On a prompt from a friend, I’ve been reading a little about pseudo-intellectual Jordan Peterson. In a New York Review of Books piece reviewing Peterson’s new book, 12 Rules for Life, I ran across this passage (bolds mine): Peterson himself credits his intellectual awakening to the Cold War, when he began to ponder deeply such “evils associated with belief” as Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, and became a close reader of Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago [published in English in 1974]. This is a common intellectual trajectory among Western right-wingers who swear by Solzhenitsyn and tend to imply that belief in egalitarianism Read more