© Carlos Osorio/Toronto Star/Getty ImagesProf. Jordan Peterson of the University of Toronto is the author of the best-selling book โ12 Rules For Life.โ
Two years ago, almost nobody had heard of University of Toronto psychology professor Jordan Peterson. Now his new book 12 Rules For Life: An Antidote to Chaos is one of the bestselling books on Amazon, his YouTube lectures have garnered millions of views, and he has become one of the most loathed and loved academics on the Internet. He spoke with TIME about his rise, his supporters and the news. All links to evidence in Peterson's responses were provided by him.Are you surprised at the success of your new book 12 Rules for Life, which has been No.1 on Amazon for several weeks? Surprised barely covers it. I can't reconcile myself to what's been happening since September 2016.
How did it all start? I put three videos [on YouTube].
One objecting to new legislation in Canada that required a form of compelled speech under the guise of compassion for the downtrodden that I thought was a terrible, terrible mistake.
Another objecting to the University of Toronto's requirement that its Human Resources staff undergo unconscious bias training, which I regard as scientifically suspect. And
another detailing out the structure of what I regarded as the politically correct game. Those caused a tremendous amount of trouble.
Is it fair to say that you attract a lot of young male followers who are quite angry? I don't believe that's true.
You never worry about things that are said by your fans? Oh, sure. I worry about them. But I have irrefutable evidence that I've pulled thousands of young men away from the attractions of the "alt-right."
Part of the core information that I've been purveying is that identity politics is a sick game. You don't play racial, ethnic and gender identity games. The left plays them on behalf of the oppressed, let's say, and the right tends to play them on behalf of nationalism and ethnic pride. I think they're equally dangerous. The correct game, as far as I'm concerned, is one where you
focus on your individual life and try to take responsibility for your actions.Would gun legislation help stop school shootings? I think that in the United States the probability that gun legislation would stop the school shootings is basically zero. School-shooting culture doesn't seem to have manifested itself in other places as much as it has in the U.S. And I can't tell exactly why that is. It's conceivable that it has something to do with the more rough and ready attitude towards guns.
Do you think it's the responsibility of people at the top of the power totem pole to share benefits with those at the bottom? There's no doubt that
inequality destabilizes societies. I think the
social science evidence on that front is crystal clear. The correlation between inequality and male homicide rates is absolutely staggering. The answer to the problem of inequality is for the people who are fortunate enough to either have been gifted or deserved more to do everything they can to make the communities around them as strong as they possibly can.
Is it the same with power? If you are in the group that has the easiest access to opportunity or power, does it not behoove you to lift up those who are more oppressed? I don't think we should shoot for equality of outcome at all. I think that would be an absolute catastrophe. There's no evidence whatsoever that any attempt to ever do that has worked. You think we should all listen to the same music and eat the same food and go to the same plays and what, share the same partners?
When you seek to represent the oppressed, don't you end up representing a lot of people who are in some kind of gender or ethnic minority? In the 1970s when the French intellectuals in particular were forced to abandon their Marxism because of its obvious catastrophic murderousness, they played sleight of hand and transformed Marxism into identity politics. I don't think it has anything to do with genuine concern for the well being of the oppressed.
How do you feel about the LGBTQI movement? Like many civil rights movements, it's had its beneficial effects. I think that for a variety of reasons, it would probably be better to talk about intersectionality as an idea. Because the LGBT etc. movement is increasingly an exercise in intersectionality. But the problem with that, and this is actually one of the perversely comical things about intersectionality as an intellectual movement, is the intersectionalists have discovered the flaw of identity politics. And the flaw in identity politics is that there's an innumerable number of valid minority statuses. Which is also part of the reason why the West turned to the individual as the paramount category. The LGBT movement is very well organized and had a tremendous amount of political and sociological success in the last three decades. But now it's an activist bureaucracy with nowhere left to go. It's not going to just voluntarily dismantle itself. So now humanities departments at universities have become part of that activist bureaucracy.
They have become completely dominated by radical leftists. That's just
a reflection of the empirical facts. It's
not something I'm inventing.
Why do you say in the book that "most men do not meet female human standards"? The
evidence for that is pretty clear. Women have every reason to be as picky as they possibly can be, because they bear the brunt of the catastrophe of childrearing.
Do you worry that to phrase it as you do, and also to say that "women will not date guys who are their friends," seems to promote an antipathy between the genders? There is an antipathy between the genders. Their interests are not identical. Look what's happening in our culture. The whole last three months have been consumed by the #MeToo scandal. Our interests aren't identical at the biological level. Or even at the practical level.
So what do you think of the #MeToo Movement? I think that the treatment of women at the hands of some men is reprehensible. That's what a small percentage of very dangerous men are like. That should be stopped. But then you have a believe-the-victim strategy, which is associated with dangers like violation of the presumption of innocence. It's more deeply reflective of a bigger problem in society, which is that the birth-control pill has enabled women to compete with men on a fairly equal footing. But we still don't know what the rules are that should govern the behavior, the interaction between men and women in places like the workplace.
Does the huge number of women who report some kind of sexual assault or harassment suggest that it's more than just a couple of bad actors? That it is a systemic problem? Well it depends on how you define sexual assault or sexual harassment. The question is: Where do you place the boundaries for defining that phenomena? And if it's - let's call it unwanted penetrative sex, then no, I think it's a very small minority of men who are doing most of the damage.
What if it's unwanted sexual attention by a senior employee that then leads to your marginalization at work? Well, again, I think that the men who engage in that sort of thing on a regular basis are a very small minority. The depth of the measurement problem is a big problem. It's like defining hate speech. Is there hateful speech?
Well, obviously. Who's going to define the parameters of hate?
Oh, well, we can solve that later. Well no, we can't. That's the problem.
You say women won't marry men who earn less than they do. But already 29% of women earn more than their husbands. Is this a cultural thing that might change? Well, in my more cynical moments I think it'll change entirely. There's lots of cultures in the world where women do all the work. It's not necessarily that easy to entice men into responsible work. We tend to think of that as a norm in the West. It's a norm that's been established through a hell of a lot of effort.
Would you suggest that trying to give more voice to minorities and to women who feel that they have been systemically held back... First I don't think there is any evidence at all that women are being systemically held back. Not in the West. I think we're past that by about a decade.
Except that we have many more women than men graduating from every level of university and yet they rarely get to the C-suite, or the boards. What is going on there? I know exactly what's going on there. If you want to occupy the C-suite, or the top one-tenth of 1% in any organization, you have to be obsessively devoted to your career at the expense of everything else. And women look at that and they think, No. So you actually have to reverse the question.
The question isn't, Why aren't more women in the C-suite? The question is, Why are there any men? Because it's the men who are willing to be obsessive about their careers and work 80 hours a week like nonstop and hyper-efficiently. The hyper-productivity of a minority characterizes every domain where there's creative production. And almost all of the hyper-productive people are men.
Reader Comments
What happened Sept 9 2016? Jupiter entered Libra for 13 months.
Now.. we have Jupiter in the taboo/sex sign of scorpio for 13 months. Tbat s why the shit is hitting the fan and splattering.
Do you think it's the responsibility of people at the top of the power totem pole to share benefits with those at the bottom? "The answer to the problem of inequality is for the people who are fortunate enough to either have been gifted or deserved more to do everything they can to make the communities around them as strong as they possibly can."
Uh, right, except they haven't, they never have, and anyone with a brain knows they never will. In fact, the opposite has been shown to be true, the more people have, the more they really believe they deserve it because they are somehow better.
Just look at the distribution of wealth, the trend is in one direction, fewer & fewer people have more & more wealth, so obviously they are not sharing it. Absolutely moronic. What does that mean, anyway, "make the communities around them strong"? He just admitted that inequality destabilizes society, so one can infer that the solution is more equality, but all he can say is basically "gee I hope those rich people start sharing more of their money with the poor people".
As if that's ever going to happen, regardless, anyone who thinks we haven't already waited long enough are just as lame.
Conservatives are factually more generous than leftists, actually. Maybe because they are richer, I don't know, but either way it counters your statement.
"He just admitted that inequality destabilizes society"
That's probably his first problem (other than new-agey definitions of truth). Inequality (of opportunity) based on wealth and birth does destabilize society at least based on moral grounds; greed, maybe, although that does go back into communities; but not the sort of inequality that is now common: that of skill and ability. The amount of money you've made generally signals how much effort you've put into some domain. Like 99% of the time, if you like. It is funny that Peterson's solution is also your solution. He just sees no need for force.
Maybe there is some need, by the way, for force, or for redistribution. I'm not trying to paint things like "force," "leftist," "equality" as good or bad. Not by themselves.
I realized I don't actually know that.
Not sure I get where Peterson is coming from. It's not very direct, negating the value of providing work and purchasing expensive products because of other people's emotional reactions; it is also traditionally a leftist argument (watch out 1%ers).
They can share more equitably in a civilized fashion, or try to hoard it all to themselves and find out what happens, up to them, as they have all the control now and make the rules.
"The amount of money you've made generally signals how much effort you've put into some domain."
Sorry, I don't buy the Horacio Alger myth that anybody can get rich BS.
That's true as much as the statement anybody can win the lottery is true.
Statistically, most people will work their asses off and get nowhere, a very few will work their asses off and get somewhere. To become obscenely wealthy in most cases involves some shady dealing.
I won't deny their suffering, but poverty is decreasing substantially particularly in the last decade, not growing. If you prefer that is due to an interplay of market economies, freer trade policy (now and in the British empire, for example), and social democracies providing for those who truly cannot help themselves.
"The insanely rich can only hold onto their obscene degree of wealth for so long, as history also demonstrates. "
Many centuries. And if they are overthrown, or partially overthrown, tyrannies take their place, along with contradictory government policy.
"Statistically, most people will work their asses off and get nowhere, a very few will work their asses off and get somewhere."
Now that would be rooted in both a problem in inequality and also people's choices, yes. I see it in terms of opportunity: people can either find things that will take you to more opportunities, or sacrifice a little time now to make more in another field. Or, they can not do either, and the natural result for that could be stagnation.
"Does the huge number of women who report some kind of sexual assault or harassment suggest that it's more than just a couple of bad actors? That it is a systemic problem? Well it depends on how you define sexual assault or sexual harassment. The question is: Where do you place the boundaries for defining that phenomena? And if it's - let's call it unwanted penetrative sex, then no, I think it's a very small minority of men who are doing most of the damage."
So, in other words, if it's not Rape, it's not sexual harassment.
What a cave-man.
Are there actually people who think this guy is the bee's knees?
(I jest, suckers are a dime a dozen)
No one argues in favor of rape ("penetrative sex").
The question was whether sexual harassment was systemic problem, he dodged the question by segueing into talking about rape, then saying rape isn't systemic.
How to avoid answering a question 101.
He should run for office while he's riding a high, good political skills, knows how to say what people want to hear in the time honored tradition of any populist...he even seems able to cry on demand. Great political skills.
And it's true. So what's the problem.