Let me side with you for a moment. I’ll say “leftists” don’t understand what’s going on. Tell me what’s going on, and what it represents to you. Why does Peterson speak to you. Who is your tribe?
Wow, that was the most honest question anyone has actually asked me so far on the JP discussion, especially since … welll … the disaster that this thread turned out to be.
So, this is how I see JP. To preface, I understand JP as completely genuine in what he says and believes. There have been comical accusations in the Macleans magazine of him “huckstering” or doing it for the money, but it’s clearly not true. He has genuinely cried, on camera, multiple times for the things he’s talking about. One example that I found particularly nice;
If Peterson was really doing anything for the money, he would have bought a mansion and a yacht by now, since he no doubt has the money at this point since his book has sold over a million copies in half a year and his Patreon registers over 80K per month. And yet, he continues living in his nice little house and continues working 16 hours a day in order to address his sudden new fame. So that’s one of the more important facts.
JP’s message is pretty clear to me, I think. So far, I’m like four chapters into his book and I’ve watched a lot of his material. He is primarily a psychologist, that’s what he is. He’s a longstanding psychologist with a significant academic stature, being a former associate professor at Harvard (where he won the Levenson Teaching Prize) and professor of psychology at the University of Toronto (where he was ranked by the university as one of the three life changing professors). The most significant influences on him are Freud and Carl Jung, especially Jung, with his highly important psychological work on mythology and archetypes. Peterson conveys, I think, a very important truth that many others haven’t. While many people today dismiss mythologies, like I did very recently, Peterson has pointed to them for the archetypes of ancient mythologies, developed over thousands of years by humans, as revealing serious truths about mankind. This includes the archetypes of chaos and order, the conscience, being, the heroic path, suffering, etc. This was articulated in his 1999 book Maps of Meaning, which was a significant academic success in his career. And this is where his views must be understood in their proper context.
JP, as he says and clearly thinks, is concerned with how people live out their lives and the tragedies that they have to undertake without any support and with few options in the malevolent suffering that the world is. JP knows this firsthand due to his life experience. Earlier in his life, his best friend committed suicide, and his daughter suffered for many years during her late teens from cancers and disabilities that came close to killing her (something like that), and add this on to JP’s clinical experience which he says he has some 25,000-50,000 hours of experience from. JP thinks life is suffering. I think I agree with that, fundamentally. So he wants to know why life is suffering, and what we can do about that. This is where much of his 12 Rules for Life emerges, a great book by any measurement. But JP’s beliefs about suffering, and his decades of research into the catastrophes of the 20th century with the Nazi’s and Stalin have also lead him to battle with a serious political climate. Authoritarianism.
Some of the books JP has pointed to in his lectures, I think, is telling about him and what he understands. I hope to soon read some of these books, such as Ordinary Men, a book about how a Polish battalion in WW2 of ordinary police offers, like the everyday ones you might see, went from their daily lives to being able to drag a naked pregnant women into the middle of the street and shoot her in the back of the dead. And the book documents their transformation, how it was causing them physical breakdowns while they were at it. There are other books, but this is important. JP is highly concerned with authoritarianism, which is where his reprisals against postmodernism, marxism and compelled speech comes from. Interestingly, his stance against compelled speech is why he’s famous.
So, we all know the story. Bill C-16 made it some form of discrimination to fail to use someone’s proper pronoun, and JP’s opposition sparked his claim to fame. Some leftist legal experts came out of the woodworks and claimed JP had misinterpreted the bill, but there’s solid evidence he’s correct at this point. Firstly, many legal experts have supported his interpretation, such as Bruce Pardy from Queen’s University. The University of Toronto sent him two cease-and-desist letters for supposedly violating C16 or something, so one would expert the universities lawyers to be competent, and Bill C-16 was invoked in the quasi-Maoist trial of Lindsay Shepherd at Wilfrid Laurier University (Wilfrid has since apologized after this event). There’s more evidence, but this is apart from the point. This is, essentially, as I understand JP’s message and where he comes from. I think the way he articulates himself is so clear and descriptive and compelling that it’s no wonder he is where he is now. I’d recommend any JP ‘hater’ to watch this older video of JP as one testament to who he is. He genuinely believes in equality, lest it needs to be said.
