Back when we were primates, we used to comb each other's hair. We laid hands on one another. We pinched fleas and beheaded parasites and swept off dead skin.
We protected one another. This wasn't strictly about hygiene. It was also a bonding ceremony. We maintained social order without ever saying a word. But eventually our population grew too large for such personal touches, and we had begun to flourish into proper language, so our expectations of community drifted into abstractions, metaphor, art, symbols, and, worst of all, political fanaticism. Imbued with consciousness, we discovered that life is endlessly complicated. Our response was to declare war.
I first met Jordan Peterson at Dave Rubin's house in January 2018, shortly after the release of Peterson's best-selling book, "12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos." He was a whir of a man. Radiating chaos. Chattering like the frog from Sesame Street. How exactly is a 54-year-old Canadian professor who just became gaspingly famous supposed to act?
If this is your first encounter with Jordan Peterson, welcome to the internet. May God have mercy on your soul. Because you've stumbled into a particularly volatile corner.
Allow me to be your Virgil.
Over the next four months, I shadowed Peterson sporadically for what would eventually become "The Long Distance Call," titled after a verse from Paul Simon's song "Boy in the Bubble."
That's how it felt to see Peterson in 2018. He was an enigma. The way he rode into Western consciousness like the squinting anti-hero of a Sergio Leone film: "Serpents? I bloody hate serpents." But before we ever fully decided whether he was a hero or a villain he just sort of vanished. Which was odd, because for about two years, he'd been culturally ubiquitous.
Rumors bounced around Reddit and Twitter, among journalists: Cancer, drugs, rehab, psychosis, sirloins. It was all so outrageous and vague.
Then, halfway through 2020, the year that still might end us all, in the middle of a godforsaken pandemic that as of the publishing of this review still continues, Peterson re-emerged. At Babaroga Steakhouse in Belgrade of all places, to celebrate his birthday. If you believe in synchronicity, "Babaroga" translates to "bogeyman."
There weren't many other celebrations in June 2020. Just lots of fear and death. America was on fire, heartbroken, afraid. Lots of places were. Travel was restricted. Quarantines, lockdowns. People kept dying. Closer and closer. People you knew. So, Peterson plucking at Tomahawks on Instagram was a hell of a plot twist.
Then he got Covid. And Pneumonia. Hospitalized. Abyss. Somehow survived. Not much later, he announced the release of his third book, "Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life":
Jordan Peterson's list of rules in Beyond OrderTwitter
Slowly, the details of his absence emerged. Basically, he had a lot of bad all at once. The pace and intensity of fame, the constant vitriol and love that engulfed him. He had his anxiety medication, clonazepam, upped when his wife of 30 years contracted terminal cancer. Then a series of moments sometimes days on end when he assumed he was going to die. Wanted to, maybe, who could tell. He bounced to various hospitals in the U.S. and Canada throughout 2019, fighting off the crippling anxiety and thoughts of self-destruction, hunted by insomnia, unable to dream, to escape or forget.
Most other reviews delightfully go through the rest of Peterson's collapse, or couch it with boring praise, in the case of conservative media. Either way it's tacky and banal.
Some critics have taken Peterson's collapse as proof that he, a psychology professor and clinician with decades of practice who recently underwent real-world personal experience of everything he'd been studying, should not be writing books about self-improvement.
That's like saying a poet shouldn't write love poems because they've known heartbreak.
Love him or hate him, Peterson deserves an honest examination for some reason love or hate seem to be the only two options we're given when deciding how to feel about Peterson. Which is ridiculous, and hardly productive.
Peterson often resembles an aggressive goose. He has a history of tantrums that outshine the tantrums he's reacting to. Although the initiating tantrum is often technically an ambush.
These skirmishes of the culture war perhaps our greatest distraction flesh out mostly online, mostly Twitter and Reddit, although the more fringe rhetoric circulates 4Chan and Tumblr.
Journalist Jesse Singal breaks this divide into "normies" and the "too-online":
"You need controversy," Peterson said, during one of our 2018 interviews, in the dressing room after one of his shows, under a dead lightbulb.
Fame, he said, relies on public opinion. It's about the constituent individuals choosing which humans rise to the top. Something about how valuation shapes hierarchies Peterson relates most things hierarchically.
He then described fame as an outcome of an admiration-to-controversy ratio. In order to become famous, a person must cultivate an ever-widening balance of the two. On that particular night, Peterson rated himself at a 60-to-40, but admitted that it fluctuates constantly.
Which, it's a near-satirically Peterson move to conceptualize fame as some unending game that spirals through our species, an array of data points.
"What's the best percentage of controversy?" he asked. "It's not zero, I can tell you that much."
It's never zero with Jordan Peterson.
When Penguin Random House Canada announced the release of "Beyond Order," Penguin employees tried to stop its publication. They consider Peterson "an icon of hate speech and transphobia" and despise "the fact that he's an icon of white supremacy."
It's a narrative you hear repeated but never proven. And it feeds into Peterson's Fame Ratio: The people who want to attenuate him only give him further strength.
Just last week, Peterson went viral because of a comic book, Captain America, issue #28. In it, the Nazi supervillian Red Skull, "the New Leader of the Power Elite," has brain-washed young white men over the internet with "his new theory of the world." Then cut to a screen of Red Skull next to signs that say, "10 rules for life," "CHAOS AND ORDER," "KARL LUEGER'S GENIUS," and "THE FEMINIST TRAP."
But this isn't about liberals or moderates or centrists or Democrats or independents or socialists. This isn't a rebuke of racial or social justice causes.
There are two combatants: Jordan Peterson and the Bourgeois Activist Class.
Think of Peterson's previous book, "12 Rules for Life" (white cover, white font) and his latest book, "Beyond Order" (black cover, white font) as interlocking halves of the same totality. Contrary, yet unified.
Different yet selfsame.
Marxist philosopher Guy Debord closes "The Society of the Spectacle" with a choice, an ultimatum. Do you want Truth? Or spectacle? Truth? Or mass media, boredom, celebrity, endless consumption, lonely crowds, atomized people? We used to connect with each other, as a species. Now all we have is a constant flow of bad movies we're never in.
"In a society where no one can any longer be recognized by others," writes Debord, "every individual becomes unable to recognize his own reality."
Over the course of six months, I wrote 11 drafts of this review, but deleted them all, because they failed to capture something beautiful and unique. I had written the same review as everyone else. And just as shallow. Like theirs, mine lacked a certain practicality. So I tried various styles and gimmicks. I wrote some stunning sentences, a few perfect, gorgeous phrases. Like any person should, I admired my handiwork in the quiet. Grinning at its completeness. Then, every time, it collapsed when I tried embracing it.
It wasn't obvious that I had really considered Peterson's ideas or the ideas of his enemies let alone put them to use, if only as part of my job. But this was more important than any job. This was a matter of saving the nation.
Like its predecessor, "Beyond Order" can be genred as Philosophical Self-Help. A postmodern version of Viktor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning."
I did not get the impression that Peterson ever excluded himself from statements like, "It is much more psychologically appropriate to assume that you are the enemy that it is your weaknesses and insufficiencies that are damaging the world than to assume saint-like goodness on the part of you and your party."
Peterson mentions his own frailty, his obvious imperfection, repeatedly throughout the book. And not through grit teeth. Not every time.
His approach is a more radical version of Carl Rogers' "Unconditional Positive Regard," a "person-centered" counseling technique in which the therapist responds to what the patient tells them, however bad, with total acceptance. The goal is for the patient to cultivate a sense of responsibility for themselves.
The goal is meaning.
Meaning: The ultimate pursuit of Peterson's philosophy, "something far deeper than mere thought that orients us properly in life, so that we do not become overwhelmed by what is beyond us, or equally dangerously, stultified and stunted by dated, too narrow, or too pridefully paraded systems of value and belief."
This isn't a philosophy text, it's about 50 years behind the prevailing ideas, and far too approachable. But for a self-help book, it is philosophical. Does that undermine its cultural status? Is it like saying "I saw an episode of Jerry Springer in which everyone wore tuxedos and recited 'The Aeneid,' so 'The Jerry Springer Show!' can now be considered high brow"? No, not for most people. But it's part of the reason some of Peterson's critics see him as a tradition that is fighting erosion.
"Beyond Order" averages a captivating line every few pages, a passage that echoes in you after you read it every chapter. Scattered throughout sections about mythology and hierarchies (I never want to hear about hierarchies again) and the mechanisms of storytelling, personal anecdotes, and LSD wisdom, are fitful sentences of creative intensity. And one tremendous idea I won't ruin it.
In his description of Nietzsche's foreboding eye, Peterson writes, "The incomprehensible level of prophetic capacity remains a stellar example of how the artist and his institution brings to light the future far before others see it." This has long been a subject of fascination, perhaps even obsession, for Peterson, the idea that a rare human emerges from each zeitgeist with an honest-to-God vision of the future. Does Peterson consider himself one of these visionaries?
Maybe.
More important, should we?
Anyone asking that question will likely have already said no.
The academic criticism of Peterson's work is more erudite than what you'll get from journalists, but often just as editorial, with an abrupt tone-change in reviews of his first book, 1999's "Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief," a recondite slog through most of Peterson's favorite ideas. Some of the criticism borders on gleeful bullying, like Ben Whitham's histrionic essay, "A postmodern neo-Marxist's guide to free speech: Jordan Peterson, the alt-right and neo-fascism."
(While academics and critics have mocked him for using the phrase "Neo-Marxist Postmodernists," it doesn't appear in "Beyond Order" a single time.)
But "Beyond Order" isn't a book specifically for academics. It is a book for restless no ones, in need of a bucket of cold water. For husbands or wives who want to keep improving. For lost souls. For depressed people who can't answer, "What next?" For atheists. For career-minded people who find themselves stuck and dissatisfied with the direction or pace of their advancement. For undergraduates. For drug addicts, alcoholics. For eating disorder patients. For preachers. For congregants. For people who can't catch a f***ing break.
For hobby psychologists and amateur philosophers. For aesthetes. Yes, for young men, especially those in need of guidance. But, yes, for young women, too. Yes, for conservatives. But also for liberals, who ought to see what all the fuss is about. For first-time moms and dads, trying to raise a newborn during a pandemic without losing their minds although, given the book's length, they'd better go with the audiobook.
Philosopher Jacob Boehme wrote that all things are rooted in a Yes and a No.
For Peterson, Yes is Order Yin, light, reality, the conscious, the King, Culture, Goodness.
No is Chaos Yang, dark, potential, the unconscious, the Dragon, Nature, Hell.
He sees this Chaos and Order dualism as undergirding the structure of reality, where Life is the endless collision of opposites, a progression through contraries, dual forces at play, complementary negations, the life-affirming struggle of "an eternal dichotomy."
He practices a science of contraries that, in the West, dates back to at least Aristotle's "Metaphysics," and in the East for even longer, so old that nobody knows when it began or who got it started, a philosophy that begins with the pre-dawn silence that contained only nothingness.
Peterson's intellectual father and mother, respectively, are Friedrich Nietzsche and Carl Jung. In many ways, Peterson is a condensation of their largest ideas.
Like Jung, Peterson believes that "people find meaning in optimally balancing" any polarities. Peterson is also an Existentialist in his belief that life is bloody awful and ruthlessly absurd, but the point of it is to establish meaning, through individual dignity, personal love, and creative effort. Jean-Paul Sartre: "Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself."
But, as an Existentialist, Peterson resembles the Christian Existentialist Paul Tillich more than Sartre. As Tillich writes in "The Courage to Be": "Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony."
Over a century ago, Nietzsche predicted 200 years of Nihilism. We have about 70 years left.
Of everything that I studied during my research for this review, "nonbeing" was the most destructive. Far worse than any political idea. Worse than any tragic stories. It led me into a two-week depressive episode. Surrounded by the negation of all life, or so it seemed. Absence. Nullity. Emptiness. I hated that place. I hated that feeling.
To be clear, my research on Nietzsche is what sent me into the spiral, not Peterson's book.
Reading Nietzsche is like fiddling with a Ouija Board: You've got to be careful. Nietzsche is criminally misunderstood, and I'm no doubt guilty of that myself. He's certainly not a Nihilist. Like Peterson, Nihilism was one of his greatest enemies. It's just that his wild ideas can be so devastatingly transformative and hard to contain.
Peterson incorporates a lot of Nietzsche's ideas. (Tell me this doesn't sound like Peterson: "When a person wishes to become a hero, the serpent must previously have become a dragon, otherwise he lacks his proper enemy.")
Peterson is fond of Hell as a personification of Bad as a totality, of all the most negative aspects of everything. His characterization of Hell resembles Dante's, where Hell is the privation of humanity, the image of the human soul turned upside down, inside out, the rejection of love.
Dante's Hell is full of victims. Self-pitying souls who choose pride over kindness and cry nonstop. (Performatively.) They whine and complain and blame any number of objects or people for their confinement. They boast about the reputation they left behind or the totally excusable sins they succumbed to.
They belong to the void. The negation. The world cratered into grey muddy emptiness. A loose tooth receding inwards.
This possibility terrifies us. If we went extinct, who would tell the indifferent universe how important we had been?
Anxiety often arises from the fear of nothingness. We're afraid to die; but we're anxious about the possibility that nothing will happen when we do. Just, zip, then Tony Soprano, no music, no light, no color. But, as anyone who's whispered into a canyon knows, even total absence will resound with echo, the rippling arrival of one from zero.
What we say is always so much less encompassing and vast than what we leave unsaid, knowingly or not. What matters is the tumult and rise. As Rilke put it, "the darkness of each endless fall, / the shimmering light of each ascent."
So if the Nietzschean chaos nearly destroyed me, the Jungian order led to restoration. Specifically Jung's concept of Synchronicity, the meaningful coincidence of inner and outer events that aren't causally connected, a harmony of parallels. Once I discovered Synchronicity, I was reborn into the world, like the fuzzy afterglow of LSD.
With this newfound clarity, I understood Peterson's chaotic orderliness better. His admixture of spirituality and positivism.
So I emerged in the dark woods. Now I would need to rebuild myself. "Beyond Order" was there at that exact moment, with no-nonsense instructions, barks, really, cadet calls. I would have to undergo differentiation, to become an individual. We have no sense of direction without establishing differences.
Carl Jung, in the "Undiscovered Self":
But Individualism alone can lead to horrific outcomes. Not as a concept, but as a weaponized ideology that disregards the wellbeing of the collective, often for insidious reasons. There is no individual without the collective. A baby cannot raise itself.
James Davison Hunter writes, "[T]he key actor in history is not individual genius but rather the network and the new institutions that are created out of those networks."
Jung achieved this through Mandalas, "circular patterns he etched into notebooks, and through them he observed his transformation." He noticed that Madalas are common among people experiencing mental anguish. They signify an attempt at repair, a way to pull it together. Yet mandalas have also been used for centuries in Eastern religions for meditation, as a symbol, a relic, a microcosm of the universe.
It's about the perfection of the all-containing circle. Mandalas always cohere to the harmony of the circle. It's about the synthesis of so many various parts, like the Jungian archetype of the self, the totality of the personality and mind and spirit and soul, both its conscious and unconscious elements, a united totality like the Tao, a circle, a union of opposites, a play of light and shadow, contained in the whole, always there, resting at the center of it all.
Plato called the essence of thought the interior dialogue of the soul with itself. Hans-Georg Gadamer, described this inner world as "the mirror and the image of the divine Word." Jung offers the possibility that the relationship between body and soul is a synchronistic one. That matter and mind are one and the same.
With his previous book, "12 Rules for Life," Peterson championed "the merits of a more conservative view of the world." Chaos.
In "Beyond Order," he "argues for the merits of a more liberal view." Order.
Overall, he's looking for "a balance between reasonable conservatism and revitalizing creativity."
In Rule 11, he concludes that liberalism and conservatism "both are 'correct', but each of which tell only half the story." He adds, "to develop a properly balanced view of the world of experiences, it is necessary to accept the reality of both elements in culture."
At one point, he even says that "there is, of course, some value to Marx's observations."
The Bourgeois Activist Class obeys then enforces a certain cultural brutalism. French President Emmanuel Macron warned about the effect of "certain social science theories entirely imported from the United States." In a 2019 speech, former President Barack Obama rebuked the new movement: "I get a sense among certain young people on social media that the way of making change is to be as judgmental as possible about other people.
They have even earned their own pejorative in Chinese: "Baizuo."
The activist class overwhelmingly hates Peterson. We know this because we hear all of the Bourgeois Activist Class's opinions. They're elites masquerading as the proletariat.
Peterson rails against political correctness (q.v. "Rule 5: Do not do what you hate"), but most Americans don't like political correctness. Only one demographic does. Take a guess. There aren't that many of them, really.
From The Atlantic:
So they're outnumbered, but they're powerful, and they're loud, because they have parked themselves next to all the cultural megaphones. A 2020 study in Science Advances determined that "journalists are overwhelmingly liberal perhaps even more-so than surveys have suggested." But they are not liberal at all, they are "far to the left of even the average (Twitter-using) American." Which is quite a statement, considering Twitter itself leans disproportionately left.
In my experience, most of them are decent people, but they are tough to be around. In part because they're impossible to criticize. They're a cultural annoyance. But they have power because we've all handed it to them.
If the right actually engaged in the culture, they'd have no reason to complain. But at the moment, they aren't contributing. They generally lack fine culture and hate-fear higher education but refuse to do anything about it.
They need to stop complaining about academia and just learn to engage with intellectual pursuits. More reading. More art. More film. More poetry.
Learn the big ideas, they aren't all radical. And, when they are, learn them anyway. Actually learn them. Hans-Georg Gadamer: "A person who has no horizon is a man who does not see far enough and hence over-values what is nearest to him."
But this quickly becomes a normative issue: If someone doesn't respect your values, why the hell should you even so much as acknowledge theirs? As a country, we already live in their world. We already adhere to their value system. Part of the problem is that they not only ignore the values and needs of other people, they want a society that contains theirs and theirs alone.
Why should you have any respect for, or pay any attention to, anyone who thinks you are evil and your life is an abomination? Which actually brings us full circle. Because isn't that is how conservatives feel about this situation? About the activist class themselves, not their broader causes. As in, "Life would just be easier if they weren't such a nag."
It wouldn't. Their nagging serves an invaluable purpose. They keep us in motion. Humans need to be remodeled, or else life, collectively, can spiral into primitive darkness. After awhile, we begin to lose the fineries that make us so intricate and special.
I've spent a lot of time analyzing the Peterson phenomenon from every angle, and the activist class seems to be the most heated aggressor. They're demanding the most and offering the least. Chronologically, however, Peterson was the initial agitator. Otherwise he would still just be psychologist who's a wacky figure among the Canadian professoriate, and not the most famous public intellectual of an entire generation.
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The Jordan Peterson war continues - TheBlaze