Hey there! Welcome to That Dang Dad, a
place to try some free samples in the
marketplace of ideas. My name is Phil,
thank you for joining me tonight.
I finally managed to catch up with the Zizek Peterson debate and I had some
thoughts on it...
I'm not going to critique anyone's
performance or critique any of their
ideas or tell you who I think won or
anything like that...
I think smarter people than me are gonna
take care of that online. Instead I kind
of wanted to explore what the heck we're
doing when we even have like a debate
like this. So let's take ZvP as our
example... So first Jordan Peterson gets
up and gives kind of like a 10-minute
overview and sort of frames the topic
of the debate the way that he sees it
and offersf his perspective on
things.
Then Slavoj Zizek gets up and he gets ten
minutes to do the same thing, they just
get a short period to react to what the
other one has said, there's some audience
questions, they get to ask each other
some questions and then answer them, and
there's a closing remarks and
bing-bang-boom battle of wits
concluded. Love it!
so you know let's be honest, if you're a
Peterson fan, I kind of doubt Zizek
converted you to his sort of pessimistic
brand of Marxism and if you're a
Zizek fan I'm pretty sure Jordan
Peterson did not win you over to his
sort of kind of Christian fueled
capitalism or whatever. So when
the dust settles what exactly did we do
here? Was it vanity, was it a
grift? You know, I wouldn't go that far, I
think that there's value in listening to
to academics
argue about something at length
rather than try to dunk on each other in
like 200 characters on Twitter or
whatever. It's nice to hear a long-form
argument
for something. I think for me, the real
value is in hearing the way that an idea
is sort of interlocks with some other
complementary supplementary or
even kind of downright hostile other
ideas.
I think the feature of the debate is
that it's kind of semi random, you know,
you don't know what your opponent is
going to say and so if you
bring ideas to a debate, they sort of get
dynamically tested by things
you weren't anticipating. I think this
was really clear in the Zizek Peterson
debate because Peterson basically spent
his entire opening remarks critiquing
specifically the Communist Manifesto and
then all of a sudden discovered that
when Zizek got up to talk, he was not
at all focused on that specific
book and was instead talking about
things have been happening in the last
decade in politics and economics. And so
there was a little bit of a "oh shoot I
prepared for one thing my opponent
brought up another!"... y'know it's neat to
hear the way that these ideas sort of
bounce off each other. In fact at times
the two even  agreed with each other
on certain things which was kind of
interesting. They kind of took
things in different directions but there
was a lot of points of agreement during
the debate, and in fact I can't be sure,
but there was at least one part where I
kind of thought Jordan Peterson looked a
little charmed by Zizek and his sort
of weird digressions and things like
that. So I would say if you're like a
lore nerd for economics I mean I think
the debate was worth your time  if
only to see how both the participants
sort of responded on-the-fly to
everything. I will say this I
don't think that a debate really has any
value as kind of a crucible to
test the truth claims of ideas or
anything like that.
I think debates test preparation, they
test thinking on the fly, they test your
charisma, like y'know whether you agree
with
Peterson's ideas or not I think even he
would tell you afterwards that he was a
little underprepared for sort of the
places of the Zizek wanted to go and
he was pretty unprepared to stand
out against Zizek's swagger and his 
easy command of all these kind of arcane
topics and dirty jokes and things like
that. But you know swagger is not any
reason to trust someone and trust that
they're telling the truth... Also I
think a debate like this really requires
a lot of supplemental knowledge that you
know not everybody has. It kind of
requires like at least this one required
a real command of the
scholarship. They brought up all
these thinkers and books and essays and
movements and things like that unless
you study this in school like
twenty to thirty percent of the debate
it's gonna go right over your head. I
think for me it was closer like thirty
three percent... I haven't run the
numbers finally but it's about thirty
three maybe thirty five I don't know. So, if you were hoping that this
debate was gonna be just these pure ideas
broadcast to these rational open minds
that are soberly weighing the evidence
for truth, I think you'll be disappointed
um you know I would even disagree with
something that a lot of people are
saying which is, wow this shows the
value of two professionals having an
open dialogue about things that they
disagree with...
I would not say it was a free
exchange of ideas I think both
participants were talking about wildly
different things that they were
interested in, I mean that was what was
fascinating for me about the debate.
Jordan Peterson clearly wanted to talk
about the communist manifesto and Slavoj
Zizek clearly wanted to talk about other
things so i don't know how much exchange
of ideas that there were... y'know and
none of us are rational. We don't just
consume ideas through a rational
membrane. I mean we hear ideas and we
shoot them through the prism of things
that we already believe and we kind of
evaluate them against the way that we
already see the world. But I kind of think
that the debate did have one important
value for all of us:
I think it shows that this stuff matters!
Y'know, whether you're a lobster boy or
a Marxist raccoon, I think it's fair to
say that these questions are not idle
academic wankery. Economics
really impacts people's lives it's it's
real stuff, it's not just a game, it's not
just a theory and formulas and some
charts in a book somewhere, you know, I
really love that this debate generated a
lot of buzz because economics
is how people feed their families, it's
how people survive so I'm really glad
people are sort of taking this stuff
seriously! So what do you think? Was the
debate worthwhile? Am I being
cynical about people sort of changing
their minds about things once they see
the debate? Let me know in the comments
what you think, maybe give me a Like, you
can subscribe if ya nasty but either
way I really appreciate you watching
thanks for joining me and I'll see you
next time on That Dang Dad!
Good night!
