“WHAT AM I EXACTLY?”

Here in a guest cottage at the summit of a high hill in northern California, the tenth stop on a three-continent tour to promote his new book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, Jordan Peterson has broached the topic that never fails to move him to tears. The emotional burden he bears as a virtual father figure to millions of wayward young men.

For a moment, he resists, falling silent and still. He looks stricken. “This always breaks me up.” The tension gathers in his weather-beaten face. He flushes. The effort to hold back tears then shifts to the effort to expel them. They flow freely. The cathartic release of emotion sends a subtle tremor through his rather emaciated body. He recovers his speech. “I don’t tell people, ‘You’re okay the way that you are.’ That’s not the right story. The right story is ‘You’re way less than you could be.’”

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The encouragement that the fifty-five-year-old psychology professor offers to his audiences takes the form of a challenge. To “take on the heaviest burden that you can bear.” To pursue a “voluntary confrontation with the tragedy and malevolence of being.” To seek a strenuous life spent “at the boundary between chaos and order.” Who dares speak of such things without nervous, self-protective irony? Without snickering self-effacement?

“It’s so sad,” he says. “Every time I go to these talks, guys come up and say, ‘Wow, you know, it’s working.’ And I think, Well, yeah. No kidding! Nobody ever fucking told you that.”

In these moments, Peterson is filled with frustration that so many need his message, for want of what had once been common wisdom. At the refusal to address men in the language that summons them to embrace their better instincts. (Yes, Peterson is one of those problematic figures who believe that men have a nature that is best appealed to in ways consistent with that nature.) Why has no one ever set these young men straight before? Where were their fathers? Where were their teachers? Why have they left it up to him, a YouTube personality, to roust them from their hiding places and send them out into the world?

12 Rules for Life is nominally a self-help book, with each chapter heading consisting of a rule: Stand up straight with your shoulders back. Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping. Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world. Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient). Tell the truth—or, at least, don’t lie. The rules are followed by long chapters that mingle personal anecdote with practical advice and an idiosyncratic mix, familiar from his lectures, of secular homiletics, biblical references, Jungian archetypes, twentieth-century history, and scientific findings. As of this writing, it is a best-selling nonfiction title in the U. S., Canada, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand.

Peterson teaches at the University of Toronto and, until his book became a surprise global hit, he was also a practicing clinician. He has since put his practice on hold and taken an indefinite sabbatical from teaching to continue his journey into a curious sort of fame, one without any clear definition, fixed limit, or certain future. “I was talking about this with my kids the other day,” the father of two says. “What am I exactly? Most days, I can’t even think of my situation more broadly because it’s changing very rapidly.”

Peterson inhabits a polarized and fractured media landscape in which the very concept of a consensus reality has become undone, perhaps permanently. He is promoted by Random House Canada as a bearer of timeless truths and denounced on Canadian public television as a borderline fascist.

Many of Peterson’s seemingly grandiose pronouncements are, in fact, quite modest. He is often derided for repackaging banal common sense in a vague and pretentious idiom, and there is something to this. Peterson is an apologist for a set of beliefs that we once took for granted but now require an articulate defense, such as: Free speech is an essential value; perfect equality inevitably conflicts with individual freedom; one should be cautious before attempting to reengineer social institutions that appear to be working; men and women are, in certain quantifiable respects, different. His life advice concerns the necessity to defer gratification, face up to the trials of life with equanimity, take responsibility for one’s own choices, and struggle against the temptation to grow resentful. How such traditional values came to be portrayed as a danger adjacent to Nazism is one of the puzzles of our time.

The new Jordan rules: Waiting for a Peterson lecture in San Francisco. Jake Stangel

Viewed another way, Peterson’s intellectual project is exceedingly immodest, and can be stated in a sentence: He aims at nothing short of a refounding of Western civilization, to provide a rational justification for why the materialists of the digital age should root themselves in the soil of Christian ethics despite having long ago lost the capacity for faith.

Today’s interview is the last of a handful I’ve managed to extract in the interstitial moments of the unending siege his life has become. Over the past month, I’ve watched him address crowds, in the hundreds and in the thousands, in Los Angeles, Toronto, and San Francisco. It is often alleged that Peterson’s audience is almost entirely made up of angry young white men. But the one I saw at the Toronto Public Library twelve days before the talk in San Francisco was mixed in age and sex and no less racially diverse than Toronto itself, which is among the most diverse cities in the world. I spoke with Hispanic and Indian and Asian and black men and women at each of the various events I attended, as well as one transgender man.

In the long, pregnant moment before the Toronto audience greeted Peterson with a standing ovation, I found myself thinking of a line in the Philip Larkin poem “Church Going.” What one felt in that packed room was a crowd of people discovering “a hunger in himself to be more serious.” In Peterson, they had found a vital conduit to a moral legacy widely assumed to be corrupted or dead.

The themes that preoccupy Peterson—good and evil, personal responsibility, honesty of speech, love of family, the virtue of child-rearing, adherence to the daily and continuous work of self-improvement—are so dulled by overuse on the tongues of grotesque right-wing hypocrites they’ve long since been emptied of meaning. Peterson’s gift is to infuse them with renewed life, to speak them in a way that does not fill his youthful, godless, reflexively cynical audience with embarrassment. How he manages this is a marvel of the age.

“I AM OPPOSED TO THE RADICAL LEFT."

I first came across Jordan Peterson in late 2016. I had been ensnared in a destructive familial ordeal that consumed some of the most important years of my career and put a strain on my marriage. I was unable to complete a manuscript for a book that I had been contracted to write. I had assignments I couldn’t finish. I was, in other words, exactly the sort of person whom Peterson’s message is optimized to reach. I began listening to his biblical lectures at the gym, where I went to try to reconstruct myself. Early this year, I decided I wanted to witness the phenomenon close up.

I met Peterson in Los Angeles on a cloudless January afternoon, accompanied by his wife of twenty-eight years, Tammy, who had quit her job as a massage therapist in 2017 to help manage her husband’s affairs. There was something faintly comic about seeing this austere, steely-haired, admonitory figure from the frozen north at the wheel of a white Miata convertible in the southern-California sun. We were on our way to the home studio of the YouTube broadcaster Dave Rubin, a former reporter for the progressive Internet news show The Young Turks and now the host of the nonpartisan Rubin Report, on which Peterson was scheduled to be interviewed alongside the conservative pundit Ben Shapiro.

We pulled up to a pleasant white suburban house and rang the bell. Rubin came to greet us. “Every time I turn my head, you’re there!”

Inside, Rubin and Shapiro left Peterson to be made up. He and I talked about the extent to which he saw an illiberal progressivism penetrating academia. “Some of these Ivy League kids want to have it both ways,” Peterson, who spent five years teaching at Harvard, told me. “They want to be baby members of the 1 percent, which they most certainly are, and yet still portray themselves as the oppressed.” I nodded, thinking of all the people I knew to whom those words applied.

“Jordan always told her: Do not use your disease as a crutch!”

After Peterson joined Rubin and Shapiro in the studio, Tammy told me about their twenty-six-year-old daughter Mikhaila’s autoimmune illnesses, which had resulted in her needing a hip and ankle replacement in her teenage years, the subject of chapter 12 of 12 Rules (Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street). “Jordan always told her: Do not use your disease as a crutch!”

Tammy met Peterson in 1969, when she was eight years old and he was seven. They lived across the street from each other in a small town in northern Alberta. Peterson’s father was a teacher. Hers was the local insurance man. “[Jordan] taught me how to play chess in elementary school. We didn’t have much to do with each other until I moved to Montreal and he started [community college] in Alberta.” Peterson transferred to the University of Alberta, where he studied political science and psychology. He then joined Tammy in Montreal, where he enrolled in a Ph.D. program in psychology at McGill University, and where they became a couple. Peterson would leave for college at the age of seventeen standing five foot seven inches tall, and return home a year later standing six foot two.

“I don’t know that he was celibate. . . .” Tammy said. “But he was always the sort that if he was going to sleep with a woman, he was going to marry her.”

I asked if she had known other guys like that.

“He was the only one.”

Peterson’s father was a nonbeliever, and his mother was a practicing Protestant. He attended church as a young boy, until he started trying to debate the priest over doctrinal contradictions. Today Peterson describes himself as a sort of Christian, though whenever he is pressed, he neither rules out the possibility of a God nor avows his faith in one.

The local librarian, who was married to the head of the NDP, Canada’s social-democratic party, identified Peterson as a young man of promise and gave him a schooling in the great books. He spent his youth as a committed socialist before growing disillusioned with the character of his fellow travelers, whom he came to regard as motivated by resentment. At the same time, he met some conservative small-business owners who earned his grudging admiration. “It produced a fair bit of cognitive dissonance for me,” he says. “Because ostensibly, I didn’t admire the conservative ethos. But I certainly admired the people.”

By thirteen, Peterson had become “very tangled up and obsessive about ideas,” and haunted by the totalitarian atrocities of the twentieth century. For years, he was plagued by vivid nightmares of a nuclear holocaust.

At McGill, Peterson says, “I split myself into two.” By day, he was a conventional graduate student researching the neurology of alcoholism. By night, he was working on a book called Maps of Meaning, an attempt to reconcile the writings of Jung with the latest neuroscience and evolutionary biology. “I wasn’t trying to write an academic book,” Peterson says. “I was trying to solve a problem: Confronted with the opportunity to become an Auschwitz guard, how can you protect yourself against saying yes? Which was the fundamental question of the twentieth century.”

I noted that while we still read the canonical thinkers who presumed to address the big questions, nobody attempted to write in such a mode anymore. “People told me that the time for the great theories in psychology is over,” he said. “I said, ‘It might be over for you, but it’s not over for me.’ ” In 1999, fourteen years after he began work on it, Maps of Meaning was published. It was adapted into a thirteen-part series for Canada’s OTV in 2004.

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In mid-2016, Peterson was a tenured professor at the University of Toronto. If not exactly an eminent figure, he had authored a robust and frequently cited body of publications. He taught a course based on his book and was regularly named one of three life-changing professors at the university. He had started a popular YouTube channel on which he was posting videos of his lectures. Off campus, he maintained a clinical practice; he consulted with corporations; and he appeared now and then on public television. No one would have regarded him as a potential vector of global controversy.

Then, in September of that year, Peterson posted a video stating his opposition to C-16, a Canadian bill that sought to make gender identity and expression protected categories. He argued that the law might compel people to adopt a panoply of gender-neutral pronouns, something he declared he would not do. He judged these pronouns—zie, and zir, and they, to name three of the more than seventy and growing such terms—to be the invention of “postmodern neo-Marxists” seeking to use state power to decree that gender differences were not biologically based but rather social constructions that could be made or unmade at will. Peterson made plain that he was speaking out against the enforced adoption of an unscientific political terminology, and not to denigrate the transgendered. Yet it was easy to call it an act of hate and harassment directed at a vulnerable minority, and many did. He received two letters of warning from his university, but no further action was taken.

In November 2017, Lindsay Shepherd, a teaching assistant at Wilfrid Laurier University, wanted to spark debate among students about C-16, so she showed a clip of Peterson discussing the new law. University administrators accused her of “creating a toxic climate” in her classroom. In a surreptitious recording subsequently uploaded to the Internet, a professor likened Shepherd’s actions to “neutrally playing a speech by Hitler or Milo Yiannopoulos” and claimed that showing the video placed her in violation of C-16; in the tape, Shepherd is brought to tears. And though the assertion carried no legal weight, to some it appeared to justify Peterson’s concerns. The university later issued an apology and conceded that it had never received any student complaints about the video.

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Two months after posting his C-16 video, Peterson was invited onto The Joe Rogan Experience, an independently produced podcast in Los Angeles. Joe Rogan is, by his own description, a C-list celebrity: a supporting cast member on the 1990s sitcom NewsRadio, former host of the now-defunct gross-out reality show Fear Factor, and color commentator for the Ultimate Fighting Championship. Rogan’s podcast consists of multihour free-form discussions with a motley assortment of comedians, scientists, and mixed martial artists, often conducted while high. His audience numbers in the tens of millions.

In Peterson’s telling, delivered with the flair for drama that made him a star—his reedy voice at times hesitant then suddenly propelled by bursts of moral passion—the anodyne language of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” used to justify the new law was, in fact, a Trojan horse hiding an army of the radical left seeking yet another unattainable utopia. The interview established the template through which the public would come to regard him, by turns, as a hero of resistance to an encroaching assault on civil liberties, or an absurd Don Quixote waging war against a figment of his own imagination; a redemptive and transformative thinker, or the most problematic mansplainer of all time.

Soon he was earning more in donations on the crowdfunding platform Patreon—roughly $85,000 per month—than from his university salary. Peterson had created the account as an experiment in voluntary funding for the free academic lectures he had made available. During the interval when his university job seemed in jeopardy, Peterson received a flood of contributions, and it hasn’t slowed since. (He is currently seeking patrons to help bring “accredited online humanities education to as many people as possible.”)

“I have something in common with Nazis,” he told me, “in that I am opposed to the radical left."

Many of these initial supporters were drawn from the male-dominated message boards of 4chan and Reddit, where a traffic in affectionate Jordan Peterson–themed memes instantly came into existence. Peterson’s odd combination of midcentury rural slang and existential exhortations spawned viral in-jokes: “Get in, Bucko. We’re rescuing your father from the Underworld,” read one. His lectures were dubbed onto videos of Kermit the Frog, a play on his somewhat Muppetlike voice.

Peterson’s fame on these subversive platforms is often used to paint him in ominous tones. “I have something in common with Nazis,” he told me, “in that I am opposed to the radical left. And when you oppose the radical left, you end up being a part of a much larger group that includes Nazis in it.” But his refusal of the consolations of group identity also puts him at odds with the alt-right. “The alt-righters would say—and they’ve said this to me directly—‘Peterson, you’re wrong. Identity politics is correct. We just have to play to win.’ I think that’s a reprehensible attitude. But I understand exactly why you would come to that conclusion.

“What I’m saying with my YouTube videos is ‘Okay, there’s a different way of playing the whole game. Forget about the bloody group-identity framework and concentrate on what you can do as an individual.’ ”

Some see the clips of Peterson’s speeches, excerpted and circulated online with fan titles such as “Jordan Peterson Debunks the Myth of White Privilege,” as a gateway drug to the sprawling red-pilled netherworld of men’s-rights activism, scientific racism, and revanchist white ethnonationalism. But Peterson sees himself as a kind of Catcher in the Rye, rescuing alienated young men from such dangerous temptations.

"WE SHOULD ORGANIZE OUR SOCIETIES ALONG THE LINES OF LOBSTERS?"

One week before the publication of 12 Rules, Peterson sat for an interview with Cathy Newman of Britain’s Channel 4 News. He began by explaining why he believes men need to “grow the hell up.”

“What’s in it for the women, though?” Newman asked.

“Well, what sort of partner do you want?” Peterson replied. “Do you want an overgrown child, or do you want someone to contend with, that’s going to help you?”

Newman brought up the country’s nine percent gender pay gap, which she suggested was proof of systematic discrimination. “Yeah, but there’s multiple reasons for that,” he said. “One of them is gender, but it’s not the only reason. If you’re a social scientist worth your salt, you never do a univariate analysis. Okay, well then we break it down by age, we break it down by occupation, we break it down by interest, we break it down by personality.”

“You’re saying it’s a fact of life,” Newman said after a brief exchange.

“I’m saying there are multiple reasons for it, and they’re not being taken into account.”

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The interview went on in this manner for an excruciating twenty minutes, during which Newman appeared determined to expose Peterson as a cryptomisogynist by continually putting words in his mouth.

At one point, she mentioned a passage in 12 Rules about the power dynamics of lobsters. Peterson explained that the animals’ behavior illustrated the evolutionary nature of social hierarchies. To which Newman responded, “You’re saying that we should organize our societies along the lines of lobsters?”

When his opposition to C-16 came up, Newman demanded to know why Peterson’s right to free speech was more important than the right of others not to be offended. “Because in order to be able to think, you have to risk being offensive,” he said. “I mean, look at the conversation we’re having right now. You know, like, you’re willing to risk offending me in the pursuit of truth. And that’s fine. I think, More power to you!”

A long pause ensued, during which Newman was at a loss for words. “Ha! Gotcha,” Peterson said.

“You have got me,” Newman conceded with a flustered smile. The interview immediately went viral, and has since been viewed eight million times on YouTube. It was the latest in a series of stress tests through which Peterson had emerged strengthened.

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But the enmity that surrounds him has grown in proportion to his fame, and Peterson often indulges a fatalistic resignation that someday, inevitably, he will be taken down for good. “The overwhelming likelihood, as far as I’m concerned, is that this will go terribly wrong,” he told a CBC newscaster, looking beleaguered, just a few days before I met him in Los Angeles.

“I’m surfing a one-hundred-foot wave,” he told the newscaster. “And generally what happens if you do that is that you drown.”

He has already made some mistakes, as anyone who is human and who posts hundreds of hours of himself speaking online will do. The mistakes have been edited into clips in which Peterson is made to look the fool or the monster that some believe him to be. “I’m surfing a one-hundred-foot wave,” he told the newscaster. “And generally what happens if you do that is that you drown.”

Peterson, who suffers from an autoimmune disorder that affects his health, energy, and mood, has adopted his daughter Mikhaila’s diet of mostly red meat and greens, from which nearly all gluten and carbohydrates have been restricted. He has lost weight on it, which adds to the impression of being exhausted or febrile that he sometimes gives. I heard at least a half dozen friends urge him to get enough rest and preserve his strength.

In the dressing room of the Marines’ Memorial Theatre in San Francisco, Peterson mused aloud that perhaps the angry protests that had followed him were finally over. His book tour, which seemed to have no end in sight, had attracted a more mainstream audience, and there had been little in the way of controversy. But two weeks later, at a free-speech event at Queen’s University in Ontario, a protester broke a window and was found to be carrying a garrote when she was arrested. Two students waving a sign reading "FREEDOM TO SMASH BIGOTRY" briefly commandeered the stage. Peterson stood by looking nervously bemused.

Over the next few days, I watched on social media as a progressive consensus coalesced around the notion that Peterson was deliberately baiting the protesters. I read that he was part of a cynical reactionary plot to delegitimize universities, that the decline in support of free speech on campus was a right-wing myth. Others declared that “free speech” is merely a euphemism for punching down on the marginalized. Later, when I reached him by phone in Australia, where he was continuing his book tour, he sounded shaken: “They really had us trapped in there.” He ended the conversation expressing his intent to step back from the precipice of confrontation. “I’m trying to modify my Twitter approach,” he said. “I’m certainly not trying to promote polarization. I understand why the left is necessary.”

Peterson often describes liberalism and conservatism as the manifestations of particular personality types, measurable through psychometric testing. Conservatives tend to be high in conscientiousness and low in openness, which is good for keeping organizations running smoothly, he says, while the opposite is true of liberals, which is good for generating creative solutions when routine circumstances are disrupted. “The point is that you need both.” For this reason, Peterson always acknowledges the need for a political left to serve as a counterweight against the tendency toward extreme inequality that is endemic not just to capitalism but, in his view, to all complex societies.

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A little over a week after the Queen’s University melee, Pankaj Mishra published a piece on the website of The New York Review of Books calling Peterson a symptom of the “intellectual and moral breakdown” that leads to fascism. The piece included a passing reference to Peterson’s “claim” of having been inducted into a Native Canadian tribe as an instance of “eggheads pretentiously . . . romancing the noble savage.” Peterson responded on Twitter by calling Mishra a “sanctimonious prick,” adding, “If you were in my room at the moment, I’d slap you happily.” The pundit Matthew Yglesias quipped that “folks are gonna regret the decision to buy high on Jordan Peterson.”

Yet nothing materially changed for Peterson. His books remained near the top of every best-seller list. His follower count on YouTube (more than 1 million) and support on Patreon continued their ascent. He had met with Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen to discuss an unspecified future venture. Both of those billionaires have for years called for the disruption of higher education, and Peterson has spoken of his desire to create an online university that will offer accreditation in the humanities at a tenth of the prevailing cost. Though he has taken a step back from the “dangerous” social-networking service, Peterson himself was skeptical that his Twitter meltdown had done much long-term harm at all.

"THERE ARE, LIKE, NUNS IN THE AUDIENCE."

I went to a meet-up of Peterson fans at a coworking space in San Francisco the day after the book event, where I spoke to a self-taught consultant to the technology industry who had helped organize it.

I asked which aspect of Peterson’s messages resonated most strongly with him. “He’s getting people to be more responsible for their lives. He’s talking to them on the individual level. And even though he doesn’t identify as a Christian, he is very pastoral in a way that can be inspiring. It’s hard to discredit someone when they’re actually making individual lives better.” That was the simplest of all the explanations I had heard for Peterson’s continuing success in the face of ongoing efforts to expel him from polite society. I thought back to something his friend Wodek Szemberg, who produced the Maps of Meaning miniseries, had told me in a coffeehouse in Toronto.

Peterson would sometimes forward Szemberg emails he had received from viewers of the series. “A young man from Italy wrote in, saying, ‘I was about to commit suicide. I heard your lecture. And I’m going to live.’ The ability that [Peterson] has to speak to those who feel themselves at the end of the line, and to tell them: ‘There is a way for you to regroup and to rethink yourself and be productive and live a good life.’ That’s real. That’s not his imagination. The response that he gets proves how important it is for there to be someone who is believable when he says, ‘You can do it.’”

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Szemberg spoke of his own frustration with the sort of people Peterson has allowed himself to be associated with in public. “He doesn’t get it. In some sense, he doesn’t want to get it.” According to Szemberg, it was only after Peterson was scheduled to appear with Faith Goldy, then of Rebel Media, an online outlet that has been friendly to the alt-right, that Peterson finally reached the conclusion that “not everyone who wants to be your friend can be your friend.”

Szemberg nonetheless believes that Peterson’s tactical errors are inseparable from what makes him so appealing. “There is a certain style of Jewish intellectualism that appeals to both Jordan and me precisely because there is a connection between knowledge, intellect, scholarship, and emotion, where ideas are not objects of curiosity but acts of faith. They define you not merely as a thinker but as a person.”

Another member of his brain trust, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto named William Cunningham, told me he often worries that Peterson’s role as a culture warrior obscures his higher vocation as a kind of secular evangelist. “There’s my friend Jordan Peterson, who is this amazingly compassionate person who genuinely wants to help people. And then there’s Twitter Peterson, getting placards demanding he be fired immediately. Even I want to get a placard.”

Cunningham described feeling nervous before attending one of his lectures. “I was expecting to be surrounded by fascist skinheads. And there are, like, nuns in the audience, and the audience is totally diverse, and it’s this beautiful discussion about the nature of myth for creating social reality. And I’m like, Yeah, I love this stuff! And the next day he starts tweeting again, and I’m like, Noooooo, not this again!” There was a moment soon after the Cathy Newman interview when Peterson received positive coverage from New York Times columnist David Brooks and The Atlantic. “I went to Jordan and told him, ‘You have a chance now to reframe your image, and you probably won’t get a second chance,’ ” Cunningham said. “ ‘Because if Twitter Jordan comes back out, that’s probably going to be it—forever.’”

Many in the intellectual class dismiss Peterson as the “stupid man’s smart person.” The impassioned paeans to the power of the spoken truth on which Peterson’s viral fame has spread are exactly the kind of Western intellectual hubris they have worked for decades to deconstruct. That he has found a massive audience on new media by connecting with the practical concerns of ordinary people is proof of his fundamental unseriousness.

The young men who love Jordan Peterson love him for all the reasons that the smart set despises him. He gives them something the culture—sometimes it seems this way—wants to deny them. A sense of purpose in a world that increasingly defines their natural predispositions—for risk, adventure, physical challenge, unbridled competition—as maladaptive to the pacified, androgynous ideals of a bureaucratized, post-feminist world. Increasingly one hears that the problem menacing the world today is not the excesses of masculinity, but masculinity itself. That masculinity itself must—and can—be eradicated.

Peterson proposes an alternative hypothesis: “When softness and harmlessness become the only consciously acceptable virtues, then hardness and dominance will start to exert an unconscious fascination.” He argues in 12 Rules that “if men are pushed too hard to feminize, they will become more and more interested in harsh, fascist political ideology.” He notes that “Fight Club, perhaps the most fascist popular film made in recent years by Hollywood, provides a perfect example of this inevitable attraction,” as do “the populist groundswell of support for Donald Trump in the U. S. and the rise of far-right political parties even in such moderate and liberal places as Holland, Sweden, and Norway.”

Sitting on the porch of Peterson’s modest suburban row house after a speech in Toronto, I asked him how he would have voted in 2016, were he an American citizen. “People are talking about Trump voters as if they’re a tribe from another planet,” he told me. “Wait a second: This is half of your population. This isn’t some fringe group. Maybe sit and think about it and not just assume they’re all stupid. Because they’re not. They might be wrong, but they’re not stupid.

“I thought I would have held my nose and voted for Hillary,” he said. “But as the election progressed and got down to the wire, I could also envision myself going into the voting booth and saying, ‘To hell with it.’ I could feel that part of me starting to emerge. So I know how other people must have felt.”

During a Q&A session at the Orpheum in Los Angeles, one of the audience members asked Peterson to address the accusation that he was becoming a cult leader. Peterson observed that “radical individuality” was by its very nature resistant to cultlike behavior. “You can’t have a cult if your message is ‘Get your act together and live your goddamn life,’ ” he said, to a roar of laughter and applause.

Afterward, nearly half of the two thousand spectators organized themselves into an orderly queue stretching out the back of the club’s cavernous bar area and around the block. A Random House publicist stood by to guard against attempts to monopolize the author’s time. I watched several hundred people trade a few words with Peterson, some of them bearing gifts. “You are omnipresent in our life,” said the female half of one married couple.

“Thank you for helping me to become a less agreeable person,” said one Asian woman.

“You’ve helped me to grow up,” said a young man.

The ratio of those expressing gratitude for the positive effect Peterson had had on their personal lives to those wanting to talk about the culture wars was roughly twenty to one, a more or less perfect inversion of the impression given by much of the media.

I spoke to a Hispanic man named Joseph. “I was smoking too much weed. I was drinking too much. I hadn’t talked to my family in years. I didn’t think I needed anyone. Now I know that I do,” he said, wiping away tears.

“That’s why I like it. When he says, ‘Life is suffering,’ that resonates very deeply. You can tell he’s not bullshitting us.”

A twenty-six-year-old guy named Jordan received Peterson’s lectures from his sister and his mother. His girlfriend Breanna described the change in his energy and motivation since he discovered Peterson three months before. “We started talking about marriage,” she said.

I asked if Jordan had tried other self-help programs or books. “Yeah, but none has ever made a difference.” I noted that Peterson’s message is a dark one. “That’s why I like it. When he says, ‘Life is suffering,’ that resonates very deeply. You can tell he’s not bullshitting us.”

A young woman I met named Faith was inspired to break up with her boyfriend. “I heard what he was saying about weak men and how women can be drawn into those relationships to—I feel bad saying this, but it’s true—to dominate them. My boyfriend didn’t want responsibility for his life or our relationship. Dr. Peterson helped me to accept that it would be a disservice to myself—and to him—to stay with him.”

I understood at a visceral level the gratitude that his large and growing following felt toward him. Something about the intense earnestness with which he approached ideas and sought to communicate them in his lectures touched me and, in an odd way, shamed me. I had grown facile in the manipulation of words and ideas without feeling in any significant way invested in them. His example gave me permission to begin thinking about what I might become in a world that had lost its bearings, even as I had lost my own, and how I might begin the long work of regeneration. Under different circumstances, I might have gone into a church. And yet I don’t think I could have. I am by nature a skeptic and an unbeliever.

How he set this process in motion I can’t exactly say, just that a few of his phrases lodged deep in my psyche and helped loosen some bricks in the mental walls that had kept me trapped in what felt like a terminal confinement. After I spoke with dozens of his followers, it was clear that his was not a message addressed solely to white men, angry or otherwise, but to those of us—and I can’t think of anyone to whom this doesn’t apply—who needed to hear from a credible voice that though we are fated to die, and to suffer, and fail, and do harm to ourselves, and to others, that a pathway to a nobler life is within reach.

I left the book signing at 1:00 a.m. The following morning, I learned that the last autograph seeker went home with an inscribed copy of 12 Rules at 2:30.



Subscribe Now This article appears in the May ’18 issue of Esquire. Alexi Lubomirski

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