Jordan Peterson: a Noncanonical Prophet of the Digital Era.
“I lost my intellectual virginity to this professor. He is someone who perfectly defined this unknown world, made all the puzzles snap together,” said a student, leaving the auditorium.
Before the current monstrous incarnation of cyber reality took over our lives, Jordan Peterson was just one of your gifted university professors, dressed in the typical old jackets, with distinguished streaks of gray hair and a distinct voice that was both melodic and passionate. Many of us tend to remember our favorite professors for a few years after graduation, and then their teachings fade, obscured by everyday pragmatic thinking.
But no. Not Jordan Peterson. With his distinct voice of truth, his is an intriguing transformation from deep nerdiness to extraverted omnipresence.
It’s as if he emerged from the confines of university and the constraints of conformist thinking, allowing himself to be pushed to the very top by a massive wave of virtual popularity, only to wake us up, challenge us, and, at times, irritate us with his vision.
Titles like “the most influential public intellectual in the Western World,” “social-justice warrior,” “classic British liberal,” “secular prophet,” “homophobic”, “provocateur” and even “the stupid man’s smart person” (according to this statement, this includes all his followers, which just on his YouTube channel tally close to 6,5 million (2023)) quickly ran rampant, as well as the amount of controversy and criticism he generated. According to Peterson, he was called every pejorative name along the way except perhaps pedophile and was once stamped as a “Jewish shield” and a Nazi on the same day.
I am not here to judge him, nor to idolize him. As he once said about Carl G. Jung, his intelligence is “bloody terrifying.”
Debate-goliath Peterson is unlikely to face equal rivals. His aggressive opponents are acting more or less like bots, hurling stones at a tank. Since his bright online ascension, he has managed to hone his arguments further, so he would let them fail measurably, to the audience’s great pleasure.
Peterson’s growing genius is like a huge tree; it has deep roots but might get lost in its stem and branches. My short formula would probably be: “Neither, nor but … but deep.” And let me say just a few words about his humongous intellectual ability and vision.
Yes, there are a few renowned professors/intellectuals you might name who were able to shake off the heaviness of dusty academia and make their high-brow theories available to a wider audience, but why is it that so many have such affection for this subtle, now well-dressed, rarely smiling, and deeply authentic professor and intellectual?
In his own words, he is “trying to struggle with things at the deepest possible level and to explain to people why it’s necessary to live an upstanding, noble, moral, truthful, and responsible life, and why there’s hell to pay if you don’t do that.”
Jung realized that nature and human institutions were stripped of gods in the Age of Enlightenment, and Peterson similarly intuited that in the age of electronic media and political correctness, people are deprived of spirituality and deep thought. With the eye of a high-profile clinical psychologist, he has diagnosed the plight of men-children, wounded women, and families that have been cast adrift from tradition, wandering, as dark shadows, trying to cope with the demanding world in the absence of their lost self. He is not offering a recipe for a good life fit for all, but is mapping the way through it, so his insights come out looking truthful and genuine. He is a scientist who does not abandon faith and religion as manifestations of the ineffable soul, and he is masterfully using his methods to grasp the transcendent.
Peterson has emerged from the haze of political correctness with frighteningly bold declarations, a distinct voice permitted by democratic society but challenging that democracy itself.
As we know Jordan Peterson is highly sensitive to any form of “authoritarianism”. Totalitarianism was under his moral microscope for decades. About totalitarian regimes: “They’re started by people’s attempts to control the ideological and linguistic territory.”
That is how he got himself into trouble in the first place, criticizing Canadian Bill C-16 decrees about “gender identity and expression”. “Believing that gender identity is subjective is as bad as claiming that the world is flat,” he stated. And later, with the Ontario College of Psychologists coming down on his public remarks regarding climate change, the attractiveness of overweight people, and gender dysphoria.
And that of course is more profound than you think: “The fundamental hallmark of belief, it is how you act, it’s not what you say about what you think you think.” Peterson thinks.
In the dueling flamenco of ideology and religion: “To me, ideology is corrupt; it’s a parasite on religious structures. To be an ideologue is to have all of the terrible things that are associated with religious certainty and none of the utility. If you’re an ideologue, you believe everything that you think. If you’re religious, there’s a mystery left there.”
He has used his skills as a clinical psychologist to come across as a kind, perceptive person who was genuinely addressing demanding concerns. He was still there to assist millions of people at the height of his fame. After that, remarks on how Dr. Peterson had saved someone else’s life broke out all over the internet. And it’s hardly “a bloody joke,” either. How many contemporary thinkers have a reputation for guiding others toward their deepest selves or for saving lives?
But his vulnerability comes from a different place. Peterson genuinely has people’s interests at heart, he has been listening to their confessions for decades. To ignore that fact is to completely miss the mark in framing his mission. He struggles to find a way to support and, in some sense, to save people — an unbelievably difficult task. He is humbled and criticized for that. After all, he is just a smart human.
Like any human being, our professor is not immaculate on every level.
Could anyone like him have been less prone to linger in the spotlight with details such as his daughter’s meat diet, his wife’s cancer, his own addiction to medication, and his rehabilitation in Russia? Could someone like him have been less political and avoided conspiracy theories like the postmodern Neo-Marxist secret cabal?
There is a limited amount of tolerance for giving space and time to any type of challenging genius in our society. A controversial thinker of Peterson’s stature will eventually be worn down, either by destroying his reputation or being devoured by the institutions he fights.
