The Intolerant, Totalitarian World of Jordan B Peterson
Bob Briton
17/11/2021
I heard the name Jordan Peterson many times before I actually encountered his ideas and their impact on a considerable section of the community. I was with comrades at a Party stall at the local shopping centre when I was approached by a young guy keen to disabuse me of my desire to protest some aspect of the capitalist status quo. Peterson was responsible for turning this young person’s life around, getting him off alcohol and drugs and making him, in general, happier and better adjusted. Or so he said. I was interested. Who is this Peterson character and why do I hear his name so often?
Later on, I was helping someone move house and I noticed a copy of Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life* among the books to be packed. I asked to borrow the book to discover the reason for the influence of this Canadian professor of psychology. I watched some YouTube lectures by him, as well, and quickly worked out his message and the reasons why it has resonated with so many disaffected people, young men in particular. The essence is either relentless anti-Communism wrapped up in unrelieved religious mania or the other way around.
Peterson’s fame might have dimmed in recent times but there are others out there ready to take up his cause. As long as there is a need for apologetics for outrageous social injustice, there will always be such personalities.
The ‘self-development’ catch-cry in 12 Rules for Life is to stop whining and harden up. This drill sergeant approach will be welcomed by a generation feeling they have lacked guidance or who struggle to respect those trying to offer direction. If that were the only advice, it would be fine and harmless, but it’s not.
Jordan Peterson's '12 Rules for Life'.
Presumably, Peterson’s 12 Rules was written for audiences in the developed capitalist west. According to Peterson, the law and other institutions of such countries are damn nigh perfect. That’s not to say unjust things don’t happen, because they obviously do. The problem is that people are defective, corrupt and contrary; a lot of the professor’s ‘self-help’ book is devoted to tracing this back to the biblical account of Adam and Eve and the commission of the Original Sin.
Much of the rest of the book pursues similar theological arguments. It is surprising in these generally non-believing times that Peterson has captured such a large audience for his unyielding and highly conservative Christian ideas. I believe it is because he goes in swinging to uphold the sense of identity of people clinging to traditional roles in society and who believe they are under attack from presumed malevolent forces.
Peterson joins many others who bemoan the ‘cancel culture’ that has overtaken public debate. I agree, so I won’t repeat the many personal attacks made on Peterson circulated on Facebook and elsewhere. It’s perhaps the only point on which I can agree with him except perhaps the need for people to take responsibility for their limited time available on earth to do something of value. What that something of value might be is where I (and, presumably, the readers of the Militant Monthly) part ways dramatically with the professor.
Peterson maintains that, while humans have a special place in his Creator’s natural order and are blessed with ‘free will’, they have a true nature like the rest of the creatures to be found on the planet. What this nature is and how we should behave are set out in the Bible, which is a sort of “user’s manual” for people seeking a meaningful existence.
People can’t buck these rules in the same way as a lobster never strays from its ordained role and status in society. “If you slump around, with the same bearing that characterises a defeated lobster, people will assign you a lower status, and the old counter that you share with crustaceans, sitting at the base of the brain, will assign you a low dominance number,” (p25) the professor says.
Of course, this divinely supported world view is also directed at those living outside the mainstream gender roles and engaging in what would be viewed as sexual deviance; nothing new here. These views are as old as organised religion, which has always had a role in upholding pretty much every aspect of class-exploitative society.
What is new is the idea that this ‘agenda’ is the alleged main weapon of Marxists hell-bent on smashing Western Civilisation. According to Peterson, these immoral and amoral people are ungrateful for the privileges they enjoy in the capitalist society in which they live. They want to destroy the present order with no thought of what they would replace it with.
These lost souls are typified by Peterson’s long-time and now former family friend, Chris. Chris is a self-sabotaging individual who actively sets out to subvert his own happiness and that of those around him. Such people exist but Peterson extrapolates to say that this maladjustment has a political expression in Marxism. Peeled of all the layers of religious mania fused with self-development advice, 12 Rules is a 300 or so page assault on the idea that a better society is possible and a rant against Communism.
“Peterson seriously suggests that many of the ills of present day capitalism are not inherent and inevitable but the result of a Marxist conspiracy”
A glaring omission in the book is an explanation of how societies like that of Canada reached the state Peterson considers to be near perfection. Revolutionary ideas are and always have been misguided, according to the author. They have always delivered much worse societies than the ones they set out to replace. This central message has been carried in the writings of totalitarian zealots for the status quo like Orwell. Orwell’s books, particularly Animal Farm and 1984, are on the reading list of high schools around the developed world to teach the young not to question fundamentally the clearly unsatisfactory circumstances they find themselves in, lest they end up with something worse.
A closer reading of history reveals that successful movements for major social gains were headed by the same revolutionary leaderships Peterson dismisses contemptuously. And, no doubt, in times gone by those leaders would have been met with hostility by the Petersons of their era who would have claimed that slavery or feudal serfdom were ordained by God and represented the best of all possible worlds. Resistance is futile. There is nothing wrong with the society you live in. You have no cause to be unhappy. If you are, it is your fault because of your rebellion against your creator. This is the distilled essence of Peterson’s message.
It would be futile to point out to Peterson that he owes an enormous debt to supposedly maladjusted revolutionary actors throughout history. But it is true that the rights and privileges of the very social formation he promotes in the pages of his best seller were secured by precisely the means and the forces he hates. Forces that weren’t able to go far enough, as it turns out. He would probably reply that it may well have been worth such effort and sacrifice in days gone by, but not now.
Peterson seriously suggests that many of the ills of present day capitalism are not inherent and inevitable but the result of a Marxist conspiracy. A similar claim is made in The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity** by Douglas Murray. I have been active in the Marxist (or, rather, Marxist-Leninist) movement for over 40 years and have never taken part in a meeting where ‘how to undermine public morality’ was on the agenda. The usual items were how to promote ideas of solidarity and equality and the sorts of actions that would advance this cause.
Peterson would dismiss this as the claim of a sincere dupe who works unwittingly to build a hellish realm. According to the author, the end result of this struggle was demonstrated with the foundation of the Soviet Union. Every half dozen pages or so in the book there is a damning judgement cast on the USSR. Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago is usually cited as ‘evidence’ of just how awful societies become if their revolutionary elements are successful.
Solzhenitsyn’s most famous work is accorded much more historicity than was ever intended by its unhinged author. “Solzhenitsyn’s writing utterly and finally demolished the intellectual credibility of communism, as ideology or society,” (p. 155) according to Peterson. No mention is made of the research done about the veracity of Solzhenitsyn’s claims or those of the rest of the ‘100 million victims of Communism’ crew.
Peterson insists Stalin was a monster, surpassed only by Mao in terms of cruelty and megalomania. Given how widely held the author’s take on these historical figures is, and how little influence they have on the thinking of the ‘revolutionaries’ behind the attacks on ‘traditional values’ held by the professor, it might seem odd that so much attention is devoted to this theme in 12 Rules. What could explain Peterson’s obsession with Communism and its history?
Similar questions arose in my mind when reading the delusional, anti-Communist works of US novelist Ayn Rand. By the 1950s and 1960s, Communism was suffering a decline in its influence on the working class of the US. While the stridency of Rand’s and Peterson’s work might seem anachronistic, I completely understand their stance. Despite the setbacks suffered by the Communist movement in recent decades, it remains the only viable, coherent alternative to the dismal current state of affairs. Serious reactionary ideologues are aware of this and will go to any lengths to delay its inevitable resurgence. This includes dishonestly placing the blame for the maddest excesses of issue-based campaigning on the doorstep of ‘Marxism’.
It is a shame that Peterson’s call for young men, in particular, to take up responsibility for the parlous state of society is devoted to reinforcing the very same institutions that are oppressing them. The rise of far right ideology, and its origins in the sort of rather totalitarian conservatism promoted by Peterson, is a scourge and yet another hurdle for our youth to overcome before the ideas of solidarity, equality, collective effort and socialism go on the front foot once more.
*Peterson, Jordan B 12 Rules for Life, Penguin Random House, 2018
**Murray, Douglas The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity, Bloomsbury Continuum, 2019