Pundit Profiles-Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
The Professor Against Political Correctness
Jordan Peterson was born in 1962. In 1968, Sirhan Sirhan murdered Robert Kennedy for supporting Israel. Peterson watched Kennedy’s funeral and thought “I’m going to have a funeral like that.”
He skipped a grade and befriended a Métis classmate, Rene. When they were in Grade Six, they planned to see a movie until Jordan’s schoolteacher father caught Rene chewing gum in class. He said “Spit that gum out. You look like a cow.” Jordan laughed and said, “Rene the cow.” Rene told Jordan “Peterson, after school-you’re dead.” Per Jordan
“[The] rest of the day passed, quickly and unpleasantly, as it does when threat and pain lurk. Rene was more than capable of giving me a good pounding. After school, I took off for the bike stands outside the school as fast as I could, but Rene beat me there. We circled around the bikes, him on one side, me on the other. We were characters in a “Keystone Cops” short. As long as I kept circling, he couldn’t catch me, but my strategy couldn’t work forever. I yelled out that I was sorry, but he wasn’t mollified. His pride was hurt, and he wanted me to pay. I crouched down and hid behind some bikes, keeping an eye on Rene. “Rene,” I yelled, “I’m sorry I called you a cow. Let’s quit fighting.” He started to approach me again. I said, “Rene, I am sorry I said that. Really. And I still want to go to the movie with you.” This wasn’t just a tactic. I meant it. Otherwise what happened next would not have happened. Rene stopped circling. Then he stared at me. Then he broke into tears. Then he ran off.”
As an adolescent, Jordan’s friend Chris, who had anger issues and a strained relationship with his (Chris’s) father, discovered marijuana. Its usage produced a negative effect on him (Chris). Chris got Jordan to attend teenage parties with him, which Jordan disliked. Per Jordan, the only memorable events were
“the time my too-quiet classmate drunkenly began to brandish his fully-loaded 12-gauge shotgun”, “the time the girl I later married contemptuously insulted someone while he threatened her with a knife” and “the time another friend climbed a large tree, swung out on a branch, and crashed flat onto his back, half dead right beside the campfire we had started at its base, followed precisely one minute later by his halfwit sidekick.”
Chris sometimes got into conflicts with indigenous people, like the one Jordan got into with Rene, but when they let their temper flare, Chris refused to fight back saying “We took their land, … that was wrong, no wonder they’re angry” and Chris “took his beatings.”
Jordan Peterson became an atheist. He claimed Christianity contradicted evolution. He instead embraced Socialism. He attended Grande Prairie Regional College, studying political science. Chris became Peterson’s roommate. One day, Peterson and Chris walked home from a bar and Chris repeatedly tore off the side-view mirrors of parked cars. Peterson objected “Quit that, Chris. What possible good is it going to do to make the people who own these cars miserable?” Chris told Peterson that human activity was ruining everything and Peterson told Chris it didn’t make sense to punish ordinary people living normal lives.
Peterson read The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell. Per Orwell “it would be a mistake to regard the book-trained Socialist as a bloodless creature entirely incapable of emotion. Though seldom giving much evidence of affection for the exploited, he is perfectly capable of displaying hatred — a sort of queer, theoretical, in vacuo hatred — against the exploiters.” Peterson reckoned Orwell’s description perfectly applied to the Socialists he knew. After all “socialists were more intrinsically capitalist than the capitalists. They believed just as strongly in money. They just thought that if different people had the money, the problems plaguing humanity would vanish.” Peterson transferred to the University of Alberta to study the Cold War but found his professors overemphasised economic explanations.
Peterson started researching the history of totalitarianism. This led to him reading Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago and Frankl’s description of the Holocaust. He learned of the Rape of Nanking and of Mao’s atrocities.
After moving to Montreal, to study psychology at McGill, he married Tammy and fathered Mikhaila. Chris moved in with the Petersons. Chris convinced himself Tammy was interested in a romantic relationship with him, he frequently smoked, and he deliberately sabotaged the dinners he made for his friends due to viewing cooking as beneath him. Chris lashed out in response to seeing happily married couples and he abused marijuana. Peterson fathered Julian, earned a PhD, and went to Harvard. Chris killed himself.
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Peterson surmised that “when people have a low opinion of their own worth — or, perhaps, when they refuse responsibility for their lives — they choose a new acquaintance, of precisely the type who proved troublesome in the past. Such people don’t believe that they deserve any better — so they don’t go looking for it” and these friends lead them astray. Peterson moved to Ontario to become a professor. He no longer considered himself an atheist because he found the Biblical story of Cain to be a perfect description of Chris’s struggles and a well-crafted cautionary tale warning against similar mistakes. Peterson, based on Jung, found that there were archetypal truths built into the stories we tell.
Peterson wrote Maps of Meaning, about the psychology of religion and the archetypes of Order and Chaos, and adapted it into a docuseries. He wrote opinions for the National Post and answers for the website Quora. Peterson answered the question What are the most valuable things everyone should know?(linked here) with 42 rules he believed everyone, himself included, should try to follow.
Justin Trudeau proposed legislation banning discrimination based on “gender identity”. Trudeau was influenced by provisions in the Ontario Human Rights Code. The Ontario Human Rights Commission had said, in an online post (linked here) , that ““misgendering” is a form of discrimination.” Peterson made response videos, arguing that this was antithetical to freedom of expression. Steve Paikin moderated a debate linked here, discussing the issue. Paikin read through a legal analysis published by the University of Toronto and it said that “pronoun misuse may become actionable” with possible penalties ranging from job dismissal to being compelled to pay a fine but that jail time was “not one of them”. Peterson responded by asking “what if I don’t pay the fine? Then what?” Peterson noted that if someone were fined for refusing to refer to transgender people by their preferred pronouns but didn’t pay, they would be jailed such that there was a threat of imprisonment. Peterson’s interlocutor Dr. Nicholas Matte, on the other hand, claimed that “It’s not correct that there is such a thing as biological sex” and accused Peterson of “abusing students”. Paikin asked Matte if he were saying refusal to refer to transgender people by their preferred pronouns was tantamount to abuse. Matte replied “absolutely”. Peterson asked “What about violence. Is it tantamount to violence?” Matte replied “Yes”. Peterson asked if it were “tantamount to hate speech”. Matte replied “Yes, of course it’s hate speech”. Peterson noted that these replies vindicated Peterson’s assertions. Student protesters confronted Peterson demanding that he recant his views on the bill but he refused. They asked him if he were willing to disavow Nazis and he responded “yeah, I don’t like Nazis”, and that he condemned violence against transgender people, including violence committed by people claiming to be acting in his name.
Peterson launched a web-series on the psychological significance of the stories in the Book of Genesis. In his video The Great Sacrifice: Abraham and Isaac, he was asked about Charlottesville. He replied
“Having the Right degenerate into identity politics does not seem to be a positive solution. So, one of the things I would say is that, like, I understand why the identity politics that has been practised so assiduously and so devastatingly by the Left has been co-opted by the Right. I understand that. But then here’s what I would say to people on the Right who are playing that game. If you play the game of your enemies and you win, you win their game. You don’t win. That’s not victory. You just become the most successful exponent of their pathology. Well, how is that a good thing? It’s a bad thing. So, what does that leave people as an alternative? … I don’t think that the Caucasians, let’s say, should revert to being white. I think that’s a bad idea. It’s a dangerous idea and it’s coming fast and I don’t like to see that. I think the whole group identity thing is seriously pathological. I think we’ve made big mistakes in Canada. I understand why, at least to some degree in that respect, and that large mistakes are being made all over the Western world, where we’re making your group identity the most important thing about you. I think that’s reprehensible. I think it’s devastating. I think it’s genocidal in its ultimate expression. I think it will bring down our civilisation if we pursue it. We shouldn’t be playing that game. …I think that the way that you deal with this is you put yourself together. I really believe that … because I think that individual people are far more powerful, … I think [that] you aim high and put yourself together and stay the Hell away from the ideologues… And that’s the lesson of Western culture, is to place the individual at the place of paramount importance and to make the group identity emerge only when necessary, and secondarily, if ever.”
A software engineer, James Damore ,wrote a memo (linked here) arguing that part of the reason Google’s diversity policies weren’t working was that Google’s biases led to it ignoring that there existed on average non-trivial differences of personality between men and women, with partly biological roots, and that the most observable of them was that women, on average, were more interested in people than in things whereas men, on average, were more interested in things than in people. Damore suggested that this was a factor in the underrepresentation of women and offered his recommendations on how to solve the issue. Google fired Damore. Damore reached out to Peterson and asked him for an interview. In the ensuing discussion, Peterson read through the memo and explained what Damore got right (and wrong) in it. Peterson told Damore to “stick to your damn guns, man”.
Peterson published 12 Rules for Life. The British journalist Cathy Newman interviewed him about it and grilled him on everything he had to say. She responded to almost every statement by saying “what you’re saying” and creating a strawman argument to make him sound sexist, with Peterson consistently pointing out that he hadn’t said that and explaining what he actually had said.
Peterson wrote On the so-called “Jewish Question” ,debunking anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, and thus elicited backlash from Neo-Nazis like Richard Spencer and Andrew Anglin. Vox Day responded by writing a book, called Jordanetics, seeking to prove Peterson was a conman. That didn’t stop Peterson’s critics from smearing him as a Neo-Nazi. His constantly facing criticism coupled with his being dragged into the spotlight, and his wife Tammy getting ill, led to him developing anxiety and going to a psychiatrist. He took prescription drugs and developed an addiction. Upon realising this, he went cold turkey and withdrawal nearly killed him. Mikhaila took him to Russia, where he got necessary medical treatment.
After recovering, Peterson hosted Douglas Murray for an episode of his podcast. Peterson and Murray debunked Trump’s false claims of a rigged election, condemned the January 6th riot, and called out people on the Right who would defend or downplay it. They doubled down on this in response to criticism.
Peterson published Beyond Order: Twelve More Rules for Life and became an outspoken critic of legislation mandating COVID vaccines and lockdowns. Peterson started working for the Daily Wire. He harshly condemned Hamas’s October 7th attack on Israel, supported the Israeli retaliation against it, and castigated Hamas’s apologists. After Peterson debated Destiny, someone on Twitter asked him when he’d debate Nick Fuentes and Peterson responded “When hell freezes over.” When Fuentes claimed that “Jews” were in control of the Biden Administration, Peterson called him out for his anti-Semitism. Peterson criticised Candace Owens for criticising Andrew Klavan for criticising anti-Semitism. He thus elicited backlash from Tim Pool. Peterson praised Murray and James Lindsay for their calling out the “woke Right” for normalising “psychopathic” behaviour.
Peterson, unfortunately, got sick again. That said, Mikhaila has revealed that he’s, thankfully, recovering.
My name is Matitya and this has been a Pundit Profile.
