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

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

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

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

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

[T]he relentless demands of modern celebrity more content, more access, more authenticity were already tearing the psychologists public persona in two. One Peterson was the father figure beloved by the normie readers of 12 Rules, who stood in long lines to hear him speak and left touching messages on internet forums, testifying that he had turned their lives around. The other Peterson was a fearsome debater, the gladiator who crowed Gotcha! at the British television interviewer Cathy Newman.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Laura Bates

Sourcebooks ; $28.99 ; 352pp

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The dangerous hate movement we need to talk about - Forward

Jordan Peterson. (Photo by Chris Williamson/Getty Images)

Its genuinely tragic what happened to Jordan Peterson.

The Canadian psychology professor first rose to fame by railing against the liberal obsession with identity that shaped the culture wars of 2016, and subsequently became so polarizing (and popular) that his self-help book, 12 Rules For Life, sold over three million copies worldwide.

Peterson offered solid advice for angry, isolated young men; he promoted the idea of personal responsibility, discipline and self-confidence. The problem was that his positive messaging was often accompanied by his other beliefs, some of which were simply old-fashioned conservative ideals, repackaged, and some were really quite strange. Harmful, even.

Despite marketing himself as an intellectual who wasnt afraid to ask tough questions, Peterson would often blurt out seriously unscientific and outlandish claims, most famously, his strange fixation on lobsters, and the supposed similarity between crustaceans and humankind, which he used to justify the existence of unjust hierarchies.

Its a bit like pointing to a bee hive, and claiming that the insect's success makes a compelling argument to restore the monarchy.

Eventually, Peterson started to hang out with race realist Stefan Molyneux (so much for rejecting identity politics) and began to promote his daughters eye-wateringly stupid diet, which consists solely of beef, salt and water (sounds like a great way to develop scurvy).

Months into his all-beef diet, Peterson claimed that ingesting any substance other than beef would cause him serious psychological and physical harm; he even claimed that a single glass of apple cider caused him to stay awake for a full month, and filled him with an overwhelming sense of impending doom (Im not kidding).

Peterson ended up becoming addicted to anti-anxiety medication after personal tragedy struck, and suffered all sorts of horrendous health complications - its still not clear if he ever really recovered.

Now, Peterson is back, and he is about to release another self-help book, titled, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life. Which seems incredibly hypocritical, considering his big rule, one that he consistently touted while public speaking, which reads:

"Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world."

This rule always bothered me, a lot. Its the kind of thing that sounds innocuous on the surface - after all, whats wrong with practicing what you preach? Surely, there are plenty of obnoxious activists who could use that advice.

But the way Peterson promoted this rule wasnt meant to encourage - he was essentially telling activists to be quiet, to accept the worlds structural injustices, because they were imperfect and didnt clean their rooms, or whatever.

That rule functions as a cudgel, to crush the idealism of young people. And its a rule that has no basis in reality - historical heroes like Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr. had plenty of personal problems too.

And so, quite frankly, does Peterson.

Ironically, having a messy personal life doesnt mean that Petersons emphasis on personal improvement, on finding meaning through responsibility, isnt worth listening to. That is undeniably good advice.

But the notion that only those with neat and tidy personal lives are allowed to criticize the world, is dangerous nonsense.

Just like the idea of a human living solely on beef, salt, and water.

The rest is here:
How Jordan Peterson Broke His Most Important Rule (For Life)

This book does not arrive like other books. This book is very self-important and hard to get a glimpse of, a sign of Jordan Petersons global celebrity and the psychodrama that surrounds him. Either he is the worlds greatest public intellectual( er, really?) or he is that strange, driven Canadian shrink who found fame in his fifties by writing a book that reached those who dont normally read self-help books: men.

Not since I had to go and sit in an office to leaf through Madonnas Sex book and promise not to reveal anything about it (guess what it was about!) have I felt so much nervousness around a book.

The success of his earlier book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, was phenomenal, selling millions globally. Overnight this stern-looking clinical psychologist became a guru for men who felt dispossessed by modernity, and feminism in particular. His lectures were packed out. His YouTube channel a huge success.

His advice stand up straight (this is how lobsters establish dominance, apparently), tidy your room, treat yourself like you are someone you are responsible for helping was obvious and underpinned by stories from his clinical practice and his reading of the Bible, Jung, Russian literature and mythology.

In an age of moral relativism he was giving his readers a compass. He spoke about the poor self-esteem of young men and took against the aggrieved victimhood of campus culture. He reminded me a lot of Camille Paglia, whom I interviewed in the 1990s. Punchy and utterly at odds with kids raised in soft play areas.

For this he became a figurehead for the alt-Right when he is not that at all. Rather he is an old-fashioned liberal with a conservative attitude to the family, a man who doesnt believe in patriarchy but acts precisely as a paternal authority to all the lost boys.

Watching him, it is apparent he cannot obey his own rules, but in telling us that life is suffering (as all major religions do) and that the goal is to find meaning rather than happiness, he does have something to say. Within him, one feels chaos is near the surface. He often cries and is crumpled with emotion.

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Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life, review: Jordan Peterson is back with a self-help book that is not here to hug you better - Telegraph.co.uk

On March 2, Jordan Peterson, one of the most famous Canadians in the world, will publish his second book with Penguin Random House Canada (PRHC), by far the largest publisher in the country. Irrespective of whether Beyond Order: 12 More Rules For Life itself merits the attention, the release will be one of the publishing events of the year. In large part, thats because Peterson, 58, has become literally iconic. A relatively obscure if popular professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, Peterson erupted into the zeitgeist in 2016 when he released Professor Against Political Correctness, a three-part YouTube video series that began by criticizing the federal governments actions in adding gender identity and expression to Canadas prohibited grounds of discrimination.

Peterson went on to portray himself as a free speech crusader, denouncing Ottawa for turning dictated gender pronouns into compelled speech, and expanding outward into railing against cultural Marxism and radical left political machinations. In his own words, the psychologist hit a hornets nest at the most propitious time. By 2018, as his videos racked up millions of viewers and his first PRHC title, the self-help tome 12 Rules For Life, became a massive international bestseller, Peterson was the culture war incarnate. To his fans, he is the unanswerable intellectual scourge of political correctness; hes been described as the acclaimed public thinker [who] offered eternal truths applied to modern anxieties. To his critics, he is the living symbol of hate speech and transphobia and white supremacy.

The first quotation sits on PRHCs website; the second was uttered by one of the publishers employees, as reported by Vice, at an open company-wide virtual meeting. And thats the other reason March 2 will be one of the Canadian book trades notable days in 2021. Publishing has had a long history of episodes of cognitive dissonance between its body and soul, or, to be more precise, its self-image as an urgent cultural voiceincreasingly for the marginalized and otherwise voicelessand its practical needs as a profit-seeking enterprise. But 2020 unfolded as an exceptional year of reckoning for publishing in Canada and abroad, a reckoning that has continued into this year.

READ:Is Jordan Peterson the stupid mans smart person?

Since its Nov. 23 announcementinforming the public and its employees on the same dayof Beyond Orders forthcoming release, PRHC has remained tight-lipped about it. Very few of the employees Macleans reached out to want to make any kind of comment, even unofficial, and none want their names revealed. Those who are willing to speak focus on three main issues: the social media and online reaction to what became known of the company-wide meeting; how publishing, writ large, should weigh its moral responsibilities; and how the employees themselves are now rethinking their concepts of their workplace.

The level of response is much the same among PRHCs growing array of diverse authors. Most of those Macleans contacted either did not respond or said they were unwilling to comment. A handful said they feel conflicted about the Peterson publication, primarily because of what they describe as deeply positive interactions with the companys highly regarded editors, publishers and publicists. One prominent author, speaking off the record, finds that contradictions abound, even in the authors own heart. The times call for a self-critical mood, and impatience for realnot cosmeticchange is necessary, says the writer. Yet, I think believing that publishing can reflect the world more truthfully, while also believing that expression must be curtailedas determined by publishing housesare not easily compatible beliefs.

Among the few writers willing to speak openly is one who sees no difficulty in holding both convictions. Kristen Worley is the author of 2019s Woman Enough: How a Boy Became a Woman and Changed the World of Sport, a memoir about her life that also details her successful challenge, as an Olympic-level cyclist and XY female, to International Olympic Committee policies that were not reflective of human diversity. She now works with the IOC to find effective remedies for the international sporting industry. In terms of its worldwide network and influence, says Worley, Penguin Random House resembles the IOC itself, and like the international sporting industry, should pivot from a top-down leadership style to a bottom-up stewardship model. Only then will publishing be able to positively reflect the range of human diversity. People are immersed in different stories and life experiences, she says, and making those available is important for the growth and vitality of our society. A global publisher like Penguin has the potentialas a storyteller, influencer and steward of best practicesto positively impact individual lives and the very fabric of communities worldwide.

If that is an oblique critique of PRHCs Peterson position, prominent social entrepreneur Andreas Souvaliotis is more blunt. Publishers and media, like Macleans, for instance, or Facebook, have to navigate a very fine line, says the author of the 2019 memoir Misfit: Autistic, Gay, Immigrant, Changemaker, between freedom of speech on one side and lies or explicitly hate-inducing stuff on the other. He doesnt think Petersondespite holding a slew of opinions Souvaliotis considers odious, extreme, miserably negative and potentially even dangerouscan or should be banned from publication. But neither does he think PRHC was wise to take him on. Im a business guy. I know exactly where the vulnerabilities of a business can be in terms of image and reputation. A publisher has to really think hard before taking on unsavoury authors like Peterson, precisely because it may alienate its employees or its supply chain, which is authors. Youre a publisher in 2021, when everybody is thinking very, very hard about mutual respect and inclusion, and you have an extremely precious commodity in your talent, your employees: do you really want to publish this sh-t?

READ:A little compassion for Jordan Peterson

A century ago, publishings clashes swirled about potential responses to obscenity laws; today they are a reflection of how rapidly the book trades Overton windowits range of acceptable opinionis changing, especially among its younger and more socially progressive employees. One staffer, who linked their shock directly to their love for PRHCs commitment to diversity and inclusion, told Macleans that the Peterson announcement felt like a slap in the face to everything that [the company] had said and had agreed to do just beforehand in the wake of George Floyds May 25 death under the knee of a Minnesota police officer. Another employee, far more mindful of PRHCs commitment to turning a profit, saw the staff anger and anxiety from a different angle: Its the posturing. The company has profited from its moral stance, they said, referring to the number and stature of racialized and other minority authors PRHC has published and also in the way so many people employed there feel an investment in the company, and that it has the same kind of moral standards and the same political standards as they do.

Sue Kuruvilla, who in January became publisher of Random House Canadathe prestigious PRHC imprint that will release Beyond Orderresponded to a request for comment by Macleans: One of my core values as the new publisher of Random House Canada is to profile a wide variety of opinions, voices and perspectives. We must reflect and amplify a diversity of viewpointsboth within our organization and in the books we publish. Sometimes, that means publishing ideas and perspectives that some will disagree with. A decision to publish an author does not always mean we all must agree or disagree with their views. Discussion and debate are the foundation of better understanding.

Fans are photographed with Peterson (Mark Sommerfeld/The New York Times/Redux)

The combination of authorial celebrity and publisher cloutPRHC publishes or distributes more than half the books in Canada, a percentage that will only increase after its parent company finalizes its US$2-billion acquisition of Simon & Schustermakes the Peterson clash particularly newsworthy here. But its far from the first Canadian instance. In an interview, independent publisher Jack David, co-founder of Toronto-based ECW Press, recalls incidents as far back as 1982 when some staffers, apparently unaware of Christs words to St. Paul in Acts 9:5-6, found the title of John Metcalfs Kicking Against the Pricks to be offensive (in fact, its a reference to what Christ saw as Pauls futile, self-harming persecution of Christians). More recently, simply mentioning the name Karla Homolka, in regards to an opportunity to publish the English translation of her prison roommates Pillow Talk, meant I was shut down, says David. If Id gone ahead with it, I would have been working on my own.

By on my own, David means the compromise he made with employees three years ago when ECW published George Bowerings novel No One. George, who Ive known for years, was playing with fiction and memoir. The narrator, named Georgebut not George Boweringwas a university prof who goes to conferences with the hope of meeting women and bedding them. Hes also involved in a complicated marital relationship. So, 80 per cent of the book is dealing with an academic on the loose, a kind of Rakes Progress, and then the whole book changes because his wife turns the tables on him in the last 15-20 pages.

READ:Jordan Petersons people are not who you think they are

Staffers objections were that the novel was misogynist and used the narrator to shield the real Bowering from any responsibility for his real-life actions. David, who thought No One was a good novel, went ahead with publication, but the publicity devolved to me, he says. That meant making phone calls and sending out books and doing things I hadnt done in 20 years, because I didnt want staff to do stuff they didnt want to. It didnt end well. Bowering, his wife and his friends were all upset with the publicity efforts while those who disliked the novel as a concept, including media reviewers who wouldnt touch it, remained unhappy. Soon, people who had been friendly to me were no longer talking to me, says David, and that was on both sides of the divide.

Similar disruptions have lately roiled other media as well, including most notably, Twitter, whichafter years of employee pressure on CEO Jack Dorseysuspended Donald Trumps account in the wake of the assault on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. But publishing has the most money at risk in such disputesPetersons first book has sold five million copies worldwide, bringing PRHC, which had global rights to it, tens of millions in profit. It also has the largest young workforces and the biggest collective platform. The industry has faced the brunt of high-profile discord between employers and employees, and at an increasing pace in the past year.

In March 2020, dozens of Hachette employees staged a walkout from its New York offices to protest against the publishing giants decision to take on Woody Allens autobiography, Apropos of Nothing, under its Grand Central imprint. The comedian and director has long been accused by his daughter, Dylan Farrow, of molesting her as a child in the early 1990s. Ronan Farrow, Allens son, who strongly supports his sister, is the author of one of the most significant books to emerge from the #MeToo era, Catch and Kill, released by another Hachette imprint. Its a huge conflict of interest and wrong, said one anonymous Hachette employee to a journalist. Hachette CEO Michael Pietsch exacerbated the anger when, in an interview with the New York Times, he set out a publishing ethos: each book has its own mission. Ronan Farrow responded to Pietsch in an email that Hachettes declaration of editorial independence between its imprints effectively meant that as you and I worked on Catch and Kill, [addressing] the damage Woody Allen did to my family . . . you were secretly planning to publish a book by the person who committed those acts of sexual abuse. The following day, Hachette dropped Apropos of Nothing.

Three months later, numerous Hachette staffers in London told their employer during a meeting that they didnt want to work on a new young readers book by J.K. Rowling, because of the Harry Potter authors well-known anti-transgender comments. This potential mutiny was averted when Hachette argued that whatever Rowlings opinions on trans people, she was not expressing them in The Ickabog. In a statement that seemed to green-light future employee actions, the publisher said, We will never make our employees work on a book whose content they find upsetting for personal reasons, but we draw a distinction between that and refusing to work on a book because they disagree with an authors views outside their writing, which runs contrary to our belief in free speech.

By June, a third cause gripped the industry, after Floyds death. Across the U.S., with echoes elsewhere including Canada, massive Black Lives Matter demonstrations were forcing reckonings in all kinds of institutions and businesses. Anti-racism books like Ibram X. Kendis How to Be an Anti-Racist and Robin DiAngelos White Fragility shot up North American bestseller lists, while Black authors began collecting the information to show what they already knew: they werent as well-paid as their white counterparts.

Publishers responded with strong promises of the sort that excited the PRHC employee who was later shocked by the Peterson announcement, commitments to increase diversity and inclusion among workers and authors both. These were genuine and sincere pledges, (almost) everyone who has commented agrees, but they did not change publishings ruling ethos. Every book is a distinct individual; releasing titles with diametrically opposing viewpointsthe memoirs of a sexual abuser alongside a book denouncing sexual abuse, for instancesays nothing about a publishers own moral stance. And, in a distinction meaningless to anyone outside the book trade, every imprint has its own DNA and publishes very different books from other imprints, even when owned by the same publisher.

READ:This publishers first thriller broke pre-release sales records

When Penguin Random House (PRH) in the U.S. quietly acquired Beyond Order in 2019in retrospect, virtually an assurance that PRHC would also publish itNew York staff were also unhappy. But PRHs head office dampened employee discontent by moving the book from its first company homethe actual Random House marqueto the less prestigious Portfolio imprint, home to Dilbert comic collections and conservative business-oriented titles. That is significant to employees, but for readers its still PRH. Likewise, Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley, who lost his book deal with Simon & Schuster after fist-pumping the Capitol riot mob, found a new home for his anti-Big Tech book with conservative publisher Regnery, as was widely expected. Regnery is distributed worldwide by Simon & Schuster, making the major publishers rejection of Hawley virtue-signalling at its finest.

As a tumultuous year in publishing drew to a closeand thats without mentioning COVID-19the November Canadian announcement about Peterson struck a hornets nest every bit as lively as the one the psychologist hit in 2016. To his critics, Peterson is on the wrong side of every major cause: #MeToo, trans rights and Black Lives Matter. Nor will Beyond Order be a cash machine on the level of its predecessor, since PRHC has only Canadian, not world, rights this time around. In Canada, it has not been shuffled off to a less prestigious imprint. There is a degree of bafflement and disappointment among employees for all those reasons, according to those who will talk about it. And anger, too, not only against the company but also the condemnatory stream of right-wing reaction that came their way after news of their virtual town hall became public.

It made news stories around the world, the majority of which noted the tears in one staffers eyes in their headlines, the better for right-wing media to hammer people they often refer to as sad snowflakes. Mikhaila Peterson, Jordans daughter and his primary publicist, tweeted: How to improve business in 2 steps: Step 1: identify crying adults; Step 2: fire. In response, the staffer who was critical of PRHC posturing noted that publishing doesnt pay well in actual monetary terms. The trade-off for that has been the cultural capital you get from it, which makes people feel they have a more evolved workplace and a stake in that. And when the public announcement and the town hall meetingarranged with four or five hours noticecome on the same day, you know the decision has already been made. That made an ironic joke out of the companys offer of crisis counsellors for a so-called crisis of its making, according to the same employee.

There were also valid questions raised about security, said the second employee, including in publicity, marketing and sales, all of which might be liftedsources were unsurefrom the shoulders of the unwilling in the manner of Jack David taking on publicity for No One. (In that regard, a 2018 remark from then-PRHC CEO Brad Martin probably points to one factor in signing up Peterson, with his army of YouTube viewers: contemporary publishings most prized non-fiction authors come with a ready-made following.) Are angry people going to descend on our offices? asked that staffer. Publishers make the argument that there is a distinction between the publisher and what it publishes, but thats not clear outside, because more and more often people are finding the publisher who published that work and coming after them, they added. And why shouldnt we only publish what reflects our values? Were a private company, and we get to choose who we publish. Perhaps so, says the other employee while also noting that the company regularly publishes or distributes, without attracting the scrutiny that accompanies a Peterson title, a steady stream of revenue-producing books most staff probably disagree with. Last year we publishedwithout any noiseDave Rubins Dont Burn This Book, and he was literally the opener for Jordan Peterson on tour.

As for not listening to employee objectionsor making a decision and then listeningits not just Souvaliotis who finds that idea toxic for employers. ECWs Jack David simply laughs. We hire people who are smart and responsible, and we especially like them when theyre feisty. So we listen to them. Publishers realize the free speech argument is no longer the killer app, the one that shuts up all opposition, not when the opposing side thinks the speech is both false and harmful. But as long as there is a mismatch between the values and politics of an increasingly diverse junior workforce and its more traditional, in every sense, higher-ups, publishing (and other media) will keep having these moments. One could prove epic. The industry is already buzzing: about the cash value and moral swamp involved in weighing whether to publish, should it ever see the light of day, Donald Trumps presidential memoir.

This article appears in print in the March 2021 issue of Macleans magazine with the headline, 12 rules for publishing Jordan Peterson. Subscribe to the monthly print magazine here.

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Jordan Petersons upcoming book has opened up a clash of values at its publisher - Maclean's