[May 11, 2025] In a podcast on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast #877, Dr. Jordan Peterson discussed the growing phenomenon of unearned moral superiority. Joe Rogan’s podcast is the most popular on social media, sometimes reaching tens of millions of views across platforms. Dr. Peterson explains to us that the idea of unearned moral superiority comes from
I’ve written on this subject as part of an observation that many political leftists believe in the neo-Marxist victim/victimizer ideology, where victims and their supporters can do no wrong and where espousing their support of victims makes them morally superior to others. I’ve also warned about the dangers of this kind of thinking, as does Dr. Peterson.
Dr. Peterson explains that people like things simple. Folks often like the simplest explanations. We like to know who’s our enemy. We like to know our friends. And we like the feeling of moral superiority. This moral superiority can be unearned because the efforts to properly earn it are too daunting and require a measure of steely courage that maybe we don’t possess.
To complicate matters, there’s still the human proclivity to pull down those who have more. It’s like the college kids on campus claiming identity with the oppressed. Dr. Peterson is shocked. He asks how a person can speak of oppression if they happen to be at some Ivy League school. And with that high privilege of academia, they want all the power and all the moral superiority that comes from being a representative of the oppressed.
Then, Dr. Peterson discusses how universities have perverted the purpose of an advanced academic training setting and substituted protection for those who support the victim’s condition. He calls them Social Justice Warriors. Nothing is too trivial or inane to be a problem for a social justice warrior because they don’t like to deal with real problems, so they go after things like kids wearing “socially appropriated” Halloween costumes.
Peterson explains that the university is not your home. It’s not a safe space. It’s not a secure space, none of that. It’s a place to be confronted by a diversity of ideas, some of which are horrible and brutish. That’s what human history looks like. Human history is an endless bloodbath with an inkling of hope for progress peaking out.
“If you want to be safe, stay home with your mom. Don’t come to the university if you want to be safe.” — Dr. Jordan Peterson
If the university is going to make you safe, then it ceases to be a university. Those at universities who tell students they are offering them a safe space are certainly not doing them a profound disservice.
“You don’t make the world safer [for people who are anxious]; you make them braver.”
Don’t make the problems of the world smaller; make the person and their capacity to deal with problems larger. Strengthen them. That’s what we should be doing at our universities. Arm people with arguments. Improve upon their intellect. Help them learn to write so they gather their arguments and learn how to engage in intellectual disagreements.
Dr. Peterson says that the university is being made into the Oedipal Mother.
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I’ve witnessed this much too often. They are often in league with the evil that stalks our planet in the form of ideologies that prioritize the “state” or “government” over the individual. Let us pray for their souls because they are lost and are unhappy. Sadly, they are also violent, as others have noted. 🙏
Good point Pastor John. I do think you’re right. Just look at what is happening now in America, now that Donald Trump is president, as they uncover massive corruption in federal agencies with that taxpayer money going to Democrats and their friends (who donate it back to the Democrats). They will, of course, deny it but DOGE and Elon Musk have uncovered it. America’s republic is a great system of government that has been perverted for Democrat pleasure.
And most folks don’t even have a clue.
Excellent, thanks Gen. Satterfield. I’ll be thinking more about this and please write more on the subject. Also, please give you wife a special thanks on Mothers’ Day.
Indeed, Gen. Satterfield has written often about how the neo-Marxists have adopted this “unearned moral superiority” or as he calls it just “morally superior.” He and Dr. Peterson are onto something here. This unearned superiority then gives rise to a form of supremacy that we can find in dictatorships when the dictator is a father-like figure. Gen. Satterfield wrote once, i cannot find it but I know he wrote it, that Iraq’s President Saddam Hussein was seen as a grandfather-like man who would talk to his “subjects” like they were children and pass along advice.
Exactly, mainer. Gen. Satterfield has written a few times about Saddam Hussein.
“If you want to be safe, stay home with your mom. Don’t come to the university if you want to be safe.” — Dr. Jordan Peterson. Now, that may have changed in the last decade or so in America and other Western nations. Now, colleges are known to try to protect the feelings of their students instead of doing their due diligence and push and challenge many new ideas. Our advanced education system has been compromised and taken over by those who purport to have compassion for the downtrodden. Hogwash, they have lost their way and no longer are they a trusted institution of learning.
HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY
❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️
Yeah, never ever forget the mothers in your life. Especially, thank your mother. 🕷🕷🕷🕷
…….. Happy Mothers Day to my mum.…….
Yepper, Happy Mom’s Day for all those mums out there and special thanks too for those who have raised their sons properly so they are able to treat the women in their lives within the Christian Faith. These men have a long road to travel, and if their mum gave them teachings on how to respect women, then that mum has succeeded.
Good one, Gen. Satterfield.
I know people like this and sometimes I want to slap them upside the head and say, SNAP OUT OF IT. Who doesn’t know some one who claims moral superiority? I know plenty and they are all very emotional people. Most are also politically liberal.
Crazy