If you haven't heard of Jordan Peterson, you're probably pretty normal. He's what I'd call an intellectual rock star. Once a relatively obscure professor from the University of Toronto, he's also worked at Harvard as well as the UN and logged something like 30,000 hours working with patients as a clinical psychologist. After his new book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, was released at the end of January, Peterson is already on his second book tour and most of the stops already sold out. How did this happen? Why are thousands of people lining up to watch and listen to some grey-haired middle-aged psychology professor from Canada talk on stage and tell them to stop being victims, to get their shit together, and to become responsible individuals?
Peterson gained internet popularity—or infamy, depending on your level of education or indoctrination—in October of 2016 when he publicly decried the changes to the Ontario Human Rights Code (Bill C-16) that codified into law the necessity to refer to individuals by the name and personal pronouns of their choice by implying it would be a hate crime not to do so. For Peterson, it wasn't about the LGBT community at all, but rather that for the first time in Canada, the government was telling its citizenry what they must say. He often refers to such legislation as compelled speech.
That was when most people who follow news on the internet started to hear about him. He made a splash because radical leftist types at his University created a controversy around him by protesting his appearances with white-noise machines and calling him a fascist. But every new protest brought him more attention, and while folks lauded him or hated him for his behavior, he has consistently gained in popularity. People came to see the controversy but stayed for his content—moving from watching the protests and interviews about the incidents to watching his many recorded class lectures on YouTube. Thousands and thousands of individuals realized there was more to this man than simply refusing to use gender neutral pronouns in the name of free speech. There were powerful ideas here, and an important message that it seems many people really need to hear right now, either because no one has ever shared such wisdom, knowledge, and advice with them, or because deep down we know what he says makes sense—we may have even thought and felt similar things before—but we’ve been unable to articulate such lessons as eloquently.
In the intervening year and a half, I have become a Jordan Peterson fanboy. If you want to understand why, spend a few hours listening to his series on the psychological analysis of the biblical stories. It's about a dozen podcasts, each roughly two hours in length. His use of Jungian and Freudian analysis and his knowledge of symbolism and mythology as a means to extract the psychological significance of the stories is nothing short of fascinating, much of which he’s working out himself in front of the audience as he goes. I was hooked, but then again, I'm a huge nerd for studying history, religion, and psychology.
Peterson's analysis of the stories helps us grasp more of our current situation in our individual lives. He's a huge advocate for not throwing the baby out with the bathwater when it comes to Western culture, and that's made him a vocal opponent of Marxist types who want to 'smash the patriarchy' and start over in the woods eating vegan, or something equally ridiculous. He also has a masterful understanding of twentieth century history, and with it an awareness of where the Marxist doctrine goes.
I've digressed, a bit…
Last night! Jordan Peterson came to Manhattan to speak at the Beacon Theatre and I was able to get two tickets early enough so I could treat my handsome and highly intellectual boyfriend to join me. He's also a fan (and helped to edit this article because he’s awesome—hi!). We got there a little early and waited in line for about fifteen minutes before the doors opened up.
The crowd was mostly men, mostly young (20-35ish), but there were a lot of women there, too. The venue holds three thousand people and it was sold out. There was also a wide diversity of racial and ethnic groups. We saw Jewish folks wearing kippahs, people of Arab descent, folks with Asian ancestry, people of color, jock-bros drinking beer, and sophisticated elderly couples sipping wine. I got the impression that there was diversity of political opinion as well, but that would be overestimating my ESP abilities based on peoples’ demeanor and fashion choices, although I still believe that girl with the purple hair is more likely to vote liberal than conservative.
What did he talk about? Well, he did a rough outline of his book. He has 12 Rules in the book that serve as guidelines to living a meaningful and honest life, but he only got through six in about an hour and a half. The first one is pretty smart, and it's what I'd call classic wisdom (or grandma wisdom).
Rule 1.) Stand up straight with your shoulders back. It's an injunction to confidently present yourself to the world, even with all your flaws and vulnerabilities. Here he talked about hierarchy as a feature of the landscape, and not a consequence of any social constructs. To support this point, he mentioned the lobster, which he’s become famous for (spawning endless memes). Lobsters form hierarchies, and therefore they can't possibly be a social construct. Our evolutionary histories diverged about 300 million years ago, showing just how ancient hierarchies are. He also discussed research that demonstrated how lobsters responded to antidepressants that work on the Serotonin/Dopamine system, low social status within a group would result in a 'depressed' lobster (and there are ways to measure such things)—if you give him a little antidepressant he puffs back up like he just won a big fight and had his pick of the ladies. We see similar patterns in people, and you can consciously make your life better when you approach it with eager confidence. It grants you more possibility of social mobility within the hierarchy that you find yourself.
Weaved into this was a discussion of inequality, and that although no one likes social inequality and too large of a wealth gap is clearly a bad thing, we haven’t figured out any societal and political system that can actually get rid of it. Peterson ponders whether or not abolishing it is even possible when it’s so ingrained in the structure of nature itself, warning us that it’s too complicated an issue to think we can naively solve by overturning our current economic system and replacing it with a different one (which has been tried and has always failed, often with fatal consequences).
Rule 2.) Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping. He mentioned comparative study on people filling out and taking medication prescribed for them by a doctor, versus medication prescribed for their pet by a veterinarian. The data was curious: folks will almost always fill and administer medication to their pets, but much less likely will they fill, or complete, medication prescribed for themselves. There are a myriad of ways each of us could take better care of ourselves. Pick one and start small was his advice. The main point of this rule is that in caring for ourselves we are also more capable of caring for and helping others—after all, we aren’t much use to our pets anymore if we’re in poor health or dead.
Rule 3.) Make friends with people who want the best for you. Another common-sense sort of rule, but how often do we meet folks who were in toxic relationships? Maybe they had a toxic boss, or a toxic romantic partner. Maybe it was a toxic parent, or 'friend'—the trick is to learn to identify folks in your life who genuinely want you to succeed versus those who resent your success or actively work to make you miserable, perhaps because your progress makes them feel inferior and bringing you down validates their own stupid choices, or perhaps because they’re just psychopaths who enjoy manipulating you and using you for their own ends. Learning to speak up for yourself in situations where someone is aggressive and oppressive is key here, and that's something he's worked on with people in his clinical practice.
Rule 4.) Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today. This is something I used to do a lot, especially when I was feeling rather self-deprecating. He makes a good argument—there is no other you but you. Everyone is different and comes with a different set of unique circumstances. It's also impossible to know everything about anyone else. In order to do any sort of rational, realistic comparison, the only person you can compare yourself with is yourself if you want to gauge your progress. To this end he suggested small changes, little improvements that incrementally and exponentially accumulate into larger changes. Those little things add up over time and help you build your self image as well as your willpower.
Rule 5.) Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them. The idea here is that you want your kids to be well-socialized. This opens up the world for them and makes them able to enter new situations and be well-liked by the folks they find there. He also mentions the crucial period between 2-4 years old where if you don't do the right things it's very hard, if not impossible, to correct. Discipline is important, but it's also necessary not to be too overbearing. If you watch Jordan talk about this rule, which he says he felt would be the most controversial chapter in the book, he gives a much better breakdown and analysis than I can in a paragraph.
Rule 6.) Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world. This is another bit of classical wisdom reflected in the saying, "Don't go throwing stones in a glass house." There's plenty for us to work on in our own lives, and if we collectively acknowledged that and set about working on those little things that we had control over, the world would improve over time as a natural consequence. He also mentioned the Columbine shooters and Carl Panzram, discussing how the suffering of the world can sometimes result in people who become so nihilistic and resentful of existence that they seek revenge on Being itself, concluding it would be better if nothing had ever existed at all. He admits they make a strong argument for their nihilism and justifications for their heinous actions, but that in the end there really is no excuse for responding to the suffering inherent in the human condition by making it worse, not when it's always possible to work toward alleviating some of that suffering instead, if not in our own lives then perhaps in the lives of others by setting our own in order by how we respond to the tragedies of existence.
Peterson acknowledges that we've pulled a lot of folks out of poverty in the last decade or so. When he worked for the UN he was tasked with doing a study of those exact figures, how many folks were being pulled out of poverty and into lower or middle classes. The numbers were astounding. In 1895, most people lived on less than $1/day in today's dollars. Most people were seriously poor. In the twenty-first century, the UN hit its target for reducing poverty three years ahead of schedule. Every day more people are getting hooked up to the power grid, more are having access to clean water, and still more are getting access to the internet. The point is that despite how a lot of suffering still exists in the world, it’s important to be grateful for the very real improvements that have been made.
He acknowledges plenty of problems, chief among them being inequality, but like hierarchies, it is a feature of the landscape that we haven’t figured out how to manipulate out of existence, if that’s even possible. The trick is to maintain balance such that there aren't too many idle folks getting desperate and angry. So what to do about inequality is something we need to seriously discuss and address without rushing into ardent support for a particular political ideology, such as Socialism or Communism, and a reactionary criticism of capitalism as the central cause of inequality when it appears to be a more complicated and even intrinsic facet of Being, resulting from hierarchical structure in nature itself that is more ancient than trees. Although Peterson supports equality of opportunity as something we should be striving toward as a society, he is certainly skeptical of anything under the political moniker of ‘equity’ (governmental and/or ideologically enforced equality of outcome) as it eventually requires or leads to violent revolution and simply doesn't work.
The metaphor I like for equality of outcome is the Borg from Star Trek. They're a hive-mind race of cyborgs with a few queens. There is no individuality at all. They violently assimilate other lifeforms and their technology into their never-ending search for perfection. Perhaps an even better example is the satirical and dystopian science-fiction short story “Harrison Bergeron” by Kurt Vonnegut, in which a future America has passed three new Constitutional Amendments requiring all citizens to be fully equal. No one is allowed to be smarter, better-looking, more physically abled, or more skilled at anything than anyone else. This is enforced by the Handicapper General’s agents, who enforce the equality laws by making some citizens wear handicaps in order to level the societal playing field, because being smarter, more attractive, or better at something than anyone else is a form of oppression against them. Read it!
()
The Q&A was also interesting, especially the last two questions (recorded in the video above). One woman asked a rather good question about when is it okay to protest. She mentioned how he was protested at Queens University, and how some students interrupted the beginning of his talk, infringing on the right of people there to hear him speak; the folks who protested around the nation for gun control; and about a kid who was shot in his grandmother's backyard and folks blocked traffic, interfering with the normal routine in order to draw attention to an issue, preventing people from getting to and from where they had to go. His response was that it's okay to protest as long as you're willing to take responsibility for your actions and the consequences and not when you aren’t. He called today's emphasis on activism a pathological hangover from the 1960s. Granted, it doesn’t appear that Peterson thinks the Civil Rights Movement is a giant mistake (which he’s been accused of by those who misunderstand his point here), which would obviously be ridiculous, but that because these methods worked at a time when it was crucially important to implement them that it has left a lasting impression that this is the only respectable and acceptable way to solve problems in our society, and that for professors to teach the youth such a notion is a huge mistake.
The last question was on mass shootings and the gun control issue, the basic question was: what can we do about it? Peterson suggested that it wasn't a good idea to let the government have a monopoly on violent potential (his exact words were “I think it’s a mistake to set up a society where the only people who get to be dangerous are people who work for the government”) and the reason he thinks this is because he believes that would be more dangerous in the long run, not less. He analyzed the type of person that would do it, suggesting that these people are full of resentment, hate, and pathologically narcissistic. He further suggested that we need to have a discussion about why malevolent revenge is a bad idea, and that it would be a good idea to do it in the schools. The reason why it's wrong is that it makes a bad situation worse. He used the metaphor of getting into a fight with your loved ones at a funeral.
This fits in with his overall philosophy of responsibility and focusing on yourself first before trying to correct the ills of the world. Overall, I enjoyed seeing him live. Peterson’s got a genuine vibe about him and it's something you can almost grasp watching him on stage. I really would have loved to have been able to meet him, if only for a hot minute. I can hardly wait to see what he gets up to next. If you haven’t read the book yet (and you want the other six rules) then get yourself a copy and do so.