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How an unlikely intellectual turned into a cultural icon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

National Post

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Laura Bates

Sourcebooks ; $28.99 ; 352pp

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The dangerous hate movement we need to talk about - Forward

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