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A lot of his ideas are really outdated forms of psychology and psychoanalysis, so if youre wanting to learn, other sources are best. Hes basically just doing generic self help (not a criticism of self help books, but thats pretty much all hes doing) and its under a layer of debunked Jungian psychology. Id give Peterson a skip

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Jordan Peterson has mastered the art of talking a lot while saying absolutely nothing. He's 100% filler, 0% substance. You're better off going on a search online, in a library, in databases, etc. using specific terms of stuff that interests you.

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A better room-tidying book is Decluttering at the Speed of Life. Otherwise, what were you wanting to learn/why were you interested?

I get all the internet hate when I say something similar online. You should see how many folks claim that he saved their lives

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That's the problem with his kind of shtick! It draws people in because you can read into his work as much as you need to actually find a point. It is very hard to debunk when the person actually wants to believe.

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Peterson cites authors a lot, you can read Jung, Piaget, Nietzsche and others he keeps mentioning, he does a decent job at summing up some of their ideas, but he obviously has his bias in putting it all together on his own model/grand theory, so he is not an unbiased secondary source (well no one is, so that is why you should check the wiki and other secondary sources on those authors for context, but then read their books directly as well)

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I liked his books. He is not groundbreaking, but he has some interesting insights and findings.

He is worth examining yourself, as is every author who gets cancelled or blocked. Whenever there is a movement to silence an author, I try to read what they have to say.

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for someone cancelled... he sure does not shut up. Just another buzzword used to gain the right wings sympathy and get more sales.

For real - incels pop out of the wood work to defend this no talent ass clown

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Beyond good and evil is probably the easiest one to read first. He is a very polemic writer, and purposefully so, it might be difficult to understand what he means exactly or to misinterpret him, so you gotta read carefully and look for some context and diverse commentary on his writings.

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Lmao that’s a great way to build a world view entirely on bullshit. “I only read things by people who are so wrong about what they’re saying that there’s public backlash over it”. I swear people like you work hard every day to make yourselves dumber.

He's not even close to a good source for political or sociological discourse. He thinks he knows a lot, but he's frequently just making stuff up based on vague ideas about Marxism and Post-Modernism, both of which he doesn't understand. His psychology stuff is better (he's a psychologist) but, as others have said, it's mostly outdated, and rather vapid, self-help nonsense. I wouldn't recommend others in that genre because it's a genre that invites and celebrates vapid nonsense.

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Peterson makes comments like "women are the gatekeepers of sex, men are the gatekeepers of relationships" he also refuses to to use pronouns to support trans students. This put me off him. There are alot of YouTube videos he does to get an idea if he is your cup of tea.

Big topics! He's not going to teach you about those things - he can be criticised on purely factual grounds. If you just read fiction from different time periods you'll soon see what Peterson is claiming plain isn't true (this isn't about political divides, rightwingers here in the UK would extremely rarely be taken in by him, just because here we tend to be exposed to more history), and I think you'll learn about people, too.

If the references to mythology Peterson makes appeal to you, then it may also help you start picking more of those up, and you could read about it directly. Maybe even a book about Roman civilisation - I wanted to know more about that and felt a bit confused/overwhelmed, found SPQR is really accessible while containing loads of information.

Maybe you can narrow the topics down further, to a specific area of interest?

You might try Noam chomsky

If you’re looking for something to confirm your pre-existing beliefs and tell you they’re correct, you’ll find no shortage of people willing to take your money to provide this service.

You shouldn’t be looking for books on the importance of tradition for example, that’s just a conclusion in search of an argument.

Check with the incel subreddit

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Dostoyevski. That’s basically the point of his whole body of work, how to deal with the anxiety that erupts from an atheistic rationalization of the world. Peterson and his ilk commonly reference Dostoyevski as an influence, but if you read say, Crime And Punishment, you’ll see D would not have vibed w most of their conclusions.

Instead he really means to help the misguided fledgling intellectual type. "Hamlet’s” who are caught up in their heads way more than is good for them.

Please post 'Should I read X book''What do I need to know before I read X' questions, in our Weekly Recommendation Thread.

I’d suggest reading history and philosophy, literature and probably some psychology. Read widely about the world and it’s people. You may never agree with other people’s views but that’s not really the goal, the goal is to understand other people and live your best life.

Some writers to read over a lifetime, Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, De Tocqueville, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Wollstonecraft, Thoreau, Melville, W.E.B. du Bois, James McPherson, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Toni Morrison, Nietzsche, Barbara Tuchman, Zizek among many many others.

What kind of politics are you interested in learning about? And what country?

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I think there's a difference between wanting to examine for yourself books that were "cancelled" to understand the causes of the controversy and if you agree with them, and building a world view entirely on bullshit. It depends on whether you only read these books or if you read other points of view too.

Serious question, have you or do you plan to read books that have recently been banned in states like Florida

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It sounds like public backlash renders them wrong? No one should seek to form their own opinion?

It's important to acknowledge that we all have pre-existing beliefs and bias. Understanding this useful to all areas of study

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I am not opposed to reading them, though it looks like those are kids' books. If I lived in Florida and had kids I would want to know why they were banned and would do the research myself.

You got it backwards my guy. The backlash comes because of the problem, it doesn’t create the problem.

And don’t worry there’s plenty more! I definitely have a western centric list that I at least attempt to rectify but it’s a slow process.

But slowly the pieces begin to fit together, not because of any one book but the accumulation and maintaining an objective view rather than being heavily invested in YOUR view. Just my take.

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That is one of the consequences of any effort to silence someone. Like I said, he isn't groundbreaking or life changing, though he is interesting. I tried listening to his podcasts, but he hasn't really come up with anything new to make it worth my time. But for the efforts to cancel him, he might be mostly unknown.

Peterson is interesting to read (I will get downvoted for this) is anything he says particularly radical and world changing no. It’s a good and more importantly modern and current and there’s a lot of supplementary material to go and look at if you so desire.

I definitely don’t agree with everything he said but that’s the point of reading it. You read it to question your own beliefs and make sure that they are indeed your beliefs.

There’s all the obvious classical philosophers and ‘older’ philosophers but a lot of that content is important to view in the context of the time frame.

One person who I don’t see mentioned a lot is Thomas Sowell but he’s less philosophy more economic based so if that’s interesting to you then I’d recommend.

It does not come due to any problem I have. It creates a desire among the open-minded to discover for themselves if the "problem" is real or agenda driven.

Woof. I personally wouldn’t start with those two. If you’re new to the world of politics, I suggest What You Should Know About Politics…But Don’t: a Nonpartisan Guide to the Issues by Jessamyn Conrad. Great overview of the major issues in America (elections, the economy, the environment, the military, healthcare, civil liberties, education) and then discusses the perspectives of the political parties on the issues and what policies America has passed on these issues during prior presidencies.

Okay, I'll break it down for you.

Most of the modern Peterson-style "discourse" exists to provide a pseudo-intellectual justification for the feelings his audience already has.

Many people grew up doing a lot of messed up stuff without thinking about it, because everyone around them was doing it too. It just seemed normal at the time.

Now the same behavior they've done is being called out and this makes them feel bad. They don't like feeling bad, so they pay someone to tell them they aren't actually bad - they want to hear that they're good people and the people calling out similar behavior are just oversensitive kids and "wokes" that are overreacting to harmless workplace banter.

This is why you absolutely have pre-existing beliefs due to the culture you grew up in. Everyone does. Many of the kids that threw rocks at black children attending the first integrated schools are still alive today. Their kids don't want to think of their parents as bad guys either (hence why so many parents are trying to stop schools from teaching about the history of racism - because it makes thanksgiving uncomfortable when grandpa was one of the people that threw the rocks).

Our brains are extremely prone to cognitive biases based on a number of factors, especially how we're presented information. It's just science. Good books on that topic are "The Undoing Project" and "Predictably Irrational".

The former is an engaging read about how our brains can make flawed judgments in even seemingly simple, objective situations (like judging how well basketball players perform in a team tryout) and how two unlikely geniuses spawned a rethinking of basically every industry.

The second is an example of various studies that showed how even highly intelligent humans reliably make irrational decisions due to various cognitive biases.

For example, people exposed to a $4 price first for a new type of luxury candy bar tend to think it's worth $4, and balk when asked if they'd pay $5. People exposed to the $5 price first tend to think it's worth $5 instead. This is how impactful a small difference in how you're introduced to the world can affect your perceptions of even something that should be simple.

How you've grown up to this point will massively impact your perceptions on many, many things.

? I don’t like Peterson or his conclusions. But I agree that the questions he is asking are important. I think that’s giving him more credit than you’re going to find from most in this thread.

Also, throwing my intelligence out there ?? OP asked for advice on writers who approach similiar themes as peterson etc. I gave him one and the reasons why. That should be the point of this thread.

I'd definitely recommend SPQR as a starting point then, it really helped me put the pieces together later when references to Roman history came up in what I was reading, and there's a lot about the politics in it.

Religion as you mentioned above, a lot of writers in the Western canon are coming from Christian traditions, from Chaucer's corrupt and model religious officials in The Canterbury Tales, to vice, virtue and hypocrisy in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, to Dickens' redemption of Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, to Trollope's examination of different approaches to Christianity in The Barchester Chronicles and also some of the Palliser series (which is more about the contemporary political structure. Trollope himself had tried to become a MP). Honestly, if you read just Anne Bronte's Agnes Grey, which is pretty short, think about how Agnes relates to contemporary ideas of Christian virtue (Anne especially is interested in these ideas, her sisters less so but it's still an aspect, they were the daughters of a clergyman) and about women's role, I'd guarantee you'd learn more than Peterson will ever teach you about how women actually lived (if reading fiction, don't forget to notice lower class women, who may not always feature prominently. Men too).

Life of Pi is a contemporary novel that's significantly about faith and its importance to people, and very quick to read - it can also be interpreted in terms of Jungian archetypes. Jungian models are much better for analysing literature than real people, though. I'm going to see the play streamed to cinema next month, and there's also a movie adaptation.

Yeah I linked the wrong link. It's updated now to include the books that are ~higher level also. There are a few what would be considered classics on there like Brave New World and The Bluest Eye.

Reading is great, but experiencing is even more impactful. You can read about racism, for example, but when you actually meet Black people, spend time with them, talk and eat with them, worship with them, listen to them, it has a bigger and longer lasting effect. It's like learning languages, you can Rosetta Stone all day, but get on a plane and actually go to the country and immerse yourself. Then you'll get it, often even without it being explained.

Personal conduct

Please use a civil tone and assume good faith when entering a conversation.

You’re just using “open minded” to mean “I think I’m smarter than the thousands of experts who have been studying this subject all their life”.

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