Jordan Peterson was on a roll in 2022, especially following his suspension from Twitter and his joining the daily wire. Within a few weeks of each other, he’d released a series of videos termed Message to such and such, including, Message to Christians, Message to Muslims, Message to CEOs and so on.
So, in this spirit, I would like to borrow a page from Peterson’s playbook and send my unreserved, unbiased, and unapologetic message to Jordan Peterson. I will split this message into three parts. The first part will cover my introduction to Peterson, his ideals and what I find appealing about him. The second part will be a critique of Peterson's ideas, style and ideals and the third part would centre around his descent into well, we shall see.
Introduction
Dear Prof. Jordan Peterson, like most people, I first encountered you in 2017 when your famous exchange with Cathy Newman shot you into the limelight. You became an instant darling of mine. I binged on everything I could find on you and even declared you to be my newest favourite person in a Facebook post in 2018.
You had the ability to distil very common sensical but controversial cultural issues and topics into very catchy, understandable, and convincing form. Your commentary on the gender pay gap, patriarchy and other social issues was saturated with (un)common wisdom. You seemed like a cultural prophet bringing water of common sense to a desert bereft of ideas that people in the West had become stranded in. Your stance against cowering to the woke mob endeared you further to me as you locked heads constantly with Justin Trudeau the Canadian prime minister on the insanity that had begun to grip him.
I saw in you a voice of reason, an intellectual who could do a lot to bridge the ever-widening gap between liberals and conservatives. You’ve on multiple occasions described yourself as a classical liber
al, but also you had a strong appeal with conservatives like myself. The left immediately dismissed you as a right-wing nut and a gateway to the extreme right, even going so far as to portray you as the villain red skull in an animation series. You were taking attacks from all sides but continued to grow despite all that. Your book Twelve Rules for Life contained a lot of useful ideas for personal growth and development with an emphasis on the individual. Such was my introduction to you Sir.
Critique
While I was yet an ardent fan of yours so much that I thought of emigrating to Canada just so I could meet this great man, yet somewhere in the recess of my mind, there was something about you that I found incredibly unsettling. It was not your message, because those were common sense and I mostly agreed anyway. So, what was it? I couldn't quite put a finger to it, but ever so often an uneasy feeling rose to my mouth whenever I listened to you. Your teachings on religion gave me my first points of clear disagreement with you, especially on your interpretations of the Christian scripture.
I found your Biblical analysis to be rooted not in the scriptural texts themselves but in psychology, and possibly mythology. You’re a clinical psychologist so that could be expected, but I never found those lectures compelling, but rather detracting as a Christian who has more than a basic understanding of what the Bible teaches. But despite this, you were still a darling of mine, you had too much common sense that this one area of disagreement could be overlooked.
But my whole perception of you began to radically change when I became active on Twitter sometime in 2021, here I was exposed to perhaps the side of you that is optimized for the Twitter algorithm. I have always heard that Twitter was a terrible place, and I found confirmation of that saying in that, Twitter brought out the worst in a man I had come to deeply admire.
Little by little, I began to understand those unsettling feelings I had about you. I noticed that part of the unease I had was your intensity which was often mistaken for passion, your apocalyptic posturing, and dismissal of opposition as post-modernist neo-Marxist types, your serial straw manning of opponents, intellectual bullying of anyone who asked you an uncomfortable question and lately your less than elegant use of words such as “up yours woke moralists!” But perhaps the most shocking so far was your attack on online anonymity referring to people with anonymous Twitter accounts as demonic trolls. For an atheist, you sure use a lot of religiously charged words. And no, I don’t consider you a Christian, at best you’re an agnostic who admires Christian ideals but mostly because you associate Christian ideals with Western ideals, but I digress.
You have described yourself as agreeable, a claim for which I’ve found very little evidence based on the way you’ve carried yourself in public engagements. Perhaps this is true for your personal life, there’s no way for me to tell. I can hardly remember you having a light-hearted conversation, where you relax, have a laugh, or smile for more than a few seconds, even your interview with your own father was prosecuted like a general on the battlefield, precise, clinical almost devoid of human warmth.
I really found it hard to articulate this unsettling feeling about you, but one comment in a YouTube video put it far better than I ever could. It reads,
“…finally figured out what upsets me about JP. Every time I hear him talk, he just seems to be devoid of kindness and compassion. He seems like he can’t, or he doesn’t want to entertain the possibility that some, if not most people partake in activism because they genuinely want to build a better world for themselves and others, because they are afraid of the future or because they want to help those in need. Instead, of acknowledging that activism can come from fear, compassion, hope etc (all natural human emotions that need to be dealt with) he tries to discredit it by assuming that people protest, demand change, etc out of selfishness.”
The way you emphatically use words as if there was no question about what you’re saying, as though your words are the final authority on the issue at hand. The rising of your pitch as you get excited about a point strikes me as a man who is perhaps taking the issue too seriously and too personally and that you’re not able to separate the ideas from yourself or from other people. This does not make you a bad person, but the reverse would have made you a much better person. What I find particularly distasteful is your sometimes arrogant and unequivocal choice of language.
Apocalyptic stance.
You in a sense have become that which you sought to combat, at least in demeanour and in tactics. Remember how the extreme left always catastrophizes things, like we have 12 years left if nothing is done to combat climate change or that Donald Trump's presidency was causing a rise in white supremacists and attacks against minorities. We can all look at all this and see how ridiculous they were, but in a sense, you do the same thing with your cry that Western civilization is under siege and on the verge of collapsing anytime soon if nothing is done.
To be honest, I think you’re right in pointing out the attacks on the foundations of Western civilisation, I also think you’re right that something needs to be done, where I differ is in your methods, and I hate to say rhetoric. Any solution to the assault on Western civilisation that does not call for dialogue, or an appeal to the other side would only result in more balkanization, where both sides dig deeper into their positions. But even if reason cannot appeal to the other side, it is not clear that you can save Western civilization despite your best efforts.
I thought at the outset that you could appeal to the moderates on both sides of the aisle, I now think that you would continue to alienate more moderates and attract more on the extreme right, the left is completely lost to you already. One may look at your rising popularity and say, well that's counter to my claim, it actually isn't, your YouTube channel is currently pushing towards 7 million subscribers, I’m sure there are more than 7 million extreme right-leaning people on the planet, not that I’m saying all or most of your subscribers or followers are on the extreme right, I just feel the share of your followers who are moderates are steadily declining and those who are fanatics are steadily rising. I feel confident enough to give this as my opinion.
Dismissal of opposition.
Many people may not suspect, but you are quite dismissive of opposition as post-modernist neo-Marxists, and because you’ve become somewhat of a celebrity, it’s easy to sneak that dismissal beneath the radar of many people, that they are not able to see it, even I fell for that tactic for years. I will buttress this point with an example of an exchange you had with an audience member in Q and A, where the woman asked, “What else can one do aside from banal statements such as clean your room.” You retorted with a statement "You know it's actually quite difficult to answer a question that ends with your comments are banal politely, I would consider that as more of an opinionated personal political question, so why don't you try reformulating that so there is an actual question there" you got applause for that response, she reframed her question, but you proceeded to cross-examine and badger her as a lawyer would in court until the host stopped you. You went on to give your answer to the question, but there were a few things to note.
I've watched that exchange more than a dozen times and 99% of the time I watched it, I was wholeheartedly in agreement with you, but a few weeks ago, rewatching it again I began to see the loopholes in your answer. We could all acknowledge that the question could be interpreted as insulting, by her using the words banal, but in actuality, "clean your room" is kind of banal, I figured out the power of cleaning your room and organizing oneself when I was a teenager, whenever I felt lost and wanted to recenter myself, I simply cleaned my room and reorganized my surroundings, it was a very powerful technique to bring order back to my life. In essence, “clean your room” is not a novel idea. But even if we agree that the question was insulting, yet that was not all there was to that question, especially after she reframed it. She was asking what people can do to effect change on large scale on social issues, change that cannot be achieved by simply taking personal responsibility, that was a valid question. Personal responsibility is great advice, but it has its limits, but you seem to extol it to an unreasonable degree. How much personal responsibility on the part of Gandhi would have granted India freedom? What amount of personal responsibility on the part of MLK, would have given AA civil rights? These men were deeply flawed men, who did not have everything in their personal lives in perfect order as you are wanting to say, but they were able to achieve monumental social change by organizing forces beyond themselves.
Back to your exchange, your second response to her was that her question was not a real question but an opinionated personal political statement, as if that was enough to invalidate the question. The same claim can be made that your position is an opinionated personal political position, should what you say be discounted on account of that? You would usually answer with, put your life in perfect order before trying to change the world, yet everything you do is in effect changing or trying to change the world and I feel confident that your life is not in perfect order. Perhaps you can do with your own advice.
I get the utility of such advice in the sense that people often take on activism as a way of deflecting from the problems in their own lives, however, many of the great ideas or advances in civilization were done by people who didn’t have their lives in perfect order, I mean who can. If this advice is taken to its logical conclusion, human society would stagnate.
One Twitter user perfectly summed you up when he wrote
“frantic and emotional re-packaging of Biblical allegory and Jungian psychology, benzo-fuelled references to Foucault and Dostoyevsky, crying at odd intervals. All the while fence-sitting about whether or not God is real. What’s not to love”.
Someone once asked me to articulate what my gripe with you was, so I’ve ‘listed nine points as a response.
1. The most obvious, is being so convoluted in speech with a lot of caveats such that you cannot be pinned down to any one thing. When your arguments are called out, you'll simply say, but I didn't really say that, or When precisely did I say that? That’s a powerful debating tactic, but it is also a dishonest one if your goal is revealing the truth, such a technique is usually used to win an argument rather than to uncover what is true, so I get the sense that you’re deliberately vague to have escape room.
2. You’re always in attack mode. When you get pushback, you'll begin by claiming that the person is a radical left postmodernist neo-Marxist type. Which really is an ad hominem as it makes it easier to dismiss your opponent’s viewpoint. Name-calling isn’t a substantive argument. But you do it all the time. You seem to be too psychologically and emotionally invested in your position that you end up being mean when you should be clear-headed and charitable. Case in point your attack on the model featured in sports illustrated magazine.
That was a very weird attack, as many of your followers duly noted. Aside from the fact that beauty is somewhat subjective, that woman to the extent that beauty is objective, was objectively beautiful. Your tweet would have made more sense to me if you had tweeted, “Sorry not healthy” in reference to her size, but even at that, how is it any of your business? Is sports illustrated funded by taxpayer money? Can’t they as a private business do whatever the hell they want? That seemed like a needless personal attack.
3. Commenting on things you have very little understanding about for example religion. You don’t understand Christianity or the Bible as a Christian would yet you philosophize and mythologize it. This is in direct contravention of the scriptures. Apostle Paul warned of people like you when he stated in Colossians 2:8
“Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ.”
What you’re doing with the Bible is totally unChristian, the Bible should only be understood and interpreted through a spiritual lens, not a philosophical or mythological one. Your cringe message to Muslims shows you don’t understand Islam either.
4. Serial straw-manning. You on many occasions, oversimplify, and straw man your opponents. I’ll illustrate with one example, when a trans activist held a sign which said, “Fuck TERFs” you interpreted that as them calling for the literal rape of women. Really?
I’m no fan of trans activists or the trans ideology, but I would never strawman them to that extent. Never. So all the times you said fuck you to someone for which there is plenty of evidence, you were calling for the rape of such people? Weird.
5. Your alarmist posture. Even though the left is delusional in their takes on cultural issues, your alarmism on the imminent danger of post-modernist ideology is more akin to the left's climate alarmism. The nonsense we are seeing today with the mutilation of kids and the gender business comes with the age we are currently living in. The Bible prophesied about these things happening, as a Christian I’m not surprised or alarmed that these things are happening, I understand why they are happening and I’m equipped spiritually on how to handle them. If you were a Christian, you would know this.
6. You seem to think you’re some sort of cultural messiah. There is no balance to your viewpoint, it is increasingly skewed to the right that it doesn't allow for an honest conversation. Contrary to what you claim, you’re not that agreeable. To me, your cultural crusade is a way of avoiding some personal things you’re dealing with.
Akin to activists who you advise to put their house in order before trying to change the world. I believe you have unsolved personal struggles in your life, yet you’re trying to change the world. Irony much?
7. Many of your analyses when critiqued on a deeper level come off as shallow at best, with over-generalizations, or pure conjecture. You claim the literature is settled on some things and when one does a little research on the claim you make with the one reference you usually give, one finds, the literature is not as certain as you say they are.
8. If I were to sum you up in three words, the words would be, simplistic, verbose and reductionist.
Finally, on Twitter, mostly, you come off as a provocateur with a PhD, no better than Andrew Tate or Milo Yiannopolous. That being said, you do have some really great insights, I mean even a broken clock is right twice in a day. But you Sir are just as wrong as you can be right. And this is my message to you.
Charles Ekokotu (Pharm. D.) is a bibliophile, prose fiction writer, poet, and playwright. His first self-published novel, Hotel Shendam—a crime fiction novel featuring a debate on race and colonialism—is available on Amazon. A very fun read! Grab a copy now!
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Just on one point. A non-believer (atheist?) cannot grasp the spiritual sense as does the believer (devout christian) regarding the bible. So naturally, regarding it, the non-believer reads it as a pointed story within a historical context. I don't know why that is something to critique any more than vice-versa. As the intended story, the non-believer just cannot believe it. It's quite simple.
As for the rest of your critique, I agree much about JP's dogmatic delivery is unsettling. There is a destructive tone carried with it.
He is "declarative" in manner but it seems to me he is well grounded in his awareness of human aggression, selfishness, and acquisitiveness which sets limits to people's (society's?) social harmony.
It seems he promotes a strong message of self-responsibility for self-satisfaction and happiness, but that is not uncommon for a certain rank of thinkers.
I find I don't seek his input or opinions all that much. His "style" is not an attractive style. I can't dismiss JP, but he does not excite me to seek his wisdom.
I could not agree more with this essay. That said, I would highly recommend an editor. Too easy for your interlocutors to write you and your opinions off when you grammar and punctuation are subpar...as they are here.