In Defence Of Jordan Peterson

Jordan Peterson is a Canadian psychology professor and the author of the best selling book, 12 Rules For Life. He has been called “the most influential public intellectual in the western world right now.” He is an internet celebrity, and his videos on youtube have over 145,000,000 views.

After reading his book and watching his videos, I found myself becoming more and more drawn to his ideas. It’s hard to disagree with someone who has such a deep and profound respect for the truth.

He stood for something he believed in, was thrown head first into controversy, and was criticized heavily for it. It’s that type of conviction and martyrdom that speaks volumes about the faith he had in his ideas. He doesn’t ask you to blindly accept them either. His messages warn you of the danger of accepting ideologies unthinkingly. Instead, he highlights the importance of discourse and encourages continuous dialogue and debate.

Peterson’s views are complicated. They get tied into deeper philosophical discussions around perceived objective realities and identity politics.

He is commonly misunderstood to represent an agenda of extreme right wing politics and he gets accused of enforcing and justifying young, white, male privilege.

It’s almost like he’s being accused of “corrupting the youth.”

Where have we heard that before?

Read any article or critique of his work from the political left and you can see how outrageous some of their claims are. He’s blamed for tricking young men into embracing racism, transphobia, and misogyny. They say he is the leader of a cult. He’s even been called the “Nazi-Philosopher.”

The irony is, the things they say about his ideas are the exact reason we need people like him in the world. He talks about the dangers of political correctness and how people “weaponize compassion.” He says the PC-authoritarian culture is corrupting the ability for us to have intelligent conversations, as opposed to ideological ones.

He argues that our society is not a hierarchical organization emanating from a tyrannical capitalist patriarchy, but is a natural hierarchy based on competency, that has nothing to do with sociocultural construction.

It’s this idea that gives young, dispossessed, white men an alternative to the shame and guilt that they might feel from the pressures of left wing extremist politics.

I agree with most of what Peterson says, but not everything. He is a human being with the very human capability of failure and weakness. He gets criticized and villianized constantly. Right now, Peterson is recovering from a drug addiction. He was taking anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medication and he became addicted to benzodiazepines. As you can imagine, opponents of his use this as cannon fodder to illegitimize his ideas and the messages from his book. They are ad-hominem attacks, and they aim to discredit the good he has done for people like myself and millions of others. It’s sad and It’s hard to watch.

Jordan Peterson has changed my life. He’s one of the few heroes of mine who is still alive. Other authors, philosophers, and thinkers who have shaped me into who I am are long gone. I’m sure they all had opponents and nay-sayers in their time, but we don’t hear about them. Time sifted out the truth.

I’m not sure which side of history Peterson will be on 100 years from now. I do know that he’s made my life better. He’s helped me to not blame others for my own problems. He’s inspired me to be more open minded. He’s made me conscious of my own ideologies and the dangers of having too tight a grip on them.

When I think about Peterson’s negative reception by the world, it reminds me of the resentment a child feels when their parents teach them a hard lesson. The child is too ignorant to realize that they’re being taught a lesson with his or her best interest in mind.

Whether or not you agree with his political views, It’s hard to argue with his lessons about personal responsibility.

Personal responsibility doesn’t mean acting selfishly, or thinking only about yourself. According to Peterson, It means engaging in activities that contain the seeds of growth. It means having the courage to be vulnerable. It means voluntarily shouldering the biggest burden you can bear. It means to act as if truth were the path to enlightenment. It means transforming the chaos of potential into the realities of habitual order.

Responsibility is tied to the stoic principle of realizing it’s not external things that matter, but the view you take of them. You can read my post, How Stoicism Can Help Us In Times Of Crisis, for a deeper dive into that subject.

This is a quote of Peterson’s that i’ll break down, and you can judge for yourself whether his ideas merit the remarks being said of him.

“Life is suffering

Love is the desire to see unnecessary suffering ameliorated

Truth is the handmaiden of love

Dialogue is the pathway to truth

Humility is recognition of personal insufficiency and the willingness to learn

To learn is to die voluntarily and be born again, in great ways and small

So speech must be untrammeled 

So that dialogue can take place

So that we can all humbly learn 

So that truth can serve love

So that suffering can be ameliorated

So that we can all stumble forward to the Kingdom of God”

There is a lot going on there, I know, but read it again slowly. I’ll be returning to it periodically.

First, i’d like to highlight the last line of the quote. The Kingdom of God doesn’t have to be the traditional Christian interpretation. In the quote, the word God can be substituted with concepts like Goodness, Morality, Enlightenment, Nirvana, Nature, or the Logos. Dealers choice, but the message is still the same.

Lets look at Peterson’s quote in more detail.

Life is suffering.

“Life is suffering” is the common translation of the Buddhist concept called Duhkha. It’s the first of The Four Truths in Buddhism.

Pain, grief, anxiety, depression, starvation, murder, war, social and racial injustice, fear, greed, corruption, anger, envy, disease, and death. The list is long. Suffering isn’t biased either. Rich or poor, black or white, man or women. It’s inevitable.

“When you compare the sorrows of real life to the pleasures of the imaginary one, you will never want to live again, only to dream forever.”

Alaxander Dumas

Even to love is to suffer. This is from the British theologian and author of the Chronicles of Narnia series, C.S. Lewis.

“There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket – safe, dark, motionless, airless – it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.”

C.s. Lewis

The only way to avoid suffering is to avoid all the things that make life meaningful. Peterson says to accept the terrible responsibility of life. He says to pick up our suffering before it gets any worse for you.

“The chief task in life is simply this: to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control, and which have to do with the choices I actually control.”

Epictetus

You have the choice of how you think about your suffering. You can be angry, resentful, and nihilistic, or you can practice acceptance and overcome your suffering and grow. You can choose to look for the positives in your situation.

You only get one shot at life, so choose to live it to its full potential. If you find something meaningful in the process, it might make it all worth while.

“It is we ourselves who must answer the questions that life asks of us, and to these questions we can respond only by being responsible for our existence”

Viktor Frankl

Love is the desire to see unnecessary suffering ameliorated.

“It is the individual who is not interested in his fellow man who has the greatest difficulties in life and provides the greatest injury to others. It is from among such individuals that all human failures spring”

Alfred Adler

You might be asking: How is someone who is focused on their own personal responsibility and individuality supposed to help others?

This is where some people get hung up on Peterson’s message. Certain political actions in our society aim at a top down approach. They regulate and pass laws that, in theory, will trickle down and prevent or mitigate some unwanted behaviour. Many of these are band-aid solutions that don’t address the root issue. Peterson’s messages, as far as I’ve understood them, are a bottom up approach. It’s what JFK meant when he said: “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”

If someone doesn’t love themselves, or take an interest in their own well being, chances are they won’t be able to help alleviate the suffering of others. It’s why we put oxygen masks on ourselves first, or why health care workers get masks before the public.

Lets hear back from C.S. lewis again.

“Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one’s first feeling, ‘Thank God, even they aren’t quite so bad as that,’ or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils.”

C.S. Lewis

Peterson says that by transcending our own tragedies, we accept our own state of being. This allows us to accept other’s limitations, enabling us to love their existence despite their vulnerabilities.

When you take personal responsibility for your own suffering, it builds your character. It builds your will-power and self-control. Those might seem like selfish things, but if they are strengthened, so too is your character and therefore, your willingness and ability to help others.

“The purpose of life is to not be happy. It is to be useful, to be honourable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Before I continue, I’m compelled to remind myself about why I’m writing these posts. They are primarily for my children and my children’s children. They are small glimpses into who I am. They are lessons I’ve learned and adapted to my life that have made my life more meaningful, fulfilled, and happy. Sometimes, when I feel the risk of sounding preachy or inconsiderate, I have to tell myself that as a parent, my job isn’t to be friends with my children, but to prepare them for the harsh realities of the world.

Truth is the handmaiden of love.

The truth can be difficult to hear, but the sting wears off quickly if it’s understood to have come from a place of love.

Hard truths are necessary sometimes, but love is a powerful motivator. The general, Napoleon Bonaparte said: “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”

How about a friend?

If you care about someone, sometimes they need to hear the truth. They need to be interrupted. An intervention is a good example. Guilt is a better motivator than shame.

It’s hard to be honest. We’re so used to telling small lies, either to prevent others from being offended, or to not risk losing them as a friend. Maybe it says more about them than it does about us.

“Do not rebuke mockers or they will hate you; rebuke the wise and they will love you.”

Proverbs 9:8

It might not be like this if our egos weren’t so fragile.

Dialogue is the pathway to truth.

Dialogue is hard because it means letting go of your ego. Letting go of your ideologies and preconceived notions.

“Prejudices, it is well known, are most difficult to eradicate from the heart whose soil has never been loosened or fertilised by education: they grow there, firm as weeds among stones.”

Charolette Bronte

We all have ideologies that we are too stubborn to reflect upon. We think: we are right, they are wrong, and a debate about the issue will be pointless.

Educating yourself on all sides of an issue might shift your perspective and change your mind, but it’s not easy.

“That which you most need is found where you least want to look”

Carl Jung

One of my favourite things to do in conversations is say “I never thought of that.” I work with an individual who holds a wildly different set of beliefs than me. We have some pretty heated debates in the break room. We’re able to ‘mostly’ put our egos aside and take the time to consider each others points. Neither of us is afraid to back down from a conversation because it might dismantle our world views. Rather, we both welcome it. I’ve even had to thank him a few times for opening my eyes to a perspective I had previously been blind to.

“If someone can prove me wrong and show me my mistake in any thought or action, I shall gladly change. I seek the truth, which never harmed anyone: the harm is to persist in one’s own self-deception and ignorance.”

Marcus aurelius

Humility is recognition of personal insufficiency and the willingness to learn.

“If you wish to be good, first believe you are bad”

Epictetus

How many of you look to blame others when things don’t go your way. It’s like a natural instinct, to deflect. The other choice is to take responsibility and ask yourself how or what you can do to change for the better. Be humble. Look internally first.

“If anyone tells you that a certain person speaks ill of you, do not make excuses about what is said of you, but answer, ‘He was ignorant of my other faults, else he would not have mentioned these alone”

Epictetus

We can learn some humility from the original “corrupter of youth”:

“I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.”

Socrates

In my last few posts I’ve mentioned a few times about our tendency to be governed by our emotions and how our ideas are influenced by our culture.

It creates an us vs them mentality. Tribalism becomes a game you play. You get so off track, it’s not about learning or educating yourself, but winning the game. Taking responsibility in that situation means to admit when your wrong, and to find the faults in yourself first. 

It might also mean to avoid victimhood. There is comfort in being a victim. Accountability is removed, you get attention, and you are pitied. It feels like everyone owes you something. But being a victim can become a mentality, be careful of letting victimhood trickle into your character. It can manifest itself into impulsive pleasure seeking behaviour and lead to the abandonment of responsibility.

To learn is to die voluntarily and be born again, in great ways and small

“A consciousness of wrong doing is the first step to salvation”

Epicurus

You build your world views around a foundation of beliefs. They are the pillars that hold up everything else. When you learn something new, there is the risk of those pillars collapsing. It can be painful and earth shaking. But if you get through it, and you emerge from the rubble, you are one step closer to truth and love.

In her book, The Artists Way, Julia Cameron says that when you lose your misconceptions, you start to see things more clearly. Clarity is what creates change, but change is scary. It’s easier to cling to the past because its familiar. Except it’s not always what we need.

As your “old you” is tossed out, as she suggests, we should: “Be prepared for a burst of tears and of laughter…Think of yourself as an accident victim walking away from the crash: your old life has crashed and burned; your new life isn’t apparent yet. You may feel yourself to be temporarily without a vehicle. Just keep walking.”

As you might have noticed from the excess of quotes in this post, it wasn’t hard to find harmonizing words to complement Peterson’s. You might argue that his ideas are vague and ambiguous. I would argue instead, that truth has a habit of popping up throughout history without any visible links between its advocates. It’s what Mark Twain meant when he said:

“If you tell the truth you don’t have to remember anything”

Mark Twain

One of my favourite things about Peterson, is that he is extremely careful and meticulous with his words. Truth is paramount to him, and he understands the importance our words can have.

He encourages you to accept life despite all of its suffering. Accomplish something, and be proud of those accomplishments. Most of the practical advice in this post can be summarized in the short quote: “Easy choices, hard Life. Hard choices, easy life.” It’s something I repeat to myself when I get overwhelmed with the complexities of life. These are heavy topics, it helps to simplify things sometimes.

Everything worth while and meaningful in life comes from sacrifice and responsibility. Choose to give up instant gratification. Let go of self-compromising and harmful belief systems. Realize that the easier path is rarely the answer. Put vulnerability aside. Have an open mind. Love others. Be humble, and don’t use victimhood as an excuse.

Do any of these messages have any racist, misogynistic, and discriminatory undertones to them?

Perhaps it’s Peterson’s most vocal critics who are the ones with discriminatory presuppositions. Maybe they are projecting their own insecurities and egos onto an individual who wants to help people. It could be as simple as that. It’s a shame they can’t see it.

I encourage you to look into his videos and books for yourself. As the Reading Rainbow host, LeVar Burton used to say: “You don’t have to take my word for it.”

Thanks for reading.