The patron saint of Incels and men’s rights activists, Jordan Bernt Peterson (JBP), felt it necessary to write a 370-page, self-help book repeating 12 simple rules that he originally posted on Quora (with a relatively low engagement) answering the question ‘How to make life more meaningful?’ 12 Rules for Life (2018), henceforth 12RFL, is incredibly convoluted, contradictory, and misleading. Often, it is difficult to tell whether Peterson means things literally or metaphorically (he uses vagueness as a strategy to have his cake and eat it too) dismissing ideas as poetic descriptions when unable to justify his points further. His explicit metaphors are no help either, Peterson is sometimes unclear what his rambling tangential anecdotes and religious dogma are trying to convey.

I plan to address the contradictions I’ve encountered in Peterson’s views on power, hierarchies, gender, religion and tradition in due course, but I first want to make clear that there are plenty of things that he’s written and said that I agree with. For instance, I genuinely believe that all 12 rules, unfleshed, are timeless good sense. Standing up straight, treating yourself with care, surrounding yourself with people who want the best for you, taking responsibility for yourself, being honest, attentive, precise in speech, respectful and not focused on suffering all the time, are, in my opinion, good advice. But Peterson’s endless exposition, and what seems to me like pointless rambling, give these rules hidden meanings that slowly crawl themselves into the reader’s mind. He packages what otherwise could have been a sincere memoir with unjustified metaphysics and romanticized philosophical thought.

Furthermore, I don’t intend to resort to ad hominems, but for a man who routinely criticizes others as hypocrites, it ought to be noted that JBP seldom follows his own rules. Rule 6, ‘Set your house in order before you criticize the world’, has in it a claim about fixing one’s self before advising others to do so, otherwise the result would be ‘harm stemming from ignorance’. This sheds light into the contradictory nature of the self-help author, as does his constantly asserted notion ‘don’t assume someone else knows your needs better than you do’. It seems to create an even greater problem when the author is, at the time of writing this, in rehabilitation to treat an addiction to Benzodiazepines. In 12RFL he argues that you must risk being wrong if you want to have a peaceful conversation, you have to be open to having your mind changed, but that is not a courtesy that he extended to trans people in his fervent opposition to Bill C-16, which extends human rights to trans people in Canada, or for that matter anyone he disagrees with. That being said, the fact that he does not follow his own advice does not automatically make it bad advice, the ideas of many philosophers have been applauded by many in spite their turbulent personal lives. The point is that Peterson entangles himself in rhetoric and relatability to then recommend arbitrary injustices, strawman, and cherry pick views that oppose his. Like he does to ‘postmodern Neo-Marxism’, whatever that is , moral nihilism, relativism, and feminism, mystifying them to the point where all reality dissipates, and the illusion of a deep philosophy is created.

The most watched JBP interview of all time is a Channel 4 News debate on the gender pay gap, campus protests, and postmodernism, conducted by Cathy Newman as part of Peterson’s book tour in 2018. Some sections of the interview have been uploaded to YouTube with titles such as ‘JBP Leaves Feminist Speechless’ and ‘JBP Decomposes/Destroys Feminst Reporter’. This interview inspired thousands of YouTubers to analyse and deconstruct the debate, almost unanimously condemning Newman’s approach and characterizing Peterson as a destructive force to left-wing politics. But the relevance of most of the backlash has more to do with how not to interview someone. However, the attention it received, 18 million views in one year, solidified his online presence and greatly boosted the sale of his book. His ideology, regardless of whether he claims to have one or not, was endorsed by many supporters of personalities like Ben Shapiro, Joe Rogan, and Carl Benjamin (aka Sargon of Akkad), earning him a spot as part of the Intellectual Dark Web, as coined by the economist Eric Weinstein—a loosely organized group of online personalities who fervently oppose what they perceive to be the dominance of identity politics and political correctness in modern life.

Jordan Peterson’s philosophy, if there exists such a thing, is based on his Taoist-inspired conceptions of Order and Chaos. These categories provide only the illusion of profundity, and are loosely justified in terms of an incongruent accordance with Taoism. Taoism, as originally conceived by Zhuang Zhou, specifically condemned Confucianism because it emphasized rituals, hierarchical social order and conventional morality, all of which Peterson stands for. Although he uses the philosophical authority of Taoism, his own philosophy is nothing like it. He characterizes Order as inherently masculine and Chaos as inherently feminine, which no Taoist does, and provides the reader with several pages of examples that fail to serve as justification of this arbitrary categorization. For instance, order is ‘social structure, explored territory, and familiarity’ as opposed Chaos, which is ‘when you suddenly find yourself without employment, or are betrayed by a lover.’ His conception of Order and Chaos rely greatly on his own beliefs about masculinity and gender. There is no justification as to why the gender distinction ought to be made in these categories in the first place—if not to perpetuate scripts of ‘gender normalcy—or why their genders are relevant in the first place.

The sort of justifications he does provide to show that this duality manifests itself is, ‘we already know all of this, but we don’t know that we know it.’ Which is why his work has been dismissed by many psychologists as scientifically retrograde. Order and Chaos are hovering over all 12 Chapters, never really proving anything beyond the benefits one could reap from living less chaotically, by organizing their life to reduce stress and anxiety. If Peterson’s formulation of order and chaos are subjective, which based on the broadness of examples seem to be the case, then Meaning and Being and Jordan’s Path to Happiness are all subjective as well. Peterson’s rhetorical fashion, the capitalization of and ingrained meaning into common nouns, his hasty generalizations based on anecdotes and unjustified emphasis on sexual categorization in a metaphysical manner, all fail to stand up to philosophical scrutiny.

His support for social hierarchies based on biological distinctions is disconcerting. Because natural distinctions become habituated into the environment, according to Peterson, the environment ‘naturally’ creates hierarchies and traditions, such as faith, family, gender and age. It doesn’t necessarily follow that traditions should be upheld becausethey are traditions, and he doesn’t prove how things that are old have inherent value. But Peterson spends several pages exemplifying how organisms interact with their environments and vice versa, mainly attacking those he calls ‘eco-activists’, whom he claims envision nature as harmoniously balanced and perfect but never identifies who makes this argument or if someone did. ‘Because nature is what it selects,’ he writes, ‘the longer a feature has existed the more time it has had to be selected and to shape life,’ and somehow, it follows that ‘there is little more natural than culture’. Peterson’s social conservatism is strongly manifested in his case for the importance of social hierarchies, badly disguised as a psychological conclusion.

There’s only so much that can be said about Jordan Peterson before it becomes necessary to talk about lobsters. Peterson shows that antidepressants work on lobsters because they have similar serotonin patterns to humans, and claims that this is highly connected to their aggressive social behaviour. He claims that Prozac works on lobsters because the molecule is the same and the nerve terminals are very similar, so the drug does what it was designed to do. Because of this, he analyses how lobsters arrange themselves into hierarchies of gender, naturally so, and concludes that it is therefore natural in humans to do so as well, because serotonin drives social interactions. But Peterson’s jump from the animal world to the human world is an age-old trick that has been used to popularise distinctions between the male and female bodies. Our last common ancestor with lobsters was 350 million years ago—the first animal that developed an intestine, our closest physical feature to the brainless crustacean.

But Peterson uses The Lobster Case to argue that hierarchies in animal societies are based on the natural dominance of alpha-males. He characterizes success for male lobsters as material or territorial advantage, and success for female lobsters as access to males, then extrapolates this to human societies without any concrete justification. These assumptions and claims, which he rarely follows up on, and often contradicts in interviews, make up his argument against identity politics and the feminist conception of ‘patriarchy’. Changes in the behaviour of lobsters, both because of serotonin presence and reproductive patterns, build a sort of path to Peterson’s arguments for enforced monogamy and gender socialization. Yet at the same time, his quasi-intellectual cover for misogyny is cemented in his denial of the existence of the patriarchy. And while it is true that the gender pay gap is more of an attack on motherhood than it is on women, Jordan’s claims that because men invented menstrual products and have historically held jobs that have greatly impacted the environment, (builders, engineers, stonemasons), then the patriarchy as a hierarchy of power simply does not exist. And because it doesn’t exist, feminism is about women gaining power over men. But there is no explanation in 12RFL as to why ‘socially constructed hierarchies’ are not real, and there is little engagement with any of the ideologies he strawmans.

But at the core of his worldview is the idea that society is already organized in the best way possible, and that altering our ways of social being or our traditions in the name of diversity causes more harm than good. This is why white nationalists took a liking to his claims and many pledged their support to him. But broadening the scope of equal treatment to all has been a valuable part of philosophical and social thought since the eighteenth century. Recognition that transgender people have been subject to harassment and violence justifies extension of human rights protections to them. He upholds some golden age traditions under the claim that they function as an authority to regulate ‘a society of monsters.’ His support for child abuse is an example of this. Whilst he doesn’t delve into corporeal punishment, he sees violence as innate to humans, peace as the mystery- and discipline of children as essential to the process of socialization. Further into his work he claims that the disappearance of abuse across generations is a testament to ‘the genuine dominance of good and evil in the human heart,’ showing that his advice and thought processes are incredibly contradictory. Moreover, Peterson’s psychiatric paternalism is meant to encourage the reader to live a life aimed at personal satisfaction. This often implies using other people as a means to an end, as opposed to ends in themselves.

His ethical claims are a greedy mixture between utilitarianism and deontology and are neither original nor justified. His questionable choice and use of philosophical catchphrases and name-dropping, mask his messy and purposeless arguments. He dismisses Rousseau’s social contract theory by misinterpreting his conception of the noble savage, not by rebutting his argument that man in the state of nature has no conception of morality and therefore cannot be immoral. Peterson matter-of-factly concludes that ‘human beings are evil, as well as good, and darkness will dwell forever in our souls’ and that ‘everyone is a school shooter at their core.’ These statements are bizzare, firstly because it is perplexing how he chooses to bring in Rousseau’s state of nature as opposed to Hobbes’, whose conception is more similar to his. But secondly, and more importantly, behind his quasi-intellectualism Peterson has a dreadfully serious message. His obsession with upholding Western civilization and the idea of objective truth stems from the fear that the agenda of progressive politics is to destroy individual freedoms and collapse what he considers to be a stable social system. Essentially, anything that questions that status quo is, according to Peterson, a Postmodern Neo-Marxist conspiracy.

Peterson’s answer to the question of how to live one’s life is too entangled to specify. He sees religion, specifically Christianity, as ‘an end to all evils’ and the core of everything, quoting the Bible relentlessly and treating the text as incomprehensible to humans because of its holiness. As an intellectual, he allows his own mind to question the status quo, but doesn’t extend the same courtesy to the reader. Peterson seems to assume that the only alternatives to religion are anarchy and nihilism. But it is from the development of secular ethics, like Kant’s conception of duties and rights and Bentham’s happiness principle, that Peterson’s draws his arguments in the first place.

But agreeing with Jordan Peterson is inevitable. His psychological knowledge is well grounded, and his professorial lectures are an interesting, if misleading, introduction to the field of behavioural psychology. The tone is personal and caring and exactly what you would expect from a practicing psychologist. Many of his statements are superficial, common sense. And he inserts his own opinions easily into the text because so much of it slides down so easily. Peterson wants to offer you a utopic solution to the conflict between power and systems of belief through ‘the deployment of the individual’. But in reality, he is offering you nothing more than his own factified opinion. Reading philosophy feels like taking steps up a staircase as arguments build on each other to create meaning and draw conclusions, but reading and watching JBP feels like ambling in a flat, sweltering desert—do it for long enough and you may start to think you’ve found a staircase.