Great piece Matt. Very fair and thoughtful. Dr. Peterson is the wounded warrior who led Picket’s Charge straight up the hill against the woke cannons firmly ensconced in our culture’s high ground. That’s courage, action, commitment, sacrifice. More than I’ve done. I post firmly convicted comments on Substack. He sacrificed his reputation and mental health. And I kinda get it. I, once, was a committed centrist proud of my ability to fight for both sides. Now I’ve transformed into the belief the Left cannot be saved from the grotesquerie it has become and is no longer worth defending. That inner journey is sculpted by the larger cultural entropy and takes us all to uncharted territory. I’d bet you, privately, feel the same. So Jordan isn’t worth listening to now. I get it. I tip my cap and say my thanks for what he’s already done.
Outstanding comment. No, the man isn't perfect but that's rather the point, isn't it? He's had the balls to do his duty and die on a hill alone. Nietzsche went nuts .. I was going to say 'too' but I'm not sure JP is nuts however much his psyche has been distorted by the ... the everything.
BTW, if we give up on the center, and given that the lunatic left cannot be saved, yet given that the Trumpist right are wanabe fascists, what's next? It would seem to me that all sane believers in Western civ. need to come together in a big tent pitched solidly in the Center so that it can draw in the sane from both directions. And they do say that even in the States, something like 80% of the people remain sane, they just don't have anyone to follow.
Ray - well said sir. And I am often led to this haunting, tortured poem by Yeats. Who, in his time, felt exactly as we do. Read it and tell me your thoughts. Sadly, I share his dark lens: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-coming
I have it memorized ;-) Yes, he does capture a zeitgeist does he not? The 'good news' -- if that's what it is -- is that the sense of inevitable doom we feel today is not new. One should not take a poem as a literal prophesy, but surely Trump is the rough beast, its hour come at last? Thanks WB for warning us.
I am a devotee of The Fourth Turning work by Neil Howe. That civilizational history operates cyclically - in seasons - vs linearly (as we simply grow up assuming). Every 80-100 years, a “revolution” of the cycle, the existing world order decays and collapses under fatigue. The Fourth Turning crisis (winter) is the death season. 80 years ago, or so, the entire world caught a similar fever. 80 years before that, the Woke Bleeding Kansas fights of the Dred Scott decision lurched us into the bloodbath of civil war. 80 before that, we fought tooth and nail the colonial loyalists to cast off mad King George. If these cycles are profound truths and unseen hands, we are in for total destruction of the old. To be recreated with the tools and techniques (including the superiority of Artificial Intelligence). Yeats wrote The Second Coming in the run up to our last Fourth Turning. The fever of populism. The rough beasts of Hitler and Mussolini. The falcons no longer heeding their falconers. We are in for a very rough ride.
Yes. Howe. We are 'due'. Bad times made strong men (WWII) strong men made good times (50s and 60s, some of 70s). Good times gave us hippies, feminists and various sexual deviants who's doctrines have now decayed to the point were we have women with penises. The bad times are upon us. As Howe said, it takes an entire lifetime for the wheel to go around.
Exactly. What’s incredibly insightful: these generational cycles are deeply rooted in human nature. As a species, we haven’t changed in thousands of years - while our godlike tech leaps forward every few weeks. This is a progressive blind spot
But is not the obvious fact that JP is a mere mortal rather what makes him so compelling? Gods do the work of gods without too much effort, they being gods after all. But to see a very imperfect man work so hard to resist madness and decay -- even while facing his own madness and decay -- is what I suspect makes him so inspirational. I find him Shakespearean. I don't think Matt W. is really in a position to remove the straw from his eye.
I know a lot about benzodiazepine withdrawal and something about Peterson's case. Yes, its brutal, can be fatal, and very likely would impair cognitive ability. Staying on benzodiazepines also harms cognitive function ( just like alcohol). Very sad, another brilliant man nearly destroyed and certainly harmed by psychiatric drugs. I recommend the book UNSHRUNK by Laura Delano, and the documentary "Medicating Normal."
A well-balanced article about an unbalanced product of the celebrity culture. I have been to one of his Brother Loves Traveling Show productions, and actually enjoyed him, his presentation (this was the "burning bush analogy" to life) which went straight over my head! His charisma, commonsense approach in his articles to problems facing our modern world, his warnings about what Woke is and what this dogma would do - and has done - to our western culture, his wrestling with the Toronto College of Psychologists, were and still are all good theatre and make life entertaining. Not bad for a lad from a small town out in the sticks of Alberta, Canada. One would wish him God's speed and good luck in all his future endeavours.
I don’t believe Peterson was ever a “savior” nor do most people who like him. I don’t believe he has ever been a “failure” nor do most fair minded people. He was a very talented and extremely popular psychology professor at University of Toronto and teacher/researcher at Harvard.
He became extremely well known and loved/hated nationally and internationally because of his incredible courage, sincerity, intelligence standing up to some of the worst excesses of woke ideological craze in mainstream institutions.
Is he flawed, made mistakes and struggled at times. Yes - newsflash - he is human.
But he has demonstrated an almost inhuman level of resilience and strength given the breadth and depth and duration of unfair attacks he has faced from mainstream institutions. He has more than earned every drop of the enormous amount of respect, appreciation and love of millions.
I am married to a hardcore Peterson fan and I really appreciate the nuance and thoughtfulness of this piece. A fraction of the vilification he has been subjected to is well-deserved, especially with all of his ill-informed transphobic tirades, but as this article puts it, he is mostly just a middling psych professor with some quirky ideas. As a birthday present to my husband one year, I got us VIP tickets to one of his lectures and we were able to meet him. At his core I believe he is truly a kind and caring person but he unfortunately allows himself to get swept up in the political movements of the moment which are not really his lane or his area of expertise. I also wish he would just be content with taking care of his family and grandkids, but it seems his children have built enterprises off his name, so I doubt they are willing to encourage or allow him to fade out as this article suggests he should.
Firstly, Matt positions himself as the wise head-doctor describing -- with some charity and even some wisdom -- the state of his patient. I'm not sure Matt is wiser or even a better man than JP nevertheless he's entitled to his opinion. But why does he think that Peterson is not entitled to his?
> and sprinkled with unfalsifiable gibberish
Philosophical opinions are almost never falsifiable in the scientific way, are they?
> by this point “postmodernneomarxists” is completely meaningless
I find it quite clear tho 'postmodern' and 'neo' are redundant -- rather in the way that saying 'very extreme' is redundant or 'scorching hot'.
> The Christian perspective on this would be that this should be the role of the pastor or preachers
Really? I'm a Christian and that idea wouldn't occur to me. Sources? Authorities?
> and accused her of using Christianity to foster her own success
Oh my!! But Matt accuses Peterson of using Christianity to foster his own success, no? Fact is that every public personality is using something or other to foster their success, no? Indeed it's hard to avoid using one's beliefs to foster one's success, no?
> For someone who does interviews in blazers covered in saints and sells courses on the gospels behind a Daily Wire paywall in spite of not actually being a Christian, the accusation of hypocrisy is almost painful in its irony.
Really? So only Muslims can comment on Islam? Only Buddhists on the life of the Buddha? Only autistics on autism? Only believers on theism?
> And while Peterson’s Christianity lectures contained plenty of nonsense
According to whom? Perhaps Matt merely fails to understand, or perhaps simply disagrees?
> and comment on his downfall
Has he fallen? And what does 'downfall' even mean? He's pulled back from the pinnacle of his fame, surely, but does not Matt advise that that's exactly what he should do? Is that really a downfall?
I was one of those who got caught up in the JP Controversy and stayed for the lectures. I was 68 years old at the time and no longer needed a dutch uncle to tell me to clean up my room (nor did I any longer need 23 more rules for my life). I found John Vervaeke more interesting and the Intellectual Dark Web captured my attention for a while. I liked the Rebel Wisdom YouTube channel while it lasted. It is sad to see the post breakdown Jordan Peterson! =)
As the article suggests, “Peterson” always was Peterson+his audience and apparently the audience has now swallowed Peterson. As a European classical liberal who probably pays too much attention to intellectual life in the Anglosphere, there is a pattern in my interactions with the ideas of the English-speaking right: they sound interesting until they start to opine on Europe. I then realize they seem incapable of identifying far right extremists for what they are and actually support them, which makes me doubt everything they say. Peterson was interesting (not his first book though, I could never get into it, self-help just is not my thing) but unfortunately he quickly unraveled. The wokesters have that effect on their adversaries. I guess you need to be very strong psychologically to resist the torrents of hatred they so generously pour out on whomever disagrees with them. Here’s for hoping Peterson returns to a better place, also because I suspect he is actually a nice guy.
I'm too old to have cared about him in the first place, but I read this anyway to see if I missed anything. Don't think so, except...what conclusions has he offered that "many thinkers are nowhere near"? I doubt they're about Jung (who was kind of a holy crackpot himnself) , or the evolutionary psych take on religion. So what is it?
Thomas Szasz, much disliked by the gurus of our mental illness generation, put it best: Mental Illness is a metaphor. Like a broken heart is a metaphor that must be distinguished from a heart attack which is literal. There is no such thing as a sick mind any more than there is a chartreuse angel. Minds do not catch colds or cancer or dance on the heads of pins.
Psychotherapy and the priests of mental illness like Peterson are culturally accepted fraudsters. People are often miserable because of real problems and unhelpful behavior. It is nice to hear good advice from those who know how we suffer. But in the end the psychotherapy industry is based on a fairy tale no different than any other angelology.
The best evidence is the holy DSM ad infinitum: A compendium in which psychotherapists vote to add ever new mental illness and take out ones no longer socially acceptable. Imagine if they could simply vote away leukemia or skull fractures or true organic brain illnesses like Schizophrenia or Alzheimer's. But they cannot. Body illness is illness; mental illness is socially endorsed fantasy. That is why Peterson is in trouble he thought he was more and other than he actually is. He is just another high priest of the Cult of Mental Illness, Angels and Big Foot.
Every brilliant thinker we lionize has a bucket list of weirdness that we can focus on... and it will be the stuff that opponents of his/her words focus on.
Ayn Rand for example had freaky sexual thoughts and ideas.
I tend to ignore that crap.
Peterson's thinking rocks and he has done much for a segment of the population that has faced extermination attempts by the woke Regime. Peterson too has faced attempted extermination from the Regime (this piece seems to be in that camp a bit). However, Peterson has a history of some auto-immune health issues as does his daughter. He has not been healthy for some time.
Interesting how the left will lionize a person with idiot ideas because they are a health issue victim (like, "I was diagnosed as being bipolar"). But demonize a great thinker like Peterson over his health issues.
Such intellectual arrogance. Smearing someone without offering anything in substance. I am not a Christian and don't care much about Petersen's re-interpretations of the bible. However, it's clear that the man is passionate about what he is doing - curating and resurrecting an intellectual culture that has been rotting in nihilism since the peak of Enlightenment. Regardless your opinions of Petersen's particular brand of intellectual artistry, his courage and stamina are to be applauded. For example, the Petersen Academy offers far superior scholars and lectures that you could find on any elite campus (ie Harvard or Stanford) these days. What have you done to enhance the health of human culture?
Great piece Matt. Very fair and thoughtful. Dr. Peterson is the wounded warrior who led Picket’s Charge straight up the hill against the woke cannons firmly ensconced in our culture’s high ground. That’s courage, action, commitment, sacrifice. More than I’ve done. I post firmly convicted comments on Substack. He sacrificed his reputation and mental health. And I kinda get it. I, once, was a committed centrist proud of my ability to fight for both sides. Now I’ve transformed into the belief the Left cannot be saved from the grotesquerie it has become and is no longer worth defending. That inner journey is sculpted by the larger cultural entropy and takes us all to uncharted territory. I’d bet you, privately, feel the same. So Jordan isn’t worth listening to now. I get it. I tip my cap and say my thanks for what he’s already done.
Outstanding comment. No, the man isn't perfect but that's rather the point, isn't it? He's had the balls to do his duty and die on a hill alone. Nietzsche went nuts .. I was going to say 'too' but I'm not sure JP is nuts however much his psyche has been distorted by the ... the everything.
BTW, if we give up on the center, and given that the lunatic left cannot be saved, yet given that the Trumpist right are wanabe fascists, what's next? It would seem to me that all sane believers in Western civ. need to come together in a big tent pitched solidly in the Center so that it can draw in the sane from both directions. And they do say that even in the States, something like 80% of the people remain sane, they just don't have anyone to follow.
How was it an "outstanding comment"?
Subjective opinion. If you don't share it I'll not be able to change your mind.
Ray - well said sir. And I am often led to this haunting, tortured poem by Yeats. Who, in his time, felt exactly as we do. Read it and tell me your thoughts. Sadly, I share his dark lens: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-coming
I have it memorized ;-) Yes, he does capture a zeitgeist does he not? The 'good news' -- if that's what it is -- is that the sense of inevitable doom we feel today is not new. One should not take a poem as a literal prophesy, but surely Trump is the rough beast, its hour come at last? Thanks WB for warning us.
I am a devotee of The Fourth Turning work by Neil Howe. That civilizational history operates cyclically - in seasons - vs linearly (as we simply grow up assuming). Every 80-100 years, a “revolution” of the cycle, the existing world order decays and collapses under fatigue. The Fourth Turning crisis (winter) is the death season. 80 years ago, or so, the entire world caught a similar fever. 80 years before that, the Woke Bleeding Kansas fights of the Dred Scott decision lurched us into the bloodbath of civil war. 80 before that, we fought tooth and nail the colonial loyalists to cast off mad King George. If these cycles are profound truths and unseen hands, we are in for total destruction of the old. To be recreated with the tools and techniques (including the superiority of Artificial Intelligence). Yeats wrote The Second Coming in the run up to our last Fourth Turning. The fever of populism. The rough beasts of Hitler and Mussolini. The falcons no longer heeding their falconers. We are in for a very rough ride.
Yes. Howe. We are 'due'. Bad times made strong men (WWII) strong men made good times (50s and 60s, some of 70s). Good times gave us hippies, feminists and various sexual deviants who's doctrines have now decayed to the point were we have women with penises. The bad times are upon us. As Howe said, it takes an entire lifetime for the wheel to go around.
Exactly. What’s incredibly insightful: these generational cycles are deeply rooted in human nature. As a species, we haven’t changed in thousands of years - while our godlike tech leaps forward every few weeks. This is a progressive blind spot
I still listen to him! He remains a man with sharp and interesting insights. He has things to teach. Do not confuse the man with his ideas.
But is not the obvious fact that JP is a mere mortal rather what makes him so compelling? Gods do the work of gods without too much effort, they being gods after all. But to see a very imperfect man work so hard to resist madness and decay -- even while facing his own madness and decay -- is what I suspect makes him so inspirational. I find him Shakespearean. I don't think Matt W. is really in a position to remove the straw from his eye.
Love that!
No, not a great piece. Not fair. Not thoughtful. To me, it was a very sad and distorted view of Peterson.
I know a lot about benzodiazepine withdrawal and something about Peterson's case. Yes, its brutal, can be fatal, and very likely would impair cognitive ability. Staying on benzodiazepines also harms cognitive function ( just like alcohol). Very sad, another brilliant man nearly destroyed and certainly harmed by psychiatric drugs. I recommend the book UNSHRUNK by Laura Delano, and the documentary "Medicating Normal."
A well-balanced article about an unbalanced product of the celebrity culture. I have been to one of his Brother Loves Traveling Show productions, and actually enjoyed him, his presentation (this was the "burning bush analogy" to life) which went straight over my head! His charisma, commonsense approach in his articles to problems facing our modern world, his warnings about what Woke is and what this dogma would do - and has done - to our western culture, his wrestling with the Toronto College of Psychologists, were and still are all good theatre and make life entertaining. Not bad for a lad from a small town out in the sticks of Alberta, Canada. One would wish him God's speed and good luck in all his future endeavours.
A "well balanced article"? No.
I don’t believe Peterson was ever a “savior” nor do most people who like him. I don’t believe he has ever been a “failure” nor do most fair minded people. He was a very talented and extremely popular psychology professor at University of Toronto and teacher/researcher at Harvard.
He became extremely well known and loved/hated nationally and internationally because of his incredible courage, sincerity, intelligence standing up to some of the worst excesses of woke ideological craze in mainstream institutions.
Is he flawed, made mistakes and struggled at times. Yes - newsflash - he is human.
But he has demonstrated an almost inhuman level of resilience and strength given the breadth and depth and duration of unfair attacks he has faced from mainstream institutions. He has more than earned every drop of the enormous amount of respect, appreciation and love of millions.
I am married to a hardcore Peterson fan and I really appreciate the nuance and thoughtfulness of this piece. A fraction of the vilification he has been subjected to is well-deserved, especially with all of his ill-informed transphobic tirades, but as this article puts it, he is mostly just a middling psych professor with some quirky ideas. As a birthday present to my husband one year, I got us VIP tickets to one of his lectures and we were able to meet him. At his core I believe he is truly a kind and caring person but he unfortunately allows himself to get swept up in the political movements of the moment which are not really his lane or his area of expertise. I also wish he would just be content with taking care of his family and grandkids, but it seems his children have built enterprises off his name, so I doubt they are willing to encourage or allow him to fade out as this article suggests he should.
Firstly, Matt positions himself as the wise head-doctor describing -- with some charity and even some wisdom -- the state of his patient. I'm not sure Matt is wiser or even a better man than JP nevertheless he's entitled to his opinion. But why does he think that Peterson is not entitled to his?
> and sprinkled with unfalsifiable gibberish
Philosophical opinions are almost never falsifiable in the scientific way, are they?
> by this point “postmodernneomarxists” is completely meaningless
I find it quite clear tho 'postmodern' and 'neo' are redundant -- rather in the way that saying 'very extreme' is redundant or 'scorching hot'.
> The Christian perspective on this would be that this should be the role of the pastor or preachers
Really? I'm a Christian and that idea wouldn't occur to me. Sources? Authorities?
> and accused her of using Christianity to foster her own success
Oh my!! But Matt accuses Peterson of using Christianity to foster his own success, no? Fact is that every public personality is using something or other to foster their success, no? Indeed it's hard to avoid using one's beliefs to foster one's success, no?
> For someone who does interviews in blazers covered in saints and sells courses on the gospels behind a Daily Wire paywall in spite of not actually being a Christian, the accusation of hypocrisy is almost painful in its irony.
Really? So only Muslims can comment on Islam? Only Buddhists on the life of the Buddha? Only autistics on autism? Only believers on theism?
> And while Peterson’s Christianity lectures contained plenty of nonsense
According to whom? Perhaps Matt merely fails to understand, or perhaps simply disagrees?
> and comment on his downfall
Has he fallen? And what does 'downfall' even mean? He's pulled back from the pinnacle of his fame, surely, but does not Matt advise that that's exactly what he should do? Is that really a downfall?
I had never heard of Peterson before Whiteley’s rather interesting musings.
yup, nor had I. Yup, interesting musings.
I was one of those who got caught up in the JP Controversy and stayed for the lectures. I was 68 years old at the time and no longer needed a dutch uncle to tell me to clean up my room (nor did I any longer need 23 more rules for my life). I found John Vervaeke more interesting and the Intellectual Dark Web captured my attention for a while. I liked the Rebel Wisdom YouTube channel while it lasted. It is sad to see the post breakdown Jordan Peterson! =)
As the article suggests, “Peterson” always was Peterson+his audience and apparently the audience has now swallowed Peterson. As a European classical liberal who probably pays too much attention to intellectual life in the Anglosphere, there is a pattern in my interactions with the ideas of the English-speaking right: they sound interesting until they start to opine on Europe. I then realize they seem incapable of identifying far right extremists for what they are and actually support them, which makes me doubt everything they say. Peterson was interesting (not his first book though, I could never get into it, self-help just is not my thing) but unfortunately he quickly unraveled. The wokesters have that effect on their adversaries. I guess you need to be very strong psychologically to resist the torrents of hatred they so generously pour out on whomever disagrees with them. Here’s for hoping Peterson returns to a better place, also because I suspect he is actually a nice guy.
I'm too old to have cared about him in the first place, but I read this anyway to see if I missed anything. Don't think so, except...what conclusions has he offered that "many thinkers are nowhere near"? I doubt they're about Jung (who was kind of a holy crackpot himnself) , or the evolutionary psych take on religion. So what is it?
Thomas Szasz, much disliked by the gurus of our mental illness generation, put it best: Mental Illness is a metaphor. Like a broken heart is a metaphor that must be distinguished from a heart attack which is literal. There is no such thing as a sick mind any more than there is a chartreuse angel. Minds do not catch colds or cancer or dance on the heads of pins.
Psychotherapy and the priests of mental illness like Peterson are culturally accepted fraudsters. People are often miserable because of real problems and unhelpful behavior. It is nice to hear good advice from those who know how we suffer. But in the end the psychotherapy industry is based on a fairy tale no different than any other angelology.
The best evidence is the holy DSM ad infinitum: A compendium in which psychotherapists vote to add ever new mental illness and take out ones no longer socially acceptable. Imagine if they could simply vote away leukemia or skull fractures or true organic brain illnesses like Schizophrenia or Alzheimer's. But they cannot. Body illness is illness; mental illness is socially endorsed fantasy. That is why Peterson is in trouble he thought he was more and other than he actually is. He is just another high priest of the Cult of Mental Illness, Angels and Big Foot.
Every brilliant thinker we lionize has a bucket list of weirdness that we can focus on... and it will be the stuff that opponents of his/her words focus on.
Ayn Rand for example had freaky sexual thoughts and ideas.
I tend to ignore that crap.
Peterson's thinking rocks and he has done much for a segment of the population that has faced extermination attempts by the woke Regime. Peterson too has faced attempted extermination from the Regime (this piece seems to be in that camp a bit). However, Peterson has a history of some auto-immune health issues as does his daughter. He has not been healthy for some time.
Interesting how the left will lionize a person with idiot ideas because they are a health issue victim (like, "I was diagnosed as being bipolar"). But demonize a great thinker like Peterson over his health issues.
Such intellectual arrogance. Smearing someone without offering anything in substance. I am not a Christian and don't care much about Petersen's re-interpretations of the bible. However, it's clear that the man is passionate about what he is doing - curating and resurrecting an intellectual culture that has been rotting in nihilism since the peak of Enlightenment. Regardless your opinions of Petersen's particular brand of intellectual artistry, his courage and stamina are to be applauded. For example, the Petersen Academy offers far superior scholars and lectures that you could find on any elite campus (ie Harvard or Stanford) these days. What have you done to enhance the health of human culture?