We Don't Talk about Jordan Peterson

Why bringing up Jordan Peterson is now low-status.

Still from Peterson’s Biblical Lectures

I had a dream that I was in Jordan Peterson’s attic.

He and his family were down below. I had to find a way to carefully cross over a large gap in the ceiling to “get to the other side.” To fall down into his household, I knew on account of dream logic, would mean to be fully associated with him, which I intuited was bad. I needed to find my way toward my own house, which was somewhere across the gap, into the darkness - what I assume was something like Jung’s collective attic space (ha).

I’m tempted, right here, to tell you exactly what I think is wrong with Peterson’s outlook and therefore his “household.” I could do so in a lot of detail, not because he’s so obviously wrong, but because I know more about what he thinks than anyone but my wife knows about me. I won’t. There are many, many people more than willing to play that game.

That fact is explained by Peterson’s fame reaching critical mass; a tipping point where there is no more status to be gained by being associated with his ideas. This phenomenon also explains the hipster urge to “like things before they were cool.” If you say anything positive about Peterson, you mostly stand to lose. If you manage to humiliate him publicly, you mostly stand to gain. Even for the people whose lives have been positively transformed, I notice an interesting dynamic: we tend to dogwhistle Peterson to one another. “Carl Jung” is the most common stand-in.

I get the sense that an entire genre of Substacks and Twitters exist because of this dogwhistle - posting Dostoyevsky and Jung quotations with what would otherwise be run-of-the-mill wisdom, except for the unspoken implication of being associated with the worldview Peterson made popular. They also tend to downplay it with Millennial-style humor, something like, “Jung was COOKING when he said this.”

To people unaware or less influenced by Peterson, this whole ecosystem and its origins all seem pretty strange and improbable, I’m sure. Nevertheless, he started a massive cultural shift back around 2016, which was the catalyzing point for all current interest you’ll probably have noticed by now around “re-enchantment,” myth, family, virtue, classic literature, relevance realization (via his friend, John Vervaeke), Christianity, the West, and so on.

It’s not like no one was writing about these: David Bentley Hart, Charles Taylor, Iain McGilChrist, Robert Pirsig, and many more. Eliade was blowing the lid off this stuff last century. But Peterson was maybe the first to connect how the fundamentally incorrect modes of apprehension pushed by the modern scientific “consensus” directly caused suffering in young people, particularly men. He spoke directly to the hearts of those young men in his classrooms, in their own language, and then, probably most importantly, was one of the first famous intellectuals to publish his lectures on YouTube, which are now arguably the most viewed lecture series in human history.

Those who he has influenced (if you look at the numbers, there must be millions and millions), if they are socially sophisticated, keep the source of their conversion secret. “Peterson” became a name you only bring up in a private conversation if someone says “archetype” or “clean your room” a few too many times.

In this way, Peterson has become the ritual scapegoat for the cultural demons he helped reveal to our consciousness. The demon(s) are a fuzzy cluster of scientific materialism and post modern identity politics spawned from cultural Marxism. Despite (because of?) giving us a way to exorcise ourselves of them, we are obliged to humiliate and destroy Peterson. This is a metaphor, and it also seems to be happening.

In the old days, a man like him would be forced to drink hemlock for “corrupting the youth.” All the better for Socrates, probably, because at least he got to die with some dignity and finality. Here, through my words and millions of others, he lives on, still corrupting the youth with impunity.

Our dramas have become more psycho-spiritual, so we ritually murder each other’s reputations instead of the fleshly bits. It turns out this is more effective, anyway. By keeping Peterson alive and therefore mundane enough to do something like a podcast, anything resembling idolizing him is mocked. Comparing Peterson to, for example, Socrates is lame, which I have just done. Oops.

Through Socrates’ death, his reputation becomes incomputable. Through Peterson’s continued life, one spiritual destruction (and resurrection) after the other, his reputation takes on superhuman size. His ability to live up to that reputation, though, would be much easier if he were dead. His every choice and movement is scrutinized to death by mad mobs. I wouldn’t be so bold to claim that this explains his health troubles, but I would also be surprised if they were totally unrelated.

I remember the first time I encountered Peterson’s face. It was that infamous GQ interview. I watched the entire thing, then I immediately watched it again. I hated him with unreasonable passion. But I could not stop bothering with it, like poking my tongue where a tooth used to be.

Predictably, my head at the time was filled with po-mo ideas about Marxism, Will to Power, moral relativism, systemic oppression, and what have you. My eyes are nearly rolling out of my head as I even write these words, but not because those ideas are boring and wrong. They are, in fact, so boring that people who spend their time griping about them are themselves almost exactly as boring. However, both of them, I have to admit, are sometimes not technically wrong. It’s all a bit beside the point.

Or maybe this is just dirty work I don’t wanna do anymore. Peterson was the first time anyone educated dared to tell me something outside of the great hegemony of the universities. A hegemony, by the way, whose manifestation in my life was a total disaster. Peterson pulling me out, despite it being low-status to admit, probably saved my life.

My reaction to him at first, though, was anger and hatred.

Which, I suppose, is how I imagine a college-educated liberal would feel about me if I told them what I really think: I no longer believe in progress as a universal good, I no longer think everyone in the past is evil, and I don’t think science provides a working ontology. That doesn’t mean that I suddenly feel myself to be a “conservative,” which seems more like the sort of temperament that dislikes ideas that don’t connect directly with personal experience, rather than an ideology. Without that sort of person, by the way, you don’t get consistent electricity or plumbing. I am however, for better or worse, pretty much defined by not being like that. I write essays, for God’s sake.

There is a third cultural category that has quietly congealed around the time of Peterson’s rise to fame. By one simple definition, it is a cohort of traditionalists who also happen to be high in the typically “liberal” trait of openness. From within this new cohort (and its auxiliaries), the Boomer binary of crew-cuts and hippie hair is breaking down. Most people have no idea about this Great Psychic Rezoning. For suburban moms with mildly conservative husbands, for example, being liberal in the sense of “I don’t judge anyone’s lifestyle choices!” is still a mark of status. For them, social conservatism is akin to their husband’s involuntary disgust response against foreign concepts, which would be properly mitigated with “education” and “tolerance.” Conservatism, in this view, is like a child who doesn’t like cheese because he won’t try it.

That’s not to say that small-minded hicks no longer exist, and that occasionally conservatism is nothing but the expression of a cultural comfort zone. But this binary no longer captures the reality of the current culture war, so to hear people communicating this way increasingly feels embarrassingly out-of-the-loop. And yet, it is a difficult topic to broach with them. They literally cannot see outside of their binary frame.

The forcing function for this persistent cognitive blindness is easy enough to locate: when all else fails, out come the Nazi comparisons. Old-guard comedians like Marc Maron, for example, can’t understand what’s going on with the new mega-fame of comedians like Theo Von, who are, at least in part, riding Peterson’s unspoken cultural wave. The bizarre enlightened hick sort of character is endlessly confusing to very “tolerant” and “informed” cable news-watchers. Theo is willing to do things they categorically can’t, like interviewing both Trump and Bernie Sanders, to great success with his own audience. Maron makes fun of Theo for this by saying, get this, “He would interview a NAZI and still be nice!” Wow. That’s fresh stuff, Marc.

He lacks a certain in-the-know, which is particularly humiliating for liberals, who have traditionally been the hip ones. However, to those fully committed to the status they accrued by conforming to a pre-Peterson worldview, understanding here would mean self-destruction. So, they go out of their way to not understand. This helps explain their compulsive comparisons to Hitler long after its peak effectiveness. For them, Hitler is their devil. If his name loses power by endless repetition, the wheels start to come off the wagon.

I see this everywhere: A writer on Substack (who I really like) posted a Note about how the big anti-reductionism thinkers like Eliade, Jung, and Neumann (he’s implying but can’t state it outright: all major influences on the Petersonian worldview): “all flirted with fascism.” Which, to me, is just a more sophisticated way of expressing, “bad bc Hitler.” What does he even mean by fascism? If we only mean that they were interested in unity as mythological concepts, a Nazi that does not make them.

But, by noticing how this invisible gravity pushes all objects toward this same orbit, we can infer that modernity’s center of gravity is the story of World War II. It is, without a doubt, Modernity’s Creation Myth, in which a plurality of rag-tag Allies beat the homogenous and tyrannical Axis powers. It created the cultural consensus we all still operate within - it is the image of faceless Hugo Boss uniforms vs. a corn-fed Iowa boy sharing cigarettes with a New York Jew.

Unification, tradition, and order can obviously go wrong at the extremes, because… well, Nazis. We are very aware of that danger. But so can diversity, individuality, and fragmentation - at the extremes. History is full of tyrants, both left and right (in fact, the left probably has a larger body count). Hitler just happens to be one example of a tyrant gone wrong toward an excess of order. The polar opposite of Hitler is not Jesus, though - it’s Stalin.

Being aware of that danger, according to the very tolerant, is the same as being a Nazi. That line is no longer convincing to this growing third cohort, which, again, just so happened to have culturally catalyzed around Peterson, and which, again, you are not allowed to notice.

Because of modernity’s unquestioning worship of Progress as always being positive steps away from Nazis, an iron curtain fell between me and the “unenlightened” past. I could see the literature and the art, sure, I could see it with my eyes, but it could not penetrate me. Its only interest, if any at all, was how it gave rise to the present moment and therefore to the hopes of a more tolerant future.

There was a feigned interest, occasionally, if some thinker was “ahead of his time” (and how annoying about the past that it’s usually a “him,”) but there was the deeper sense that some more modern thinker was probably better - they had more up-to-date data from which to draw. The interest in the historical thinker, if I could have been honest with myself (I couldn’t), was really just to give myself a sense of superiority and maybe to be prepared to throw the name out in an argument with someone less “educated.”

My unconscious religion was something like scientism, which parks its implicit “Eden,” not in some ideal past, but in the future’s utopia. All must be sacrificed to bring about this utopia; and so knowledge about the past was only useful for finding tools toward this sacred destination. The more recent and anti-tradition the thought, the more “good” it was, therefore, implicit in this set-up, too, was the necessity of rebellion.

Since the future here is pure potentiality which makes us free from the past - collective and personal - all structures built in the past are therefore obsolete and probably also tyrannical. They are best rebelled against, constantly. The smartest people, then, are the dysfunctional and probably alcoholic “geniuses” of rebellion. Sometimes they are autistic detectives or hyper-logical scientists. Hence, the left’s cultural fantasy of George Carlin, Rick from Rick and Morty, or Sherlock Holmes and his many network-TV incarnations.

That is also to say, this is not some exotic quasi-religion I’m talking about. This is what I picked up from NPR, popular non-fiction (Danny Kahneman, Yuval Noah Harari), post-modern literature, and some from my college professors. It was the water I was swimming in, and so I did not see it as a very particular way of seeing the world. To me, it was the world. In that sense, it was a “religion” to me, therefore anyone who questioned it would be felt to me as a heretic and blasphemer. What is stranger than that, maybe, is that I never heard anyone convincingly question it! I seemed to only come across those who were clearly just not “smart” or “open-minded” enough to accept The Science. I genuinely thought that the only opposition to my views were conservatives in the “comfort zone” sense.

But then, along came this man - the Canadian who sounds like Kermit - who was making a big fuss about my invisible assumptions. He must be, I thought at the time, a comfort-zone conservative disguising himself in cherry-picked scientific data and some big word salad. Although I hated him, something about him caught my attention. I could not stop, after that interview, hate-watching, and then hate-reading his stuff. Hate slowly turned to disagreement, disagreement to confusion, confusion to questioning. Finally, in a more earnest way, I went looking for reasons why he might be wrong.

What I found, despite my hope, was that his detractors - at least the ones I could find from a good-faith search - didn’t understand him. This is partly because Peterson speaks the language of Jung - that is to say, a right-brain and metaphorical way of speaking. They tend to do things like pull Peterson’s quotes out of his context and slap them in their reductionist one (arrogantly and boringly to boot, I find), which, from their perspective, makes him seem absurd, and then assure you that you can safely ignore the man.

It was too late, I already had not ignored him. This tact only works if you don’t already understand Peterson. People like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, who I thought the most qualified sort of people to help me understand why Peterson was wrong, were also frustratingly dismissive. What was especially annoying was how embarrassingly little they know about Peterson’s forbearers like Jung, Eliade, and Neumann.

All claims that he speaks in meaningless word salad or is “drunk on symbols,” I knew from personal reading and revelation, were at best dismissive misunderstandings, and probably just lies. It would be like claiming jazz was just a bunch of noise to a person who enjoys jazz. Clearly, they are able to find coherence in the cacophony, even if you can’t.

On the polar opposite end of the spectrum, detractors also said that Peterson’s claims are obvious and therefore banal. This is actually true, in a sense - especially if you are a temperamentally conservative person, which I am not. Part of what he’s doing, basically, is showing the complex origins and deep meanings of normal behaviors, and therefore why they should be preserved. It’s like writing a book to explain why and how to dance at a wedding. If you already like doing that, it’s going to seem, as my dad says about Peterson, “wordy.” But if normal behaviors have been attacked very thoroughly by your culture, and you’re the sort of person who takes thinking seriously (high in openness), then you may actually need to read a book explaining the cosmic significance of cutting up a rug. I did.

To people outside of this whole Peterson thing, again, this all probably seems a bit strange. But for men of a certain age and disposition, we were abandoned by the world and given no way of accessing wisdom from the past. Peterson came along and, like Thor himself, held the iron curtain open and let the light of the sun shine through. It was the first time we had seen it, so we squinted at and cursed the light. But he held it open anyway, and he burned up in the heat.

To a certain group of lost millennial men, it was like the archetypal dad finally coming home. Those men, now coming of age as leaders, fathers, and artists, are currently shifting the way we all think, as this next great cultural shift is underway. What’s interesting to me about all of this is how so very little Peterson’s name is directly mentioned. I suspect a good portion of these people, like me, feel a pressure to downplay the effect he had on their lives.

We can get by without mentioning him - we can just read Dostoyevsky and Homer and the Bible and claim that we knew all along how much wisdom was there. And why not? This scapegoating seems a little inevitable. There will probably be some in the comments below. The first person to say the ship is sinking is usually thrown overboard for mutiny.

It is still a little cowardly, though.

My wife was the first person to point out to me that I get embarrassed when Peterson comes up with strangers. I have a tendency to linger on his faults in a way I don’t when she and I are in private. If I am afraid of sharing a tiny fraction of the mob’s ire with Peterson, I can’t imagine how he feels. Again, I’m not saying that his bouts of illness are a result of spiritual warfare - but I’m also not saying the opposite. It all feels too neat to be a total coincidence. And I do hope he recovers soon.

These days, I avoid Peterson’s work. The door has been opened to me and original sources are now my main interest. Peterson’s great sacrifice was devoting his entire life to a system of thought that destroys life to try to defeat it from within, for the sake of those it hurts the most. He helped me see, by a materialistic framework, why the materialists are wrong.

Thanks to that sacrifice, I can sidestep his battle altogether and just fight my own. Should I have already known that though reading great literature? You could say so. It does seem somewhat obvious to me now. But I was drawn in by materialism’s promise to gain power over reality. I had to know for myself: Will this save me? It didn’t. The next thing I needed to learn: neither will Peterson. That’s why I can criticize Peterson in great detail if I wanted to - I’ve worked hard to differentiate myself from him. Through that, I have avoided falling into his house. But I won’t use it to humiliate him here, even if I could.

I am grateful, Jordan Peterson. I think it’s right to risk saying as much.