![]() ![]() So, what does Peterson actually believe? He bills himself as “a classic British liberal” whose focus is the psychology of belief. I think he’s a goof, which does not mean he’s not dangerous.” One person who has crossed swords with Peterson declined my interview request, having experienced floods of hate mail “He’s very much a cult thing, in every regard. “Peterson’s secret sauce is to provide an academic veneer to a lot of old-school rightwing cant, including the notion that most academia is corrupt and evil, and banal self-help patter,” says Southey. Tabatha Southey, a columnist for the Canadian magazine Macleans, designated him “the stupid man’s smart person”. Last November, fellow University of Toronto professor Ira Wells called him “the professor of piffle” – a YouTube star rather than a credible intellectual. Not everybody is persuaded that Peterson is a thinker of substance, however. His earnings from crowdfunding drives on Patreon and YouTube hits (his lectures and debates have been viewed almost 40m times), now dwarf his academic salary. He is also adored by figures on the so-called alt-light (basically the “alt-right” without the sieg heils and the white ethnostate), including Mike Cernovich, Gavin McInnes and Paul Joseph Watson. For rightwing commentator Melanie Phillips, he is “a kind of secular prophet … in an era of lobotomised conformism”. Economist Tyler Cowen said Peterson is currently the most influential public intellectual in the western world. ![]() Camille Paglia anointed him “the most important and influential Canadian thinker since Marshall McLuhan”. “I hit a hornets’ nest at the most propitious time,” he later reflected. A few days later, a video of student protesters disrupting one of Peterson’s lectures enhanced his reputation as a doughty truth-teller. This more verbose, distinctly Canadian version of Howard Beale’s “mad as hell” monologue in Network had an explosive effect. Starting from there, he railed against Marxism, human rights organisations, HR departments and “an underground apparatus of radical left political motivations” forcing gender-neutral pronouns on him. Peterson was troubled by two developments: a federal amendment to add gender identity and expression to the Canadian Human Rights Act and his university’s plans for mandatory anti-bias training. His ballooning celebrity and wealth, however, began elsewhere, with a three-part YouTube series in September 2016 called Professor Against Political Correctness. The tough-love, stern-dad strand of his work is represented in 12 Rules for Life, which fetes strength, discipline and honour. He published his first book, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief, in 1999 and appeared in Malcolm Gladwell’s bestseller David and Goliath, talking about the character traits of successful entrepreneurs. Two years ago, he was a popular professor at the University of Toronto and a practising clinical psychologist who offered self-improvement exercises on YouTube. All of those options are equally possible.” “I feel like I’m surfing a giant wave … and it could come crashing down and wipe me out, or I could ride it and continue. “In a sensible world, I would have got my 15 minutes of fame,” he told the Ottawa Citizen last year. They think he could be the culture war’s Weapon X.ĭespite his appetite for self-promotion, Peterson claims to be a reluctant star. No wonder every scourge of political correctness, from the Spectator to InfoWars, is aflutter over the 55-year-old professor who appears to bring heavyweight intellectual armature to standard complaints about “social-justice warriors” and “snowflakes”. It is harder to argue with someone who believes what he says and knows what he is talking about – or at least conveys that impression. ![]() Peterson is not just another troll, narcissist or blowhard whose arguments are fatally compromised by bad faith, petulance, intellectual laziness and blatant bigotry. His new book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos has become a runaway bestseller in the UK, US, Canada, Australia, Germany and France, making him the public intellectual du jour. The confrontation has worked wonders for Peterson. As he told Newman in his distinctive, constricted voice, which he has compared to that of Kermit the Frog: “I choose my words very, very carefully.” The whole performance, which has since been viewed more than 6m times on YouTube and was described by excitable Fox News host Tucker Carlson as “one of the great interviews of all time”, bolstered Peterson’s preferred image as the coolly rational man of science facing down the hysteria of political correctness. The more Newman inaccurately paraphrased his beliefs and betrayed her irritation, the better Peterson came across. T he Canadian psychology professor and culture warrior Jordan B Peterson could not have hoped for better publicity than his recent encounter with Cathy Newman on Channel 4 News. ![]()
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