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RFK Jr. Is Using a Crazy Jordan Peterson Test to Determine Who Should Work at His Health Department
I Took the Test RFK Jr. Is Using to Determine Who Should Work at His Health Department
We are extremely doomed.
Donald Trump has promised to allow Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to “go wild” in his new role as secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The environmental lawyer, antivax conspiracist, and brainworm survivor chartered an oddly shaped coalition of COVID denialists and almond moms in his path to the White House, all of which was successfully marbled into the Trump platform during the waning months in the campaign. It’s hard to know exactly what Kennedy is cooking up for public health, or if some of his more radical ideas (like, say, removing fluoride from the water supply) will ever make it past the purgatory of “advisory boards.” But we do have at least one hint about how the man intends to structure his wing of the executive branch: a test ostensibly designed to locate potential employees for RFK’s reign at HHS. Among other things, Kennedy would like to know if you’ve ever experienced clairvoyance.
...
Things get even weirder once you get to the latter half of the test, which, in form and function, is a MySpace–style personality quiz. I was asked to rank a series of attributes, from 1 to 5, on how they gel with my psychic makeup. And given how disparate and unattached those attributes were, this proved to be an impossible task. Do I “make people feel at ease” more than I “spend time reflecting on things”? Do I feel like I “neglect my duties” more than either of those strengths? What? What kind of question is that! The whole thing reeked of neo-psychological quackery, in the Gladwell tradition, where the vast gradient of human experience can be neatly organized into, like, three smooth categories.
And yet, after that first round of personality disentangling, RFK’s assessment gets much more specific, and, somehow, even more bizarre. The quiz presented me with a lengthy list of strange personal insecurities, and asked me to highlight the five that I identified with most. That sounds straightforward enough, but the available choices coalesced into a majorly unwell person. One reads, “I tend to have unstable and intense personal relationships, where I alternate between extremes of idealizing and devaluing another.” Another adds, “I don’t have that much interest in having sexual experiences with another person,” which I choose to interpret as a smart bit of incel coalition management. Speaking for myself, I was self-aware enough to check off “I require excessive admiration,” but I made sure to leave out “I don’t feel much empathy for others” to ensure that the next regime doesn’t peg me as a sociopath. (This is also where the question about “having clairvoyance” surfaces, but honestly, compared to the other options, it might be among the least distressing of the bunch.)
And just like that, the test was over. I was presented no score or evaluation, just a terse “thank you” and the end of the line. I suppose I must live with the fact that the government now possesses a record of my darkest inclinations—an RFK-ified survey of my morality—but I don’t get the sense that he’s gotten any better sense of whether I’m a fit or not for Health and Human Services. Maybe that shouldn’t be too surprising, because when journalist Timothy Burke dug into who, exactly, is responsible for this deeply strange audit, he learned that the publishing company is called ExamCorp. ExamCorp’s president? None other than Jordan Peterson, the psychologist turned right-wing gadfly.
https://slate.com/life/2024/12/rfk-robert-kennedy-trump-health-human-services-job.html
We are extremely doomed.
Donald Trump has promised to allow Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to “go wild” in his new role as secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The environmental lawyer, antivax conspiracist, and brainworm survivor chartered an oddly shaped coalition of COVID denialists and almond moms in his path to the White House, all of which was successfully marbled into the Trump platform during the waning months in the campaign. It’s hard to know exactly what Kennedy is cooking up for public health, or if some of his more radical ideas (like, say, removing fluoride from the water supply) will ever make it past the purgatory of “advisory boards.” But we do have at least one hint about how the man intends to structure his wing of the executive branch: a test ostensibly designed to locate potential employees for RFK’s reign at HHS. Among other things, Kennedy would like to know if you’ve ever experienced clairvoyance.
...
Things get even weirder once you get to the latter half of the test, which, in form and function, is a MySpace–style personality quiz. I was asked to rank a series of attributes, from 1 to 5, on how they gel with my psychic makeup. And given how disparate and unattached those attributes were, this proved to be an impossible task. Do I “make people feel at ease” more than I “spend time reflecting on things”? Do I feel like I “neglect my duties” more than either of those strengths? What? What kind of question is that! The whole thing reeked of neo-psychological quackery, in the Gladwell tradition, where the vast gradient of human experience can be neatly organized into, like, three smooth categories.
And yet, after that first round of personality disentangling, RFK’s assessment gets much more specific, and, somehow, even more bizarre. The quiz presented me with a lengthy list of strange personal insecurities, and asked me to highlight the five that I identified with most. That sounds straightforward enough, but the available choices coalesced into a majorly unwell person. One reads, “I tend to have unstable and intense personal relationships, where I alternate between extremes of idealizing and devaluing another.” Another adds, “I don’t have that much interest in having sexual experiences with another person,” which I choose to interpret as a smart bit of incel coalition management. Speaking for myself, I was self-aware enough to check off “I require excessive admiration,” but I made sure to leave out “I don’t feel much empathy for others” to ensure that the next regime doesn’t peg me as a sociopath. (This is also where the question about “having clairvoyance” surfaces, but honestly, compared to the other options, it might be among the least distressing of the bunch.)
And just like that, the test was over. I was presented no score or evaluation, just a terse “thank you” and the end of the line. I suppose I must live with the fact that the government now possesses a record of my darkest inclinations—an RFK-ified survey of my morality—but I don’t get the sense that he’s gotten any better sense of whether I’m a fit or not for Health and Human Services. Maybe that shouldn’t be too surprising, because when journalist Timothy Burke dug into who, exactly, is responsible for this deeply strange audit, he learned that the publishing company is called ExamCorp. ExamCorp’s president? None other than Jordan Peterson, the psychologist turned right-wing gadfly.
https://slate.com/life/2024/12/rfk-robert-kennedy-trump-health-human-services-job.html
Via Lawyers, Guns and Money
The pseudoscience goes all the way down.
8 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
So nothing to worry about!
