The #1 Reason Why Jordan Peterson Is Misunderstood And What He’s Really Up To: As explained by one of his former Harvard students Alexander Dunlop Follow Aug 12, 2018 · 12 min read

His combative media antics notwithstanding, Jordan Peterson is a spiritual teacher. There. I said it.

And I’m reminded of when, years ago, I spoke to someone who’d been a student of Joseph Campbell’s at Sarah Lawrence College. He told me how the students there used to refer to Campbell as “Saint Joe.”

Joseph Campbell

Those of us who’ve been lucky enough to have Jordan Peterson as our college professor echo the same sentiment. He was easily the most influential instructor I had. His teaching expanded my consciousness and profoundly shaped the direction of my life.

Now, let’s get down to brass tacks.

When Peterson talks about cleaning up your room as the starting point of any fixing up of reality you want to do and don’t go trying to fix complex social systems until you can fix up your own room, he really means it in the sense of clean up your own energy field and stop spewing toxic energy out into the collective field.

Because he does believe in the collective field of Being. And he does believe that one person’s actions have a ripple effect across the shared field of collective human consciousness.

And so, when he says, in so many words, clean up your own energy field and don’t try to do anything else until you can do that, he means that if your own energy field is chaotic, all you’re going to do is spread chaos throughout our collective human field.

It doesn’t matter how good you say your intentions are, if your own energy field is disordered and imbalanced, you’re only going to bring disorder and imbalance with you wherever you go. So, if you try to go about correcting complex social systems, all you’re going to do is wreak havoc. You can’t do otherwise.

Recall this Bible verse… Bueller, Bueller…: “How can you say to your brother, ‘let me take the speck out of your eye,’ while there is still a log in your own eye. You hypocrite! First take the log out of your own eye and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye (Matthew 7: 4,5).”

It’s the flip-side of Gandhi’s famous dictum: “Be the change you wish to see in the world.”

Gandhi

And it’s essentially the same thing that Peterson is teaching: sort yourself out first bucko! And for gawd’s sakes, wash your hands before you start groping around in the eyeballs of others.

But thus, Peterson is speaking metaphysically, like other spiritual teachers before him, about our metaphysical reality and the ripple effects of energy that vibrate across our collective field of Being.

Stop spewing toxic energy; stop pointing fingers at ‘what’s wrong;’ stop casting blame and you’ll stop contributing energetically to the problem of disharmony and disorder. Here’s what you can do: start emitting a personal vibration that’s well-ordered, coherent, harmonious, and peaceful. And that’s how you’ll really effect a positive ripple of change across our collective field.

The problem is Peterson doesn’t actually say this. Not in these words. Not out loud anyway.

Instead, when pushed, he doubles-down on his castigation of immature no-nothings who shouldn’t be trying to “smash the patriarchy.” And he gets downright ornery in the delivery of his sermon. Which, of course, doesn’t help the medicine go down.

What’s happening, however, is that Peterson is deliberately steering clear of anything that sounds “woo woo” or “new agey.” He deliberately tries to sound academic and deliberately tries to martial empirical evidence to buttress his teaching. So, he couches his metaphysic under the various cloaks of psychology, sociology, philosophy, biology, physics, etc. without ever fully taking possession of his metaphysical sensibilities or, of himself, as a metaphysical teacher.

And what happens is that scholars in each of these various disciplines are up in arms crying foul about how Peterson re-positions and re-purposes their science in service of his metaphysic.

But really, what Peterson is doing is culling parables from these various disciplines in service of his spiritual teaching. It’s not unlike when someone by the name of Jesus talked to his rural contemporaries using metaphors they’d understand, about sheep and goats.

Peterson is speaking to his academic contemporaries, utilizing their own research and scholarship, to extract a metaphysical narrative about the nature of Being, it’s natural ebbs and flows in interdependently-arising hierarchical ecosystems, and about heroic human redemption of these same hierarchical ecosystems in the face of an impossibly-complex and infinitely-unknowable Being.

It’s just that, well, Peterson himself doesn’t fully realize that this is “what he’s up to.” And he certainly doesn’t use the words “interdependently-arising” and “ecosystems” to describe the hierarchies that he’s at pains to explain are just “the way reality is constructed.”

But that is what he means when he says that you can’t just tinker with a hierarchy — pulling out the pieces you don’t like — without potentially destroying the entire ecosystem. Nor can you do away with a hierarchy without erecting another hierarchy in its place. Because we exist inside complex hierarchical webs that are the very ecosystems of our existence. That is the nature of Being.

For example, think of the food chain. The food chain, of which we stand at the top, is a complex hierarchical ecosystem. And we know that if you remove even one little plankton from the food chain, it has a profound and possibly disastrous ripple effect across the whole hierarchical ecosystem.

This is what he’s trying to say when he says you can’t just remove one piece — that you don’t like — of our cultural hierarchy, without possibly setting off a cascading domino effect of catastrophic consequences across our whole cultural ecosystem.

In short, he gives examples from biological hierarchies to tell a metaphysical story about our collective human existence. He utilizes the lobster as a parable. And a prophetic warning.

But again, even he isn’t fully aware that this is what he’s up to. So how can he expect his listeners to get that this is what he’s up to?

It’s a level confusion. He’s speaking on a metaphysical level and yet being heard on a literal level. And it’s his own level confusion that’s causing the level confusion in his listeners! Worse, however, when his audience gets confused, he just doubles-down and pounds his metaphysical fist, straining his voice to insist that what he’s saying is true! No wonder then, he gets perceived as a tad authoritarian.

And it begins because of his own level confusion about what he’s really up to.

To his credit, he does say that people are often unaware of what they’re really up to. And he has said that he didn’t know “what he was really up to” when he wrote his first book, Maps Of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief.

The same is true with this latest book: 12 Rules For Life: An Antidote To Chaos. He hasn’t yet fully acknowledged, even to himself, what he’s really up to.