Peterson’s concerns about chaos amount to a fear of individual freedom. Much of Peterson’s scholarship emphasizes imposing order onto the chaos of life, but liberals don’t believe that chaos results from freedom. In fact, much of the liberal tradition centers around unplanned order that spontaneously emerges from free individuals voluntarily associating with one another.

Language, and culture more broadly, can be seen as the quintessential spontaneous orders described by past classical liberals like Hayek and Smith before him. The concept of spontaneous order is important to keep in mind in this context because Peterson’s entire schtick seems to be about warning people of life’s inevitable chaos and how we ought to embrace established hierarchies to impose order on chaos and make life livable. This seems incompatible with the classical liberal embrace of unplanned order.

Peterson and his fans will argue that they derive order from behaviors that have conferred evolutionary advantages to humans throughout history and prehistory, which constitute as such a bundle of examples of spontaneous order. What they fail to account for is how consciously adopting and perpetuating those myths and practices alters our paths forward as a species in a way that amounts to conscious design–even assuming we have perfect knowledge of what worked in the past and why. Evolution is not something that happened to our ancestors, led to us, and left us bound to recreate previously adaptive behaviors in perpetuity. The evolutionary insights that Peterson likes to point to encouraged our ancestors to live together in relatively large and complex groups. That is nice and important, to be sure, but as Deirdre McCloskey notes, it took more than ten thousand years after that happened for our species to begin innovating against abject poverty, slavery and serfdom, and the vagaries of the environment.

Peterson wants to preserve incumbent hierarchies qua their incumbency. In other words, Peterson is not an adversary of established norms, mores, or institutions but rather an effective defender of them. He appeals to myths and legends about Jungian archetypes to obscure his defense of what are already predominant ideas. In one word, Peterson is a conservative.