FROM THE VAULT: The Prognosis of Jordan B. Peterson

Getting inside the squishy innards of a nightmare crank

This piece was originally published in 2018 on a now-defunct website. References to topical issues will likely be dated. The satirical diagrams below were created by myself and our resident Aussie David McGorlick. Enjoy!

PART 1: JAZZ IN THE WAITING ROOM

For years, jazz fans like myself have been shunned. It is the belief of mainstream culture, not wholly erroneously, that the forces which dominate jazz have descended into the realms of either avant-gardist experimentation too inaccessible to mainstream audiences, or else perpetual circlejerks of old standards. It is refreshing to find jazz once again courting mainstream appeal, thanks to fresh young musicians such as Kamasi Washington, BBNG, Flying Lotus, Thundercat, and Kendrick Lamar. But I never believed that in my own lifetime I would see a work of truly unrepentant jazz wind up the ubiquitous soundtrack of the summer, and yet there it was: Jordan B. Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life audiobook.

Whitney Balliett once called jazz “the sound of surprise.” If that’s true, I would argue that Peterson’s album takes jazz to whole new heights, surpassing petty surprise to produce the bona fide sound of confusion. For whatever reason, whenever I mention my adoration for Jordan Peterson’s music, people ask me for my opinion on his beliefs. They’re kooky, sure, but much like John Coltrane I was convinced this was simply the result of doing a lot of experimenting with acid, and have put about as much consideration into Peterson’s actual words as I have into the gatefold proselytizing of Coltrane’s own A Love Supreme. 

Of course, white jazz musicians in the modern era receive their share of criticism, which I feel is at least somewhat unfair, and generally comes from people who themselves don’t know a whole lot about the history of jazz—I mean, just consider the impact of guys like Bix Beiderbecke, Eddie Condon, and Paul Bley (Canadian bias showing) for instance. At the end of the day, black or white, no matter his beliefs, we should accept Peterson at face value for what he is: a real hep cat who makes wild and crazy noises with his mouth. But if I must—if I really must—address his beliefs, then I will do see here.

PART 2: BRING IN THE PATIENT

Look at Jordan Peterson go! He has grown from a boy spending his days doodling nearly schizophrenically-incoherent conceptual diagrams into a man who Tyler Cowen has infamously referred to as “the world’s most influential public intellectual”; but whether Cowen’s title is even still apt in this context is uncertain, as Peterson’s superstardom propels him in status well beyond any “public intellectual” who may have come before him. Even at the height of his fame it’s hard to imagine Marshall McLuhan selling out a home-court at Queen Elizabeth Theater, and yet Jordan B. Peterson has not only accomplished that, he’s accomplished it twice in one month. That’s nearly six-thousand people, and the question remains: are these folks here to merely gawk at the circus sideshow, or are they really so desperate to join it?

I read Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos and thought it was quite a bit of nonsense, but I’ll at least start out by dismissing some of the easy shots that myself and others have made against the dude. His claims that postmodern philosophy is rampant at universities under the guise of social justice, which he believes is a “neo-Marxist” plot to destroy Western values (using the phrase many critical claim is meaningless, “postmodern neo-Marxism”), has been pointed at to suggest that Peterson doesn’t have the slightest clue what any of those words mean, and I share these doubts, but for now I’ll give him the benefit.¹

Marxism is certainly “Western” in origin, but Marx’s ideological descendants never really took hold there institutionally, and when we think of the places where they did—China, Russia, Vietnam, Cuba—they are distinctively “non-Western” and in fact belong more traditionally to categories analogous to “Eastern” and/or the “Global South.” While Marx himself once referred to the pursuit of justice as an indelibly bourgeois concern, a lot of the theory that underlies social justice is still indebted to Marx’s examinations of class struggle (although Peterson may also be conflating this with Tony Blair’s statements about supposed “Third Way” socialism). I can also understand how one might see the skepticism of narratives practiced by postmodernists to have largely attacked and undermined Western narratives, and how one might conclude, perhaps erroneously, that this is the result of some greater cultural plot rather than an incidental result of most-if-not-all postmodern thinkers living in the West.

While, in theory, postmodernism is exemplified by a general skepticism toward “metanarratives,” such as “Marxism,” several thinkers associated with postmodernism (whether they did or didn’t embrace the label) such as Kristeva and Sollers were nonetheless “flaming Maoists” (or, if you prefer Elias Khoury’s turn-of-phrase, “Maoist phonies,” take your pick); the relative Marxism of postmodern thinkers such as Deleuze or Foucault is a debated subject (I would say “they weren’t” and the CIA agrees with me, but it’s at least debated); and postmodern Judith Butler is a major progenitor of contemporary gender theory, something Peterson rallies against most specifically. Still, Peterson can himself sound like a postmodernist sometimes (“here’s the fundamental problem: group identity can be fractionated right down to the level of the individual”), and it isn’t as if Lyotard’s biggest critic wasn’t himself.

There is quite a lot to complain about with regards to most of the above postmodern thinkers. Individuals, particularly those coming from more analytic philosophy traditions or from scientific realism, have attacked its primary thinkers for engaging in gross conjecture, equivocation, and logically-inconsistent sophistry, sometimes seeming to endorse absolute permissiveness. Many leftists also accused postmodern rhetoric of being bourgeois opium that enables a kind of relativistic apathy anathema to social change and revolutionary progress. Peterson seems to borrow from the criticisms of both camps in his attacks on postmodernism: he believes that postmodernism is using a culture of moral relativism to lull the defences of “traditional values” into a stupor. He identifies what he sees as an “appalling post-modern [sic] claim: that logic itself—along with the techniques of science—is merely part of the oppressive patriarchal system.” Peterson also incorporates, discovering it as if by accident, a degree of intersectionality into his work: “by what possible logic should “‘American Indian’ therefore stand as a canonical category? Osage tribal members have a yearly average income of $30K, while Tohono O’odham’s make $11K. Are they equally oppressed? [Disabled people?] What about [different kinds of] disabled people?” Well, is he entirely off-base here? The problem is that Peterson doesn’t seem to offer any solution, or else his solution is to over-relativize in this way until he can deem affirmative action unnecessary, which seems counter-intuitive to both the very real problem of disparity he describes and his own self-affirmed claims to hate relativism. If you’re starting to get dizzy you’re starting to understand the central problem with the man’s thought: Peterson is wholly incapable of being consistent.

His arguments for backing up his position would be inane if they were simply flawed, but they are so impressively circular and broken as to become nearly hypnotic in their nonsense. It has been pointed out that Peterson’s arguments regarding lobster hierarchies display a lack of even an eighth grade understanding of ethology (and lobster intelligence isn’t even related to ours evolutionarily), and his invocation of evo-psych bullshit betrays (like it does every evolutionary psychologist) an ignorance of any developments in the understanding of evolutionary biology since Darwin; his strange takes on what amounts to just Joseph Campbell pastiche are so fucking stupid I might go ahead and write a follow-up about them alone—but it is the meat and potatoes of his rhetorical approach that are by far his dumbest contributions. In his book he refers to the belief that gender difference is socially-constructed as “insane.” He claims that the belief may be discarded because it is impossible to prove or disprove that gender is socialized—I find that claim wholly bizarre, as Peterson clearly believes quite strongly in several things he thinks are irrefutably the result of social construction. Take, for instance, when Peterson claims postmodern/neo-Marxist/misanthropic white guilt concerning native kids turned his childhood friend into a life-long depressive wreck (“my doomed friend”): 

“when my friend Chris got into it with Native kids, he wouldn’t fight back. He didn’t feel that his self-defence was morally justified, so he took his beatings. ‘We took their land,’ he later wrote.² ‘That was wrong. No wonder they’re angry.’ Over time, step by step, Chris withdrew from the world. It was partly his guilt. He developed a deep hatred for masculinity and masculine activity. He saw going to school or working or finding a girlfriend as part of the same process that had led to the colonization of North America, the horrible nuclear stalemate of the cold war, and the despoiling of the planet.”

This episode—which ends, spoilers, with Chris committing suicide—isn’t just totally anecdotal (and possibly at least a little bit, if not entirely, fabricated), it’s an endorsement of the idea that societal pressures, beliefs, norms, etc. can condition someone into a hopeless state. It does not speak to me of what Peterson posits is the natural pathology of the male specimen; rather, it demonstrates an elasticity of self-perception and identity strongly enforced by socialization.

Peterson will rule any argument he encounters as purely-speculative and fundamentally “unprovable” if there's too much data that disagrees with him, and thus could provide a case for a rebuttal of his hypothesis. Peterson can only be “right” or “unprovably wrong.” He is incredibly susceptible to methodological double-standards: Peterson himself has absolutely no qualms stating the unprovable, and has a tendency to shift rationalizations in a way that seems untenable, and he does so quite daringly, by which I mean quite precariously. This is best demonstrated in that hilarious TIME Magazine interview wherein Peterson argues that Disney's Frozen must be inherently propaganda unless it... isn't? i.e. he authoritatively declares something to inherently be the case, but reflexively suggests that this argument is incorrect… simply if it were to be incorrect? How could this be proven either way??

Is it necessary to always be consistent? Emerson once called consistency “the foolish hobgoblin of little minds.” That being said, Emerson was also a completely self-aggrandizing idiot who went on in that quote to compare himself to Galileo, Socrates, and Jesus Christ all in one breath simply because he’d been called out for being a tosser who didn’t understand the idealist philosophies he was so obviously cribbing his notes from. A degree of consistency is important, yes, and some people—Emerson and Peterson among them—exhaust the degree to which inconsistency can be tolerable. Peterson calls the future “the place for all potential monsters,” to which Nathan J. Robinson, a man who dresses like he wants to be a white pimp, aptly retorted: “the future is the place for all potential anything.” 

PART 3: DIAGNOSIS

Now here comes the part where I’m supposed wrap it up and tell you what all of it “means,” to justify why I’ve given Peterson the spotlight, and offer up some half-baked, poorly-considered conclusion as to just what Peterson’s philosophy says about us right at this moment, about everything. As I’ve already demonstrated, Peterson’s philosophy doesn’t really say much about anything at all, and if you would like to consider the relative meaning of “nothing” in regards to “everything,” then you can go right ahead; it doesn’t seem to be an effort really worth anyone’s time, nor does it seem as though such an inquest will reveal anything in the way of actual insight.

I read, in preparation for this article, way, way, way too many pieces about Jordan Peterson. I could have quartered my time easily, as there’s very little original journalism to be shared between much of it. One major takeaway from reading these articles is how often they’ll regurgitate one another without fully admitting it; yet it is patently clear that the authors are feeding off of each others’ work to near-plagiaristic ends. When Jonathan Foiles at Slate’s “Medical Examiner” seems to imply that he is critiquing the whole of a recording of one of Peterson’s “therapy sessions” in order to make deductions about Peterson’s therapeutically-practical methodology, he uses nothing but the exact same excerpts of the session included in Nellie Bowles's interview with Peterson from the New York Times, word for word, and styled almost identically:

And yet Foiles still has the balls to say this:

Troubled by what you saw? You didn’t see shit you fucking fraud—not only is the recording half an hour long [the old link is broken, but I managed to find the recording archived here —Ed.] and yet you managed to not use a single word that was not in the NYT piece, but the recording was also entirely audio. Where the fuck do you get off talking about other people’s bogus methodologies when your own practice of journalism is just as odious?

Almost every single article—including this one you’re currently reading—begins with a reference to Tyler Cowen's description of Peterson as “the most influential public intellectual in the western world.”

Why? Since when the fuck do we let Tyler Cowen of all people single-handedly decide what the consensus is on literally anything? How is this anything other than just lazy, recycled journalism?

These articles typically end with the same fluffy conclusions in an attempt to “explain” Peterson, but one wonders whether there is any honest attempt in much of it to explain fuck all about anything to anyone, and whether the whole thing is just a cynical grab at clicks for relevant content. I will say with absolute transparency that the only reason I wrote this article at all was because I believed I could make you click on it—I don't believe there's any substantial reason to really cover or address Peterson. In fact, doing so may very well be a large part of the problem. The efficacy of covering Peterson at all is so completely fucked up. We do it because he's a controversial subject—much like the President [read: this was first published under the first Trump term], everything he says is immediate fodder for comment and criticism, and those clicks transform into anger, which very quickly transforms into money for Peterson. It seems as though the media’s interest in challenging or debunking Peterson might be something he openly invites, not just because this sort of negative press has more mileage, but because it’s just the sort of thing that seeks to further line his pockets. Don’t buy my conspiratorial thread? What if I told you that opinion came from Dr. Peterson himself?

“I shouldn’t say this but I’m going to because it’s just so goddamn funny, I can’t help but say it—I’ve figured out how to monetize social justice warriors… if they let me speak then I get to speak, and then more people support me on Patreon... So they go protest it and then that goes up on Youtube and my Patreon account goes way up.”

If every one of his nine-thousand-and-two patrons on Patreon pay just his base $5 a month, then he’s making at least half a million dollars annually off of them alone, in addition to the six-figures Rebel Media raised for him when he had his federal funding cut, and he has a best-selling book fast-approaching a million sales. 

It's all fine and dandy to type up a storm about Peterson's obviously offensive suggestion that women should be enforced into monogamy, but relatively little attention is being paid when Peterson schedules time to pow-wow with Monsanto bigwigs teaching farmers to “prepare their children to go to college with the skills needed to push back effectively on over-simplified ideologies,” tweeting ad-like endorsements of Koch-Brothers-affiliated NGOs, and attending Turning Point USA’s Young Women’s Leadership Summit. What is exposed here is a nefarious and predatory economy which surrounds the man, and we see at last the real guts of this disgusting sausage. Peterson isn't an effective thinker, but he is an effective showman—which is not to suggest that he doesn’t believe whatever it is he peddles, but if there really is something Peterson “tells” us about anything, it's of the sorry state of mass media in the internet age and its susceptibility to being played by a conman.

1. Some time after this article I went to see Peterson debate Žižek in Toronto (a hysterically good time) and Peterson effectively had to admit on-stage that he basically had no idea what he was talking about with any of this, so that clears that up.

2. Wrote? I didn’t pick up on this the first time, but this would suggest there’s written evidence for this story. Can Peterson provide these writings?