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A RELIGIOUS PROBLEM It does not seem reasonable to describe the young man who shot twenty children and six staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012 as a religious person. This is equally true for the Colorado theatre gunman and the Columbine High School killers. But these murderous individuals had a problem with reality that existed at a religious depth. As one of the members of the Columbine duo wrote:

"The human race isnt worth fighting for, only worth killing. Give the Earth back to the animals. They deserve it infinitely more than we do. Nothing means anything anymore."

People who think such things view Being itself as inequitable and harsh to the point of corruption, and human Being, in particular, as contemptible. They appoint themselves supreme adjudicators of reality and find it wanting. They are the ultimate critics. The deeply cynical writer continues:

"If you recall your history, the Nazis came up with a 'final solution' to the Jewish problem. . . . Kill them all. Well, in case you havent figured it out, I say 'KILL MANKIND.' No one should survive."For such individuals, the world of experience is insufficient and evilso to hell with everything!

What is happening when someone comes to think in this manner? A great German play, Faust: A Tragedy, written by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, addresses that issue. The plays main character, a scholar named Heinrich Faust, trades his immortal soul to the devil, Mephistopheles. In return, he receives whatever he desires while still alive on Earth. In Goethes play, Mephistopheles is the eternal adversary of Being. He has a central, defining credo:

"I am the spirit who negatesand rightly so, for all that comes to bedeserves to perish, wretchedly.It were better nothing would begin!Thus everything that your terms sin,destruction, evil representthat is my proper element."

Goethe considered this hateful sentiment so importantso key to the central element of vengeful human destructivenessthat he had Mephistopheles say it a second time, phrased somewhat differently, in Part II of the play, written many years later.

People think often in the Mephistophelean manner, although they seldom act upon their thoughts as brutally as the mass murderers of school, college and theatre. Whenever we experience injustice, real or imagined; whenever we encounter tragedy or fall prey to the machinations of others; whenever we experience the horror and pain of our own apparently arbitrary limitationsthe temptation to question Being and then to curse it rises foully from the darkness. Why must innocent people suffer so terribly? What kind of bloody, horrible planet is this, anyway?

Life is in truth very hard. Everyone is destined for pain and slated for destruction. Sometimes suffering is clearly the result of a personal fault such as willful blindness, poor decision-making or malevolence. In such cases, when it appears to be self-inflicted, it may even seem just. People get what they deserve, you might contend. Thats cold comfort, however, even when true. Sometimes, if those who are suffering changed their behaviour, then their lives would unfold less tragically. But human control is limited. Susceptibility to despair, disease, aging and death is universal. In the final analysis, we do not appear to be the architects of our own fragility. Whose fault is it, then?

People who are very ill (or, worse, who have a sick child) will inevitably find themselves asking this question, whether they are religious believers or not. The same is true of someone who finds his shirtsleeve caught in the gears of a giant bureaucracywho is suffering through a tax audit, or fighting an interminable lawsuit or divorce. And its not only the obviously suffering who are tormented by the need to blame someone or something for the intolerable state of their Being. At the height of his fame, influence and creative power, for example, the towering Leo Tolstoy himself began to question the value of human existence. He reasoned in this way:

"My position was terrible. I knew that I could find nothing in the way of rational knowledge except a denial of life; and in faith I could find nothing except a denial of reason, and this was even more impossible than a denial of life. According to rational knowledge, it followed that life is evil, and people know it. They do not have to live, yet they have lived and they do live, just as I myself had lived, even though I had known for a long time that life is meaningless and evil."

Try as he might, Tolstoy could identify only four means of escaping from such thoughts. One was retreating into childlike ignorance of the problem. Another was pursuing mindless pleasure. The third was "continuing to drag out a life that is evil and meaningless, knowing beforehand that nothing can come of it." He identified that particular form of escape with weakness: "The people in this category know that death is better than life, but they do not have the strength to act rationally and quickly put an end to the delusion by killing themselves. . . ."

Only the fourth and final mode of escape involved "strength and energy. It consists of destroying life, once one has realized that life is evil and meaningless." Tolstoy relentlessly followed his thoughts:

"Only unusually strong and logically consistent people act in this manner. Having realized all the stupidity of the joke that is being played on us and seeing that the blessings of the dead are greater than those of the living and that it is better not to exist, they act and put an end to this stupid joke; and they use any means of doing it: a rope around the neck, water, a knife in the heart, a train."

Tolstoy wasnt pessimistic enough. The stupidity of the joke being played on us does not merely motivate suicide. It motivates murdermass murder, often followed by suicide. That is a far more effective existential protest. By June of 2016, unbelievable as it may seem, there had been one thousand mass killings (defined as four or more people shot in a single incident, excluding the shooter) in the US in twelve hundred and sixty days. Thats one such event on five of every six days for more than three years. Everyone says, "We dont understand." How can we still pretend that? Tolstoy understood, more than a century ago. The ancient authors of the biblical story of Cain and Abel understood, as well, more than twenty centuries ago. They described murder as the first act of post-Edenic history: and not just murder, but fratricidal murdermurder not only of someone innocent but of someone ideal and good, and murder done consciously to spite the creator of the universe. Todays killers tell us the same thing, in their own words. Who would dare say that this is not the worm at the core of the apple? But we will not listen, because the truth cuts too close to the bone. Even for a mind as profound as that of the celebrated Russian author, there was no way out. How can the rest of us manage, when a man of Tolstoys stature admits defeat? For years, he hid his guns from himself and would not walk with a rope in hand, in case he hanged himself.

How can a person who is awake avoid outrage at the world?

Originally posted here:
12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos: Jordan B. Peterson ...

The Canadian psychology professor and culture warrior Jordan B Peterson could not have hoped for better publicity than his recent encounter with Cathy Newman on Channel 4 News. The more Newman inaccurately paraphrased his beliefs and betrayed her irritation, the better Peterson came across. The whole performance, which has since been viewed more than 6m times on YouTube and was described by excitable Fox News host Tucker Carlson as one of the great interviews of all time, bolstered Petersons preferred image as the coolly rational man of science facing down the hysteria of political correctness. As he told Newman in his distinctive, constricted voice, which he has compared to that of Kermit the Frog: I choose my words very, very carefully.

The confrontation has worked wonders for Peterson. His new book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos has become a runaway bestseller in the UK, US, Canada, Australia, Germany and France, making him the public intellectual du jour. Peterson is not just another troll, narcissist or blowhard whose arguments are fatally compromised by bad faith, petulance, intellectual laziness and blatant bigotry. It is harder to argue with someone who believes what he says and knows what he is talking about or at least conveys that impression. No wonder every scourge of political correctness, from the Spectator to InfoWars, is aflutter over the 55-year-old professor who appears to bring heavyweight intellectual armature to standard complaints about social-justice warriors and snowflakes. They think he could be the culture wars Weapon X.

Despite his appetite for self-promotion, Peterson claims to be a reluctant star. In a sensible world, I would have got my 15 minutes of fame, he told the Ottawa Citizen last year. I feel like Im surfing a giant wave and it could come crashing down and wipe me out, or I could ride it and continue. All of those options are equally possible.

Two years ago, he was a popular professor at the University of Toronto and a practising clinical psychologist who offered self-improvement exercises on YouTube. He published his first book, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief, in 1999 and appeared in Malcolm Gladwells bestseller David and Goliath, talking about the character traits of successful entrepreneurs. The tough-love, stern-dad strand of his work is represented in 12 Rules for Life, which fetes strength, discipline and honour.

His ballooning celebrity and wealth, however, began elsewhere, with a three-part YouTube series in September 2016 called Professor Against Political Correctness. Peterson was troubled by two developments: a federal amendment to add gender identity and expression to the Canadian Human Rights Act; and his universitys plans for mandatory anti-bias training. Starting from there, he railed against Marxism, human rights organisations, HR departments and an underground apparatus of radical left political motivations forcing gender-neutral pronouns on him.

This more verbose, distinctly Canadian version of Howard Beales mad as hell monologue in Network had an explosive effect. A few days later, a video of student protesters disrupting one of Petersons lectures enhanced his reputation as a doughty truth-teller. I hit a hornets nest at the most propitious time, he later reflected.

Indeed he did. Camille Paglia anointed him the most important and influential Canadian thinker since Marshall McLuhan. Economist Tyler Cowen said Peterson is currently the most influential public intellectual in the western world. For rightwing commentator Melanie Phillips, he is a kind of secular prophet in an era of lobotomised conformism. He is also adored by figures on the so-called alt-light (basically the alt-right without the sieg heils and the white ethnostate), including Mike Cernovich, Gavin McInnes and Paul Joseph Watson. His earnings from crowdfunding drives on Patreon and YouTube hits (his lectures and debates have been viewed almost 40m times), now dwarf his academic salary.

Not everybody is persuaded that Peterson is a thinker of substance, however. Last November, fellow University of Toronto professor Ira Wells called him the professor of piffle a YouTube star rather than a credible intellectual. Tabatha Southey, a columnist for the Canadian magazine Macleans, designated him the stupid mans smart person.

Petersons secret sauce is to provide an academic veneer to a lot of old-school rightwing cant, including the notion that most academia is corrupt and evil, and banal self-help patter, says Southey. Hes very much a cult thing, in every regard. I think hes a goof, which does not mean hes not dangerous.

One person who has crossed swords with Peterson declined my interview request, having experienced floods of hate mail

So, what does Peterson actually believe? He bills himself as a classic British liberal whose focus is the psychology of belief. Much of what he says is familiar: marginalised groups are infantilised by a culture of victimhood and offence-taking; political correctness threatens freedom of thought and speech; ideological orthodoxy undermines individual responsibility. You can read this stuff any day of the week and perhaps agree with some of it. However, Peterson goes further, into its most paranoid territory. His bete noire is what he calls postmodern neo-Marxism or cultural Marxism. In a nutshell: having failed to win the economic argument, Marxists decided to infiltrate the education system and undermine western values with vicious, untenable and anti-human ideas, such as identity politics, that will pave the road to totalitarianism.

Peterson studied political science and psychology, but he weaves several more disciplines evolutionary biology, anthropology, sociology, history, literature, religious studies into his grand theory. Rather than promoting blatant bigotry, like the far right, he claims that concepts fundamental to social-justice movements, such as the existence of patriarchy and other forms of structural oppression, are treacherous illusions, and that he can prove this with science. Hence: The idea that women were oppressed throughout history is an appalling theory. Islamophobia is a word created by fascists and used by cowards to manipulate morons. White privilege is a Marxist lie. Believing that gender identity is subjective is as bad as claiming that the world is flat. Unsurprisingly, he was an early supporter of James Damore, the engineer fired by Google for his memo Googles Ideological Echo Chamber.

Cathy Newman was wrong to call Peterson a provocateur, as if he were just Milo Yiannopoulos with a PhD. He is a true believer. Peterson is old enough to remember the political correctness wars of the early 90s, when conservatives such as Allan Bloom and Roger Kimball warned that campus speech codes and demands to diversify the canon were putting the US on the slippery slope to Maoism, and mainstream journalists found the counterintuitive twist what if progressives are the real fascists? too juicy to resist. Their alarmist rhetoric now seems ridiculous. Those campus battles did not lead to the Gulag. But Petersons theories hark back to that episode.

Peterson was also shaped by the cold war; he was obsessed as a young man with the power of rigid ideology to make ordinary people do terrible things. He collects Soviet realist paintings, in a know-your-enemy way, and named his first child Mikhaila, after Mikhail Gorbachev. In Professor Against Political Correctness, he says: I know something about the way authoritarian and totalitarian states develop and I cant help but think that I am seeing a fair bit of that right now.

In many ways, Peterson is an old-fashioned conservative who mourns the decline of religious faith and the traditional family, but he uses of-the-moment tactics. His YouTube gospel resonates with young white men who feel alienated by the jargon of social-justice discourse and crave an empowering theory of the world in which they are not the designated oppressors. Many are intellectually curious. On Amazon, Petersons readers seek out his favourite thinkers: Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Solzhenitsyn, Jung. His long, dense video lectures require commitment. He combines the roles of erudite professor, self-help guru and street-fighting scourge of the social-justice warrior: the missing link between Steven Pinker, Dale Carnegie and Gamergate. On Reddit, fans testify that Peterson changed, or even saved, their lives. His recent sold-out lectures in London had the atmosphere of revival meetings.

Such intense adoration can turn nasty. His more extreme supporters have abused, harassed and doxxed (maliciously published the personal information of) several of his critics. One person who has crossed swords with Peterson politely declined my request for an interview, having experienced floods of hatemail, including physical threats. Newman received so much abuse that Peterson asked his fans to back off, albeit while suggesting the scale had been exaggerated. His fans are relentless, says Southey. They have contacted me, repeatedly, on just about every platform possible.

Peterson's audience includes Christian conservatives, atheist libertarians, centrist pundits and neo-Nazis

While Peterson does not endorse such attacks, his intellectual machismo does not exactly deter them. He calls ideas he disagrees with silly, ridiculous, absurd, insane. He describes debate as combat on the battleground of ideas and hints at physical violence, too. If youre talking to a man who wouldnt fight with you under any circumstances whatsoever, then youre talking to someone for whom you have absolutely no respect, he told Paglia last year, adding that it is harder to deal with crazy women because he cannot hit them. His fans post videos with titles such as Jordan Peterson DESTROY [sic] Transgender Professor and Those 7 Times Jordan Peterson Went Beast Mode. In debate, as in life, Peterson believes in winners and losers.

How does one effectively debate a man who seems obsessed with telling his adoring followers that there is a secret cabal of postmodern neo-Marxists hellbent on destroying western civilisation and that their campus LGBTQ group is part of it? says Southey. Theres never going to be a point where he says: You know what? Youre right, I was talking out of my ass back there. Its very much about him attempting to dominate the conversation.

Petersons constellation of beliefs attracts a heterogeneous audience that includes Christian conservatives, atheist libertarians, centrist pundits and neo-Nazis. This staunch anti-authoritarian also has a striking habit of demonising the left while downplaying dangers from the right. After the 2016 US election, Peterson described Trump as a liberal and a moderate, no more of a demagogue than Reagan. In as much as Trump voters are intolerant, Peterson claims, it is the lefts fault for sacrificing the working class on the altar of identity politics. Because his contempt for identity politics includes what he calls the pathology of racial pride, he does not fully endorse the far right, but he flirts with their memes and overlaps with them on many issues.

Its true that hes not a white nationalist, says David Neiwert, the Pacific Northwest correspondent for the Southern Poverty Law Center and the author of Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump. But hes buttressing his narrative with pseudo-facts, many of them created for the explicit purpose of promoting white nationalism, especially the whole notion of cultural Marxism. The arc of radicalisation often passes through these more moderate ideologues.

The difference is that this individual has a title and profession that lend a certain illusory credibility, says Cara Tierney, an artist and part-time professor who protested against Petersons appearance at Ottawas National Gallery last year. Its very theatrical and shrewdly exploits platforms that thrive on spectacle, controversy, fear and prejudice. The threat is not so much what [Petersons] beliefs are, but how they detract from more critical, informed and, frankly, interesting conversations.

Consider the media firestorm last November over Lindsay Shepherd, a teaching assistant at Ontarios Wilfrid Laurier University, who was reprimanded for showing students a clip of Peterson debating gender pronouns. Her supervising professor compared it to neutrally playing a speech by Hitler, before backing down and apologising publicly. The widely reported controversy sent 12 Rules for Life racing back up the Amazon charts, leading Peterson to tweet: Apparently being compared to Hitler now constitutes publicity.

Yet Petersons commitment to unfettered free speech is questionable. Once you believe in a powerful and malign conspiracy, you start to justify extreme measures. Last July, he announced plans to launch a website that would help students and parents identify and avoid corrupt courses with postmodern content. Within five years, he hoped, this would starve postmodern neo-Marxist cult classes into oblivion. Peterson shelved the plan after a backlash, acknowledging that it might add excessively to current polarisation. Who could have predicted that blacklisting fellow professors might exacerbate polarisation? Apparently not the most influential public intellectual in the western world.

The key to Petersons appeal is also his greatest weakness. He wants to be the man who knows everything and can explain everything, without qualification or error. On Channel 4 News, he posed as an impregnable rock of hard evidence and common sense. But his arguments are riddled with conspiracy theories and crude distortions of subjects, including postmodernism, gender identity and Canadian law, that lie outside his field of expertise. Therefore, there is no need to caricature his ideas in order to challenge them. Even so, his critics will have their work cut out: Petersons wave is unlikely to come crashing down any time soon.

See the original post:
How dangerous is Jordan B Peterson, the rightwing professor ...

I know how ridiculous it sounds, Mikhaila Peterson told me recently by phone, after a whirlwind of attention gathered around the 26-year-old, who is now offering dietary advice to people suffering with conditions like hers. Or not so much dietary advice as guiding people in eating only beef.

At first glance, Peterson, who is based in Toronto, could seem to be one of the many emerging semi-celebrities with a miraculous story of self-healingwho show off postpartum weight loss in bikini Instagrams and sell one thing or another, a supplement or tonic or book or compression garment. (Not incidentally, she is the daughter of the famous and controversial pop psychologist Jordan Peterson. More on that later.) But Peterson is taking the trend in extra-professional health advice to an extreme conclusion: She is not doing sponsored posts for health products, but actively selling one-on-one counseling ($75 for a half hour) for people who want to stop eating almost everything.

Peterson seems to be reaching suffering people despite a lack of training or credentials in nutrition or medicine, and perhaps because of that distinction. Her Instagram bio: For info on treating weight loss, depression, and autoimmune disorders with diet, check out my blog or fb page! The blog, which is called Dont Eat That, says at the top that many (if not most) health problems are treatable with diet alone. This is true, if at odds with the disclaimer at the bottom of the page that her words are not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment.

I told her Im surprised people need further counseling, in that an all-beef diet is very straightforward.

They mostly want to see that Im not dead, she said. What I basically do is say, Hey, look at all the things that happened to me and brought me to where I am now. Isnt it weird? And then let people draw their own conclusions.

Peterson described an adolescence that involved multiple debilitating medical diagnoses, beginning with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. Some unknown process had triggered her bodys immune system to attack her joints. The joint problems culminated in hip and ankle replacements in her teens, coupled with extreme fatigue, depression and anxiety, brain fog, and sleep problems. In fifth grade she was diagnosed with depression, and then later something called idiopathic hypersomnia (which translates to English as sleeping too much, of unclear causewhich translates further to sorry we really dont know whats going on).

Everything the doctors tried failed, and she did everything they told her, she recounted to me. She fully bought into the system, taking large doses of strong immune-suppressing drugs like methotrexate.*

Her story took a dramatic turn in 2015, when the underdog protagonist, nearly at the end of her rope, figured out the truth for herself. It was all about food.

Peterson adopted a common approach to dieting: elimination. She started cutting out foods from her diet, and feeling better each time. She began with gluten, and she kept going, casting out more and morenot just gluten or dairy or soy or lectins or artificial sweeteners or non-artificial sweeteners, but everything. Until, by December 2017, all that was left was beef and salt and water, and, she told me, all my symptoms went into remission.

And you quit taking all your medications?

Everything.

There is so much evidenceabundant, copious evidence acquired over decades of work from scientists around the worldthat most people benefit from eating fruits, vegetables, nuts, beans, and seeds. This appears to be largely because fiber in plants is important to the flourishing of the gut microbiome. I ran this by some experts, just to make sure I wasnt missing anything that might suggest a beef-salt diet is potentially something other than a bad idea. I learned that it was worse than I thought.

Physiologically, it would just be an immensely bad idea, Jack Gilbert, the faculty director at the University of Chicagos Microbiome Center and a professor of surgery, told me during a recent visit to his lab. A terribly, terribly bad idea.

Gilbert has done extensive research on how the trillions of microbes in our guts digest food, and the look on his face when I told him about the all-beef diet was unamused. He began rattling off the expected ramifications: Your body would start to have severe dysregulation, within six months, of the majority of the processes that deal with metabolism; you would have no short-chain fatty acids in your cells; most of the by-products of gastrointestinal polysaccharide fermentation would shut down, so you wouldnt be able to regulate your hormone levels; youd enter into cardiac issues due to alterations in cell receptors; your microbiota would just be devastated.

While much of the internet has been following this story in a somewhat snide way, Gilbert appeared genuinely concerned and saddened: If she does not die of colon cancer or some other severe cardiometabolic disease, the lifeI cant imagine.

There are few accounts of people having tried all-beef diets, though all-meatknown as carnivoryis slightly more common. Earlier this month, inspired by the media conversation about the Peterson approach, Alan Levinovitz, the author of The Gluten Lie, tried carnivory, eating only meat for two weeks. He did lose seven pounds, which he attributes to eating fewer calories overall, because he eventually got tired of eating only meat. He missed snacking at coffee shops and browsing the local farmers market and trying out new restaurants around town, cooking with his family, and just generally enjoying food.

I was psychologically exhausted, Levinovitz told me. When he returned to omnivory, he regained the lost weight in four days.

Peterson told me it took several weeks for her to get used to the beef-only approach, and that the relief of her medical symptoms overpowers any sense of missing food. If even a tiny amount of anything else finds its way into her mouth, she will be ill, she says. This happened when she tried to eat an organic olive, and again recently when she was at a restaurant that put pepper on her steak.

I was like, whatever, its just pepper, she told me. Then she had a reaction that lasted three weeks and included joint pain, acne, and anxiety.

Apart from having to exist in a world where the possibility of pepper exposure looms, the only other social downside she notices is that she hates asking people to accommodate her diet. So she will usually eat before she goes to a dinner party, she told me, but then Ill go drink and enjoy the party.

Drink, as in, water?

I can also, strangely enough, tolerate vodka and bourbon.

The idea that alcohol, one of the most well-documented toxic substances, is among the few things that Petersons body will tolerate may be illuminating. It implies that when it comes to dieting, the inherent properties of the substances ingested can be less important than the eaters conceptualizations of themas either tolerable or intolerable, good or bad. Whats actually therapeutic may be the act of elimination itself.

For centuries, ascetics have found enlightenment through acts of deprivation. As Levinovitz, who is an associate professor of religion at James Madison University, explained to me, the Daoist text the Zhuangzi describes a spirit man who lives in the mountains and rides dragons and subsists only on air and dew. Theres an anti-authoritarian bent to pop-culture wisdom, and a part of that is dealing with food taboos, which are handed down by authorities, Levinovitz said. Those are government now, instead of religious. And because they are wrong so oftenor, at least, apparently wrongthats a good place to go when carving out your own area of authority. If you just eat the wrong foods and dont die, thats a ritual way to prove that you go against conventional wisdom.

Petersons narrative fits a classic archetype of an outsider who beat the game and healed thyself despite the odds and against the recommendations of the establishment. Her story is her truth, and it cant be explained; you have to believe. And unlike the many studies that have been done to understand the diets of the longest-lived, healthiest people in history, or the randomized trials that are used to determine which health interventions are safe and effective for whom, her story is clear and dramatic. Its right there in her photos; it has a face and a name to prove that no odds are too long for one determined person to overcome.

The beneficial effects of a compelling personal narrative that helps explain and give order to the world can be absolutely physiologically real. It is well documented that the immune system (and, so, autoimmune diseases) are modulated by our lifestylesfrom how much we sleep and move to how well we eat and how much we drink. Most importantly, the immune system is also modulated by stress, which tends to be a by-product of a perceived lack of control or order.

If strict dietary rules provide a sense of control and order, then Petersons approach is emblematic of the trend in elimination dieting taken to an extreme: Avoid basically everything. This verges into the realm of an eating disorder. The National Eating Disorder Association lists among common symptoms refusal to eat certain foods, progressing to restrictions against whole categories of food. In the early phases of disordered eating, as with bipolar disorder or alcoholism, a person may look and feel great. They may thrive for months or even years. But this fades. Whats more, the temporary relief from anxiety may mean that the source of the anxiety goes unsought and unaddressed.

I asked Peterson about the possibility that she may be enabling people with eating disorders. She said she would draw a line if a client were underweight or inducing vomiting. Otherwise, its extremely disrespectful to people with health issues caused by food to be lumped into the same category as people with eating disorders. More of the same blame the patient stuff that doctors and health professionals already do.

The popularity of Petersons narrative is explained by more than its timeless tropes; it has also been amplified by the fact that her father has occasionally cast his spotlight onto her story. Jordan Petersons recent book, Twelve Rules for Life, includes the story of his daughters health trials. The elder Peterson, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, could at first seem an unlikely face for acceptance of personal, subjective truth, as he regularly professes the importance of acting as purely as possible according to rigorous analysis of data. He argued in a recent video that American universities are the home to ideologues who claim that all truth is subjective, that all sex differences are socially constructed, and that Western imperialism is the sole source of all Third World problems. In his book, he writes that academic institutions are teaching children to be brainwashed victims, and that the rigorous critical theoretician is morally obligated to set them straight.

It is on grounds of his interpretation of income data, for example, that he has spoken out against the idea of a wage gap between men and women being unfair, as it can be explained away by biological factors associated with certain personality traits that are more valuable in the capitalist marketplace. From arguments from social-science evidence, he has expressed uncertainty that lesbian couples can raise children without a male father figure. And it is academic evidence that leads him to write in his book that the so-called patriarchy is an arbitrary cultural artifact.

Yet in a July appearance on the comedian Joe Rogans podcast, Jordan Peterson explained how Mikhailas experience had convinced him to eliminate everything but meat and leafy greens from his diet, and that in the last two months he had gone full meat and eliminated vegetables. Since he changed his diet, his laundry list of maladies has disappeared, he told Rogan. His lifelong depression, anxiety, gastric reflux (and associated snoring), inability to wake up in the mornings, psoriasis, gingivitis, floaters in his right eye, numbness on the sides of his legs, problems with mood regulationall of it is gone, and he attributes it to the diet.

Im certainly intellectually at my best, he said. Im stronger, I can swim better, and my gum disease is gone. Its like, what the hell?

Do you take any vitamins? asked Rogan.

No. No, I eat beef and salt and water. Thats it. And I never cheat. Ever. Not even a little bit.

No soda, no wine?

I drink club soda.

Well, thats still water.

Well, when youre down to that level, no, its not, Joe. Theres club soda, which is really bubbly. Theres Perrier, which is sort of bubbly. Theres flat water, and theres hot water. Those distinctions start to become important.

Peterson reiterated several times that he is not giving dietary advice, but said that many attendees of his recent speaking tour have come up to him and said the diet is working for them. The takeaway for listeners is that it worked for Peterson, and so it may work for them. Rogan also clarified that though he is also not an expert, he is fascinated by the fact that he hasnt heard any negative stories about people who have started the all-meat diet.

Well, I have a negative story, said Peterson. Both Mikhaila and I noticed that when we restricted our diet and then ate something we werent supposed to, the reaction was absolutely catastrophic. He gives the example of having had some apple cider and subsequently being incapacitated for a month by what he believes was an inflammatory response.

You were done for a month?

Oh yeah, it took me out for a month. It was awful ...

Apple cider? What was it doing to you?

It produced an overwhelming sense of impending doom. I seriously mean overwhelming. Theres no way I couldve lived like that. But see, Mikhaila knew by then that it would probably only last a month.

A month? From fucking cider?

I didnt sleep that month for 25 days. I didnt sleep at all for 25 days.

What? How is that possible?

Ill tell you how its possible: You lay in bed frozen in something approximating terror for eight hours. And then you get up.

The longest recorded stretch of sleeplessness in a human is 11 days, witnessed by a Stanford research team.

While there is debate in the scientific community over just how much meat belongs in a human diet, it is impossible for all or even most humans to eat primarily meat. Beef production at the scale required to feed billions of humans even at current levels of consumption is environmentally unsustainable. It is not even healthy from a theoretical evolutionary viewpoint, the microbiome expert Gilbert explained to me. Carnivores need to eat meat or else they die; humans do not. The carnivore gastrointestinal tract is completely different from the human gastrointestinal tract, which is made up of a system designed to consume large quantities of complex fibers.

What the Petersons are selling is rather a sense of order and control. Science is about questions, and self-help is about answers. A recurring idea in Jordan Petersons book is that humans need rulesits subtitle is an antidote to chaoseven if only for the sake of rules. Peterson discovered this through his own suffering, as when he was searching the world for the best surgeon to give his young daughter a new hip. In explaining how he dealt with Mikhailas illness, he writes that existence and limitation are inextricably linked. He quotes Laozi:

It is not the clay the potter throws,

Which gives the pot its usefulness,

But the space within the shape,

From which the pot is made

Dietary rules offer limits, good or bad, that help people define the self. This is an attractive prospect, and anyone willing to decree such rulesdietary or otherwiseis bound to attract attention. Fox News recently declared Peterson the lefts public enemy number one in a segment where he discussed with Tucker Carlson why the left wants to silence conservative thought. Though to have lived through the last year is to have lived in a world where Peterson and his ideas have enjoyed near-constant amplification.

The allure of a strict code for eatinga way to divide the world into good foods and bad foods, angels and demonsmay be especially strong at a time when order feels in short supply. Indeed there is at least some benefit to be had from any and all dietary advice, or rules for life, so long as a person believes in them, and so long as they provide a code that allows a person to feel good for having stuck with it and a cohort of like-minded adherents. The challenge is to find a code that accords as best as possible with scientific evidence about what is good and bad, and with what is best for the world.

* This article previously misidentified Peterson as the author of a guest post on her blog.

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The Jordan Peterson Meat-Only Diet - The Atlantic

Jordan Peterson is a Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. His main areas of study are the psychology of religious and ideological belief, and the assessment and improvement of personality and performance.

From 1993 to 1997, Peterson lived in Arlington, Massachusetts, while teaching and conducting research at Harvard University as an assistant and an associate professor in the psychology department. During his time at Harvard, he studied aggression arising from drug and alcohol abuse, and supervised a number of unconventional thesis proposals. Afterwards, he returned to Canada and took up a post as a professor at the University of Toronto.

In 1999, Routledge published Peterson's Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief. The book, which took Peterson 13 years to complete, describes a comprehensive theory for how we construct meaning, represented by the mythical process of the exploratory hero, and provides an interpretation of religious and mythical models of reality presented in a way that is compatible with modern scientific understanding of how the brain works. It synthesizes ideas drawn from narratives in mythology, religion, literature and philosophy, as well as research from neuropsychology, in "the classic, old-fashioned tradition of social science."

Peterson's primary goal was to examine why individuals, not simply groups, engage in social conflict, and to model the path individuals take that results in atrocities like the Gulag, the Auschwitz concentration camp and the Rwandan genocide. Peterson considers himself a pragmatist, and uses science and neuropsychology to examine and learn from the belief systems of the past and vice versa, but his theory is primarily phenomenological. In the book, he explores the origins of evil, and also posits that an analysis of the world's religious ideas might allow us to describe our essential morality and eventually develop a universal system of morality.

Harvey Shepard, writing in the Religion column of the Montreal Gazette, stated: "To me, the book reflects its author's profound moral sense and vast erudition in areas ranging from clinical psychology to scripture and a good deal of personal soul searching. ... Peterson's vision is both fully informed by current scientific and pragmatic methods, and in important ways deeply conservative and traditional."

In 2004, a 13-part TV series based on his book Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief aired on TVOntario. He has also appeared on that network on shows such as Big Ideas, and as a frequent guest and essayist on The Agenda with Steve Paikin since 2008.

In 2013, Peterson began recording his lectures ("Personality and Its Transformations", "Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief") and uploading them to YouTube. His YouTube channel has gathered more than 600,000 subscribers and his videos have received more than 35 million views as of January 2018. He has also appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience, The Gavin McInnes Show, Steven Crowder's Louder with Crowder, Dave Rubin's The Rubin Report, Stefan Molyneux's Freedomain Radio, h3h3Productions's H3 Podcast, Sam Harris's Waking Up podcast, Gad Saad's The Saad Truth series and other online shows. In December 2016, Peterson started his own podcast, The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast, which has 37 episodes as of January 10, 2018, including academic guests such as Camille Paglia, Martin Daly, and James W. Pennebaker, while on his channel he has also interviewed Stephen Hicks, Richard J. Haier, and Jonathan Haidt among others. In January 2017, he hired a production team to film his psychology lectures at the University of Toronto.

Peterson with his colleagues Robert O. Pihl, Daniel Higgins, and Michaela Schippers produced a writing therapy program with series of online writing exercises, titled the Self Authoring Suite. It includes the Past Authoring Program, a guided autobiography; two Present Authoring Programs, which allow the participant to analyze their personality faults and virtues in terms of the Big Five personality model; and the Future Authoring Program, which guides participants through the process of planning their desired futures. The latter program was used with McGill University undergraduates on academic probation to improve their grades, as well since 2011 at Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University. The Self Authoring Programs were developed partially from research by James W. Pennebaker at the University of Texas at Austin and Gary Latham at the Rotman School of Management of the University of Toronto. Pennebaker demonstrated that writing about traumatic or uncertain events and situations improved mental and physical health, while Latham demonstrated that personal planning exercises help make people more productive. According to Peterson, more than 10,000 students have used the program as of January 2017, with drop-out rates decreasing by 25% and GPAs rising by 20%.

In May 2017 he started new project, titled "The psychological significance of the Biblical stories", a series of live theatre lectures in which he analyzes archetypal narratives in Genesis as patterns of behaviour vital for both personal, social and cultural stability.

His upcoming book "12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos" will be released on January 23rd, 2018. It was released in the UK on January 16th. Dr. Peterson is currently on tour throughout North America, Europe and Australia.

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Jordan B. Peterson

Perhaps she has used that tactic to good effect elsewhere. (And the online attacks to which shes been subjected are abhorrent assaults on decency by people who are perpetrating misbehavior orders of magnitude worse than hers.)

But in the interview, Newman relies on this technique to a remarkable extent, making it a useful illustration of a much broader pernicious trend. Peterson was not evasive or unwilling to be clear about his meaning. And Newmans exaggerated restatements of his views mostly led viewers astray, not closer to the truth.

* * *

Peterson begins the interview by explaining why he tells young men to grow up and take responsibility for getting their lives together and becoming good partners. He notes he isnt talking exclusively to men, and that he has lots of female fans.

Whats in it for the women, though? Newman asks.

Well, what sort of partner do you want? Peterson says. Do you want an overgrown child? Or do you want someone to contend with who is going to help you?

So youre saying, Newman retorts, that women have some sort of duty to help fix the crisis of masculinity. But thats not what he said. He posited a vested interest, not a duty.

Women deeply want men who are competent and powerful, Peterson goes on to assert. And I dont mean power in that they can exert tyrannical control over others. Thats not power. Thats just corruption. Power is competence. And why in the world would you not want a competent partner? Well, I know why, actually, you cant dominate a competent partner. So if you want domination

The interviewer interrupts, So youre saying women want to dominate, is that what youre saying?

The next section of the interview concerns the pay gap between men and women, and whether it is rooted in gender itself or other nondiscriminatory factors:

Newman: that 9 percent pay gap, thats a gap between median hourly earnings between men and women. That exists.

Peterson: Yes. But theres multiple reasons for that. One of them is gender, but thats not the only reason. If youre a social scientist worth your salt, you never do a univariate analysis. You say women in aggregate are paid less than men. Okay. Well then we break its down by age; we break it down by occupation; we break it down by interest; we break it down by personality.

Newman: But youre saying, basically, it doesnt matter if women arent getting to the top, because thats what is skewing that gender pay gap, isnt it? Youre saying thats just a fact of life, women arent necessarily going to get to the top.

Peterson: No, Im not saying it doesnt matter, either. Im saying there are multiple reasons for it.

Newman: Yeah, but why should women put up with those reasons?

Peterson: Im not saying that they should put up with it! Im saying that the claim that the wage gap between men and women is only due to sex is wrong. And it is wrong. Theres no doubt about that. The multivariate analysis have been done. So let me give you an example

The interviewer seemed eager to impute to Peterson a belief that a large, extant wage gap between men and women is a fact of life that women should just put up with, though all those assertions are contrary to his real positions on the matter.

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Why Can't People Hear What Jordan Peterson Is ... - The Atlantic