Think of your garden variety conservative provocateurs (your Milos, your Blairs, your Gavins) - they appeal to their audiences by speaking to beliefs and values otherwise shunned by society.
Some of the social media reaction around Dr Jordan Peterson’s upcoming appearance on Q&A puts him in the same basket.
But many of Dr Peterson’s fans see his self-help teachings as a revelation; nuanced sociological theories that justify their version of the world and how they fit into it.
The situation gets murky when young men (and it is mostly young men) use Dr Peterson’s arguments to suit their own hateful agenda.
Who is Jordan Peterson?
Dr Peterson taught psychology for over 20 years in some of North America and Canada’s most prestigious universities.
Throughout the ‘90s and most of the ‘00s he dealt in dense personality studies; namely how creativity works in humans.
His work before he gained public profile was well regarded within the psychological community.
“His work in personality assessment ... is very solid and well respected,” David Watson, a psychology professor at Notre Dame University told Vox.
The beginning of his rise to fame began in 2016 when the Canadian Parliament was dealing with a bill that would outlaw discrimination against people on the basis of “gender identity” or “gender expression.” It was called Bill C-16.
In September 2016, Dr Peterson dropped a series of videos on his YouTube channel decrying the slippery slope of political correctness that the bill would lead too.
His argument was that branding the misgendering of someone as hate speech encroached on his freedom of speech, “That’s why I made the video. I said that we were in danger of placing the refusal to use certain kinds of language into the same category as Holocaust denial,” he said.
The 57 minute YouTube lecture picked up, gaining 400,000 views in a month. There were protests against him across Canada. He did the rounds on national and international TV. Boom! A powerful ideological figurehead is born.
A frame from Dr Peterson's Bill C-16 video. Source: YouTube
What does Jordan Peterson believe?
Dr Peterson, possibly above all, furiously denounces Marxism.
In a video lecture of his, Identity politics and the Marxist lie of white privilege (1.7 million views at time of writing) he introduces the concept that human society is defined by biology - some people are simply more gifted than others and that life is pain for all.
He argues that communism has been repackaged as postmodernism and is being pushed by left-leaning liberals to society’s ultimate detriment.
Marxist theorists are skeptical about Dr Peterson’s ideas, Harrison Fluss of Marxist journal Historical Materialism told Vox that “He connects the two in [an] overarching conspiracy theory.”
Who's listening?
Dr Peterson says that 80% of his million-plus YouTube subscribers are male.
One of his main ideologies is that modern society has induced a “crisis of masculinity”. That men have been oppressed by increasing efforts towards equality from a 21st century world.
He frequently spruiks ‘enforced monogamy’ - that our modern view of fluid relationships is contributing to male perpetrated violence.
It’s an ideology that speaks to the incel movement; a group of disenfranchised men that blame women for not having sex with them, hence their “involuntary celibacy”.
In a profile with the - when discussing the Toronto man who self-identified as an incel and drove his car into a crowd, killing 10 people - Dr Peterson said, “He was angry at God because women were rejecting him. The cure for that is enforced monogamy.”
Dr Peterson would later explain that his concept of enforced monogamy was warped by the article. That what he argues for is not a government mandated system, but a return to the mid-20th century reverence for monogamous values.
“Men get frustrated when they are not competitive in the sexual marketplace. Frustrated men tend to become dangerous, particularly if they are young,” he said.
“The dangerousness of frustrated young men (even if that frustration stems from their own incompetence) has to be regulated socially. The manifold social conventions tilting most societies toward monogamy constitute such regulation.”
Dr Peterson’s critics argue he speaks to his predominantly white, male audience and tells them the same things as any other alt-right mouthpiece; your failure is not your fault, you are the one being oppressed, you are the victim.
As writer and Canadaland podcast host Jesse Brown puts it, “The underlying mass-appeal of [Dr Peterson] is that he gives white men permission to stop pretending that they care about other people’s grievances.”
And his audience responds to this message with mass adoration.
His most recent self-help book 12 Rules For Life has sold over two million copies and up until recently he was raking in $80,000 worth of donations a month via a membership platform called Patreon.
He deleted his account in December 2018 in protest after Patreon made moves to remove political personalities from the platform.
Click on a Dr Peterson video on YouTube and underneath will be a banner for his branded merch.
The paradox of Peterson
Of course, Dr Peterson’s critics can skew his profile towards monstrous if they cherry-pick enough. Taking Dr Peterson’s new book and its teaching at face value, it comes off as rather twee.
His 12 rules for life begin with “Stand up straight with your shoulders back” and end with “Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street”.
His fan-base praise him for being so fiercely passionate, frequently crying during his talks - showing men that it’s ok to express emotion. He points towards a new way of raising boys so they don’t bottle up anger to the point of explosion.
His 2013, pre-fame TED talk on potential urges people to pay “attention to the things that manifest themselves to you”, to become a “stronger and more informed person”, to become an “individual” who doesn’t fall “prey to pathological belief systems”. It’s not controversial. It has also gained less than 400,000 views in the six years it’s been online.
His break-through video about Bill-C16 got 400,000 views in one month.
After a decades long career he’d finally found an audience.
