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“It was recognition of my own idiocy, which was profound — and still is,” he said. “I decided when I was about 17 that I didn’t know anything. Which I think Justin Trudeau should have decided.”

Peterson was also uncomfortable with many NDP activists, who were middle class and seemed to hate the successful, but also didn’t like the poor: “They seemed resentful and bitter and peevish.”

When he got to college in Grande Prairie, Peterson worked for the board of governors. The governors were local businesspeople and Progressive Conservative appointees. He came to admire these self-made men and women who were often new immigrants.

“They built something out of nothing and they had something to show for themselves,” he said.

Wary of the far right

Peterson makes a pointed personal attack here on middle-class socialists, but it’s worth noting he’s wary of the far right. He has said in various interviews if identity politics take over, with competing ethnic and political groups struggling to crush the other side, that white, right-wing men will form their own tribe and become a cruel force.

Peterson’s crusade is to reject toxic identity politics and focus on individual improvement as the road to a better world.

He talks of each of us being “crucified people,” subject to the world’s suffering and malevolence:

“You’re going to have a rough life, just like everybody else. And you’re going to have your fair share of suffering. And you’re going to be touched by malevolence, and that’s going to hurt, and you need something to justify that. You think, ‘Well, what is a noble enough aim so I can suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and prevail in spite of that?’ That’s what you need. That’s what everybody needs. And maybe you could have it if you just decide what it was. Why not? It’s worth a shot. You don’t have anything better to do.”

dstaples@postmedia.com