On this episode of the Jordan B Peterson Podcast, Jordan is joined by Dr. Anthony Daniels or as you might know him, Theodore Dalrymple, which is his pen name. Dr. Anthony Daniels is a British writer and essayist. He is known for writing such pieces as Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass, The Mandarins and the Masses, Not With a Bang With A Whimper, Spoiled rotten: The toxic cult of sentimentality, and The Terror of Existence. His columns in the Times, Spectator, and the Wall Street Journal.
Dr. Anthony Daniels and Jordan discussed a variety of topics relating to distinct differences in culture and mindset in the poor “Underclass” in Britain. They examine many stories from Dr. Daniel’s time as a consulting physician in a prison and hospital in one of the poorest areas of London and draw conclusions on similarities in violence, domestic abuse, learned helplessness, education, monogamy, the disintegration of the family, and more.
Find more Dr. Anthony Daniels writing under his pen name Theodore Dalrymple
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Regarding J.Peterson’s criticism of the idea Western civilization is fundamentally a power struggle:
I submit that power as a concept is insufficiently specific. Power, as a concept, includes actions utterly opposite from a moral perspective. Moral here means ‘really’ good for human life in full context.
But there is the power to kill, and the power to defend. These are morally and existentially opposite. The power to take is opposed to the power to produce real necessary human values that satisfy real human needs for living and meaning. There is the power to threaten; the power to cooperate. The power to enslave; the power to trade.
To lump all human motivation into one undifferentiated ‘will to power,’ is an attack on humanity by equivocation. I do not really know if this was intentional by Nietzsche or his interpreters. But anyone who disagrees with this claim of undifferentiated power motivation as foundational to western civilization should not permit all forms of power to be explicitly or implicitly lumped together as a single thing. To do so is to lose the argument before it starts, and it is to proceed as if the threat of harm is of equivalent value to the offer of trade. It is anti-human life.
FANTASTIC.