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So how come not everyone can be a prophet? The Bible tells us why people who wouldn’t listen to the Pharisees listened to Jesus: “He spoke as one who had confid

So how come not everyone can be a prophet? The Bible tells us why people who wouldn’t listen to the Pharisees listened to Jesus: “He spoke as one who had confidence”. You become a prophet by saying things that you would have to either be a prophet or the most pompous windbag in the Universe to say, then looking a little too wild-eyed for anyone to be comfortable calling you the most pompous windbag in the universe. You say the old cliches with such power and gravity that it wouldn’t even make sense for someone who wasn’t a prophet to say them that way. “He, uh, told us that we should do good, and not do evil, and now he’s looking at us like we should fall to our knees.” “Weird. Must be a prophet. Better kneel.”

lhnz 9y ago
I've noticed this in teams, too. Sometimes there is something which is clear to everybody, but which needs the right person to say it, in order for it to have the necessary gravitas to be followed. I think a lot of people need authority figures to function.
tenaciousDaniel 9y ago
I can't get onboard with this interpretation. There are a ton of people who are very charismatic and prone to making sweeping statements about the universe, and yet they don't gain a substantial following. Reza Aslan, for example. He's popular, but not nearly on Peterson's level. There are people who are drawn to Peterson simply due to his charisma, but I think at the end of the day there's something else going on. I think he's hit some kind of nerve though it's difficult to pinpoint it. Edit: Ha, maybe I should read the goddamn piece before commenting.
- rusk 9y ago
  He has absolutely hit a nerve, or hit a few nerves and done so with great accuracy. You see the thing about Peterson is for whatever reason (could even be just for the purposes of marketing himself), he is very much the controversialist. Time and again he'll say something controversial that he knows will troll a huge audience and then he's always got research and facts to back it up. That his take is often facile isn't really of consequence as any typical interviewer doesn't have the tools to take him up on it. The guy is a professor of psychology. You may not like him or his views, but he is "smart", and fundamentally the meat of his message is actually quite benign so you can't even really accuse him of being "bad". It's like he's built his own persona into this gigantic strawman that looks like an ogre to everybody.
  - weego 9y ago
    Is it really that controversial though? I'm nearly 40 and I feel like had Jordan Peterson said a lot of what he says now when I was at University it would have been of almost no note whatsoever. It feels more like his statements are elevated to controversy by how polarised, anti-contextual and narrow the margins of contemporary discourse have become rather than him being particularly controversial. "Enforcing equality of outcomes though imbalanced policy is less desirable than giving equality of choice and letting other natural variables dictate the outcome" seems such an uncontroversial statement as to be almost self-evident, and yet...
    - rusk 9y ago
      Like I say, the meat of his ideas are not controversial and actually quite banal. He doesn't really say a lot of things that self-help authors haven't been saying for years. As you point out the acceptable margins of contemporary discourse are stifling and he purposely sets out to challenge (even "bait") them, and this is what's controversial. I think this is what people like him for, as much as for his actual therapeutic writings.
      - weego 9y ago
        "he purposely sets out to challenge (even "bait") them, and this is what's controversial" You've summed up exactly what I was trying to get to but failed in 10x as many words. Thank you.
    - n4r9 9y ago
      I don't think controversy needs to be modern. To take a more extreme example, it was common just over 100 years ago in the UK to hear that women should not have the vote due to the distinct natures of men and women [0]. Now (for comparison's sake) we hear Peterson talking about how women are naturally more "agreeable" and "self-sacrificing", and that this is vital for the purposes of childcare [1]. I'm not qualified to debate biological determinism, but I do wonder whether statements like this reinforce existing prejudices about the capabilities of both men and women in the workforce. Just recently for example there was an article about how men tend not to work in nurseries, "as parents assume they pose risk to children" [2]. [0] http://www.johndclare.net/Women1_ArgumentsAgainst.htm http://www.johndclare.net/Women1_ArgumentsAgainst.htm [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9hcKUUFn5k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9hcKUUFn5k [2] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/2018/03/14/majority-councils-have-no-men-working-nurseries-parents-assume/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/2018/03/14/majority-co...
psyc 9y ago
Having watched a lot of Peterson's lectures, there's a fact about him which I think might lead a lot of critics to say false things about his level of confidence or arrogance. He speaks in a very confident, impassioned tone, but his actual words are permeated by deep humility.
- rusk 9y ago
  Yes, there is a dissonance there that led me to be suspicious at first. It's probably just that he's an introvert who learned "how to speak confidently" from a book or a course or something. That said, I don't think he comes across as completely intellectually honest in a lot of his interviews. I think that this might be more a product of a lot of the bad faith he's been subjected to than anything intrinsic to his ideas. Though I do think he plays it up a bit now to broaden his reach.
  - thinkingemote 9y ago
    I think he learnt how to speak from a few decades of teaching, and in his teaching technique (as opposed to speech giving, debating). I've noticed most teachers and lecturers I've met as being good confident speakers. Not all academics, but the proper educators, almost all yes. I've noticed that he does fall into set patterns of anecdote and stories in interviews, like he will reply to a question and then pause for a little bit and then reply with something almost pre-scripted, a previous thought but slightly changed.

lhnz 9y ago

I've noticed this in teams, too. Sometimes there is something which is clear to everybody, but which needs the right person to say it, in order for it to have the necessary gravitas to be followed. I think a lot of people need authority figures to function.

tenaciousDaniel 9y ago

I can't get onboard with this interpretation. There are a ton of people who are very charismatic and prone to making sweeping statements about the universe, and yet they don't gain a substantial following. Reza Aslan, for example. He's popular, but not nearly on Peterson's level. There are people who are drawn to Peterson simply due to his charisma, but I think at the end of the day there's something else going on. I think he's hit some kind of nerve though it's difficult to pinpoint it. Edit: Ha, maybe I should read the goddamn piece before commenting.

rusk 9y ago
He has absolutely hit a nerve, or hit a few nerves and done so with great accuracy. You see the thing about Peterson is for whatever reason (could even be just for the purposes of marketing himself), he is very much the controversialist. Time and again he'll say something controversial that he knows will troll a huge audience and then he's always got research and facts to back it up. That his take is often facile isn't really of consequence as any typical interviewer doesn't have the tools to take him up on it. The guy is a professor of psychology. You may not like him or his views, but he is "smart", and fundamentally the meat of his message is actually quite benign so you can't even really accuse him of being "bad". It's like he's built his own persona into this gigantic strawman that looks like an ogre to everybody.
- weego 9y ago
  Is it really that controversial though? I'm nearly 40 and I feel like had Jordan Peterson said a lot of what he says now when I was at University it would have been of almost no note whatsoever. It feels more like his statements are elevated to controversy by how polarised, anti-contextual and narrow the margins of contemporary discourse have become rather than him being particularly controversial. "Enforcing equality of outcomes though imbalanced policy is less desirable than giving equality of choice and letting other natural variables dictate the outcome" seems such an uncontroversial statement as to be almost self-evident, and yet...
  - rusk 9y ago
    Like I say, the meat of his ideas are not controversial and actually quite banal. He doesn't really say a lot of things that self-help authors haven't been saying for years. As you point out the acceptable margins of contemporary discourse are stifling and he purposely sets out to challenge (even "bait") them, and this is what's controversial. I think this is what people like him for, as much as for his actual therapeutic writings.
    - weego 9y ago
      "he purposely sets out to challenge (even "bait") them, and this is what's controversial" You've summed up exactly what I was trying to get to but failed in 10x as many words. Thank you.
  - n4r9 9y ago
    I don't think controversy needs to be modern. To take a more extreme example, it was common just over 100 years ago in the UK to hear that women should not have the vote due to the distinct natures of men and women [0]. Now (for comparison's sake) we hear Peterson talking about how women are naturally more "agreeable" and "self-sacrificing", and that this is vital for the purposes of childcare [1]. I'm not qualified to debate biological determinism, but I do wonder whether statements like this reinforce existing prejudices about the capabilities of both men and women in the workforce. Just recently for example there was an article about how men tend not to work in nurseries, "as parents assume they pose risk to children" [2]. [0] http://www.johndclare.net/Women1_ArgumentsAgainst.htm http://www.johndclare.net/Women1_ArgumentsAgainst.htm [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9hcKUUFn5k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9hcKUUFn5k [2] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/2018/03/14/majority-councils-have-no-men-working-nurseries-parents-assume/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/2018/03/14/majority-co...

psyc 9y ago

Having watched a lot of Peterson's lectures, there's a fact about him which I think might lead a lot of critics to say false things about his level of confidence or arrogance. He speaks in a very confident, impassioned tone, but his actual words are permeated by deep humility.

rusk 9y ago
Yes, there is a dissonance there that led me to be suspicious at first. It's probably just that he's an introvert who learned "how to speak confidently" from a book or a course or something. That said, I don't think he comes across as completely intellectually honest in a lot of his interviews. I think that this might be more a product of a lot of the bad faith he's been subjected to than anything intrinsic to his ideas. Though I do think he plays it up a bit now to broaden his reach.
- thinkingemote 9y ago
  I think he learnt how to speak from a few decades of teaching, and in his teaching technique (as opposed to speech giving, debating). I've noticed most teachers and lecturers I've met as being good confident speakers. Not all academics, but the proper educators, almost all yes. I've noticed that he does fall into set patterns of anecdote and stories in interviews, like he will reply to a question and then pause for a little bit and then reply with something almost pre-scripted, a previous thought but slightly changed.