Commentaries on JB Peterson: Rebel Wisdom

[Music] Jordan Peterson has become hugely successful. What do you make of the phenomena? Why do you think he's become so successful?

There is a drought of authenticity and courage, and Peterson has found that hunger, and he's tapped into it. I admire his ability to detect it and to speak to it plainly in a way that resonates with people. I did, we were on a panel together in Vancouver, and I watched his talk. He described his own surprise at how effective his message had been. He basically said that if he had outlined his message as the core of a business model, it would have looked laughable to him, and that he was as shocked as anybody that people are resonating with it.

But when you live in a world that is as full of crap as the world we live in, where people are advertising [ __ ] to you from the moment you get up to the moment you go to sleep, and then somebody finally tells you some truth that you need to hear, it's a relief. It's a relief just to know that there's some channel that isn't compromised by nonsense. He, I don't think he's the only one speaking truthfully, but I think he is speaking from the heart, and people know it.

I think that he grasps directly the fact that human beings can only actually make sense of the world by virtue of communication with other human beings. This is all about the notion of admixture, that one must have a mixture of love. I mean, he uses the mythopoetic to make sense of order. Order and chaos, the way, or the Daoist way, is the alchemical admixture of order and chaos. And that's it; like, that's how you do it.

If you biased towards orderliness, you find yourself in a rigid, non-adaptive, non-creative, non-exploratory framework, which will die because the world changes. If you bias towards chaos, you eat your young and evaporate, which also dies for obvious reasons. The key is to actually enable these things to be in relationship with each other, in a vital, healthy relationship with each other. That, I think, is in some sense the essence of what he's focusing on and instead of the core, what he's acting about.

He's very easy to work with, as his voice is an instrument. He speaks very deliberately and sonorously and rhythmically. Anyway, he actually speaks in a kind of form of rhythmic poetry sometimes. He is actually rapid; Peterson’s words plus lo-fi hip-hop equal JBP way. At first, it's like, oh, it's a novelty thing. Then, I kind of listen to him, and it's like, no, it's not a novelty thing; this is actually really good.

Yeah, that's been the reaction all over. I think that was Peterson's reaction. He was instantly like, thought this was gonna be silly and was amusing. It was like, oh, this is actually awful, and now we're essentially proving useful.

That's generally interesting that you say, as well, that Peterson has a very musical or a very performative aspect to his speech because he talks about performing that performance or aligning yourself with the truth. If you're aligning yourself with the logos of the creative principle, you would expect for that to have an effect on your actual performance. But he feels like a very embodied speaker when he's on stage; like, he's fully inhabiting the stories that he's telling. That performative aspect of it seems to be, at least to me, also related to what he's talking about—the logos of something incarnated more in your life and incarnate and more in your being.

Yes, and watching him become that over the years because he was not always as confident and able to just—now, you know, you free stars, right? His whole career has really reminded me of 50 Cent, for example. He got big off the back of drama; there were created dramas—beefs with other rappers and being shot 13 times and all this stuff—which draws people into the story.

But then he had this huge body of work, and that kept people there. Peterson did this; he had these public dramas that brought people to him. But then when they got to him, there was this huge body of work for them to get sort of lost and immersed in. Peterson has some kind of drama like every week at this point; he's like the ultimate sort of contemporary battle rapper. He's at war with all sorts of people at all times, and it's brilliant, very interesting.

If you're inside, you know, if you're a rap fan or if you're, what would you call, if you're an intellectual dark whatever the hell it is, it’s like this guy's getting incredible beefs every week, right? And there's a new sort of supervillain to root against every week. Regardless of whether you’re on his side or not, you know, the whole thing’s very entertaining. But then he pulls you in, and then there’s all this meaning and this huge body of work.

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But he’s quite new on this light; if you watch him, like, 15 years ago, it was a bit awkward and sort of he was very charming, and he knew what he was talking about, but the absolute [ __ ] beast that he has become as a performance creature who can now just rock up at an amphitheater and just like freestyle a two-hour lecture off the top of his head. He’s very into not repeating himself too much.

In contrast, if you go see a stand-up comedian, you’ll see pretty much the same set every week for like a year or something, right? He won’t do that; he’s more like a very good DJ. He has all these—yes, like a fistful of things that, you know, his works together and they’re linked and he can take on these different journeys. But depending on who’s in the room and where he is, he will create a new and transformative experience.

I remember discovering Jordan Peterson last June and just immediately thinking this is the thing that is needed right now. This is about the re-internment of the world, the assimilation of spirituality, the assimilation of religion. This is the thing, and I was kind of obsessed, like digesting, listening to all of his stuff, and then pitched an interview to him. I was lucky enough to get an interview with him in October that we then put out as the Truth in the Time of Chaos documentary in January.

At exactly the time that, ironically, he then kind of shot to fame with an interview with my ex-colleague Kathy Newman on Channel 4 News, when a lot of what I had gone to talk to Jordan Peterson about was synchronicity. It was just uncanny; that’s when the synchronicity stopped. That’s right; that’s right. That’s when things start to line up.

Yeah, and the more you’re in that space, the more they line up. Yeah, and so the question is, if you’re like really in that space, how much do things line up? All of this was happening, and I wondered what I was gonna make—what to make of this, and for quite a while, I was thinking, well, I have this kind of link to Kathy and I have some kind of link to Jordan. So what I need to do is to create a bridge between them and get them to go and do the second interview that I thought was necessary.

And so for a while, I was doing that, kind of trying to do stuff behind the scenes. Then it was clear that Kathy wasn't interested; Channel 4 weren't interested. Sorry, Channel 4 News weren’t interested, so in the end, I thought, well, it came to me. Okay, I should make a documentary glitching the matrix—which then was a way of just downloading all the stuff that I’d been thinking about for quite a while.

Especially since the election of Trump about kind of the shadow side of liberalism and all of the blind spots of liberalism. So Glitching the Matrix was kind of the title of it, and it all came from a very real flow state of being really aligned and feeling like, okay, this is what I’m meant to be doing, which is the essence of kind of synchronicity. The essence of Jordan Peterson's deeper meaning is, you know, when you’re aligned at the right place and then your sense of meaning tells you what to do.

I think he’s often misconstrued by people who can’t get past the politics or have a reactivity to him. But to me, he is doing nothing less than channeling and fully articulating the deep story of Western culture for the first time. Well, certainly for the first time in the internet age; you could argue that Jung was doing the same thing back in the 50s, and that there are people who come along and do this at times in the past.

But effectively saying we already know a lot of the answers; we already know the way to live. It’s embodied interaction, it’s embodied in mythologies, it’s embodied in our religions. It’s embodied in all of these things. Look at this piece of art; what is it saying? We represented it in art; we represented it in all these ways. Now we can fully articulate it—tie into neuroscience—and that it’s an epic, epic project.

And so I get accused, and it’s very easy to sort of say, well, you’re obsessed with Jordan Peterson; you’re a fanboy, and all that stuff. For me, the message that he’s bringing forward is that deep. It’s that deep, and therefore I want to continue to use his thought as a lens to link into other great thinkers. Like, we just put out an interview with Rupert Sheldrake, who I think is an amazing rebellious thinker; he’s been doing this stuff for a long time.

I want to also continue to kind of expand that into other thinkers, make the conscious link to this sort of deeper worldview, and help, yeah, just bring out great content, really, where is his insight coming from? So, we were talking to you when you were describing, “Hey, you almost sound a little bit like Jordan Peterson.” I mean, in the sense of, yeah, I mean, if I had to describe my worldview in a nutshell, it would be sort of a Neoplatonic.

So there was a Neoplatonic, stoic, mystic, Christic, Gnostic. So the idea of Neoplatonic, I believe I have always just sort of felt like there is a realm of ideal forms. Stoic—do the suck it up, fat kid, and do the hard thing—100%. Gnostic, there is a certain ineffable experience of being. And then the mystic Christic is some reflection on the Judeo-Christian Western tradition, but nothing to do with 2,000 years of bureaucratic administration and everything to do with what is nominally the metaphor of Kairos and Chronos; the intersection of kind of sacred and profane time in human form.

So in that respect, yeah, I would track with Peterson. My sense is for me, my, you know, gnosis or understanding has come from ecstasies, has come from peak experiences. My sense for him, at least as he shares what he does of his life, has come from catharsis, has come from the suffering, it's come from battling depression, has come from staring the abyss in the face versus the view from the summit.

Those are ideally come full circle and reinforce each other. But if I had to sort of delineate maybe where's his transmission anchoring from, it's maybe a little bit more the staring the abyss and surviving it than calling out coordinates from the mountaintop. The most important thing for me, quite apart from his work with these stories, modernist was, as you say, his investigation into the Bible.

I’ve always been fascinated, although I'm an atheist, I’ve always been fascinated by the power of the biblical stories. I often found myself looking at these huge cathedrals and churches that sprouted up all over Europe, you know, and ask myself, well, what's that about? You know, why was this story so powerful? I mean, yeah, it’s a defense against death if you want to be cynical, but, hey, it could be lots of other stories, you know? Why is this one so unbelievably powerful? What does it mean for it to be so powerful?

And Peterson, I think, brilliantly answers that question in the biblical lectures he’s done. He really changed me; those lectures genuinely did. I think changed the way I lived my life because he came to this very, very important conclusion—of which I’m pretty convinced by. I don’t think I’m ever 100% convinced about anything, but I’m very convinced by his idea.

I’m someone who suffered depression, and depression is like a crisis of meaning in your life. The worst thing about depression is not about being miserable; it's having a life that seems utterly meaningless. That’s why it’s such torment, and Peterson’s in a way tries to answer the question, how do we, as an individual—that’s a bit of a paradox—how do I, as an individual, acquire meaning? Because meaning is the most important thing any of us could have.

You know, there’s meaning as it—you know, if you don’t know, and yet no one could quite say what meaning is, which I think is interesting in itself. You know, one says, well, I want a sense of meaning. What is a sense of meaning? What is meaning? And Petersons, I think it—knowledge is that mystery. But also he says, well, you know, if you want a sense of meaning, it’s not about just doing what you want. It’s not about just following your bliss, as Joseph Campbell would be, or having as much fun as possible, or even necessarily being happy—no, absolutely not necessarily being happy.

There were more important things than being happy. And I’ve also found that to be true in my life. I hadn’t heard someone making a compelling case like this that was actually getting traction with people, and it was clear Peterson was getting traction. So then I said, I’ve got to listen to this guy; I’ve got to figure out what he’s saying and why it’s working and how I should respond to what’s happening around him.

How is it being as well? Because Peterson has obviously been getting more and more controversial, and I’ve kind of felt this as well. Sort of like, you end up getting into conversations—no, he didn’t mean that; it wasn’t about that. How is that being?

I deeply suspect there are a number of friends of mine that are deeply concerned for me because of this Jordan Peterson thing. Because they hear, again, the soundbite world grabs a few things—Jordan Peterson is a bigot, he’s transphobic, he’s homophobic, he’s, you know, the godfather of the patriarchy, whatever he is.

But the thing is, they know me. They know I’m not a bigot; they know where I was raised; they know who’s in my church; they know me by my actions. So what to do with this? I’ve given Jordan Peterson, in a sense, a year of my life. What do you do with that? Well, they don’t know what to do with that, so they’re quiet and they watch and they wait.

When Adam invited me to do that podcast, we were all someone who, similar to the two of you, I believe was starting to track Peterson. And not just Jordan Peterson, what he was saying, but also the ripples he was having in culture—the absolute phenomenon and explosion of attention that was happening around him in the media. I started kind of watching him, reading him with an open mind.

My experience was an open mind, like, oh, I resonate with that. I love he’s bringing in Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell and archetypal dimensions to his thinking. I like how he’s kind of kicking the left a little bit and calling them on some of their problematic thinking. Then watching this kind of phenomenon from the left or the far left, where people just with extraordinary levels of anger and fear and distrust, and kind of the difference in that experience of my own and some of our experiences of Peterson, and then watching a lot of friends who are on the far left having radically different experiences and perceptions of who he is and what he’s bringing.

I was really just curious about that, and it seems like, similar to some of the stuff you’ve been doing with Rebel Wisdom. As a, I mean, you’re training as a psychologist; we do a lot of work with psychology as well. When there’s a huge reactivity to something, there’s always something interesting going on behind it, and it sort of makes you inquire.

It’s like, okay, what are people reacting to? Yes, whether you love them or hate them, it’s that equal proportion of intensity. Whenever that’s there, it’s what’s kind of called a complex. A complex is a psychological, and I think Jung would say it can be an autonomous complex; it’s not part of the ego; it’s so deep-rooted.

In my opinion, it’s a collective complex in the collective unconscious; it’s like everyone on the right thinks everyone on the left is a Stalinist, and everyone on the right thinks everyone on the left is a Nazi. There’s this polarization happening where people like Peterson, who are trying to carve out, I would say, not non-political but a kind of position that’s lateral to politics—that’s more in the psychological domain—to ask people to look at themselves as individuals, to question the extent to which they’re projecting their shadow onto the other.

Until we can resolve issues on that level, it’s going to be very difficult to resolve these political disagreements. That’s one of the main reasons that I’ve found myself so interested in what Peterson is saying. He’s shifting the level of the conversation, at least.

I was so excited to see Jordan Peterson erupted onto the stage, and I know you had a particular part in that. There is a culture war that is in right precedence. I mean, we are in the middle of a culture war. There’s a polarization, and Jordan Peterson is standing in the middle as a lightning rod, taking all the projections from both sides.

He clearly sees the postmodern ideology, and it is an ideology; it’s a system of beliefs and values that will not lead us to the promised land. It is problematic; it leads us into a swamp with no exit; it is not sustainable. He sees it very clearly, and in my opinion, he sees it from a modern perspective—very brilliant modern perspective. He has a depth because of his understanding of Carl Jung and his own work in psychology that is deeper than most people.

So people are drawn to that depth; he sees something much deeper than what other people are seeing right now. We had never met one another, and I knew actually very little about Jordan Peterson's written word; he knew pretty little about mine. We were just told to sit down and shoot, and we had no idea where we were going.

So he just started talking, so why the master, his emissary, and he just went from there. But what I felt was, you know, a super intelligent man who had wide-ranging interests in psychology, philosophy, and didn’t rule out a spiritual or two things. I don’t think that I would—

In the film, I think it probably comes out that there are aspects of what Jordan was saying that I was getting. Well, yes, but so I didn’t entirely kind of—I'm not a Jordan Peterson fanboy—but I do have a huge respect for him, and we had a great conversation. We were proposing to do more.

What do you make of the sort of the criticisms? Because often he’s described as a fraud or a charlatan in some of the media coverage. But when you watch the interview with yourself, I mean, that’s a very high-level conversation. The idea of him as a fraud or a charlatan just seems kind of bizarre.

It’s outrageous; it’s disrespectful, it’s dismissive, and it’s entirely typical of blinkered liberalism. You can disagree with him about many things, and I would disagree with him about a number of things, but to say that is just to show how painted you are. He’s clearly an extraordinary man.

I mean, I think what strikes people is that he was relatively unknown, and then he became known, but that’s what life isn’t it? It doesn't prove for a showers.

Yeah, I mean, a lot of this sounds quite Jordan Peterson-esque. What’s your attitude towards Jordan Peterson?

Yeah, I mean, I’m glad he’s out there, and I think there are—I mean, I think at a minimum there’s sort of three different Jordan Petersons. There’s Jordan Peterson the analyst and academic, which essentially nobody ever heard of. There’s Jordan Peterson, the kind of contrary and public intellectual, which sort of kicked off in 2016. Then there’s sort of Jordan Peterson as a Rorschach blot for the culture wars, which both left and right wildly distort who he is, what he's saying, and what it means for them.

So we get the second and the third ones completely mixed, although the first one, you know, University of Toronto, and hopping your former Harvard professors, is the one that gives the credibility and the weight to the other two dialogues. So in that respect, I think what I imagine him to be as an actual man is a pretty high-integrity, principled person who likes to think for himself and likes to speak not just truth to power, but also likes to remind his audience—whether it’s students or broader than that—what is the life well lived?

Now there—I think there are problems in how, in the age of soundbites and hundreds of hours of footage and tons of speaking and those kind of things, that become problematic. And I’m not in any way convinced that if I sat down with him and said, “Hey mate, what about this bit?” that he would actually stand and defend it.

But the impressions I get would be that his—I think he sometimes over-catastrophizes the slippery slope to Marxism in the sense that all this, you know, this way lies Stalinist death camps; therefore we cannot give one inch on concessions to progressive ideals or agendas. Although having said that, I have also personally experienced the almost Chinese Communist-like struggle sessions of political correctness in the Academy and in its kind of left-wing, you know, left coast idea.

It’s not that I don’t see the peril; I do. I just think sometimes he uses the slippery slope argument maybe just a little early.

The bottom line without necessarily enough conditions to justify it, he sometimes, in my experience, I think—the last time I remember him on Joe Rogan doing the "life is nasty, brutish, and short," the kind of Hobbesian, "it's always been this way; therefore, any efforts to try and recalibrate or rebalance the scales are fundamentally flawed, delusional, and by the way lead to the Stalinist death camps," without any more nuanced socio-political critique of practices and policies.

So, for instance, concentration of wealth and the 1%, and even the percentage of 1% has been directly traceable, at least in the US, over tax and corporate law—various deliberate policies that are fundamentally different in the 70s and 80s—now resulted in an incredible skewing and aggregation of wealth in the hands of the few.

For him to skip over that and go to lobsters and serotonin feels like skipping some critical steps and also skipping some critical places of potential responsibility. What became real clear is that the left and liberal were no longer the same—the old original leftists were liberals, but the new leftists were illiberal; they’re anti-liberal. That’s a disaster; you can’t go forward with that kind of pathology.

If you're somebody like Jordan Peterson, who is thinking integrally, and you’re looking around and seeing what the hell's going on, and you’re starting to notice this, and then the government comes along and says, "Oh, and by the way, I'm going to compel your speech," that would send anybody with integrity and integral thinking over the wall.

So he was up, you know, all night; he did those three videos, you know, forcing unconscious bias retraining and political correctness. What he saw happening with that and the nightmare of Bill C-16 threw him up on the net, went viral. And the main cause of that, in my opinion, is these orange liberal values of equal opportunity that were getting crushed between the extreme far left of green and the strong far right of ethnocentric amber.

These liberal values in between were just getting left out of the picture, and that was a disaster. That was the thing that at least put Jordan Peterson on the map. He was arguing against Bill C-16 because not only that, it put into law a constructivist view of human identity—that was his complaint. It had nothing to do with transgender people, and the people that attacked him for being anti-transgender had absolutely nothing to do with that.

He’s very clear about that; what it was was putting into actual law a constructivist view of human nature, which, by the way, is pure green; it’s pure postmodern green viewpoint. That also is an attack on free speech in the worst possible way.

For me, his success signifies how much we’re thirsting for this father energy in our culture. What do you make of Jordan Peterson, and what do you make of the Jordan Peterson phenomenon?

You know, I think first of all I would not have predicted it, so I don’t want to—I think maybe I’m often called, among my people who agree with me, a visionary, but I was not a visionary for seeing Jordan Peterson. I think it’s amazing that an intellectual, that is young, who is, you know, who speaks in terms of often metaphor and allegory, has risen to such extraordinary success.

I think it is in part a result of our enormous hunger. We, you know, we have attached to two extremely unlikely figures because of our hunger: Donald Trump on the one hand and Jordan Peterson on the other. Two ends of the extreme in terms of somebody who’s been willing to say, you know, fathers are important, families are important.

Jordan and I found ourselves in a hour-and-a-half dialogue in which I would give a— you know, I would talk about fathers in roughhousing, and he would talk about some intellectual Piaget, or someone else who was, you know, who was in the literature or in Disney movies or something else that related to that. It was just a fascinating hour-and-a-half.

I think because, you know, we usually when I'm being interviewed, I don’t learn a great deal, but I certainly learned. It was wonderful the way we learned from each other.

And you’re from Canada? Yeah, one of the biggest phenomena of the last couple of years has been Jordan Peterson. Yeah, what have we made of him, his rise, and what it says about the culture that people are so thirsting for what he’s talking about?

Peterson, first was very bright. I saw Denis articulate and in some ways a compelling speaker. So he said he’s an attractive figure in some ways. When I read him, I sense a lot of suppressed rage in him. In fact, I think his voice is choking with a rage that you have to deal with.

I don’t think you’ll understand just how angry he is. It’s interesting as he talks about rage that you have to deal with that. I don’t think he’ll understand just how angry he is.

And if you look at his websites, the comments were full of rage by his young acolytes. Well, that’s an energetic thing, but it’s his energy that draws people as much as what he actually teaches.

Secondly, he teaches a repression. I mean, he very rightly takes an issue where somebody mandates the cencon language, and he very rightly and righteously says, “I will not be dictated to about what language I’m gonna use.” But good for him; I’m all in favor of not mandating language.

On the one hand, on the other hand, he basically advocates repression. In his book, he talks about how an angry two-year-old child needs to be sent by themselves until they get over it, rather than understanding why a child would be angry, what frustrations they’re having, and what human contact they need to help them move through that anger.

He says repress the anger, so he’s all about repressed anger. For example, it’s very interesting; he talks about children; you have some little varmints and little monsters. I know that’s meant to be humorous, but it’s also a certain way of thinking of the young human child.

So fundamentally, I see him as an agent of repression, posing as an agent of libertarianism, not to mention he’s got this big in his bonnet about what he considers to be—I assume he considers to be conspiracies by left-wing intellectuals. They seem to be his bete noire. Being a left-wing intellectual myself, I’d like to talk to him. So now, what are you so upset about, Jordan? What are you so afraid of?

You know, he talks about these bloody Marxists, and he points out very accurately all the horror that occurred under so-called Marxist regimes, particularly in the Soviet Union. He’s absolutely accurate about that. But then he promotes Christianity. Shall I tell him about the mass murders that occurred in the name of Christianity?

Should I tell him about all the millions that were slaughtered in the names of the gentle Jesus? In other words, let’s be fair about it. He seems to pick ideologies to attack and abhor and embrace other ideologies that are just as murderous in practice.

Sometimes it’s a much more interesting question for me: What happened in Eastern Europe? How come, under an ideology that was meant to liberate people, so many people were oppressed? I come from Eastern Europe; I was born in Hungary. He doesn’t have to tell me about what it was like.

But how about asking, how come a religious philosophy that was meant to promote love and acceptance and compassion has become such an agent of repression, oppression, and killing? So can we be objective, or are we going to simply be tribal about it?

I have a lot to say to Jordan. I have a lot to—as much as I appreciate actually some of what he says, and as interesting as I find him, I think he's a very mixed figure, largely an occasion to repression.

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