The health of the planet and its people are at risk. The deterioration of the global commons—i.e., the natural systems that support life on Earth—is exacerbating energy, food, and water insecurity, and increasing the risk of disease, disaster, displacement, and conflict. In this Commission, we quantify safe and just Earth-system boundaries (ESBs) and assess minimum access to natural resources required for human dignity and to enable escape from poverty. Collectively, these describe a safe and just corridor that is essential to ensuring sustainable and resilient human and planetary health and thriving in the Anthropocene. We then discuss the need for translation of ESBs across scales to inform science-based targets for action by key actors (and the challenges in doing so), and conclude by identifying the system transformations necessary to bring about a safe and just future.

Finally we discuss system transformations that could move humanity into a safe and just corridor and reduce risks of instability, injustice, and harm to human health. These transformations aim to minimise harm and ensure access to essential resources, while addressing the drivers of Earth-system change and vulnerability and the institutional and social barriers to systemic transformations, and include reducing and reallocating consumption, changing economic systems, technology, and governance.

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Gupta, J., Bai, X., Liverman, D., Rockström, J., et al. (2024). A Just World on a Safe Planet: A Lancet Planetary Health–Earth Commission Report on Earth-system Boundaries, Translations, and Transformation. The Lancet Planetary Health, September 11, 2024.

https://doi.org/10.1016/S2542-5196(24)00042-1

Improved knowledge of glacial-to-interglacial global temperature change yields Charney (fast-feedback) equilibrium climate sensitivity 1.2 ± 0.3°C (2σ) per W/m2, which is 4.8°C ± 1.2°C for doubled CO2. Consistent analysis of temperature over the full Cenozoic era—including ‘slow’ feedbacks by ice sheets and trace gases—supports this sensitivity and implies that CO2 was 300–350 ppm in the Pliocene and about 450 ppm at transition to a nearly ice-free planet, exposing unrealistic lethargy of ice sheet models. Equilibrium global warming for today’s GHG amount is 10°C, which is reduced to 8°C by today’s human-made aerosols. Equilibrium warming is not ‘committed’ warming; rapid phaseout of GHG emissions would prevent most equilibrium warming from occurring. However, decline of aerosol emissions since 2010 should increase the 1970–2010 global warming rate of 0.18°C per decade to a post-2010 rate of at least 0.27°C per decade. Thus, under the present geopolitical approach to GHG emissions, global warming will exceed 1.5°C in the 2020s and 2°C before 2050.

Impacts on people and nature will accelerate as global warming increases hydrologic (weather) extremes. The enormity of consequences demands a return to Holocene-level global temperature. Required actions include: (1) a global increasing price on GHG emissions accompanied by development of abundant, affordable, dispatchable clean energy, (2) East-West cooperation in a way that accommodates developing world needs, and (3) intervention with Earth’s radiation imbalance to phase down today’s massive human-made ‘geo-transformation’ of Earth’s climate. Current political crises present an opportunity for reset, especially if young people can grasp their situation.

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Hansen, J., Sato, M., Simons, L., et al. (2023). Global warming in the pipeline. Oxford Open Climate Change, 3(1), kGAD008.

https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfclm/kgad008

High-end climate change requires transformative solutions, as conventional strategies and solutions will not be enough if major disruptions in social-ecological systems are to be avoided. However, conventional climate assessment approaches and methods show many limitations if they are to provide robust knowledge and support to the implementation of such solutions in practice. To this end, we define transformative climate science as the open-ended process of producing, structuring, and applying solutions-oriented knowledge to fast-link integrated adaptation and mitigation strategies to sustainable development. In particular, based on our experiences within regional cases in Central Asia, Europe, Iberia, Scotland, and Hungary, we have selected 12 dimensions that scientists and practitioners can use as a checklist to design transformative-oriented climate assessments. While it is possible to talk both about transformative adaptation and transformative mitigation, in this paper, we make the case that societal transformation does not depend on mitigation or adaptation policies and actions, mostly because they are related to sustainability innovations, which are endogenous developments derived from deliberate social learning.

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The global assemblage of human-created buildings, infrastructure, machinery and other artifacts has been called the ʻtechnosphere’, and plays a major role in the present-day dynamics of the Earth system. It enables the rapid extraction and processing of materials from other spheres, combusts fossil fuels causing climate change, and transports materials and people across the planet surface. It provides a vast range of services to humans, such as supporting the production of food, shelter, long-distance communication, and entertainment.

However, Earth system science has been slow to explicitly incorporate the technosphere as an integrated part of its conceptual and quantitative frameworks. Here we propose a refined definition of the technosphere, intended to assist in developing functional integration with other Earth system spheres, and an End-Use Technosphere categorization, EUTEC, that is theoretically aligned with human activities and wellbeing. The formal definition and resolved categorization enable basic attributes of the technosphere to be delineated, including its mass distribution among components and in space, as well as its temporal dynamics. In particular, of the roughly 1 Tt of technosphere mass, we estimate that one third is comprised of residential buildings and one third by the transportation system, both of which we map at one-degree resolution. Moreover, we show that reconstructions of technosphere mass since 1900 follow exponential growth with long-run growth rates of >3 % y-1, consistent with autocatalytic behaviour, allowing it to become an ever-more dominant component of the Earth system. The quantitative understanding of the technosphere remains rudimentary, and is in great need of further work to better integrate it with Earth system science.

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Galbraith, E., Faisal, A., Matitia, T., et al. (2024).  Resolving the Technosphere. EGUsphere [preprint].

https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2024-1133

From a systems perspective, ethical behavior is always related to community; it is behavior for the common good. In today’s world, there are two relevant communities to which we all belong. We are all members of humanity, and we all belong to the Earth Household, the global biosphere. As members of the human community, our behavior should reflect a respect of human dignity and basic human rights. As members of the Earth Household, our “common home,” we should not interfere with nature’s inherent ability to sustain life. This is the essential meaning of ecological sustainability.

The defining characteristic of deep ecology is a shift from anthropocentric (human-centered) values to ecocentric (earth-centered) values. It is a worldview that acknowledges the inherent value of non-human life, recognizing that all living beings are members of ecological communities, bound together in networks of interdependencies. All these considerations, and the radically new system of ethics they imply, are clearly expressed in the Papal encyclical Laudato Si’.

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Epistemic responsibilities (ERs) of universities concern equipping and empowering its researchers, educators and students to attain, produce, exchange and disseminate knowledge. ERs can potentially guide universities in improving education, research and in service to society. Building on earlier philosophical work, we applied empirical methods to identify core ERs of universities and their constituting elements. We used a three-round Delphi survey, alternating between closed questions to gain consensus, and open questions to let panelists motivate their answers. 46 panelists participated in our study. We reached consensus on six ERs: 1) to foster research integrity, 2) to stimulate the development of intellectual virtues, 3) to address the big questions of life, 4) to cultivate the diversity of the disciplinary fields, 5) to serve and engage with society at large, and 6) to cultivate and safeguard academic freedom. Together the six ERs contain 27 elements. Consensus rates ranged from 73%-100% for both the ERs and their elements. Participants’ detailed responses led to substantial improvements in the accompanying descriptions of the ERs. Our findings can inform the debate about the roles and responsibilities of universities, and inform researchers and policy makers to emphasize epistemic tasks of universities.._

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Neoliberal ideology is linked to poorer collective health and well-being. At the individual level, however, neoliberal beliefs may actually promote self-efficacy, self-esteem, and self-reliance. We examined the effects of three beliefs underlying neoliberalism—(a) Personal Wherewithal, (b) Natural Competition, and (c) Anti-Government Interference—to understand the unique pathways by which neoliberalism affects health and well-being at the individual level. Participants were recruited using paid advertisements on social media in May/June 2020. Multivariable regression identified associations between each of the three identified neoliberal beliefs and participants’ (a) self-rated physical health, (b) number of health diagnoses, (c) life satisfaction, (d) loneliness, and (e) social trust of family, close friends/partners, coworkers, neighbors, and strangers. Among 2632 respondents, personal wherewithal was associated with better health, life satisfaction, and social well-being (perhaps by promoting self-efficacy and self-reliance to undertake healthy behaviors), while anti-government beliefs were associated with worse life satisfaction and social well-being (perhaps by reducing benefits inherent in collective action and social connection). Those hoping to reduce the negative effects of neoliberalism on collective well-being must contend with the reinforcing effect that personal wherewithal might have in shaping the perceived benefits of neoliberalism among those with these beliefs.

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Responding to the proposition that learning to live in the Anthropocene involves learning how to die, this article problematises the modes of world-making upheld in some of the contemporary proposals for the global reorganisation of societies towards just, socio-ecological transitions beyond the techno-fixes of geoengineering, green growth, and their attendant ideals of progress. Specifically, it critically examines one such proposal that, inspired by process philosophy, has proven deeply influential in China’s recent shift in ecological (geo)politics: the idea of an ‘ecological civilisation’ based on principles of ontological relationality, democratic responsibility, and a new alliance between the sciences and the humanities. The article argues that while such a project rejects the substantive values of modern progress, its regulative notion of civilisation retains the modern story of progress as a mode of valuation and therefore reinscribes imperial, colonial values at the heart of ecology. In response, the article suggests that learning to die in the wake of ecological devastation requires making life outside the modern coordinates of progress, which is to say living without the ideal of civilisation.  Seeking to expand the political imagination at a time of socio-ecological transformations, it calls for ‘ecological uncivilisation’ as a permanent experimentation with improbable forms of world-making and methodologies of life that are envisaged thanks to ongoing histories of decolonisation and not in spite of them; that strive to live and die well but not always better.

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Savransky, M. (2022). Ecological uncivilisation: Precarious world-making after progress. The Sociological Review, 70(2), 367–384.

https://doi.org/10.1177/00380261221084782

Recurrent economic, ecological and democratic crises provoke opportunities to critically examine previously unquestioned assumptions about economies, an effort which can include those people on which the theory and practice are usually designed and tested. This article claims that there is a role for participatory research (PR) approaches to play for social economists seeking to understand and support local problem-solving, especially in social economy activities and socioecological change processes. The objective of the article is twofold: first, a simple framework for understanding the different manifestations of PR will be presented based on the degree to which a project has (a) scientific or transformative goals, and (b) hierarchical or democratic decision-making. Second, this text will discuss the kind of PR that is ethically and epistemologically compatible with social economic scholarship. This theoretical argument is grounded in feminist, Black and Indigenous principles of (1) highlighting subjective and socially-embedded perspectives, (2) critically interrogating power dynamics within research contexts and processes, and (3) ethically engaging participants in collaborative research. Such an approach aims to dismantle the hierarchical binary between scientific and non-scientific knowledges, with social economists actively contributing to collective problem-solving efforts rather than acting as detached observers and planners.

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Palka, J. (2024). The Potential of Participatory Social Economics: A Framework and Feminist Perspective. Forum for Social Economics, 53(2), 141–169.

https://doi.org/10.1080/07360932.2024.2329875

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For too long in higher education, different worker groups have conceived of themselves as separated by distinct, even competing interests. The isolation between groups reduces communication, fosters unawareness of common interests, and hinders their ability to effectively collaborate in solidarity, as does the divided and largely independent structure of the unions and bargaining units representing them. Without greater collaboration and solidarity, members of the higher education community are less able to resist the harmful trends that have been transforming the sector over the previous decades, subjecting them to increasingly similar working conditions and distancing higher education from its student learning, community service, and research missions. We propose a combination of elements from anarcho-syndicalist and social justice organizing approaches, centering intergroup solidarity and a flexible commitment to shared missions, as ways for higher education workers to build greater power and have a greater influence on the transformations occurring across higher education.

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Scott, D., & Kezar, A. (2019). Intergroup Solidarity and Collaboration in Higher Education Organizing and Bargaining in the United States. Academic Labor: Research and Artistry, 3(10).

https://digitalcommons.humboldt.edu/alra/vol3/iss1/10

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Against pessimistic trends in social and political theory, this article argues for the indispensability of hope in conceptualizing the future. Such hope, however, does not need to be beholden to a unitary vision of the future, as with traditional metaphysical or Enlightenment notions of progress, but should instead accommodate a multiplicity of possible better worlds.

Pluralizing the future links it to diverse nonsynchronous temporalities of past and present and emphasizes the roles of contingency, action and experimentation in concrete aspiration. Immanuel Kant and Ernst Bloch here offer philosophical foundations for this perspective.

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Goldman, L. (2024). Experimentation and the future(s) of political hope. European Journal of Social Theory, 27(2), 314–331.

https://doi.org/10.1177/13684310241229653

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Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has provided a critical site for investigating the ethics of American foreign policy and interventionist tendencies. For spectators, the most pervasive question has been whether American aid to Ukraine has materially benefitted Ukrainians. Instead, my research question is twofold: how should we evaluate the ethicality of geopolitical action, and have America’s intentions for aid been as pure as people have assumed them to be? I argue that an action’s ethical value in international relations should be evaluated by the action’s intention, not its consequence, as the latter is too complex given the interwoven nature of geopolitical affairs. Then, under this ethical framework, I assess the intentions of American aid to Ukraine, exploring multiple other possible incentives for involvement aside from mere generosity, including racial bias and strategic interests. Using theoretical literature as well as news coverage, the paper demonstrates the smokescreen of American aid and the ways the media has concealed their true, less generous intentions.

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Ross, M. (2024). Unmasking Intentions: Ethics in International Relations and Aiding the Ukrainian Cause. Critical Debates in Humanities, Science and Global Justice, 3(1).

https://criticaldebateshsgj.scholasticahq.com/article/116566-unmasking-intentions-ethics-in-international-relations-and-aiding-the-ukrainian-cause

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The unspeakable savagery of the unfolding genocide in Gaza and the absolute impunity of the Israeli genocidists and their Western sponsors have sent shock waves around the world and sparked a global intifada of solidarity with Palestine. Palestinians are struggling against 75-plus years of settler colonialism, occupation, and apartheid, to be sure. But there is more to the genocide than meets the eye. It shows us both the past and the future, a redux of the dark history of European colonialism that reached its zenith in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and also a ghastly glimpse into the future of a global capitalism whose extermination impulse is rising to the surface in the face of unprecedented crisis.

Let us step back momentarily from the horror of Gaza and recall that the hallmark of radical social science is to distinguish surface appearance from underlying essence in the events we seek to understand. This involves placing the “noisy abode” of headlines and the swirl of current events in a larger historical and structural context that give them deeper meaning.

Buckminster Fuller was the first to use the term “energy slave” in 1940. At the time, he estimated there were 36 billion energy slaves, or 17 per person, serving modern but mostly (~80%) pre-industrialized humans.

In 2022, global per capita energy consumption averaged 21,039 kWh, i.e. the average modern human (rural+urban) is served by 140 energy slaves (so there are currently about 1,136 billion energy slaves on Earth — for a time, and 80% are fossil fueled, with most of the rest (e.g. nuclear, solar PV, wind), except biomass, dependent on the fossil fueled industrial-growth hegemon, e.g. mining, transportation, manufacturing, storage, supply chains…).

Left Is Not Woke by Susan Neiman is a wonderful little book you can recommend to friends and family members. Her prose is lively and refreshingly fearless. She does not rely on complicated sentences or passive voice to gloss controversy. She takes a stand and sticks to it. Nor does she suffer from the reverse-victimhood complex common to so many “anti-woke” writers.

Wokeness, as defined by Neiman, is an ideology that reduces all groups down to the “prism of their marginalization.” By doing so, it makes an implicit claim about society as a set of conflicts rooted in power dynamics between rival groups (black versus white; cis versus trans; straight versus gay; and on and on). Neiman offers a provocative question at the start: “Which do you find more essential: the accidents we are born with, or the principles we consider and uphold? Traditionally, it was the right that focused on the first, the left that emphasized the second.”

People are familiar with the way drugs are marketed. An equally important aspect of marketing is the way conditions and diseases are marketed. For the pharmaceutical industry, the bigger and wider those diseases, the more people who can be diagnosed, and the bigger your markets are.

The marketing of medical conditions has become a key plank of pharmaceutical industry marketing. The relationship between the medical profession, the pharmaceutical industry, and the patient movements has resulted in a harmful convergence of interests. This has led to the expansion of medical diseases, whereby more and more aspects of ordinary life are being defined as symptoms or signs of illness.

It may come as a surprise that the concept of economic growth has only existed since the 1940s. Before that, the idea that an economy should grow, or even that there is such a thing as the economy at all, was foreign to most. This changed after the Second World War, when the United States faced a resurgence of labor movements at home and pressure from communist countries and national liberation movements abroad. It was in this period that the Gross National Product—what later became known as the Gross Domestic Product or GDP—would be introduced as a way to measure economic activities and the success of capitalist accumulation, eventually becoming discursively linked to the idea of progress and modernity.

Economic growth, as measured by the GDP, became an ideological device in the elite toolkit to defer demands from organized labor (“we cannot redistribute wealth until we grow”), measure capitalist countries against socialist ones (“the socialist experiment is a failure because those countries are not growing as much as their capitalist neighbors”), and impose structural adjustment on the global South (“we cannot give you loans until you strip your country of its assets and public services to stimulate growth”).

The weakness of capitalist growth and investment and rising inequality has meant that the ruling orders have demanded austerity, privatization, the cutting of public services; the deregulation of markets, environment and health; the freeing of international capital movements; the crushing of trade unions; and so on. And the mainstream parties—not only of the “center-right,” but often even more so, the social democratic center left—have accepted and adopted these policies as “there is no alternative” (TINA).

But with these measures imposed now for decades, capitalism is not meeting the needs of billions. The political result is the increasing collapse in support for the “mainstream,” particularly liberal, social democratic left. Everywhere these parties have slumped in support, while so-called “populist” parties of the hard right have gained in support and even entered governments in Europe. The American phenomena of Trumpism is emerging everywhere in Europe, Latin America, and even in parts of Asia.

In 1978, the philosopher Bernard Suits used his enigmatic book The Grasshopper to pose the question: what would we do in utopia, in a world freed from necessity? His answer was that we would play games, which he defines as ‘the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles’.

Today we live in a world saturated with games and gamified social interactions, yet we seem further from utopia now than when Suits’ book was published. Work, the realm of necessity, dominates our lives, while material inequality has skyrocketed. This apparently contradictory situation becomes more understandable when we recognise games as the form of cultural expression native to contemporary, late neoliberalism, or what we might call ‘platform capitalism’.

Neoliberalism can be distinguished from classical liberalism, and indeed other iterations of capitalism, through its drive to re-found the whole of society around an ethos of competition. Neoliberal theorists recognise that competitive markets are not naturally occurring but must be constructed by an active, interventionist state. Extending the effects of competitive markets beyond the economic sphere requires dramatic institutional reform and intrusive managerial practices to both assess and mould behaviour. It’s a set of techniques with which we are all now familiar. Our actions are audited against arbitrary systems of measurement, producing key performance indicators with point systems that can then be used for competitive ranking. When we interact with such structures we must conform to their logic or lose out. 

Film and television writers face an existential threat. Thanks to decades of deregulation and a gush of speculative cash that first hit the industry in the late Aughts, while prestige TV was climbing the rungs of the culture, massive entertainment and media corporations had been swallowing what few smaller companies remained, and financial firms had been infiltrating the business, moving to reduce risk and maximize efficiency at all costs, exhausting writers in evermore unstable conditions.

The film and TV industry is now controlled by only four major companies, and it is shot through with incentives to devalue the actual production of film and television. What is to be done?

This article explores reading strategies and advocates for a more conscious close reading. Starting by tracing the hermeneutic heritage of close reading, and examining its development from the New Criticism movement onwards, it then describes the fundamental physical and cognitive aspects of reading as a distinct form of analytic attentiveness.

Three methodological steps are delineated, discussed, and exemplified through the author’s close reading practices. By employing a paratextual lens to the close reading of manuscripts from the Early Modern period, the article demonstrates how theoretically informed readings, such as the paratextual perspective, enhance the reading process and deepen our understanding of historical conditions.

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In the emerging scene of non-western island studies, research done on the sinophone world mainly (but not exclusively) by sinophone scholars has become a conspicuous strand in the literature. Despite the diverse locations in focus, most research tends to functionally apply rather than organically engage with west-inflected island theories. Starting from this premise, I embark on a series of critical reflections on the multilayered and intersecting subjectivities of the non-western island researcher and the related challenges in the context of epistemological decolonialization by analyzing two symptomatic narrative vignettes abstracted from my own research experiences in local island and archipelagic areas in China. Specifically, I argue that in the face of intersecting structures and conflicting forces, the non-western island researcher is both stranded and enabled by a series of in-between conditions in which epistemological innovation is difficult, but still possible if pursued through relentless interrogation of one’s own vested interest and constant realignment of positionality. In the end, I propose three ethical-epistemological traps for non-western scholars practicing island research under the shadow of western intellectual hegemony.

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This article explores the theorization of (in)visibility in Honneth, Ranciere, Cavell and Tully. It situates the work of Honneth and Ranciere against the background of Wittgenstein’s account of continuous aspect perception and aspect change in order to draw out their accounts of invisibility and the aesthetic character of transitions to visibility. In order to develop a critical standpoint on these theoretical positions, it turns to Cavell’s concept of soul-blindness and investigates the form of invisibility through the example of racism as addressed by Gaita, Fanon and Memmi. This analysis provides the basis for a critical evaluation of the strengths and limitations of Ranciere’s and Honneth’s approaches and leads to the proposal that Tully’s public philosophy provides a more adequate way of addressing the issues of struggle and uptake that are central to the transition from invisibility to visibility.

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What is close reading and what are the steps we take in close reading as a methodological approach? This article explores reading strategies and advocates for a more conscious close reading. Starting by tracing the hermeneutic heritage of close reading, and examining its development from the New Criticism movement onwards, it then describes the fundamental physical and cognitive aspects of reading as a distinct form of analytic attentiveness. Three methodological steps are delineated, discussed, and exemplified through the author’s close reading practices. By employing a paratextual lens to the close reading of manuscripts from the Early Modern period, the article demonstrates how theoretically informed readings, such as the paratextual perspective, enhance the reading process and deepen our understanding of historical conditions.

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Liberation philosophy seeks to contribute to the liberation of the oppressed and to the creation of a more just society. A meliorative philosophy is one that improves human lives. A liberation philosophy can be regarded as meliorative only if it has a compelling theory of change. A theory of change for philosophical interventions should explain how they can contribute to social, political or economic change. The main components of such a theory are identified and shown to be present in the work of the best liberation philosophers, such as Martin Luther King Jr. A meliorative philosophy improves human lives by, among other things, providing the kind of guidance that leads to better decision-making and improved conduct. Philosophy should conceive of the guidance it offers as co-created and reflect on the conditions for effective co-creation. The distinctive virtues of meliorative philosophy, including liberation philosophy, are personal qualities that enable co-creation. These include humility, practicality, an openness to diverse perspectives, and an instinct for lived complexity. There are philosophical purists who reject the demand that philosophy should answer to practical needs. We should be sceptical about some of the claims made by philosophical purists.

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With the constitution of consciousness human experience/behaviour acquires a new “doubled” form. All animal behaviour can be exhausted with reference to inherited experience and personal experience (unconditional plus conditional reflexes). This, however, is not the case with human beings; in humans we have to introduce new elements, for instance, historical experience (inherited from our ancestors through learning; accumulated historical experience), which is extended.

Furthermore, there is social experience, that is, the experience we acquire in connection with other persons. The most important component of human experience, furthermore, is human being’s active adaptability (human activity)—adaptation of the environment to ourselves.

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The cultural pressure to endorse or reject public intellectuals wholesale can be problematic, perpetuating groupthink and diminishing scope for intellectual growth, societal maturation, and political imagination. On encountering public figures who appear to be both right and wrong, sometimes simultaneously, perhaps dangerously, there is scope to be more creative and less reactive in our response. In the illustrative case of Jordan Peterson, commentators often oriented their analysis within a conceptually moribund political spectrum; e.g. Peterson is “alt-right” attacking “the radical left.” Social media echo chambers lead some to read that Peterson’s “fanboys” were “misogynist trolls” while others heard that his critics were “virtue signaling snowflakes”. The tendency of print and broadcast media to seek a defining angle diminishes rather than distills complexity; for instance, Peterson’s fame was associated with a perceived crisis in masculinity, but that was not the whole story. “Petersonitis” is introduced here as a serious joke to describe the intellectual and emotional discomfort that arose from the author’s attempt to seek a fuller understanding of complex characters in a divisive political culture. 

In a response to Peterson’s book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, twelve relatively dispassionate perspectives on his contribution are offered as an antidote to the language of allergy and infatuation that surrounded his rise to fame. Peterson is described here as symptomatic, multiphrenic, theatrical, solipsistic, sacralizing, hypervigilant, monocular, ideological, Manichean, Piagetian, masculine, and prismatic. First person language is used to reflect the author’s experience of Petersonitis, after having been drawn to Peterson’s online video lectures, debating with him in a public forum, and gradually clarifying the nature of the limitations in his outlook and approach. It is hoped that the paper will help readers recognize, recover from, and ultimately transcend Petersonitis, and to appreciate the much wider application of the idea.

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