Jordan Peterson, a Canadian academic, didn’t figure out how to get rich as a rightwing provocateur.
He stumbled into fame and popularity. His appeal to the alt-right happened by accident. It started with a Canadian law against transgender discrimination, and grew from Peterson’s dislike of political correctness.
Lashing out against the law on YouTube, “He said he would refuse to refer to transgender students by their preferred pronouns,” which he deemed “radically politically correct thinking.” He went on TV to argue the law would result in “people like him being arrested.” His spiel went, “I’m not using the words that other people require me to use. Especially if they’re made up by radical left-wing ideologues.”
But Peterson is a psychologist, not a lawyer, and legal experts said he was misrepresenting the law. Being prosecuted for hate speech “would require something far worse, like saying transgender people should be killed, to qualify for legal punishment.”
This kind of exaggeration became Peterson’s stock in trade and his ticket to fame and money. Vox describes this incident as “an early example of what would become a hallmark of Peterson’s approach as a public intellectual — taking inflammatory, somewhat misinformed stances on issues of public concern outside his area of expertise” and conflating them to play on white male grievance.
Soon, a “Peterson brand” evolved, characterized by “taking combative stances on camera — especially arguments where you’re set up to win, like a calm professor confronted by angry students,” which generated for him “huge numbers of fans.”
It took off, and Peterson exploited his intellectually dishonest approach to the hilt. For example, he argued that two obscure French philosophers nobody reads pose an existential threat to civilization. He wove vast, overarching conspiracy theories, framing opposition to white male privilege as a Marxist threat hanging over the world. He equated humans to lobsters.
A longtime Canadian observer of Peterson says his “underlying mass-appeal … is that he gives white men permission to stop pretending that they care about other people’s grievances. He tells his fans that these so-called marginalized people are not really victims at all but are in fact aggressors, enemies, who must be shut down.”
Vox says “Petersonian lobster theory” isn’t about exploring “questions of truth,” but providing alienated young men “a sense of purpose and meaning” that “fulfills roughly the same role in their life as religion might.”
The problem is, “He gives them a sense of purpose by, in part, tearing other people down — by insisting that the world can and should revolve around them and their problems.” And that makes him a propagandist who monetizes reactionary politics by promoting hate against marginalized groups — but not overtly enough to get him arrested, despite what he claims the Canadian law says, which is just another of his many lies.
I mentioned at the top of this article that Peterson is an academic. I need to clarify that he was an academic, and a respected one, before he became an internet mercenary. It’s been many years since he’s published academic papers.
Now, he’s nothing but a snake oil salesman. Read the article here.