Though he may signify his expertise via interior decoration more than academic publication,1 Jordan Peterson presents himself as an expert on the psychology of totalitarian regimes. A negative fascination with Nazis’ crimes occupies his mind; in his talks he endlessly condemns their ideology and violence. We can hardly object to this. Alongside his fascist tendencies, though, this fixation only heightens his paradoxical status. Addressing audiences about the dangers of fascism, his condemnations form a dissonant harmony with his own fascistic statements; his performance becomes a discordant, public self-reproach. A masochistic cruelty animates him as he blasts behaviours he cannot recognise as his own. It is no wonder that his politics confuse the public. Peterson’s speeches are strange spectacles of ambivalence, projection and disavowed self-hatred. With more self-awareness, his tirades would be practically Maoist.
Contradictions of this kind abound in Peterson’s thought. His ante-fascist ambivalence becomes especially clear when he discusses the Holocaust. In 12 Rules for Life Peterson writes of the ‘pointless torment’ of Auschwitz, where guards forced prisoners to work themselves to death. Prisoners would carry ‘a hundred-pound sack of wet salt from one side of the compound to another,’ Peterson says, ‘then [they would] carry it back.’2 While they completed this death-work, the shadow of the infamous words wrought in iron above the camp gates fell upon the frozen ground. ‘Arbeit Macht Frei,’ they read. ‘Work sets you free.’
The Nazis’ message was clear. A fatal surrender to exhaustion was the only abyss of freedom left open to the Jews. The sign implied that if they preferred not to be shot or gassed they could find their demise through relentless, futile labour. These blackly ironic words perverted the meaning of freedom. They made the camps’ spiritual violence explicit and absolute.
Auschwitz was the apotheosis of savagery. Its barbaric program of undying labour clearly disgusts Peterson and we can only share his reaction. Despite his awareness of its violence, though, he fails to detect the duplication of this awful irony in his own life. In a 2017 YouTube Q&A, a viewer asked Peterson about his ‘average daily schedule.’3 A stark image followed. Since 1985, Peterson said, he has worked between fourteen and sixteen hours every day. He does the arithmetic live. ‘At least fourteen hours a day,’ he says, is around ‘100 hours a week.’ The audience then does the multiplication. Over 32 years this schedule would have resulted in a minimum of 163,072 hours of work – 155% more hours than the average worker.4
A longstanding and conscious ethical commitment secures Peterson’s choice to work these hours. ‘A long time ago,’ he says, he decided to ‘live a hyper-efficient and hyper-productive life.’ Negativity apparently motivates this commitment. ‘I don’t like to be unoccupied,’ he says. ‘I have to be occupied, doing something productive all the time, because otherwise I’m not pleased with myself.’ Idleness makes Peterson uncomfortable, and propelled by self-negation, he struggles to stop working. ‘I don’t know even what I would do,’ he says, ‘if I didn’t do that.’ Like Auschwitz’s prisoners, a commitment to undying labour colonised Peterson’s future. Work became his purpose in life and death.
A friend said to me that Peterson’s work schedule is ‘insane.’ I would go further. Peterson clearly sees his work schedule as a compulsion, motivated not only by the ‘substantial amount of meaning’ it lends his life but by self-criticism. Ironically, the work that might ‘set him free’ is sustained by a certain psychological unfreedom. By keeping this illiberal schedule, then, Peterson breaks his own Rule for Life. The profound self-violence implied by his habit suggests he breaks Rule 2 – Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping.
The desire to work is generally a sign of health. Like other healthy impulses, though, it is a form of self-abuse when pushed to an extreme. A totalising commitment to work, productivity and efficiency, motivated by self-criticism displays neither kindness nor compassion for yourself. It disrespects your freedom and forecloses other non-productive desires. No matter how meaningful the work might be, a habit of total-work indicates a rigidity of the soul. An ossified instinct for liberty. An ethic inimical to life.
A work compulsion is not a Rule for Life. Can we call Peterson’s ethic a Rule for Death, then? Perhaps. It certainly seems to betray a kind of addiction to work. And as Al Alvarez argues in his study of suicide, The Savage God, addictive behaviours often signify a chronic and disavowed will to death.5 Alvarez does not mention work in his list of suicidal behaviours. But as the Japanese with their karoshi and the Chinese with their guolaosi show us—each word meaning roughly ‘overwork death’—self-destruction through a labour addiction is entirely possible.6 Goebbels knew ‘the intensities of work’ could be a ‘form of intoxication.’7
Eternal work can be a path into death. This is a general truth we might apply to Peterson, a man who has struggled with melancholy, addiction and suicidality. Depression has afflicted him for many years. For ‘nearly two decades,’ SSRIs treated his suffering.8 Yet addiction consumed him when he traded his antidepressants for a benzodiazepine habit. A spectacular nervous breakdown followed in 2019 that mandated a long and arduous convalescence. Physical agony and ‘overwhelming thoughts of self-destruction’ plagued him daily in these months. Stricken, his total-work regime nonetheless continued. During his time of chaos he still managed to write a new book, which he gave a phenomenologically astute title – Beyond Order.
An Aside
In the Overture of Beyond Order: 12 More Rules, Peterson admits that he believed the drug he took was ‘as is often claimed of benzodiazepines—a relatively harmless substance.’ I find it almost impossible to believe that a clinical psychologist and self-professed expert on neurochemistry who wrote his PhD and multiple academic papers on addiction would say this. That benzodiazepines are addictive is common knowledge. When I was prescribed Valium my doctor immediately warned me about the possibility of addiction and told me not to use the drug over an extended period. For Peterson, the addiction risk for benzos seems to be a piece of information Žižek might call a ‘known unknown.’ In other words, it was repressed, drawn into the unconscious where it settled next to his longstanding suicidality.
Peterson has now recovered from his addiction. Whatever his present wellness, though, accidie, addiction and suicidality litters his history. Our unconscious impulses repeat, Sierpinski-like, at all levels of life; it’s feasible, then, that his work schedule expresses or defends against the same depressive, suicidal urges. Whether death truly shadows this habit, his total-work ethic nonetheless resonates with that singularly evil slogan of the regime Albert Camus claimed was hellbent on a suicide pursued by provoking the world’s rage – Arbeit Macht Frei.9 In some ways Peterson’s ethic is even more extreme. Unlike the Holocaust victims, nobody forced Peterson to choose the life-denying unfreedom of endless work. A free man, he voluntarily treats himself like a slave.
All over the world we observe a work ethic we can capture by perverting Derrida’s most famous quote: il n’ya de hors-travail – ‘there is no outside-work.’ The Soviets had their gulags and the eighteen-hour workday is the holy grail of capitalist dedication. Yuppies make their five-year plans and unwittingly follow Stalin and Mao. Work unto death prevails in all political regimes. It is not specifically fascist. Rather the ethic gestures toward a preference for absolutes. A willingness to dominate the self. A desire for absolute unfreedom. A certain totalitarianism of the soul.
There is no better sign of totalitarianism than a person’s inability to see outside their current system. Peterson lacks the freedom of thought to consider alternative ways of living. He cannot not work. With his rapacious need for labour, Peterson genuflects to this totalitarianism of the soul. Though he proclaims himself a liberal, his work habits show he is anything but a free man.
Footnotes
Peterson has dozens of USSR paintings on the walls of his house. Meanwhile, a Google Scholar search of his publications containing keywords like ‘nazi,’ ‘fascism,’ ‘communism’ and ‘totalitarianism’ returns five scholarly results, only four of which discuss these phenomena in any depth: 1999’s Maps of Meaning, and three journal articles from 1999, 2002, and 2017 respectively.
12 Rules for Life, p.197.
See https://youtu.be/1UhdQud45p4. See also 12 Rules for Life, p.358.
Assuming Peterson works 14×7×52 hours per year as he says, and the standard worker completes 40×50 hours per year, accounting for holidays.
The Savage God, pp.154–5.
Male Fantasies, Vol. 2, p.235.
See the Overture of Beyond Order: 12 More Rules.
The Rebel, p.135.