I have spent at least 100 hours over the past 6 months listening to the lectures of Youtube sensation and clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson.
His critics view him as a life-guru for blundering, angry white men—as the leader of the “Incels” (short for “involuntary celibates”) who are useless both to women and to society. He has been called “the belle of the alt-right” and “the stupid man’s smart person,” and, my favorite, “a Messiah-cum-surrogate-dad for gormless dimwits.” He is, according to the New York Times, a patriarchical pseudointellectual, riding his devilish dark horse into stardom and corrupting everybody in his path, at best an idiot fraud and at worst, the most dangerous thinker in the West.
I adore the man.
Peterson rose to fame in 2016 when he released a series of YouTube videos opposing Canada’s Bill C-16, which aimed to compel the use of transgender pronouns (the punishment for offenders is a fine, and if the fine is not paid—jail). Peterson’s objection was not to transgender people, but to the government mandating speech for the first time in common law history. His videos went viral and, as you might imagine, all hell broke loose. Many of his ideas were twisted to paint him as a villain. His enemies multiplied—but so did his followers.
Before that Peterson was an obscure psychologist at the University of Toronto. He never intended to be a media darling, let alone the “savior of the internet,” as his fans affectionately call him. Politics made Peterson famous, but this is not why his fans drive hundreds of miles to see him in person.This is not why they watch every single video. They do this to learn about personal responsibility and the human capacity for evil. They want to become better people.
His premise is simple: The world is a terrifying, chaotic place. Your choices are never between Unpleasantness and Utopia but between Bad Thing One and Bad Thing Two. You cannot escape challenging sacrifices, but you can learn which sacrifices are better than others. It is up to you to rise and make the right decisions—and this is how you will reduce anxiety and find contentment.
Peterson’s view of human nature is likewise simple: You are peaceful only because you are not hungry. People are capable of great evil, and it is naive to think that you are an exception. But people are also capable of great goodness.
What is goodness? He heavily stresses that harmlessness is not the same as virtue. When the time comes, can you fight for what is right? Can you identify coercion and cruelty when you see it? Are you strong enough to resist? In his lectures, he teaches people how to break bad habits, take responsibility for their actions, restrain their dark side, and understand the chaos of the world.
Peterson interweaves mythology, neuroscience, and data-driven research into a tapestry of what we know about the human condition. He wants to tell a story. He believes that we can learn all the facts in the world, but without stories we cannot meaningfully integrate information. And this approach has clearly moved people. Academics don’t often write best-selling books and they rarely sell out concert halls.
But Peterson is filling a need. His fans aren’t seeking him out because he validates their existing beliefs, or because, as critics claim, he provides a platform for them to vent their anger. They come to him to learn something new.
The need he is filling is the void of nihilism. The world is becoming more connected, and yet communities are breaking down. People leave their families and their hometowns for education and for work. This is a cultural phenomenon that hurts people personally. Not only are they lonely, but they fail to receive appropriate checks on their behavior. It is not that people are sane: It is that people are kept sane through feedback from those who care about them. Without this, their minds wander. They do crazy things, and not only is nobody there to stop them, nobody even tells them that something is wrong.
Nobody tells them that there is a wrong—or a right. We don’t learn morality in school (unless “sit still, stay bored” is a commandment). Instead, we learn unhealthy incentive structures that we are lucky to replace later—if ever. If a student in a fight tries to solve the problem himself, he is punished and scolded to tell the teacher next time. Most schools discourage fending for yourself. And the situation is not much better at universities. Where does a person without a dependable family or a community learn to make sense of the world? There are large pockets of people just like this, craving for guidance and moral responsibility.
Jordan Peterson not only gives them hope, but he gives them direction. The postmodernists say that contentment is entirely subjective, but this is not true. Researchers know some of the patterns. Actions have predictable consequences. Competence is good. Health is good. Trust is good. Being alive is good. And this is what Peterson teaches.
Tens of thousands of people have sent him letters. They thanked him. He saved their lives.
Who has he helped? It is the exhausted man who learns to hug his crying child instead of shouting. It is the woman who discovers evil in the eyes of her lover and learns that leaving is the right choice. It is the opioid addict who determines that there is no point to self-destruction: the world will anyway take its toll. It is the man who puts off killing himself until tomorrow, because what is the hurry?
And so when I hear that Jordan Peterson—the watchful professor with decades of clinical experience, the man who touched millions of souls, the man with toil in his hands and courage in his heart—is an unqualified, fraudulent, white-supremacist Nazi-lover—I cannot help but remember this quote from Solzhenitsyn:
“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
It is not so obvious, what is right and what is wrong. It is easy for confusion to take hold, and Jordan B. Peterson is not the first name to be ravaged in the name of righteousness. We all have darkness that will destroy us if we let it. We need his message now more than ever. And despite all the slander, despite all attempts to tear him down, we can still hear it.
