In January 2018 Peterson appeared on a Channel 4 News interview with Cathy Newman. Newman attempted to grill Peterson for half an hour for the perceived sexism in his work. You can watch the whole thing on YouTube or if you don’t have time there’s a smaller clip under the title ‘Jordan Peterson Leaves Feminist Speechless’. It’s one of his most-watched appearances. Newman doesn’t come off well, she clearly didn’t know much about Peterson beyond a few basics and his reputation as a transphobe and she went in combative and hostile. But she had no good response to the points Peterson made and he comes off very well. This interview is a good place to start on Peterson’s political views. It includes his most famous claim.

The claim is as follows. Social hierarchies — what Peterson refers to as ‘dominance hierarchies’ — are not social constructs, as activists claim, but are hardwired into the human brain. He cites research into lobsters because lobsters are a common ancestor to most mammalian life being among the first aquatic life to evolve to survive on land, and some structures and chemicals in the human brain can be identified in lobsters. For example both use Serotonin as a reward chemical. In lobster communities there are clear hierarchies of rank: males fight over who will be leader and thus dominate a territory; those of lower rank share food with the leader; females mate with the highest ranked lobster available. Lobsters are wired to do these things instinctually. What this shows (besides that female lobsters are all gold diggers) is that if you overturn social hierarchies you are going against nature. Why Socialist states always fail. Peterson makes the case that Capitalism is a natural system, corresponding to our neural makeup, hence people should stop complaining about society, the system, the people at the top, as this is the natural order of things.

Here are some things wrong with this:

1. Nobody wants to get rid of hierarchies completely. Not even Communists or Anarchists. ‘Competence hierarchies’ (i.e. you’re the best doctor so you get the most choice, the toughest jobs, top pay/respect, etc.; a trainee couldn’t walk into a hospital and be assigned as brain surgeon because of ‘equality’ or something) are present in all models of society. Alternatives like Socialism advocate getting rid of hierarchies such as worker-manager-CEO and instead allowing people to manage themselves cooperatively rather than through top-down hierarchies.

2. Animal behaviour produces entirely neutral data; there is a big gulf between what lobsters do and how society should be run and Peterson fills this with his own interpretation. Couldn’t the same lobster studies be used to justify slavery or Feudalism? The data is vague enough to mean many things. Why is present-day top-down Neoliberal Capitalism the most natural? Does this mean the system should never change again?

3. It’s unclear why everything must follow nature. Chimpanzees, a much closer human ancestor, violently fight each other for territory, behave in ways that could be interpreted as rape, masturbate in public (only in zoos, though); does this mean we should all be doing the same? There are over 10,000 worker-run cooperatives currently in Europe, many financially successful and often rated higher in worker satisfaction polls than hierarchical workplaces. And a growing number in the US. Is this a denial of human nature? If so, why are they successful? Thinkers often prize rationality and intellectual thought… until (as Peterson ran into here) it points to conclusions they don’t like; then they claim we must follow our animalistic nature instead. (Peterson is just the latest iteration of 19th century Romanticism.) Things like ‘freedom’ and ‘rights’ are unnatural constructions but this doesn’t discount them. And I’ve never seen Peterson mention ‘neuroplasticity’, currently popular in Psychology, which points to how flexible our minds and behaviours can be.

4. Philosopher Slavoj Zizek pointed out that the hierarchical relationship between boss and worker is more complex than just dominator-subordinate. A boss may crave approval from those below her even if her leadership is secure; a worker may unconsciously like being dominated by a boss — even though she claims to hate it — because she is afraid of the thought of working freely. Reducing the relationship to a quantitative analogy simplifies things too much.

5. Lastly, what is really all that should need to be said: they’re lobsters! Why are we even talking about this? They’re nothing like humans. They don’t even have brains in the way humans do, they have clusters of nerves all through their bodies which act as a ‘brain’. The human brain has more reward chemicals than Serotonin. It would be ridiculous to organise society based on lobsters.

Also in the Cathy Newman interview Peterson makes clear his opposition to identity politics (he compares trans activists to Chairman Mao), political correctness, elitist Liberalism, and ‘the Left’ more generally, all of which he neatly ties together under the banner ‘Postmodern Neo-Marxism’. Because he claims they all stem from the philosophies of Marx and the Postmodernists (which he believes are the same thing). He believes this ideology is why Western civilization is in ruin.

The internet is filled with detailed critiques showing Peterson doesn’t have a clue about Marxism or Postmodernism and I’ll leave it to interested readers to search that stuff out themselves. But here is a telling instance, from when Peterson debated Slavoj Zizek, a (sort of) Marxist. In his opening Peterson says that his preparation for the event was skimming through The Communist Manifesto which he’d read a few decades before. This is, as far as I can tell, the entire of his knowledge of Marxism, confined to a poor reading of this twenty page pamphlet Marx wrote as a young man. Almost everything he says in the Zizek debate is wrong. At one point he complains that nowhere does Marx mention nature, which he sees as a failing since he (Peterson) believes humans’ battle with nature is what is at the heart of all politics. Only, Marx does say nature is integral to his philosophy… on the first page of the Manifesto. And we’re back to the question of whether he’s lying or just can’t read. Not that it matters.

It’s difficult to satarise a man who sincerely sells stuff like this.

Postmodern Neo-Marxism doesn’t exist other than as a neat grouping of all the things Peterson doesn’t like, and it stinks of ‘Cultural Marxism’. Cultural Marxism was a conspiracy spread by the Nazis in the ’30s in which intellectuals — mainly Jews — were accused of secretly being Communists and planning to ignite revolution through Germany. Peterson hasn’t led the same level of witch-hunt as the Nazis but that’s maybe only because he doesn’t have the means to, but he genuinely believes this ideology heralds the ruin of society. But Postmodernism is on the fringes of academia, and Marxism is still ignored by mainstream politics. I don’t believe ‘Western civilization’ (which is a vaguely defined concept anyway) is falling apart but I agree there are big problems, and they have nothing to do with identity politics or political correctness or activism — those are some of the things I’m most proud of about the time I’m living in — I’d say neo-Nazis and racists, war criminals and corrupt governments, monopolistic corporations destroying the planet, an exploitative economic system, are bigger threats to society than some student activist with blue hair who wants you to stop being an arsehole to her because she’s trans.

This aspect of Peterson’s work means that response to critics is preemptively built into the work itself. If you agree with Peterson you are an original free thinker. If you disagree with him then you must be brainwashed by cultural Marxists, Feminists and Liberal media.

Peterson’s vendetta is really against relativism (i.e. the idea that all ideas or morals are as good as all others, and there’s no way to value one more than another or say one thing is better than anything else). He likes to be able to place things in a hierarchy. And he wrongly believes all ideologies and theories he dislikes are relativistic and ‘social constructivist’. Even if you don’t agree with these theories they still contain a wealth of great insights, but Peterson gives them no analysis and just writes them off for being ‘nihilist’.

In 2017 Peterson announced plans to create a service online that would list all university professors (in the US and Canada) who taught Postmodern Neo-Marxist ideas. He framed this as a big help to society, especially to parents so they could see who was teaching their children and stop them from being brainwashed. He said what he called ‘ideological subjects’ like Gender Studies and Ethnic Studies ‘need to go’ but he also wanted to identify PN-Ms in other subjects, whether Literature or Social Science, feeling they had infected academia as a whole. It was basically a giant list of all the people Peterson doesn’t like, advocating a witch hunt mentality against them. (Apparently the right to free speech doesn’t extend to these ideas.) Thankfully the idea was scrapped after negative response to it online.

Peterson’s usual refrain to interviewers who focus on his politics is to say that his politics aren’t what’s important, what is is the advice and guidance he’s given to young men who often write to him to say thanks for what he’s done. But the two can’t be separated. The way a person lives their life is deeply intertwined with how they see the world and their philosophy of life. Most viewers will absorb Peterson’s outlook while he talks about other things. His advice isn’t just about getting the basics right — and you can see this from the way his fans act — it’s about hating feminism, having a conspiratorial view of academia, focusing on yourself to an extreme degree, and seeing everything as a psychodrama being enacted on the Jungian planes of the unconscious mind. Being a lobster is about a lot more than tidying your room.

A key Jungian idea is The Shadow. Jung believed everything that happens on the surface of consciousness has a corresponding shadow that mirrors it in the unconscious. If you are disciplined then a shadow presence may build up that desires to be slobbish and hedonistic; if a person is filled with self-hate on the surface then the Shadow may create a megalomaniac self-image to balance it out. Jung believed that when you criticise someone you are really criticising yourself. Someone insecure about her appearance will negatively judge other people’s appearances; a person who hates religion might be doing so to project away from their own dogmatic way of living. (Jung’s therapy focused on becoming aware of the Shadow so that it’s contents couldn’t unknowingly influence you.) I’d like to make the case here that all the things Peterson hates are actually present in his own work, and his public tirades against these things are all acts of projection:

He hates relativism but his work is built on his own subjective interpretations, of myths, psychology, even science. His strawnman of Postmodernists is that they believe there are infinite ways to interpret things, each equally valid. And yet Peterson regularly adopts this type of thinking. When asked if he believes if Jesus literally resurrected from the dead he replies he can’t answer because it’s unclear what you mean by ‘Jesus’ and what you mean by ‘literally’. If asked if he believes in God he replies he can’t answer because it’s not clear what is meant by ‘God’. But he leaves things in this relativistic limbo rather than provide definitions and give concrete answers. In one video (which I’ve failed to hunt down) a student calls him out on his claims that the sexual liberation of the 60s were a bad thing — leading to higher divorce rates and a destabilised family unit — saying that she (the student) is glad her parents divorced because they hated one another and it would’ve been horrible growing up in the middle of that. He respons that yes, divorce sounds like a good thing here, and that divorce can only be understood on a case-by-case basis. But then what’s the point of making totalising assertions and narratives out of it? Don’t most people divorce because they no longer love — or even like — each other? This is present through all of Peterson’s work: he confidently asserts things as objective facts, but when later pressed to explain himself he reverts to a relativism of acting like the real meaning of any word can never be agreed on and all things work on a case-by-case basis.

He hates collectivism and identity politics but his own work is an identity politics for white men. Regardless of whether he sought this audience out originally or not, he caters specifically to young white men and provides his own version of the identity politics he claims to hate. Part of Peterson’s harmonious order is a patriarchal society like those of the past.

He hates Socialism and overt state control but he’ll infrequently indorse some weird authoritarian idea. Like on Joe Rogan’s podcast when he advocated for ‘enforced monogamy’ to reduce the large number of incels in society (i.e. so sex starved young men don’t go on as many killing sprees). Like all Peterson Hot Takes he words it with enough vagueness that he and his fans could later claim he was being misrepresented by brainwashed SJWs. He said what he meant was that there should be a strict culture of monogamy which is ‘enforced’ once a person becomes married (I presume by making adultery illegal) despite his defence of personal freedoms. The guy might even be a repressed Stalinist: he’s obsessed with Communism, ties every lecture — no matter the subject or how tenuous the link — to Soviet Russia, and his house is filled with Soviet memorabilia and posters.

He claims to hate ‘ideological thinkers’ and says his beliefs simply follow facts and rationality. He is the embodiment of the ‘enlightened centrist’ who has fooled himself into believing he hasn’t ‘picked sides’ and doesn’t think ideologically, which all people do to a degree. I suppose it’s just a coincidence that all his ‘facts’ fit perfectly with alt-Righters and Conservative Christians and lead to him telling incels exactly what they want to hear. People who talk vehemently about what ‘free thinkers’ they are mostly seem to be trying to persuade themselves.

He rallies against nihlism. But when asked about climate change he had this to say:

‘No it’s not going to unite us. And we’re not going to do a damn thing about it either. So it doesn’t really matter. So… well what are we gonna do, you gonna stop having heat? You going to stop having electricity? Stop driving your cars? You gonna stop taking trains? You gonna stop using your iphones? You’re not going to do any of that and no wonder.’

Aside from a complete misunderstanding of climate science (stop having electricity and iphones? What?) it shows he has no hope for humanity’s future in the face of impending doom. In the same talk he says renewables and other energy sources don’t work and that the problem is too complex to fix. Both of which are untrue. It’s hard to imagine a more nihilistic stance.

At the centre of it all is the fact Peterson spends his life judging others and instructing people how to live but doesn’t have his own life together. It recently became known Peterson is recovering from addiction to prescription benzos. His reliance on the drugs was linked to his wife being diagnosed with cancer (she’s recovering and healthy thankfully) but his behaviour suggests he might have been addicted since long before. He flew to Russia to undergo an experimental rehab treatment where he was put into a medically-induced coma for eight days while his body went through the process of withdrawal. Which is hardly taking responsibility and looking your demons in the face. (On Twitter his daughter blamed the healthcare system in the West.)

Fans will respond that none of this matters, that this is an ad hominem attack, it’s the ideas that matter, because ideas are bigger than one person, and these are capital T truths he’s preaching. But this is Platonic babble: ideas only exist as things for people to express or act on. How people act is more insightful than the principles they stand for. The two rarely line up. If the guy who’s outlining for you how to get your life together is a drug-addicted depressed often hateful and angry wreck then it’s likely his ideas and philosophies have something to do with it.