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Jordan Peterson on selection

He equates wanting to sleep with multiple women with Hue Hefner and general promiscuity; rather than being what happens when the good male desire for polygamy is unchained from social restrictions of marriage in a free love environment.
Assumes monogamy is the only mature, moral choice. That having multiple women is misuse of your opportunity.
Trots out the line that having multiple women will destabilize society; with no evidence. Many stable societies have had polygamy.

Most notably he also falsely claims sexual mating will follow a Pareto distribution (that's never been true anywhere). For it to be that way, the man with the most women would have to have more than all others combined (or close to that). And while that is absolutely absurd, he's essentially made exactly that argument, as have others, stating (I don't recall if it was elsewhere in this interview or a different one) that under polygamy the top men would get all the women leaving most men without wives.

But this too is a myth.
 
I was perhaps a little more myopic.

I like what he had to say about being the kind of man worthy of a selection of women.

I happen to believe when polygamy is common, not necessarily prevalent, market forces naturally force men toward a higher standard.

As it is now, men can stay in their parents home till 30, never hold down a job, and yet somehow are sexually marketable to women that will practically adopt them.
 
NeoPatriarch said:
As it is now, men can stay in their parents home till 30, never hold down a job, and yet somehow are sexually marketable to women that will practically adopt them.
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Too true!
 
NeoPatriarch said:
I was perhaps a little more myopic.

I like what he had to say about being the kind of man worthy of a selection of women.

I happen to believe when polygamy is common, not necessarily prevalent, market forces naturally force men toward a higher standard.

As it is now, men can stay in their parents home till 30, never hold down a job, and yet somehow are sexually marketable to women that will practically adopt them.
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If we had polygamy I don't know that we'd necessarily see huge pressure on men to improve. It's just the alphas that now sleep with women and leave them childless and alone would instead marry them.

Men are staying in their parents home till 30 without a job because of the economic havoc that is going on in society. That's not being caused by men suddenly being lazy. And to the extent that it is doe to the sexual marketplace, it is because women no longer value the provider type but rather view it as a negative.

You want men under 30 to work hard and live on their own? Get men and women to marry in their late teens early 20s again and fix the economy.
 
*Just a note and maybe a different thread* I've never considered the single man with wealth and high career status who sleeps around and acquires women to dispose an alpha male. More of a lone wolf if anything. These are perhaps my least favorite type of person...just sayin.
 
rockfox said:
If we had polygamy I don't know that we'd necessarily see huge pressure on men to improve
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Maybe not huge pressure, but giving women more choices does affect market forces.

In addition, my experience is that doing a good job as a patriarch (an improvement over what I was as a monogamist husband) increases the attraction.
I believe that Is. 4:1 exemplifies this as it would be pure foolishness for them to attach themselves to a man who was single and slightly less foolish to pick a monogamist. They would tend to pick a proven patriarch, thus the reason for providing for themselves.
 
steve said:
I believe that Is. 4:1 exemplifies this as it would be pure foolishness for them to attach themselves to a man who was single and slightly less foolish to pick a monogamist. They would tend to pick a proven patriarch, thus the reason for providing for themselves.
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That's a good observation. The situation will probably happen to many different classes of men. I can see how it could be a single men. That many women without a man indicates a lot of single men. Men not wanting to marry who need some incentive to take them on. Men who might not think they had the financial means to take on several women.
 
Elijahsfire said:
*Just a note and maybe a different thread* I've never considered the single man with wealth and high career status who sleeps around and acquires women to dispose an alpha male. More of a lone wolf if anything. These are perhaps my least favorite type of person...just sayin.
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In terms of the sexual marketplace, the alpha is the one who is the most attractive to women. You might not care for their moral choices in life but the women often could care less. Don't fall in the trap of assigning moral value to 'alpha' and trying to define out of it people you don't like. It is simply those at the peak of the human sexual hierarchy.
 
rockfox said:
In terms of the sexual marketplace, the alpha is the one who is the most attractive to women. You might not care for their moral choices in life but the women often could care less. Don't fall in the trap of assigning moral value to 'alpha' and trying to define out of it people you don't like. It is simply those at the peak of the human sexual hierarchy.
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My objection to not calling them alpha is not necessarily a moral one. If we call such men alphas who often posses a certain type of cowardice then the whole analogy of what makes an Alpha male broken. We are after all drawing from the animal kingdom after all. So suppose we get rid of the notion that alapha male are something to aspire to. After all if we take the whole "how much tail they get from willing women" instead of leaders possessing admirable maculane traits, then let's trash the whole term. We have enough of the horny little Peter pans with stacks of cash around as it is, I would be perplexed to bestow upon them a title as Alpha. Its BS. I grew up with strong men that possessed the type of strong qualities overall that would better fit them as being called Alphas. So "alpha male" goes in the garbage .
 
More useless moralizing. It's just a name. My point of conversation is the affect that polygamy would have on the men who get the most, and hottest, women. These are the men at the top of the sexual hierarchy so to speak. What are commonly called alphas. I'm not presenting them as some archetype of ideal man for us all to strive for.

If women don't like to chase after the men with the most admirable masculine traits and strong qualities, well, that's a different sort of problem.
 
rockfox said:
That many women without a man indicates a lot of single men.
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I think it indicates a lack of men period. Look at Isaiah 3 I think a lot of them get killed off in war...
 
We have an awful lot of single women today, and not a lot of men worth marrying.

Our culture isn’t healing itself, it will only get worse.
 
rockfox said:
That many women without a man indicates a lot of single men.
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Or, it indicates God's judgment falling much more heavily on men. Is. 4:1 seems to happen right after major judgment. I suspect men receive the greater judgment and are significantly reduced in number.
 
Ancient Paths said:
Or, it indicates God's judgment falling much more heavily on men. Is. 4:1 seems to happen right after major judgment. I suspect men receive the greater judgment and are significantly reduced in number.
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Agreed.

Another possibility is that these women realize that a particular judgement is coming for everyone. I surmise that its like being issued a summons to appear at your trial and you don’t have a lawyer. You don’t want just any lawyer, but the best one you can find/afford.

IMO this all comes back to covering. In Jewish culture a woman was not allowed to give testimony even for herself. Someone else had to be her advocate/covering. I have my own ideas about why that was. This passage makes me think that there will be an understanding of both covering and poly in that time and single women will be extremely apprehensive about being without a covering.
 
Pacman said:
I think it indicates a lack of men period. Look at Isaiah 3 I think a lot of them get killed off in war...
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Good catch.

Your men shall fall by the sword,
And your mighty in the war.
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However I will note that this could also simply mean military defeat generally. For example the US has recently suffered said defeats, but we haven't a shortage of men. Modern warfare of the lass several decades doesn't involve that large a percentage of the population.

It could also be both. As in, this prophecy could have multiple fulfillments; each with different shades of details.
 
rockfox said:
Modern warfare of the lass several decades doesn't involve that large a percentage of the population.
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Yes it does. The wars just haven't been fought in your country so this effect hasn't been felt at your end. It's still very real however. War's still as ugly as ever, you've just been sheltered from the ugly end. For example, Iraq had hundreds of thousands of deaths (estimates vary widely), only 4000 of which were US soldiers. Syria has had an even larger number of deaths (around 300,000 combatants alone, plus untold civilian casualties), but only a tiny number of these are US, Russian and other foreign soldiers. So the deaths occur and have an enormous impact on the population, they just haven't affected the USA enough to be noticeable at your end. Yet... (hopefully never, but the way things are going that sadly seems inevitable if these endless wars continue, someone's going to push back eventually and even if they are unsuccessful it won't be pretty for anybody).
 
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In Syria, 3ook big numbers, but out of 23 million; so only 1%. But compare that to tribal warfare. A tribe looses a war and ALL the men will be killed and ALL the women will be hauled off to slavery.

Take a look at the US today, the most dominant military power on the planet. We have more personnel than most other militaries and probably spend more than all others in the world combined. Yet we have something on the order of 1.5 million service members. That is .39% (almost 1/3 of 1%) of our population. Those are incredibly small numbers compared to a tribe. When a tribe goes to war, most all able bodied men partake. If your typical tribe has 150 members, if a similar % of them were warriors as in the US; that would be just over 1/2 of a man composing their military.
 
Jordan Peterson is always fascinating to listen to. I see others came away from the video with different perspectives, but I think he was talking more about being a casual sexual partner and how that is damaging to a culture. I took from the video more of his condemnation of a "free love" society rather than his condemning a man for having multiple committed marriages.

Which I agree that a man having multiple casual sexual relationships with multiple women is damaging to society, but a man having multiple committed relationships with multiple women is beneficial to society. You can't and shouldn't separate sex from marriage and doing so damages society.
 
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