Jordan Peterson speaks at the 2018 Young Women’s Leadership Summit hosted by Turning Point USA in Dallas, Texas, on June 15, 2018. (Gage Skidmore/CC BY-SA 2.0)
Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson is collaborating on an initiative to develop “alternative” global policies and bring together a wider spectrum of viewpoints on humanity’s greatest threats.
Dubbed “The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship” (ARC), the project aims to foster a collective global dialogue on the topics of social and national prosperity.
“ARC is being established as a new movement of hopeful vision, local, national and international in its aim and scope, aimed at the collective, voluntary establishment of an alternative way forwards,” said Mr. Peterson in a release announcing the project’s launch.
He added that the initiative was being developed “in a time when the stories which once provided our societies with coherence have been picked apart by corrosive cultural criticism and governing elites are taking ever more power to themselves.”
ARC’s website says the group presents an alternative to “big government and the inevitability of decline” and seeks solutions that “draw on humanity’s highest virtues and extraordinary capacity for innovation and ingenuity.”
ARC is set to host its inaugural international conference in London in October 2023, bringing together over a thousand prominent leaders from politics, culture, business, and academia over the course of three days.
The alliance has an organizing committee of over 30 individuals including U.S. congressional members, former prime ministers, British parliamentarians, and global business leaders. Canadian MP Leslyn Lewis, former Australian prime ministers Tony Abbott and John Howard, and U.S. Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy are among its members.
‘Fundamental Questions’
In ARC’s mission statement, six “fundamental questions” are addressed including topics such as energy, environmental stewardship, families, and societies.
“In year one, we will wrestle with the need to responsibly steward the environment and our natural resources so that all people can benefit from access to affordable energy, while also mitigating against future environmental challenges,” said ARC board member Baroness Philippa Stroud, a UK think tank leader and a member of the House of Lords, in the release.
“We will explore ways that genuinely open markets can be fostered to create prosperity for all, including those ‘left behind’ by globalisation. And we will consider the role families and communities have to play in the 21st century.”
Mr. Peterson and Danish researcher Bjorn Lomborg lamented the loss of free speech and open debate in the western world in an opinion piece published in The Globe and Mail on Aug. 10.
“The meaningful exchange of truly diverse ideas and perspectives has withered over recent decades. Unorthodox thinking is increasingly trashed or disregarded, even as the chattering class’s fear- and force-predicated approaches repeatedly prove inadequate to cope with the true complexities and crises of the modern world,” said the article.
It noted that the pandemic had amounted to a humanitarian disaster of global proportions, the consequences of which few escaped.
Mr. Peterson and Mr. Lomberg denounced the news media and international organizations such as the United Nations for what they said was “fearmongering” and climate alarmism, criticizing their absolutism surrounding humanity’s greatest threats.
“Fear-mongering and the suppression of truly inconvenient truths are pushing us dangerously toward the wrong solutions—politicians and pundits call en masse for net-zero policies that will cost far beyond $100 trillion, while producing benefits a fraction as large,” the opinion piece said.
“But a plan that makes of all problems the same compelling crisis without prioritization is no plan at all.”