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But if Peterson thinks that acting like a petulant child gives him cachet, he may want to heed the advice of Mark Kingwell, a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto: “Being pissed off doesn’t make you more right. Anger in discourse is the resort of last resort. . . . Raising your voice adds no validity to your points and might even act to undercut them.”

Truth distortion has also become one of professor Peterson’s trademarks. His fire and brimstone speeches typically warn how leftist radicals have embraced an “anything goes” attitude toward truth, which Peterson blames on universities that teach postmodern philosophy.

Spoiler: Philosophy departments do not teach students that one truth is as good as the next or that value judgments are impossible. What postmodernism says is that we humans have access to the material world only through our own descriptions of it. That is, we do not know the world directly, like a god; rather, we understand it through the vocabularies at our disposal.

Accurately describing a given phenomenon involves input from various disciplines, each making its unique contribution to the truth-telling process. This takes time, effort and consensus-building.

Peterson distorts postmodernism’s essence by pushing it to absurd extremes (that is, truth means whatever one claims it is), convinces his audience that the most radical version represents the doctrine’s core meaning, and then blames others for spreading a fable he created.