The ideas of Peterson, 55, a University of Toronto psychology professor turned YouTube philosopher turned mystical father figure, have emerged as influential. The messages he delivers range from hoary self-help empowerment talk (clean your room, stand up straight) to the more retrograde and political (a society run as a patriarchy makes sense and stems mostly from men's competence; the notion of white privilege is a farce). He is the stately looking, pedigreed voice for a group of culture warriors who are working diligently to undermine mainstream and liberal efforts to promote fairness. He is also successful. His book, 12 Rules for Life, which was published in January, has sold more than 1.1 million copies. Thanks to his YouTube channel, he makes more than $US80,000 ($106,000) a month just on donations. Hundreds of thousands of people have taken his online personality tests and self-improvement writing exercises. Yet he rarely smiles. "I am a very serious person," he often says. Loading Replay Replay video Play video Play video His home is a carefully curated house of horror. Most of the sprawl of art is communist propaganda from the Soviet Union (execution scenes, soldiers looking noble) to remind himself, he says, of atrocities and oppression.

"Marxism is resurgent," he says, looking ashen and stricken. He quit his private practice last year and is on an early sabbatical from the University of Toronto. He dragged the school into controversy in 2016 by opposing a Canadian government bill that he believed would compel him to use a student's preferred pronouns. "I am not going to be a mouthpiece for language that I detest, and that's that," he said during a debate. Why did he decide to engage in politics at all? He says a couple years ago he had three clients in his private practice "pushed out of a state of mental health by left-wing bullies in their workplace." I ask for an example and he sighs. He says one patient had to be part of a long email chain over whether the term "flip chart" could be used in the workplace, since the word "flip" is a pejorative for Filipino.

So he was radicalised, he says, because the "radical left" wants to eliminate hierarchies, which he says are the natural order of the world. In his book he illustrates this idea with the social behaviour of the lobster. He chose lobsters because they have hierarchies and are a very ancient species, and are also invertebrates with serotonin. This lobster hierarchy has become a rallying cry for his fans. Recently, a young man named Alek Minassian drove through Toronto trying to kill people with his van. Ten were killed, 16 were injured. Minassian declared himself to be part of a misogynist group whose members call themselves incels. The term is short for "involuntary celibates", although the group has evolved into a male supremacist movement made up of people – some celibate, some not – who believe that women should be treated as sexual objects with few rights. Some believe in forced "sexual redistribution", in which a governing body would intervene in women's lives to force them into sexual relationships. Violent attacks are what happens when men do not have partners, Peterson says, and society needs to work to make sure those men are married. "He was angry at God because women were rejecting him," Peterson says of the Toronto killer. "The cure for that is enforced monogamy. That's actually why monogamy emerges." Preventing hordes of single men from violence, he believes, is necessary for the stability of society. Enforced monogamy will save us all.

Some of Peterson's supporters pay $US200 ($265) a month for a 45-minute Skype conversation to discuss their problems. (Peterson says this service has since been discontinued.) For today's Skype call, he wears a sharp blazer and shirt, but no shoes. At one point, Peterson, relatively quiet, becomes heated on the topic of women who find marriage oppressive. "So I don't know who these people think marriages are oppressing," he says. "I read Betty Friedan's book because I was very curious about it, and it's so whiny; it's just enough to drive a modern person mad to listen to these suburban housewives from the late '50s ensconced in their comfortable, secure lives complaining about the fact that they're bored because they don't have enough opportunity. It's like, Jesus, get a hobby. For Christ's sake, you ... you ... ." Jacob Logan, 18, from Alliston, Ontario, was first in line for Peterson's talk. He had arrived 12 hours early, wearing a shirt with lobsters stacked upon each other.

"Whenever I listen to him, it's like he's telling me something I already knew," Logan says. "Learning is remembering." Peterson is wearing a new three-piece suit, shiny and brown with wide lapels with a decorative silver flourish. It is evocative of imagery from a hundred years ago. His speech too is from another era – stilted, with old-timey phrases, a hypnotic rhythm. It's a vocal tactic he came to only recently. Videos from a few years ago have him speaking and dressing in a more modern way. I ask him about the retro clothes and phrases. "That's what happens when you rescue your father from the belly of the whale," he says. "You rediscover your tradition." Inside among the crowd was Sue Bone, 66, a retired flight attendant from Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Bone loved her flight attendant job until she began to find it dehumanising and corporate. Her friend told her the airlines were now run by "angry gay queens," she says. She found Peterson. She feels he understands the danger of these strange new social forces. "He's waking us up in the West," she says. "You're a divine locus of consciousness," Peterson tells the crowd of 1200 or so people. He pleads – he often sounds frustrated, like you've just said something absurd and he's trying to correct you without raising his voice. He runs his hands over his face when it's all too much. He cries often. There are now regular Jordan Peterson discussion groups. The one in Toronto meets once a week at a restaurant called Hemingway's and is run by Chris Shepherd, who used to be a professional pickup artist and coached men on how to get sex fast at a club but is now a dating coach.

Shepherd first encountered Peterson in a viral video of the professor getting yelled at by campus activists. Watching the stoic professor take on righteous liberal anger touched Shepherd. "Campus censorship has been a problem when I was at university too," he says at Hemingway's one recent afternoon. I ask for an example. "One law professor said something like 'You young ladies should get married and start families,' and he got fired," Shepherd says. "The message was just you'll have a happier life if you get married instead of focusing on your career." "Certainly not a firing offense," he says. Except, for now, it is.

New York Times