Reply To: Jordan Peterson & Controversies

[Bera]

@epicentity

What does it mean to attract truth seekers to the works of this community?

I told you in the chat earlier, but I felt like I needed to say it here too. In my opinion, truth seekers are attracted by the truth. 🙂

@fayest42

Who is Auburn trying to attract to CT?

CT is a research project, so, at least the way I see it, it aims to find out the truth about types and to inform whoever is interested. There is no specific target group, as far as I know. There are people with very different backgrounds interested in CT.

If they don’t like him (Peterson), will they immediately leave or will they stick around to see exactly why he is brought up?

If someone leaves CT because he/she doesn't like Peterson and because Auburn mentioned Peterson as being relevant to CT in this neutral, non - offensive way, it means this person's views significantly clash with ours.
An then in the end even if this article was not on the site, this clash would still come to light sooner or later. This person would go on discord and find videos of Jordan Peterson and feedback about them from Auburn or members' opinions that were not opposed by Auburn. Or would at some point ask something about Jordan Peterson and be unhappy about the answer. Or would see the thread with Big Five test results and remember this is a system supported by Jordan Peterson and become upset that we are "popularizing" it indirectly.
It is likely that this person would still be unhappy in the end after we also wasted energy on trying to address these issues. If the person didn't discover that CT has some similar views with Jordan Peterson, I guess this difference in views would still manifest somewhere else sooner or later.

Could the points made in that article be made without reference to him?

I think so, yes, but he makes them too and then it's fair to reference him.

 Sometimes controversies draw more people to something than would have otherwise seen it. Is that something we want?

I don't think it is something we want. I personally don't like conflicts and disagreements. But, on the other hand, they are an inevitable part of life, especially in a community of people from different countries, age groups and backgrounds. Even type / quadra differences can play a part in this.
I will give some examples that I think could be connected to our discussion till now:

Fi: Discovery of Inner Essence
The Fi user is aware very early on that every individual possesses a unique and sacred soul which remains unmodified at its core, but which can be tarnished and crippled by our necessary collision with an imperfect world. Through years of conditioning, the environment misshapes and warps that essence when we’re forced to live through imaginary characters and personas; to fabricate egos and narratives atop of our neglected and parched nativity. When Fi is strong in a person, an acute aspiration buds forth to boldly return themselves and others to their sacred spark; that purity that remains always incorruptible but buried beneath a mountain of faces.

Vs.

Fe: The Human Condition
Given this awareness, the Fe user is an acute student of human behavior, understanding – by the tracking of this domain – how we act, how we emote, how we move and why we make the choices we make. Fe monitors how it is that society shapes our opinions and thoughts; how it is that collective ideologies permeate into our beings and define our moral landscapes for better or worse. Thus, Fe soon comes to develop a concept of “the human condition” from a universal place defined by what commonly manifests across populations and lifetimes.In this sense, Fe comes to understand “what it means to be human” from the outside-in, using what is externally evident as reflective of our shared internal reality.

And then regarding an observation above - that Jordan Peterson rarely says anything new, there is :

Ni: Narrowness & Convergence
The Ni user is not an inciter or generator of novel things, nor is his specialty a spontaneous creativity, but is instead the holistic assimilation of trends over time, and a convergence of perspective along the most reinforced trendlines. They generally see only one or a few trajectories stemming from a given situation and are magnetically drawn to the likeliest interpretations. Thus, the ideas the Ni user arrives at are not things he creates, but things he discovers to already be “the case”; often sourcing from an inside-out evaluation of being but just as well from a panoramic evaluation of society. In this way, the Ni user is a sort of investigator or excavator of the primordial imagery in himself and society. 

vs.

Ne: Daydreaming
The Ne function is motivated to discover new information, whether by absorbing it from the outside or by synthesizing it out of existing datasets through a creative alchemy. 

So, at least some of the reasons for disagreement can even be function related, type related or quadra related. Which is interesting and informative in itself.