To his followers, Jordan Peterson is a prophet of masculinity. The 56-year-old has become a spiritual leader for young men who resent the feeling that they have to apologise for being male. Men, he told me, are “sick and tired of [being] under the weight of accusations that their ambition and forthrightness is a manifestation of something that’s fundamentally tyrannical”. He doesn’t believe the feminist contention that we live in a male-dominated society.
Peterson’s gospel is a popular one. On a recent rainy night in Long Island, New York, I watched more than a thousand people – including plenty of couples – file into the Westbury Theatre to hear him speak. Tickets started at $44 and for upwards of $200 you could meet the man himself afterwards. Peterson is one of the leaders of the “Intellectual Dark Web”, a loose group of controversialists who circulate around each other’s podcasts, YouTube channels and live shows, preaching versions of the same message: students are being coddled by “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings”; feminism has gone too far; activist groups such as Black Lives Matter are unnecessarily divisive; and what’s with all the new-fangled gender pronouns young people have these days?
The IDW make a great show of being – as they see it – “locked out” of the mainstream media and persecuted for their opinions. But looking round the Westbury Theatre, it hardly felt like a clandestine meeting. Introducing Peterson, fellow IDW member Dave Rubin said: “It’s not about diversity of skin colour... it’s about intellectual diversity!” The overwhelmingly white crowd applauded. The questions at the end were chummy, borderline fawning. It felt like, well, it felt like a safe space. We were warned before the lecture started that hecklers would be ejected.
Peterson’s elevation from obscure Canadian psychology professor to bestselling author, YouTuber and self-facilitating media node reflects a backlash against the campaigns for gender and racial equality. He has become a hero to the alt-right (a group he claims to despise) and to the “manosphere”, those internet forums where men swap pick-up artist lines and pore over research that claims to show women are biologically less suited to being CEOs.
Two years ago, Peterson was virtually unknown outside his native Canada, where he gave lectures at the University Of Toronto on subjects such as the Jungian symbolism of The Lion King. Then, in early 2018, he published a book of tough-love advice called 12 Rules For Life and his combative interview with Channel 4 News’ Cathy Newman on the gender pay gap went viral.
After their clash, Newman got so much abuse that Peterson had to tell his fans to “back off”. The fervour of his online army – who refer to themselves as “lobsters”, in reference to a famous passage from his book 12 Rules For Life – made me pause before agreeing to interview him. After we finished talking, he told me I was brave to do it.
The strange thing is that in person Peterson does not come off as an alpha male. He is quiet and reserved – until he revs himself into a fury about, say, Marxism on university campuses. He dresses like a dandy, in elegant three-piece suits. He married his childhood sweetheart and cries often, sometimes about the cruel excesses of communism. He eats an all-beef diet, which he says has alleviated his depression, among other things. So who is the real Jordan Peterson – angry right-wing ranter or tough-but-fair father to a generation of lost boys?
What follows is a condensed, edited version of our conversation...
Helen Lewis: You’ve sold two million copies of 12 Rules For Life, you have 800,000 followers on Twitter and 1.4 million subscribers on YouTube. What is it that you’re selling that so many people want to buy?
Jordan Peterson: I don’t think I’m selling anything.
Well, I went to your show – people pay a lot of money to see you speak. What is it that they are hungry for?
They’re hungry for a discussion of the relationship between responsibility and meaning. And we haven’t had that discussion in our culture for 50 years. We’ve concentrated on rights and privileges, freedom and impulsive pleasure, and those are all useful in their place, but they’re shallow and that’s not good. Because if people are moored shallowly, then storms wreck them – and storms come along. People need a call to responsibility, because they need to mature; they need to want to be adults.
In your interview with Channel 4’s Cathy Newman, you said your fanbase was very male. Is that still the case?
I would say the talks are probably 60/40 or 65/35 male to female. The book has definitely expanded my audience. And that’s a good thing. I never set out specifically to talk to men – my students for most years at university have been primarily female. I can’t tell how much of it is merely a consequence of the fact that YouTube skews so male. It might also be something to do with the call to take on voluntary responsibility. I’m not exactly sure why that would be more necessary for men right now; it might be because our culture confuses men’s desire for achievement and competence with the patriarchal desire for tyrannical power and that’s a big mistake. Those aren’t the same things.
One of the things I want to come back to is this idea, you say it in the book, that there is masculine order and feminine chaos.
No, actually, I say that those are symbolic representations of the two things.
OK, so why then? Why is order necessarily masculine?
I think it’s because our primary social hierarchy structures are fundamentally masculine.
And that’s not the patriarchy?
Well, it’s not the modern idea of the patriarchy, that’s for sure.
That’s my idea of the patriarchy, which is a system of male dominance.
In what sense is our society male-dominated?
The vast majority of wealth is owned by men. Women do more unpaid labour...
That’s a very tiny proportion of men and a huge proportion of people who are seriously disaffected are men. Most people in prison are men. Most people who are on the street are men. Most victims of violent crime are men. Most people who commit suicide are men. Most people who die in wars are men. People who do worse in school are men. It’s like, where’s the dominance here, precisely?
But I can say equally that most rape victims are women. There are almost no women who rape men.
There’s an asymmetry in all sorts of places, but that doesn’t mean that Western culture is a male-dominated patriarchy. The fact that there are asymmetries has nothing to do with your basic argument. This is a trope that people just accept: “Western society is a male-dominated patriarchy.” It’s like, “No, it’s not. That’s not true.” And even if it has a patriarchal structure to some degree, the fundamental basis of that structure is not power, it’s competence. That’s why our society works.
It’s only when a structure degenerates into tyranny that the fundamental relationships between people become dependent on power. If you hire a plumber, who’s likely to be male, it’s not because there’s roving bands of tyrannical plumbers forcing you to make that choice – and that’s the case with almost every interaction that you have at the face of our culture. You’re dealing with people who are offering a service of one form or another, who are usually part of the broad middle class, and what you’re looking for is the person who can offer the best service. It’s not a consequence of being dominated by anything that’s tyrannical.
The first of Peterson’s 12 Rules Of Life is “Stand up straight, with your shoulders back.” He spends several pages describing how male lobsters fight for dominance, leaving the victorious ones with a more upright posture. Human society, he argues, is also naturally a hierarchy. “There is an unspeakably primordial calculator, deep within you... it monitors exactly where you are positioned in society,” he writes. If you’re a No1 male, “You are a successful lobster, and the most desirable females line up and vie for your attention.” Before interviewing Peterson, I emailed a friend who is a geneticist about all this, and he replied: “Using the lobster model, I could choose literally any animal social structure to justify any human behaviour. Otters drown females and fuck their corpses. Ergo, serial killers are natural.”
People take away from this chapter that male lobsters compete for female lobsters and that says something about society now, that men need to be dominant.
There’s nothing in that chapter at all that suggests that the way that men should succeed in human hierarchies is a consequence of the exercise of power. If you want to be a successful man, then you should be competent, and that will move you up the hierarchy, and that will make you attractive, and for good reason.
My big problem with the lobsters comparison is it’s scientifically rubbish. You cannot read across from lobsters and what they do to what humans do.
Of course you can. That’s why serotonin [a molecule linked to feelings of happiness] works on lobsters.
You’re anthropomorphising to a ridiculous degree. These are creatures that urinate out of their faces.
Neuroscientists and people who study motivation and emotion know perfectly well that there is biological and behavioural continuity across the animal kingdom, which is exactly why I chose lobsters. Hierarchies are a third of a billion years old. You can’t blame them on the West or men or capitalism. And we’re wired for hierarchical perception in ways that you can hardly imagine.
You write in 12 Rules that you skipped a grade in school and you were small for your age. Do you think that shaped your personality?
It made it difficult for me to participate in sports, so I didn’t really do anything that was fundamentally athletic until I was in graduate school. My parents are guilty about that, because they felt that it wasn’t good for me, but I’m not unhappy about it. I got through school faster. I wasn’t a fan of school. I think it might have encouraged me to do two other things, which was hang around with rougher kids than I might have otherwise – partly as a compensation, I suppose, for being smart and academically able, and also small, so I probably exaggerated my roughness, I suppose – and it made me verbally more capable of defending myself.
You ended up married to your teenage sweetheart.
I met her when I was eight, so we’ve known each other for 50 years.
I read that and thought it was moving. But what happens if you’re top lobster is that you get to impregnate all the females. That’s being evolutionarily successful as a lobster, right?
It’s a proclivity towards polygamy, which is one of the things that pulls on human society.
Right, and you’re now a pretty big lobster and yet you’re faithful to your wife. You don’t go round impregnating every woman that you see.
No, no. One woman’s enough trouble.
You’ve been able to overcome that biological urge. So maybe there are other biological urges, such as men’s propensity towards violence, that might also be overcome?
Well, it’s not self-evident that you want it to be overcome. What you want to do with a child who is aggressive is socialise them so that they become sophisticated in their manifestation of their aggression. You don’t want to inhibit it – you certainly don’t want to socialise little boys to be more like little girls.
In the book you say that if you try to feminise men, they might feel the allure of fascist ideologies.
That’s psychoanalysis 101. If you repress something, it comes back with a vengeance.
If you don’t mind me saying so, you are in touch with your feminine side. You are well-dressed. You talk a lot about your diet. You’ve talked about your emotions.
No. I hate talking about my diet.
Right, but you cry in public. You enjoy spending time with your kids.
I know. Sad, isn’t it?
I think that’s very admirable.
*[Smiles.] *Pretty strange behaviour for a patriarchal tyrant.
But you are a man who some people would say has feminine traits. Do you feel the allure of authoritarian, fascist ideologies because you’re baking cakes?
Oh, I notice the allure.
And what do you do?
If you see any temptation in that, then you should straighten yourself up real quick and that’s what I’ve done for decades. If you don’t see the allure in it, you’re a fool, just like if you don’t see the allure in the radical leftist ideas. It would be lovely if there was a strong man who could solve all our problems and those who deserved it got exactly what was coming to them. You want to see the dark parts of what you are attracted to.
Did you have different ambitions for your daughter [Mikhaila, who is named after Mikhail Gorbachev and runs Peterson’s private office] and your son?
Some of them were different. I encouraged my daughter in her desire to be a mother, which is not something I did with my son.
Did you encourage him in his desire to be a father?
Absolutely.
So you encouraged both of them to be a parent.
Right, but those are different. It’s harder for young women, because the problem of integrating family with career is a more complex problem for women to solve. I’m not a fan of the idea that the most fundamental orientation that a person is likely to have in their life is career. I don’t believe that’s true for most people: I certainly don’t believe it’s true for most women.
On the Me Too movement, tell me your reaction to what’s unfolded over the last year.
There’s certainly no shortage of evidence for reprehensible sexual behaviour on the part of people who can use power to get away with it, so that’s not so good. The Me Too movement? I suspect it probably did some good things and some terrible things. So I would say that there’s a dangerous proclivity to abandon the concept of the presumption of innocence. So on university campuses, for example, we’re moving towards a preponderance-of-evidence model. I’m not very happy with that model. I think that’s a very big mistake: the presumption of innocence is nothing short of a miracle and we abandon it at our extreme peril. So I’m not happy with that. I think the “believe the victim” idea is something that only a fool could conjure up, because it opens the door to unbelievable opportunity for manipulation.
I think what people are arguing for is don’t instantly dismiss or disbelieve the victim.
Some people are arguing to not automatically disbelieve the victim – which is a perfectly reasonable thing to argue for – but that isn’t where it ends.
In 12 Rules, you compare population-control advocates such as David Attenborough to Columbine killer Eric Harris.
It’s the motivation that I question. What kind of statement is, “The planet would be better off with fewer people on it?” First of all, there’s an easy solution to that: you could leave.
Unfortunately, despite the best efforts of Elon Musk, that is not yet an option. Or do you mean suicide?
That’s what I meant, yes. If you’re very concerned about your carbon footprint, there’s a very fast solution. The problem I have with much of the environmentalist movement is there’s a powerful stream of anti-human sentiment that motivates it, masquerading under the guise of virtue.
On gay parenting, you said you want to see more studies. What do you think might be the adverse effects of having same-sex parents?
I don’t think we know what modelling is optimal for children: that’s really the issue. I suspect that two parents are better than one. But we don’t know what exposure to role models, say, is necessary for the continuity of maternal behaviour or for the adoption of functional gender roles. And so that’s the variable: no one knows what the consequences of being raised by two people of the same sex is. Maybe none.
Peterson’s surge in popularity has coincided with the rise of the so-called “alt-right”, which combines old obsessions (whiteness under threat, unfeminine women, Jewish conspiracies) with the new propaganda tools of social media. Because Peterson is a staunch critic of multiculturalism, and because he rejects feminism, he has been hailed as their “hero”. It’s a label he dislikes. But he is sympathetic to their pet issues: for example, the contention that former English Defence League leader Tommy Robinson is a free-speech martyr, rather than a thug whose grandstanding risked causing the collapse of a grooming trial. And a few months ago, Peterson was pictured with two men holding a flag showing the cartoon frog Pepe, a symbol co-opted by pro-Trump racists and the expert trolls of the 4chan website.
Let’s talk about free speech. You write about Nietzsche, who became the Nazis’ favourite intellectual...
Only through his sister’s mistranslations of his work.
Do you worry about how your work might be used by other people?
Of course. I worry about that all the time.
I saw you posing with the Pepe flag.
I can’t believe you brought that up! Why are you concerned about Pepe, anyway? Jesus. He disappeared like three years ago. And most of that was trolling by young guys who were trying to drag the media into idiot accusations. Like the idea that this was a white supremacist gesture, which I was asked about on CBC [Canada’s public broadcaster]. It’s like, no. It wasn’t. It was 4chan trolls playing the media for fools.
I’m asking how much responsibility you have, particularly with regard to the alt-right, some of whom have enjoyed your work, to say, “I’m not one of you.”
They haven’t enjoyed my work. I’m extraordinarily sick and tired of this particular accusation-slash-line of questioning. I’m no fan of the identitarian right, the ethno-nationalists, the alt-right. First of all, what do you mean by alt-right exactly? Let’s define what constitutes alt-right first. They tend to be white supremacists and, generally, when people tar me with an alt-right epithet, the reason they’re doing that is to associate me with those people. They don’t like me because I’ve made it very clear, not only in my videos but on Twitter, that I don’t like them. I don’t like their anti-Semitism. I don’t like their use of identity politics. I don’t agree with their aims. The only reason that I was ever associated in any sense whatsoever with anything to do with the alt-right was because it was extremely convenient for the radical leftists – who I fundamentally detest – to paint me as a representative of that viewpoint. Other than that, zero.
That’s not what I did.
Well, you brought up the whole Pepe thing!
There was a reason I did that, which is that Nietzsche himself said, “I’m an anti-anti-Semite,” and yet his philosophy ended up being used by the Nazis. So my question is how much responsibility do you feel...
It’s not how much responsibility I feel. It’s how much responsibility I take. And I take as much responsibility as I possibly can. Which is why I’m doing what I’m doing. I’m going around the world talking in different cities. I’m putting out content that I think is useful for people online and I’m clarifying what I think. I have 300 videos on YouTube, virtually every single word I’ve said to students in a professional capacity since 1992. And despite the fact that I have innumerable, highly motivated enemies, they haven’t been able to find one thing I’ve said in 30 years that justifies any of those accusations.
I just wonder if posing with the flag is something that you regret now, that you wouldn’t do again.
Well, I don’t think it did me any good. [Long pause.] Ah, I don’t think I’ll betray my former self: we’ll just leave it where it is.
The idea of the Intellectual Dark Web is based on the idea that you have been marginalised. To me, you don’t look like somebody who has particularly suffered an outrageous amount for your opinions. People have certainly disagreed. They’ve been rude...
I’m not claiming I’ve been marginalised. I would never use that word, first of all. That’s for sure. I don’t feel oppressed. The only reason I haven’t suffered an outrageous amount for my opinions is because I’ve handled the consequences of their utterance exceptionally well. My job was at risk; my career was at risk; my family’s stability was at risk. So I wouldn’t push that one too far.
In what way was your job at risk?
Jesus! Last year, 200 of my fellow faculty members signed a petition to get me fired. The university wrote me two cease-and-desist letters from their HR department with their legal staff. Three of those and you’re done. They just fired Rick Mehta in Canada, at Acadia University, for talking about many of the same things that I’ve talked about. So the fact that I’ve come through this relatively unscathed has very little to do with the vitriol of the attacks. There was plenty of motivation to take me out. It just didn’t work.
OK. Quick-fire questions. When did you last cry?
Oh, God. Who knows? Last week, probably.
Who is your smartest opponent?
[Atheist neuroscientist] Sam Harris is pretty smart. I mean, we disagree on things. I don’t regard him exactly as an opponent. I don’t tend to think of people as opponents, generally.
When did you last change your mind about something important?
I’m changing my mind about things all the time. Every time I do a lecture, I change my mind about something.
Something big.
There’s an obesity epidemic in North America, perhaps throughout the Western world. I overestimated the degree to which that was a consequence of the sedentary lifestyle and the degree to which a lack of discipline was contributing to it. I think much more now that it’s an illness.
Are you still on an all-beef diet?
Unfortunately, yes.
Really? Just beef? Anything on it?
No, nothing. It isn’t something I would lightly recommend. It’s a little hard on your social life, makes travelling quite difficult and it’s dull as hell.
What has it done for you?
I lost 50lb in seven months. Stopped snoring. I had some auto-immune conditions that seem to have gone away. I’m not taking antidepressants. My mood isn’t perfectly regulated, but I’m under a fair bit of stress, so that might have something to do with it. I sleep less. I can work more. I don’t have gerd [acid reflux].
I imagine your arteries might not be in great shape.
I don’t think we have any idea what causes arteriosclerosis. All of the dietary knowledge we have is rubbish. So this all-beef diet has apparently cured my daughter.
Of juvenile rheumatoid arthritis?
That was the original diagnosis. She’s completely symptom-free. That sort of thing makes you sit up and take notice, because, well, it doesn’t make any sense.
When was the last time you lied? The book says no lying: do you still lie?
Everybody lies. And I’m pretty damn careful about it.
What is most important to you?
Not being stupid. Not making foolish mistakes. Not being incautious.
That’s tough on yourself.
Life’s tough, man!
How would your life have been different if you’d been born female?
Multiple orgasms.
It’s not a bad one. What’s your biggest regret?
That I didn’t take advantage of the opportunity to learn to play the organ when I was seven.
Finally, how would you like to be remembered?
JP: As someone honest.
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