When discussing the value of higher education, eventually somebody brings up the point that a liberal arts education is something that helps make life worth living. Learning the liberal arts, learning about culture and history, learning about your place in this big tradition of human civilization, they say, helps you better navigate the world. Those advocating for straight-vocational training are doing students a disservice by not giving them the opportunity to study the liberal arts.

Graduate school marketing departments and collegiate salesmen speak of the virtues of reading thinkers like Jung and Dostoyevsky and how great it is to learn from those who studied them in depth. If college and the universities fail at preparing people with vocational skills, at least they should be able to provide them with a liberal arts education that they can actually use, right?

This is exactly what Peterson is doing. To read an alt-right political agenda or something else into it is willful ignorance.

Jordan Peterson is accomplishing for depth psychology what colleges failed to do for the liberal arts in general: ignite curiosity in free individuals and create lifelong students.

The academic is quick to shoot back that his “pop psychology” is just smarter-looking self-help and that Peterson reeks of charlatanism. This piece below is one such example.

Rather than fact-checking the piece (which has been done online already by numerous others) it’s worth trying to get a better understanding of the question. Peterson’s crime is giving listeners and students tools they can use to improve their lives and connecting these tools to literature, mythology, and clinical experience.

Isn’t the point of understanding oneself and the world better to help oneself? Isn’t liberal arts, properly done, self-help? What should liberal arts look like if it can never be used to improve one’s own life?

If intellectuals were honest about Peterson and what he’s accomplishing, even the most anti-Peterson intellectual should be able to admit that his project is a net-good accomplishing the goals on which most of his colleagues set out in going to graduate school. He’s a prolific researcher and reputable to boot — formerly a professor at Harvard and now at University of Toronto. 12 Rules for Life is not his first book, with Maps of Meaning coming in as a tome of a textbook and depth psychology.

Even the claim that Peterson is unfairly parlaying his prominence into profit falls apart on its face. 12 Rules for Life was proposed before Peterson’s prominence due to Bill C16 (as anybody who knows the timeline for publishing a book should realize) and Peterson started posting his lectures on YouTube years before late 2016.

Peterson influences lifelong students in and outside his classroom and inspires a generation of readers and learners.

That’s why intellectuals oppose him.

Dr. Peterson, The Influencer

The model of the world by which an intellectual or academic operates is the model taught in school. Study hard, do well, get good grades, and you will ascend the dominance hierarchy. Students who follow this system are rewarded in the school framework while those who fail to follow it are punished.

The intellectual wants the whole society to be a school writ large, to be like the environment where he did so well and was so well appreciated. By incorporating standards of reward that are different from the wider society, the schools guarantee that some will experience downward mobility later. Those at the top of the school’s hierarchy will feel entitled to a top position, not only in that micro-society but in the wider one, a society whose system they will resent when it fails to treat them according to their self-prescribed wants and entitlements. — Robert Nozick

Once the dozen-plus years of compulsory schooling comes to an end, some young people pursue their success outside of the school framework and do so quite well. People who got poor or mediocre grades in school go on to become successful businessmen and women and accrue wealth. Even more, they accrue influence. They may be intelligent but their intelligence manifests itself better in the business world than in the schoolhouse.

Meanwhile, the intellectuals who spend years in graduate school go on to do well, put together their theses and their presentations, get their professorships (sometimes at prestigious universities!) and still fail to accrue much wealth. Even worse, outside of their small intellectual fiefdoms, they fail to accrue influence. Save the occasional Peter Singer or Jordan Peterson, few academics acquire influence outside of the academy.

When you spend so many years growing up in a system that tells you that you will be at the top of the dominance hierarchy and then you’re not, your expectations are violated. This violation of expectations manifests itself as resentment. You followed the rules, you did things as you were supposed to, and some guy who runs a construction company or built an app gets more influence and respect than you.

pc: The Guardian

Peterson brings an additional level of resentment to the table for these academics and intellectuals who envy his success in their own hierarchies. Not only did he win at their own game with professorships at Harvard and Toronto and more citations than most of his peers get in a lifetime, but he also succeeds in the game of influence outside of the academy. To use his own analogy, he’s the largest lobster in their own circles and a big lobster in society at large.

Among my own network, many of the otherwise-levelheaded intellectuals I know who turn into dogmatic ideologues at the mention of Peterson are those who spend the most time trying to become influential outside of the traditional classroom. They go on podcasts and speak at summer seminars. They write articles for popular publications and blogs. They build their own little fiefdoms on social media. Yet they don’t touch the nerve Peterson touches. He succeeds where they, too, followed the rules and did not succeed as widely.

Dr. Peterson, The Disruptor

The academy is, ultimately, a guild system. Like the guild systems of old and the guild systems of skilled trades today, those who operate outside of the system buck the expectations of everybody else. There are norms about how to succeed and fail. Having dominated the traditional guild through citations, research, and years at Harvard and Toronto, Peterson moves on to disrupt the guild itself.

By putting his lectures online, raising money via Patreon, and hosting independent lectures that anybody can attend, Peterson is unbundling the intellectual experience of the academy and removing the gatekeepers. The resentment sent his way by academics and intellectuals in the guild is much like the resentment and indignation sent the way of independent bloggers and reporters when the Internet started to displace the Mainstream Media as a source of information.

Peterson’s now infamous interview with Cathy Newman on Channel 4 News.

Dr. Peterson, The Capitalist

Not only does Peterson win at the academic’s game and disrupt their game, he wins in the marketplace. While most of his content is available for free, he’s committed the cardinal sin of placing his feet into the marketplace and succeeding at it.

Academics and intellectuals spend years studying ideas and rarely make more than six figures every year in the pursuit of their ideas. That stings. You expect that performing well and doing your job well will bring you rewards but the marketplace rewards value creation not merely understanding ideas.

People value what Peterson is saying and are willing to part with their money to hear more of it. What is wrong with that? Again, go search r/JordanPeterson for people who have quit smoking, lost weight, regained their relationships, gotten promotions, forgiven loved ones, and put themselves together thanks to Peterson’s work.

Peterson brings in more than $60,000/month in small donations on Patreon and his lectures reach more people than the entirety of people who have ever attended the University of Toronto, ever. If that’s improving people’s lives, what could possibly be wrong with that?

That intellectuals resent Peterson’s success in the marketplace says more about their own relationship to value creation than it does of Peterson’s character.

If you enjoyed this piece, please give it a clap. If you hated it, tweet hatemail at me at @zslayback on twitter and I will use it to make fun of you. More of my witing is available at zakslayback.com.