Jordan Peterson: The Helpful Rambler

1. Background

The Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson rose to internet fame in the last several years, partly due to his protests against a Canadian law that, he said, would compel people to use other people’s preferred pronouns, including made-up words like “ze” and “xir”. Peterson said he would not use such words. The resulting SJW freak-out brought Peterson to international attention, whereupon many viewers discovered that they rather liked him. He has since quit his university professor job to become a full-time (very successful) self-help author and public speaker.

If you haven’t seen it, this clip from his interview with Cathy Newman is pure gold, as a sort of unintentional comedy: https://youtu.be/CLS-BdjP24Y

JP: [T]he reason that I write about lobsters is because there’s this idea that hierarchical structures are a sociological construct of the Western patriarchy, and that is so untrue that it’s almost unbelievable.

And I use the lobster as an example, because the lobster—we diverged from lobsters in evolutionary history about 350 million years ago—common ancestor—and lobsters exist in hierarchies, and they have a nervous system attuned to the hierarchy. And that nervous system runs on serotonin, just like our nervous systems do. And the nervous system of the lobster and the human being is so similar that anti-depressants work on lobsters. And it’s part of my attempt to demonstrate that the idea of hierarchy has absolutely nothing to do with sociocultural construction, which it doesn’t.

CN: Let me just get this straight. You’re saying that we should organize our societies along the lines of the lobsters?

Anyway, what should we think of JP? Is he good or bad? Why do people love him, and why do other people hate him?

2. The Rambler

JP has come in for a lot of criticism, most of which is politically-motivated BS (e.g., that he’s transphobic, sexist, etc.).

At least one criticism is fair: He’s a bit of a rambler. He gives rather long answers that often seem to free associate a long chain of things. When he comes to what would, for an ordinary interviewee, be the end of the answer, something he says makes him think of something else, and he adds another phrase, then starts going on some more. There is also a lot of metaphorical talk (“the dragon of chaos”); he thinks about life in terms of stories and myths, and it’s not always obvious what the literal meaning of the metaphors is.

When he interviews other people for his own podcast, he often elaborates at length on his own views, which isn’t how interviews usually work. Perhaps they’re not meant to be interviews, but rather just conversations. Which is fair enough, since his audience is as interested in his views as they are in those of his guests. For my taste, though, he’s an insufficiently organized speaker.

3. JP Is Better than You

JP describes people coming up to him—on the street or at his public lectures—and telling him about how his advice has helped them turn their lives around. (https://youtu.be/5ER1LOarlgg)

That’s probably also why his 12 Rules for Life is a bestseller—a lot of people find his advice helpful. And not just slightly helpful, like a set of good movie reviews, but life-changingly helpful. He goes around the US and Canada giving lecture/discussions to sold-out audiences, which I would guess are a mixture of self-help advice and philosophical reflection on the human condition and the nature of society.

Here are his famous 12 rules for life:

1. “Stand up straight with your shoulders back.”

2. “Treat yourself like you are someone you are responsible for helping.”

3. “Make friends with people who want the best for you.”

4. “Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.”

5. “Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them.”

6. “Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world.”

7. “Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient).”

8. “Tell the truth – or, at least, don't lie.”

9. “Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t.”

10. “Be precise in your speech.”

11. “Do not bother children while they are skateboarding.”

12. “Pet a cat when you encounter one in the street.”

These all seem like sound advice. Especially #12, which I follow religiously.

Another piece of JP advice: Suppose you have a big goal that you’re having trouble getting to. E.g., you want to improve at your studies. Start by setting a lesser goal that is in the right direction but small enough that you will actually do it straight away. After that, take another small step. And so on.

If you’re wondering why JP deserves praise for saying such simple things, well, what matters isn’t how complicated his ideas are; what matters is that he’s in fact causing tangible improvements in people’s lives, that those people can experience. (Not like when I claim to improve my students’ lives by telling them intrinsically valuable items of knowledge that they don’t see the value of.)

Not many people are willing and able to do that. It’s safe to say that few of Peterson’s critics have ever helped anything like the number of people that Peterson has, in anything like the clear and dramatic way that he has. Most are busy being ideologues and congratulating themselves for it. They should probably take a break from attacking the outgroup, and maybe learn from Peterson about what it’s like to improve the real world.

4. Why Do People Love JP?

a. Social Insights

JP doesn’t think of himself as mainly a political commentator, yet his political remarks are a big part of what made him famous and still makes his fans happy. People are tired of listening to doctrinaire leftist BS about society. Despite what critics will say, he’s no extremist (e.g., he sees the need for both conservatives and liberals in society); it’s just that the woke elites have become so extreme that they perceive mainstream views as Nazi-like extremism. The wokists have also become so vicious that many people are afraid to question them—but not JP. That makes him something of a hero to conservatives.

The lobster exchange above is a good illustration. Intellectuals have been busy for decades trying to minimize biology’s role in understanding human life while condemning most hierarchies as needless injustices (except hierarchies created by left-wing elites). Conservatives tend to acknowledge the import of biology and to respect social hierarchies.

Btw, how good was the lobster argument? Well, the example seems to mistakenly suggest that our ancestors have had social hierarchies for 350 million years, which I think is false, since most species are non-social. (Lobsters and humans evolved sociality independently.) A better example would be other primates. Since almost all primates are social, our common ancestor was social, so that takes you back ~60-90 million years. Of course they all have hierarchies. That’s plenty for Peterson’s main point: social hierarchy is deeply rooted in our biology.

b. Charisma

It’s not just the views JP expresses. It’s the way that he says them. He is charismatic because he’s passionate and confident. In the above video clip, he concludes with feeling:

“One thing we can’t do is say that hierarchical organization is a consequence of the capitalist patriarchy. It’s like, that’s patently absurd. It’s wrong. It’s not a matter of opinion. It’s seriously wrong.”

(watch it to get the full effect).

In an earlier generation, people on the right might have looked to William F. Buckley or George Will as standard bearers. Today, the culture war feels more warlike than ever, so we need someone more combative. Peterson is smart and intellectual (he’s a former professor, after all), but unlike most professors, he’s not apparently afraid of conflict at all. (Elsewhere, he says that he’s actually quite agreeable, but you couldn’t guess that from his social commentary.)

c. Meaning and Position

Now here’s the main thing. People need a sense of meaning in life, and they need a sense of their place in the world. The worst thing about modern life is not that it’s hard. It’s a lot easier than life used to be. The worst thing about it is that it often feels empty, and people are aimless because they lack well-defined social roles. This is partly due to the weakening of religious faith as well as a general loosening of social constraints. I say this, btw, even though all traditional religions are false and many traditional social constraints were arbitrary—the loss of those errors still has psychological costs. Today, you can do what you want, within much broader constraints than ever before, which is as it should be. But most people have no idea what they want. So they may just use that freedom to sit in their mom’s basement watching internet porn.

Enter Jordan Peterson. The biggest thing he’s offering is a modern brand of meaning, grounded in his version of Jungian psychology. He doesn’t tell you that a great, supernatural being has a plan for you (he doesn’t deny it, either; he’s remarkably cagey about his religious views). He doesn’t tell you about a utopian society of the future that you have to work toward. He tells you that there is human nature and there are universal themes to be found in life. He says that life is filled with danger and pain, and we have difficult work to do and responsibilities to shoulder if we are to make our lives worthwhile. He’s not shy about morally judging people either. Many of his anecdotes are about things that other people have said and done that he finds appalling.

Is that what people want to hear? As it turns out, yes. Struggling through a difficult life, with onerous responsibilities weighing on you and a risk of being negatively judged for your failings—it turns out that humans are made for that. What we’re not made for is sitting on couches wondering what to do. (See this vision of the future from the movie Wall-E: https://youtu.be/s-kdRdzxdZQ. I bet you don’t envy the people on the flying chairs.)

All this is tied to JP’s charisma—part of his charisma lies in the fact that his strong emotional responses to things are moral perceptions. He doesn’t just emotively respond to things; he judges things as admirable or condemnable.

5. Why Do People Hate JP?

In response to his remarks about climate science (wherein he opined that one can’t trust climate models), the Guardian eagerly leapt to the attack, denouncing JP’s “word salad of nonsense”: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jan/27/word-salad-of-nonsense-scientists-denounce-jordan-petersons-comments-on-climate-models.

Quotes such as “stunningly ignorant” and “he has no frickin’ idea” are attributed to climate scientists commenting on Peterson—which do not exactly sound like typical language for academics. Pace the Guardian, there was no word salad in JP’s remarks; they made perfect sense, expressing a coherent, if misguided view (he is no climatologist, after all). Critics could have simply tried to patiently explain the mistake, if indeed JP was mistaken. Instead, they sound both contemptuous and enraged. (Which actually does not make one persuasive to third party viewers, fyi.) That is not unusual; many seem outraged by Jordan Peterson.

Part of what enrages many is that JP will not kowtow to the intellectual authority figures of our culture. He does not fear to take on any orthodoxy that strikes him as false. Nor does he cower in the way that you’re supposed to when someone threatens to call you a racist, sexist, or transphobe. That is deeply contrary to the orthodox left-wing elites’ sense of how a proper person should behave. A proper lay person should be clay in the hands of the intellectual elites, and a proper elite should submerge his own judgment in the elite collective like a good soldier.

But I think these elites are not merely upset at an effective opponent. I think they’re also resentful, because JP is far more charismatic, far better liked, and far more successful as a public intellectual than almost any of his critics are. No one hangs on the words of the Guardian staff in the way that people hang on Jordan Peterson’s words. He does what they only wish they could do.