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If you hang around intellectuals or academics long enough, one of them will make the joke that they wish they were conservative because there is a lot more money in it.Jordan Peterson is living proof of that.

The Koch Brothers and the Heritage Foundation are eager to fund and promote the brightest minds conservatism has to offer. They intend to use the free market language of the right, there is a high demand for intellectuals who will defend conservative ideas, but there is a very low supply.

So if youre wondering how 55-year-old Canadian psychology professor Jordan B. Peterson became an overnight sensation, going from obscure academic to international bestseller lauded in the New York Times as most influential public intellectual in the Western world right now, you dont have to look much further than that old academic joke.

Jordan Peterson is famous because in the era of the resurgent alt-right, the loose collection of conservatives that align with white supremacists, there are few intellectuals willing to align themselves with the movement. The alt-right is in need of intellectuals to justify their fascist worldview, and Peterson has been ready.

Until 2016, Peterson languished in relative obscurity. He taught at Harvard and then at the University of Toronto after earning a Ph.D. from McGill. In the fall of 2016, he became embroiled in a controversy that would cost him his teaching position, but would ultimately launch him to stardom.

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In Canada, as in America, the rights of transgender people have been a hotly debated issue.

Peterson found himself a viral star after opposing a bill known as C-16, which sought to add gender identity and expression to laws regarding discrimination. Peterson began his now thriving YouTube career with a series of lectures arguing that asking people to refer to others by their preferred gender pronouns infringes on free speech. His stance on this issue led to an interview with Channel 4s Cathy Newman which also went viral (the video currently has nine million views).

Suddenly, Peterson was a star with a platform and an eager audience. His views include an Ayn Randian focus on the individual and masculinity, as well as darker viewpoints including anti-Social Justice Warrior screeds, critiques of feminism, the suggestion that political correctness is the undoing of Western culture, and even the implication that violence against women is okay if the woman deserves it.

If Peterson were to advocate these views outright, without a carefully constructed academic veneer, he would be treated like Richard Spencer or Milo Yiannopoulos. Even more likely, he would be largely barred from the public square. But Peterson cleverly follows the playbook of respectability, cloaking his views in Jungian archetypes, fatherly self-help diatribes, and labored academic language. He lends himself an aura of intellectual seriousness his ideas do not deserve. Beneath all the layers of pretense and respectability, Peterson is making an argument you can find at any bar in America. Its a hard world out there, he argues, so get whats yours.

Prior to this year, Petersons only published book was a tome titled Maps of Meaning. In this text, Peterson relied heavily on Swiss psychologist Carl Jung whose work involved interpreting life through mythic archetypes or deeply rooted characters and symbolic motifs that reappear in art, dreams, myths, and religions.

The primary project of Maps of Meaning was to prove modern culture is natural. By this, he means that the structures of society are in place because of how humans are meant to exist in terms both intellectual myth and evolutionary science. This is an incredibly niche subject, but it isnt hard to see why this would be appealing to conservative defenders of the status quo. His argument boils down to Make Western Civilization Great Again.

In January, Peterson released 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote for Chaos. Several hundred pages slimmer than his earlier work, the book mixes his ideas about masculinity, individualism, and mythic destiny with a self-help style manual for living.

12 Rules breaks up his long academic and philosophical digressions into chapters with titles fitting of a book like The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, like Stand Up Straight with Your Shoulders Back and Be Precise In Your Speech. With this book, Peterson rebranded as a kind of Malcolm Gladwell of the right, boiling down varied, complicated concepts into digestible chunks that support generally accepted ideas that he can then use to bolster his misogynistic, bigoted, reactionary worldview.

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In the book and lectures, Peterson contends that a man should be a dominant figure. It is feminine aspects, Peterson argues, of society that prevent men from self-actualizing. Boys are suffering in the modern world, he cautions his audience. The only way to stop the suffering is to toughen up. He refers to his female critics as rabid harpies.

Taking into account Petersons audience and particular appeal, this approach makes sense. Whether you want to talk about the alt-right, Proud Boys, Pepes, gamers (Peterson counts PewDiePie among his fans), or the economically anxious, there is a mass of young, underemployed white men who chafe at the modern liberal answers society provides. Peterson offers them a role model, a mentor, and even a father figure to look up to and affirm their isolated and often prejudiced worldview.

Understanding Petersons intellectual and cultural project will also help you understand his popular YouTube videos a little better. For example, why does Peterson spend some much time talking about Disney movies? Famously, Petersonlikes to tear into Frozen for being SJW propaganda. Remembering that Peterson is setting out to affirm a more traditional view of masculinity, free of the influence of things like Marxism, postmodernism, leftists, or what many people might call social progress, his anger makes complete sense.

While Peterson has a long list of the forces of modernity he is generally opposed to, writers like Shuja Haider of Viewpoints have pointed out that he declines to engage in direct criticism of the work of the various authors he critiques. Essentially, he rails against modernity without ever really bothering to define it. If he did, he would have to admit he is speaking of things like civil rights and gender equality. This is just one example of the kind of lack of intellectual rigor that led Macleans Tabetha Southey to call Peterson, the stupid mans smart person.

Peterson is careful not to explicitly align himself with fascists. But it isnt a giant intellectual leap from Petersons words to the actions in Charlottesville. How does one toughen up if not through violence? He says he is not of the alt-right, but he has said, If men are pushed too hard to feminize, they will become more and more interested in harsh, fascist political ideology.

Peterson tries to duck out of taking responsibility for the political actions of his followers. One of his 12 Rules is Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world. But everything is especially political when you are positioning yourself as a cultural theorist. As the world develops around us, we are impacted every day by the worlds political realities. We pay rent on that house we have to put in order.

Nathan J. Robinson is the author of perhaps the most thorough dismantling of Petersons intellectual credibility so far. As he concludes his argument, he makes exactly this point:

Peterson speaks to disaffected millennial men, validating their prejudices about feminists and serving as a surrogate father figure. Yet hes offering them terrible advice, because the individual responsibility ethic makes one feel like a failure for failing Millennials struggle in part because of a viciously competitive economy that is crushing them with debt and a lack of opportunityBut if you cant pay your student loans, or your rent, and you cant get a better job, what use is it to tell you that you should adopt a confident lobster-posture?

Here Robinson refers to an anecdote in 12 Rules in which Peterson explains that human males, like lobsters, are subject to a rigid hierarchy of dominator and dominated. While he is welcome to indulge in whatever metaphors he likes, the sad view dominates his work. He may sound smarter than your average fascist, but his wordsare little more than furious, insignificant bluster.

The only thing you can really learn from Jordan Peterson is that while being a conservative academic might be lucrative, it certainly isnt worth it.

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Jordan Peterson: What You Should Know About the Alt-Right YouTuber

Before Jordan Peterson became the worlds most polarizing intellectual, he was a salesman. In the late 1990s, he flew to corporate HQs across North America to pitch a piece of hiring software called ExamCorp, a 90-minute psych assessment hed developed with colleagues as a young assistant psychology professor at Harvard. It was simple, a personality test and some computerized tasksclick certain objects, generate words that start with, say, the letter H. Peterson told managers it could help them hire the right person for a position, and that tests like these had reliably predicted the job performance of corporate administrators, factory workers, pharmacists and U.S. Navy servicemen. No one bought it. They said it was too expensive, too time-consuming. They balked when they tried the test for themselves and didnt like their results. When they asked Peterson who his other customers were, he had to admit that there were none.

Peterson didnt need to sell the software to pay the billsby this time, he was making more than $100,000 a year as a psychology professor at the University of Toronto and earning extra income from a part-time clinical practice. But he kept up the software side gig for 12 years because he liked the challenge of turning esoteric psychological research into a profitable real-world product. He developed more evaluations, including The Self Authoring Suite, a series of self-help writing exercises, and Understand Myself, an online personality test. Then, finally, he landed his first paying customer. In 2009, the Founder Institute, a start-up boot camp in Silicon Valley, hired him to develop a proprietary assessment that could predict which of its applicants would become successful entrepreneurs.

But it would be several more years before hed find a substantial customer base. In 2016, he posted a series of videos called Professor Against Political Correctness to YouTube. In those videos, he famously attacked U of Ts human resources department and lamented the demise of free speech, the folly of identity politics and the corruption of liberal arts education. Then he blasted Bill C-16, the federal amendment that protects Canadians from discrimination on the basis of gender identity and gender expression, and vowed never to use trans peoples preferred pronouns if coerced by law. If a trans person approached him and had a conversation about it, hed consider it, but legally requiring citizens to do so, he argued, was a step toward tyranny. Moreover, if something as fundamental as gender was no longer fixed, then orderthe symbolic masculine force keeping chaos, the eternal feminine, in checkwas in jeopardy.

At that point, Peterson was more a fed-up academic screaming into the void than an ideologue issuing a rallying cry. But overnight, he was drafted into the culture wars. Critics painted him as a privileged professor denying trans lives. Activists hounded him online and on campus. Hundreds of U of T faculty petitioned for his termination; the deans office and HR sent letters of warning but never fired him.

Sympathizers saw a free-speech champion defending traditional values. Peterson found a massive new audience, drawn in by contentious opinions and delighted to find a deep back catalogue of psych lectures hed uploaded to YouTube. In those videos, he dashes across auditoriums preaching plucky self-responsibility and weaving Nietzsche, the New Testament and, later, The Lion King into stories with simple, sensible morals like Clean your room and Make friends with people who want the best for you. His tough-love sermons inspired thousands of people, especially wayward young men, to pick themselves up and do something with their lives. Fan mail filled his office; he eventually stopped trying to read it all. Peterson had found acceptance, adulation and, coincidentally, customers. In the first week of those videos going live on YouTube, at least 25,000 people signed up for the $10 and $30 psych exercises on his website, making him at least a quarter of a million dollars.

Controversy has since become the lifeblood of his business empire. Following the pronoun scandal, when Peterson was denied federal funding to pay for research assistants, Rebel Media co-founder Ezra Levant came to the rescue by launching a campaign that raised nearly $200,000 for Petersons research. Every time Peterson publicly clashed with a protestor or combative interviewer, more people followed him on Twitter or uploaded clips to YouTube with titles like Jordan Peterson DESTROYS Feminist on Toxic Masculinity. His YouTube channel has more than 200 million views and some 3.5 million subscribers. For a time, Peterson was the second-most-lucrative creator on the crowdfunding website Patreon (after the left-leaning podcast Chapo Trap House), netting roughly $80,000 a month. He promised 45-minute one-on-one Skype sessions to anyone who pledged at least $200 per month. Ive figured out how to monetize social justice warriors, he told the podcaster Joe Rogan.

Petersons reach is now vast and powerfulhe has nearly 10 million followers across his social media platforms, including, most recently, TikTok. All that attention has helped turn him into one of the bestselling authors in Canadian history. For a Canadian non-fiction title, 10,000 copies sold is considered a bestseller. Twenty-five thousand is sensational. Petersons 2018 book, 12 Rules for Life, sold five million. It was translated into more than 45 languages. For a time, it was the bestselling book on Amazon and the most popular audiobook on Audible. It spent several weeks at the top of bestseller lists, selling more copies than any title by Malcolm Gladwell.

The book made his publisher, Penguin Random House Canada, tens of millions of dollars, and Peterson millions. The tour that followed earned him millions more in speaking fees. In 2018 and 2019, he lectured to sold-out halls in 160 cities, more dates than any of Drakes world tours. There are now hundreds of pieces of merchandise available on Petersons website, including lobster-print pillows ($33) and hoodies ($57) that proclaim the first rule from his book, Stand up straight with your shoulders back.

Fame has boosted the bottom line, but it has also deeply taxed Peterson. For almost three years straight, he worked 16 hours a day, bombarded by trolls on Twitter and stopped by admirers on the street. He had panic attacks and hardly slept. He became dependent on tranquilizers, then almost died in a Russian hospital. Hes still returning to stable health. When he wakes up, he can barely stand. He spends several hours sitting in a sauna before he feels functional enough to begin the day. His worst symptoms are still lurkingI can feel the pulse, he says. And yet, after all hes been throughthe physical and mental trauma and the brink of deathhe has just released a new book, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life, which restarts the relentless hustle that nearly killed him. The question, for a man who is already a millionaire many times over, is why?

Even Petersons most ardent hater would admit he is a man of exceptional intelligence. Unlike many of his fellow academics, he is also a charming and engaging public speaker who can translate dull esoterica into riveting stories that resonate with the audiences personal experiences. In 2018, an author and businessman named Rob Moore interviewed Peterson about entrepreneurship and uploaded the video to YouTube with the title Jordan Peterson Reveals How to Sell Anything to Anyone. Depending on how you read it, that is either a compliment or a criticism.

Halfway through the 12 Rules book tour in 2018, Peterson had lunch with the Texan billionaire Jeff Sandefer at a steakhouse in Des Moines, Iowa. Sandefer had made his fortune in the oil industry before launching the Ed Foundation, which funds conservative politicians and libertarian think tanks. Hed flown his Cessna up to Iowa to talk to Peterson about his other passion: education.

Like Peterson, Sandefer had clashed with public universities. In the 1990s, hed developed a successful entrepreneurship program at the University of Texas, employing part-time instructors with professional experience. In 2002, when the school replaced those teachers with tenure-track professors, he quit in protest and founded the Acton School of Business, a private MBA program based in Austin. Its infamous for its 100-hour workweeks, and reviews describe it as either an invaluable, life-changing experience or a failed experiment for trust fund kids. Sandefer said hed been drawn to Petersons philosophies because they aligned with one of Actons educational pillars: learning how to live a life of meaning.

The reason for the meeting was that Peterson had been teasing plans to found an online educational institution for more than a year, promising Patreon supporters that their money would help build it. Sandefer, meanwhile, was about to lose his ability to offer students an MBA because Hardin-Simmons University, through which Acton was accredited, was cutting its budget. Sandefer needed something new to entice students.

Two months after their lunch date, the duo announced the nine-month Peterson Fellowship at the Acton School of Business. The Acton curriculum provides an institutional analog to the psychological content I have been sharing in my online videos, podcasts and books, Peterson wrote in a blog post about the fellowship, which would consist of a four-month online course followed by five months of in-person instruction in Austin. The cost: $65,000. The post cited Actons top marks in student competitiveness in the Princeton Review, a rating system that has no affiliation with Princeton University and is based mostly on student feedback. The fellowships website featured a sleek black-and-white photo of Peterson, grizzled and glancing out over a rugged landscapemore movie poster than higher-education ad. Are you everything you could be? it beckoned. Choose your future. Peterson fans were sold, and some 2,500 people applied for just 50 slots.

Soon, there was grumbling on the Jordan Peterson subreddit, where his fans usually share memes and debate his teachings. People began telling different versions of the same story: Acton had offered them a position in the programso long as they accepted within 72 hours. One initially enthusiastic Redditor posted an email exchange with the school, in which he expressed concern over the vagueness of the programs descriptions and asked how Peterson would be involved, if at all. Sandefer himself wrote back, saying, I applaud your skepticism; its a valuable trait. However, it doesnt sound as if this is the right opportunity for you. The work well be doing together requires a tolerance for ambiguity and will be messy. In his post, the Redditor appealed to Peterson directly, explaining, The Acton MBA seems like a wonderful standard program, but fellows applied for this because of YOUR NAME, not because of Acton. If you just signed off on this as a branding deal Im profoundly disappointed.

Sandefer didnt respond to an interview request, but I spoke to two Peterson fellows, one from the inaugural class in 2019 and another from the second cohort, which was cut short by Covid before in-person classes began. They told me that Peterson had no direct involvement in the programno face-to-face time over Zoom or the likebut that the fellows briefly beta tested educational projects related to his online institution. When Acton lost its MBA-granting status because of budget cuts, the school spun it thusly: In order to allow us to innovate freely and continue to disrupt business education, we are relinquishing any and all accreditation to free us from bureaucratic constraints.

As Peterson continued to round the globe promoting 12 Rules, his daughter, Mikhaila, entered the public eye. In the summer of 2018, she appeared in the U.K. Times and on Joe Rogans podcast to dish on her fathers sudden fame, and to introduce her own brand: the Lion Diet, a supercharged paleo menu consisting solely of beef, salt and water.

The diets origin story is now Peterson canon. Growing up, Mikhaila suffered from a long list of ailments, including sleep problems, depression and rheumatoid arthritis that forced her to get hip and ankle replacements. After a string of horrendous experiences with prescription medicationincluding OxyContin withdrawal, which she described as the feeling of ants crawling under her skinshe decided to take her health into her own hands. She slowly eliminated foods from her diet until she was eating only beef, a change she claims fixed all her conditions and allowed her to stop taking medications entirely.

Mikhailas carnivore diet quickly became a family affair. Her father, after some initial skepticism, joined in, and soon reported similar results: he lost 50 pounds, and claimed his lifelong depression and anxiety had vanished, and that a laundry list of other health issuespsoriasis, gum disease, leg numbnesswere suddenly cured. On Instagram, Mikhaila posted a picture of her mother, Tammy, looking fit and trim in a bikini, with the hashtag #meatheals.

Nutritional scientists have described the Lion Diet as an immensely bad idea, and Mikhaila herself admits she has no science to back it up. Yet she advises people to try it themselves and has repeatedly attempted to monetize the idea. At one point, you could pay $120 to Skype for an hour with Mikhaila about eating nothing but beef. She also briefly sold memberships to a club called the Lions Lair, which included daily contact with me and meetups around the world, for $599 a year.

Many posts on the Peterson subreddit dismiss the Lion Diet as a swindle. But Mikhaila is a talented, tireless promoter. She tells her own story with conviction. Over the years, I learned that everything Id been told and everything I believed in regarding the medical community was wrong and harmful, she has said. The actual best way to do science on your body is to test things out on yourself. On social media, she documents and promotes her wellness regimen: 12-day fasts, cryotherapy, infrared saunas. And like any good influencer, she lives the kind of life her fans dream about. She has plump, perma-red lips and a penchant for designer sneakers. She owns a condo in downtown Toronto with her husband and she works out of a rental suite in a five-star hotel that was last listed at $6,500 a month. She has posted pictures of herself riding in private planes and lounging poolside with an IV drip pumping an anti-aging molecule called NAD+ into her arm.

Of course, Mikhailas claim to fame is her proximity to the messiah. For a while, Mikhaila was her fathers deputy, helping to manage his business affairs while developing her own branch of the family empire. In early 2019, however, Tammy was diagnosed with a rare form of kidney cancer, and Peterson dropped everything to care for her. He named Mikhaila CEO of Luminate Enterprises, one of two companies that together oversee his books, lectures, online courses, podcasts and social media channels. Mikhailas prior experience was an incomplete psychology and classics major, a bachelors degree in biological and biomedical sciences, and a four-month stint working Ryersons media services desk. She now presides over a multimillion-dollar empire.

Mikhaila took over a business in crisis. Her mother teetered between life and death for five months until she recovered in August 2019, after a second surgery. But by that point, Petersonso wracked with anxiety by the compounding pressures of overnight fame, public persecution, constant travel and high expectations, plus the overwhelming fear of losing his wifehad developed a dependence on benzodiazepine, a tranquilizer that his family doctor prescribed in early 2017, shortly after he became a household name. (Mikhaila says her father was prescribed the drug after a severe autoimmune reaction to sodium metabisulfites in alcoholic apple cider.) At Petersons request, his doctor had increased his dosage during Tammys hospitalization, but that only made his anxiety worse. He also experienced a condition called akathisia, the unbearable sensation of being constantly stabbed with an electric cattle prod. So, he resolved to get off the anti-anxiety meds entirely.

Benzodiazepines are notoriously difficult to kick. Quitting cold turkey can cause fatal seizures, and gradually decreasing the dosethe accepted method of treatment in North Americacan involve two years of gruelling withdrawal symptoms. Peterson spent more than two months in rehab in the northeast U.S., but as doctors tried to wean him off the benzodiazepines, the akathisia worsened.

When he returned to Toronto, Peterson was in such agonyit was like being whipped, constantly, he saidthat his family checked him into hospital. He would say to Tammy and Mikhaila, How can I possibly go on like this? The family says the doctors offered no answers.

In December 2019, the Petersons held an emergency family meeting. Mikhaila had a plan. Her husband, Andrey Korikov, a Russian-born business consultant, had found a clinic in Russia that would perform an ultra-rapid detox. Petersons doctors vehemently advised against itremoving the benzodiazepines from Petersons system so quickly could kill him, and Russian health care is far less advanced than North American medicine (the country regularly finishes in the lowest third of global health rankings). Feeling that theyd exhausted all other options, however, the family made the difficult choice to send Peterson to Moscow.

Before the New Year, Mikhaila pulled him out of the hospital, hired a nurse and a bodyguard for her father, and together they all flew to Russia. Clinicians there heavily sedated Peterson for nine days and performed plasmapheresis, a process that draws blood, filters out toxic substances and returns the blood to the body. When Peterson woke from his slumber, he was benzodiazepine-free but bedridden and delirious. He thought hed been kidnapped by tree people in Florida, and that their leader was going to kill him to impress his girlfriend. He berated Mikhaila, asking why shed brought him there.

Peterson spent a month in a Russian ICU before convalescing in Florida, where Mikhaila signed him up for weekly NAD+ treatments. Last summer, the family sought additional rehab in Belgrade to deal with lingering neurological damage caused by the benzodiazepines and the detox. At the time, Serbian officials were under-reporting coronavirus cases and deaths, and the countrys Covid restrictions were lax. On Instagram, Mikhaila posted a video of herself at a crowded nightclub with the caption, Coronavirus? Never heard of it. Peterson later tested positive for Covid-19, as did Mikhaila, Korikov and their two-year-old daughter.

While Peterson was sidelined, Mikhaila managed the family business. She hired a handful of new Luminate staffersthe company now employs a director of operations, a digital marketing officer, a product manager and an executive assistant. On her dads YouTube channel, she updated his followers on her familys horror movie of a year. During media interviews and the introduction to Petersons weekly podcast (mostly lectures from the 12 Rules tour), she segued from dire family news to plugs for the Lion Diet or her dads social platform, Thinkspot. Under her stewardship, the Peterson brand has become ad-packed, highbrow, beef-fuelled reality TV.

Their audience kept growing, but Mikhaila was genuinely panicked about the rapid detox. Im fucked if this goes badly because the entire world is going to blame me, she said. Not only was her father in life-threatening danger, but his health woes also exposed inherent contradictions. Peterson, who has written disparagingly of addicts and dispensed advice on how to kick drug habits, had developed a dependency on prescription meds, and hed nearly died after Mikhaila defied doctors orders. One of Petersons 12 rules is Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world, yet for years his house was in utter chaos.

Remarkably, Peterson slowly recovered, and in late 2020, he returned to Toronto. Doubters will argue Mikhaila recklessly played with her fathers life, but in the end, he is alive today and free of his dependency. Would he have eventually reached this state had he stayed in Toronto? She is convinced the answer is no.

Since Peterson returned home, the line between Jordan and Mikhaila has blurred. She appears on his podcastor is it him on hers? The episodes are a lot like his lectures, only now with more star power. The Petersons talk for hours with celebrity guests like the actor Matthew McConaughey and the self-help author Mark Manson about topics both classically Petersonianpostmodernism, privilege, left-wing ideological thinking in the academyand not: hostage negotiations, breathing techniques, international trade. Compared to the pugnacious interviews on which he built his brand, the podcast is relatively benigna safe space for Peterson and like-minded thinkers. Often seated at his side, Mikhaila is both kin and collaborator. Not only is she caring for her still-frail dad, shes trying to make sure his one-man brand endures. The balancing act must be exhausting.

The Petersons story is carefully constructed to protect that brand, and Mikhaila is fastidious about the details. She insists her dad had a drug dependency and avoids the word addiction. Dependency, from their point of view, indicates a physiological affliction, while addiction implies a neurological craving.

Despite the fact that Peterson regularly rails against the crutch of victimhood, his daughter has lately framed him as a victim, stuck in a situation of someone elses making. In January, he agreed to his first media interview in years, hoping to set the record straight about his health before the release of his new book. Mikhaila spent two hours briefing the U.K. Times Decca Aitkenhead on her dads medical history. Then, during the interview, she played publicist, interjecting with a hold up if she objected to a question. An hour in, despite Petersons assurances that he could keep going, Mikhaila declared, I have to shut this down. Aitkenheads feature painted Mikhaila as a micro-managing crackpot and Peterson as a fallen hero whod contradicted his own strongman philosophy by taking drugs to numb the pain of mental illness. Furious, the Petersons published the interview audio and transcript, a 40-minute response video, two blog posts, a few Instagram photos and a flood of sanctimonious tweets in response. Mikhaila called it a hit piece and insisted that journalists, not Peterson or his book, were responsible for the controversy surrounding her father. Turns out the entire mainstream media is a tabloid now, she said.

Perhaps they were fishing for attention. More likely, they were vying to regain control of the family narrative, their stock in trade. What Ive increasingly realized is something like: the best story will win, Peterson has said. I hope that what Im doing is telling the best story.

When Peterson was looking for a publisher for 12 Rules back in 2017, Penguin Random House in New York passed, so its Canadian counterpart secured worldwide rights. He didnt need to write another book, at least not for the money. Yet during the most trying years of his lifetouring in 2018, at his wifes bedside in 2019, in rehab in 2020he slowly eked out chapter after chapter. It was hellish, he said. But writing propelled him; it was a balm to his anguish and lack of hope for the future, he said. If I would have lost the book, I wouldnt have had anything left. No job. No function.

Peterson says he is ambivalent about Beyond Order given the suboptimal circumstances in which he wrote it. Nevertheless, he approached Penguin Random House in New York with the book last year. The American publisher didnt make the same mistake with the new title. They arranged to release it under Portfolio, a little-known business imprint that typically publishes corporate histories and prosperity-minded self-help books.

In November, Vice reported that dozens of employees at Penguin Random House Canada, which holds Canadian rights to Beyond Order, had filed complaints to management, begging them not to publish it. The company held an internal town hall where several staffers broke into tears, ashamed to work for a company that would publish a book by, in the words of one young employee, an icon of hate speech, and worried that doing so would negatively affect trans people. In response, the publisher argued that Peterson had helped millions of people on the fringes, where they were at risk of being radicalized by the alt-right. In a statement, Penguin Random House Canada vice-president Sue Kuruvilla said the company is committed to publishing a variety of voices and that sometimes, that means publishing ideas and perspectives that some will disagree with. Of course, its also a publishers job to make money selling books, and Beyond Order will no doubt sell. By its release date, the book had at least 100,000 pre-sales. Follow-ups to non-fiction hits rarely perform as well as the original, but even if it sells 2.5 million copies, half as many as 12 Rules, the book will mean a fortune for both Penguin Random House Canada and the Peterson family business.

Yet for all his ever-accumulating wealth, he doesnt seem motivated by profit. Peterson still leads the archetypal professors life, living in a modest semi in Seaton Village. His essay-writing app is freely available online, as are hours of his lectures on YouTube. He chose to forgo hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in 2019, when he deactivated his Patreon account to protest their deplatforming of the anti-feminist YouTuber Carl Benjamin.

Petersons motivations seem to be more existential than financial. He sees himself as a defender against the postmodern cultural relativists and neo-Marxist indoctrination cults infiltrating higher education, corrupting government and ushering in a reign of terror. As he watches the world get more woke, his mission only intensifies. He cannot rest when order hangs in the balance. He is spurred on by every book sale and podcast download, all of which are surely forms of validation, proof to him that his worldview is correct and reassurance that he is delivering the masses from evil. The physical and emotional tortures that come along with this quest, and the fresh wave of fame the new book will bring, appear to be simply the cost of doing business.

This time around, however, Peterson is trying to avoid slipping into a downward spiral. He is now living a more private life, apart from tweeting and appearing in videos and podcasts, sometimes with Mikhaila, leaving much of the family businesss day-to-day operations to her. Owing to the pandemic, Peterson cant fill lecture halls or book blockbuster debates. Hes not likely to make headlines battling journalists eitherfollowing the Times feature, he cancelled scheduled media interviews. Peterson refused via his representatives to be interviewed for this story unless we granted them what they called final cut of the published copy and full rights to the interview audio, conditions we declined.

In his absence, the Peterson empire forges on. In February, Tammy became the latest member of the family to step into the spotlight, speaking on a podcast and a panel about resilience, religion and, of course, her husband. Mikhaila, who also declined to be interviewed for this story, has announced plans to step away from managing her fathers brand. For now, she continues to deliver a never-ending feed of tweets, podcasts, Instagram photos, YouTube videos and booksnot just her fathers, but her own. She is working on a memoir and a cookbook dedicated entirely to beef.

This story appears in the April 2021 issue of Toronto Life magazine. To subscribe for just $29.95 a year, click here.

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Jordan Peterson's weird family empire - Toronto Life

Thank you, Jordan Peterson, for opening my eyes.

I might not be unique saying this course was extremely useful to me. But still it isso. Every lecture gave a lot of thought, so I would outline just a few examples why I consider this coursevery helpful.

I always felt that I was an agreeable person, so I was so interested to know thatagreeable people are paid less for the same job than disagreeable, which correlated with my experience &thus showed me areas to improve to be able to have more bargaining power the next time.

Lecture on men & women personality differences was an eye opener to me that we aremore the same than we are different, which made me feel I can understand women better.

In the end, I would like to say I have deep respect for Jordan Peterson. Moreover Iam extremely grateful for his desire to help people, in this case to help people understand themselves andothers better. His desire coupled with his talent, deep scientific knowledge, achievements and ability toexplain so clearly makes his help so much more efficient. Dominic Sandbrook said about Jordan Petersonthat he is a prophet for our times, which strikes me as highly probable!

Thank you, Jordan Peterson, and God bless you.

Petr Olegovich Osipov

Russia

Title Senior

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Jordan Peterson Course

Jordan Peterson is a psychology professor at the University of Toronto, a widely cited scholar of personality, and the author of whats currently the No. 1 best-selling nonfiction book on Amazon in the United States. The New York Timess David Brooks, echoing George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen, calls him the most influential public intellectual in the Western world right now.

Jordan Peterson is also a right-wing internet celebrity who has claimed that feminists have an unconscious wish for brutal male domination, referred to developing nations as pits of catastrophe in a speech to a Dutch far-right group, and recently told a Times reporter that he supported enforced monogamy.

When Cathy Newman, a journalist for the UKs Channel 4, challenged Petersons arguments in a televised interview, she received so many death threats that she had to get help from the police. There were literally thousands of abusive tweets it was a semi-organized campaign, she recalled in an interview. It ranged from the usual cunt, bitch, dumb blonde to Im going to find out where you live and execute you.

This is not a case of mistaken identity, of two Jordan Petersons yoked to the same name. These seemingly distinct men, the accomplished scholar and the controversy-courting culture warrior, are one and the same, and their work is integrally interlinked. And that hybrid of scholarly air and provocative trolling has netted Peterson a huge following; he has 560,000 followers on Twitter and nearly 1 million YouTube subscribers.

Peterson introduces people [to] many many other things they just dont really get elsewhere, Cowen says. He is still influential, massively so, reaches a large general public audience of millions, most of all young males. How many other intellectuals do?

So how did an obscure Canadian psychologist become an international phenomenon?

The answer is that Jordan Peterson is tailor-made to our political moment. His reactionary politics and talents as a public speaker combine to be a perfect fit for YouTube and the right-wing media, where videos of conservatives destroying weak-minded liberals routinely go viral. Petersons denunciations of identity politics and political correctness are standard-issue conservative, but his academic credentials make his pronouncements feel much more authoritative than your replacement-level Fox News commentator. (I reached out to Peterson; a spokesperson turned down my interview request.)

Peterson is also particularly appealing to disaffected young men. Hes become a lifestyle guru for men and boys who feel displaced by a world where white male privilege is under attack; his new best-selling book, 12 Rules for Life, is explicitly pitched as a self-help manual, and he speaks emotionally of the impact his work has had on anxious, lost young men.

Jordan Peterson, then, isnt just some random professor who managed to strike it rich. Hes emblematic of the way white male anxiety is producing new and powerful political movements across the West today.

Peterson is both a clinical and research psychologist, meaning he sees patients while also doing research. After he received his PhD in psychology from McGill University, one of Canadas two most prestigious universities, in 1991, he spent two years practicing at McGills hospital. After that, he was hired by Harvard, where he taught until 1998. He left when the University of Toronto, Canadas other leading university, hired him as a full professor and a practicing clinician.

Petersons research specialty is personality traits; one of his most prominent papers is a study of what makes people more or less creative, where he argues that people who pay more attention to seemingly irrelevant details actually tend to be more creative. According to Google Scholar, he has been cited more than 10,000 times in academic publications and is one of the 70 most cited researchers in his subfield. I spoke to eight academic psychologists before writing this piece; the feedback I received on his published work was uniformly positive.

His work in personality assessment ... is very solid and well respected, says David Watson, a psychology professor at Notre Dame.

But this work, respected as it may be, has little to do with Petersons fame. His most influential research was published in the late 90s and early to mid-2000s; of his 20 most cited papers, only one came out after 2010. By contrast, his international celebrity as measured by worldwide Google searches for Jordan Peterson didnt start to rise until October 2016:

What happened in the fall of 2016 is that Peterson inserted himself into a national Canadian debate over transgender rights specifically by refusing to refer to a student by their chosen gender pronouns.

At the time, the Canadian parliament was considering something called Bill C-16, a bill banning discrimination against people on the basis of gender identity or gender expression. In September, Peterson released a series of YouTube videos attacking the bill as a grave threat to free speech rights. He said he would refuse to refer to transgender students by their preferred pronouns; separating gender and biological sex was, in his view, radically politically correct thinking. He argued that C-16 would lead to people like him being arrested.

If they fine me, I wont pay it. If they put me in jail, Ill go on a hunger strike. Im not doing this, Peterson said in an October 2016 TV interview. Im not using the words that other people require me to use. Especially if theyre made up by radical left-wing ideologues.

Experts on Canadian law said that Peterson was misreading the bill that the legal standard for hate speech would require something far worse, like saying transgender people should be killed, to qualify for legal punishment. This is an early example of what would become a hallmark of Petersons approach as a public intellectual taking inflammatory, somewhat misinformed stances on issues of public concern outside his area of expertise.

But it worked for him. Petersons videos on C-16 and political correctness racked up more than 400,000 views on YouTube within about a month of posting. There were rallies both for and against Peterson in Toronto; he made the rounds on Canadian television.

Perhaps the defining moment of this controversy was a filmed confrontation in October 2016 between Peterson and a group of student activists at the University of Toronto. In it, Peterson calmly fields questions from trans students who are angry about his refusal to recognize their gender identity. In the video, he turns the argument around on them suggesting that transgender activism, and the broader rise of political correctness, was bound to produce an ugly and dangerous backlash.

Ive studied Nazism for four decades. And I understand it very well. And I can tell you there are some awful people lurking in the corners, Peterson says. Theyre ready to come out. And if the radical left keeps pushing the way its pushing, theyre going to come.

Fans of Petersons worldview saw the video as proof of his genius and bravery; Peterson was the avatar of reason and facts pushing back against irrational social justice warriors (SJWs). One cut of the confrontation, titled Dr. Jordan Peterson gives up trying to reason with SJWs, currently has more than 3.5 million views on YouTube.

This was a seminal moment in the Peterson brand. It was proof that taking combative stances on camera especially arguments where youre set up to win, like a calm professor confronted by angry students would get you huge numbers of fans. There are now innumerable videos of Peterson arguing with various liberals and leftists on YouTube, with titles like Leftist Host SNAPS At Jordan Peterson, Instantly Regrets It. They have millions of views and have led to a massive surge in donations to Petersons personal account on the crowdfunding site Patreon. He currently earns around $80,000 per month from Patreon donations.

I shouldnt say this, but Im going to, because its just so goddamn funny I cant help but say it: Ive figured out how to monetize social justice warriors, Peterson told the podcast host Joe Rogan. If they let me speak, then I get to speak, and then I make more money on Patreon ... if they protest me, then that goes up on YouTube, and my Patreon account goes WAY up.

Petersons stellar academic credentials act as a sort of legitimizing device, a way of setting up his authority on politics and making his denunciations of leftist ideologues more credible and attractive to his fans. Combine his undeniable talents as a public speaker and debater with his ability to use YouTube to reach audiences around the world and you get a right-wing celebrity who has transcended Canada and become a global reactionary star.

Petersons political ideas are most cleanly laid out in a two-and-a-half-hour lecture hes given, titled Identity politics and the Marxist lie of white privilege. His upload of one of the speeches, at the University of British Columbia Free Speech Club, has been viewed more than a million times on YouTube, with other copies and excerpts from it racking up similarly large numbers.

In the lecture, Peterson weaves together an incredibly broad set of topics ranging from Soviet history to the biblical story of Cain and Abel to Nietzsche to lab experiments that involve feeding rats cocaine to produce a kind of unified theory of modern politics. At base, he argues that that Soviet-style communism, and all the mass murder and suffering it created, is still a serious threat to Western civilization. But rather than working openly, it seeps into our politics under the guise of postmodernism.

Petersons argument starts with a vivid denunciation of Marxism. Human society, like all animal kingdoms, is in Petersons mind defined by certain biological truths including the reality that some people are naturally more gifted than others, and that life will always involve suffering. Marxism, he believes, is rooted fundamentally in the hatred of people who succeed in a capitalist economy and thus will always result in violence when one attempts to implement it.

Are these Marxists motivated by love or hatred? Well, is it love or hatred that produces 100 million dead people? he asks in the speech, rhetorically.

Peterson believes that the failure of Soviet communism has not actually deterred communisms fans in the West, who still secretly cling to the old hateful beliefs. He argues that they do so under the guise of a school of thought he refers to as postmodernism, which he sees as his archenemy.

Western leftist intellectuals are [fundamentally complicit] in the horrors of the 21st century, he says. Its not that theyve learned anything since; theyve just gone underground. And thats what I see when I see postmodernism.

Peterson uses the term postmodernism fairly loosely, but hes referring to, roughly speaking, French philosophers working in the middle of the 20th century, most prominently Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault.

He argues that these philosophers, famous for their skepticism about objective reality and emphasis on the social construction of human society, were actually crypto-Marxists. The difference is that they change the language instead of arguing that society is defined by class oppression, Peterson says, they argue that its defined by identity oppression: racism, sexism, gender identity, and the like.

How about if we dont say working-class capitalists we say oppressor/oppressed? he says, summarizing the alleged postmodern line of thinking. Well just think about all of the other ways people are oppressed, and all the other ways that people are oppressors, and well play the same damn game under a new guise.

This makes postmodernism, which he believes has quietly permeated Western culture in the past 20 or so years, a tremendous threat.

The Marxists arent just wrong: Theyre wrong, murderous, and genocidal, he says. The postmodernists dont just get to just come along an adopt Marxism as a matter of sleight of hand because their Marxist theory didnt work out and they needed a rationalization, because its too dangerous its too dangerous to the rest of us.

Actual experts on postmodernism note that the thinkers Peterson likes to cite were often quite critical of Marxism. His reading of these thinkers, as the social critic Shuja Haider points out, is shallow and deeply uncharitable. Petersons fantasy of neo-Marxist wolves in postmodern sheeps clothing has little bearing on actual debates in 20th-century political theory, Haider concludes.

Petersons understanding of Marxism and postmodernism is very vulgar, Harrison Fluss, an editor at the Marxist journal Historical Materialism, tells me. He connects the two in [an] overarching conspiracy theory.

Perhaps more fundamentally, there is no evidence that 20th-century French thinkers have a dominant influence on any sector of the left in contemporary Western politics, let alone society as a whole. I know of no credible political scientist who believes this, and Petersons adherence to the notion can lead to bizarre outbursts. For example, he once accused Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of being in thrall to a murderous equity doctrine because Trudeau sent a tweet calling feminist activists inspiring and motivating.

But Petersons grand theory is brilliant as a political stance one designed to weaponize the grievances of the kind of young men attracted to the alt-right.

Petersons framework serves as a justification for dismissing the idea of any kind of privilege white, male, or otherwise as a tool used by closet Marxists to manipulate you. He states this explicitly, calling it a Marxist lie designed to enable the Marxist-postmodernist effort to seize control of the state.

[We cannot] allow people who are manipulating us with historical ignorance and philosophical sleight of hand to render us so goddamn guilty about what our ancestors may or may not have done, he argues, that we allow our shame and our guilt to be used as tools to manipulate us into accepting a future that we do not want to have.

This theory elevates battles over political correctness and free speech into existential struggles over Western society. He is very literally arguing that if the postmodernists win, if people start using others chosen pronouns, were one step closer to modern gulags.

Petersons position helps claim the mantle of facts and reason for the anti-PC right. Because postmodern theorists are skeptical about the notion of an entirely objective reality, Peterson argues, the entire project of identity politics is grounded in an irrational rejection of logic and discussion. Its not only right to reject identity politics; its a sign of irrationality not to.

Postmodernists dont believe in fact, as he put it in the lecture on white privilege and Marxism. They believe that the idea of fact is part of the power game thats played by the white-dominated male patriarchy to impose the tyrannical structure of the patriarchy on the oppressors.

These arguments are catnip for a very specific kind of young white man Peterson himself said in his Channel 4 interview that 80 percent of his YouTube audience is male. These young men are upset about the erosion of white male privilege, about the need to compete with women and minorities for jobs and spots at top universities, and they are angry about the way feminists and racial justice activists describe society.

In Peterson, they found someone telling them that their grievances are not only justified but, in fact, important: that they have picked up on a secret threat to society writ large, and that they are its first victims. Peterson is drawing on a deep well: This kind of anger about the declining social status of white men is incredibly common across the Western world today, and finds a comfortable home in reactionary political movements on both sides of the Atlantic.

The underlying mass-appeal of [Peterson] is that he gives white men permission to stop pretending that they care about other peoples grievances, writes Jesse Brown, host of the Canadaland podcast and a longtime Peterson watcher. He tells his fans that these so-called marginalized people are not really victims at all but are in fact aggressors, enemies, who must be shut down.

But Peterson isnt only giving these men an architecture in which to ground their frustrations. Hes also giving them a road map on how to succeed in a society they no longer understand.

Peterson became more than just an internet celebrity on January 23, 2018. Thats when his book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, was published by Random House Canada and skyrocketed to the top of international best-seller lists. It was after this books publication, and the following press tour, that David Brooks pronounced him the worlds most influential public intellectual.

Each chapter of the book is devoted to a specific, somewhat strange-sounding rule. The first chapter is called Stand up straight with your shoulders back; the last is Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street.

The book is a kind of bridge connecting his academic research on personality and his political punditry. In it, Peterson argues that the problem with society today is that too many people blame their lot in life on forces outside their control the patriarchy, for example. By taking responsibility for yourself, and following his rules, he says, you can make your own life better.

The first chapter, about posture, begins with an extended discussion of lobsters. Lobster society, inasmuch as it exists, is characterized by territoriality and displays of dominance. Lobsters that dominate these hierarchies have more authoritative body language; weaker ones try to make themselves look smaller and less threatening to more dominant ones.

Peterson argues that humans are very much like lobsters: Our hierarchies are determined by our behaviors. If you want to be happy and powerful, he says, you need to stand up straight:

If your posture is poor, for example if you slump, shoulders forward and rounded, chest tucked in, head down, looking small, defeated and ineffectual (protected, in theory, against attack from behind) then you will feel small, defeated, and ineffectual. The reactions of others will amplify that. People, like lobsters, size each other up, partly in consequence of stance. If you present yourself as defeated, then people will react to you as if you are losing. If you start to straighten up, then people will look at and treat you differently.

Look for your inspiration to the victorious lobster, with its 350 million years of practical wisdom. Stand up straight, with your shoulders back, he concludes, in one of the books most popular passages.

The lobster has become a sort of symbol of his; the tens of thousands of Peterson fans on his dedicated subreddit even refer to themselves as lobsters.

This is classic Peterson: He loves to take stylized facts about the animal kingdom and draw a one-to-one analogy to human behavior. It also has political implications: He argues that because we evolved from lower creatures like lobsters, we inherited dominance structures from them. Inequalities of various kinds arent wrong; theyre natural.

We were struggling for position before we had skin, or hands, or lungs, or bones, he writes. There is little more natural than culture. Dominance hierarchies are older than trees.

The relationship between human and lobster brains is outside Petersons area of academic expertise. Experts in the field who have evaluated his claims have found them lacking, as lobsters and humans neurological systems are radically different. One important distinction is that humans have brains and lobsters (technically speaking) do not.

If nervous systems were computer games, arthropods like lobsters would be Snake on a first-generation mobile phone and vertebrates would be an augmented reality (AR) game, as Leonor Gonsalves, a neuroscientist at University College London, puts it in a review of Petersons argument at The Conversation. The human brain is hugely malleable ... believing that it is natural that some people are losers because thats what lobsters do can have dire consequences.

But Petersonian lobster theory, and the other things like it in the book, arent really questions of truth. Theyre about providing the sort of alienated young men who are attracted to his broader work a sense of purpose and meaning. It fulfills roughly the same role in their life as religion might; its perhaps unsurprising that Peterson is quite interested in the Bible and discusses it often.

I think his mass following suggests the existence among a substantial cross-section of young men of a deep hunger for moral order that may well be ultimately a religious yearning, Yuval Levin, vice president of the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, tells me. Peterson is actually fairly careful to distinguish the teaching hes offering from an explicitly religious teaching, but I think he does that because he grasps that some significant portion of the people looking to him are really looking for something like a religious teacher.

The difference is that Peterson is reaching people who, for whatever reason, arent getting what they need from organized religion alone. In fact, some of his followers are actively hostile to religion, seeing it as fundamentally irrational. Hes a moralist who can appeal to the New Atheist set, even though he doesnt share their hostility to religion.

This aspect of Petersons work is far more sympathetic than his ill-informed and frankly nefarious politics especially since some of his cardinal rules, like tell the truth, are perfectly good moral precepts to live by.

Its worth watching a five-minute excerpt from a BBC interview about his role as a mentor for young men. Peterson openly starts to cry at the beginning:

Last night, I was at this talk I gave. And about a thousand people came, and about 500 of them stayed afterward. And most of them are young men, Peterson says, starting to tear up. And one of them after another comes up and shakes my hand and says, Ive been listening to what youve been saying ... I started cleaning up my room, and working on my life, and Ive started working hard on myself, and I just want to thank you for helping me.

When you watch this interview, you get a sense of what Peterson must have been like with his patients as a clinical psychologist empathetic, passionate, deeply concerned with the welfare of his patients. Its moving, really.

But Peterson has inextricably intertwined his self-help approach with a kind of reactionary politics that validates white, straight, and cisgender men at the expense of everyone else. He gives them a sense of purpose by, in part, tearing other people down by insisting that the world can and should revolve around them and their problems.

This painful contrast is on display later in that very interview, in which he explicitly argues that concern for sexism is to blame for the plight of the Wests young men.

Were so stupid. Were alienating young men. Were telling them that theyre patriarchal oppressors and denizens of rape culture, he says. Its awful. Its so destructive. Its so unnecessary. And its so sad.

The empathy that he displays for men and boys in his BBC interview and 12 Rules for Life is touching. The problem is that he cant seem to extend it to anyone else.

For more on Jordan Peterson, including a short interview with Peterson himself, listen to the May 14 episode of Today Explained.

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Jordan Peterson, explained - Vox

When he published The God Delusion in 2006, Richard Dawkins might have been disappointed to learn that even 14 years later a self-help guru steeped in Christian teachings can still attract a large, devoted following. The New Atheists, such as Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens, seemed to conquer all before them in the noughties, but the years following were hardly a victory for sober reason over passionate belief.

Jordan Peterson, a Canadian psychologist by training, came to fame in 2016 protesting Bill C-16, a proposed Canadian law which he claimed would compel him to use peoples preferred pronouns. Legal experts disagreed, but the once obscure academic became a focal point in a stewing culture war throughout the English-speaking world and a guide for many feckless young men.

In the British case, Petersons most memorable moment was a clash with Channel 4 News Cathy Newman in January 2018. In the interview, Peterson laid out the thesis of his new self-help book, 12 Rules For Life, arguing among other things that men should take responsibility for their lives if they wanted to be suitable partners for women.

Newmans reception of Peterson during the uncut half-hour posted on YouTube was uncharitable, with the interviewer alleging that Peterson was indifferent to womens interests in the gender pay gap debate and linking him to the alt-right. Even The Atlantic, a progressive American publication, held it up as a case study in hyperbolic misrepresentation. But the battle lines had been drawn around Peterson, whose views were dangerous to his critics and life-changing to his fans.

After the book tour, Petersons own life hit a snag. His wifes diagnosis with terminal illness led to an increase in his intake of benzodiazepine, which he had previously started taking to deal with anxiety. This led to what his daughter described on YouTube as a physical dependency, with Peterson spending eighteen months between hospitals in places as far flung as Russia and Serbia.

All this happened away from the Internets glare, until Peterson returned to the medium that made him famous. In a YouTube vlog in October, Peterson described the difficulties he had faced over the past two years, saying that he had only just recovered sufficiently to return to work.

Surprisingly, for a Western internet celebrity in 2020, his next steps included lectures and videos on the biblical texts Exodus and Proverbs. This followed his earlier analysis of Genesis a project which included a lecture video that has gathered 6.6 million views.

With Gods grace and mercy, Peterson says he can pick up where he left off, which suggests that the Christian belief he has previously professed remains. What his faith means in practice is tricky to define, with at least one interviewer having to wrench a straightforward admission of Christianity from him.

The gurus reticence about describing himself as a Christian is less to do with modern Western squeamishness about the old faith and more because he is a stickler for accuracy in speech. Indeed, a conversation with the New Atheist podcaster Sam Harris foundered when the pair could not agree what truth meant.

Despite the equivocation, there seems something significant about Petersons faith in our era, his rise having coincided with a new emphasis among English-speaking intellectuals about the Christians roots of the West. The historian Tom Hollands Dominion is the most prominent work to argue that Christian assumptions still underpin Western societies, even as the church pews empty.

Much of Petersons message is similarly old fashioned. The first chapter of 12 Rules For Life instructs readers to stand up straight with your shoulders back to present an assertive stance to others. This emphasis on personal responsibility runs through his message, with another chapter telling us to set your house in perfect order before you criticise the world.

A lot of this advice is good, if obvious and sometimes haphazard. It is scorned because it lacks the intellectual sophistication that many of his critics are comfortable with, save when Peterson delves into the kind of mystic theological musings that our atheistic public life has little experience in. We could do without the mumbo-jumbo, but that doesnt invalidate the core message.

Critics can take comfort in the fact that the Wests increasingly godless youth are unlikely to find faith in the divine anytime soon, whatever the messianic leanings of figures like Peterson. The problem, as Dawkins might lament, is that when people stop believing in God, other figures sometimes suffice.

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