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Why Do Young (White) Men Love Jordan B. Peterson So Much?
Until 2016, Jordan B. Peterson was a relatively obscure, middle-aged professor of psychology at a Canadian university. He had created a self-help program called Self-Authoring. He had also written a tome called Maps of Meaning about the psychological significance of “archetypal stories” from the Bible and mythology. And he regularly posted his university lectures on YouTube, for which he had developed a respectable following. He was accomplished, but he was certainly not famous.
Then came Bill C-16. This Canadian law that may have required (among other things) that public university professors use a student’s pronouns of choice – not only for a transgendered biological male who wants to be called “she” but also for self-proclaimed “non-binary” people, who wanted to be called new, fanciful pronouns. An outraged Peterson declared on his YouTube channel that he would not be compelled to use state-mandated language.
While Bill C-16 would only affect Canadians, many saw it as a natural progression of the shut-up campaign currently being waged by American leftists against anyone who isn’t a full-throated partisan in the social justice wars. And Peterson was seen as a guy who was fighting back – with passion, intelligence, and courage. And what’s more, he drove the left crazy!
Suddenly, Peterson became a YouTube superstar – especially among young, white men. A couple of weeks ago his book of advice, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, was released at #1 on Amazon.com. The success of the book and his media blitz to promote it has put him on the radar of every conservative thinker out there. Conservative wonks have been trying to size him up: Is he conservative? Is he a friend or foe? If we embrace him as we did Milo Yiannopoulos, will he make us look bad?
Young men (of any race) are rarely conservative – at least in the sense that conservatism is an ideology articulated by National Review, The Weekly Standard, and such. But nowadays, young men are often anti-left. Back when the American left focused primarily on class divisions, there were plenty of young, white men who were happy to get on board. Under the worldview of the old-fashioned left, it was the rich who were cast as the villain – and not very many young men are rich. But since the American left has shifted toward “intersectional” theory, the villain is now pretty much any white, straight, cis-gender male. Since white men don’t see themselves as hateful, “privileged” villains, they rightly (if reflexively) reject the left.
But once young, white men reject leftist ideology, what should they then embrace? From what point-of-view can they understand their gut-level revulsion at the stench of intersectional politics? For some young men, it’s Ayn Rand. For others, it’s Young Republicans. For a very small number, it is the white-men-are-the-real-victims ideology of the alt-right.
Jordan Peterson provides an additional (and welcome) alternative to these options. He unflinchingly attacks the left, sure – that’s why he’s famous. But once he has his audience’s attention, he refuses to offer an alternative ideology or an outlet for political activism. Instead, he offers personal responsibility.
In Peterson’s view, the healthy focus of a young man’s life should be on becoming competent. You will not be able to fix the world, he explains, until you can run your own life well. This has been said before, but it cannot be said often enough. Political activism cannot give meaning to a young man’s life. He needs, instead, to concern himself with the problems directly in front of him: his job, his family, his own front lawn, his neighborhood association. Focusing on things he can actually change will keep him from growing resentful, make him useful to other people, and maybe, just maybe, prepare him to deal with large societal problems once he has become extremely competent.
Better that than wasting your life kvetching on Facebook about things you can’t control!
Published in General
JP has himself said that Youtube skews male (I don’t know if it skews “white” male); I expect as his notoriety increases, so will his appeal to other demographics.
I’ve been recommending him to everyone for months; everyone who has taken the time to listen (and most have) have thanked me. From young to old, gay and straight, several different races.
I saw JP live in LA last month and the crowd (2K plus) was a pretty healthy mix of races and ages.
I just saw an interview with him last week where he stated that the most recent numbers indicate that his demographics have changed. He now has more female followers and attendees at his talks while still mostly male have recently been more noticeably female. Interesting.
I wager that it’s cyclical.
In the second half of the 1970s, there was a reaction to the bubblegum hippies of the 60s and the dystopian pessimism of the early 70s. This resulted, in part, in a surge of popularity for authors who promoted a similar ethos. e.g. Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Joseph Campbell.
(Do you remember the name of the college in the early Doonesbury strips?)
One could argue that the “one man against the world” films that started being popular in the late 1970s (and arguably reached their zenith with Die Hard) were another manifestation of this cyclical trend.
(Is it a coincidence that the Death Wish remake is out this year?)
The 1970s was also the last time that the 18-to-30 demographic was so dominant. When you have such a large number of people right at the age where they’re trying to figure out how to be self-sufficient adults, it shouldn’t be that huge of a mystery why a Emerson-esque guru would emerge in the zeitgeist.
The late 70s was also the “golden age” for crackpot cults: The Moonies. Jonestown. The Bhagwan Rajneesh. Scientology.
Coincidence? Or maybe that’s what happens when there’s an unusually large number of people at just the right age where they’re looking for guidance on “how to adult”?
One big difference, as illustrated by the population charts, is that in the 1970s the young adult cohort was way less likely to still have their parents around. This might mean that today’s cohort will be less vulnerable to cultish hero worship.
They like Peterson, and they’ll make him money by watching his YouTube videos, but they’re not going to follow him into the desert or the jungle to build a commune. They’re looking for a professor, not a substitute father.
This is the real core of political freedom. It is not democratic representation. It is government remaining in the background while citizens focus on themselves and their immediate neighbors. The beauty of the US Constitution was not opportunities for voters to be expressed through government, but rather the deliberate inefficacy of creative governance that kept the vultures feeding on each other so voters were generally left alone.
While government is small, democracy does best precisely because it does little. When government is large, it becomes difficult to ignore as it so often and powerfully intrudes in daily life.
I don’t doubt an increase in female followers. Because of this brouhaha of his not giving in to the state mandate over language, many of us who had never heard of him are now loyal followers. I suspect that some of the Canadian youtube content producers I often listen to have also been influenced by him, as a lot of his information is info I had been learned before. But it seems like he is the source.
Jordan Peterson is the professor that a great number of young people wish were holding forth at their institutions. Instead they get complicit faculty and craven administrators.
Personal responsibility is at the heart of conservative Judeo-Christian values.
Bravery is hard to find in the academic world.
Are there any similar professors in the United States or other countries?
There seem to have been more brave soles during World War II with Oskar Schindler, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Claus von Stauffenberg, and people like that, but this generation of intellectuals may be remembered for their cowardice.
People who want to save lives directly like Schindler and Bonhoeffer travel to other countries where there are lives that need saving. In America, there are no Nazis rounding people up and loading them into boxcars. You cannot fault people for failing to fight an enemy that doesn’t exist.
At the end of the day, today’s enemies of freedom in America use … peer pressure and/or the court system. That’s orders of magnitude less of a problem than the Nazis were.
I think that JP is gaining women viewers precisely because his prescriptions make men better mating material. He points out in his book that there may be a biological (evolutionary) basis, not just cultural, for parents preferring male offspring over female offspring — it is a better strategy for proliferation of their DNA. It is estimate that 1/8 of the central Asian and eastern European peoples carry some DNA from Genghis Khan, so prolific was his sexual as well as geographic conquest. Men can sire so many children from many women, while a woman has a much smaller capacity to pass on DNA. This highlights the competition between women to mate with the most desirable male. Women improve their chances of suitable mating when there is an expanded population of competent males. And JP is seeking just that: Men becoming competent enough to attract a woman, and in the process bettering society as a whole for both men and women.
The strength of Jordan Peterson is the logical underpinnings of what he says and writes cohehere with intellectual and ethical fortitude and this juxtaposes attractively against the looney left.
And many of his lectures on religion discuss these tenets. He combines psychology, sociology, history, and religion in a way most young people haven’t heard before.
Here’s a dissenting view:
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/03/the-intellectual-we-deserve
I think the article might be overly harsh, but it does provide a bit of an antidote to some of the overt hero-worship that Peterson gets from most of the Right.
It’s actually kind of funny to read that now. I finally listened to Jordan Peterson speak on a recent episode of EconTalk, where part way through he rather openly admits that nothing he says is “new”, that all he really does is aggregate ideas that other people had before him.
I’m shocked, I tell ya. I thought that the heart of Judeo Christian values involved ending the Second Amendment and supporting immigration.
It may be strange to witness the process of someone who is expounding long standing values and attitudes of a society as he becomes a new hero, both in Canada and elsewhere.
But the latest generation of device-driven young people doesn’t have a great deal of knowledge regarding basic activities, such as making a bed or even more importantly, learning how to listen to the Inner Self as well as to others. After all, listening is much different than responding to emojis with another emoji.
For his attempts to correct his imbalance, I feel Peterson is doing society a huge favor by tackling the issues he is tackling.
There is another guy, forget his name, but he too has become a super star, simply because he is addressing such issues as the importance of making small talk with colleagues, and the importance of taking a break from devices. (The guy is probably in his mid-twenties.) It is a sad thing when society’s younger adults need instructions in such basics. But better late than never, I guess.
Peterson is an original thinker. There’s his lobster argument in which he shows that social hierarchies have been a feature of living creatures for at least 350 million years. That is, since before trees grew on the land. Most people are familiar with this argument of his by now. In other words, the postmodernist idea that social hierarchies are artificial constructs is bunk.
Also, he was being interviewed on one video where they were discussing the new atheist arguments against religion, one of which is that religions are the cause of wars. If there was no religion there would be no war, or some such.
To which Peterson said, “But, you know, chimpanzees go to war. You can lay that fact right on the table.” And he went on to talk about studies of communal war-like behavior in monkeys.
It took my breath away. One of the most difficult pieces of rhetoric that the new atheists have come up with, and he demolished it right off the top of his head.
I read the entire commentary article and I confess I can’t figure out what the author’s beef with Peterson is. It seems to be that Peterson utters banal truisms as if they were new while offering comfort to disaffected young men. A lot of young men hear his ideas about personal responsibility and concentrating on what you can change in your own life and find it to be refreshing and new. Kudos to Peterson, but I think that’s why the author is angry with him, the part about affirming young men.
This is an amazing book review of Peterson’s 12 Rules.
I got halfway through before I decided I’d best print it out and digest it at leisure.
And that’s just the review!
He’s a famous academic with common sense – rare enough – but he also explains why it’s common sense. Giving the logic and such behind all this stuff folks have taken for granted for generations – until the last one or two. To a bunch of folks that have been taught that all that common sense is at the very least not common, if not altogether wrong, Peterson is a new sort, and someone to listen to.
Is it in Proverbs, or Ecclesiastes:
Whatsoever thy hand findest to do, do it with thy might, for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge nor wisdom in the grave, whither thou goest.
And the Deist Voltaire: Cultivate your own garden.
Yea, verily, nothing new under the sun…
Not the vibe I got at all. Here’s a passage which seems to summarize the Current Affairs reviewer’s beef with Peterson:
The beef appears to come in two parts. Part one is that Peterson is deceptive in that he dresses up “stuff everybody already knows” in “gobbledygook” so “it feels like something” (but, importantly, in the author’s eyes, isn’t something, just an empty feeling). Part two is that Peterson counsels “lost people to abandon projects for social change”, which the author sincerely believes is advice which will make their lives worse in the long run.
The other review Drew mentioned in comment #20 praises Peterson for dressing up “stuff everybody already knows” in more flowery language so “it feels like something”, believing that the ability to do this – not impart new wisdom to people, just get them emotionally invested in commonplace truisms – is what makes Peterson a “prophet”. That said, if the Current Affairs review is sufficiently disenchanted with commonplace truisms, and it sounds like he is, he is likely to suspect such emotional investment won’t pay off.
I’ve been slowly digesting 12 Rules for Life. I usually read very quickly but there is too much information to do so.
How much of it is new? I suspect earlier generations took most of it for granted but today’s culture? They (I) need to hear it again. What Peterson does is put the info out boldly, succinctly, and expectantly. Occasionally you have to say water is wet. You shouldn’t have to but I never thought I would live in a time when you got to pick your own gender either. The requirement in reading it is that you weigh words against actions.
I can see if you want to focus on social change, multiple genders, or children must be free to do as they want, this book would seem to be gibberish.
“Someone” once wrote that “White Men are the Jews of Liberal Fascism.” Perhaps after being taught in public schools from K-12 under such an ideology, there are large numbers of young, white males who really believe they are the cause of all the world’s oppression and have been convinced that any achievement they might attain in education or work will come at the expense of The Oppressed. These young men have been raised on the zero sum understanding of Pop Marxism – if they succeed someone else loses. They have also been stripped of traditional religious beliefs by our Secular/anti-Christian schools and popular culture. One thing JP offers some of these young men is a way to find meaning and purpose in their lives. They can “fix the world” by fixing themselves. He gives a proper understanding of academic and economic activity in a free society – through individual achievement, the whole becomes more wealthy.
I know that I was ~75% indoctrinated along these lines in rural Ohio in the 70’s & 80’s (1990 hs grad). I threw away a full-ride to one of the best engineering schools in the US because I didn’t want to join the corporate exploitation machine…gave drunken/crying rants about how “WE” were guilty for killing the people of El Salvador….wasted a decade with real socialists (including a couple “solidarity” trips to Cuba) until I finally figured out just about all that I’d learned about the world from Cronkite/Rather to Newsweek/Time to New Republic/The Nation/The Progressive/Z…and Chomsky was wrong/perverted.
It seems to be significantly worse for the younger generations. I have a 26 year-old nephew who is a half-step above homeless musician/retail worker who earnestly feels a great burden from his White Privilege. I sent him “Up from Slavery” because it seemed he needed inspiration to self-improvement and achievement from a non-White-Oppressor source. I was told Booker T. wasn’t authentically black.
I try to spread Peterson’s videos around. One never knows what will click with someone. There isn’t a mechanistic method to change a person’s whole belief system. But, for all those who are ready for a change and looking for something better than the personal hell that our culture and schools have indoctrinated them into, JP is out there offering guidance.
Tell him Booker T. Washington was born a slave. You can’t get any more authentic than that.
That Current Affairs piece is almost identical to a similar piece written a few months ago and posted on this board in a similar thread a few months ago. As I wrote then, the genius of Peterson is not that what he says is new. The genius is that what he says is true. Sure, its all been said before but his point is that it is being rejected despite being demonstrably true. He is a man of courage and that should make him a worthy hero. Articles like the one linked by Nick underscore how stupid and evil the left really is. They are wrong and they know they are wrong. Peterson is merely some guy saying very eloquently that the emperor is naked.
Makes me think the critic hasn’t actually familiarized himself with Peterson. Same way people who never listened to Rush are certain that he’s a racist nazi.
Also, there’s flowery language and then there is simply a person’s ideological slip showing. I get it, the critic isn’t impressed by Peterson, but his treatment of those who are impressed is so a part of the zeitgeist: those dumb animals are just “lapping up” whatever they’re given. There is no establishment? There is no cause for disenchantment with an elite which has been letting even these basic truths Peterson talks about get challenged and overturned and even criminalized in the culture? Right. No wonder I’ve never heard of Nathan Robinson while Peterson is enjoying some popular interest in his ideas.
The thing is that the things Peterson talks about most certainly are not things everyone already knows. Look no further than the constant protesters he faces, the deeply antagonistic interviewers he’s encountered. Not to mention people getting disciplined, fired, or perhaps even arrested for discussing these “things everyone already knows”. If they were truly things we all know then there would be no Jordan Peterson phenomenon. But we know these things are controversial even though they shouldn’t be. God bless Peterson for talking back.
Regarding “gobbledegook”, any of Peterson’s output which could be considered self-help is conspicuously devoid of jargon or meaningless terms designed to obscure or confuse. Forgotten truths, with scientific and anecdotal backing, illustrated with relatable examples.
Regarding the secrets to a good life bit, Peterson never claims insight or access to secrets or even that a good life is waiting for you if you follow his advice. On the contrary, he is often much more bleak. It’s better to know truth and clarity than not, but difficulty and pain are still our lot in life! No bromides or elixirs. Pretty harsh sometimes, actually. The rules for life appear to be a best shot rather than a sure thing.
Has the critic actually immersed himself in the material he’s criticizing?