Jordan Peterson and the “New Right” Politics of Self-Help

(c) Richard Bolstad 2023

What is Jordan Peterson’s “Field”

Jordan Peterson was a Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto. In 2018 he took time off teaching to publish his second book, a self-help text called “12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos”, followed in 2021 by “Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life”. Since then he has become one of the most popular self-help advocates in the world, his first book alone selling over 2 million copies. As a writer of self-help books myself, I want to start by acknowledging that this is an impressive success. “12 Rules for Life” clearly has an appeal to a wide audience! And that’s why I will finish this critique of his work by suggesting where you might go to get better information if the concerns about “freedom of speech” in his books appealed to you.

In 2022 Peterson signed a deal to be the resident “personal development” expert at “The Daily Wire”, a right wing news outlet that disputes the truth of human-made climate change, opposes Covid-19 vaccination and public health measures, and is identified by numerous fact checking sites as a primary source of false information on social media (In 2019, Facebook identified 14 anonymous pages which were set up by The Daily Wire to help it create more than 70% of the false news that Facebook was dealing with). Obviously, The Daily Wire gets most of its support by claiming to defend freedom against a hostile agenda promoted by scientists and medical sources (Baragona, 2020).

Before we look at Peterson’s approach to stuff that is in his field (He has a PhD in Psychology) let’s note that he confidently claims to know more about things like climate science than the actual experts do, and to believe that climate science experts are engaged in a conspiracy to trick us into harming human society. In a famous interview with Joe Rogan (Readfearn, 2022) Peterson claimed that climate science was wrong because you can’t predict over time what will happen. “Peterson told Rogan that because the climate was so complex, it couldn’t be accurately modelled. He said: “Another problem that bedevils climate modelling, too, which is that as you stretch out the models across time, the errors increase radically. And so maybe you can predict out a week or three weeks or a month or a year, but the farther out you predict, the more your model is in error.” This is a complete misunderstanding of climate science. It is an accurate description of weather forecasts: it’s harder to tell what the weather will be like in several years on a particular day, but climate is literally the longer term patterns of such weather, and is always studied in long term. This naive comment of Peterson’s gives us a great example of how his interactions with the scientific community go, of course. In an article by Peterson in 2022 (“Peddlers of environmental doom have shown their true totalitarian colours”) he criticizes governments adopting climate crisis action, saying “We do not believe, finally and most absolutely, that your declared emergency and the panic you sow because of it means that you should now be ceded all necessary authority. So leave us alone, you centralisers; you worshippers of Gaia; you sacrificers of the wealth and property of others; you would-be planetary saviours; you Machievellian pretenders and virtue-signallers, objecting to power, all the while you gather it around you madly.” Who is he speaking to? Scientists and Elected Governments. And he believes that he is fighting for freedom, on behalf of a humanity that is being forced to do things they should not be forced to do. He believes that he and the tiny minority of climate scientists who don’t believe the research, are being “cancelled”. And right here, we are down the “conspiracy theory rabbit hole”.

Of course, Jordan Peterson also claims to know more about appropriate Covid-19 response than the authorities in the World Health Organization. (Peterson and Bhattacharya, 2023). He maintains that the “system of ideas” that were used to manage the pandemic were pushed by an international “Cartel” and that the media fell into line with them, while the Biden White House acted as a “shill” for Pfizer pharmaceuticals. He opposed vaccination, claiming it posed more threat to many than infection with the virus would, and opposed community lockdowns and mask mandates, saying that all these public health responses are inconsistent with liberal democracy and that they are comparable to the Soviet Union’s rule under Stalinism. As a nurse trained in Community Nursing response to infectious diseases, I could write pages about this, but mainly, would refer readers to the results we got in New Zealand by using these measures more effectively (Baker and Wilson, 2022).

I have no objection to a Psychologist branching out into other fields: I trained as a psychotherapist, and I do it myself. What I do feel suspicious of is a man who branches out into areas where he has no expertise to make comments that contradict the experts in each field, and to claim that the reason those experts all share a different belief to him is that they are part of a massive conspiracy. And Peterson’s claim that he was an advisor to one of the people on a UN panel on Climate Change (Peterson, 2022) hardly carries weight when he appears not to know that he is contradicting every recommendation made by the panel (which he was not technically a member of: Howell, 2022; United Nations, 2012). I recommend extreme caution following any of Peterson’s other out-of-field claims. For example, he and his daughter Mikhaila claim to live on a diet consisting entirely of beef, salt and water (Woods, 2023). OK, I am not a dietician either, but I am a Registered Nurse, and I gotta say this is unusual. Read Jessica Migala’s summary of the usual dietician cautions about his choice (Migala, 2022). Peterson claims the diet improved his anxiety level, increased his strength, and healed his daughter’s autoimmune disorder. Anyway, in the rest of the article I will focus more on Peterson’s claims about human relationships.

The Fear of Gender Flexibility

A key focus of The Daily Wire, and of Jordan Peterson in recent years, is epitomized in its documentary movie, “What is a Woman”, which features Jordan Peterson and criticizes both social acceptance of Transgender surgery, and the use of personal pronouns other than the choice of he/him or she/her given at birth by parents. In fact, Peterson refused to alter his use of pronouns (or indeed name) to acknowledge that Canadian transgender actor Eliot Page wanted to be known as Eliot Page, and not his previous name. Peterson was suspended from being able to use Twitter until he agreed to change his comment, and of course he claimed that Twitter was banning him, and even that he was being “cancelled” for speaking his truth. This refusal to accept the gender identity of the person being spoken about or to challenges the very existence of three separate but overlapping groups who are questioning the limits of traditional gender categories and for various reasons are not “cisgender” (meaning not the gender they were assigned at birth):

1) transgender individuals (people identified as one of the traditional two genders at birth, who then identify themselves as the other gender, and who in many countries can now elect to have gender or sex reassignment therapy). Transgender organizations generally say that less than 0.02% (one in 5000) of the world population have this type of variation in gender identity, though a study in Brazil found that 0.69% of the population identify themselves as transgender (Spizzirri et alia, 2021).

2) intersex individuals (people born with biological characteristics which do not fit the typical binary notions of male or female bodies: for example, people whose sex chromosomes are neither XX nor XY, and people who have genitals looking similar to those of both traditional categories). Intersex organizations generally say that 1.7% of the world population have such variations, apparent either at birth or at puberty (Blackless et alia, 2000).

3) non-binary individuals (people who identify as intermediate between male and female, or as a third gender, or as being fluid and moving between various choices, whatever their particular sexual attractions and biochemical state). Various research studies have identified 0.4% of population in European states as non-binary, but a study in Brazil found that 1.19% of the population actually consider themselves neither male nor female, while not necessarily using the term “non-binary” (Spizzirri et alia, 2021).

Note that gender identity is a separate matter from sexual orientation, which also occurs not only on a continuum from heterosexual/straight to gay/lesbian, but also includes polysexual, pansexual and asexual. The existence of all three non-cis-gender groups has been described in almost all cultures from as early as historical records exist, and gender ambiguous art (the bearded goddesses of fertility in ancient Cyprus, for example: Winbladh, 2012) is a part of the human heritage dating back to the Paleolithic. Many traditional societies have, as Marie-Louise Winbaldh notes, seen these individuals as expressing a sacred and essential variability that has only recently been “cancelled” by modern fundamentalist Christianity. For this perhaps 2% of the world population, the apparently simple Daily Wire question “What is a woman” contains too many biological and social presuppositions to be answered in a universal way without denying their very existence. Hippocrates, the Ancient Greek “father of modern medicine” emphasized that doctors (who get to see these variations) always confront the reality that gender is a continuum, with what he called “hermaphroditism” as the perfect balance place. Many early Christian theorists such as St Augustine held that Adam, the first human, was by definition a hermaphrodite, and the separation of Eve from Adam’s body created gender, so that this non-gender state represented an original purity (DeVun, 2018). Sadly, in modern research, members of all three groups generally are more likely to have violence directed at them (and where they are more visible, for example in Brazil, they are far more likely to be murdered than any other group), and more likely to be discriminated against in getting jobs, being allowed into public toilets etc. (Spizzirri et alia, 2021).

The Daily Wire uses Jordan Peterson as its Psychologist explaining gender diversity, which he actually views as merely a “sociological contagion’ – a disease of thinking. “Rogan also asked Peterson to share his thoughts on what is behind the surge in people identifying as transgender. Peterson explained that the trend is being driven by “sociological contagion,” and compared it to “the satanic ritual abuse accusations that emerged in daycares in the 1980s.”” (Wilson, 2023). Having said he would rather die than say Eliot Page’s name the way he asks for it to be said, Peterson claimed that the new Canadian law (Bill C-16, passed in June 2017) would make him a criminal for saying the wrong words and wind him up in a Canadian version of the Gulag Archipelago. The law actually simply forbids discrimination on the basis of gender identity, and Toronto University Law Professor Brenda Cossman emphasises the absurdity of Peterson’s self-victimization, saying ““The misuse of gender pronouns, without more, cannot rise to the level of a crime,” she says. “It cannot rise to the level of advocating genocide, inciting hatred, hate speech or hate crimes … (it) simply cannot meet the threshold.”” (Dragecevic, 2017)

Jordan Peterson and the Second Rise of Fascism

How serious does Jordan Peterson think the social contagion of gender politics is? It turns out that while Canada doesn’t think his arrogance reaches the level of genocide, he certainly thinks the “moral degeneracy” of gender diversity is worth answering with genocide. In a famous Youtube video “Russia Vs Ukraine or Civil War in the West?” Peterson (2023a) argues that Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is due to the west’s moral degeneracy (a claim Putin has repeatedly made himself). He said “And are we degenerate in a profoundly threatening manner? I think the answer to that may well be yes. The idea that we are ensconced in a culture war has become a rhetorical commonplace. How serious is that war? Is it serious enough to increase the probability that Russia, say, will be motivated to invade and potentially incapacitate Ukraine merely to keep the pathological West out of that country, which is a key part of the historically Russian sphere of influence?”

Peter McLaren is a left wing Professor at Chapman University and Co-Director and International Ambassador for Global Ethics and Social Justice. He responded with alarm when Jordan Peterson began suggesting that the invasion of Ukraine might be the only way to purge the evil of transgenderism from our society. “Peterson argued that Vladimir Putin was forced into the war with Ukraine in order to prevent ‘degenerate’ US culture from breaching the borders of Russia. ‘The culture war is now truly part of why we have a war [in Ukraine],’ Peterson said…. Peterson may resent [female-male trans actor] Elliot Page for showing off his abs, and Putin might be jealous, but believing that Ukraine deserves to be destroyed for its own good and the good of Russia over this IS both wrong-headed and a dangerous form of lexical opportunism masked as profound and complicated thought.” 

It’s not just left wing writers who are shocked by this support of Putin though. David French is a right wing lawyer and evangelical Christian, an opponent of gay rights in general. But he is clear (French, 2022) that allowing people to live in gay or transgender relationships is allowing a “sin” of a vastly different kind to invading Ukraine and committing genocide, and he distanced himself strongly from Peterson on this issue. He said “The right’s disproportionate commitment to moral equivalence in the Russia-Ukraine war is explained partly by pure contrarianism (opposing anything the “elite” supports) and partly by a profoundly negative view of modern Western cultural life, and a pre-war view of Putin as a muscular representative of specifically anti-woke Christian nationalism. There’s no question that Putin has forged a close relationship with the Russian Orthodox Church, but that is an indictment of the Russian Church, not an endorsement of Putin. He’s a brutal war criminal who employed his military in indiscriminate attacks against civilians in the wars in Chechnya and Syria well before the wholesale slaughter in Ukraine.”

In 2023, Jordan Peterson stepped in to a Twitter discussion to explain Christianity to Pope Francis of the Catholic Church. The Pope had said “Social Justice demands that we fight against the causes of poverty: inequality and the lack of labour, land, and lodging; against those who deny social and labour rights; and against the culture that leads to taking away the dignity of others.” Peterson replied “There is nothing Christian about Social Justice. Redemptive salvation is a matter of the individual soul.” (Peterson, 2023b) So what does Peterson mean when he advocates Putin as a hero of the Christian church, saving the world from a west that is “degenerate in a profoundly threatening manner”? He does not deny that Christianity entails social action: the only question is which social action. For Peterson, Christianity is compatible with Putin fighting Ukrainians, but not with Pope Francis fighting poverty.

From Modi’s India to Bolsonaro’s Brazil, from Putin’s Russia to Trump’s USA, fascism is rising (Mason, 2021, p. 3-77). As in the 1930s, it does not so much declare itself as aiming for a totalitarian government based on terror, as merely aiming to create a male dominated ethno-state, where people can be “free” of the uncomfortable sensitivities of “modern values” such as gender equality and ethnic diversity. Once again, as in the 1930s, it claims to “tell it like it is”.

The last time fascism rose, in the 1930s, psychology was in its infancy, and the Freudian psychotherapy of Wilhelm Reich and Erich Fromm offered the most popular way of understanding human non-rational impulses. “In the 1920s, key figures from the Freudian movement gravitated towards Marxism. Wilhelm Reich, one of Freud’s star pupils, joined the KPD in 1930 and convinced the party to launch an association for Proletarian Sexual Politics (abbreviated to Sex-Pol), which at its height had 40,000 members. Erich Fromm, another Freudian psychiatrist, joined the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt (commonly known as the Frankfurt School) to head up a research program into working-class attitudes to fascism. Reich and Fromm made real-time attempts both to theorize fascism and to fight it.” (Mason, 2021, p 179). The Freudians proposed that it was the fear of freedom, especially the fear of sexual freedom, that engaged popular support for fascism. This explains why modern fascists are obsessed with stopping gender diversity and rolling back women’s rights. Announcing his “special military operation” against Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Vladimir Putin said the West “sought to destroy our traditional values and force on us their false values that would erode us, our people from within, the attitudes that they have been aggressively imposing on their countries, attitudes that are directly leading to degradation and degeneration, because they are contrary to human nature.” (Putin, 2022) This statement reveals, in its very avoidance of direct language about issues such as women’s right not to be beaten by men, and about legalization of homosexuality, that the Freudian critique was on track. Putin’s speech reveals, in what it cannot say, a fear of even mentioning the freedoms that must be stopped.

Jordan Peterson is the key Psychologist supporting the rise of American Fascism. As Fascists always have, he makes it seem that he is merely defending the “freedom” to question gender and other “identity” politics. He demands the right to say what he thinks, about Jews, Women, Black people, Ukrainians, children etc. The invasion of Ukraine reveals what he is willing to accept if given this “freedom”.

Jordan Peterson’s Personal Struggle Against Equalitarian Relationships

What are the 12 “Rules” that Jordan Peterson recommends in his viral self-help books? Many of them are not what you would expect from the “self-help” genre. For example, one (Rule Number 5) is about the importance of hitting your children. He explains “If you flick your two-year-old with your finger just after he smacks the baby on the head with a wooden block, he will get the connection, and be at least somewhat less willing to smack her again in the future. That seems like a good outcome…. For the child who is pushing the limits in a spectacularly inspired way, a swat across the backside can indicate requisite seriousness on the part of a responsible adult. There are some situations in which even that will not suffice, partly because some children are very determined, exploratory, and tough, or because the offending behaviour is truly severe.” (Peterson, 2018, p. 140) There is not a single piece of evidence quoted for this and in fact decades of research shows that violent punishment of children is associated with negative effects in the moment and with severe negative effects longer term “The evidence is clear and compelling — physical punishment of children and youth plays no useful role in their upbringing and poses only risks to their development. The conclusion is equally compelling — parents should be strongly encouraged to develop alternative and positive approaches to discipline” (Sedarati, 2020; Durant et alia, 2012)

But isn’t Peterson a Psychologist? This is his field. Can’t we trust him to follow, or at least acknowledge the science? Apparently not. Rule Number 1 in Peterson’s book is about the importance of acting tough, and accepting the fundamental hierarchy of nature, exemplified with a long study of lobsters. Repeatedly, Peterson claims that hierarchy has been natural and necessary to social interactions ever since lobsters first evolved 480 million years ago. “Sometimes it is known as the Matthew Principle (Matthew 25:29), derived from what might be the harshest statement ever attributed to Christ: “to those who have everything, more will be given; from those who have nothing, everything will be taken.” You truly know you are the Son of God when your dicta apply even to crustaceans. Back to the fractious shellfish: it doesn’t take that long before lobsters, testing each other out, learn who can be messed with and who should be given a wide berth—and once they have learned, the resultant hierarchy is exceedingly stable. All a victor needs to do, once he has won, is to wiggle his antennae in a threatening manner, and a previous opponent will vanish in a puff of sand before him. A weaker lobster will quit trying, accept his lowly status, and keep his legs attached to his body. The top lobster, by contrast—occupying the best shelter, getting some good rest, finishing a good meal—parades his dominance around his territory, rousting subordinate lobsters from their shelters at night, just to remind them who’s their daddy. The female lobsters (who also fight hard for territory during the explicitly maternal stages of their existence) identify the top guy quickly, and become irresistibly attracted to him. This is brilliant strategy, in my estimation. It’s also one used by females of many different species, including humans.” (Peterson, 2018, p. 9-10). “He describes debate as “combat” on the “battleground” of ideas and hints at physical violence, too. “If you’re talking to a man who wouldn’t fight with you under any circumstances whatsoever, then you’re talking to someone for whom you have absolutely no respect,” he told Paglia last year, adding that it is harder to deal with “crazy women” because he cannot hit them.” (Lynskey, 2018).

Bailey Steinworth (2018) actually is an expert on the subject of lobsters (she is completing a Doctorate on evolutionary developmental marine biology, at the University of Florida, and has published research on the evolutionary biology of sea creatures, including on how they often switch from sexual to asexual reproduction based on environment). Peterson’s desperate bid to claim that “male” and “female” are eternal categories associated with “dominant” and “submissive”, and that asserting dominance is the key to happiness, not only does not fit with human and primate history, but also does not explain the lobsters, an example which he is simply cherry-picking from a field he knows very little about. “As a psychologist, Peterson understandably seems to favor lobsters because of their well-characterized behavioral repertoire, citing among other things research on the neurotransmitter and antidepressant target serotonin. But they’re not the only inhabitant of the ocean that’s been studied in this way. He might also be interested in Aplysia. Like lobsters, sea hares of the genus Aplysia — sea slugs named for sensory structures that resemble rabbit ears — have been used extensively in serotonin studies. Behaviorally, however, lobsters and sea slugs could hardly be more different: While a lobster rarely wants to see another lobster, a sea hare placed on its own will crawl toward chemical cues indicating the presence of other sea hares. In fact, being with other members of its species improves a sea hare’s ability to learn and remember. Peterson’s opening chapter emphasizes that male lobsters compete for the best territory to win access to the most females. By contrast, in sea hare sex, everyone gets a turn. They’re hermaphrodites that mate in groups, alternating between the “male” and “female” roles…. Hermaphroditism is so common that it’s possible the ancestor of all animals was a hermaphrodite, and some of our most distant relatives in the animal kingdom, the ctenophores, are almost all hermaphrodites.” (Steinworth, 2018). From the lowliest sea slugs to our nearest surviving primate relatives the bonobos, nature is full of the kind of gender diversity and flexibility that constantly emerges through human history, and that Fascism is so frightened of. Nature has far more examples of the success of cooperation than of violent dominance at every level. That’s why, in NLP, the principle of rapport is usually considered to be the core determinant of success in relationships, rather than fear of punishment.

Archaeologists David Graeber and David Wengrow were the most recent scholars to urge a radical re-evaluation of the history of dominance in their 2021 book “The Dawn of Everything”, when they argued convincingly that through most stages of human history, including some remarkably recent examples, hierarchy as we now experience it simply did not exist. “It’s not just that some early cities lack class divisions, wealth monopolies, or hierarchies of administration. They exhibit such extreme variability as to imply, from the very beginning, a conscious experimentation in urban form. Contemporary archaeology shows, among other things, that surprisingly few of these early cities contain signs of authoritarian rule.” (Graeber and Wengrow, 2021, p. 283). Only archaeologists have noticed this previously, because, it seems, humanity has a kind of collective amnesia in its school history texts. It implies, however, that, unlike lobsters, humans can collectively take charge of their social relationships. In fact, that is pretty much what my teaching NLP is all about.

How Did Peterson Get Here?

Jordan Peterson is not a marine biologist, despite devoting a whole chapter to the field. But part of why the lobsters are so inspiring to him is that they get high on the brain transmitter serotonin. Peterson’s own use of Serotonin-Reuptake-Inhibitor antidepressants (Sedarati, 2020) is presumably behind his completely unscientific claims saying that they raise serotonin and that this therefore alleviates depression by the same method that injecting serotonin into submissive lobsters makes them more confident. Depressed human beings do not have a deficit of serotonin, and “antidepressant” drugs do not miraculously fix such a deficit, nor do they provide any useful medical response to most depression (Kirsch, 2011). This is so well established that most Psychiatrists deny that they ever made such claims. During a class that was uploaded to his YouTube channel in March 2017, Peterson compared taking antidepressants for depression to taking insulin for diabetes. This is pure nonsense.

Peterson himself later stopped use of antidepressants, on the recommendation of his psychiatrist, and recovered from his addiction to antidepressant and anti-anxiety drugs in a clinic in Russia. His daughter Mikhaila explains “The medication almost killed my dad. He’s a psychologist and even he wasn’t aware of how bad these medications are for some people.” Peterson took antidepressants (Celexa, an SSRI) for two decades and Benzodiazepines for 3 years. He then took ketamine. None of these drugs had the effect that is found usually in clients, according to Peterson. He became more depressed on anti-depressants, more anxious on anti-anxiety drugs and he found the (often inspiring) experience of ketamine a living hell. These are paradoxical responses, or what doctors might even call nocebo. If I was working with a client who exhibited such responses, this would be immensely helpful because it would explain that this person is highly motivated by what NLP calls “polarity responses”. Peterson himself describes it as a useful and masculine characteristic – low “Agreeableness”, in personality trait terms. He says “There’s a personality trait known as agreeableness. Agreeable people are compassionate and polite. And agreeable people get paid less than disagreeable people for the same job. Women are more agreeable than men.” (Friedersdorf, 2018). And with that flourish, as I’m sure you noticed, Peterson suggests that women (like ethnic minority groups, immigrants etc.) have no-one but themselves to blame if they get less than men for doing the same job.

Dorian Lynskey (2018) concludes, about Peterson, that his apparently erudite, pseudo-scientific advocacy of dominance hierarchies is a dangerous smokescreen: “Rather than promoting blatant bigotry, like the far right, he claims that concepts fundamental to social-justice movements, such as the existence of patriarchy and other forms of structural oppression, are treacherous illusions, and that he can prove this with science. Hence: “The idea that women were oppressed throughout history is an appalling theory.” Islamophobia is “a word created by fascists and used by cowards to manipulate morons”. White privilege is “a Marxist lie”. Believing that gender identity is subjective is “as bad as claiming that the world is flat”.” However, when someone quotes Peterson’s words back to him, his “Low Agreeableness” trait prompts him to say a) “I never said that,” and b) “If I did say it, you are taking me out of context”. This denial allows him to make profoundly insulting comments about women, and cultural and gender groups, and then deny that he means what is linguistically presupposed. Reading again his comment on women above, when he says “Agreeable people are compassionate and polite. And agreeable people get paid less than disagreeable people for the same job. Women are more agreeable than men.” he is saying, by simple logic (A=B=C) “women get paid more than men”. He will in other comments:

1. deny this reality of a gender difference in pay rates, saying that checking the statistics of women and men is itself unfair because only personality is affecting pay rates: to claim that something unfair is happening to women is “an appalling theory” and an example of “identity politics”. In this case he is saying that identity politics mistakes correlation for causation.
2. say that due to serotonin, and the eternal biological difference between male and female, such hierarchies are inevitable, such hierarchies are important for stability, women are biologically different and thus destined to be submissive and even that, “it’s a complex problem and we just don’t know what to do about it.” In this case he is saying that since male and female are eternal categories, gender is causative, not merely correlative with inequality, and that is why inequality cannot be removed.

If an interviewer disagrees with one of these claims, quoting Peterson’s previous speeches, he will usually say that the quote is taken out of context and switch to the other claim. I am suggesting that he is using two entirely contradictory lines of argument, and that the only shared logic or context is that they both conclude that we should not demand equal pay for equal work. Lynskey also points out that Peterson is continuously flirting with conspiracy theories, and calmly shifts from stating rational truisms (e.g. this time in history is full of “offence taking” and “victimhood”) to stating irrational conspiracy ideology (This is all a deliberate post-modern Marxist plot which leftists are using to create an authoritarian society). Like many such conspiracy theorists, who claim that it is the scientists and doctors who are creating authoritarianism, he strangely cheers the most obvious authoritarian governments in the world and praises their brutality. “So, what does Peterson actually believe? He bills himself as “a classic British liberal” whose focus is the psychology of belief. Much of what he says is familiar: marginalised groups are infantilised by a culture of victimhood and offence-taking; political correctness threatens freedom of thought and speech; ideological orthodoxy undermines individual responsibility. You can read this stuff any day of the week and perhaps agree with some of it. However, Peterson goes further, into its most paranoid territory. His bete noire is what he calls “postmodern neo-Marxism” or “cultural Marxism”. In a nutshell: having failed to win the economic argument, Marxists decided to infiltrate the education system and undermine western values with “vicious, untenable and anti-human ideas”, such as identity politics, that will pave the road to totalitarianism.” Just to be clear, there is no group of people who call themselves “cultural Marxists” and the debunked conspiracy theory that actual Marxists have secretly shifted their strategy for overthrowing capitalism, to raising gender and cultural identity issues, is the 1990s brainchild of conspiracy theorists such as Andrew Breitbart, founder of Breitbart News. It has no basis in fact. There are people who call their theories postmodern, but Peterson is using the term in an entirely unique way unrelated to “postmodernism” itself. (See my previous article on NLP and social theory for an attempt to explain what postmodern means).

For me as a trainer in the field of “self-help” and alternative Psychology, Jordan Peterson’s fame reveals again the need for clear social theory rather than just clichés, in self-help. I never expected to see a self-help book advocating violence against children, and celebrating the dominance of men over women, but then I never expected to see self-help gurus defending Fascism and genocide as necessary social purification. Sadly, this has always been the way that Fascism won mass support. Remember that fascism claims to “tell it like it is”, but it simultaneously reassures us that the truth cannot be found in science, in reasoned arguments, or in researched “traditional news media” (what Vladimir Putin calls the “empire of lies” – Putin, 2022, and what Hitler called  “Lügenpresse” and Trump called “fake news” – Snyder, p. 73).

Instead, fascism urges us to a primal trust of certain “pure” individuals who “fight for us” in an eternal battle of light against dark. Controlling the stories available in the mainstream media is an essential Fascist task, as Steve Bannon (Trump’s fascist ally) said: “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” (Illing, 2020). Sean Illing points out “Bannon articulated the zone-flooding philosophy well, but he did not invent it. In our time, it was pioneered by Vladimir Putin in post-Soviet Russia. Putin uses the media to engineer a fog of disinformation, producing just enough distrust to ensure that the public can never mobilize around a coherent narrative. In October, I spoke to Peter Pomerantsev, a Soviet-born reality TV producer turned academic who wrote a book about Putin’s propaganda strategy. The goal, he told me, wasn’t to sell an ideology or a vision of the future; instead, it was to convince people that “the truth is unknowable” and that the only sensible choice is “to follow a strong leader.”” Worldwide, Russian propaganda is coordinated through the “troll farm” of the Internet Research Agency (Агентство интернет-исследований) run initially by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a more explicit fascist who also runs the Wagner Group army (named after Hitler’s favorite composer). (Zemlianichenko, 2022; Volchek, 2021).

Peterson is of course emphatically denying that he is “right wing”, let alone promoting “fascism”, “patriarchy” or “white supremacism”. He claims to be merely presenting “facts” about the natural laws of hierarchy and the dangers of diversity. For example, he has frequently quoted (e.g. on his Twitter feed) “The largest study on diversity ever done” – a 2006 study (Putnam 2007) that concluded “New evidence from the US suggests that in ethnically diverse neighbourhoods residents of all races tend to ‘hunker down’. Trust (even of one’s own race) is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friends fewer.” Sounds bad huh? And indeed it does when presented in the way the study was, by the source from which Peterson quotes it (Steve Sailor’s article in the American Conservative titled “Fragmented Future: Multiculturalism doesn’t make vibrant communities but defensive ones.”). Strange that Peterson didn’t quote the original research article, which carried on to say: “In the long run, however, successful immigrant societies have overcome such fragmentation by creating new, cross-cutting forms of social solidarity and more encompassing identities. Illustrations of becoming comfortable with diversity are drawn from the US military, religious institutions, and earlier waves of American immigration.” So who is Steve Sailor, the person whose views on diversity research Peterson is actually quoting instead of the original research? Sailor, who says he believes that other races have lower IQs and need stricter moral guidance compared to white people, is described as a white supremacist by organizations such as the Southern Poverty Law Center (Phillips, 2014). He prefers the term “evolutionary conservative”. His spin on this importance research about multiculturalism is not accepted by the researchers, and it gives us a good example of where Peterson’s “facts” about “natural hierarchies” and “unnatural diversity” are coming from. Claims about the “facts” come thick and fast in Peterson’s online Tweets and videos, and I don’t want to spend time here going through many more of them. I simply want to point out that there are “facts” from research and there are “facts” from fascist claims about research, and it helps to know the difference. Maybe Peterson doesn’t know the difference, but to the extent that he does, he is choosing the fascist spin.

Peterson’s former close friend and colleague, Bernard Schiff, warns: “I have no way of knowing whether Jordan is aware that he is playing out of the same authoritarian demagogue handbook that he himself has described. If he is unaware, then his ironic failure, unwillingness, or inability to see in himself what he attributes to them is very disconcerting….. I was Jordan Peterson’s strongest supporter. Now I think he’s dangerous.” (Schiff, 2018). Schiff, as he says in this essay, has a Trans daughter.

Peterson is just a Psychologist urging the cult of strong leaders (Fascism). That is Rule One in his book, and that is reason enough to stop admiring his work in general. Is there a pinch of truth in what he is saying? Of course. As Dorian Lynskey (2018) said, “Much of what he says is familiar: marginalised groups are infantilised by a culture of victimhood and offence-taking; political correctness threatens freedom of thought and speech; ideological orthodoxy undermines individual responsibility. You can read this stuff any day of the week and perhaps agree with some of it.” But Jordan Peterson is himself a prime example of self-victimization, and certainly not the smartest choice in terms of helping us get out of that. If that was what attracted you to Peterson, my recommendation is to read Tim Urban (“What’s Our Problem?: A Self-Help Book for Societies”). Or even, check out our book “The Transcendence Process Guidebook” and our “Transcendence” video set of training on social change and self development. For more information about Peterson’s own ideas and actions, with 3 hours of video clips and analysis, see Cody Johnston’s 2022 YouTube video “A Brief Look at Jordan Peterson”.

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