Readers Respond to Jordan Peterson in Aspen

My article “Jordan Peterson Comes to Aspen” generated a lot of correspondence. Most of it defied the conventional wisdom that the University of Toronto professor turned celebrity intellectual is either uncritically loved or hated. Some Dr. Peterson fans disagree with parts of his oeuvre; some critics see merit in his project; and lots of folks are earnestly wrestling with his ideas. By the time I cleared my inbox I felt more optimistic about public discourse than before––and more persuaded than ever that social media is hugely distorting.

Since so many fans and critics alike are trying to think through the words of this suddenly influential man, I’ve been inclusive in the number of emails I’ve included. Folks who are interested in an appetizer or a fast-casual dining experience should satiate your hunger and leave at will. And I’ve pared down some emails for concision to keep the quality high for those who stay for the 12-course dinner.

Either way, I hope one takeaway, wherever readers come down on Dr. Peterson, is to have a less caricatured view of the folks on the other side. The arguments in these emails are useful in part because they are trying to get at the truth. But those that are in error still lend insight into how their authors are thinking.

Don’t assume that I agree or disagree with any of what follows.

Savannah writes:

Thank you for your measured commentary on Jordan Peterson. I think my primary discomfort with him is the core idea you've identified: that he promotes the "psychological project" over the "sociological project" of correcting the ills of society. I follow self-help ambivalently, as someone who in practice takes on nearly absolute responsibility for my life's outcomes and for better living through intentional self-improvement but subscribes earnestly to the idea that social circumstances outside individual control, including political and socioeconomic structures, are determining factors in those outcomes.

I suspect this is a common dialectic held by others in my Anxious Young Liberal demographic.

The fact that Jordan Peterson visibly appears at the junction between self-help and political discourse indicts the idea that I can have it both ways. Whether he's willingly standing between politics and personal philosophy or has been placed there by critics is not totally clear to me, but there he is. I have a similar discomfort with Sam Harris, with The Minimalists, and even with figures who seem to fall to the left of the spectrum but preach a new kind of prosperity gospel of expensive self-care, like Gwyneth Paltrow and a wide array of copycat lifestyle bloggers, and yet, I receive (look forward to!) their newsletters.

Peterson disturbs me because some of his ideas and attitudes aren't that far outside my cultural/intellectual wheelhouse, but he seems to be irresponsibly allowing his alt-right following to take these ideas in a direction I fundamentally disagree with (hence the confusion between "obvious" and "wrong," I suppose—maybe the transmission / transformation of his ideas through the culture really can make them both at once).

Alex says:

Like many young people, I grew up in a society where I was free to do basically anything. I was told from a young age that I could do anything. Despite all of this potential I was never told how. Jordan is the how. Everyone wants to live a meaningful life but no one had ever taught me how to lead a meaningful life. For some meaning comes naturally … but for most of us, life is suffering, and life is suffering primarily because of our own behaviour. Sure, there are obviously external forces at play, but our society does a pretty good job of supporting people and protecting them from external harm.

No one is talking about internal harm. Internal harm is the harm your inflict on yourself when you decide that you are a victim. I've been there. As a victim you come up with excuses for everything. You blame others for your faults, and by doing that you never address the real problems in your life. What Peterson has taught me is that you need to address the real problems in your life before you go out and try to fix the world. You need to turn in the victim card and take responsibility or else you will continue down your path of destruction.

All of this might be difficult for successful people to understand, and at one point I would have been the same person saying "what Peterson is saying is obvious." In reality, you can never truly appreciate what Peterson is saying until you really need it, and there are no shortage of people in this world who really need it.

A writes:

The strength of both the positive and the negative responses to Jordan Peterson calls for explanation... I think Scott Alexander was on the right track in suggesting that Peterson fits the prophet archetype and so people respond accordingly. However, he also fits the archetype of the strong and authoritative father figure. When people respond to Peterson, they often aren't responding so much to his teaching as to the man himself and to the archetype he represents.

For many young men, the authoritative yet loving father figure is something for which they have a sort of primal hunger. Such a figure is peculiarly capable of leading them towards maturity in manhood. If Peterson were a more maternal figure saying the same things, his words couldn't have the same resonance. On the other hand, there are a great many people for whom the authoritative father figure represents the patriarchy and all that they find oppressive about that. They see the archetypal threat to their freedom, someone who represents a particularly unapologetic male form of authority.

For someone whose positions excite so much controversy in context of gender debates, it is apt that Peterson himself may demonstrate something of the fact that gender and gendered archetypes are deeply and likely inescapably constitutive elements of all of our perception. The notion that all that matters is the content of someone's beliefs or statements seems naive.

A good example of this was the re-staging and gender-reversal of the presidential debates, which illustrated just how powerfully the gender of the speaker conditioned the audience's reaction to them. When a man played the part of Hillary Clinton, he provoked a negative reaction in many who had supported her. However, when a woman played the part of Donald Trump, people who loathed Trump were rattled by how appealing they found her. It seems to me that Peterson is someone who triggers people's gender archetypes in similar ways, producing polarization in people's responses to him.

Anonymous writes:

I'm 28-year-old Canadian pursuing a clinical psychology career. I'm pretty sure this is the first time I've ever written a journalist. Your articles on Jordan Peterson fill me with a genuine feeling of relief and hope. You seem like you actually care about seeking the truth, and in this day in age, that’s a breath of fresh air. Your ability to remain clear-headed and rationale when writing about someone so often conveyed as binary––either God or the Devil––is inspiring. It must be a challenge to accurately portray this strange, painfully alluring public figure. It seems like many forget he is a human being like the rest of us.

I don't characterize myself as either a die-hard JP fan or a vehement detractor. I stumbled on one of his videos over a year ago on YouTube, well, because Big Brother knew I was struggling with social anxiety and "just happened" to pop up as a recommended video for me. At the time, I found his style of speaking engaging and his advice uniquely practical, like he understood a certain nuance about social anxiety that no one had ever conveyed to me