I recently had a fascinating conversation with a Current Affairs reader, Benjamin Howard, who was once a major fan of Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, the famous Canadian psychologist and author of the bestselling book 12 Rules For Life. Howard has taken what I suspect is an uncommon intellectual journey. From admiring Peterson and swallowing the professors critique of the woke mind virus, Howard has become so skeptical of Peterson that he is now building a comprehensive website called JordanPetersonIsWrong.com.
I spoke to Howard because I wanted to better understand two things:
Personally, I have little respect for Petersons intellectual contributions. But I dont extend that contempt to his readers and listeners, because I think he offers persuasive narratives to those who feel lost and confused. I have long considered him a charlatan, but I also think you can be a very perceptive and decent person and still be taken in by charlatans. By talking to Benjamin, I wanted to see how Peterson looked not from my perspective (as a left-wing cynic) but from the perspective of someone who had once deeply admired the professors intellect. Ive written out my criticisms of Peterson at voluminous length (they are also available in a book, The Current Affairs Rules For Life). I am long past the point of wanting to rehash them, and Peterson has ducked my attempts to organize a one-on-one debate despite initially agreeing. The question that interests me most now is: Given that I think Petersons apocalyptic black-and-white worldview is incredibly dangerous and delusional, what can be done to de-radicalize his followers and keep them from joining the right-wing mission to eradicate leftism and transgenderism from the world?
Benjamin and I began our conversation by talking about what sets Peterson apart from other anti-woke pundits. Peterson has not just built a following for his critique of political correctness, but for his program of personal self-improvement. His 12 Rules For Life is not really a political book at all (although a couple of its rules have political implications, such as his view that you shouldnt criticize the world until you set your house in perfect order). Instead, Peterson offers his answer to the question What are the most valuable things that everyone should know? He gives a set of maxims ranging from Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient (#7) to Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street (#12). Peterson explains that people need ordering principles because chaos otherwise beckons. The rules are his attempt to counter chaos so we can stay on the straight and narrow path.
For Benjamin, the fact that Petersons self-help principles are so prescriptive, and he doesnt offer affirming and uplifting messages, is part of the appeal. Benjamin explained:
Theres certain kinds of self help where it feels like theyre just telling you what you want to hearYou shouldnt feel bad about yourself, this kind of positive thinking. And Peterson was straightforwardly against that. [His take was more like] just, if youre not doing well, you should feel bad about yourself and you should want to improve yourself and if you dont, then somethings wrong with you.
Now, to me, this seems pretty horrible (Im much more of the Mr. Rogers you are special school so hated by the right). But Benjamin says the approach was actually inspiring because Peterson has a way of speaking [where] it feels very deep in his heart that he wants you to do better for yourself. For Benjamin, what may look to other people like obvious and paternalistic advice can feel very useful to certain people at certain points in their life:
Ive heard some critics of Peterson say, well, his self-help is all just obvious. They dont even get why anyone would listen to his self-help or enjoy itHe says clean your room, doesnt everyone know that? But theres a certain point in your life where you dont know that or you do know it, but you dont care about it, or you dont see why you should do itHe gives an explanation of why its important. And you might want to look up his clean your room speech. Its very interestingHe kind of has a habit of making everything feel really profound and super meaningful. Thats part of what makes it motivating. And so if yourelacking in motivation, then someone comes along and sort of slaps you in the face and says, Hey, this is really important, clean your room, then youll actually do it.
Benjamin himself, when he first heard Peterson on the Joe Rogan podcast in 2018, was at a point in his life where this kind of message spoke to him. As he explains:
At the time that I encountered Peterson, I wasnt where I wanted to be in my life. I had graduated high school, and then I didnt go to post secondary immediately after. I was trying to do writing, and I was just working part time at a furniture warehouse. Theres kind of that vacuum after going to high school. In high school, you have all these friends and everythings decided for you. You know exactly what youre doing. Youre being graded, so you know if youre doing it well. And then one year out of high school, its like, what do I do now? At first youre like oh, I have all this freedom. For the first two months or whatever. And then a year goes by and its like Oh, Im still not moved out of my parents house, which I thought I would haveThat waswhere I was at when Jordan Peterson entered. And when youre in that kind of place having someone whos coming along with this very confident, inspiring message of Heres what you need to do to fix your life, thats really valuable. I still dont credit him for helping me to change my life or something. But maybe a little bit.
There are plenty of people who do credit Peterson with changing their lives (just read the YouTube comments sections or the Amazon reviews of his books). Benjamin did get to where he wanted to be in his life, enrolling in college to study computer science, and when his life changed, his interest in listening to Jordan Peterson started to wane, because he no longer felt he needed to hear these tough love messages about getting his act together.
Peterson is not just a self-help guru, though. Hes also a demagogue who pushes reactionary talking points about how transgender people and socialists pose a threat to the social order. Benjamin and I discussed how Peterson combines the how to fix your life message with regular attacks on woke culture. Benjamin concedes that at the time he first encountered Peterson, he enjoyed hearing him going off against political correctness, and thought he had done it in a way that was very unique and intelligent. When Peterson explained the sources of what was wrong in the world, Benjamin describes the listening experience as:
Oh, now I understand. Everything clicks into place. It makes it almost addicting to listen to him. You feel like youre really learning something deep about the whole world, like how everything is really working.
(Incidentally, that feeling of being told the secrets of how everything is really working is part of the source of QAnons appeal, too.)
In trying to explain why Peterson is so compelling, Benjamin points to his confidence, charisma, and his seemingly genius ability to combined eclectic insights into a giant unified theory:
Hes also able to weave in a lot of different topics together, where hes got the self-help, hes got religion, hes got psychology, and then the politicsIf you listen to one of his lectures where hes in this lecture hall talking for an hour, two hours, hell go across all these different topics and weave them, like hes trying to give the impression that theyre all unified together. But its this hodgepodge of different things that maybe arent related. It gives this feeling of Wow, this guy knows about everything, and hes just so knowledgeable, and hes giving this profound insight that other people just dont have. I think there is definitely an impression that youre getting genius insights from this person. I think thats what leads to over-trusting of his information, because if hes a genius, then why look into anything he says? He must just be correct.
I think Benjamin is right about the impression Peterson gives. In my own writing, I dissected some of the tricks Peterson uses to convey the impression that he knows more than he actually does. But what I was really interested in was the question of why Benjamin left Peterson behind. What broke this mans spell?
It wasnt reading Current Affairs. Or at least, that was only part of it. In fact, Benjamin told me that the first time he encountered my article about Peterson, he hated it. He rejected its analysis and thought I was just a hater launching unfair attacks. Other things had to happen before Benjamin would be open to hearing such a sharp critique.
Ive mentioned one of the things that happened, which is that Benjamins life circumstances changed when he went to college. When he was there, he took a couple of courses that opened his mind. First, he took a course on ancient Greek and Roman religion, which he says pushed him toward being an atheist, because he saw how these societies decided things based on religious ideas that seem loopy today. Things were decided just based on What do the gods want to do? I just realized Whoa, they did a lot of crazy stuff back then. Critically analyzing these ancient societies allowed Benjamin to see parallels with our own.
Second, Benjamin took a critical thinking course. (For some reason, we dont mandate critical thinking in schools, but we should!) This taught him to spot outright errors in the thought of the genius psychologist:
I was still very much into Peterson at that time. But I noticed the naturalistic fallacy. Thats something that Peterson actually does very frequently. Or appeal to tradition. And so you notice, Oh, okay, there are some problems here.
But Benjamin says that a crucial eye-opening moment came when he heard Peterson make a remark he just considered totally off the wall and transparently wrong:
I really enjoy art and fiction and music. And Peterson said, without religion, there would be no art, there would be no poetry, and there would be no music, no anything. And I went, Whoa, that is so not true. What about all these atheists? People that made great things. So for me, that was the part that was like, Thats crazy.
Seeing that someone seemingly profound was not right about everything led Benjamin to take a more critical approach to Petersons thinking, at which point a lot of his faith in Petersons genius began to crumble. (The central role of college courses in changing Benjamins thinking helps us explain why the right hates college.) He noticed that Peterson exaggerated and misrepresented the Canadian law that was supposedly going to throw him in jail for misgendering people. He noticed that Peterson was not interested in accurately or fairly representing the postmodern neo-Marxists he criticized. Benjamins disillusionment started slowly, and then happened all at once. It was only then that he re-read my article in Current Affairs and found himself agreeing with a lot of the criticisms I made. I hadnt persuaded Benjamin, but I did confirm a lot of what he had started to figure out on his own. Now, as I say, Benjamin is so critical of Peterson that hes building a whole website laying out the flaws in Petersons thought. I think this is a valuable project, because there are a lot of people who remain fans of Peterson and have yet to undergo the process of disillusionment that Benjamin has been through. I hope he can help them.
There are a few interesting insights to be found in Benjamins story, if were thinking about how to keep people from turning toward hateful reactionary thinking. First, and Ive said this before, we need to have faith in peoples ability to change their minds. I find Peterson repellent, but I dont find it helpful to call his listeners fascists or even transphobes. Many are young men like Benjamin who are simply in a tough place in their lives and susceptible to the messages of charismatic figures who promise to explain the world, identify your enemies, and help you fix your life. (Thats not to say that Peterson himself is not transphobic; he is, and its extreme, toxic, and frightening.)
We can also see that even though people can change their minds, the process takes time. It doesnt happen because someone presents you with a set of arguments that own and destroy a certain position. Changes in our thinking come from experience, not just pure reason. My article on Jordan Peterson did not snap Benjamin out of his fandom. He had to figure things out bit by bit, with different bricks slotting into place. Studying ancient societies made him critical of religion. Studying critical thinking gave him the tools to see when Peterson was wrong. And so when Peterson defended religion using arguments Benjamin knew didnt make sense, the genius suddenly seemed a bit, well, stupid.
I was encouraged by my conversation with Benjamin. As we see reactionary politics getting more and more aggressive in this country, with would-be dictators like Ron DeSantis clamoring for power and legislatures around the country embracing anti-LGBT legislation, we need more urgently than ever to figure out how we can talk to people and keep right-wing movements from attracting new followers. It can be done. Its not easy, and its not just a matter of handing people copies of Responding to the Right and buying them subscriptions to Current Affairs (although you should of course do both). Sometimes, peoples lives have to change in order for their minds to open, and you cant really affect that. We can, perhaps, give them the kind of inspiration they are looking for in dark times, so that they will be less in need of the messages someone like Peterson offers. We can perhaps show them that while having a clean room is nice, a lot of our problems must be addressed through collective political action. But first and foremost, we have to have some empathy and patience. I have confidence that there are many people out there like Benjamin who can eventually come to see through the lies and misdirection of demagogues and join the project of building a better world for all.
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Excerpt from:
The Process of Leaving Jordan Peterson Behind Current Affairs - Current Affairs