Editor’s Note: Bad Takes is a column of opinion and analysis.
For those who haven’t been following his career, Jordan Peterson is a Canadian clinical psychologist under threat of losing his license for spouting medically irresponsible garbage online and publicly exhibiting behavior unbecoming a professional therapist.
The College of Psychologists of Ontario investigated more than a dozen complaints against Peterson and recommended he take a media training class — a modest disciplinary action with which Peterson has vowed not to comply. Instead he flew into Austin last month to use the most popular podcast ever, The Joe Rogan Experience, as damage control for what remains of his tattered reputation.
Ever a sneering mess of contempt for climate activists and drag queens, there’s plenty to eyeroll and cringe at in what amounted to Peterson’s three-hour sermon, during which Rogan seldom wedged a word in edgewise.
I could write about how Peterson referred to gay parents as “not ideal” by heterosexist standards. Or how he praised male-dominated societies for their contributions to progress, expecting “a little gratitude for the positive end of the patriarchy” and eerily echoing the Proud Boys’ motto, “I am a Western chauvinist and I refuse to apologize for inventing the modern world.”
Or how he commented on climate change by saying “I don’t even think it’s clear that carbon dioxide is a problem,” continuing to disregard the international scientific consensus that fossil fuel emissions are driving up global temperatures.
One could write 2,000 words debunking those three whoppers alone, and maybe call the column “Bad Takes.”
But let’s be nice and refrain from such easy criticism. If you, like Peterson, can convince yourself that trans kids are just faking it to “feel special” or that the countless millions who have protested carbon pollution are just trying to “appear virtuous,” you’ve likely unburdened yourself of any obligation to actually refute opposing arguments, much less grapple with the real-world challenges we must face together.
Any sensible emendation to traditional gender binaries or comfortable patterns of consumption is a dealbreaker for most of Peterson’s fanbase. So if admirers of Dr. Red Skull have at least read this far, I’d like to instead highlight seven of the least dumb statements Peterson made at his latest meeting of the minds.
As the saying goes, even a broken clock is right twice a day.
1. “We’re now seeing a little bit of the dangers of censorship emerge on the Right, which is kind of frightening to me. I’m an admirer in many ways of what’s going on in Florida with [Gov. Ron] De Santis, but him and [conservative activist] Christopher Rufo are trying to ban Critical Race Theory (CRT). The problem with that is you can’t define it. How do you control something you can’t define? The answer is, you battle it out on the battleground of ideas. So I don’t see how the government stepping in to regulate what educational institutions are doing can really be done. And of course you enable, inevitably, no matter what your goal is to begin with, if you’re going to control ‘misinformation’, that’s just going to play into the hands of people who like to censor, and that’s just as likely as it is on the Right as on the Left. It’s a real dangerous game.”
I have no notes. Not five minutes had elapsed in the interview before Peterson felt compelled to rebuke the De Santis administration’s attempts to scrap African American studies under the pretext of “stopping wokeness.” Gov. Greg Abbott has already passed similar legislation in Texas, with more promised to follow, and Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick has threatened to revoke and deny tenure to any professors who teach CRT, over Peterson’s now-adamant objections on free speech grounds.
“The culture war we’re in right now is a battle of systems of ideas. This is why what’s happening on the conservative front in Florida has some danger,” Peterson elaborated later in the podcast. “It’s like, ‘We want to ban CRT.’ Well, that’s a war that has to be raged in the realm of the abstract. As soon as you concretize it, you fall prey to the same pathology and you’ll end up enabling censors. I don’t think you can defeat bad ideas with law. You have to defeat bad ideas with a better vision.”
Wholly agree, and we on the Left should welcome that debate, in good faith, because much of Peterson’s vision of the future is objectively and indisputably abhorrent.
2. “Online criminality is actually terrible. You know, I don’t think there’s an old person in North America who isn’t being targeted by some gang of psychopaths who document all of their interests and their locale and who knows how much money’s in their bank account, who is doing everything they possibly can at every second to leverage access. That’s just happening continually. And some lonely old character who’s not functioning cognitively quite like he used to gets sucked in by someone pretending to be his friend and offered a great investment opportunity, and it’s very very very difficult to track this sort of thing online.”
Admittedly this is low-hanging fruit, but it’s important to find common ground where we can. In President Joe Biden’s Feb. 7 State of the Union address, he promised to “crack down on identity fraud by criminal syndicates stealing billions of dollars.” Biden also pledged to protect “seniors’ life savings by cracking down on nursing homes that commit fraud.” In its sentiment at least, this is a bipartisan commitment to our elders worth keeping.
3. “The psychopath comes in and pretends that he’s a productive, generous reciprocator, but he’s not, he’s just an instrumental manipulator. But he can get away with it because there’s enough wealth generated by the honest cooperators, so that there’s a space for someone to exploit the system. Psychopaths mimic competence. That’s what a narcissist does too. But that opens up a space for exploitation, because if you can mimic narcissistic false confidence, then you look competent.”
The figure who instantly popped in my head when listening to Peterson talk about male psychopaths was social media personality and self-described “misogynist” Andrew Tate, who’s now on trial in Romania for sex trafficking. Offensive pop-psychoanalysis of “young naive women” aside, Peterson’s remarks here are a call for male responsibility that even the most radical of feminists could second.
4. “The psychedelic tradition is part and parcel of the universal religious heritage of humankind.”
After Rogan asked whether the burning bush that appeared to Moses on Mount Horeb may have in fact referred to “some sort of a psychedelic experience,” Peterson didn’t dismiss the possibility as a typical evangelical Christian might. Instead, he highlighted the importance of psychedelic drugs to religious sacraments stretching back thousands of years. He cited the founding director of drug-legalization nonprofit Doctors for Cannabis Regulation, Brian Muraresku, whose work delves into the hallucinogenic origins of philosophy and religion , particularly in ancient Greece.
Peterson further cited Robin Carhart-Harris, head of the Centre for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College, reporting that, bad trips notwithstanding, “the psychedelic experience definitely mimics something like radical learning” and “reimmerses you in the complex world and shows you how remarkable and beyond comprehension everything really is.”
It’s a welcome relief when Peterson sounds more like the father of American psychology, William James, who himself experimented with the mystical propensities of ether, and less like the unhinged pastor of Cornerstone Church, John Hagee. We can only wish that all the Meemaws and Peepaws buying tickets to hear Peterson speak would stop voting for politicians that lock up people for ingesting mind-altering plants. At present, in Texas, “less than a gram is a state jail felony.”
5. “It’s easy to get all paranoid and conspiracy theorist about the World Economic Forum, but I don’t think anybody is sitting at Davos going, ‘We got to scrap seven billion people.’ … And that isn’t to say there aren’t sometimes also actual conspiracies, but it’s very useful to separate out the conspiratorial nature of a set of dynamic ideas from the people who are partial carriers of the ideas.”
This is an appropriately cautious attitude to adopt toward conspiracism of the Alex Jones variety. As the leading Marxist philosopher of his generation, Gerald Cohen, wrote in 1978: “When Marxists venture functional explanations of ideological and superstructural phenomena, they are often accused of espousing a ‘conspiracy theory of history.’ A Marxist says, ‘It is no accident’ that leftist commentators receive little space in major American newspapers. They are then criticized for imagining that an omnicompetent elite exercises fine control over these matters.
Marxists can be too sensitive to the charge. There is more collective design in history than an inflexible rejection of ‘conspiracy theories’ would allow. Thus, while ideologies are not normally invented to fit the purposes they serve, a fairly deliberate and quite concerted effort to maintain and protect an existing ideology is not unusual. When a high state functionary, reflecting on the unequal distribution of information in society, concludes that ‘this inequality of knowledge has become necessary for the maintenance of all the social inequalities which gave rise to it’, he may be expected to see to the persistence of an educational structure which reproduces ignorance in the right places.
Conspiracy is a natural effect when men of like insight into the requirements of continued class domination get together, and such men do get together.”
Perhaps Peterson is more Marxist than he lets on?
6. “You don’t get to impose your utopian vision in the service of your narcissism on the poor. … The powerful players in the world are increasingly collaborating to impose a top-down vision of the future on everyone. How do we arrange systems of governance to stop the march of something like pathological gigantism? This is why I like you and Russell Brand politically, because you guys are very sensitive to the danger of that kind of corrupt collusion, that regulatory capture that occurs when corporate, media, and government entities are all in bed together.”
The energy giant Shell made $40 billion in 2022. If you earned $54,000 every single day since the year Jesus of Nazareth lay in a manger, you would not have made more money than that one fossil fuel company did last year. That’s gigantism. Internal memos at Exxon examined last month by Harvard researchers revealed that, since the late 1970s, Exxon’s in-house scientists predicted global warming with remarkable accuracy, yet the company still funded propaganda campaigns to disparage climate models — arguably the most consequential and massive act of corporate fraud in history.
Perhaps we should find encouragement that, despite all his fallacious naturalistic defenses of inequality and hierarchy, Peterson subconsciously seems to concede the moral superiority of egalitarianism. But how can someone who runs ideological cover for the largest corporations on Earth somehow sincerely regard himself as an anti-globalist freedom-fighter for the world’s poor?
His “cautionary tale about the possibility of tyranny” seldom includes the remotest skepticism of global capitalism. He falsely trumpets the eradication of global poverty just like Bill Gates has, and he romanticizes billionaire philanthropy just like George Soros. And no sooner does Peterson reject utopian thinking than he heedlessly advocates unrestricted extractive growth on a planet of finite natural resources.
How is that not profoundly more “utopian” than the commonsense recognition that we must learn to live within our ecological means and not max out our carbon budget? “The danger of the Davos crowd,” as Peterson accurately names it, is that they will pay lip-service to environmental causes while dragging their feet on meaningful change. For all the Biblical exegesis, Peterson offers no exodus from an already oppressive status quo and represents the worst kind of Pollyannaish globalist.
“Imagine you could have the world you wanted. None of this ‘limits to growth’-nonsense,” Peterson said in a sampling of his supposedly anti-utopian pragmatism. “Everyone can have enough, and maybe more than enough. There’s also a very good idea in the Book of Exodus that, if people organize themselves properly, there’s no limit to the abundance the natural world can produce. The core idea is, you get the hierarchy of social organization right, it generates unlimited wealth.”
And if you stick your last $20 in the collection plate, the electric bill on your kitchen table will magically pay itself. This reeks of Prosperity Gospel, and whatever the merits of the Bible as moral teaching, the overwhelming majority of atmospheric scientists just might prove a more useful, up-to-date guide for preserving a habitable planetary surface in the 21st century than a cherished fable written a few millennia ago.
The nosedive of irony is that Peterson then proceeds to mock those who accept climate reality as “a religion,” as he substitutes the sacredness of Mother Nature with the Invisible Hand of the Market and pushes a “vision of the Promised Land” that could well precipitate one billion climate refugees by mid-century.
7. “It’s pretty clear we have to live inside a story. … People perish from lack of vision. … We’re hoping to put forward a vision that’s an invitation to the table, with the idea that if we got our act together, especially with our technological power, God only knows what sort of world we could build, but definitely one where there’s enough for everybody. It’s a tricky problem because there has to be some degree of international communication and international consensus. We all do live on the same planet, and we’re pretty integrated now. There has to be something approximating an international conversation.”
In addition to defending his clinician license, Peterson also borrowed Rogan’s megaphone to announce his new-fangled project: a consortium in London later this year that will unite religious conservatives with neoliberals. But that’s not some fresh revolutionary idea, that’s just repackaged Reaganism, and only a right-wing extremist, however closeted, could mistake such an unholy alliance for a centrist way out.
Although Peterson admits the need for an “uniting narrative” and for an “international conversation,” he does almost all he can to further marginalize the already muted voices of the indigenous, the poor, the young, the wildlife and everything within us that resists reduction to the economic.
Peterson caricatures Greta Thunberg with Jungian archetypes, allowing him to denigrate all activism, seemingly without realizing that his own political intervention counts as activism too. Although a self-appointed expert at diagnosing the sanctimonious self-serving delusions of others, Peterson cannot find his own with a floodlight.
Still, I’m sensitive to the critique that lavishing undue attention on this old man yelling at the clouds may detract from more impactful pursuits. Unfortunately, what Peterson says resonates with a critical mass of our fellow citizens. I have slammed his penchant for obliviousness in wrestling with climate breakdown, as if denying an emergency could make it go away. Yet Peterson himself is a natural disaster in the realm of popular ideas that we can’t ignore.
Because we greens are not trying to raise energy prices on those who are struggling, much less trying to depopulate our species. We want the price of renewable energy to plummet, and we’re calling for massive public investment, led by the richest countries, to achieve a rapid and fair transition away from fossil fuels. What’s more, we’re trying to create an economic system where those who are struggling are not perpetually condemned to precarity and poverty.
And to treat, as Peterson so incessantly does, the rigged exploitative game as inevitable — “a law of nature” — is not only perverse, it’s defeatist.
From my Christian upbringing, I recall a Bible story about a man who warned of an impending ecological catastrophe but was ignored by arrogant naysayers. And, boy, did the climate skeptics have egg on their face at the end of that one!
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This article appears in Feb 8-21, 2023.