I want to try to tackle something different this week. I want to assess a public intellectual in the most unbiased and critical way I can, and try to come up with a fair and satisfactory conclusion. I want to form a reasonable evaluation of his credibility, his persona, and his contributions to public discourse. I’m choosing, of course, one of the most controversial human beings of the 21st century. Because why not. Let’s do hard things.
Dr. Jordan Peterson has been in and out of the media’s spotlight for several years now. He was a psychology professor at the University of Toronto for many years, and he has also taught at Harvard and been involved in various other professional pursuits across various disciplines. He no longer practices as a clinical psychologist - most of his time these days is spent writing, enjoying his family, working on personal projects, and engaging in conversations with other public figures on podcasts.
Dr. Peterson began his adult life studying alcoholism, and its neurological and psychological intricacies. He then began a lifelong foray into the psychological implications of the tragedies of the 20th century. He’s not a historian per se, but he has extensively studied totalitarian states. He looks at everything through a psychological lens, not a political one.
Viewpoints on his character
And I think that brings us to the crux of the Dr. Peterson problem - everyone who dislikes him seems to dislike him because of his political commentary. People confuse him for a political activist when all he has ever tried to do was stand up for his country and for the psychological realities of life. He’s one of the most cited psychological writers of our time - to say he doesn’t know what he’s talking about would be a foolhardy mistake.
Most people who dislike Jordan Peterson see him as a sexist, bigoted Christian Conservative. Most of the criticism of his character or his words comes from the left side of the political spectrum where he is considered an enemy of progressive thought and particularly of any non-male party.
Most of the praise and appreciation for Jordan Peterson comes from young men, seemingly from both sides of the political spectrum hovering somewhere near the center of modern politics. The people who get the most out of his contributions seem to be young people, especially men, who are looking for guidance and purpose and a moral framework for life.
I think part of the void JBP fills for his readers and listeners is the absence of religion and spiritual direction. Is he a god? No, and he’s not trying to be. Nobody sane sees him as any sort of god or divine figure - that, along with other accusations such as “he’s an alt-right nutjob” or “he’s a caveman who just wants to oppress women,” can be thrown out wholesale. Because they are ridiculous, hyperbolic things to say. And those kinds of accusations no longer hold any credible value anyway, as they are thrown around like candy in modern politics. If you call someone a Nazi for saying something mildly controversial, you are doing something extremely foolish. You are watering down important words. You are taking the heft and seriousness out of words that should be scary and non-trivial. That is a gigantic problem in our modern use of language - and that’s a topic for another blog post. Our words should be chosen carefully - words that are meant to have gravity should only be used for heavy remarks.
Dr. Peterson is more like an uncle figure or a mentor or, well would you look at that, a teacher. Considering he has been employed long-term at some of the most respected institutions on Planet Earth, it seems reasonable that he would be seen as a teacher.
The spotlight
So where did his story in the spotlight begin?
Several years ago, Dr. Peterson came under sociopolitical fire for his outspoken opposition to Canada’s Bill C-16. This bit of transgender identity rights legislation was a step too far in his eyes - he argued that legislating people’s speech was a bridge that should never be crossed. His opinion, having studied totalitarian regimes for his entire adult life, was that once you begin to mandate speech and force people to use certain words whether they agree with it or not, you are officially in totalitarian territory and the stripping away of other individual rights will inevitably follow.
This was the pivotal moment where JBP went from psychology professor on YouTube to enemy of the state. He was now seen as an enemy of progressive and tolerant thought. He was seen as an oppressor of transgender people, an adversary of individual rights for anyone other than men, and a reactionary hatemonger.
It doesn’t seem to me that this is a reasonable assessment.
Now I haven’t read the bill in its entirety, because who reads the entirety of these things, but my understanding is close in line with his. It looks to me like the Canadian government was planning to force its citizens, through the threat of jail time and criminal charges, to use people’s preferred pronouns to address those people. Whether the pronoun was real, or made up 6 minutes ago, you were at risk of becoming a criminal if you didn’t address someone by their preferred gender identity or pronouns.
People began attacking JBP as he was clearly trying to take away individual rights and freedoms. However, this is again a foolhardy assessment of the situation. People asked him if he cared about transgender people getting bullied. Or getting a fair shot at good jobs or housing. Or if he wanted to see trans people suffer because he didn’t support their lifestyle.
But these people missed the nuance of his point. He was not talking about lifestyles, or employment, or bullying, or housing, or social stigma. He was talking about the legislation of mandatory speech patterns. Period. That’s all. Just legislation of compelled speech. He was making no point beyond this one.
And you must give him credit for that - he has indeed become intimately familiar with totalitarian regime development patterns. And the forcible change of behavior in citizens, especially as it pertains to oppressed persons or minorities, is one of the common symptoms of this kind of problem. Whether you support trans people and their pronouns or not, his point here is valid.
If you haven’t seen how his critics (often college students) speak to him, check out the video that made him famous:
Now this, of course, is not a problem unique to Jordan Peterson. This is how all of our political discourse seems to work - misquotes, personal attacks, and relentlessly ignorant repetition of questions that are designed not to be productive but instead to gain moral high ground with shock value. Or to be so complex and muddy that it leaves the addressee speechless. If you’ll notice here, he often has to stop and correct the students speaking to him as they are saying or implying things that are overly generalized, inappropriately vague, or downright mean and misleading. He has to spend so much time avoiding the land mines deliberately laid by the questioning parties, that he barely even has time to say anything useful. Our political discourse is embarrassing, and this ugliness is only a mild display of it.
And, side note, this is why podcasts and YouTube videos are so important. Nothing in politics can be accomplished in 3-minute interviews. Which is why I am so staunchly opposed to people’s tendency to sit at home watching the news. It’s an utter waste of time. Long-form conversations have given us back our control over social and political discourse, and that’s why they have grown explosively in the form of podcasts. Intelligent people are tired of the news hijacking our politics and turning them into a worthless, angry embarrassment.
After this video went viral, he began a tour of news programs, interviews, and podcast appearances that lasted a few years. And he became ever more controversial - loved by some, hated by others. A polarizing figure.
One of the other big controversies at the center of the public caricature of Dr. Peterson is his stance on Marxism and post-modernism. He has spent quite a few publicly-viewed hours discussing the dangers and intricacies of the postmodernist doctrine as well as the intellectual shortcomings of Marxism. I won’t get into too much detail, but his critics have repeatedly said that he clearly doesn’t understand Marxism as well as he claims he does.
And on that point, I am inclined to agree. After seeing countless interviews and discussions, as well as his debate with Slavoj Zizek, I think Dr. Peterson is actually unprepared to discuss Marxism in its entirety. I get the impression he has read the Communist Manifesto and nothing else Marx or his partner Engels wrote. He seems unacquainted with the ideas and critiques presented in Karl Marx’s expansive literature. Now, granted, Karl Marx was kind of a weasel who didn’t even remotely embody his own alleged values, but that doesn’t mean his body of work has no good ideas. I think it was silly of JBP to discuss Marxism at such length all this time without reading anything more than the blatantly contradictory and easily-refuted observations and commandments in the Communist Manifesto. (I have read that document too, and it’s a joke. It doesn’t hold up to even the most elementary intellectual scrutiny.)
So far I’d say Peterson is misunderstood and vilified, but that he has also overextended himself into conversations he should have left alone.
He has also given some delightful interviews where he tempered his frustration and responded quite well to aggression and abusive interview tactics. He sat with Cathie Newman for an interview and she put all her effort into demonizing him and making him look dumb - and it backfired severely. She made a fool of herself and everyone who supports her with her brash and adolescent tactics. (That cringeworthy video is available on YouTube.)
Other work, and a continuing intellectual presence
Meanwhile, Dr. Peterson continued to lecture, write, and pursue other educational and public activities.
He gave a series of lectures on The Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories and posted them on YouTube. This series, in my opinion, constitutes some of his best and most honest work. He meanders carefully through the first segment of the Old Testament and identifies some really deep and useful bits of wisdom contained in those stories.
He tends to be overly wordy at times, using 300 words where 40 will suffice. And this is another common critique of him that I agree with. Sometimes he overcomplicates language and delivery. But that’s a small price to pay for someone who has this many useful things to say.
One funny moment I remember with Dr. Peterson is from his conversations with Sam Harris a few years ago. Harris asked Peterson if Christ literally died and was literally resurrected. And Peterson got frustrated and said “well it would take me like 40 hours to answer that question” or something to that effect. And Harris, ever the witty seeker of simplicity, said “how about ‘almost certainly not.’ What’s wrong with that?” And the audience laughed. This was a perfect display of how Dr. Peterson tends to overcomplicate and give long-form explanations when they aren’t always necessary.
JBP is also a best-selling author - most notably for his book 12 Rules for Life, and its follow-up Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life; but also for his deep dive into religious and spiritual history with Maps of Meaning.
Some people slap the label of Christian Conservative on him and dismiss him as a good old boy or a bigot. And others claim that he is a fool or unqualified to venture into religious conversations. But I think those people are doing the baby-and-bathwater thing. If we only ever listened to people who are “supremely and definitively qualified to talk about a topic”, we’d never get any new ideas. Cross-disciplinary approaches are required for progress across the intellectual frontier. And what I enjoy most about Dr. Peterson (and what his critics just can’t seem to understand) is that he applies psychological wisdom and models to as many situations as possible in life. I think that’s not only a useful thing, but an utterly essential thing. If we can’t understand ourselves in a given situation, then we know nothing. And if we can’t talk about religion in an honest and practical way, then what can we talk about? That’s like… layer 1 of the human experience. It should be talked about, from as many angles as possible.
Numerous times, JBP has become overly emotional in public - often even crying on stage. He is on the neurotic side, and he himself says that he has some feminine traits as far as emotions and personality go. I personally find it kind of off-putting that he has become so emotional in public. I mean I don’t think that makes him a bad person or anything, but it’s a little over the top for me.
Another critique of Dr. Peterson involves his own health. He, after studying alcoholism for years and telling people to clean their rooms, became dangerously dependent on benzodiazepines (anti-anxiety medication that is commonly abused). The short story is that his wife was given a terminal cancer diagnosis, his life had begun to spin out of control, and his anxiety was at an all time high. I won’t speculate on his life or how true his narrative is, but… I can see how that would happen. These things happen.
Do I think this takes away some of his credibility? Perhaps. I did lose some of my respect for him after hearing of this and hearing how he handled his treatment. But I don’t have any desire to discount everything he says now. Not at all. He has had a positive influence on my life. Not every addict is a bad person, and not every good person is immune to becoming an addict. Things are complicated.
I mean, Karl Marx was arguably a pretty terrible person, and he didn’t even take benzodiazepines. And a lot of Peterson’s critics are self-proclaimed Marxists. Where does that leave us? Well, neither group should hate the other - let’s allow some room for life to be complicated and for ideas to grow on their own merits.
You ever hear the advice “never meet your heroes”? Well, everybody’s got their own messes and their own shortcomings. If we only took advice from perfect people, we’d all be dead.
Jordan Peterson has also been a founding contributor or creator of other educational and publicly available products and services. Many of which have track records of being tremendously helpful to their users.
He has been asked why he seeks to profit from these pursuits - given his supposed desire to help people, it seems hypocritical. “How very capitalist of you.”
Well, yes and no.
I follow a brilliant trader on Twitter named Brent Donnelly. He writes a newsletter about global macro and trading insights. He said he has been asked why he charges money for said newsletter. His answer was something like:
Well, I like to spend my time writing. But I also have about a million other things I could be doing. One of which is spending time with my family, and others of which are various productive activities. You know what I want? I want to write every day. And you know what my readers want? To keep reading my writing. How else do I ensure that happens other than to get paid for it? That makes it so that everyone gets what they want. Otherwise I really couldn’t financially justify the time I spend writing.
And I would imagine it’s the same with Dr. Peterson. Profit motive not only ensures quality and integrity, but provides the lubricant necessary for busy people to spend time on things.
Or maybe he’s a capitalist pig. Who knows.
What he stands for
Now of course I cannot speak for him. But I can tell you what his character means to me, and what his contributions to people’s lives have been.
He stands for taking accountability. For one’s life, for one’s sense of direction, for one’s future. He believes in cleaning your room so that you can work outwards from that one immaculate space and take on more and more of the world. As you clean and organize more and more of yourself and your life, you can handle bigger and harder things. Because you as a person are in order and ready for the challenge. He believes in starting small and committing - not doing multiple things half-assed, but doing one thing with your whole ass. “Work as hard as you possibly can on one thing, and see what happens” is something he’s known for saying.
He suggests that having a sense of direction is vital. It doesn’t have to be a perfect sense of direction. It just needs to be something that seems good and useful. From there, you can course correct. As you learn more about yourself and take deeper inventory of where you want to be going, you can alter your sense of direction and keep moving towards what is meaningful to you.
He believes in working relentlessly on discovering truth, and putting that truth carefully into words. If you’ve seen him speak publicly, you have probably laughed at him saying things like “well that depends on what you mean by good!” He insists on getting the details right - almost to a fault. And he believes that generalizations rarely ever do any good. He implores people to specify and articulate, because that’s the only way that real solutions can be found. And in most cases, that’s the only way that the actual problem can be found. Particularize and solve. Such is psychology, such is life.
And he also encourages people to be truthful even when it absolutely sucks to be truthful. He believes that telling the truth is the adventure of a lifetime. And that makes a lot of sense to me. I mean, think about it. How often do you commit little lies of commission or omission? How often do you tell the entire truth and nothing but the truth, so help you God? If you’re like me, that’s an unbelievably difficult undertaking. Because it requires hurting people’s feelings and being at the center of controversy and hard conversations all of the time. Relentlessly, constantly. Telling the truth is a lot harder than just saying “no” when someone asks you to go out this weekend.
He believes in getting yourself in order before you criticize the world. And, given how many people are divorced and have terrible finances and extreme, hateful politics in our modern world, that seems like a good suggestion. I’m not trying to be mean here - I’m just saying, most people are not in any position to give “advice.” Arguably including Dr. Peterson, and me, and you, and anyone. Which is why paying attention to people’s actions, not their words, is the better bet. Advice is cheap; action is where the real advice lies. And looking inward to solve your problems is a lot more productive than blaming the world and being a bitter, scapegoating person.
He believes in “picking up your damn suffering and bearing it. And trying not to do anything stupid so you don’t make it worse.” Again, a harsh yet worthwhile bit of wisdom. Everyone has their crosses to bear, and the only thing worse than complaining about it is doing something destructive that makes it even harder to bear.
Dr. Peterson speaks about religion and God and belief and spiritual sturdiness through the lens of storytelling and psychological mechanisms. He believes, like me, that even if stories like the Bible are exaggerated or unrealistic, that there is timeless wisdom in them that we would be fools to disregard. He argues that “believing” in something is equal to “living it out in your own life.” That is, if you claim to believe something, you right well better be living in accordance with it. Otherwise you’re lying to yourself and everybody else by claiming you believe it.
He believes that a lot of misunderstandings in our modern politics could be solved with nuance and an understanding of how humans are wired. That if we took the time to understand the spectrum of human emotions, ambitions, and motivations, that we could have more productive conversations. Start with what you agree on and work up from there, as it were. Republicans and Democrats are much more similar than they are different - they just have different approaches to solving problems. And we’d do well to remember that.
Peterson also brings evolutionary biology and history into a lot of his conversations to make his point. Now, this seems at times to be stepping a bit out of bounds. He’s not always necessarily qualified to be speaking about these things. And of course that’s probably not a good thing. He talks often about how there are fundamental differences between men and women, and that ignoring those differences is ridiculous. And that makes perfect sense. But it’s also possible that he overextends himself beyond this topic, into territory that is not really in his wheelhouse.
But at the end of the day, he is trying to help people fix up their minds and start living better lives. He is trying to encourage people to take on responsibility because responsibility is directly correlated with a sense of meaning and spiritual sustenance. And this I definitely agree with. The only person unhappier than he who is too busy is he who has nothing to do.
So, what?
I used to be a huge fan of Jordan Peterson. I’m still engaged with some of his online content, but I no longer follow him with the same attentiveness I once did. Partially because of his excesses, and partially because I have probably learned just about everything he has to teach. I have watched nearly everything he has ever put online, and I’m a better person for it. I have learned more than I can put into words by watching his lectures and reading his written work. The amount of wisdom he can pull out of a story like Pinocchio is both hilarious and profound.
And my attention is now on other thinkers. And that’s not a bad thing. Attention needs to be where there is the most opportunity for growth.
I think of JBP as a man who uses storytelling and careful explanations to bring some of the last several centuries’ worth of intellectual thought to a modern, intellectually thirsty audience. I think of him as a teacher, an honest person, and an overall stand-up guy. Does he take himself and his ideas too seriously at times? Perhaps. He likes to make everything a dragon that needs to be slain. Sometimes he may be a little showy or emotional or over the top. And he has his shortcomings and he has overextended himself at times - and does that make him look silly? Well sure it does. But name a person who hasn’t.
He uses psychology to approach life’s issues. And I’m a fan of that. Anyone who isn’t a fan of that probably shouldn’t be reading my blog, as that’s my primary approach to just about everything. I like storytelling and psychology. I like to teach people about people by studying and discussing people.
Dr. Jordan Peterson is a person who journeys into wild and sparsely inhabited intellectual territory. He is a person who is on the frontier of human thinking. And, as history has repeatedly shown, it is not possible to be on this frontier without being controversial. That’s not how it works. Leonardo da Vinci was incredibly controversial. I mean, the church condemned him because he secretly dissected human corpses for god’s sakes. And yes, he occasionally painted. And we look back on him as a pretty swell guy. Socrates was also massively controversial, as was John F. Kennedy, and Nelson Mandela, and Dr. Peterson's contemporaries like Sam Harris.
It's not possible to push human thinking forward without stepping on some toes or making some people unhappy. To explore what is behind us and what’s inside of us without frightening some folk. To push people out of their comfort zones without making them uncomfortable - which is quite obviously the entire point. It's not possible to be at the highest level of human thinking without arousing fear, suspicion, contempt, and dismissal.
It is therefore my conclusion that Dr. Jordan Peterson is exactly what and where he should be. A modern thinker who takes risks with his vocabulary in a world where taking verbal risks is frowned upon. A thinker who makes mistakes while he pushes us outward into the intellectual frontier. A person who pushes things precisely far enough sometimes, and too far other times.
If you want the liberties that come with a free society, you are required to have your feelings hurt sometimes. To hear people say things you don’t like. It’s not optional. It’s required.
And sometimes they’re wrong, and sometimes you’re wrong - the important thing is, we’re talking instead of killing each other.
Drink some water.
JDR
“Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer, but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past. Let us accept our own responsibility for the future.” - John F. Kennedy