© Nick Kozak photo/Star photo illustrationUniversity of Toronto psychology professor Jordan B. Peterson ignites a global debate that is absurdly reductionist: is he a hero or a villain?
But at this moment, as he ambles into his sun-drenched living room, he first needs to get through the next agenda item in a daily schedule that is snapped together like a jigsaw puzzle by a team of handlers.
"How long are we going to talk?" he asks, as solicitously as Mister Rogers.
When I tell him I booked two hours with the gatekeepers, horror dances in his eyes, as if I just casually asked for one of his kidneys. But he nods gamely and rubs the back of his neck. His slender body folds up like an origami crane as he settles into a leather recliner and swivels into gabbing position.
Get comfy, Professor. There is much to discuss.
Driving in that morning, I find myself thinking about Peterson's neighbours in Seaton Village. What must they make of this epic transformation? A few years ago, Peterson was a household name in the same way Jell-O is nutritious. Maybe they'd see the University of Toronto psychologist in the summer, sitting outside, doing a little light reading - The Brothers Karamazov, say, or The Great Mother - in the company of Sikko, his now departed American Eskimo dog.
Then about 18 months ago, holy hell, their neighbour is in the news more than Justin Bieber. Peterson takes a fierce stand against Bill C-16, the Canadian Human Rights Act amendment. The man in the modest semi ignites a global debate that is absurdly reductionist: is he a hero or a villain?
Fast-forward to 2018. When neighbours see him these days, Peterson is likely to be wheeling a suitcase, scrambling to the airport, en route to another sold-out event somewhere in the world where his name is emblazoned on the marquee.
Indeed, the first thing I see upon entering his home is a carry-on bag.
So based on media archetypes, in about six seasons, their neighbour has gone from "obscure psychologist" to "controversial professor" to "YouTube celebrity" to "father figure for a generation" to "leading public intellectual" and now, as he leans back and extends the footrest on his recliner, "bestselling author" of an advice book that is rocketing off shelves on both sides of the Atlantic.
"I haven't expected anything that's happened to me for two years," Peterson says, sounding subdued, like he's reciting a FedEx shipping label.
Nobody would describe Peterson's resting face as jolly. Find a picture of him online and, 98 per cent of the time, he is brooding with such feverish intensity, it's as if he is trying to suck the photographer's soul into a metaphysical vortex. You get the sense he wouldn't crack a smile even if pinned and tickled by chimps.
On this morning, true to form, his gaunt face betrays no joy.
If you didn't know the man in black socks, blue jeans and muted yellow button-down had just sold more than 600,000 copies of his new book in a few weeks and was now raking in more dough per month than most Canadians make in a year, you might guess he was three months behind on the rent.
This doom-and-gloom is not an act. In the '80s, when Peterson was obsessively studying genocide and 20th-century atrocities, he started having recurring nightmares about nuclear apocalypse. In his head it was the end of days.
The nightmares have ceased but his concern for humanity abides.
"I think we're at an inflection point right now and things could go really badly," he says. "That's still the most likely outcome, I think. It's pretty unstable. I'm not pessimistic about that exactly because things could go really well, too. But I'd like to be remembered as part of the process that inflected things in a positive direction."
On an individual level, the tension between calamity and salvation is pretty much the subtext of his new blockbuster, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. Imagine a Hobbesian view of existence - solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short - combined with the philosophy of Winnie the Pooh: you're braver than you believe, stronger than you seem and smarter than you think.
"It's my attempt to lay out the principles for living properly in the face of tragedy and evil," explains Peterson. "And my claim that there's a pathway away from both of those things that is more powerful than both of them."
When he says this, his eyes are closed, like he's under hypnosis. A few hours earlier, he was on a red-eye from the West Coast. I can almost hear the jingle for Sleep Country. In clear violation of the first rule in his book - "Stand up straight with your shoulders back" - his body is curled into a cannonball.
Peterson is now tiptoeing along a pathway that leads away from his old life.
Even before 12 Rules came out in January, he had stormed the world stage as the most intriguing Canadian mind since Marshall McLuhan. But the book, which will roll out in new markets over the next two years and be translated into more than 40 languages, has catapulted him into the cultural stratosphere.
As his agent, Sally Harding, tells me: "This kind of success opens an unimaginable number of doors."
Next up is a 12-city speaking tour that begins March 25 at the Beacon Theatre in New York. Before it ends, in Phoenix on June 1, Peterson will address followers in Toronto, Washington, Chicago, Detroit, Denver, San Francisco, Seattle, London, Dallas and Austin, headlining venues usually reserved for performers with standup material or musical instruments.
The tour is organized by Creative Artists Agency, the Hollywood kingmaker with a client roll that has included George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Bruce Springsteen and Cristiano Ronaldo. Peterson's handlers are also searching for new ways to push his celebrity into galaxies where no academic has gone before.
But the other day, Peterson wasn't thinking about fame and riches. He was thinking about St. Joseph's Oratory in Montreal, Canada's largest church. He could picture the majestic olive dome as the faithful ascended, a blur of moving limbs and dreams.
He often has these daytime "visions," as he calls them.
"That's what human beings are doing," he says. "We are stumbling up the steps with our brutal loads towards the heavenly city on the hill. That's what I'm doing. Carefully. Carefully. Step by step."
Then after a pause: "I've been living day-by-day since September of 2016."
That fall, before Peterson denounced Bill C-16 in a series of videos that went viral, it was as controversial as a mall directory.
But after parsing the legislation, Peterson did not view C-16 as an egalitarian coda that would merely expand the list of prohibited grounds of discrimination to include gender identity and gender expression.
No, in his view, being forced to use "preferred pronouns" amounted to "compelled speech." And he flat out refused to use invented pronouns under government fiat. He would rather rot in jail than forfeit his right to choose his own words.
This is where it gets interesting. If Peterson had limited his remarks to free speech or academic freedoms, this might've blown over after a news cycle. But this specific bill became a bugle call for a general declaration of war.
"Well, then the next thing is I said I oppose the radical left," he recalls.
He aimed his mortars at postmodernists, neo-Marxists, feminists, diversity and gender advocates, social justice warriors and entire university departments he believes are corrupt and harming society with ideological poison.
The subdued tone is gone. Peterson is now fired up.
"I think the idea that the postmodern radicals have launched an all-out assault against the categorical structure of western civilization is precisely what they claim," he says. "The thing about people is they often tell you what they're doing."
But what Peterson was doing became a subject of frenzied speculation.
To admirers, his dismantling of political correctness and disembowelling of liberal sacred cows was a revelation. Peterson was calling out cultural zealots who see the West as one big power conflict. To detractors, he was a bête noire, a gargoyle perched atop a spire of dubious scholarship.
Ira Wells, who teaches literature and cultural criticism at the University of Toronto, wrote an essay for The Walrus in November headlined "The Professor of Piffle."
"Let's be clear," wrote Wells. "Peterson doesn't understand the major thinkers in the 'postmodern' tradition who he libels for money. His grotesque caricature and slander of the humanities is very different from what actually happens in humanities classrooms."
Wells declined to be interviewed for this story. But at least he got back to me: other Peterson critics did not respond to interview requests.
"I feel like there is big cultural conversation right now whether Jordan is a great man or an evil man," says novelist and screenwriter Gregg Hurwitz, author of the Orphan X series. "For me, I just know him to be deeply, deeply good. That's what matters to me more than anything. He's given me a ton of advice academically, intellectually, as a husband, as a father."
Hurwitz is one of Peterson's closest friends. As with other inner circle residents, he is now giving advice to the man who just wrote a bestselling book of advice. It's odd. But as Peterson's celebrity adapts to new platforms - as doors of opportunity reveal themselves in this disorienting labyrinth - his advisers know one clumsy misstep could bring a swift and ignoble end to the journey.
So they are watching with critical eyes, providing tracking data and real-time feedback, as if Peterson was an experimental aircraft entering an alien planet.
"It's such a volatile time," says Hurwitz. "One phrase stated incorrectly can lead to a thunderous cacophony of moral outrage and indignation. We need to make sure that he's staying on point with clarity."
Trusted advisers have also warned about possible guilt by association when it comes to some of his fans. Peterson abhors identity politics on the left and the right. But this hasn't stopped some on the right from claiming him as a fellow traveller. This can be hazardous to his reputation if those same admirers advocate for ethno-nationalism or march with tiki torches or show up to his events with turbocharged alt-right symbols, including Pepe the Frog.
© TwitterFriend and TVO producer Wodek Szemberg says about the polarizing professor: "Some advice that I have conveyed to him is that he needs to watch who his hangers-on are."
But with 12 Rules landing as an instant phenomenon, Peterson's journey is moving at the speed of sound - his voice. And with each passing day, he is increasingly immune to the polarizing nature of his Being, circa 2016.
The real story, he says, is the 35,000 emails he's received since August from those who credit him with pulling them back from the abyss. Forget the radical left and the radical right. It may sound precious, but Peterson just wants to help individuals live better lives.
He shares a story about a recent trip to Los Angeles.
As he walked down the street with his wife, Tammy, a car screeched to a halt. A man in his early 20s jumped out to shake Peterson's hand and thank him for helping to repair his relationship with his father. Then the father jumped out.
The two embraced and stared at Peterson, as if he was personally responsible for reuniting loved ones estranged not by physical distance, but by an emotional chasm.
As Peterson recalls the looks on their faces, his own eyes get moist.
He is suddenly on the verge of tears.
"They were both so happy," he says. "Imagine if you could have what you wanted. What you'd want is for people to come up and say, 'I've been following you and everything is better.' That's really good."
These are not people in his life. Not to sound harsh, but why does he care?
"It's my social justice warrior compassion," he says, with a smirk. "People think I'm a hard character. But not really. Quite the contrary. It just seems unnecessary. There is nothing worse than unnecessary suffering."
Peterson was always a popular lecturer, first at Harvard and then the University of Toronto. He rarely refers to notes - "I prepare my lectures, but then I don't give the lecture I prepare" - yet never loses the thread.
He loves lecturing. He loves psychology. He loves archetypal stories.
But until he started uploading his lectures to YouTube in 2013, his sphere of influence rarely extended past the ivory tower. Now he can reach anyone, anywhere. And for all the talk of opening new doors, there may be old ones that must close for this journey to move forward.
"Who knows what the plan is," Peterson says, when I ask if the plan is to return to the University of Toronto in 2019, following his sabbatical this year.
Peterson has created a riptide in popular culture, one that is slowly pulling him away from the academy. He is not the same person he once was. There is a Jungian concept, he explains, called "Regressive Restoration of the Persona."
"You can't go back to what you were," he says. Returning to his old life, he'd be "like Humpty Dumpty ... all glued together. But I don't know what to do."
He glances to his right, where his tiny backyard sits in plain view of other houses.
"I'm loath to give up my university affiliation. But I'm not going back to teach the same courses because they're online. There's no reason to do them again. So what I would like to do is propose to the university that I teach something like a hybrid between a university and a public course. But I don't know if ..."
His voice trails off, but not before the problem twists into focus.
The videos on his YouTube channel, with titles such as "Biblical Series 1: Introduction to the Idea of God" and "Identity Politics and the Marxist Lie of White Privilege," have racked up more than 50 million views. It might be closer to 250 million, he calculates, when you consider "the YouTube world as a whole."
It is a world that has seduced him.
When Peterson talks numbers, whether he's citing the prodigious reach of podcasts such as The Joe Rogan Experience or analyzing how people are making videos from clips of his lectures - "That's happening at the rate of about 4,000 a week" - he can sound less like a 55-year-old professor and more like a millennial data analyst.
He gets as jazzed about metrics as he does about Freud. Then he weighs the numbers between physical and virtual lecture halls - between the University of Toronto and YouTube - and his face finds a new level of downcast.
"That's why I wouldn't go back," he says, citing the 1.5 million views for his first Bible lecture. "When you see that, you don't think, 'Oh no, back to 200.' That's insane."
Is it possible Peterson has already taught his last class at the University of Toronto? Yes. But if he does leave, without joining a new institution, does he risk losing a vital alchemy that exists between academe and the world beyond? Maybe.
© Chona Kasinger/New York Times file photoSays Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker: "It's often ideas from deep in the scientific literature that get popular readers engaged — they've already heard the clichés and comments on comments, and are hungry for new and surprising discoveries."
To be in the company of Peterson is to be in the presence of a formidable intellect. He is intense. He thinks aloud. His neurons form a reference library. His ideas zig across eras and zag across disciplines. He puzzles over unanswerable issues by asking questions or he gets sidetracked by politics and all this grand philosophy is replaced by taunts and withering condemnation.
It's as if Socrates was dragged into a never-ending rap battle.
One second Peterson is questioning the left's grasp of fundamental issues: "Inequality is a big problem. But it's a way worse problem than people on the left think it is. They like to think it's a consequence of capitalism, and I would say that is actually ignorant. We already know that that's not true."
The next second, he is exploring consciousness, vectors and theoretical physics, while melting my brain: "Here's a weird thing. If you go out at night and you look up at a star and a photon hits your eye, that photon would not have left that star 20 million years ago if your eye wasn't there now to see it."
When adviser and friend Norman Doidge first met Peterson, at a dinner party in 2004, his first impression was a question: "Is he brilliant or is he a genius?"
© Vince Talotta/Toronto Star file photoU of T psychiatrist Dr. Norman Doidge on first meeting Peterson, now a good friend: "He was just so authentically possessed by the very great questions of meaning and life and the problem of evil ... and trying to understand what drove human beings to lose their senses and put themselves and others at risk."
Peterson's decades-long excavation of humanity at its darkest, from the Holocaust to Mao's "Great Leap Forward," has left him haunted by the connective tissue between moral choices made at the individual level and the rise of totalitarian states. He found this nexus, as laid out in various works, including Alexander Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, completely convincing.
This is a major plank in his thinking. Peterson also believes you can't contend with evil until you understand your own capacity for it. He recalls a moment when Lloyd Axworthy was Canada's Minister of Foreign Affairs and Slobodan Milosevic was wreaking havoc in the former Yugoslavia.
"There was a front-page article about the ethnic cleansing, and Axworthy said, 'I just don't have the imagination for that kind of evil,' " recalls Peterson. "And I thought, 'You son of a bitch.' You think that's an ethical statement. You're a minister for foreign affairs. If you don't have the imagination for that kind of evil, then those who do will win. It's not a virtue."
So what, I wonder, is Peterson's capacity for evil?
"Well, it's like the rest of humanity," he says. "It's unbounded. I understand the Columbine kids. I can understand the attraction of that, even. That's the attraction of power and destruction and hatred."
I won't lie to you. When lingering on the subject of evil, Peterson leaves me dangerously close to urinating on his couch.
For example: "I've spent some time thinking about some very dark things. And I thought for a good while about what I would do if I was a terrorist. There are so many things you could do that would be so destructive. I thought, 'Take a tanker of gasoline and fill the sewers with it.' It would be easy. One match."
Or this: "Do you know what happens if you explode one hydrogen bomb above North America 300 miles up? All of the electronics die. All of them. Everyone starves. That's an electromagnetic pulse. That's just one bomb. Just one. You don't blow up a city. You just blow it up 300 miles up."
So, yeah, there are no unicorns and circus jugglers in his visions.
But then, moments later, we careen back to goodness and light. Peterson is not a materialist. Is he religious? "Oh, definitely." But he seems most given to the divine as it illuminates the contours of misery in this world.
"I believe that everything people do is meaningful," he says. "I believe we make a decision between heaven and hell with every decision we make. I think that's literally and metaphorically true."
It's unusual to hear an academic reference God or the Bible as often as Peterson does. At times, he can sound more like a pastor than a professor while sprawled in his recliner. Surrounded by Socialist Realist paintings that serve as a constant reminder of past horrors committed in the name of utopia - "The art is winning," he says, "the totalitarianism is losing on each canvas" - there are nods to Revelation, Genesis, Book of Exodus, the Sermon on the Mount.
At one point, I'm convinced a mischievous deity is screwing with our conversation. Just before Peterson makes a reference to Noah and the Ark, the world's friendliest contractor sashays into the house without knocking - "HELLO!" - to repair drywall in the basement that was damaged by, you guessed it, a flood.
Given his professional training, and his reverence for science, methodology and empirical data, Peterson's religious allusions can create a captivating tension.
"I think the Bible is true," he says. "But I don't know what that means. I don't know how to reconcile it with the idea, for example, that the universe is 13 billion years old, or that we evolved over this four-billion-year period from nothing, essentially. There is this overlay on top of that of this mythological landscape that is also true. But I don't know how both of those can be true at the same time."
He's been grappling with weighty inquiries for as long as anyone can remember. What was Peterson like as a child? He was curious, at times recklessly mobile, pensive, small but strong and - this one is surprising - slow to begin talking.
"But then once he started," his father, Walter Peterson, tells me, "he never quit."
The eldest of three children, Peterson was born in Edmonton, and grew up in the nearby hinterlands of Fairview, Alta. His childhood home was freighted with encouragement and an emphasis on telling the truth: "If something is bothering you, you don't want to sit on it and let it sour you," says the elder Peterson.
There were also books galore. Walter, a teacher, used phonic techniques to help the kids sound out words. Before long, little Jordan was devouring the Dr. Seuss canon. He was deep into complex materials before kindergarten.
"He could read damn near anything," recalls Walter Peterson. "We went to visit his great-grandmother out on the coast when he was about 5 and she couldn't get over it. She'd give the kid the newspaper and he'd read the newspaper to her."
Can the father make sense of the son's uncharted journey?
"Nobody can make sense of it," he replies. "I don't think Jordan can make sense of it. In fact, I know he can't make sense of it. It flabbergasts him every day."
Peterson's mother, Beverley, gets on the other line.
"He had no idea this was the path he was going to go down," she tells me.
Peterson's parents are achingly proud. You can hear it in their voices. But they also seem concerned about this journey due to the crushing demands on their son's time, the Messiah expectations of fans and, most of all, his physical well-being.
"Most of the advice I give him is to make sure he looks after his health," says Beverley.
Back at Peterson's house, we're talking about epistemological theology - I think that's what we were talking about - when Tammy enters the living room and hands her husband a plate of ribs.
"Thanks, Tam," Peterson says, grabbing the fork.
There is nothing else on his plate. I do a double take, only because it's just after 9 a.m. and, outside of The Flintstones, you rarely see breakfast ribs. But while Peterson's capacious mind is powered by psychology, philosophy, religion, literature, science, years of clinical research and the great works of western civilization, his body is now running on "meat and greens."
For years, he's been hobbled by autoimmune disorders, including psoriasis and uveitis, an inflammation of the eye. He developed gastric reflux disorder about five years ago, during a trip to Berlin. For much of his life, he also needed to nap two hours a day. When he got up in the morning, he felt like a bag of cement.
His health reached a crisis point in December 2016 - during the apex of his political battles - when he barely slept for three straight weeks.
But after a sweeping diet change, the ailments have faded.
Detective work by Peterson's 26-year-old daughter, Mikhaila, who is also saddled with autoimmune problems, led to this "meat and greens" edict. So Peterson now feels better but endures a meal regimen so insanely oppressive - no dairy, no juice, no nuts, no sugar, no carbs - it would cause a riot if imposed on prison inmates.
One of the main reasons Tammy now travels everywhere with her husband, she later tells me, is to "make sure I can feed him wherever we go."
"The airlines don't seem to care if I fill my suitcases with food, as long as there is no liquids," says Tammy Peterson, who met her husband when they were children in Fairview, living across the street from one another. "It's very anxiety-provoking for Jordan if I don't have food with us because he has no options."
It's a crazy mental image: Canada's most famous professor crossing international borders with suitcases full of possibly contraband meat and greens. You can imagine him in a terminal, glancing at the departures board while gnawing on a lamb chop.
Then again, the last two years have been a blur of surreal sights and sounds: the scorched reaction to his Bill C-16 videos; the lineups at his book signings; the debates with critics who are often woefully overmatched; the hostile TV interrogations in which loaded questions and false assumptions blow up in the interviewer's face, as happened earlier this year in the U.K. on Channel 4 (I'm looking at you, Cathy Newman); the exponential growth of his social media following; the protesters who disrupt his talks by robotically shouting, chanting, breaking windows and pumping out white noise in a febrile and misguided attempt to suffocate words and ideas that make them uncomfortable, thereby making a mockery of both university and Enlightenment values.
But the detractors, so far, have only managed to galvanize Peterson's star.
Make no mistake: Jordan B. Peterson has monetized the radical left.
In a strange way, the hate is freeing. Even without a tenured salary or what is now undoubtedly a future of fat book advances and evergreen royalties, he earns about $80,000 (U.S.) per month from private donations via his Patreon account.
This is the greatest gig ever: strangers are paying Peterson to be Peterson.
Not that he seems to be luxuriating in any financial windfall. There is no tuxedoed butler greeting me at the front door. There is no Ferrari in the driveway - there isn't even a driveway. As father Walter notes: "I think a lot of the criticism that comes his way, from people who don't really look into him very deeply, is that he has an agenda to become famous and make a lot of money and that kind of thing. I don't think anything is further from Jordan's mind than that. He's just not that kind of a person."
To be sure, Peterson's cramped house is filled with artifacts that would quickly get you escorted out of a pawnshop, objects that mostly have visual and sentimental value. At one point, when he returns from a bathroom break, Tammy is opening a package and I overhear Peterson say, "Oh, you got your bird clock!"
But even without extravagant spending, the money is pouring in. It may never stop.
Peterson meets regularly with one of his business partners, Daniel Higgins, including the afternoon of our interview. A high school version of his self-authoring program, which guides participants through writing about their past, present and future, is in the works.
He makes frequent trips to Silicon Valley, where investors are all ears and keen to ride shotgun on the Peterson Express. Talk to people who know him and speculation about what comes next can lurch from starting an online university to a new talk show for public intellectuals, from new global speaking tours to new books, from a reimagined role as an educator to a career in politics.
Most of us watched the implosion of Patrick Brown and recent chaos within the Ontario PCs - leading up to Doug Ford's win on Saturday as new party leader - as curious onlookers. Peterson saw a potential starring role.
"I thought about running when the PC party blew up here," he admits. "I thought that's a catastrophe and maybe I can bring some depth to the leadership race."
Whatever comes next, Peterson's time to make decisions is shrinking.
He worked on his first book, 1999's Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief, for three hours a day for 15 years. Then 12 Rules was written in five years. It's been out for about two months and his agent is already tending to the next proposal.
In the parlance of 12 Rules, Peterson is now standing between order and chaos, between past routines and future opportunities that hold the promise of unimaginable rewards but also, if things go sideways, unbelievable risk.
Ultimately, he must avoid becoming collateral damage in his own war.
So what is guiding Peterson through this journey into the unknown?
"Fear," he says. "What do they say, the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom?"
When he gazes into the mirror each morning, I don't know what Peterson tells his reflection. But it may well be, "Don't screw this up, bucko."
Remember his metaphorical vision about St. Joseph's Oratory? As humans ascend the steps, I ask, how do we know when we've reached the top?
"There is no top," Peterson says. "That's the thing. There is an endlessly receding landscape of possibility. There is no top. There is also no bottom. What's that line, 'Hell is a bottomless pit because there is always something stupid you can do to make it worse.' Yeah. That's a terrifying idea. But the opposite is also true. There is nothing so good that it can't be made better."
The 12 rules
1 Stand up straight with your shoulders back.
2 Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping.
3 Make friends with people who want the best for you.
4 Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.
5 Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them.
6 Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world.
7 Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient).
8 Tell the truth - or, at least, don't lie.
9 Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don't.
10 Be precise in your speech.
11 Do not bother children when they are skateboarding.
12 Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street.
I enjoyed the link to this article, however: The Professor of Piffle [Link]
Some choice excerpts:
"Peterson’s defence of IQ rests on shaky foundations. While he tells students that IQ was empirically established through Charles Spearman’s factor analysis, he does not share the well-known critique of that method: factor analysis supports both of the contradictory causal explanations of intelligence (intelligence as innate versus intelligence as the product of environmental advantage). Peterson then stacks the deck in favour of biology, citing brain size and neural conduction velocity (essentially, the speed at which an electrical pulse moves through tissue) as the determinants of IQ. Again, he does not tell students that both explanations were discredited by later research...
In the tradition of nineteenth-and early twentieth-century pseudo-scientists, phrenologists, quacks, and scientific racists, Peterson’s commitment to IQ is simply the reflection of his commitment to an unalterable hierarchy of human beings. And this is why his dismissal of “unnatural” and “made up” gender pronouns, alongside his casual sexism—his belief that women would be better served by having babies than careers and that male feminists are “creepy”—turns out to be central to his intellectual project, which seeks to resurrect the conventional patriarchal pecking order. For Peterson, transgender people and powerful women upset the “male dominance hierarchy” that forms the centerpiece of his thought. His world view is predicated on the promise of restoring authority to those who feel disempowered by the globalism, feminism, and social-justice movements he derides....
Peterson’s immense popularity on the far right lies precisely in his intellectual validation of those traditional power hierarchies as natural and necessary—a message perfectly attuned to those who feel dispossessed and threatened by movements for sexual and racial equality. Most of Peterson’s videos offer variations on the theme that human behavior is the product of an ancient “male dominance hierarchy” that separates winners from losers—and that any attempt to question or subvert this hierarchy will result in unhappiness for the individual or chaos for society...
Peterson doesn't understand the major thinkers in the 'postmodern' tradition who he libels for money...(He is) a YouTube star who offers a wafer-thin intellectual validation for the political retrenchment of traditional hierarchies."