JORDAN PETERSON SAVES THE WORLD
ARC Conference 2025: Market Zionism and the Will to PowerPoint
In this post I explain what I gathered from attending Jordan Peterson’s 2025 ARC conference, and suggest at the end what we may build in place of its vision of the future for our civilisation.
It is a long and serious treatment of the philosophy and economics of the ARC movement, whose stated purpose is to answer the civilisational question we face at the present moment.
POWERPOINT TO THE PEOPLE
Arriving at the Arc Conference was like strolling through a Ballardian parable: the London Excel centre is a corridor of shuttered neon lit concessions, desolate like a recently abandoned planet.
Arc, say the signs, bright as a Scientologist promise.
What I found at the end of this yellow-bricked road was a vision of the future in a vast, light industrial shed. Thanks to the efforts of the neoliberals, we all feel at home in these functional boxes these days.
I wandered into the hall below, and then made my way into the adjacent auditorium for the opening speech, which like most PowerPoint presentations was an outrageous, if highly animated, theft of my precious time.
The Golden Road to Nowhere
Jordan Peterson’s Arc Conferences began with a mission statement to save Western civilization from its enemies, and present a vision of a bright new future of “courage” and “dignity”. At this year’s conference at the Excel in London, yellow banners displayed these words in the meeting hall.
“Those of us who love our nations – and those of us who love the principles and values on which it [sic] is founded – know that there is something that is wrong”.
This is how Phillipa Stroud, Arc’s CEO, introduced the antisocial missionaries of tomorrow’s world.
Jordan Peterson then appeared, to squint and croak dramatically about everything, using very grand words.
His routine these days is that of a tortured messiah, a man displaying his suffering as a carnival act for an audience that does not deserve him. Of course, the audience loves him, he is a hero to them. The substance of his performance art is that the West can be saved by neoliberal economics inspired by Zionism.
When he talked about the need for divine inspiration of the state, he repeated the Zionist slogan of leading “the desert to bloom”.
Yet it is his friends – like Benjamin Netanyahu - who have reduced Gaza to rubble, and whose globalized consumer models have leveled the West into a monocultural desert - what JG Ballard called an international nowhereland.
In this second instalment of what could be called The Will to PowerPoint, Peterson appears, like an animated punctuation mark, to throw up some bullet point bullshit whilst he squints and frowns like a free market Kahanist Wittgenstein:
This is how Peterson talks these days
“The sacrificial altar is at the center of the church and the church is at the center of the town and the town is at the center of the state and the state organized under the Divine principle of sacrifice that constitutes our proper association with the Divine spirit that establishes the state that leads the desert to bloom and the land to abundance”.
Jordan Peterson is not a Christian and he is not a Catholic. He has said being Catholic is “about as sane people can get”. So why isn’t he?
OUT OF STEP WITH THE NEW POLITICS
After him, House Speaker Mike Johnson appeared via video link to deliver a speech not only from another continent, but from another world view entirely.
Johnson made it clear that American political economy has moved on from liberal globalism, both in the domestic and international economic dimension, and in the “soft power” sphere of financing the liberal consensus worldwide through CIA structures like USAID.
Whilst Peterson is sponsored by people who see no higher spiritual purpose in life than shopping, Mike Johnson’s view is one inspired by the “little platoons” of Edmund Burke.
These, Johnson said, are the voluntary associations whose existence is the basis of community, and provide an example for the restoration of the American nation. The real life examples he gave were of Christian community groups organizing disaster relief outside the state bureaucracy.
What is also obvious to anyone who has read Burke is that these “little platoons” have nothing whatsoever to do with the market and its “values”.
Burke’s conservatism is about people, not profit. It is about the value of life, not its price.
Johnson’s speech has yet to appear on the Arc YouTube channel, as it directly contradicts almost everything said afterwards onstage.
Peterson’s conference on saving Western civilization took place in a vast light industrial shed, one of many in London’s financial and commercial-shed district. These are the cathedrals of the global marketplace. There are no little platoons here.
PETERSON THE “CLASSICAL LIBERAL”
The “classical Liberalism” Peterson is promoting is the economic model of into-the-box thinking. It is this school of thought, from Reagan and Thatcher through Clinton and Blair, that has replaced the architecture of our cultures.
We now live, work and die in these boxes.
Financialisation devoured our communities by dissolving our trades and industries, replacing moral values of the West with preference, convenience, and choice.
It is the market that says the elderly should commit suicide – because they are too expensive a burden to maintain. Abortion is about freedom of choice. The value of life is dismissed as a matter of inconvenience.
These are liberal market values.
This “Classical Liberal” model is the reason everywhere now resembles an airport lounge.
To arrive at Arc is to shuffle down a seemingly endless corridor of shuttered consumer concessions, all staffed, just as the Arc Conference itself, by immigrants. This is the masterpiece of the self-appointed saviors of the West.
Later on Monday a speech was given by a Nigerian woman about the need to limit immigration into Europe. Of course, Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke is the leader of the Conservative Party of Great Britain.
She hardly spoke about “conservatism” at all, which is good, but instead went on at length to defend “liberalism”, which is what conservatives like her actually are: free market valuers who talk about responsible global citizenship.
We are all just replaceable parts in a money machine to these people.
Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke is the Nigerian daughter of a Yoruba nationalist, and she sat on the stage and said some cultures were superior to others. Bold take.
Hers - the Yoruba - sold other Africans into slavery. Does this make her tribe higher or lower in the Petersonian transvalue system?
Adegoke is the leader of the British Conservative Party - an electoral machine which has supervised the transition of Britain from somewhere to nowhere.
Which culture won the moral victory there? Hers, or the one that says she is as British as I am? Why are we being lectured in our homeland by a woman whose people were given a taxi from the Stone Age by ours?
The conference was a cacophony of tone deaf minstrels. What did their grand slogans mean?
Kemi Badenoch, if we call her by her brand name, leads a party which has admitted over one million third world immigrants per year into Britain since Boris Johnson decided to “open the floodgates”.
These people, say the Conservatives, are welcome to remain unless they refuse to fit in, in which case nothing will happen.
They will be given passports and then will identify as British. Once this ritual is performed - poof! There is no problem. They will be as native as Adegoke herself, and we shall all be the same but different.
It is fashionable among conservatives now to say that men identifying women is madness because it contradicts the obvious.
No conservative anywhere has admitted that the same logic applies to passport citizenship.
Adegoke is TransBritish. She is a transvaluer. Why do “conservatives” do this?
Mass migration is great for the bottom line, and for the top one: GDP. According to Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson opened the floodgates of unskilled third world immigration because he wanted the Financial Times to like him.
You have to understand that our rigged political system wasn’t just about rainbow flags and open borders.
The sponsored consensus was a belief system for an economic model of international nowhereland, in which there is no higher spiritual purpose for mankind than shopping.
The Arc Conference took place in one of its temples - a vast, light-industrial shed staffed by migrants.
A MESSAGE FROM “CONSERVATIVE” SPONSORS
The vision presented by Peterson is simply a message from his sponsors.
These people are the open borders, market values, consumer liberationists whose monuments are everywhere you are. Their utopia, which has devoured every somewhere it has touched, is itself the source of many of the problems the conference bewails.
Consumer economies are addiction economies, and these addictions are consolation prizes for the subtraction of the meaning of life as it becomes nothing more than a series of contactless transactions between replaceable populations.
Stroud and Peterson agree with Mike Johnson that “this is our civilisational moment” - as did many of the speakers.
It is the remedies they are selling which they differ, and the buyer should beware the alluring talk of a threat from outside the air conditioned bright canteen of the market valuers.
In this moment, many people are realizing that the political and social culture they inhabited was little more than a message from their sponsors.
The USAID revelations, which is the revelation of the method of sponsoring a model of US power intended to conquer the globe, have shocked most people with the obvious news that the liberal-global empire was an attempt to sell a counterfeit culture as the genuine article.
Yet this cultural production was not done for nothing. It was the sponsorship of thought leaders, media, corporate and public messaging to manufacture belief in a borderless, deregulated international financial system. This is the beating heart of globalism. This is what Peterson is pitching as the lifeboat of our way of life. It is an invitation on to a sinking ship.
The sponsorship of culture and of new values is not confined to the progressive left.
Arc is sponsored by the owner of the Spectator, the house magazine of the UK conservative party, which has long celebrated the virtues of mass migration and whose former editor continues to do so. Its current one, Michael Gove, said in the 1990s that nothing could be done about it. Mass migration has been the policy of neoliberal conservatives for decades.
Catholics would – and should – argue that our Western civilization was not founded by Adam Smith but between the 9th and 11th centuries by the institutions and scholarship of the Church.
CATHOLIC SOCIAL TEACHING – A FUTURE BEYOND THE LIBERALS
There was no talk of this onstage, except from a Jewish Labour peer who was shut down after 90 seconds for pointing out that the people who said the market will fix everything sold all our industry to China to make a fast buck.
Lord Glasman spoke briefly of the dignity of work and his is probably the only serious vision of a postliberal politics in Britain at present. A friend and admirer of Steve Bannon’s American worker nationalism, Glasman’s blueprint is based on the Catholic social teaching of Pope Leo XIII.
He was abruptly cut off before he could speak about any of this, with the floor being given to a corpulent aborigine who spoke a lot and said very little.
I watched in mute and silent horror as his paunch escaped his shirt when he continued his senseless disquisition offstage - a token presence whose contribution prevented any sense being talked to the four thousand clappers seated in the arena.
CATHOLIC POLITICS
Wandering backstage I passed a self intoxicated Peterson and spoke to Glasman about his ideas.
On Wednesday, recording Faith and Reason, I mentioned another historical irony: why is it that the Vatican teaches the liberal global consensus of Net Zero, open borders and LGBTQ, when a Jewish politician from a leftwing party is the only man making the case for Catholic politics?
Why indeed are Catholics listening to Peterson at all?
We have our own economics, our own virtues, and our own idea of social organisation in Distributism. The traditional Catholic church can supply all the answers to life, but the modernists will not teach it. Bishop Barron appeared at Arc to promote this product line, which has no points of objection to the wholesale commodification of life, and shares a platform with an array of homosexuals and Zionists like Douglas Murray, Bari Weiss, and Dave Rubin – who together with his “husband” has bought some children to enjoy.
PETERSON’S ROAD TO NOWHERE
Jordan Peterson’s Arc conference is a golden road to nowhereland.
It has no moral values to impart, because the only value recognized by the market worshipers is in numbers – of consumers, product sales, preference and price.
He presents a profitable vision of a future which is bought at the loss of everything but itself, and his project completely disregards the fact that this financialized model is pure globalism.
It replaces traditional cultures and places everywhere with wipe-clean, flatpack monoculture, and replaces our trades and tradesmen with replaceable migrant labor.
These money changers have exchanged everything of value, including the value of life, for money.
There is nothing moral in this rotten system, and both its product lines are expiring. No one wants to live in a borderless ripoff utopia, and even American Jews are recognising that Israel’s actions have shown it “has no moral red lines”. Neoliberal Zionism is not a politics of the future.
BASSOON FUGUE
I left the meltdown marketplace of ideas to do a show for LifeSiteNews that night. I am told by my colleague Andreas Wailzer that Peterson concluded his consumer Zionist jamboree with a speech punctuated by musical interludes.
His sponsored public meltdown is aptly bookended by a bassoon-parping fugue state staged as the wisdom of salvation.
As I have argued elsewhere, Jordan Peterson is a seething nutcase who has no knowledge of the politics he claims to oppose, and no interest in Christ beyond marketing his new values to replace those of faithful Christians.
He is proof positive that, given the right backers, going insane is a good career move.
And now that this obscene clown show is over, to some serious thoughts on a political economy for the future of the nation.
CATHOLIC ANSWERS
In a speech given in November, Glasman was told by the critic of liberalism John Gray that these people had replaced our industry with a knowledge economy – and now no one knows anything.
Glasman explained what his vision would provide - restoring the dignity of work, and of the workers.
A reindustrialising programme to revive our wrecked homeland, inspired by Catholic Social teaching. This, and the messaging from the United States Government, finally provides a ray of hope for my people, the white working class, whose lives have been ruined by decades of state-sanctioned hatred, contempt and neglect.
I believe that Glasman has the only serious vision of a postliberal political economy. I am not a Socialist, like him, and would offer Distributism in its place.
However I agree that the destruction of our nation and our people is a direct result of the neoliberal economic system of debt slavery, plunder and addiction which will see us all die with no legacy beyond an inbox of unread emails.
Begun under Thatcher, continued by Blair, and celebrated by the Free Market liberals, this neoliberal system has replaced our nations with a borderless global supermarket browsed by strangers.
Initially named by Walter Lippmann, one of the architects of the counterfeit culture we inhabit and which is now dissolving, it reduces to a revolutionary replacement of everything with itself, including the value of human life.
The human condition is reduced to a series of transactions in a lifelong bargain hunt, and the freest markets and most open borders welcome the most rapacious of predators.
Another world is possible.
Glasman added to John Gray’s remark that we have a knowledge economy in which no one knows anything.
He said no one knows how to make anything, either.
He is not quite right. The nowhere men who sponsor Jordan Peterson can make something – a sale.
They are selling you the ruin of the past as the renewal of the future. They are selling you the economic power which partnered with the CIA in USAID to transmit a global culture. Though it may surprise you, conservatives have supported mass migration and the destruction of traditional culture for decades because it made them rich.
We have no need of these “conservative” idols and their idolatry.
We have no need of heroes at all.
We Catholics have our own hero – Christ – and His church has all the rules for life we shall ever need.
Faith is a gift, not a grift on behalf of profiteering backers. The civilisational moment is here, and its definition is not to be found in a vision of life as a morally neutral bargain hunt. It is rooted in the essential value of life, not in price, and we have no need of new values to replace it.
I met some great people at ARC, but only one of them was (briefly) onstage. I came home with a nasty cold, and I now believe that being in the same room as Dave Rubin has compromised my immune system.
If you would like to lose friends and alienate people, send them my iconoclastic and well-reasoned mindbombs. God bless you all. Do not despair. The times are changing for the better and these chiselling, death cult lunatics are finished.
I have only been reading you for the past several months, so please forgive me if this has already been covered: When will feminism die? Because it has to in order to bring back the birth rate (I assume).
We have traded the happiness of our families and their home lives for (roughly) doubled productivity by farming out our wives as cogs in the consumerist machine?
We took away the family's happiness and their homes by turning women into mere producers, then told both men and women that happiness lay in buying more stuff. With such a dispiriting vision of family life it is easy to see why it is not as appealing to our recent generations as it should be.
Thank you for your time in reading this and I value your writing so no need to respond if it slows you down!
Why are Catholics listening to this man at this late stage in the game? He's so obviously a double-talking, gobbledygook-spouting charlatan.