Beyond his ante-fascist duality Peterson holds another contradiction within. Every day for over 30 years, this self-professed liberal freely gave himself to a deeply illiberal ethic. He devoted himself to a culture of total-work where he laboured endlessly and there were no alternatives to productivity. The man valorises free speech. But ironically—tragically—it seems he has never been able to say the words, ‘I choose not to work.’ The height of liberty, I suppose, includes the freedom to choose subjugation. To plunge into addiction and death.
Peterson’s ethic of total-work shackles him to capitalism. It probably emerges, then, from the ideologies that perpetuate today’s labour arrangements. Foremost among these are the mandates of our ‘potential culture.’ During the neoliberal era, our society has developed a demand it now makes of us all – 'Manifest your potential!’ Beneath its auspice, privatised universities espouse the pro-capitalist rhetoric of ‘self-development’ to attract career-bound students. Individual achievement is our collective fetish. All must realise their dreams. A blend of fear and pleasure makes this oneiric fantasy our utmost purpose. Achieving our potential is now desired and compelled and desired because it is compelled. The all-consuming hustle, the self-imposed ‘996’ – these are our Absolute Goods.
‘Potential’ is vital to neoliberal politics. It is also of profound significance to Jordan Peterson. Like Kanye West, who named his record label G.O.O.D Music, an acronym for ‘Getting Out Our Dreams,’ Peterson is an acolyte of potential culture. The ethic of total-work reveals his obedience to our culture’s achievement-injunction. In his talks, too, he eternally returns to the concept of potential.
‘I feel like there’s so much potential in all of us.’
—Kanye West.
Potential’s ‘an interesting idea,’ Peterson says, and intriguing it is.1 For him, our potential is a fantasy of what we could be tomorrow that commands us today. One of science’s biggest unsolved mysteries, he says elsewhere, is how consciousness transforms our ‘potential into actuality.’2 An ambitious thinker, Peterson hopes to solve this mystery. He has therefore developed a theory he explains in—what else?—a TEDx lecture called ‘Potential.’
Peterson’s TEDx Talk begins with some Kantian foreplay. Humans do not see the world as it is, he says. Instead we perceive a partial representation or ‘map’ of the thing-in-itself. A strong epistemological beginning. Yet he rapidly deviates from old Immanuel’s Critique. Sometimes, he says, we glimpse the ‘reality’ lying behind the ‘map.’ Occasionally we break through the doors of perception. Then we discover the ‘real information’ flowing ‘out of the ground of Being.’ Those lucky enough to encounter these epistemic founts—flooding from what we must again assume is capital-B Being—can absorb this information. They can learn and grow.
Humans build themselves from information, says Peterson. Learning makes us ‘different’ and ‘stronger.’ More powerful after we consume this noumenal info, our potential shifts. Improved, we can choose more ‘specialised’ pursuits and refine our goals. Such transformative effects surely have many benefits. But most conveniently for the world’s workers, they also include substantial economic returns. Those who learn and specialise as they sip liberally from the groundwaters of Being become highly skilled and competent, says Peterson. More valuable to employers than those parched souls desiccating on the arid lands of phenomenal reality, then, they can ‘find a good job’ and capitalise on their skills.
‘Real information’ is a valuable commodity. Yet the specialisation it enables has an opportunity cost. To actualise our potential we must choose one future over another. Such gains and losses are basic ontological facts of life. But Peterson quickly makes the ontological political when he says there is no ‘avoiding the responsibility of narrowing’ ourselves through employment. Echoing Mrs Thatcher, that other neoliberal archetype who said ‘there is no alternative’ to deregulated capitalism, Peterson ominously says ‘it’s better to be that role than to be no role at all.’ The alternative to specialisation, it seems, is nothing. Unemployment is equivalent to the abyss. Idleness is indistinguishable from the null of non-being.
Potential, Peterson says, is all we could become if we maximise the information we extract from the world. In our economic system it also pays to capitalise on information. Existentially and economically we should aim to be like Peterson, then – ‘hyper-efficient’ and ‘hyper-productive.’ ‘Capitalising on our potential’ will counteract the ‘malevolence’ and ‘suffering’ of Being, he says on the Rubin Report. It will also help us become part of the ‘small proportion of people’ who accumulate most of society’s goods. A commitment to potential, in short, will enable the material inequalities and spiritual satisfactions that make life worth living. With this conservative vision Peterson encourages people to strive for achievement and individualistic, material wealth. But he uses an unfortunate turn of phrase to do so. To maximise our potential, he says, we must cultivate an ‘addiction to possibility.’3
A chiaroscuro results from Peterson’s thoughts on potential. Death, malevolence, suffering and nothingness beckon those who fail to capitalise on their potential. Meanwhile an addiction to possibility delivers us from this depressing hell to the capitalist world of jobs, wealth and the delights of inequity. Peterson’s arguments are ostensibly existential. Yet his words also create a clear link between his work ethic, death, addiction, individual achievement and capitalism. He tells us to Work or Die, basically, using a vernacular indebted to at least five themes from contemporary economic theory—information, learning, knowledge, specialisation and work—and the central theme of David Foster Wallace’s neoliberal classic, Infinite Jest – addiction. Peterson’s language even echoes Peter Drucker’s in Post-Capitalist Society, where the author insists that we need a new ethic of education, specialisation knowledge and being to turn our information economy’s ‘potential into performance.’4 Peterson may not have read Drucker’s book. Yet his brand of existentialism nonetheless supplies the ethic Drucker demanded. He turned Drucker’s vision of post-capitalist potential into actuality.
Philosophy is often politics in disguise. Adorno thought as much of Heidegger. I imagine Jordan ‘postmodern neo-Marxism’ Peterson would agree. Nonetheless, his work seems guilty of the same deception. His existentialism supports neoliberalism’s potential culture. In my eyes, this is no accident. As Peterson developed his ideas, a widespread interest in ‘potential’ and achievement gripped Western culture. This ‘addiction to possibility’ is the product of many different forces. But few are as influential as a Nobel-prize winning economic theory from the 20th century – Gary Becker’s idea of ‘human capital.’
Footnotes
See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJJClhqGq_M from approx. 19:00.
Post-Capitalist Society, pp.176-191.