A couple of days ago, I went for a bit of a walk and some errands and while I did, I thought what better light(ish) listen then the recent Jordan Peterson interview on his daughter's podcast that I'd heard a fair bit about, since it announced officially his move from Canada to Arizona. And as they went through a small list of conversation topics (and a lot of Trudeau-bashing, rightfully so), I found myself getting hella excited, because the topic they'd reached was Peterson Academy which is under his tutelage and where he teaches several courses, but which is run essentially by her.
And it was the weirdest thing, walking around the grocery store, grinning at all the future courses that were being hinted at or discussed. Peterson mentioned a couple of professors had reached out to ask if they couldn't teach at PA full-time, since it offered them carte blanche on what they could teach.
You can tell. You can see how much they're enjoying themselves, how much they like their subjects, and that in turn is extremely invigorating for me as a student. There's nothing, nothing that compares to learning about a topic from someone who's genuinely passionate. It's how ideas go round, I think, and I for one notice this often in my day-to-day life. When I meet someone I like and respect and consider very smart, which isn't all that often, but it does happen, I become interested in their interests. It's a cheat sheet to growing yourself - if you sift through the people that you come across carefully enough and surround yourself with clever, educated, passionate people, then the job's half-done. They'll expose you to a slew of interesting new ideas and subjects. In a way, that's exactly what PA is doing. Seeking out the best professors and thinkers and trusting they'll come up with good topics to teach.
They usually do.
Yesterday, I finished my tenth course on Peterson Academy, and I have to say, I'm really enjoying myself. Not all the courses are mindblowing. Some, while very nice, didn't really warrant a full-blown 8-hour course in my opinion, but they're still so rich with new information. I'm constantly being introduced to new ideas and new people to follow (often the teachers, but sometimes just footnotes in a lecture who turn out to be really clever people).
I last wrote about my experience a couple of months ago, so I figure it's time for a quick update.
When I last told you about PA, I'd just started a course on Shakespeare's Tragedies with comedian and writer Andrew Doyle. I adored it. Him. He was so funny and clever and broke down some of my favorite plays offering some really unique insights. Talked about the relationship between art and politics, and why good art doesn't moralize (something many contemporary artists seem to have forgotten).
I also took Peterson's course, Introduction to Nietzsche: How to Philosophize with a Hammer. Got me reading Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil, which I wasn't too thrilled with, but I've also read bits of The Gay Science, which I think I might like a little better. He made it easy. I didn't realize I thought of Nietzsche as something I wasn't supposed to understand. I had no problem thinking it was for snooty cunts and that it wasn't for me, and had no idea how much I was missing.
Once I finished the Nietzsche course, the Introduction to Plato one with James Orr came naturally, since Nietzsche drew in many ways on Plato's writings. I heard the Orr philosophy classes are some of the most popular and I can see why - he's a great speaker, and I swear it's not just the British accent. He made Plato so easy, so reasonable. Definitely not what you expect when you hear "Cambridge professor talking about Plato". As the country was going through its disastrous elections at the time, I definitely related with Plato's idea that power should rest with philosopher kings.
Oh, but the one I enjoyed best was Michael Malice's The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Union. To be honest, I had no idea what to expect and the poster for it wasn't too encouraging, but I figured it'd make a nice change from philosophy. Hands down, the best course I've taken on PA so far. Malice is a born storyteller and he brought such humanity to the subject, it didn't feel like a dry history class, at all.
On the contrary, I found myself tearing up often, since Malice didn't spare any details describing the cruelty and reign of terror that followed the Russian Revolution, or the barbarism of Stalin or later, the Stasi in East Germany.
Weirdly enough, though I come from a post-Communist country, I realized the subject had always existed in the back of my head, but this was the first time I genuinely acknowledged it. The course got me facing the horror of it, the inhumanity. In the comments, I ran into other Romanians of a similar-ish age, who hadn't really experienced it first-hand, talking about how it got them talking with their parents about it. I talked to my mom about it a lot, too, and I'm surprised how different it seems. Because while Malice is of Ukrainian/Russian origin, he was raised in the US and told the story from history's point of view, from the Western point of view. Mostly. He did tear up describing the Ukrainian famine under Stalin's brutal regime, for instance. But the latter years and the fall of the Iron Curtain, I found, to be quite different from the stories I'd heard growing up here. Obviously. Information from the outside world, for a start, was scarce.
One thing that I would've liked to hear mentioned in the class was the brutality of the protests here in Romania. It was by far the bloodiest fall of the Communist regime. Compared to places like Prague, it was a bloodbath and I know many people who suffered, were imprisoned or even shot during the 1989 revolution. Sadly, it wasn't mentioned. I kept thinking of all those people who had to die here, and for what? Because some egomaniac cunt didn't wanna go peacefully? Because the Iron Curtain couldn't be seen to fall that easily? Whatever the answer, it seems like too much, and at the same time, not enough to warrant human life.
It was a fantastic course and really sold me on the PA experience. Last month, when they were running a Black Friday deal for enrollment for the next couple years, I wasn't convinced. Now, I might be. I'm realizing the value of being exposed continuously to interesting new ideas, to exciting thinkers and concepts, how I appreciate it. It's not every day and it's certainly not every school that's got you grinning and excited about the classes coming up, is it?
