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The book they couldnt cancel has arrived. Jordan Peterson may be a prolific writer and vlogger with followers around the world eager to read his work, but the completion and publication of his new book, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life, looked uncertain only a matter of months ago, and not just for the obvious, Covid-related reasons affecting us all.

The staff revolt at Penguin Random House Canada against publication of this work drew a lot of attention. Less widely covered are the private struggles Peterson has undergone over the past year against addiction to a drug in the benzodiazepine class, the agonies of withdrawal, and the torments of akathisia, an ailment that can make sufferers uncontrollably nervous and restless. You can beat akathisia. Fortunately for his followers, its a bit harder to quell a restless intellect.

Peterson was mostly out of the public eye in 2020. In the new year, he has taken tiny steps toward resuming his role as a figure offering advice to millions, grappling with some of the most divisive issues of our time, and spurring fierce loyalty, often among young men put off by identity politics and a culture of grievance, and equally spirited attacks from those who accuse Peterson of everything from misogyny to transphobia to apathy in the face of looming eco-disaster.

One might think that the last thing the world needs is another self-help book, but Beyond Order is a hybrid of genres. It offers a series of essays on how to live responsibly and productively, but Peterson goes way beyond self-help bromides, drawing on cases from his clinical practice to illuminate errors that people are prone to make and the outcomes they can expect from choosing one course of action over another. References to Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, and Jung woven into the narrative suggest that Peterson has situated his practice within a theoretical framework that itself rests on decades of study and reflection. His mind has roved far and wide.

The point is not to gush about Petersons erudition, but rather to give a sense of the idiosyncratic nature of his practice. After all, the authors named here might not seem to offer templates for easy self-improvement. They led troubled lives and wrote dark tomes from which one could extract themes of nihilism and despair.

To take one example, look at Dostoyevskys 1864 work, Notes from Underground, which Peterson has praised in his lectures. It famously begins, I am a sick man. I am an unattractive man. I believe there is something wrong with my liver. Consider the fate of the protagonist. In A Story of the Falling Sleet, the story comprising the latter part of Notes, the bitter and alienated narrator finagles his way into attending a dinner with a handful of more socially acceptable acquaintances who make no secret of their disdain for him. Then, as the others sit engaged in chatter about salaries and social status, ignoring the narrator, the latter begins to act more and more strangely until an unbearably awkward and ugly scene develops and he must leave. He could have tried harder to fit in.

The narrators revolt against the falsity and superficiality of the company of Russians who have warily let him into their social circle does not lead to happiness and fulfillment. Rather, his atrocious conduct climaxes in humiliation and a flight through the dark and frigid streets of St. Petersburg, leading finally to an encounter with a stranger, a call girl, to whom he vents about the brevity and futility of existence. With his fixation in this and other works on despair, mental illness, and murder, Dostoyevsky might seem an odd choice for Jordan Peterson to hold up when advising people on how to turn their lives around and find fulfillment.

But in truth Dostoyevsky is not so far afield at all. His characters live in changing times, with new doctrines coming to supplant more traditional ideas, much as in our world today, where relativism and postmodernism fuel identity politics, and radical ideology comes to hold sway not just in academia but in the corporate world, entertainment, sports, and other spheres.

Dostoyevskys Underground Man rejects what is fashionable and socially acceptable. In other works, like The Possessed, which Peterson discusses at some length in Beyond Order, the conflict is more explicitly ideological. Dostoyevsky warns about the dangers of new doctrines that have come to hold sway in some social circles. He could see that the adoption of a rigid, comprehensive utopian ideology, predicated on a few apparently self-evident axioms, presented a political and spiritual danger with the potential to far exceed in brutality all that had occurred in the religious, monarchical, or even pagan past, Peterson writes.

Peterson seeks to drive home that rejection of and rebellion against false idols, newfangled doctrines, and the misuse and corruption of language for ideological ends is a personal choice that can lead to changes in how we live and see the world around us and fight for our goals. The impetus finds support in the writings of Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche, but the results, while potentially dramatic and disconcerting, are not necessarily tragic at all. We in 2021 can emulate the decisiveness and independence of certain troubled personages in literature, can be as boldly defiant as the Underground Man, but potentially reach a much better outcome in our careers and lives.

One of the many ambitious and driven people to whom Peterson has offered counseling in the course of his career is a woman who worked at a corporation where the HR department had a hair-trigger response to any complaints about allegedly insensitive language.

Surely we can all agree on the need to treat co-workers with respect and avoid using derogatory or offensive terms, but some of the examples in the case Peterson relates here are hard to believe. An edict came down in the womans office against use of the term flip-chart, on the grounds that the former part of the phrase is a slur sometimes used to demean to Filipinos. (You learn something every day. Bet you had no idea, the last time you told someone to stop being flip, that you were using a racial slur.)

No worker of Filipino extraction had actually complained about the use of the term. It appears that the firms administrators just had way too much time on their hands. On the heels of this edict, they went on to rule out a number of other terms that people had thought to be innocuous, including master key, which they took to be a reference to slavery. The employee wrote to Peterson, expressing her concern about the slippery slope on which the internal culture of her firm now found itself, not to mention the self-righteousness of those who decided it was their right and prerogative to dictate how others could express themselves.

When and where do we stop? If a tiny minority of people even hypothetically finds some words offensive, then what? Do we continue to ban words endlessly? she asked. She conveyed to Peterson signs that she had picked up on that the mandates handed down from the firms directors were having a harmful effect not only on her own conscience, but on the mental health and productivity of some of her colleagues, who did not want to speak out.

The reader senses that concerns of this nature, about outlawed or prescribed language, not to mention mandatory bias training, are fairly widespread in the corporate realms of Canada and the U.S., but that many employees are too anxious about their careers to voice such concerns publicly. Hence they turn up in missives between employees and their shrinks. Reflecting on his experience with this patient, Peterson writes, Those events seemed to form a coherent pattern, associated with an ideology that was directional in its intent, explicitly and implicitly. Furthermore, the effect of that directionality had been manifesting itself, by all appearances, for a reasonable amount of time, not only in the corporate world my client inhabited, but in the broader world of social and political institutions surrounding the corporation for which she worked.

Petersons patient in this case was a refugee from a former Eastern Bloc country where ideology had squelched personal freedoms as a matter of course for many years. It was all the more psychologically harmful to be in the position of objecting to the curtailments of freedom going on around her at work while lacking any idea of what to do or how to make her concerns known. But, in the end, she did take a stand. She began to apply more broadly the skills and talents she had cultivated as a developer of in-house educational projects for her firm.

Taking on speaking roles at corporate conferences, she maneuvered herself into a position from which to challenge at many venues the rampant manias and ideologically driven excesses of our day, though she let the flip-chart issue fall by the wayside. This was not an easy step to take. The fear of reprisal was real, and she had to work hard to develop her public speaking skills and make herself widely available as a speaker. These moves challenged her deeplybut the consequence was an expansion of personality and competence, as well as the knowledge that she was making a genuine social contribution, Peterson relates. The Will to Power, properly understood.

Imagine the effects on our corporate culture if more people followed the courageous example of this woman. Moral courage can of course take many forms, but the bottom line comes across in Petersons simple adage: do not do what you hate. Much of the wisdom imparted in Beyond Order is one or another variation, applied to many social and cultural contexts, of this theme.

Another of the anecdotes in Beyond Order has to do with a young gay man who was in an abusive relationship that made him depressed and anxious, but, for complex psychological reasons, was unable to see the situation for what it was. This patient clung to a view of people as essentially good and incapable of violence, even after a fight in which the boyfriend shoved him so hard he fell down. Peterson took time really to get to know this client and understand what was going on in his head. He offered advice that boiled down to an exhortation to grow up, to part forever with the rosy view of human nature that led him to imagine that a genuinely abusive or wicked person could not exist.

To this end, Peterson asked the patient to read a couple of books about atrocities carried out by ordinary Germans and Japanese in World War Two, and pursued a number of specialized treatments, including hypnosis. The outcome, in the end, was positive. The patient shed his naivete about the world and came to see that the boyfriend truly wished to harm him, to inflict pain and rage for the sake of it. This blunt realism about the human propensity for evil was not easy to impart, but the patient undoubtedly came out better. This is the kind of wisdom you need to get on in the world.

The third chapter of Beyond Order is entitled Rule III: Do not hide unwanted things in the fog. It is a long elaboration of a blunt message: pretending that people, ideas, memories, and social conditions are not real, or imagining through a kind of cognitive dissonance that they are not valid issues and could not or have no right to exist, is no way of dealing with them. This wisdom applies on many levels, the personal as well as the political, but it is lost on many of Petersons enemies, who have gone to extreme lengths not only to try to silence his voice, but to dress up their efforts in respectable garb. If a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, then the suppression of viewpoints by any other name is just as odious.

One of the shabbiest exercises in journalistic chicanery in recent memory is a December piece by Nathan Robinson in The Guardian. Robinson says that publishers are well within their legal rights to refuse to give Peterson book deals, which of course is true. He goes on to argue against publishing Peterson at all and suggests that the world needs more, not fewer, internal revolts at publishing houses that have the audacity to propose releasing a book by Peterson or other politically incorrect figures. This is where the argument gets truly weird.

Petersons book is unworthy of publication, you see, because it is wrongheaded, contains bad arguments, and, when you come down to it, lacks social value. Robinson tries to lend support to this assessment with a series of straw-man caricatures of Petersons views that bear little relationship to what Peterson has actually said or written.

Identifying himself as the editor of a small magazine that proudly follows an editorial policy favoring some submissions over others, Robinson goes on: If Jordan Peterson or Henry Kissinger submitted an essay, it would be rejected. And yes, it would be because we disagreed with the opinionwe dont publish arguments we find morally debased and poorly reasoned, by people whose views we do not wish to promote as sensible and worth listening to.

So here Robinson admits that if it were up to him, publishers would release only work that he finds politically congenial, but he denies that this amounts to suppression of speech. His argument is an exercise in tautology. It seems incredible to have to point this out, but anytime we disagree with someones views, it is because we find them, at bottom, to be morally flawed and/or insufficiently well reasoned. Whether we say I beg to differ or your views are debased or youre full of shit! or something even less civil may depend on how polite we are, and on the circumstances, but in the end, these reactions come down to the same thing.

We may never see a feebler excuse for the banning of a viewpoint than Robinson presents here. If Robinson had his way, no major publishers would ever release the work of conservatives, and he doesnt seem at all concerned about the precedent he establishes. If people of a different political mindset applied the same reasoning, progressive authors would never get their work into print either. The outlawers of incorrect opinions would simply have the excuse of saying, Hey, Im not engaging in censorship, just declining to publish work that is without social value.

One of the chapters in Beyond Order is entitled Rule VIII: Try to make one room in your home as beautiful as possible. This chapter, in which Peterson waxes eloquently about the salutary effects of sparing no effort to make your personal environment just right, expands on a theme he has expressed in the past. Not everyone buys it.

Some of Petersons opponents are eloquent, and none perhaps more so than philosopher Slavoj iek, whose debate with Peterson in Toronto on April 19, 2019, has racked up more than 3.1 million YouTube views. A highlight of the debate was a question that iek put to Peterson, in response to the latters precept that one should put ones own house in order before attempting to change the world. What if your house is in disorder precisely because of larger, external conditions, iek asks. For example, he points out, you might live in a repressive state like North Korea where, to extend the analogy, rules and laws and the abuse of power make it impossible to straighten out your house.

iek also points out that there could be cases where the imperative to perform discrete and simple tasks (put your house in order) leads people to believe that theyve done their duty and can leave so much else undone. It gives people an excuse to get by with doing very minimal, rote duties like organizing recyclables and ignoring more urgent issues. These are solid points, well put by iek. Petersons rebuttal here has to do with the value of exposure therapy and the proven utility of facing ones demons, and he argues that if done properly, such an approach can contribute both to setting ones own house in order and to a broader societal stability.

Peterson quotes Jung about how taking a personal problem seriously can better equip someone to deal with a social problem. Sometimes the problems in a relationship are microcosms of larger issues, and dealing with them has implications far beyond the context of the relationship. I believe that you do solve what you can about yourself first before you can set your family straight, and before you should dare to try to set the world straight, Peterson argues.

Basically, Peterson expands on his original point without really addressing the kinds of hypothetical scenarios iek has raised. Imagine that a couple enjoy an ideal relationship, that they are totally adept at keeping the romance going when left to their own devices, but they happen to live in a totalitarian state where military assignments or the arbitrary quartering of troops in homes or the jailing, torture, or murder of imagined dissidents by paranoid authorities makes the relationship unsustainable.

Its possible to imagine circumstances where no amount of setting ones own house in order will be of much use, where the implementation of measures on a national levelthe adoption of something akin to our Bill of Rightsis really in order. It is a critical point. Unfortunately, Peterson gives iek only a tiny mention in Beyond Order and leaves the Toronto debate, and ieks objections, unresolved.

Of course, putting your whole house in order before trying to change the world is not exactly the same as making one room in it as beautiful as possible. Maybe Peterson did learn from the iek debate, and refined his argument into something a bit more logically defensible.

Peterson is fond of citing the longer Dostoyevsky novels in his lectures, or what we might call the Big Five (Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, The Idiot, The Possessed and The Adolescent), and occasionally shares his views on shorter works like Notes from Underground. Reading Beyond Order, one might think of a work that is relatively unknown even among those who appreciate the importance of Dostoyevsky. The 1846 novella The Double is about Golyadkin, a citizen of St. Petersburg, who finds out that he has a Doppelgnger, a man also named Golyadkin who has a wildly different personality but is physically impossible to tell apart from himself.

The real Golyadkin, or Golyadkin senior, as he is known, faces increasing social ostracization and alienation as Golyadkin junior steals the show, attending parties and winning prestige while making Golyadkin senior accountable for his misdeeds. In the unforgettable final scene, a horse and carriage carry Golyadkin senior off to a remote point in the woods as the double and a huge throng of revelers stand outside a house cheering and jeering.

In his bouts with near-fatal illness and would-be censors, Peterson has lost none of his rhetorical bite, his piercing eloquence, or his intellectual honesty. The politically correct junior Golyadkina hypothetical persona more acceptable to the guardians of correct opinionhas failed utterly to usurp the place of the senior Golyadkin, or of any honest citizens who adopt the precepts that Peterson has set forth. Golyadkin senior is not going off silently into the dark.

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The Return of Jordan Peterson - Book and Film Globe

Is Dr Jordan Peterson about to convert to Christianity? If so, its a big deal. The earnest but sardonic Canadian psychologist is already the most effective advocate for the moral precepts of Christianity in the English-speaking media. But, until now, his penetrating exposition of the Bible has been inspired more by Jungian symbolism than by actual religious belief.

That may be about to change, albeit not in the happiest of circumstances. In recent months Peterson has suffered from a combination of medical conditions that have left him in wretched pain, both physical and psychological. This has left him wondering whether its time to submit to the dogmatic assertions of orthodox Christianity. He explains his complex reasoning in an extraordinary podcast, in which he presents himself to his friend Jonathan Pageau, an Eastern Orthodox Christian, as something close to a broken man. He certainly sounds and looks like one. The contrast with the Jordan Peterson who politely humiliated the sneering Cathy Newman of Channel 4 News is excruciating.

Peterson will survive his crisis, Im sure. Whether he will convert is, of course, impossible to say; he doesnt know himself. But my guest this week, Dr Gavin Ashenden, is well qualified to describe his dilemma. Gavin was himself a disciple of Jung before what he describes as an encounter with demons led him back to Christianity. He makes the point that, even if Peterson doesnt take the leap of faith, he has already led more people into that faith than any number of dim-witted or intellectually cowardly bishops. Please dont miss this episode.

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Is Jordan Peterson about to move from Jung to Jesus? | Holy Smoke - Spectator.co.uk

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How an unlikely intellectual turned into a cultural icon

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This week marked the much-anticipated release of University of Toronto Prof. Jordan Petersons latest book, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life. If his last book, which has sold more than five million copies, is any indication, the newest one is bound to be another massive commercial success.

Peterson is an odd fit for a cultural celebrity. Hes obviously a complicated person who seems a bit awkward and introverted and whose obscure interests (including clinical psychology, philosophy and theology) are far from mainstream. Yet his intellectual and cultural reach is extraordinary.

His YouTube channel, which combines lectures, podcast videos and various speeches, has 3.5 million subscribers and more than 145 million views. His social media accounts (including Facebook, Instagram and Twitter) have another 4.7 million followers. And there are reports that when Peterson was on Patreon, the popular crowdfunding website, he was earning nearly $50,000 per month from individual contributions.

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Hes easily Canadas most significant public intellectual. No one else is even close. In fact, Tyler Cowen, an American economist and serious public intellectual in his own right, has called Peterson the most influential public intellectual in the entire Western world.

It begs the questions: How does a well-regarded yet mostly obscure Canadian psychologist transform into a global phenomenon? How did we end up in what New York Times columnist David Brooks has referred to as a Jordan Peterson moment?

I think there are three main reasons. The first is that theres an incredible hunger among young people particularly young men for a combination of practical and transcendental wisdom. The modern ethos of hyper-individualism reflected in platitudinous commencement speech slogans like find your truth and you do you fails to provide generational guidance on fundamental questions about how to live a good and meaningful life.

The result is that Western societies increasingly have a critical mass of 20-somethings who feel anxious, rudderless and alone. Petersons so-called rules (such as make friends with people who want the best for you) may seem banal to some readers, but for a young person trying to make his or her way in the world, they offer an action plan for life of greater structure and purpose.

The second reason is that in a political culture that seems to descend into lowest-common denominator arguments by default, Peterson generally stands out by refusingto dumb down his ideas. He has enough respect for his audience members to eschew superficial talking points and instead communicate to them as thinking adults, even on complex topics such as moral philosophy, the worldly expression of good and evil and the Bible.

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Peterson has implicitly bet that those who think that modern audiences are incapable of engaging beyond carefully calibrated slogans are wrong. And hes been proven overwhelmingly right.

A few years ago, as Petersons profile was on its rapid ascendancy, we both spoke at a policy and political conference in Toronto. I spoke after him, but my then-girlfriend (now wife) and I arrived early to see what all the fuss was about with this eccentric professor who was generating such a buzz in the mainstream and online media.

His remarks were dense and esoteric. There were references to French philosophers Michel Focault and Jean-Paul Sartre and various nods to Marxism, structuralism and post-modernism. I mostly followed what he was saying, but suffice to say, it was far from a light talk.

Yet, as I looked around the fully packed lecture theatre, the audience was spellbound. Peoples engrossment was a sign of the underlying demand for Petersons unique mix of intellectualism, intensity and soberness.

Which brings me to the third (and most controversial) factor behind Petersons passionate support. He has championed a conservative alternative to the prevailing zeitgeist that fairly or unfairly tends to be characterized as wokeness. Hes not been afraid to speak bluntly about the forces of cultural Marxism, the radical left and political correctness that he sees as a threat to Enlightenment thinking.

This line of argument doubtlessly resonates with young conservatives who, according to a recent study, are significantly underrepresented on university and college campuses. As Ive written before, theres a growing sense among conservatives that their ideas arent fully permitted in mainstream institutions. Peterson has proven to be a credentialed yet combative advocate for these people.

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It doesnt mean, of course, that he is without his flaws. Theres plenty to disagree with in his ideas, arguments and tact. His hard-headed message can seem unempathetic, clinical and cold. David Brooks has observed an element of joylessness and gracelessness in Petersons worldview. Reason magazines Matt Welch has described him as a flawed messiah. His critics would say even worse.

But the story here is less about Peterson and more about what his popularity says about us. The fecundity of his message suggests that modern societys mix of consumerism and secularism isnt fulfilling peoples metaphysical needs. Theres something missing in our lives. Peterson, for better or worse, is filling that gap for a large number of young people in Canada and around the world.

Its made for an unlikely intellectual and cultural icon. And it definitely sells books.

National Post

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Sean Speer: The keys to Jordan Petersons success - National Post

Jordan Peterson is back. The Canadian professor of psychology who is one of the worlds leading intellectuals has recovered from a coma that resulted from his severe dependence on sedatives, which nearly killed him. His new book Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life has just been released, and he seems set to resume a public career that made him famous and wealthy. The left has a not-so-subtle message for Peterson upon his resurrection: Watch your back.

Last year, an article called What Happened to Jordan Peterson? appeared in the New Republic. Were it not for an article in the Atlantic this week, it would barely be worth mentioning in its substance. In it, the author attempts to explain how Peterson wound up in a coma in Russia. She fully admits she has no actual idea, but that does not stop her from her guesswork or to mock the supposed guru of self-restraint for his condition.

The article is reminiscent of the endless parade of psychologists and psychoanalysts on certain cable news networks who opined for years about the perilous state of Donald Trumps mental health. In both examples, what is amazing is that any doctor would go on the record regarding such matters without so much as examining the patient. It is also worth noting that those same cable networks and publications not only ignore the regular mental and physical lapses of Joe Biden but treat them as little more than grandfatherly charm.

It is the second, more recent piece, also titled What Happened To Jordan Peterson, by feminist scribe Helen Lewis whose famous GQ interview with Peterson in 2018 garnered more than 26 million views on YouTube in the Atlantic that really sheds light on the message the progressive media is sending to Peterson. That message is that should he get back in the public intellectual game, there will be a huge target on him. But that of course is nothing new.

Lewis invents a kind of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde out of the Canadian professor. On the one hand, he is a thoughtful professor who should know his small place in the ivory tower. On the other, he is a contemptible anti-feminist culture warrior. She writes:

[T]he relentless demands of modern celebrity more content, more access, more authenticity were already tearing the psychologists public persona in two. One Peterson was the father figure beloved by the normie readers of 12 Rules, who stood in long lines to hear him speak and left touching messages on internet 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 interviewer Cathy Newman.

There is a reason that Lewis insists on creating these two Petersons. The latter is absolutely key to the straw man she creates to prove her thesis that Petersons medical condition was a direct result of his desire for fame and fortune. She is desperate for his true disease to be not dependence, but hubris. At no point does she seriously entertain the possibility that the unhinged, often personal attacks launched against Peterson by progressives after his rise to fame played any role whatsoever in his condition. It is of course quite possible that it did not, but in an article full of guesswork, it is a possibility no fair-minded person could ignore.

The fundamental flaw in Lewiss piece is in separating Petersons scholarly work from his role as a public intellectual dealing with pressing issues of the day. She describes in detail how he got in hot water for refusing to use transgender pronouns and for arguing that men and women do and should play different societal roles. He has also been bitterly attacked for his disbelief in the concept of white privilege.

That Lewis thinks these positions exist somehow outside of his more scholarly work betrays how little she understands him or his appeal. His earliest YouTube success in 2017 was a series of lectures on the Bible, and what its stories can tell us about the modern condition. In the vein of Carl Jung or Joseph Campbell, Peterson has this strange notion that ancient stories actually matter, that they are guideposts left to us as an inheritance.

Far from being separate from his culture war battles, his work in bringing the tales of old into modern importance are of a piece with it. In both, he preaches that we are in fact constrained by reality, that it is not simply a mutable plastic we can form to our will. That is ultimately the message that so many, including but not limited to struggling young men, found so appealing and helpful.

For his trouble, he was accused, as Lewis acknowledges, of being some father figure of the alt-right, a Nazi-creating machine leading men astray in dangerous ways. This was always nonsense. But it did give cover for screed after screed decrying the negative influence and personal flaws of Peterson. But what was the left really attacking? What were they so upset by in his work? Here we must go back to Lewiss false dichotomy.

It was not his positions on hot-button issues that truly angered the left; it was the root of them: his belief that the Bible, mythology, and the Western tradition still have lessons to teach us. For progressives, these stories must be silenced, or at least contextualized in a way that shows how little they apply to todays world in which we can all be pretty unicorns if we so choose. It is Petersons attacks on postmodernism and particularly Marxism, both of which erode the stories of our ancestors that the left cannot abide, that is poison to their project.

And so the anti-Peterson articles have begun to flow like water. They are a threat, make no mistake. If Peterson will just shut up, go back to teaching, and call people by their chosen pronouns, he will be left alone. If not, if he dares take to the public square, the denunciations will continue. And if that harms his mental health, so be it. He is just that dangerous, they can justify doing harm to protect their precious shibboleths.

But we can hope he doesnt slink away. His contributions to discourse, the causes of freedom, and to our connection to ancient humanity are already enough to mark a great career. His once-controversial positions have become more mainstream; others have taken up the mantle. But he is not shy, and we should not be blamed for desiring more of his wisdom.

Jordan Peterson is back. We dont know exactly what that will look like beyond one feature we already see: The progressive media will resume their vendetta against him, without care regarding the man himself. It is shameless, and it is dishonest. But it also exactly what progressives do when they cant win an argument on the merits. For now, all we can do is wait and see and wish him well. It is nice to have him back.

David Marcus is a New York-based writer. Follow him on Twitter, @BlueBoxDave.

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Jordan Peterson Was A Victim Of Vicious Critics And He Still Is - The Federalist

Men Who Hate Women: From Incels to Pickup Artists; The Truth About Extreme Misogyny and How It Affects Us All

By Laura Bates

Sourcebooks ; $28.99 ; 352pp

Theres an ideology thats spreading via the internet, leading to terrorist attacks in America. It existed before the internet of course, but the past decade has seen it spread rapidly through mobile social media, growing in both breadth and virulence. Of course for an ideology to convince a score of men to commit mass murder in suicide attacks on the U.S. mainland you would expect there to be a sizeable number of less fanatical supporters. And that is indeed the case. Anyone who doubts the mass influence of this ideology only has to look at the ways in which mainstream politicians have mouthed support for its basic tenets.

Laura Bates new book Men Who Hate Women traces the overlapping, intersecting and mutually informing networks of male supremacy that comprise the manosphere. Millions of boys and men in search of support for a myriad of problems are being greeted by toxic networks. Early mens rights organizations such as the National Organization for Men Against Sexism supported individuals struggle against outdated and bigoted definitions of masculinity like power, physical strength and domination that were making them unhappy and hurting the people around them. More recently, like cuckoos in the nest, MRAs (Mens Rights Activists) have appropriated the rhetoric for their particular brand of misogyny and thrown anyone opposed to male supremacy out of the manosphere.

Bates, a Cambridge-educated actress who experienced regular mistreatment at auditions, set up the Everyday Sexism project in 2012 to record the day-to-day sexisms that women suffer, from the minor to the egregious. In 2014 her best-selling book Everyday Sexism recounted her experience setting up the project and how it found resonance across the world. Men Who Hate Women deals with the emerging resistance she has encountered recently from more organized purveyors of disinformation and misinformation, from high schools through to national media. Although her personal experience is based in England, her data comes from across the English-speaking world and especially from the United States. Though much of the content is difficult to read, graphically shocking and violent, every parent and teacher in America needs to read the easily digestible ninth chapter Men Who Dont Know They Hate Women. In it Bates, describes how body-building networks, online gaming chats, Instagram and YouTube are being used by racists, misogynists and anti-Semites to inculcate middle school and high school students with bigoted norms.

One of the reasons that Men Who Hate Woman is so disturbing is the sheer scope of the hatred that it encompasses and the simplicity of Batess argument. She traces the arguments through the various flavors and tiers of the manosphere as they intersect and hook up to one another, beginning with understandably insecure 15-year-old boys (which is to say, basically, all 15-year-old boys) and ending with a pussy-grabbing president, via various types of self-promoting enablers like Steve Bannon and Jordan Peterson. But its even broader than that.

After the white supremacist marches in Charlottesville in 2017, James Fields Jr. deliberately drove his car into a crowd of anti-racist counter-protestors killing Heather Heyer. Subsequent reports noted his neo-Nazi links but few media reports in his case or in others note the connection to the manosphere. As he drove into the crowd Fields was chanting White sharia now.

While those who cast slurs at Mexicans or systematically disadvantage Blacks are not necessarily misogynists or antisemites they are all looking for someone to blame. In his 2018 Information Wars, Richard Stengel surmises that the weaponization of grievance is the unified field theory behind the rise of nationalism and right-wing strongmen. Where the American Dream and media-perfect lives meet the vicissitudes of an unforgiving world and harsh capitalism, disappointment lies. For people expecting an easy, fulfilled life but end up having to work hard for scraps, its easier to look to those who are plotting against you than to do the hard work of introspection or the even harder work of system analysis and reform.

In a quotation of unknown provenance that has been polished by the internet, When youre accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression. Privileged groups dont need to be treated with objective equality to feel like they are being oppressed any diminishment of power can lead to a vague feeling of lost prestige and discontent. Embracing nationalism and right-wing strongmen is a political way of siding with power and abdicating responsibility for social reform. On a personal level, siding with power is just agreeing that the people who traditionally have power men should be in even more control. Jobs and sex are owed to us by the world and the women who are stopping this need to be taken to task isolated, disempowered, enslaved, raped or killed, depending on the area of the manosphere.

Unsurprisingly the people happiest with the status quo being preserved and even enhanced are mostly men, mostly white, mostly middle-class and as far as we see for whole of the manosphere at the moment predominantly located in North America and the United Kingdom. And that includes the most fertile ground in which to seed righteous indignation young, insecure men.

Male supremacists believe they are entitled to sex and jobs and power. Women are stopping them having those, so they take up different strategies to compel them. In the crabbed, clubby, insecure jargon of the manosphere these angry boy-men can become part of self-reinforcing groups. These groups include incels (involuntary celibates), PUAs (pick up artists), MGTOW (men going their own way). Each of these communities employs casually brutal language whose use desensitizes users and dehumanizes women. Words matter. These groups frame the worldview of millions of men and even have visible influence, as particular chunks of jargon like white sharia emerge into public view

The manosphere is organic and heterogeneous but, in general, Incels are violently anti-women and anti-feminist, pick up artists are casually anti-women as a means of getting sex and the MGTOWS (mig-tow) believe that women are so dangerous that they should be avoided as much as possible. While reading Bates I used this simplifying taxonomy: the shoot em ups (kill them), the mess em ups (f with their bodies and heads), and the avoid ems (isolate and disempower). Also known as the Elliot Rodgers, the Donald Trumps and the Mike Pences.

Each of these echo chambers hurts women most but still hurts its members. Bates approvingly quotes a Pankaj Mishra review of Jordan Petersons 2018 12 Rules For Life: An Antidote to Chaos. In the New York Review of Books he says that Peterson is a disturbing symptom of the malaise to which he promises a cure. Bates takes this critique and goes further to excoriate the manosphere, showing that it is both a symptom and an ongoing cause of the malaise to which it promises to be a cure. Heres how it works.

From jobs to sex to almost anything, unhappiness can be blamed on women undermining classically sexist ideas of what it is to be manly and powerful. The manosphere ignores Macbeths attack on toxic masculinity I dare do all that may become a man; Who dares do more is none to quote, unquestioningly, a millennia of patriarchal images to reinforce its dubious claims. As men are encouraged and bullied to adopt increasingly rigid gender roles, treating the women in their personal and professional life badly, they become increasingly unhappy to which the only available answer is to blame women. The vicious cycle accelerates. There is power spinning off this spiral of hatred, insecurity, entitlement and sexual frustration, that is seductive for salesmen and politicians. Unscrupulous predators exploit millions of unhappy men ready to spend money and votes on snake oil misogynists.

By virtue of its appeal to a mass audience, the manosphere is a significant part of the hate-osphere. Through disinformation, misinformation, bullshitting and framing the hatosphere skews and pollutes social discourse, undermining trust and creating rifts sometimes for ideology, sometimes for the lulz. The manosphere teaches millions of men how to be effective parts of the hatosphere. Disinformation is the lies put out there by vested interests, like the Australian MRA claim that 21 fathers die from suicide a week. Misinformation is the arguably unwitting spread of those lies by supporters, media, social media, politicians. Bullshitting is the deployment of irony to take the edge off hateful comments to draw people in; Bates quotes Andrew Anglin, editor of the neo-Nazi publication Daily Stormer as saying, The unindoctrinated should not be able to tell if we are joking or not. Framing is talking about the wrong thing or using the wrong terms. The term alt-right is the wrong euphemism for a group of American neo-Nazis, and every bit as much their coinage as Proud Boys. Framing means having the wrong debate smearing or defending Holocaust survivor George Soros rather than discussing the rise of Americas extreme right; arguing about wolf-whistles or the possibility of fake rape accusations rather than Americas legal and social blindness to endemic sexual assault pointed out by the MeToo movement.

So far this millennium has provided the conditions for a perfect storm of grievance. Globalization policies have enriched the wealthiest few, stripped workers in rich countries of their jobs and, especially in the United States, of their power and labor rights. At the same time, the response of the American left has been to skirt the issue of deep economic inequity and to insist on an inadequate rhetoric of inclusion. Batess sobering book reminds us that we need a society to be proud of and communities committed to progress and improvement.

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The dangerous hate movement we need to talk about - Forward