The New York Review of Books Jordan Peterson
This article was published online on March 2, 2021.
One solar day in early 2020, Jordan B. Peterson rose from the dead. The Canadian academic, and then 57, had been placed in a nine-24-hour interval blackout past doctors in a Russian clinic, after becoming fond to benzodiazepines, a class of drug that includes Xanax and Valium. The coma kept him unconscious as his body went through the terrible effects of withdrawal; he awoke strapped to the bed, having tried to rip out the catheters in his artillery and get out the intensive-care unit of measurement.
When the story of his detox became public, in February 2020, information technology provided an reply to a mystery: Whatsoever happened to Jordan Peterson? In the three years before he disappeared from view in the summer of 2019, this formerly obscure psychology professor's proper name had been a constant presence in op-ed columns, internet forums, and culture-state of war arguments. His book 12 Rules for Life: An Antitoxin to Chaos, published in 2018, sold millions of copies, and he had conducted a 160-city speaking tour, drawing crowds of upward to three,000 a dark; premium tickets included the chance to be photographed with him. For $ninety, his website offered an online course to improve sympathise your "unique personality." An "official merchandise store" sold Peterson paraphernalia: mugs, stickers, posters, phone cases, tote bags. He had created an entirely new model of the public intellectual, halfway between Marcus Aurelius and Martha Stewart.
The price of these rewards was living in a maelstrom of other people'south opinions. Peterson was, depending on whom you believed, either a stern only kindly shepherd to a generation of lost immature men, or a reactionary loudmouth whose ideas fueled the alt-correct and a backlash to feminism. He was revered as a guru, condemned as a dangerous charlatan, adored and reviled by millions. Peterson has at present returned to the public sphere, and the psyche-splitting ordeal of modern celebrity, with a new volume, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life—an intriguing title, in light of his recent experiences. The mystery deepens: What really happened to Jordan Peterson, and why has he come back for more?
Growing up in Fairview, Alberta, Peterson was small for his age, which fostered both a quick wit and a fascination with the power and violence of traditional masculinity. He once recounted in a Facebook mail how he'd overheard a neighbor named Tammy Roberts joking with some other girl that she wanted to keep her surname, so she would have to marry "some wimp." Then she turned around and proposed to the teenage Hashemite kingdom of jordan. He spent a youthful summer working on a railroad in Saskatchewan, with an all-male grouping that nicknamed him Howdy Doody, later the freckle-faced puppet. Equally a pupil, he visited a maximum-security prison house, where he was particularly struck by a convict with a savage scar correct down his chest, which he surmised might take come from surgery or an ax wound: "The injury would have killed a lesser human being, anyway—someone similar me."
How to be a greater homo was very much on Peterson'due south mind. Raised in a mildly Christian household, he decided as a teenager that "religion was for the ignorant, weak and superstitious." He yearned for a left-wing revolution, an urge that lasted until he met some left-wing activists in college. Then, rejecting all ideology, he decided that the threat of the Cold War made it vital to understand the homo impulse toward destruction. He began to study psychology.
Alongside pursuing his doctorate, teaching at Harvard and then the University of Toronto, and raising a family—he married Tammy in 1989, and yes, she took his surname—Peterson started piece of work on his first book, a survey of the origins of belief. Its ambition was nothing less than to explain, well, everything—in essence, how the story of humanity has been shaped by humanity's love of stories. Maps of Meaning, published in 1999, built on the work of academics similar Joseph Campbell, the literature and faith scholar who argued that all mythic narratives are variations of a single archetypal quest. (Campbell's "monomyth" inspired the arc of Star Wars.) On this "hero'due south journey," a beau sets out from his humdrum life, confronts monsters, resists temptation, stares into the abyss, and claims a nifty victory. Returning habitation with what Campbell calls "the power to bestow boons on his boyfriend men," the hero can also claim the liberty to alive at peace with himself.
In the fall of 2016, Peterson seized the take a chance to embark on his ain quest. A Canadian Parliament bill chosen C-xvi proposed calculation "gender identity or expression" to the list of protected characteristics in the country'due south Human Rights Act, alongside sex activity, race, religion, and and then on. For Peterson, the bill was proof that the cultural left had captured public-policy making and was imposing its stylish diktats by law. In a YouTube video titled "Professor Against Political Correctness," he claimed that he could be brought before a regime tribunal if he refused to use recently coined pronouns such as zhe. In the beginning of several appearances on Joe Rogan's blockbuster podcast, he fabricated clear that he was prepared to get a martyr for his principles, if necessary. His intensity won over Rogan—a sometime mixed-martial-arts commentator with a huge young male person fan base and eclectic political views (a frequent critic of the left, he endorsed Bernie Sanders in 2020). "You are i of the very few academics," Rogan told Peterson, "who accept fought against some of these ideas that are not merely existence promoted merely are being enforced."
The fight over C-sixteen, which became law in 2017, was a paradigmatic culture-war boxing. Each side overstated the other side's argument to bolster its ain: Either you hated transgender people, or you hated free speech. In Peterson's view, the neb exposed the larger calendar of postmodernism, which he portrayed equally an credo that, in denying the existence of objective truth, "leaves its practitioners without an ethic." (This is not how theorists of postmodernism define it, and if you have a few hours to spare, do ask ane of them to explain.) He was on the side of science and rationality, he proclaimed, and against identity politics. Feminists were wrong to argue that traditional gender roles were limiting and outdated, considering centuries of evolution had turned men into stiff, able providers and women into warm, emotionally sensitive nurturers. "The people who hold that our culture is an oppressive patriarchy, they don't want to acknowledge that the current hierarchy might be predicated on competence" is how he later phrased information technology. (This was during Donald Trump's presidency.) The founding stories of the world's great religions backed him upwards, every bit did the hero'south journey: Information technology is men who fight monsters, while women are temptresses or helpmates.
The mainstream media began to pay attention. Peterson had posted some advice on the Q&A site Quora, which he turned into his second book, 12 Rules for Life, a mashup of folksy wisdom, evolutionary biology, and digressions on the evils of Soviet Communism. (His girl, Mikhaila, is named afterward Mikhail Gorbachev.) It stresses the conservative principles of self-reliance and responsibility, encouraging readers to tidy their bedrooms and smarten themselves upwardly to compete for female attention—a bulletin reinforced past a questionable analogy involving lobsters, which fight by squirting urine from their faces to plant their identify in the mating bureaucracy. "Parents, universities and the elders of society have utterly failed to requite many young men realistic and demanding practical wisdom on how to live," David Brooks wrote in a New York Times column. "Peterson has filled the gap." He offered self-help for a demographic that wouldn't dream of reading Broth.
Yet the relentless demands of modern celebrity—more content, more admission, more actuality—were already fierce the psychologist'due south public persona in two. One Peterson was the begetter effigy beloved past the normie readers of 12 Rules, who stood in long lines to hear him speak and left touching messages on cyberspace forums, testifying that he had turned their lives around. The other Peterson was a fearsome debater, the gladiator who crowed "Gotcha!" at the British television receiver interviewer Cathy Newman subsequently a series of testy exchanges about the gender pay gap and the freedom to give offense. His debates were clipped and remixed, so posted on YouTube with titles announcing that he had "DESTROYED" his interlocutors.
I know this because one of them was me: Our interview for British GQ, which has garnered more 23 million views, is easily the most viral moment I've ever had. While dozens of acquaintances emailed and texted me to praise my operation and compare Peterson's stern bear on to Hannibal Lecter with a Ph.D., mean comments piled up like a snowdrift below the video itself. I was "biased and utterly intellectually bankrupt," "quack and malicious," and "like a petulant child who walked into an adult chat." What kind of human being, several wondered, would marry a dumb, whiny, shrill feminist like this? (Quite a overnice i, thanks for asking.)
Peterson lived in this separate-screen reality all the time. Even every bit he basked in adoration, a grand internet piranhas ripped through his every utterance, looking for bear witness against him. One calendar week, Bari Weiss all-powerful him a leading culture warrior, including him in a New York Times feature equally a member of the "Intellectual Dark Web." 10 days afterward, the paper published a mocking profile of him, reporting that his house was busy with Soviet propaganda and quoting him speculating most the benefits of "enforced monogamy" in controlling young men's brute instincts. Subsequently he was accused of pining after Margaret Atwood'southward Gilead, he quickly posted a note on his website arguing that he meant only the "social enforcement of monogamy."
The negative publicity affected him deeply, and it was endless. After the Indian essayist Pankaj Mishra charged him with peddling "fascist mysticism," Peterson tweeted that Mishra was an "arrogant, racist son of a bitch" and a "sanctimonious prick." He added: "If you were in my room at the moment, I'd slap you happily." Even sleep brought no relief. Peterson is a believer in dream analysis, and after one particularly ill-tempered interview in October 2018, he blogged nearly a nightmare that followed. In his dream, he met a human who "simply would not close up." The human being reminded him, he wrote, of an acquaintance at university in Canada he calls Sam, who drove effectually in a Mercedes with swastikas on the doors, proverb the worst things he could, unable to resist inviting attacks. "I can't assist myself," Sam had told Peterson. "I have a target fatigued on my back." Eventually, at a party, Sam overstepped the line; he was most to be assaulted by a mob until another acquaintance "felled him with a single punch." Peterson never saw Sam again. In his dream, the Sam-similar man talked and talked and "finally pushed me beyond my limit of tolerance … I bent his wrists to forcefulness his knuckles into his mouth. His arms bent like prophylactic and, even though I managed the job, he did not stop blathering. I woke up."
It is hard to resist reading the subtext similar this: Peterson had spent months beingness casually described equally a Nazi and associated with the alt-correct, labels he always rejected. He had metaphorical swastikas on his car door. He couldn't resist putting a target on his own back, and he, too, couldn't stop talking. Indeed, in May 2019, afterwards railing against left-wing censoriousness—at present widely called "cancel culture"—he met with Viktor Orbán, the proudly illiberal prime number minister of Hungary, whose government has airtight gender-studies programs, waged a campaign to evict Central European University from the country, and harassed independent journalists. Orbán'southward state-backed version of cancel culture—or, to use the right word, authoritarianism—apparently didn't come up in their meeting. Peterson had previously told an interviewer to depict politicians like Orbán not as "strongmen," just every bit "dictator wannabes." However, the visit—and the posed photo of the men in chat, released to friendly media outlets—gave intellectual embrace to Orbán's repressive government.
All that time, the two Petersons were pulling away from each other. Equally the arguments over his message raged across YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and traditional media, he became an avatar of our polarized media climate. People were consuming completely different Petersons, depending on their news sources. When I saw him on his speaking tour at a theater on Long Island, the kickoff question he was asked was not about pronouns or the decline of Western civilization; it was When was the last time you got boozer? The second was a heartfelt plea that will be familiar to any new parent: How can I go my baby to sleep?
The past two years have clearly been hell for Peterson. In a June 2020 video interview with his daughter, he looked gaunt and restless every bit he described his struggle with drug dependency, a torment that he revisits in the "Overture" to Across Order, his new book. Equally he describes it, an allergic reaction during the 2016 Christmas holiday manifested as intense feet, leading his family physician to prescribe benzodiazepines. He also started following what Mikhaila calls the "lion nutrition," consuming only meat, common salt, and h2o. In 2019, "the tumultuous reality of [beingness] a public figure" was exacerbated by a serial of family health crises culminating in his wife'southward diagnosis, in April, of what was idea to be terminal cancer. (She has since recovered.) Peterson—who notes that he had been plagued for years by "a tendency toward depression"—had his tranquilizer dosage upped, simply to experience rising anxiety, followed by the ravages of attempted withdrawal. He was at the edge of the abyss—"anxiety far across what I had ever experienced, an uncontrollable restlessness and need to move … overwhelming thoughts of cocky-destruction, and the complete absenteeism of any happiness whatsoever."
Throughout this turbulent time, Peterson was working on Beyond Order. He makes no claims that his suffering provided a teachable moment (particularly, he notes, when a pandemic has upended lives everywhere). He too declines the opportunity to place his addiction in the context of the prescription-drug-corruption crunch. Peterson seems to take softened his disdain for religion, and as for Tammy, "passing and then near to death motivated my married woman to attend to some issues regarding her own spiritual and creative development." Notably, Peterson is not fix to give up on the hero'south journey, despite the terror he has endured. "All of that misfortune is only the bitter half of the tale of existence," he writes, "without taking note of the heroic element of redemption or the dignity of the human spirit requiring a certain responsibility to shoulder."
This volume is humbler than its predecessor, and more balanced betwixt liberalism and conservatism—but it offers a similar blend of the highbrow and the banal. Readers get a few glimpses of the fiery online polemicist, simply the Peterson of Beyond Order tends instead to 2 other modes. The showtime is a grounded clinician, describing his clients' troubles and the tough-love counsel he gives them. The other is a stoned college freshman telling you that the Golden Snitch is, similar, a metaphor for " 'circular chaos' … the initial container of the primordial element." Some sentences beg to exist prefaced with Dude, like these: "If Queen Elizabeth Ii all of a sudden turned into a giant fire-breathing lizard in the midst of one of her countless galas, a certain amount of consternation would be both advisable and expected … Merely if it happens within the context of a story, and so we accept it." Reading Peterson the clinician tin can be illuminating; reading his mystic twin is like slogging through moisture sand. His fans dear the erstwhile; his critics mock the latter.
The prose swirls like mist, and his keen insight appears to be little more than the unthreatening observation that life is complicated. (If the start book hadn't been written like this too, you lot'd guess that he was trying to escape the butterfly pins of his harshest detractors.) After nigh 400 pages, nosotros learn that married people should have sex at least once a calendar week, that rut and pressure plow coal into diamonds, that having a social life is practiced for your mental wellness, and that, for a human in his 50s, Peterson knows a surprising amount about Quidditch. The chapter inviting readers to "make one room in your domicile as beautiful as possible" is typically discursive, but unusually enjoyable: Peterson knows his Wordsworth. (Information technology is not gratis from weirdness, however. At one bespeak, he claims to have looked at ane.ii million paintings on eBay while selecting his living-room decor.) His prose likewise lights upward when he describes the wonder of watching his granddaughter encounter the world.
On the rare occasion that Beyond Order strays overtly into politics, Peterson still can't resist fighting straw men. What Peterson sees equally healthy ambition "needs to exist encouraged in every possible manner," he writes.
It is for this reason, among many others, that the increasingly reflexive identification of the striving of boys and men for victory with the "patriarchal tyranny" that hypothetically characterizes our modernistic, productive, and comparatively gratis societies is then stunningly counterproductive (and, it must exist said, brutal: in that location is almost nothing worse than treating someone striving for competence equally a tyrant in training).
Simply who is reflexively identifying all male appetite equally innately harmful? If any mainstream feminist writers are in fact arguing that the West is a "patriarchal tyranny"—as opposed to simply a "patriarchy" or male-dominated guild—he should practise the reader the favor of citing them. Is he arguing with Gloria Steinem or princess_sparklehorse99 on Tumblr? A tenured professor should embrace bookish rigor.
Peterson writes an entire affiliate against ideologies—feminism, anti-capitalism, environmentalism, basically anything ending in ism—declaring that life is too complex to be described by such intellectual frameworks. Funny story: There's an bookish motion devoted to skepticism of one thousand historical narratives. It's called … postmodernism. That affiliate concludes by advising readers to put their own lives in order earlier trying to change the world. This is non but a rehash of ane of the previous 12 rules—"Clean up your sleeping accommodation," he writes, because fans love it when y'all play the hits—but also ferocious chutzpah coming from a man who was on a lecture tour well after he should take gone to rehab.
The Peterson of Beyond Order, that preacher of personal responsibleness, dances around the question of whether his own behavior might have contributed to his breakdown. Was information technology really wise to concur to all those fell interviews, elevate himself to all those international speaking events, send all those tweets that prepare the internet on fire? Like a rock star spiraling into burnout, he was consumed by the pyramid scheme of fame, parceling himself out, faster and faster, to everyone who wanted a piece. Peradventure he didn't desire to let people downward, and he loved to feel needed. Perhaps he enjoyed having an online regular army glorying in his triumphs and pursuing his enemies. In our frenzied media civilisation, can a hero ever return home victorious and resume his normal life, or does the lure of another take a chance, another dragon to slay, some other "lib" to "own" always call out to him?
Either mode, he gazed into the culture-state of war abyss, and the completeness stared right back at him. He is every ane of us who couldn't resist that pointless Facebook argument, who felt the sugar rush of the cocky-righteous Twitter douse, who exulted in the defeat of an opposing political tribe, or even an adjacent portion of our own. That kind of unhealthy behavior, furiously lashing out while knowing that counterattacks volition follow, is a very modern form of self-harm. And yet in Beyond Society, the arraign is placed solely on "the hypothetically safe merely truly dangerous benzodiazepine anti-anxiety medication" he was prescribed by his family doctor. The book leaves you wishing that Peterson the tough therapist would ask hard questions of Peterson the public intellectual.
To imagine that Peterson is pop in spite of his contradictions and human frailties—the things that bulldoze his critics mad—is a mistake: He is popular because of them. For a generation that has lost its faith in religion and politics, he is one of notably few prominent figures willing to confront the most cardinal questions of existence: What'southward the point of being live? What kind of personal journey endows our existence with meaning? He is, in many ways, countercultural. He doesn't offer become-rich-quick schemes, or pickup techniques. He is not libertine or libertarian. He promises that life is a struggle, merely that it is ultimately worthwhile.
Notwithstanding Peterson's summit to guru condition has come at swell personal cost, a pour of suffering you wouldn't wish on everyone. Information technology has made him rich and famous, but not happy. "We compete for attending, personally, socially, and economically," he writes in Beyond Order. "No currency has a value that exceeds it." But attending is a perilous drug: The more nosotros receive, the more nosotros desire. It is the culture war'due south greatest advantage, all the same it started Jordan Peterson on a journey that turned a respected only unknown professor into the human being strapped into the Russian hospital bed, ripping the tubes from his arms, desperate for another prepare.
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Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/04/what-happened-to-jordan-peterson/618082/