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I certainly don’t think Peterson regards himself as any kind of prophet: a recently released documentary about him, “The Rise of Jordan Peterson,” reveals that he was fixated on the nature of evil from a young age (especially in the form of war and genocide), but also shows him to be far more interested in analyzing these phenomena as an academic and author, rather than proselytizing any kind of totalizing creed to deliver humanity from suffering. But I do think that the powerful reaction he attracts — both from his most devoted followers and his most vicious detractors — owes something to the tragic atmospherics that sometimes characterize his speaking style.

Every progressive Canadian columnist took his or her turn writing what was more or less the same column bashing Peterson.

And while these two groups are at each other’s proverbial throats on social media (and sometime even at real-life protests outside his speaking events), they are flip sides of the same basic phenomenon. As Peterson himself has discussed, we are living in a post-Christian age, and many people now turn to politics, academia, activism and sometimes even their YouTube autoplay feed, seeking figures who can play the role of ersatz prophet or demon. For some, it’s Donald Trump, or Bernie Sanders, or Greta Thunberg. For others, it’s Jordan Peterson.

There was a period in 2017 and 2018 when every progressive Canadian columnist took his or her turn writing what was more or less the same column bashing Peterson — usually on the basis of his pronoun wrongthink, or because of some stray angry comment he’d made on Twitter, or because he’d met with the wrong person, or taken a picture with someone who turned out to be a nut. (It’s difficult for prophets to maintain their aura of purity in the age of social media.) The overall theme was that Peterson is “the stupid man’s smart person.” These columns were strikingly peevish in tone, and seemed animated by an almost hysterical (and oddly reactionary) fear that Peterson is a sort of pied piper who uses his Harvard education and extraordinary academic pedigree to convince the unread and unwashed to abandon social-justice puritanism. The phobic tone echoes the conservatives of yore who warned young people to avoid jazz clubs lest their music-addled brains succumb to communism.