… I kind of really relate to Jordan Peterson, actually?

If we wish to be reductive, we can say that Jordan Peterson is a smart guy with kind of weird interests who hit a certain zeitgeist and found himself spiralling. I consider him something of a cautionary tale for people with Late Romantic proclivities, because he’s gone from an actual, tenured college professor whose research (through a pop-NF book) managed to leave the ivory towers of academia and reach a wider audience, to a man whose ambition, misguidedness, and health collaborated to create one of the strangest and most spectacular downfall stories… maybe ever?

Because it isn’t just one thing that took him down, this hubris cocktail could come for any of us, and especially as academia gets harder to break into more of us will be grasping and elbowing for our careers, not looking out for our health, and ready to trust some strange bedfellows. I’m keen to look at Jordan Peterson as a human, not as a character, that we may understand not only where he is now, but also to give him the dignity of where he was and understand what his appeal was for the wide swathe of people who felt represented by him. These are things about Jordan Peterson that I relate to, aspects of him that I see in me.

• He’s got the dress sense of an academic, admiring aesthetics from the outside. I am personally on constant lookout for the chance to wear a suit, a ballgown, pink and silver brogues… and yet undeniably more comfortable in a tweed blazer. I even share his perspective on why to dress well: I do think it shows a respect for your environment and your role to dress nicely, and I also want to signal to the world a grandiosity that I perhaps do not possess, and an allegiance to a history that isn’t truly mine. Still, though, fashion is out of my depth when it is playful or grandiose, however much I may respect those elements.
• He’s over emotional. Look, man, I get it – the world is fucked. Sometimes it just hits you how fucked the world is and you cry. Here’s to hoping it doesn’t hit us at memeable moments…
• He has the academic tendency to forget that you’re really clever in one specific field and subsequently forget that your opinions on other topics are less well-informed than you’d like. Jordan Peterson is a psychiatrist and I am a Romanticist – both fields which overlap into a (surprisingly, in my case) wide range of modern socio-political issues, but alongside that both of us are informed by our fervently held political opinions. Peterson would probably resent my counting his religious faith as a political belief, but as the greater part of my own religious practice is based in what is undeniably a political ideology I have no choice but to, for comparison’s sake, consider his own in the same terms. It would be fatuous to suggest that the academic rigour we apply to our work could be feasibly applied to every idea we come across, never mind those biases that are largely impervious to change, and I think this is something all academics could do well to remember – whilst our well-grounded research and own lived experience may guide our perspectives and utterances, true enlightenment must come from outside of the echo chamber, whatever that looks like for us.
• He’s trying (and, OK, failing) to be a renaissance man and public intellectual. Boy is this relatable – did you notice my blog is filled with mediocre poems? I personally think they are better than Peterson’s poems, but at least he had a concept and vision for his book that united his work. Don’t we all want to be academic-meets-perfume-muse? He’s certainly closer to this dream than I am.
• Prescription meds and a kind of insane diet have ruined him and his perspective. I was off my meds for a while a couple of years ago – with a doctor’s help (as Peterson’s benzo addiction has been) – and was utterly insane, part of which did manifest in some strange food behaviours (at one point I ate nothing but soup). Meds are important, and whilst doctors are trying their best our own bodies are so peculiar that there’s no simple fix with any of it. Get help if you need it – whether with your guts, your brain, your arthritis – as pain is incredibly difficult to think around, work with, and manage, yet bodies are so complicated that I can comfortably say (especially in a post-covid world) that we all need some kind of help fine-tuning. Also, eat your greens; one does not need to be a dietician to know that man cannot live off steak and salt alone.
• He constantly looks like there’s something distasteful happening around him. As somebody with a deviated septum and covid-lungs who thus gawps like a fish in a vain attempt to get enough oxygen, I am sympathetic to people whose resting faces suggest that their physical bodies are betraying them. I like that he has good posture – again, this to me suggests attention and respect and interest, even if it isn’t quite true – but beyond that conscious choice Peterson has made I choose not to use a layman’s body language analysis to judge people, as I believe we are encouraged to by TikTok.
• I, too, need to get off the internet. I mean, don’t we all? It’s what Peterson was doing on the internet originally that had me interested in him: by broadcasting his lectures he was democratising education, and the power he had as a tenured professor to enact that – or even simply encourage the debate as to whether we should do that – is, to me, a radical and interesting choice that I cannot help but agree with. Unfortunately in broadcasting his lectures he was not only blasting his knowledge but also his face and ‘brand’ all across the internet, and it is this ‘brand’ that contributed to his downfall: first, by associating him with the less intellectually rigorous ‘sceptic’ community of podcast bros, and then by allowing him to be associated with strange, unscientific things from the community around him – yes, the podcast bros, but also his own daughter. Peterson was vulnerable to their advances for a number of outside factors (not least his own culpability by chasing their approval and audience) and valuable to them for the ‘Professor clean-your-room’ brand he had built. When everything is content, it is not possible to have a sincere and helpful conversation; in a community where everything is a public or political statement, it is not possible to meet your own needs if they conflict with or simply ought to be kept separate from your considered intellectual ideas. A person’s selfhood cannot sustain itself as an emblem for anything, and whilst we may understand that Peterson’s ‘brand’ was at least partially persona and he likely did have trustworthy and forthright people in his life, they clearly fell by the wayside in favour of the public persona and community that he chose over his wellness and reputation in outside circles.

Jordan Peterson is a tragic figure of academia. Though we may say he was brought down by his own hubris like any good Greek hero, that idea is simplistic and does not go far enough; we should not forget that a tragic hero is the victim of his own story as well as its architect. We can learn a lot from Peterson if we admit that many things he embodies are things that we, too, embody, and that there but for the grace of providence go we.

On This Topic:

• Contrapoints is the writer on JP.
• CJ the X is kind of intense but I do really relate to everything they say so I can’t help but recommend them. Also, as a famously intense person myself, this isn’t so much a stone cast as an apology.
• There is so much to say about this man. Like, so much.

To-Do:

• Pension stuff – stop ignoring their emails
• Pack for Cornwall
• Lib mini mailing list committee – get in touch.

Today’s Culture:

• Diamine composer series ink – I thought Chopin would be my boy with that gentle duck-egg blue, but Mozart reddish-brown is in two of my pens right now
• I’m reading a few books at the moment, but because I’ve been leaving my iPad at home my current lunchtime read is Fludd by Hilary Mantel. Please don’t borrow it from my library for a week or two, as I’m plucking it off the shelf each day for a chapter at a time.
• I’m selling a bunch of stuff on eBay, because I want to hoard less. If you want a pen or some odd music merch, take a look.