Like countless men, I recently discovered the online lectures of Jordan P. Peterson, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto who rose to Internet fame and notoriety in November of 2016. The obscure professor had posted videos to his small YouTube channel voicing opposition to Canadas Bill C-16, which prohibited discrimination on the basis of gender identity a concept that can include misgendering people by refusing to refer to them by their preferred pronouns. Peterson denounced the postmodernist motivations of the law, whose totalitarian end game, he believed, was to criminalize free speech.
As things are wont to unfold on the Internet, Petersons videos and media coverage snowballed until he eventually caught the eye and became a three-hour guest on popular YouTube channels such as the Rubin Report and the Joe Rogan Experience. Petersons animated divertissements won instant fans through his particularly engaging mix of topics: free speech and political correctness, the history of totalitarianism, personality traits and psychological well-being, heros-journey mythology, and the stories of the Old Testament.
Wise nuggets from his interviews and lectures were uploaded at an accelerating pace, and Peterson amassed millions of views. His own channel leapt from obscurity to 300,000 subscribers and counting. Peterson next set up a Patreon account to raise money, vowing to fast-track the video uploading and promising a lengthy series of lectures on the Bible, and his newfound flock ponied up over $40,000 in monthly support, which Peterson says he wants to use to create an online university. Though his book Twelve Rules for Life: An Antidote for Chaos isnt due out until September September of 2018, that is it is fast climbing the Amazon ranks from preorders. Hes tweeted out that he has all ten of the top ten higher-education podcasts on iTunes. Reddit communities, memes, and clever-slogan-stamped products are popping up every day.
Peterson says his online audience is 90 percent male. These huge numbers of men, many of whom are willing to donate $5 or $10 per month, have embraced a 54-year-old paternal authority figure who tells them that theyre a mess and need to get their lives in order. It works because Peterson connects his message to something eternal, offering mytho-intellectual fatherly advice that men, especially Millennial men, are starved for in an age of perpetual and trivial digital distraction.
To use one of his own refrains, he has ascended to the top of the dominance hierarchy when it comes to motivating males in the digital age.
Peterson has become an Internet hero partly by being a cartographer of the human soul. He talks at length about mapping your environment, ever weighing goals and results, risks and rewards, and what happens when unexplored territory chaos, the flood, the serpent in the garden suddenly appears and shatters your world.
One of his popular lecture series, taken directly from his UT classroom, is called Maps of Meaning, also the title of his 1999 book. Peterson presents men a roadmap for dealing with their past, the unresolved alarms that discordantly sound in our minds clamoring to be attended to, but that we are all too keen to tune out. If you have a memory thats more than 18 months old but still causes negative emotions, says Peterson, then its something you have yet to resolve. The brain needs to mark case closed on negative experiences to understand what went wrong so as to avoid making the same mistake in the future. Thats pretty intuitive when youre five and learning to ride a bike, but it gets a lot harder the older you get.
Id always thought I was a pretty well-adjusted person, free from things like petty envy or road rage. Sure I had problems, but I always thought they were worries about the future, not demons from my past. Then I discovered Peterson on YouTube, and he helped me understand that I share in the human condition, which is to say, Im a mess.
* * *
In this bleak midwinter, years into a midlife crisis, I received some bad news I didnt take very well. I fell into my habit of aversion and avoidance, and in doing so built up a dragon in my mind that could torment me at will. After five days of subconscious alarms going off, unattended to, everyday life suddenly fell to pieces.
I became wracked with fear and sorrow, constantly weeping in a way Id never experienced before. At one point misguided by meditation teaching and wrapped up in knots about consciousness, thinking, and trying not to think about not thinking I was ready to dial 911 for an ambulance to come sedate the torment away. But the idea of waking up in a New York mental institution with real loonies emboldened me to ride out the panic, which eventually subsided, as such episodes always do.
From that near crack-up things gradually improved as I clawed my way out of the dark place by tapping the instinct for self-preservation, and by seeking wisdom from a variety of books from different traditions from Nietzsches thoughts on affirming life by viewing its sufferings as an aesthetic phenomenon, to James Allens classic 1903 self-help tome As a Man Thinketh, and to the surprisingly entertaining and enlightening 1948 book by Dale Carnegie called How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, which combined stories of everyday folks conquering their demons with wise words from the great minds of Western literature. Gradually my world inched back toward messy normalcy.
All this coincided with the rise of Jordan Peterson, whom I discovered as if by fate, and his words became a daily regimen. I joked to friends that I was in therapy, and that it was actually quite sophisticated in a 70s Woody Allen kind of way. With Dr. Ps constant message of sort yourself out, each day the little epiphanies grew larger. There were times when Dr. P described my issues so precisely it made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. This made me realize that all human problems are pretty much the same, and that its Petersons archetypal, big-picture approach that is resonating with men at this particular moment in time.
Although the medium he uses is cutting-edge, giving his therapy sessions near-infinite reach, what Peterson teaches is not new but timeless: 4,000-year-old Biblical tales, mythologies of the past two millennia, and ideas from 19th- and 20th-century figures such as Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Solzhenitsyn, and Jung. Dr. P isnt just a therapist for men at a time of masculine crisis; no, the man who draws so much on patriarchal archetypes is fast becoming YouTubes new ideal male authority figure.
Firm but caring, Peterson is not a rigid drill sergeant out to eradicate your knee-jerk adolescent revolt. Thats a different kind of self-help guru for a different kind of man. Instead, Dr. P encourages, which, as he points out, means to instill with courage. In cognitive therapy, removing fear doesnt work. You dont make the bad stuff go away be retreating to a safe space, to use a popular buzzword; you do so by making yourself stronger. Peterson doesnt tell you what you should do, because only you can figure out your purpose but he can point out a few places to look. In short, Peterson speaks the way I always wished my father had.
But we cant choose our parents, and accepting them for who they are is another part of sorting yourself out. My own dad, kind and supportive as hes been to his adult son, would score in the 99th percentile for conscientiousness (work, discipline, order) in the Big Five personality test that Peterson often mentions, and in single digits for openness (variety, intellectual curiosity, aesthetic sensitivity, in touch with feelings) hardly the ideal for a writer son in search of wisdom and truth.
Imagine if you did everything you know you should be doing but arent, Dr. P says, and imagine what your life would be like in ten years. Then imagine the opposite, a complete cave-in to the worst of your tendencies. But change is so difficult as to seem impossible, as Dr. P himself says and right on cue I found a lecture in which he tells the story of Noah. What do you do when your Great Flood comes along and destroys your sense of external identity, when you lose your job or your spouse leaves you? Why, you be like Noah, who had Gods favor for his ability to adapt, to reinvent himself as shipbuilder and captain in order to survive, and in so transforming himself saved the world.
You dont wall yourself inside a safe space of ideology, territory, or experience. Learning and what is a life well lived but constant learning? requires the constant tearing down and transformative rebuilding of the boundaries of your experience as you acquire new information.
* * *
Change starts with little things, which despite being little feel immovable from the density of their weight. For years I would rise, often from a restless night, and go directly to my desk, hoping for some good news on the computer to jump-start my day. Id soon become distracted with all the trivialities of the news. Then, coffee ingested and ready to work, Id find my back was a wreck from sitting too soon after rising, which Id been told repeatedly by a chiropractor not to do.
With Dr. Ps voice in my head encouraging me to imagine what I could be if I stopped doing the things I know I shouldnt be doing, and started doing the things I know I should, I wondered what to do first thing in the morning. I mean besides the obvious and necessary.
I settled on something embarrassingly banal, the kind of thing old folks do: I would take a walk around the block, and have my first impressions of the day come from outside rather than a computer screen.
This simple act of will kicked my brains positive emotions into overdrive. Doing something different makes you feel different, which makes you think different, and finally be different. The front stoops of my neighbors, which I had so often passed, averting my eyes to the red-brick eyesores, were suddenly radiant with the beauty of flowers. Birds and squirrels went about their business of daily survival, oblivious to human folly and existential dread. And then I beheld a tree I had never noticed before, covered with heart-shaped messages I assumed were there to commemorate the site of some tragic accident. But when I investigated, the messages turned out to be timeless quotes on happiness and friendship put there to inspire and uplift anyone willing to notice. And I never had. One of the Old Testaments central messages, according to Peterson, is quite simple: pay attention.
Pay attention. Sort out your past. Author your future. Take responsibility for something. Identify not with that part of you that can be shattered, but the part that rebuilds itself from shatters. Face your fears one step at a time, and note with each voluntary approach how you didnt perish, but instead were strengthened.
I slept soundly last night and awoke with the sun. As I strolled on Day Two of the new walk-around-the-block routine, my mind was fertile and alert. What could come of this glorious day? When I eventually sat down at my desk, I began writing this.
Countless men are grateful to Jordan Peterson for having the courage to speak his mind on a contentious social matter. This temporal issue brought him many enemies, but his timeless messages earned followers that vastly outnumber them. The sheer numbers testify that he is the right man at the right time, someone capable of showing young men that cleaning up their room has cosmic significance, and that imposing a little order upon chaos is good for the soul, which in turn is good for the world.
READ MORE: Q&A Stephen Mirarchi: Fatherhood as Heroism Q&A Greg Popcak: The Standards of Fathers and Fatherhood The Transformative Power of Fatherhood
Christian Chensvold is a New Yorkbased writer whose op-eds have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, among other places. He is the founder of Ivy-Style.com.
See the rest here:
YouTube's New Father Figure - National Review
- Mind uploading - 01 - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Mind uploading - 02 - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- A new way to battle Mexican drug cartels - KLTV - March 8th, 2010 [March 8th, 2010]
- Mobile Health Screening Units Visit Lowe's Workers - International Supermarket News - March 8th, 2010 [March 8th, 2010]
- The quintessential sewing machine - Business Mirror - March 8th, 2010 [March 8th, 2010]
- The Future of Windows - Technologizer (blog) - March 8th, 2010 [March 8th, 2010]
- SEO Press Release Distribution Site Online PR News Celebrates 10000 Active Users - Online PR News (press release) - March 8th, 2010 [March 8th, 2010]
- Utilizing Online Mailing Services – Make the Most of Direct Marketing - RisMedia.com (press release) - March 8th, 2010 [March 8th, 2010]
- Carr's first look at 'Extreme' home - KLTV - March 8th, 2010 [March 8th, 2010]
- Should you advertise on iPhones? - Smart Company (blog) - March 8th, 2010 [March 8th, 2010]
- Review: Mega Man 10 - Destructoid - March 8th, 2010 [March 8th, 2010]
- Had I World Enough, and Time - Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies - March 8th, 2010 [March 8th, 2010]
- Unicast Continues Innovative Technology Enhancements With Latest Release of ... - CNNMoney.com (press release) - March 16th, 2010 [March 16th, 2010]
- Facebook scouts for 'passionate' India head - Economic Times - March 16th, 2010 [March 16th, 2010]
- SXSW: YouTube Launches Partner Program for Indie Bands - Wired News - March 17th, 2010 [March 17th, 2010]
- Wider Still and Wider! - Bangkok Post - March 17th, 2010 [March 17th, 2010]
- P2P Versus The World - Rampage - March 17th, 2010 [March 17th, 2010]
- Yakuza 3 - The MMOMFG Review - MMOMFG (blog) - March 17th, 2010 [March 17th, 2010]
- Behind the musings: The annotated high schools column - Chicago Tribune (blog) - March 17th, 2010 [March 17th, 2010]
- Jihad Jane, YouTube, and Me - David Horowitz's NewsReal Blog (blog) - March 17th, 2010 [March 17th, 2010]
- Justin Bieber Releases 'U Smile,' Announces Summer Tour Dates - MTV.com - March 17th, 2010 [March 17th, 2010]
- FCC announces National Broadband Plan - VentureBeat - March 17th, 2010 [March 17th, 2010]
- Image hosting on the cheap: a look at three free services - Ars Technica - March 17th, 2010 [March 17th, 2010]
- Content Management: Secrets of the Trade - Formtek Blog (blog) - March 17th, 2010 [March 17th, 2010]
- FCC's National Broadband Plan: There is a dark side - ZDNet - March 17th, 2010 [March 17th, 2010]
- 5 Reasons Old Media Should Buy Facebook - AllFacebook (blog) - March 17th, 2010 [March 17th, 2010]
- "Steal It" and Other Internal YouTube Emails from Viacom's Copyright Suit - Fast Company - March 19th, 2010 [March 19th, 2010]
- Now cafes in monument premises for tourists during CWG - Sify - March 19th, 2010 [March 19th, 2010]
- Google-Viacom court papers leave a lot to the imagination - FierceOnlineVideo - March 19th, 2010 [March 19th, 2010]
- FCC's broadband plan: A possible dream - Washington Post (blog) - March 19th, 2010 [March 19th, 2010]
- The Importance of Using Social Networking for Business; Part I – Facebook - IPWatchdog.com - March 19th, 2010 [March 19th, 2010]
- Recording YouTube Videos - Acoustic Guitar - March 19th, 2010 [March 19th, 2010]
- Who's using location-based social networking? - KC Free Press - March 20th, 2010 [March 20th, 2010]
- iPhone will continue to beckon BlackBerry owners - CNET - March 20th, 2010 [March 20th, 2010]
- Rain leaves its mark on Azalea Trail events - KLTV - March 21st, 2010 [March 21st, 2010]
- Viacom v. YouTube/Google: A Piracy Case in Their Own Words - DailyFinance - March 21st, 2010 [March 21st, 2010]
- Getting a look at next high-tech | Philadelphia Inquirer | 03/22/2010 - Philadelphia Inquirer - March 22nd, 2010 [March 22nd, 2010]
- Sprint chews on Apple while lauding 4G Overdrive hotspot - The Tech Herald - March 22nd, 2010 [March 22nd, 2010]
- 'Repo Men' contest -- the nationwide chase is almost over - Los Angeles Times (blog) - March 22nd, 2010 [March 22nd, 2010]
- Viacom vs. YouTube/Google: A Piracy Case in Their Own Words - DailyFinance - March 22nd, 2010 [March 22nd, 2010]
- These iPhone apps will help make March Madness a little more sane - Appolicious - March 22nd, 2010 [March 22nd, 2010]
- Eye-Fi Pro X2 cards have arrived, and you probably want one - tuaw.com (blog) - March 23rd, 2010 [March 23rd, 2010]
- Pharmacist shows who wins, loses with health care bill - KLTV - March 23rd, 2010 [March 23rd, 2010]
- High-Tech Texts! - The Campus Slate - March 24th, 2010 [March 24th, 2010]
- CTIA WIRELESS 2010: Samsung's New Galaxy Brings 4" AMOLED Screen, Social Hub ... - Marketnews.ca - March 24th, 2010 [March 24th, 2010]
- Google must follow Chinese rules or leave - China Daily - March 24th, 2010 [March 24th, 2010]
- Jay-Z Short Documentary 'NY-Z' Premieres Online - MTV.com - March 24th, 2010 [March 24th, 2010]
- DAs clash over Mineola sex ring appeal - KLTV - March 25th, 2010 [March 25th, 2010]
- iSilo for iPhone - BusinessWeek - March 26th, 2010 [March 26th, 2010]
- Questions Abound as "New START" Agreement is Completed - Global Security Newswire - March 26th, 2010 [March 26th, 2010]
- What will Apple do next in mobile services? - Mobile Entertainment - March 26th, 2010 [March 26th, 2010]
- How much is too much to pay for health care? - Anchorage Daily News - March 27th, 2010 [March 27th, 2010]
- The Future of Smartphones: 4G and Beyond - Entrepreneur - March 27th, 2010 [March 27th, 2010]
- Uploading and uplifting: sharing big data files - Earthtimes (press release) - March 28th, 2010 [March 28th, 2010]
- Verizon Blasts 'Outdated' FCC Broadband Plan - NewsFactor Network - March 28th, 2010 [March 28th, 2010]
- Web Host Layered Tech Offers Mezeo-Powered Cloud Storage - Web Host Industry Review - March 29th, 2010 [March 29th, 2010]
- Dropbox: Now one more reason to want a Nexus One - ZDNet (blog) - March 30th, 2010 [March 30th, 2010]
- Exaflood: Politicians Prop Up Dinosaurs, Ignore Cutting Edge Technology - NewsBlaze (press release) - March 30th, 2010 [March 30th, 2010]
- Instructions - Washington Post - March 30th, 2010 [March 30th, 2010]
- Uploading for Life Extension Will Be Valid - Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies - March 31st, 2010 [March 31st, 2010]
- 'Glee's' MySpace Auditions: What Not To Sing - Wall Street Journal (blog) - March 31st, 2010 [March 31st, 2010]
- Memeo iPad Reader: Like the GDrive on your iPad (only different) - ZDNet (blog) - April 1st, 2010 [April 1st, 2010]
- Why are pipe bomb 'how to' videos legal? Answer is alarming - KLTV - April 1st, 2010 [April 1st, 2010]
- Trip to Haiti inspiration for East Texas teen - KLTV - April 1st, 2010 [April 1st, 2010]
- Jason Kilar Leads Hulu To Profitability, But Will He Stay On At Hulu? - TVbytheNumbers - April 2nd, 2010 [April 2nd, 2010]
- Layers for IPad Adds Online Gallery, Pro Options - PC World - April 2nd, 2010 [April 2nd, 2010]
- Shane Dawson, YouTube's Comic for the Under-30 Set - New York Times - April 2nd, 2010 [April 2nd, 2010]
- Hands-On With the Apple iPad — and Your Questions - Wired News - April 4th, 2010 [April 4th, 2010]
- FedEx Simplifies International Shipping with FedEx Electronic Trade Documents - MarketWatch (press release) - April 6th, 2010 [April 6th, 2010]
- Cacoo Lets Multiple Users Create Designs Collaboratively And In Real-time - TechCrunch (blog) - April 7th, 2010 [April 7th, 2010]
- Comcast: Your New Overlord - ITworld.com - April 7th, 2010 [April 7th, 2010]
- Bloggers Photograph Food, We Get Hungry - Switched (blog) - April 7th, 2010 [April 7th, 2010]
- Apple suggests only the iPhone can fingerprint songs - Geek.com - April 7th, 2010 [April 7th, 2010]
- Senior with mental challenges killed along highway - KLTV - April 7th, 2010 [April 7th, 2010]
- Book a Cruise and "Flip" Over a Free Camcorder - CruiseCritic.co.uk - April 8th, 2010 [April 8th, 2010]
- Creation Myths: what the argument that the iPad's not for creating content ... - Huffington Post (blog) - April 8th, 2010 [April 8th, 2010]
- Want market share? Make a brain claim - Marketing Web - April 8th, 2010 [April 8th, 2010]
- 10 Ways World of Warcraft - OUPblog (blog) - April 8th, 2010 [April 8th, 2010]
- Check-in to Foursquare: Latest social media service lands in SW Florida - Naples Daily News - April 8th, 2010 [April 8th, 2010]
- Apple iPhone OS 4 Announcement Makes Users Feel "Finally!" - HULIQ - April 8th, 2010 [April 8th, 2010]