‘So they build up hypotheses that collapse on top of one another, it’s human, a lobster couldn’t do it.’
—Samuel Beckett.1
N.B.—This piece was originally written in 2021 and some of its claims are outdated. Consider it an early point in a time-series analysis of Peterson’s descent into far-right hatred. See the Introduction for more information.
Dr Jordan B. Peterson is a psychology professor at the University of Toronto,2 political commentator and best-selling self-help guru. A man who took to the stage to save Western culture after his wife had a ‘prophetic dream’ about the end of the world, he is also a self-proclaimed ‘classical liberal’ people regularly call a fascist.3 Once more, the confusion in terms. Again, people mistake the bordering but opposed nations of liberalism and fascism for one another. To which state does Peterson belong?
The people are divided on this question. To some Peterson is a liberal. Others are sure he is a fascist. Muddying the waters further, some say his ‘vacuous words are a kind of Rorschach test onto which countless interpretations can be projected.’ More still claim he is the victim of ‘hyperbolic misrepresentation.’ The latter echo Peterson himself, a man whose most enduring edict may be ‘I didn’t say that.’4
Immediately, contradictions. In theory you can’t be both liberal and fascist. Nor can you be infinitely interpretable and terribly misrepresented. But politics is not theory. Our world is not so tidy. Instead life ‘is sheer ambiguity,’ as Don DeLillo wrote. ‘If a person doesn’t see that, he’s either an asshole or a fascist.’5 Politics is pure in the abstract but untidy in reality. Positions distinct on paper appear in the world imbricated, compromised and contaminated. The world is more complex than language; uncertainty always prevails. Failing to see that would make us, in DeLillo’s words, assholes or fascists.
Were he pure Peterson would simply be liberal or fascist – or, I guess, an asshole. There would be no ambiguity. Instead, he mirrors reality itself. He is beset by ambivalence and his thought fits comfortably into neither ideology. Some of his ideas orbit that dark star, fascism. Others hover in more liberal space. Really, it seems both his critics and defenders are right. His politics are both liberal and fascist. Ante-fascist.
Let’s start with the fascism. Though he associates with White supremacists like Stefan Molyneux, Peterson himself rarely descends into outright discrimination.6 Like other fascist ideologues, though, he is obsessed with a plot that demonises minority groups. Peterson is no anti-Semite. He does not openly persecute Jews. Instead, he lambasts progressive scholars and activists who perpetrate the ‘postmodern neo-Marxist’ corruption of culture and academia.7 Left-wing professors and their resentful acolytes, he says, have poisoned the humanities. Post-structuralist ‘grievance scholars’ produce vapid work with no ‘intellectual credibility.’8 Users of gender-neutral pronouns like ‘zhe/zher,’ he says, ‘stand ‘at the vanguard of a post-modern, radical leftist ideology that I detest, and which is, in my professional opinion, frighteningly similar to the Marxist doctrines that killed at least 100 million people in the 20th century.’9 Third-wave feminists, scholars that queer Dostoevsky – they are purveyors of pure evil, it seems. ‘Cancel culture’ is their fault. Their ideas are genocidal. In Peterson’s eyes, they must be stopped.
A certain historic government, we recall, once had similar problems with ‘cultural Bolshevism.’ Nonetheless, Jordan Peterson—Defender of the West, Protector of Free Speech—has bravely joined Hungary’s Viktor Orbán in calling for governments to defund ‘Activist Disciplines’ and women’s studies.10 Their alliance is surprising. In November 2018, Peterson correctly called Orbán a ‘tyrant’ and a ‘dictator wannabe.’11 Yet his passion for Orbán only grew afterwards.12 On May 30th 2019—just six months after he denounced Orbán—Peterson met the leader in Budapest.13 The man clearly impressed him. Afterwards he told the Hungarian press that Orbán was trying ‘to restore the metaphysical foundation of Hungarian culture.’ He ‘may get lucky and succeed,’14 Peterson optimistically intoned. At a talk the next day he then told his audience how ‘wonderful’ it was to see their country ‘re-emerge into freedom.’ Under Orbán’s stewardship Hungarians could ‘reclaim [their] proper destiny as individuals.’ They could ‘re-build something… magnificent.’ Peterson neglected to mention that this metaphysical revival—this transcendental rehab—had been pursued by a racist, queerphobic, and authoritarian regime famous for its illiberal and undemocratic policies.15 ‘You have an adventure in front of you that’s calling,’ he told his enormous audience filled with subjects and supporters of Orbán’s fascist violence.16 ‘So more power to you.’17
The ‘bloody postmodernists’ of the ‘Activist Disciplines’ are a sensitive topic for Peterson.18 Following today’s conservative fashion, he reserves much disgust for the ‘treacherous’ Derrida. Even worse is the ‘reprehensible’ Foucault, a man Peterson admonishes for struggling with suicidality.19 Peterson is a much-cited professor; his approach to these opponents, though, is anti-intellectual. Content with ad hominem attacks, he fails to cite their works in his books.20 Nor does he engage with any specific claim they made – even though their ideas, like his own, are heavily influenced by his beloved if selectively read Nietzsche. Peterson’s other opponents fare no better. The ‘equity doctrine’ of the ‘radical left’ becomes a pure product of psychopathology, resentment and murderous aggression in his hands.21 Sometimes he says the same of fascists and other right-wing extremists. Unsurprisingly, he does not apply the same diagnostic standards to conservatives – or, despite his self-proclaimed talent for introspection, to himself.
An ire for ‘the left’ animates Peterson’s being. The man, however, is no mere critic. First and foremost Peterson is a positive, systematic thinker. He has laboured long and hard on an alternative to these insidious ideologies. An admirable project. Unfortunately, his work is steeped in esoteric, metaphysical language. Rorschach’s inkblots undulate before our eyes—is that you, father?—as we wade through Petersonian phrases like ‘the soul of the individual hungers for the heroism of genuine Being.’ ‘Meaning,’ he says elsewhere, ‘is what manifests itself when the many levels of Being arrange themselves into a perfectly functioning harmony.’22 Heidegger’s long shadow adumbrates these passages where Peterson deploys that Mitläufer’s trademark capital-B Being. Invoking the weight of philosophical tradition—a tradition admired today by far-right actors and white nationalists including Steve Bannon, Richard Spencer and Aleksandr Dugin—he nonetheless sunders the term of its substance, using it inconsistently and without clear definition. Ultimately his meaning drowns—an ironic, tragic death—in the rivers of ink he pollutes with the ‘jargon of authenticity.’ He joins Adorno’s fascist ideologues, then, who obscure society’s materialist truths behind a fog of turgid language.23
An ambitious intellectual, Peterson often refers to man’s hunger for heroism. He shares the fascists’ fetish for the brave. Perhaps this is why he valorises masculine strength and deplores effeminate weakness. Consider this passage from 12 Rules for Life, poetically titled ‘Toughen Up, You Weasel.’ ‘Men have to toughen up,’ he tells us. ‘If they’re healthy, women don’t want boys. They want men.’24 Man’s sexual success, says this heterosexist hero, underwrites our species’ romantic happiness. Male toughness is essential. Weakness is a terrible threat. ‘If you think tough men are dangerous’ he writes, ‘wait until you see what weak men are capable of.’25 Forever trembling before the spectres of Auschwitz, the gulags, the Killing Fields, Peterson implores men to develop their existential armour. His audience must ‘hit [themselves] against the world,’ he says. Such collisions make us ‘hard and durable and able to bear the terrible conditions of existence without becoming corrupt.’26 Battering the world and being battered in turn will remake us as strong men immune to fascism.
The world’s fate depends on male hardness. The primal forces of masculinity and femininity must therefore remain balanced. ‘When softness and harmlessness become the only acceptable virtues,’ Peterson says, ‘hardness and dominance’ will ‘exert an unconscious fascination.’ Allegedly mandated by leftists today, such effeminate and sensitive traits are an existential danger for Peterson. ‘If men are pushed too hard to feminize,’ he says, ‘they will become more and more interested in harsh, fascist political ideology.’ ‘The populist groundswell of support for Donald Trump,’ he continues, ‘is part of the same process.’27 Inevitably, feminism is to blame for fascism. Though Peterson explicitly positions himself against fascism with these masculine musings, his argument crashes into paradox. Masculine strength is a prophylactic for fascism, he says. Yet fascist ideologues often valorise masculinity in the same way to support their movements. Elevating the masculine is akin to a homeopathic treatment, then. The poison supposedly treats the symptom it causes. In Peterson’s eyes fascism can fight fascism.
Fascists’ views on capitalism often mirror their confused, reactive visions of masculinity. They are blind to the role capitalism plays in the trends they abhor. They believe we can repair the world if we restore capitalism to its true powers. Peterson is no different. Though he insists identity politics is a ‘postmodern neo-Marxist’ conspiracy, the movement remains a liberal bid for self-determination that supports consumer culture. Sometimes identity politics is repressive and contradictory; more often it makes millions for capitalist producers. Elsewhere, Peterson insists that universities have declined due to insidious leftist influences. Yet this ‘corruption’ occurred over the years where world communism collapsed and market principles annexed higher education. The decline of universities was caused by a ‘long march through the institutions’ as the conservatives claim. Yet the damage was wrought by Louboutin shoes rather than revolutionaries’ boots. It was the capitalists—not the communists—whose footsteps echoed through the corridors and courtyards.
Purblind to capitalism, Peterson cannot see how market ideology penetrates other university courses. Recall how the former Chair of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, said that the ‘entire intellectual edifice’ underpinning global financial markets collapsed during the Global Financial Crisis. Nonetheless, like thousands of other students worldwide I learned that damaging and defunct intellectual edifice during my undergraduate economics degree. My lecturers, along with academics at hundreds of other universities, effectively ignored Greenspan’s statement. They denied history, politics and intellectual failure by doing so. The ideological corruption of economics education is obvious. Tellingly, Peterson is silent on such facts.
Occasionally, Peterson comes close to critiquing capitalism. At the final moment, though, he veers instead into anti-modernist ambiguity. A video, ‘Why You Need Art In Your Life’ shows this when Peterson derides the new corporate architecture of the University of Toronto.28 Campus architecture, Peterson notes, has deviated from its original style in recent decades. Half the university now resembles a ‘God-awful’ ‘mass factory,’ he says. No longer is it a place appropriate for the ‘sacred endeavour’ of studying the humanities. A Foucauldian claim follows this observation. The changes in universities’ ‘attitude towards knowledge,’ he says, paralleled the ‘architectural transformation.’ This is not a coordinated phenomenon, he sees, but a consequence of an unstated logic that saturates the university community. ‘None of this is accidental,’ he says. ‘It’s not like there’s a conspiracy because there isn’t. But that doesn’t mean these things aren’t tangled together.’ Shockingly, Peterson glimpses the late capitalist épistéme. We hear this and wait with bated breath for the deduction that logically follows these observations. In hallucinatory optimism, we almost see him reach for Frederic Jameson’s Postmodernism to show how capitalist production and cultural aesthetics are bound together. Yet our hopes are disappointed. Instead of materialistic critique Peterson gives us metaphysical tragedy. Ever melancholic, he mourns the loss of the ‘call to higher Being’ and yearns for the former glory of the pre-factory university days. (We presume he means this in the ‘capital-B Being’ sense; illustrating the limits of phonocentrism, however, we cannot be sure). Made myopic by metaphysical tears he says nothing of finance, economics or capitalism. This lacuna is not necessarily fascist. But it does make his speech a criticism of capitalism that extirpates capital and occludes economics. Peterson is not anti-capitalist, then, but anti-modernity. Like the Japanese and German fascists, he bemoans the losses wrought by change, fetishises the past and does so in active ignorance of capital.
Clearly, this self-proclaimed liberal has a predilection for some illiberal ideas. His thought appeals to some of Paxton’s ‘mobilising passions.’ His mind contains several of Eco’s clots around which ‘fascism can coagulate.’ We have seen the man’s obsession with a plot, his anti-intellectualism, his ire towards an ‘othered’ group and his intolerance of progressive politics. Incomplete, shabby and ideological defences of capitalism populate his thought alongside his anti-modern inclinations. Victimhood and a sense of crisis loom ominously over his talks. Most damningly, he has also called for the suppression of free speech and aligned himself with openly fascist tyrants.
Peterson may not be a fascist. His politics clearly sit somewhere beyond liberalism, though. On the land of ante-fascism.
Footnotes
Three Novels, p.365
Update: December 2022 – was a professor of psychology. Peterson resigned from his professorship at the University of Toronto earlier this year.
Great Jones Street, p.132.
See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iF8F7tjmy_U. Though I believe this statement was accurate at the time of writing in early 2021, Peterson has since become much more explicit in his discriminatory views: he has become extremely vocal about his disdain for overweight people and the trans community.
In tandem, of course, with the man’s increasingly authoritarian rule. As Ruth Ben-Ghiat writes in Strongmen, Orbán ‘declared a state of emergency’ during the pandemic ‘then instituted rule by decree to give himself dictatorial powers.’
Update: December 2022 – And a leader who, perhaps unsurprisingly, made a speech this year that commentators rightly decried as ‘pure Nazi,’ where he said: ‘This is why [Hungarians] have always fought: we are willing to mix with one another, but we do not want to become peoples of mixed-race.’
Update: June 2023 – Peterson returned to Hungary in May this year. ‘There is currently no alternative to the family model represented by the Orbán government,’ he said in a lecture he gave, ‘since apart from these most basic ideals there are no other values on which a healthy society can be based.’ He also spoke at Sándor Palace, the residence of the President of Hungary, and was awarded the Grand Cross of the order of Merit of the Republic of Hungary by Katalin Novák for ‘his exceptionally dedicated and influential activities in defence of creative freedom and the education of youth.’ I will be blunt: if a fascist gives you an award for serving their country, it probably means that you are a fascist too.
Between his three published books, Peterson never discusses a single word Foucault actually wrote. Meanwhile he spends a total of three sentences discussing one of Derrida’s claims, rejecting it without serious argument.
See pp.15 & 38 of the transcript of his Munk debate with Stephen Fry, Michelle Goldberg and Michael Eric Dyson, available at: https://munkdebates.com/getmedia/80828104-84DF-4F0D-AF22-5BA9D8BB2D6A/Munk-Debate-Political-Correctness-May-2018-Transcript.pdf.aspx. See https://twitter.com/jordanbpeterson/status/955440524575391744?lang=en
12 Rules for Life, pp.xxxv, xxxi & 201.
See The Jargon of Authenticity.
12 Rules for Life, p.331.
12 Rules for Life, p.332.
12 Rules for Life, p.330.
See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7z3mg6fjmzw. Incidentally, Kanye West once watched this video. See https://www.dailywire.com/news/kanye-west-watching-jordan-peterson-videos-amanda-prestigiacomo