For all that he’s regarded in some quarters as the house philosopher of male supremacy, Jordan Peterson is quite a vulnerable figure —and admirably honest about that vulnerability in talking about his depression, his feelings of powerlessness, his care for his daughter. He’s translated that honesty into a public persona that reaches directly to thousands upon thousands of young men (the female Peterson fan is not unheard of, but she’s unusual) and helped them articulate their own dissatisfactions with the kinds of masculinity on offer.
This following has made him into a global superstar psychologist and theologian. There’s no one else quite like him — some people have even started wondering why he doesn’t have a female equivalent. This singularity is a lot for any one man to carry without some weirdness getting in, and now Peterson is on the cusp of a comeback, with a new book on its way, it seems like a good time to reckon with just how weird things have got.
There’s the all-beef diet, developed by his daughter and then adopted by him, with enthusiastic testimony about its cure-all powers. Then there is the claim he was once kept awake for 25 days by accidentally consuming some vinegar (a sad downside, apparently, of the all-beef diet). More troublingly, there are the eight days he spent in a medically-induced coma in Russia earlier this year to treat a “physical dependence” on tranquilisers.
More curious is the fact that he became the world’s most significant public intellectual, having published precisely one academic book 18 years ago — a book which contains more pictures of dragons than legible sentences. (I’m not joking about the dragons.) In this book (Maps of Meaning) he describes going to a maximum security prison dressed in “long wool cape, circa 1890, which I had bought in Portugal, and a pair of tall leather boots”. Unsurprisingly, the get-up attracts attention, and Peterson finds himself “surrounded by shoddy men, some of whom were extremely large and tough-looking”.
Extraordinarily, he has ascended to the position of the liberal Left’s number one enemy. When Penguin announced that it would be publishing a sequel to his wildly successful 2018 self-help manual Twelve Rules for Life (to be called Beyond Order: Twelve More Rules for Life), some members of staff were so distraught that they cried.
Even weirder, the staff seemed to think that leaking this information would be persuasive. (Peterson’s own position on crying, from Twelve Rules, is this: “Anger-crying is often an act of dominance, and should be dealt with as such.”) But that’s still not the weirdest thing. Is it that people think he’s not just “an icon of hate speech” but also stupid? He might seem absurd; but he’s not stupid.
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