Psychologist and author Dr. Jordan B. Peterson provided a breakdown of today’s environmentalist movement that is almost religious in nature.
Tucker Carlson invited Jordan Peterson to join his show Friday to explain what Carlson observed to be a discrepancy — namely that environmentalism’s purported goal to save the environment actually does more harm to the environment than good. Peterson validated Carlson’s observation by noting how Sri Lanka has become a “wasteland” and how Germany’s energy is more expensive and less reliable all due to “idiot hypothetically environmentalist policies.” He then explained what he believed was behind this.
“But there’s something that’s even deeper lying underneath the surface,” Peterson said, citing converging evidence from different disciplines. “The structure through which we see the world is essentially a narrative—a story.”
The question that follows, Peterson asked, is what is that story and what elements does it contain?
“The environmentalists offer us a story to live by and it’s a pseudo-religious story and it essentially elevates the biosphere, the earth — Gaia, the earth goddess — to the status of primary deity and characterizes her as sort of a waif-like innocent victim, easily taken advantage of and fragile. It casts the entire human endeavor on the social front as a raping and pillaging, patriarchal, monster only interested in power. And, it casts the individual as a devouring mouth riding on the back of that giant, essentially.”
There is some truth to that, the “12 Rules For Life: An Antidote to Chaos” author granted, explaining how humans are capable of destroying the environment. However, that story is “very incomplete,” and as a result, human beings are “demonized,” which is “extraordinarily dangerous.”
Environmentalism’s giveaway that it is religious in nature instead of a way of dealing with the realities of the world is that it has “odd features.” Peterson provided the environmentalists’ radical opposition to nuclear power and natural gas as prime examples of those odd features.
“It’s clearly the case that there’s nothing that reduces carbon production more effectively than nuclear power,” Peterson said. “It’s also clearly the case that if we were careful with nuclear power … that we could be providing extremely lost-cost energy to people, especially poor people throughout the world, but we’re not going to do that. In fact, we have an anti-energy policy in place, especially in any places that are ruled essentially by the left.”
Starvation has increased globally over the past few years as a result of environmentalist policies, Peterson noted, put in place by “hypothetically well-meaning deluded pseudo-religious environmental worshippers of the apocalypse.” He called the situation “appalling,” and that it’s “likely to get worse before it gets better.”
