It is time to stop acting as if leftist ideologues “mean well” and simply have a different opinion on how to conduct human affairs. It is time to stop acting as if they are just one more reasonable voice in the public debate, or that their “ideas” are in any way worthy of civilized consideration. They are engaged in criminal thuggery, and so is any government that allows, abets, or supports their activities.
I will explain exactly how, and then you can try to tell me where my philosophical math is wrong.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know who Jordan Peterson is, and unless you’ve been on a month-long safari, you know that the College of Psychologists of Ontario recently informed him, from their ivy thrones, that if he does not submit to re-education for his social-media Wrongthink, they will take away his license to practice psychology. You can look up the details yourself, or watch the video below for some color commentary by Peterson himself. I will get to some specifics regarding Peterson’s situation at the end, but first we must lay some essential groundwork. The left, you see, is up to something extremely dangerous.
Let us begin with the most baseline notion—that the initiation of coercive force is morally impermissible. You may not use force against someone who has not themselves initiated force. This is, or ought to be, the fundamental rule governing human interaction. Any coercive force initiated against a nonaggressive person is, as an ontological fact, morally impermissible.1
Next, let us look at whether speech constitutes an act of force—or “violence,” as the left have taken to labeling conservatives’ (and much of libertarians’) speech.
J.S. Mill was obviously on the right track when he said that “The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.” However, the word “harm” is far too open-ended, leaving people the latitude to claim that just about anything, including bruised feelings, constitutes “harm” (especially people on the left, for whom victimhood is a holy rite). For harm we must substitute force—specifically coercive force: force initiated to achieve some particular aim (to tyrannize, control, acquire resources, etc.). And for Mill’s “power,” we must substitute protective force—force that is deployed in response to the initiation of coercive force. All of this is fancy philosophical explanation for something that even toddlers know innately (and to which many adult leftists appear willfully blind).
The reason that force, rather than harm, must be the chosen variable, is because only force directly interferes with rights. Rights are, in essence, exclusive title to personal control over one’s own thoughts, actions, and choices. A right is anything you want to do that does not initiate coercive force against another. Only coercive force can directly alienate a person from the enjoyment of his or her rights.
Speech is not force. Speech might be able to rattle the weak-minded, but that is not the same thing. Saying, “You should not eat that burrito” is not force. Slapping the burrito out of a person’s hands is. The latter is actionable (by means of protective force). The former is not.
Today’s left do not hold this view. Their Postmodernist and cultural-Marxist forebears have instructed them that there is no fixed morality; there is only the question of who holds the power. Yet they do recognize that the rest of us normal human beings do hold this view, and since their primary objective is to use force against us in order to take our stuff, they have had to develop workarounds: various dogma to blunt or addle our innate sense of right and wrong.
So, for example, they have developed the doctrine of “climate change,” which casts every human as a threat to the health of the planet. Now they don’t need you to initiate an act of force against anyone in order to justify the use of force against you (to control you or take resources from you). Your very existence is an act of violence; therefore they are forever and always ‘justified’ in using violence against you.
Or take the notion of “white privilege.” When you start unpacking any specific white human person’s life, it becomes very difficult to identify any way in which (s)he has benefitted from some specifiable structural privilege. The task becomes even more challenging (and more morally repugnant) once one starts trying to unpack a specific living person’s culpability for wrongs that his/her dead ancestors may (or may not) have committed. The left’s solution is simple: Your very identity is an act of violence. You are guilty just for existing, and thus they are forever and always ‘justified’ in initiating coercive force against you.
Do you see how this works? Do you see the scam they’re pulling?
Enter your speech. They claim that your words are “violence.” Since all reasonable people know that the only justification for using (protective) force against someone is if they have themselves first initiated (coercive) force—and they are counting on you to be that reasonable person, even as they refuse to be—then any speech that is “violence” may be met with real violence in response.
Do not give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that they are just snowflakes who cannot handle harsh words. DO NOT. Rather, recognize the awful truth that they have created this formulation on purpose because their objective is to use force against you. That is their goal. Describing your words as “violence” is just a precursor—softening up the decent or weak-minded public to believe that the violence they intend against you will have been justified by the “violence” of your words.
They have even gone one step further. They carry signs that read, and their professors and activists now endlessly intone, that “Silence is violence.” (Sometimes, “White silence is violence.”) Do you hear that? Failing to say the things they demand that you say is now an act of “violence.” Your failure to speak their words justifies violence against you. You need to take this very seriously.2 This kind of rhetoric, and these sorts of tactics, have precedents in history. What begins with this kind of rhetoric never ends there.
Now, let us take a look at some real acts of violence.
If you catch a fish and I slap it out of your hands and eat it myself, I have committed an act of violence.
If I drill a hole in the bottom of the boat you use to go fishing, I have committed an act of violence.
In these cases, I am using force to interfere with the means by which you feed yourself and your family. These actions are attacks—upon your life and property, which is an extension of your self-ownership. They are initiations of coercive force which are actionable by means of protective force.
Enter the Canadian government and the College of Psychologists of Ontario.
The Canadian government, like all governments, derives its authority from two things: force, and the willingness of people to be subjected to that force. That’s it.
I am not an expert in Canadian law specifically, but roughly speaking, here is how these sorts of things work: The Canadian government requires that clinical psychologists be licensed and accredited, and they empower the College of Psychologists to be arbiters for who does, and does not, enjoy that status. They decide who gets to make a living and who does not, and the government will back up their edicts with physical violence (arresting those who practice medicine without the required license, for example).
The College of Psychologists of Ontario have, in essence, informed Peterson that his speech is “violence,” and, backed up by the coercive might of the Canadian government, they will now use real violence to interfere with his livelihood.
The details do not matter—this is categorically the same as slapping a fish out of his hand. And it is just as actionable. We may have become accustomed to the frosting of ‘legitimacy’ that we have smeared all over the inherent violence of the state and its institutions, but that violence is there nonetheless. They are criminal enterprises, the lot of them.
It does not matter that Peterson himself probably won’t suffer financially from this, since he has moved beyond clinical practice as a primary source of revenue. That fact does not change the criminality at the heart of the act. (And it does not do anything for all the other poor souls who can be, and have been, subjected to this same form of violence, and who do not have the reach and recourse necessary to fight it.)
In future posts (and in my soon-to-be-published book), I will lay out proofs for this notion. It ought to be understood as an axiom, but since it is not, I have done the work to demonstrate its reality as a moral and natural fact. I will also provide the precise distinction between coercive force and protective force (though you should be able to suss out the basics here from terminology and context).
Some will argue that I am being too harsh on the individual humans who adhere to the political left. I take that concern very seriously. It troubles me too, and I will be addressing it in future pieces. For now, here are a few quick responses: I try to talk about “the ideology” as much as I can, rather than focusing on people. But people create, transmit, and propagate ideologies. I try to remember that everyone is an individual, and also that people can change. But what does any of that matter? People were individuals, and anyone could have changed, in Russia, Germany, China, Cambodia, North Korea, and Venezuela. All the nuances never seem to stop the trajectory—the inevitable push over the cliff into oppression, mass murder, and ultimate collapse. I will also show, in future pieces, why there is no substantive difference between leftism in the West and the leftism that took over the aforementioned countries. One is incremental, the other moves rapidly, but they all share the same underlying presuppositions and goals, and the end result is baked into the cake. The cancerous, late-stage leftism under which the developed world now languishes may look different, but it is taking us over the same cliff, and it is the same sort of agreeable people, ever-so concerned with “the public good,” who are driving us there. At some point, continuing to give them the benefit of “good intentions,” and continuing to pretend that their ideas aren’t inherently violent, rights-violative, and disastrous, is simply suicidal.
Agreed that Peterson is being treated badly. Regulatory bodies hate members who get too mighty. But you're right, this goes beyond Tall Poppy syndrome
It’s simpler than that. Peterson agreed to certain standards of behaviour when he took the clinical license, which is ultimately the property of the province of Ontario not Peterson. The CPO claims Peterson violated his professional standards of conduct. The judge agreed in his ruling. However, I did read somewhere that the judge who made the decision that ordered Peterson to attitude coaching was known in the past to be in unfriendly toward Peterson in the debate about the LSO and pronouns etc. when the judge was the president of the LSO.
I think Peterson behaved badly and needed an attitude check. I also know that the college handled his situation completely wrong.