Derek Robertson is a news assistant for POLITICO Magazine. Follow him on Twitter @afternoondelete.

What’s a Canadian psychologist doing on the list of 50 people reshaping America? Jordan Peterson insists he is less a political thought leader than a personal and philosophical guide, one whose best-selling book offers tough-love advice to a population of restless young men who feel boxed out by modern gender politics.

Peterson’s work has found fertile ground in the seemingly endless debate over “political correctness” and cultural reform writ large—and the professor hasn’t shied away from the wider political arguments, either. He has dipped his toe into the argument over climate change, rhetorically mused over the fate of South African farmers in a seeming endorsement of Tucker Carlson’s controversial segment on land expropriation, and appeared on “Fox & Friends” to warn parents against the dangers of liberal indoctrination on campus.


In the conflict between left and right, Peterson is clear about which side he blames more for the ills of the modern world. In a wide-ranging interview with Politico Magazine in July, Peterson sounded off on the dangers of university speech codes, the plight of young men and what critics get wrong about Donald Trump.

This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.



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Derek Robertson: Was there an inciting incident that led you to write 12 Rules for Life?

Jordan Peterson: No, I wouldn’t say so. I had conceptualized this book long before I got involved in any of the politically oriented, let’s say scandals, so it was something broader than a particular event. I could see the emergent tension between a collectivist vision and a utopian collectivist vision, and I knew the dangers in that. And it seemed to me from a long while back that the best antidote to that was an individualist ethics.

So, I was trying to solve a broader problem. The problem was partly … the proclivity for rationalist types to spiral into a kind of nihilism and the tendency for collectivist tyranny, a totalitarian viewpoint to emerge as an alternative to nihilism. And so, I was observing that an individualist ethos managed to skirt both of those catastrophes.

Robertson: What do you think is the biggest misconception people have had about the book?

Peterson: The book has been criticized as if it’s a testament to the utility of the oppressive patriarchy, and that’s absolute nonsense. Only a … motivated, casual, biased reading of the text would reveal that. I mean, it’s obvious that we need hierarchies, and it’s obvious that it’s the purpose of the conservative wing so to speak for those hierarchies. But it’s deeply obvious that hierarchies dispossess people and can become corrupt, so they have to be watched, and someone has to speak for the dispossessed. And I make that case very clearly in the book, and that’s very commonly ignored by my critics on the radical left.

Robertson: When you see restrictions on free speech that are advocated by conservatives in the public sphere—to use an extreme example, something like Donald Trump’s criticizing football players for kneeling during the national anthem—do you think that either form of speech restriction [from the right or the left] is more pernicious, and why?

Peterson: Well, the radical leftist restrictions are obviously more pernicious in the university environment. There are no conservatives in the university environment. So there’s no contest. … It’s absolutely dominated by radical leftists. Now, in the broader public, well, that’s a whole different issue. I mean, the thing is that when maneuvers to suppress free speech are used by those who occupy one pole of the political spectrum, they will instantaneously be used by those who are equally extreme on the other pole. So, it’s an absolutely counterproductive game. … Now, in the U.S., you see a vicious counter-response to that as the political system becomes increasingly Republican, say, increasingly right-wing, but that’s not happening in most of the rest of the West.

Robertson: Given that the left is more dominant in universities than in the culture at large, is there any danger that people outside academia will potentially overmap the extent to which speech is restricted by the left?

Peterson: I’m not so sure they’re overmapping it. That’s part of what the discussion is about. I don’t know how much of a danger these collectivist ideas present, but they’re not trivial. So, I see their effect manifesting itself, for example, in my country, in misguided legislation on a continual basis, and … that’s part of what the political discussion is about, when things go too far on either side. The answer isn’t obvious. The effect of these doctrines in the university has been devastating, as far as I’m concerned, and I see the same danger arising in the general culture.

Robertson: When you think about the critique of your work from the left, is there any point you think is valid, or anything you’ve puzzled over, or anything that has made you more introspective?

Peterson: Well, I’ve puzzled over lots of it. The symbolic identification of the feminine with chaos is something I’ve puzzled over for a very long period of time. So that’s got people’s backs up to some degree, I suppose, but that’s partly because they don’t understand that chaos is ambivalent, both good and bad, just like order is both good and bad. But it’s not my problem that femininity has been used to symbolically represent chaos—that’s just how it is. Now, whether I’ve done as good a job as possible of communicating that is a different matter, but I certainly wrote about it extensively in my first book, which is unfortunately much more difficult to read.

Most of the so-called critiques of my work from the left aren’t critiques of my work—they’re parodies of it, and then critiques of the parody. As I said already, I’ve been criticized for being a staunch advocate of hierarchy, but … hierarchies are necessary, both inevitable and necessary. But that doesn’t mean they’re without their pitfalls, and that they tend toward tyranny and oppression and dispossession, which is, of course, what the left says. That’s actually the place of the left, to speak for the dispossessed, but that doesn’t mean the left gets to degenerate into uncritical identity politics, and to cast the world as a place of struggle between essential groups.

Robertson: Do you ever give special consideration to the fact that, in large part, your advice and intellectual program are aimed at re-empowering people who are already at the top of the hierarchy in many ways—

Peterson: That’s nonsense! Complete bloody nonsense. There isn’t a single thing I’ve written that does that. All I’m suggesting to people is that they start to improve their lives by addressing the changes they can make that are within their purview, and that the process of incremental improvement is far more powerful than people think. And that it’s also very unlikely to do any harm. And so, and it’s not something that empowers people at the pinnacle of the hierarchy—quite the contrary. The most effective way of working forward, if you’re alienated and nihilistic, and rife with bad habits and a lack of discipline—the evidence for that is quite clear.

There’s a reason 1.5 million people bought the book and that 150,000 people have come to my lectures, and all of them tell me the same thing, or virtually all the same thing, the vast majority of them. And it’s that they’ve been putting these ideas into practice in the confines of their individual life, and things are way better. And this is what’s being missed by the critical media coverage, even the positive media, for that matter—what I’m doing is not political. It’s psychological, and focused on the individual, and it’s working. So, the idea that it empowers the people who already have powerful positions in the hierarchy—it’s just an identity politics gloss. It’s a generic criticism, a clichéd criticism—it has nothing to do with what I’m doing. It’s just the same criticism that’s trotted out by radical leftists whenever they encounter anything they think is vaguely conservative. There’s no thought in it at all.

Robertson: Most of the people you’d characterize as advocates of “identity politics” believe that men inherently have more power and value in society. It seems that much of your argument … is predicated on the idea that that is not necessarily somehow the case.

Peterson: Well, it’s clearly not necessarily the case. I mean, men do all the dangerous jobs. They’re much more likely to be killed. They’re much more likely to be victims of crime. They’re much more likely to commit suicide successfully. They’re much more likely to be held back in school. They’re much more likely to get poor grades. They’re much less likely to be in university. They’re much less likely to graduate from university. The vast majority of the seriously dispossessed are seriously dispossessed men. Like, this whole split of the world into one privileged gender compared to the other is—I think the whole viewpoint is pathological. Like, I don’t even like to argue about it from within that confine—“Oh, well, are men more oppressed than women?”

Well, how about that’s a stupid question? That’s the right response to that question. Because as soon as you enter into the argument, you’re validating the question. It’s like, I don’t think we should be dividing up the world that way. That’s part of the pathological game. Both men and women suffer immensely in life. Both men and women suffer immensely in life. And not only that, they also contribute unnecessarily to that suffering as a consequence of their own unexamined malevolence and resentment. And then to say, “Well, who’s more oppressed?” or “who’s more malevolent?” is like—well, first of all, you shouldn’t be analyzing at the level of a group. You’re making a fundamental error right then and there.

Robertson: So, if a backlash to that division is inevitable, where does the reasonable, measured counterbalance end and reactionary politics begin?

Peterson: Well, the measured response is putting your own life together. That’s the measured response. And then, if you put your life together, you clean up your room, if you start gluing your family back together, if you start improving your relationships with your siblings and your parents and your children, and you start acting appropriately and responsibly in school and in the workplace, then you’re going to get wise enough to engage in civilized political discourse. And that’s the answer to the identity politics polarization on the left and the right.

Robertson: What is the key difference between a personality that is self-actualized and assertive in the way in which you hope to lead your readers, and an overly authoritarian personality like Trump’s? Where does a man’s psyche—

Peterson: Well, first of all, it’s not clear that Trump has an authoritarian personality. I would say that he has the personality of a salesman. He’s extremely extroverted and assertive, and somewhat disagreeable. But that isn’t the hallmark of a classic authoritarian, because classic authoritarians tend to be extremely orderly. So whatever Trump might be, it’s not obvious that he’s a classic authoritarian. It’s not even obvious that he’s a classic conservative. And so, I would say the dialogue surrounding Trump and his flaws and his virtues, whatever they might be, is very ill-formulated.

Robertson: So how would you characterize him?

Peterson: He’s a bombastic salesman. He’s an entrepreneurial type. And that’s kind of strange, because the entrepreneurial types are generally not conservative. He’s an anomaly, and he’s not easy to categorize. But to categorize him as some sort of right-wing authoritarian—it’s like, he doesn’t even have the temperament for it. And I’m not making excuses for him or justifying him. I’m saying that if you’re going to criticize him, you should at least get the damn criticism right. It’s not obvious at all that Trump is an orderly authoritarian. He’s not a managerial type. He’s not an administrative type. He’s an entrepreneurial type. So, I would say to the degree that he manifests any faults, they seem to be in the domain of a tilt toward narcissism and self-promotion.

Robertson: How would you characterize his illiberal tendencies, if not as authoritarian? What do you think would be a better word for that?

Peterson: Which tendencies?

Robertson: To dispense with court rulings, et cetera ...

Peterson: Well, you know, I’m really not that interested in addressing Trump’s idiosyncrasies and peculiarities. I’m not a domain expert in American politics, and I don’t think what I have to say about Trump, apart from what I can observe psychologically—which is that criticisms of him as a classic authoritarian are misguided—I don’t think I have many things to say that are interesting about him. … Even the Republicans understand that he’s an anomalous occurrence. So, you need to figure out what to do about him, or how to talk about him.

Robertson: What would the American Founding Fathers or, barring that, other Enlightenment-era thinkers and leaders think of the state of masculinity today?

Peterson: I think it isn’t masculinity per se that’s on shaky ground at the moment—it’s that we have an idea that emerged in our culture that masculine striving—especially on the part of men, because not so much on the part of women—is associated with power, dominance and the tyrannical patriarchy. And I think that the Founding Fathers would regard that as an appalling concept, an appalling and dangerous concept. Because it’s designed to enervate the striving individual. And because it’s gender-identified, men are certainly discouraged at every level in society now [from taking] their place in the world—although I would say we do about as poor of a job of supporting the maternal role—but men are accused of participating in tyranny, merely by manifesting normative and laudable competence and ambition.

I mean, I see that with the critique of my book. I’m suggesting that people develop existential courage, the existential courage to stand up properly in the face of the overwhelming catastrophe of life, and I’m criticized for supporting the oppressive patriarchy. … And to conflate those two things is dreadful, it’s cruel, it’s malevolent, and it’s definitely one of the primary sins—perhaps the primary sin, which is really saying something—of the radical collectivist left. … We’ve never set a conceptual structure that allows us to determine when the left goes too far, even though the evidence that the left can and does go too far is absolutely overwhelming. We fail to do that at our great peril, and that’s on the right and the left simultaneously.