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>Not transcripts, not articles, not a canon of closely aligned materials by his grad students. The power to convey these truths evidently resides in Peterson an
by DanAndersen 9y ago
>Not transcripts, not articles, not a canon of closely aligned materials by his grad students. The power to convey these truths evidently resides in Peterson and Peterson alone.
I don't think that's entirely true. The Peterson fan-groups on Reddit often have group readings of books that haven't been written by Peterson but have been recommended (Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Solzhenitsyn).
I do agree that there's something of a cult of personality surrounding Peterson, and for that reason I try to keep that in mind and keep him at arm's length despite agreeing with a lot of what he says. But I do think that such behaviors are common and inevitable. Consider the "I f*cking love science" crowd and their focus on clips from Neil deGrasse Tyson or Carl Sagan (their written material is a distant second in popularity to their broadcast presentation) or the trend a few years ago of receiving news through a Stewart/Colbert-style format of ideology + humor. There's something almost inescapable about the human desire to associate with a group/club/tribe, to find a leader to rally around, and to indulge the urge to worship.