Jordon Peterson, a Media Phenomena.

What makes Dr. Jordan Peterson so popular?

I went to work after high school in 1967, not an unusual choice then. However, Bob Dylan’s somewhat earlier prophecy that “The Times They Are a-Changing” was accurate. It was a turbulent time of change.

Men my age could avoid military conscription and war by going to college. My peers signed up for higher education in numbers never seen before. While surely there were some serious students involved, a large proportion of young men going to college were simply looking for a party to go to while not going to Vietnam. Colleges and universities became more influential than ever before. Tens of thousands of not-so-serious students, wanting to avoid difficult sciences classes, gravitated toward liberal arts, increasing the influence of social science departments.

Our parent’s and grand parent’s legacy of sacrifice and hardship during depression and world wars was now a vestige of history. Dissatisfied with a dubious war in a far away place killing our peers, my generation began to question and confront previously accepted values. Racial injustice, real gender discrimination and unfair advantages enjoyed by the wealthy — the rich kids somehow easily found ways around the draft — motivated us. And left leaning, socialist academics educated us.

Howard Zinn re-wrote history in “The People’s History of the United States” convincing us our American forebears were nasty oppressors. Arguing for the political value of vulgarity, beat poet and professor Allan Ginsberg helped to dismantle previously accepted polite public discourse and manners. Nihilist stoner Jack Kerouac extolled the joys of irresponsibility in “On The Road”. Sociologists at Harvard sent their students to hit biologist E.O. Wilson in the face with a pie during a lecture. Wilson had the temerity to talk about scientific evidence supporting the notion that behavior was biologically influenced. Academic social dogma coming from the social sciences demanded that all behavior was learned. And Wilson was talking mostly about ants. Damn! Better not disagree with the liberal art’s world view, even a little.

In a recent video Dr. Jordan Peterson talked about the value of dialectic discourse. Using his arm to mimic a snake’s movement, Dr. Peterson was attempting to explain how competing trends and ideas in politics and culture were a good thing. In the same way a snake moves side to side, the left to right movements of the snake propel it forward with an aggregation of lateral movement in the center. Politics, economies and culture are complex emergent systems. Binary explanations are inadequate. However, the simplified categories of popular arguments are generally represented in a binary fashion such as liberal or conservative. Each of those binary arguments pull the snake one way or the other. The snake keeps moving forward. But anybody who categorizes Dr. Jordan Peterson as conservative has not done their homework.

In the nineties, I had achieved a fair degree of success in my orbit as a working class American. The majority of my peers, the Woodstock generation, moved on from sex, drugs and rock and roll, cut their hair and became mainstream. Educated as artists and thinkers, old hippies went to work as journalists, media people, business leaders and entertainers. They sent their kids back to the liberal institutions where they came of age. An amalgamation of academic philosophy, media, politics and entertainment was moving the cultural snake to the left. Feeling left out, uninformed, I enrolled in Brooklyn College and earned a BS in Psychology. I was forty-six.

The work of a famous German Psychiatrist, Dr. Carl Jung, fascinated me. Dr. Jung postulated there exists a collective unconscious. Based on similarities amongst the myths, legends, religions and artistic expression throughout history and across cultures, Jung claims we all are somehow imbued with similar fundamental notions called archetypes.

When I was studying psychology, Jung was presented as an interesting thinker but more of a intellectual artifact of a less informed time. Post modernist influences in the academic world eschewed the notion of anything having meaning. In kind of a re-booted version of existentialism, post modernists believe that meaning itself is but a human construct. Life is indeed so complex that two people arguing opposite sides of a philosophical argument can both be right. There is no universal correlative to the notion of meaning. We are making it all up.

While Dr. Peterson agrees the post modernist have a point, Jordan directs his most passionate arguments against them. We befuddles him, and me, is where post modernism creates a philosophical void, academic adherents insert socialism.

Shortly before Dr. Peterson’s rise to internet prominence, I discovered him on http://Quora.com. I became interested in Jordan’s incredibly insightful presentation of Dr. Carl Jung’s theories of archetypes. I read Peterson’s “Maps of Meaning” his life’s work. And I listened to — took the course in actuality — all twelve of Peterson’s two hour lectures on YouTube. Jordan had generously posted videos of his psychology course also called “Maps of Meaning”. The man is an amazing intellect and fascinating to watch. I had difficulty understanding Carl Jung. Peterson made Jung’s ideas about archetypical theories more accessible, explaining how humans have a propensity, an innate disposition, to abstract our physical experience into human constructs that emerge as stories, myths, legends and artistic expression. These constructs inform our culture, our politics and institutions. Humans worldwide share a common trait. We are all physical beings. From within our physical experience emerges all manner of human interaction, communication and expressiveness. The more clearly our abstractions convey meaning — meaningfulness itself a uniquely human abstraction — the more powerfully we are drawn.

Peterson’s meteoric rise to internet stardom was catalyzed by a political stance. Jordan objected to Canadian provincial legislation requiring college professors to address trans-sexuals by their chosen pronoun. There exists a list of such pronouns one can Google if you so desire. Jordan objected to a government speech mandate where he, or anyone, would be required to use specific language of any kind.

Academic post modernist socialists are at a crossroad. Marxian socialism was founded on the notion of oppression of the working class. Today in developed countries during good economic times, working class folks can have two cars in the garage and a summer home.

When I was growing up, nasty racial and gender discrimination existed. Working class young men were dying in an unnecessary war. Here existed classes of people socialists could define as oppressed.

US President Lyndon Johnson signed needed legislation protecting voting rights and civil rights. I am not naive, racism still exists. But in a time where there has been two black US Secretaries of State, two women Secretaries of State and a black US President, truly there is far less repression present.

With current populist political developments in Europe and The US, far left movements seem to have launched kind of a cultural Kamikaze mission. In Dr. Peterson case, social justice warriors encouraged by leftie professors, much like throwing a pie at E.O. Wilson, attempt to interrupt Dr. Peterson speeches by chanting, banging on windows and attempting to ban him all together from speaking. The far left activists, without evidence or merit, describe Peterson’s resistance to government mandated speech as homo-phobic and trans-phobic falsely portraying him an oppressor of minorities. They will find disgusting right wing comments on Peterson’s ubiquitous videos and conflate the comments with Peterson’s scholarship. Such a tactic is wrong on its face. Additionally, there are numerous examples where such comments are the product of opposition trolls.

Peterson is a clinical Psychologist. He speaks compassionately about his first hand experience with individuals suffering with gender identity issues. This man is no bigot. Any opinion to the contrary is at best mis-informed and likely malicious. It is surely spurious.

In our complex, rapidly changing, tech driven world today, finding a belief system that can endure is hard. I think young men are drawn to Jordan’s teaching because he is telling them to take responsibility for the their lives and create something meaningful for themselves. Women become mothers; they have a built in meaning maker; life is incubated from within women. Dr. Peterson’s scholarship holds the possibility of a more meaningful life for young men and women who choose non traditional paths. If my youth, the sixties, can be described as a paradigm shift, and I think it can, I believe we are now experiencing yet another.

In a political climate where oppression is not what it once was, the matrix of media, entertainment and Democratic politics are all still dancing to the same rhythm, defending social justice, labeling any and all political opponents as misogynistic, racist, homophobic, ignorant, white oppressive louts. And if you do not actually fit into those categories, paid trolls can still make you look like you do.

In an article in “The Atlantic” Caitlin Flanagan summed up reaction to Peterson quite poignantly:

“It is because the left, while it currently seems ascendant in our houses of culture and art, has in fact entered its decadent late phase, and it is deeply vulnerable. The left is afraid not of Peterson, but of the ideas he promotes, which are completely inconsistent with identity politics of any kind…In the midst of this death rattle has come a group of thinkers, Peterson foremost among them, offering an alternative means of understanding the world to a very large group of people who have been starved for one”.