It's striking to me how far Peterson had to stretch to find an analogue in nature to his vision of individualist dog-eat-dog capitalism. Even if lobsters form the individualistic hierarchies he valorizes, they're still wet bugs. He might as well said "consider the ant," or "consider the krill" or "consider the dung beetle." All of these creatures have evolved social structures that allows them to fit into their environment, but it's only with this one particular category that Peterson finds anything resembling his ideals, and it's something far detached from humanity. If he had considered the chimpanzee, the gorilla, the orangutan or the bonobo, far closer cousins, he's not going to find anything like the "natural order" he envisions.

I guess, this is to say that this vision of capitalism is a fundamentally alien concept, and it's fitting that Peterson had to draw on the stark and quite alien landscape of the ocean floor to find a metaphor for this system.

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[–] keepcarrot@hexbear.net 10 points 2 years ago

I'm sure he's saying "Even the lobster, so far and alien from us, has hierarchy, let alone animals closer to us likes apes and cats", which may or may not be true but commits the naturalistic fallacy off the bat. Obviously, he's not making a logical argument but a rhetorical one, though he's bad at that (at least to people who don't agree with him). And you can obviously find communal animals, though it would be hard to say sheep are bolsheviks or whatever.