Mean mad white men: the allure of Jordan Peterson


On 28 June, a gunman shot dead five employees at the offices of the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Maryland. The shooter, 38-year-old Jarrod Ramos, had held a grudge against the newspaper since its reporting in 2011 of a criminal case against him. (Ramos was convicted of sustainedly harassing a woman who successfully sought multiple restraining orders against him.)

Two days before the rampage, alt-right figure Milo Yiannopoulos had texted a journalist at the US news website Observer that he ‘[couldn’t] wait for the vigilante squads to start gunning journalists down on sight.’ According to Yiannopoulos, the text was a joke, although he did not waste the opportunity to further denounce the media, writing in a Facebook post the day after the shooting that:

You’re about to see a raft of news stories claiming that I am responsible for inspiring the deaths of journalists. The bodies are barely cold and left-wing journalists are already exploiting these deaths to score political points against me. It’s disgusting. I regret nothing I said, though of course like any normal person I am saddened to hear of needless death.

It’s unclear if Ramos saw Yiannopoulos’ ‘joke’ before carrying out his pre-planned attack. Certainly, Ramos did not need the encouragement, his Twitter page having long been awash with violence-laced tweets targeted at the Capital Gazette and its staff. Yet whether or not Ramos knew of Yiannopoulos’ text prior to his rampage, both seem symptomatic of an atmosphere in the United States that has become increasingly hostile to journalists and their capacity – some might say responsibility – to pass not-always-favourable comment on matters of the day.

Donald Trump routinely fulminates against reporters – ‘liars’ and ‘enemies of the people’ – and ‘failing’ news media organisations. The billionaire tech entrepreneur Elon Musk, stung by criticism of his Tesla electric car company, wants to create a crowd-sourced ‘media credibility rating site’ called Pravda (a presumably tongue-in-cheek reference to the official newspaper of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the name of which means ‘truth’ in Russian). In a Twitter-based fit of pique, during which he was accused of invoking a well-known anti-Semitic canard, Musk wrote: ‘The holier-than-thou hypocrisy of big media companies who lay claim to the truth, but publish only enough to sugarcoat the lie, is why the public no longer respects them.’ (Ironically, Musk later wrote a tweet, since deleted, in which he praised a fake news site for its ‘excellent’ reporting, linking to the Wikipedia page on ‘critical thinking’). A tranche of figures associated with the so-called ‘Intellectual Dark Web’, including Steven Pinker and Eric Weinstein, came out in support of Musk.

In a 1955 speech later published in his book of essays Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, Albert Camus famously observed that: ‘A free press can of course be good or bad, but, most certainly, without freedom it will never be anything but bad.’ In condemning the press virtually wholesale, and conflating any adverse commentary with ‘fake news’, the likes of Trump, Musk, and Yiannopoulos are singing from the same songbook as the demagogues who, in Camus’ time, viewed a free press not as an indispensible constraint on power and privilege but a dangerous impediment to their consolidation. And while intolerance of criticism seems to be a generalised feature of the age of social media, when it has never been easier to confirm our own biases and shut out the voices of those with whom we disagree, it is mainly on the right that the denigration of the media is being weaponised – ironically, the same side of politics that makes so much hay out of debates about free speech.

Which brings me to Jordan Peterson, the once-obscure University of Toronto psychology professor who shot to public notice – and a central role in both the culture wars, and the alt-right movement – in 2016 in the wake of his opposition to proposed protections for gender expression in the Canadian Human Rights Act. The publication this year of the self-help bestseller 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos has completed Peterson’s unlikely rise; he is now widely feted as one of the most significant public intellectuals in the world.

Among Peterson’s fans – at least eighty per cent of whom, by Peterson’s own account, are men – it has become a shibboleth that the media’s treatment of him has been unfair, dominated by ‘hit pieces’ and inaccurate clickbait. A fractious interview with Cathy Newman on Britain’s Channel 4, which has been viewed more than ten million times on YouTube, was taken by many of Peterson’s supporters as proof that he can’t get a fair hearing in the mainstream media (following the interview, Newman was bombarded with so much abuse, much of it vilely misogynistic, that Channel 4 called in security experts). We are told that it is this kind of journalism that gave us Trump and will return him to office in 2020, and that is driving people to the right.

But while Newman’s interview undoubtedly generated more heat than light, betraying the limitations of TV news and current affairs’ increasingly combative model of journalism, the truth is that much of the reporting on Peterson answers to precisely the same thoughtfulness his fans detect in his work and demand from his critics. Take, for example, this Current Affairs piece, or this one in the New York Review of Books. Excoriating, yes, but sloppy or unethical? Hardly. They are cogent and legitimate critiques of a highly influential author whose ideas (to the extent that they are distinguishable from nonsense, a problem to which I will return shortly) warrant close scrutiny, not least of all because of their popularity in the misogynistic, alt-right-associated ‘manosphere’.

To be sure, Peterson is no clownish firebrand in the vein of Yiannopoulos. Rather, he is urbane and respectable, emblematic of what British writer Olivia Laing has called ‘the endless malice of the polite right’. It is this, I think, that goes a long way to explaining the mass appeal of his writings and lectures: ‘just crazy enough’, in Jon Ronson’s phrase, to ensure media interest, but sufficiently intellectual-sounding to attract an audience for whom a brazen bigot like Yiannopoulos would be on the nose. For all those fan-made YouTube clips in which Peterson ‘destroys’ various interlocutors, in interviews he sounds, above all, reasonable. ‘I’m just laying out the empirical evidence,’ Peterson says to Newman at one point during their interview. It’s a rhetorical strategy shared by many stars of the New Atheist and alt-right firmaments: dressing up old-fashioned prejudice as civilised discourse while seeming to disavow ideology altogether.

So what are Peterson’s ideas, and why should we be concerned about their popularity? Insofar as it can be précised, his sprawling, 600-page first book Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief (1999) purported to explore how various universal myths and archetypes, developed over the course of human history, can guide people in making meaning and provide moral frameworks for societies. But, rather like Colin Wilson’s The Outsider (1956) – a similarly esoteric book of grand theory that, in its day, found a cult following not unlike Peterson’s – Maps of Meaning defies easy summarisation. In large part it is quasi-religious gobbledygook, ‘fascinating,’ as the sociologist C. Wright Mills has described the work of other grand theorists, ‘precisely because of its often splendid lack of intelligibility’. It is the kind of writing that seems, with its veneer of profundity, to redound on the reader’s inability to understand complex ideas, rather than on the author’s failure, wilful or otherwise, to plainly state what they mean. The beauty of this arrangement is the way it lends unlimited plausible deniability to Peterson’s claims, often so ambiguous that any criticism can be countered with the accusation that they have been misinterpreted. (Almost every defence of Peterson I’ve read runs along these lines – you just don’t understand! – without ever clarifying exactly what it is his critics are failing to comprehend.)

This obscurantism is a hallmark, too, of 12 Rules for Life, which repackages Maps of Meaning’s key message – how the post-Christian West’s crisis of meaning can be remedied by the study of ancient myths and archetypes – for a general audience. By almost any accepted definition, 12 Rules for Life is, to invoke Peterson’s fondness for redundant capitalisation, a Bad Book. Where it is not obscure, it is blindingly obvious (it’s remarkable how much of this supposedly revelatory book boils down to something like the old parental homily about taking responsibility for yourself). Where Peterson’s claims are not unfalsifiable, they are often wrong (he misquotes Adorno, and misunderstands Orwell – not a writer known for his opacity) or just eccentric. Is it really ‘the primary duty of parents to make their children socially desirable?’ Is eating breakfast really a cure for anxiety? (Peterson’s reference for this nugget is a 50-year-old study!)

The rules themselves, fleshed out in prose that lurches from the pedantic to the folksy (sometimes in the space of a single page), resemble for the most part the kind of inoffensive cant with which Instagram accounts are filled: ‘treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping’; ‘tell the truth – or, at least, don’t lie’; ‘compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today’. Others are next to meaningless, for example Rule 7: ‘Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient).’ When? Under what circumstances? Aren’t most people’s lives necessarily full of expedient actions, even supposing Peterson’s dichotomy holds?

More troublingly, far from reflecting the post-ideological figure Peterson likes to present himself as, the book is a testament to its author’s decidedly reactionary politics. Take, for instance, the gender essentialism that runs through 12 Rules for Life like a vein of rock. For Peterson, male and female are ‘natural categories’ that describe certain immutable qualities. Archetypally and symbolically, culture, consciousness, and order are all masculine while chaos and the unknown are feminine. The dominance of men over women is not reducible to a ‘disposable, malleable, arbitrary cultural artefact’ like patriarchy, but is ‘permanent’ and ‘real’, stretching back into ancient history. Drawing on evolutionary psychology and the (largely discredited) ideas of one of his intellectual heroes, Carl Jung, all of this is presented as naked fact, rooted in the unassailable truths of nature and mythology. It is for other commentators to dwell in ‘politically motivated interpretations’; Peterson is only ever ‘merely descriptive’.

In truth, there is little daylight between the alt-right’s veneration of a certain kind of hyper-masculinity – with all its talk of emasculated ‘cucks’ and ‘soy boys’ – and Peterson’s fascistic preoccupation with weakness and strength (he has said elsewhere that ‘there’s nothing more dangerous than a weak man’). In Peterson’s pseudoscientific worldview, men who are ‘naïve and harmless’, ‘losers’, and ‘useless bastards’ should look to the dominance hierarchies of lobsters for inspiration (a naturalistic fallacy of the kind Peterson often makes). For Peterson – a man apparently frustrated by the social taboo on hitting women with whom he disagrees – all conversations between men (at least those who are worthy of respect) are freighted with violence. That such authoritarian nonsense – all too easily lining up with the vicious bigotry of the online right – should now pass for wisdom says much about the moment we are in.

In The Politics of Myth (1999), Robert Ellwood observed that ‘the profoundest flaw of mythological thinking’ is ‘a tendency to think in generic terms of peoples, races, religions, or parties.’ It is not hard to see how such thinking connects with the increasingly illiberal nature of contemporary global politics, which has seen the rise of far-right parties in Europe and of xenophobic populism throughout the West. The frightening thing is we have been here before. As Pankaj Mishra has written:

deskbound pedants and fantasists helped bring about, in Thomas Mann’s words in 1936, an extensive “moral devastation” with their “worship of the unconscious”—that “knows no values, no good or evil, no morality.” Nothing less than the foundations for knowledge and ethics, politics and science, collapsed, ultimately triggering the cataclysms of the twentieth century: two world wars, totalitarian regimes, and the Holocaust. It is no exaggeration to say that we are in the midst of a similar intellectual and moral breakdown, one that seems to presage a great calamity. Peterson calls it, correctly, “psychological and social dissolution.” But he is a disturbing symptom of the malaise to which he promises a cure.

As a good student of archetypes, Peterson would no doubt be aware the false hero is a stock character in fairy tales. Often appearing near a story’s denouement, the character’s claims to being the true hero are usually tested and found to be false. If the villain is to be defeated, the false hero is to be exposed. As more and more disaffected young men look to charismatic figures like Peterson to vindicate their bitterness and sense of entitlement in the face of the increasing visibility of women and other minorities, unmasking such charlatans may prove the only guarantee of a happy ending.

 

Image: Jordan Peterson

Ben Brooker

Ben Brooker is a writer, editor, and critic based on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri People of the Kulin Nation. His work has been featured by Overland, Australian Book Review, The Saturday Paper, MeanjinKill Your Darlings, and others in Australia and overseas.

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Overland is a not-for-profit magazine with a proud history of supporting writers, and publishing ideas and voices often excluded from other places.

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  1. Even the most ardent opponent of JP knows he’s not alt right. This article is the usual disingenuous hit piece that has been trotted out for months.

  2. So in an article about allegedly unfair criticism of journalism, you repeatedly refer to Peterson as an Alt-right figure, a moniker that is factually incorrect, and which you take as self-evident true without any attempt to appropriately distinguish right from Alt-right. You also have attempted to group his criticisms of the press with those of Trump and Milo, and you added in references to a deranged murder for no apparent reason other than to stealthily associate Peterson with violence. Actually, you did that twice, by invoking the alledegly violent response to Cathy Newman and marking that as somehow Peterson’s fault, when you have no evidence for either.
    And then there is the click-bait title, which you have taken from Dyson, and which recieved audience boos from the crowd during the debate.

    What you are clearly mistaken about in Peterson’s criticisms of journalists is that, unlike Trump, Peterson’s criticisms come packaged with details of why he believes that. He’s not shouting Fake News, he’s explaining in great detail why a specific journalist is being misleading. And his audience knows he’s not making it up, because time and again, they have seen what happens when journalists splice interviews to make him look radical. They’ve seen the direct side by side, and know without any doubt that your are spinning, slanting and wrangling like crazy.
    And the result of this is that Peterson is now wisely avoiding interviews where there is editing of his words involved because time and again, when you compare what he said in context with how it has been framed by journalist, there is a real, palpable disconnect.
    That is absolutely a valid reason for criticism.

    So congratulations for writing what is basically a hit piece in an attempt to disprove the existence of hit pieces. And the pulitzer for honest journalism goes to… Someone else I hope.

    Jesus, it’s not hard:
    1. Don’t cast casual or even implied aspersions.
    2. When you have criticisms of Peterson, back up your statements with some integrity and transparency, and better yet, some facts.

  3. I started reading this with an open mind… then you copy pasted the ‘fabricated’ Cathy Newman abuse claims BS directly from the ‘progressive’ media. What happened to the ‘balanced journalism’?

    Suggest if you are going to take the moral high ground you start by presenting both views of a situation and save the outrage for conversations with your mates.

    Didn’t bother reading further….seems all you did was prove Milo right.

    Regards

  4. Jordan Peterson does not admit his fans are 80% male. He admits his you tube followers are, and then points out that this is inline with the standard demographic of you tube watchers being about the same male percentage.
    He then goes on to point out that the people coming to his talks are a broad mix of female and male.
    Gets your facts straight.
    You criticize Dr Peterson’s Maps of Meaning, written during his time as a Harvard University Lecturer, as gobbledygook.
    Your entire article is more so, but in your case it’s not written about esoteric archetypes, it’s written about a man. I am not sure what problem you have with a man who mostly speaks on the subjects of helping people feel OK about themselves by doing something worth while with their lives.
    Male suicide is a massive major problem and he seems to be one of the only public figures actively trying to do something about it. Though I wonder if you care about how many young men need help in the world.
    You have made a career of tearing others down in a very public way.
    Someone truly has hate in their heart and it isn’t Dr Peterson.

  5. Well said Richard Stephen. I would like to add, most of Peterson detractors, like this one, exhibit a shrill urgency which indicates that they are emotionally driven and therefore prone to making sloppy mistakes. For example, calling JPs talks pseudoscience. The man has put his research to the test, and yet these geniuses out there reject his published papers, researched peer reviewed findings, 1000 clinical client files, as… Pseudoscience. Childish, really.

  6. What a draw droppingly ill informed article. If this weren’t in a publication I’d simply dismiss it as someone trying to bait his audience. If there’s anything more likely to dissuade me from subscribing to this publication I can’t think what it might be.

  7. If you want to talk about aspersions, let’s talk about those being cast here on Cathy Newman. On what basis do you say her claims of abuse were ‘fabricated’ or merely ‘alleged’? (you may recall Peterson himself exhorted his followers to stop abusing her – as though such a thing should even need to be said).

    Sceptic, there is no need to ‘stealthily associate’ Peterson with violence. If you had read, for example, the transcript of his interview with Camille Paglia (linked to in my essay) you would know that Peterson comes as close to endorsing violence as makes no difference. As to the other points raised here:

    – I make no claims as to whether or not Peterson identifies as being of the alt-right. I’m interested in the uptake of his ideas by people who do identify with that movement, which is pernicious at best and dangerous at worst.

    – Sceptic (btw, you talk about transparency but won’t comment using your real name?): you ask for evidence to back up my statements. Where I provide it (according to you) I am ‘spinning’, ‘slanting’, and ‘wrangling’. Nowhere do I misrepresent, take out of context etc. any of Peterson’s views (you would know this if you had read his books, which I have).

    – Dismissing essays such as mine as ‘hit pieces’, rather than engaging with their content, simply illustrates my point that Peterson’s fans appear far more invested in accusing his critics of misrepresenting him than in defending his ideas. Could this possibly be because they are, on the whole, nonsense?

  8. Here you go Ben, attached is a link to a statistical analysis of the Twitter comments posted after the interview… the number being thrown around is that Peterson received 30 times more abuse than Newman… (Newman has played the victim before – google “Newman mosque”). Comments like “her career is dead” are not death threats. Peterson initially responded to her claims of abuse believing them to be true…he has since realised that it was all a BS victim stunt.

    Its an interesting event because it exposed the tactics employed by some people to claim victim status and the band wagon ineptitude of the legacy press.

    https://hequal.wordpress.com/2018/01/22/cathy-newmans-feminist-fans-sent-30-times-more-violent-sexist-abuse-to-peterson-his-supporters-than-vice-versa/

  9. Your turn now Ben. Provide us with the evidence of the abusive threatening comments sent to Newman. You wont be able to – because they were (A) deleted, or (B) never existed. After watching Newman’s attempts at manipulation I certainly believe (B)

    The next step in the game is for PC types to start fake accounts and send themselves threats to validate their victimisation.

    Read the 110k comments under Newman video… show us examples. The video has 11m views with 278k up (97%) vs 9k down votes (3%).

    Where is your evidence of these ‘threats’ Ben?

  10. From your essay. ..
    “”In The Politics of Myth (1999), Robert Ellwood observed that ‘the profoundest flaw of mythological thinking’ is ‘a tendency to think in generic terms of peoples, races, religions, or parties.’ It is not hard to see how such thinking connects with the increasingly illiberal (counter reaction bpeople nature of contemporary global politics, which has seen the rise of far-right parties in Europe and of xenophobic populism throughout the West. The frightening thing is we have been here before.”

    … and we see the leftist identity politics game is doing EXACTLY the same thing, breaking society into groups of “us and them”. We agree it will end in disaster. Peterson followers are not interested in group identity game from either side.

    Lefties are hell bent on creating an outgroup of CIS white males – even a dumb sociologists should be able predict that they are going to re-evaluate their position in the world… woohoo down with patriarchy. Thankfully Peterson has stopped a massive number going to the alt right by providing an alternative.

  11. This: “Peterson followers are not interested in group identity game from either side.”

    Aside from the missing article, why would you want to be a “follower” anyway? Are you talking about a herd?

    1. Not sure what you mean by missing article Cam?

      Be a sport and suggest another term for someone who listens to and generally agrees with another persons views…without being part of a collective herd…audience maybe?

      Any comments on the Newman BS Cam or are you just looking to deflect?

  12. ‘the’

    as in ‘definite’

    You’re right, I was looking to deflect. It’s good to know there are safe hands in the slips…

    I was just interested that you identify as a “follower”. No ill will meant…Sport

  13. ….is missing an ‘article’ hate speach or is that just pronouns?

    I didn’t say ‘I’ identified as a follower… ‘Peterson followers’ passive 3rd person/observer.

  14. Um, I’ll take the word of the editor of a reputable news organisation over that of a men’s rights activist blog (using methodology a first-year undergraduate wouldn’t get away with), thanks all the same. It’s instructive how those opposed to Cathy Newman’s ‘claiming victim status’ are so eager to paint Peterson as a victim.

    1. The reason you believe legacy news media is because you need their likes. None of them would publish you or hire you if you had the courage to a stand up and question their integrity. You cant risk going against your group. But journos and ‘communicators’ have zero credibility with non aligned consumers – evidence? Mainstean news is dying.

      You don’t need a masters in stats to count negative comments. The only people that have trouble drawing logical conclusions from avaiable facts are ‘communications’ graduates
      that have been told they can create their own reality.

      Its instructive how you turned it back to the victim narrative when you are confronted with data.

      Thanks all the same Ben. Good luck with the career.

      Regards
      Chris

  15. lol at how many JP fans read Overland apparently. People want to say JP is not alt-right. To the extent that the alt-right denotes Pepes memes and advocating street battles perhaps not. But our friend JP’s whole political analysis is based on “Cultural Marxism” which is a classic John Birch society anti-semitic trope. He is very poorly read on the French and humanities scholars he hates so much. If this is not alt-right than its merely classic far-right reaction, hardly a badge of honor and certainly not a classic liberal.

    1. …you can’t be right wing if you refuse to play identity politics. It does matter if you’ve never read a word.

      Political belief, like gender is a spectrum Oliver – not binary ‘progressive’ or ‘alt-right’.

      People get annoyed when they get mislabeled in both cases.

      Good that overland is getting a couple of readers from outside the echo chamber isn’t it? Or would you prefer to keep it a progressive safe space – free from critical views? Lol

  16. I only heard of Peterson when a male friend said he has been following him and cried during one of his YouTube lectures. This friend is unwell and on medication for mental health issues, unemployed for some years. I refuted his assertions that Peterson knows what he is talking about and was told off by his girlfriend who stated that Peterson is very well educated and well read. So, doesn’t mean he can’t be bat shit crazy! i know I will be dismissed by his fans for not writing a 5000 word carefully constructed critique but that is too time consuming for me. I am a feminist and his ravings about women are tiresome and paternalistic. He is in my lowly opinion, just a joke, an insignificant blip on the landscape. He spends a lot of time stating the obvious and arguing that feminists and lefties have taken over the world. Sounds more like the frustrated wailings of a soon to be superseded, irrelevant old man then a super intelligent, well educated intellectual. Glad I didn’t have him as a psychology lecturer.

  17. Ben has a BA in performing Arts right? hes not qualified to call the work of PhD professor in a completely different field unscientific. I disagree with much of what JP says and and Ben is correct to point out the ‘common sense’ nature of 12 rules for life however my own experience as an employer tells me many people lack common sense so if they read it and it helps them that’s a positive even if you hate JP. Given how long this is I was hoping to see some evidence to back up the claims and views accerted.

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