But his main contribution, I think, has been helping young men take responsibility for their lives through his lectures and his book, which actually makes some use of his expertise in psychology.
I don’t understand how he’s helping young men take responsibility. I’ve read excerpts of his book where he tells his readers to cut off their friends because people that need help are usually exploiting you. He also says that our culture needs to allocate enough women to satisfy all the creepy men that are bitter that no one wants to fuck them. He blames sexual harassment at least in part on women wearing makeup to work. He says that men can’t deal with “crazy women” because they’re not allowed to use physical force against them, which he says is a prerequisite for respecting someone, which implies that you can’t fully respect women.
I haven’t read his book, but I’ve never heard him say any of the things you claim he’s written and I can’t imagine the book being as popular as it is if it did say those things. Can you provide a couple of excerpts?
I don’t even like calling him an expert because, as you pointed out, he either ignorantly or fraudulently misuses words all the time. Everyone’s a nihilist to him, or post-modernist, or a neo-Marxist, or some other term that he’s using completely dishonestly. He conflates nihilism and post-modernism all the fucking time and he seems to believe that post-modernism is inherently communistic, which is the most imbecilic take on the term I’ve ever heard. He has no understanding of recent human history. He claims that Nazism was an atheist and anti-theist doctrine, which is an abject lie, and he seems to think that the U.S.'s behavior during the Cold War was justifiable if no humanitarian, which is incredibly absurd. Those are just my problems with his dishonesty, I could write a whole book about all the problems I have with his self-help philosophy.
I do think he has some interesting insights into psychology, but the rest I agree are kind of inane ramblings.