckons: why is there any misery at all? Because the “successful” have stolen the birthright.
That is all plenty dark, plenty appalling, but it is by no means all the darkness there is. Once the victimiser/victim narrative is in place, the moralising can begin. That is the next benefit, or payoff, of the aforementioned game. When you accept the story of victimisation, you not only understand everything, you have oh-so-easily and magically become a good person. Who could resist such an offer? Not the youth of our day offered that dual blandishment by the modern Pharisees, scribes and lawyers of the progressive mob.
Worse, at least for the Jews (but then for everyone else, the successful first among them): if the fact of disproportionate representation is accepted as evidence for the existence of corrupt machination, then the Jews are the most corrupted. This is exactly what makes the Chosen People canaries in the coal mine. Jews are the eternally successful minority. Thus, any society that no longer welcomes its Jews is already 80 per cent of the way to persecuting anyone who is successful.
And now, something for the Jewish community itself to consider — and as deeply as necessary: the Old Testament corpus itself. The Jews inhabiting any given land all-too-often come to be regarded as an existential threat by their hosts. The eternal reason, as we have seen? Their disproportionate success, and the resentment thereby elicited. The Israelites who are Joseph’s progeny in Egypt, for example, are eventually enslaved by the same people their efforts and ability saved from famine — and it is in consequence of the propagation of such successful effort. What is happening now has happened forever.
And what else? The slavish Israelites who Moses attempts to free — descendants of Joseph all — then place themselves in some real peril, within pharaonic Egypt itself, and during the long post-tyranny desert exile, because they will not notice or shake their identification with the tyrants that persecute them. The same is true now.
Tragically, the Jewish community in the US and elsewhere has identified, in the main, with the purveyors of the oppressor/oppressed narrative. According to the Pew Research Center, among others, seven in ten Jewish adults identify with or lean toward to the Democratic Party — the very increasingly progressive proponents of the story of prosecution and victimisation that explains everything and confers undeserved moral benefit upon its tellers. This pattern of identification was also evident in the UK and Europe, until recent years, when the very antisemitism on the left that is beginning to make itself known in the United States emerged in the older societies of the West.
This is not only a tilt toward Cain, so to speak (given Cain’s self-identification as victim, and his consequent transformation into the adversary of the good), but a marked deviation from Jewish tradition, in its deepest sense, as indicated in the Old Testament canon. One of the most remarkable elements of that truly remarkable collection of texts is the insistence by the Israelite prophets that any problems visited by God upon his Chosen People is a consequence of the errors of the latter and not the moral impropriety of the former.
This means that there is no excuse for playing the victimiser/victim game — even in the aftermath of some terrible historical tragedy; even in the wake of the Holocaust itself. Why is that relevant? Because the leftists now predicate their political and ideological conceptualisations on precisely that Cain-like doctrine, proclaiming, explicitly and implicitly, that all those who by group are statistically over-represented in the upper echelons of success are by definition thieves and tyrants.
And who is mostly so over-represented? Precisely the Jews, as it has forever been. And unfortunately, it cannot be had both ways: it is impossible to simultaneously be the successful and make a case for the identity of success and corruption. And so, here we are: the once-great institutions of higher learning, for example, within which a comparative plethora of hyper-successful Jews once found a welcoming home, have become the very place where Jews now must continually watch their backs.
The Destructive Left
I have encountered no shortage of Right-wing troll antisemites. They are as close to demonic as anything I have ever encountered. They sicken me. But they are (for now) a mere disparate and pathetic rabble in contrast to the monolith of the oppression-purveyors on the left. You believed, my Jewish friends, that the leftists hypothetically fulminating against the exploiters of the poor were your allies, forgetting that your disproportionate (and well-earned) success could so easily make you target number one. Just as it has an indefinite number of times in the past. And just exactly as you see it happening now.
The whole bloody story of victim/victimiser must first be seen for what it is — the moralising machination of the envious and resentful — and then eschewed and abandoned, most particularly by the Jewish liberals, who have by far the most to lose by its embrace. All the diversity, equity and inclusivity that is the modern equivalent of praying in public. All the faux compassion, which is the disguise of the modern wolves in sheep’s clothing. All the idiot left-over Marxism, which has metastasised into the cancer of modern intersectionality and resentful, destructive postmodernism. All the insistence that success is exploitation; virtue is mere sympathy for the marginalized; bitter demands for reparations; and self-pity and accusation. This will take a lot of incision, much of it personal and painful, but if any of the evil seed remains, the evil fruit will reappear. That is why, by the way, you eat unleavened bread, during the passover.
Wake up, my liberal Jewish friends. You simply cannot have your cake and eat it, too. Those you thought were your allies are the very vultures waiting hungrily for your carcasses to appear dead in the street — and we are perilously close to that, as I am sure you have become aware. If your community insists upon allying itself with the ideology that tears down success itself — that casts that success as exploitation, oppression and victimization — you will definitely be the first heads on the chopping block. As you have been forever in the past, and are once again becoming now.
If your success is deserved, so is success itself.
In consequence, the narrative of the vengeful victim must be shown for what it is: the battle cry of the resentful against the honest, productive and generous. You, my Jewish friends — the chosen people of God — are the archetypes of that latter category, first and foremost. Just as it’s always been. For better, and for worse. Do not, therefore, play the victim/victimiser game. You will inevitably end up construed as the latter and living as the former.
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