My Real Beef with Jordan Peterson
By: Mk Lords
Tags: Self Help, Gender, Jordan Peterson, Masculinity, Misogyny

I rip on Canadian psychologist & professional Messy Bitch* Jordan Peterson a lot. I dedicated an entire podcast series on Queer Eye episodes one could watch instead of reading his anxiety inducing book. It’s a joke, but it’s kind of not because I have serious issues with his entire schtick.

Jordan Peterson in 2011 saying exactly what you think he’s saying about Women & Nice Guys

First off, I want to clarify what I don’t have a problem with because his fans, some of whom are friends of mine, seem to not understand where I am coming from when I critique him. I don’t like to kick people when they’re down & believe addiction is a very serious matter. I have lived with (and loved) addicts my entire life & have a great deal of sympathy for them. I believe a large portion of people struggle with going a little too hard on the substances sometimes & am avidly pro-drug & pro-drug decriminalization.

One thing that majorly pisses me off about Peterson is his express lack of sympathy towards recreational drug users & many other populations as demonstrated in his book/videos. He, of all people now, should know the shortsightedness his “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” advice contains for people who struggle with addiction. People need strong support networks to recover & access to resources that are often out of reach for those in marginalized populations.

He didn’t die, it’s fine to laugh a little, as a treat.

It’s not a lack of trying or moral conviction that makes people addicts. Most ironically, this is the field of research he wrote dissertations on! And that foresight still didn’t protect him from the throes of addiction. When I critique him based on this disparity in belief & behavior, it’s not because I think addiction is funny. It’s because he’s been such a hard ass on others who are struggling & purported to be an expert on living clean while in the middle of a full blown benzo addiction. He actually looked down on & mocked those who were struggling while being in the same struggle, unwittingly or not. And he’s getting a full redemption arc for it with yet another book deal on How to Live Your Life. No apology, no realization of the harm he’s caused, just a bunch of people letting him skate through with no accountability for the mountain of lies he’s built his bullshit on. This is typical of how this society treats men of a certain notoriety while allowing no path for forgiveness for others. I bring gender into it because he brings gender into everything, quite unnecessarily.

I also am not hung up on gender norms. In fact, I oppose them as much as he defends them. I’ve yet to see strong evidence that enforcement of binary gender norms do anything but harm everyone. That a slight, fey academic with an extensive skin care routine can be looked to as a symbol of masculinity should be good news for me (it otherwise would be), but he refuses to reckon with his own anxieties about masculinity in any honest way. His marriage obviously defies the very gender norms he relentlessly promotes as good for others, as does his daughter’s lifestyle, which I would also have no issue with if she wasn’t such an advocate of traditionalism for other people. It appears in practice & aesthetically he refuses the cage in which he tries to lock in others. “Masculinity” as defined by Peterson falls along the same, boring traditional lines that don’t have any consistent, non-contradictory definitions. It’s arguable that this bizarre insistence on strict gender norms has even caused him psychological harm. Which I want to care about more, but simply can’t when he’s done so much to harm the young men (& some women/nonmen) who look up to him. Physician heal thyself.

He has made a lucrative living off of punching down & inflating nonthreats to bolster his own notoriety. Everything about him comes across as inauthentic to me. But when you’re a living Rorschach test, people see what they want to see. His thinking is so muddy that it makes it easy for people to pick & choose what they want because he actually stands for very little aside from the same self help narratives that have been successful for the self help industry coated with a heavy dose of vague traditional values. Is he a Christian? Is he Gnostic? We don’t know & can’t deduce his actual values except when he goes on the offensive with the same bland, anti-PC rhetoric that help line the pockets of the most insincere grifters. If I am to take him at his word, he truly believes he is the perpetual victim of a society that has made him a multimillionaire almost overnight.

Let’s look a bit at his background before he became known as Jordan Peterson the Guru. He went out of his way to get on public access channels & other TV programs to stoke the same fears for years before they garnered him the attention he craved. I also take no issue with people wanting attention — it often means there’s some unmet need in their lives, and is not inherently an immoral thing. But he’s someone who has disingenuously attacked others for perceived outcomes that have yet to manifest his entire ideologically rigid life.

His superstardom came from misrepresenting a bill in Canada that simply added trans people to a list of already protected classes of people. I have no abiding love for the state either, but we have to logically look at whether these dangers came to fruition: they did not. You can’t be arrested for misgendering someone because that’s not what the bill is even about. He’s dishonestly afraid people more likely to be victims of violence & discrimination in the workplace, housing, & every other part of existence are the real threats to our liberties. How do you have a governing body that doesn’t realistically consider the pitfalls disproportionately affecting certain populations under a heteronormative patriarchy? I don’t believe the state will disappear in my lifetime, so as long as it must exist, legal protections have to apply to those most likely to be victims of discrimination if people want to live the civil liberal society he & others espouse. His entire career as a pundit is built on this outrageous lie, which should (ha!) disqualify him from being taken seriously as a public intellectual.

But who am I to say who’s allowed to call themselves an intellectual? I’m still partial to postmodern approaches that de-legitimize all forms of authority including in the professional academic sphere. I’ve known people who chose to live homefree with a better grasp of any one of the philosophical principles Peterson routinely misunderstands. We’re not going to ever hear from them because something something norms.

He’s fought for this level of notoriety his entire career, often supremely disingenuously & been uncharitable to reasonable critiques of his fuzzy thinking. He earned all of his criticisms fair & square. I’m just trying to fairly apply his own belief systems to him. Frankly, he’s a very rich, smoothbrained (even before the benzos), needlessly verbose asshole. And again, I don’t always have a problem with people being abrasive about their sincerely held beliefs — but his level of abrasiveness has led to a greater belief in norms that cause the very harm he’s trying to “save” people from. And I doubt his sincerity entirely.

It’s become quite popular & profitable to ragequit your normal, center-liberal sphere over false allegations of censorship to jump on the Right Wing Grifter Bandwagon. I will not be overly sympathetic to him continuing to give advice when his life is so clearly messed up because at the end of the day, he’ll be fine even if his brain is slightly scrambled eggs. He has a family, healthcare, & a giant base of support — privileges I have not consistently ever had. It’s not that I’m even against messy people giving life advice, it’s that his brand of misogynist, misandrist, middle class dictums end up harming the people who take them in when there are similar sources out there giving similar (but much better) advice minus the fixation on Why Wimmin Like Bad Boys.

I am slightly obsessed with self help because I’ve lived an at times very difficult life when I’ve had to rely on inner resilience to get through extremely dark periods that a man of his social standing can never really comprehend. These dark times had to do with gender, poverty, lack of familial support, existential battles & numerous other struggles which would be significantly improved with access to even slightly more resources. I am beating this dead horse because it’s still alive & I know people, specifically his audience, can live better lives through absorbing better, more compassionate mental health resources.

His battle, however hard subjectively it is, is not equal to the battle others face every day — people he wishes he just didn’t have to look at or claims will throw him in jail for being an intentionally hurtful asshole when they have no power to do so. No, I don’t have to have sympathy for him & if people want to claim he helped them that’s all fine & well, but I would encourage them to follow people like Brené Brown, the Fab Five, or nearly any other self help guidance that’s less insistent on strict adherence to rules (that the author himself clearly doesn’t follow) & norms. Even better, get a real therapist who has similar values if you can afford it, seek out reputable apps for therapy, or utilize what free resources can be found from social benefits. I wish we all had better access to real therapy to heal from trauma.

He’s getting yet another book deal with 12 more rules that supposedly will fix your life, even though the first 12 didn’t fix his. I’m sure it will be successful. Good for him. It’s amazing what one can accomplish whining for years in a tweed coat while possessing a PhD & a penis. Maybe instead of following so many rules, we learn which ones should be broken & think for ourselves before following anyone — most of all those who claim they can help you clean your room while sitting atop a pile of their own dirty laundry.

I will continue to critique Jordan Peterson in the language he uses for his perceived enemies because it’s not punching horizontally to do so & I’m confident that the values of abolition will win out long term over the values of prohibition espoused by conservatives of all stripes.