The Appeal of Jordan Peterson

Fellow psychologist Jordan Peterson is a important player in the "unwoke" movement, and here I apply a cautious skeptical examination of some of his work.

Jordan Peterson does not know me, but I am a friend of a friend of his in the world of academic psychology. My friend once hired Jordan for a job position, and what a pick ahead of its time that was! I can see the reasoning: the intelligence, creativity, and engaging lectures were evident in his early work. But I also notice that Jordan even then loved to move away from testable theories to have fun in the world of unfalsifiable theories. But even for me, a Popperian, I have to admit some of Jordan’s unscientific work is impressively creative, even if I never fully believe it. He has worked hard over decades to think about symbolic meaning, archetypes, and rules to live by to help people thrive. Whether it does help, is an open question.

Today, after years of a social media hierarchy building up a pecking order, he is now uncontactable, unlike almost any other psychologist in my network. He simply is likely swamped by hundreds of messages daily, and now seems to be in a communication network exclusively with others who have social media networks in the 100k or more. It is understandable.

With social media, the most provocative often get the most attention. But Jordan is not just provocative, as say Alex Jones is, Jordan is actually a good empiricist when he puts that hat on, and an absolutely fascinating moral philosopher when he puts that hat on. He also has demonstrated a good deal of accuracy on some questions, and his early positions have sometimes proven to be sensible years later.

Jordan is probably the most famous psychologist in decades, with Steven Pinker a close second, and then perhaps a gap between those and others. There is often some justification to this hierarchy of fame in academia—it is usually those with a massive work ethic combined with extraordinary intelligence in which they think creatively for themselves. Fluency in communication also helps, which Peterson has more so than Pinker and more so that the typical scientist-types in academic psychology. Peterson is perhaps one of the most captivating and interest-provoking speakers who came out of the profession in his generation.

He, of course, also shot to fame by being one of the few to speak out clearly on controversial issues, such as Bill C16 in Canada. That controversy created a compelling spectacle as others looked on to see if he would survive. Compelling is the right word: Jordan’s theme in a lot of his work is that words should not be compelled. To many, he seemed to say things as he truly believed them, and millions looked on to see what would happen to them if they did the same. He is, in essence, an anti-authoritarian, but not overly so such that it impacts on accuracy consistently.

Sometime between 2016 to 2018 a member of my family told me that a mutual friend, now a therapist overseas, was a huge fan of Jordan Peterson, and was recommending him. I had already admired some of Jordan’s videos, and was generally aligned with his free speech stances. But at that stage I was not a fan—I was still at the stage of criticizing his voice as being like Kermit the frog. And like many psychology academics, I probably was just a little bit annoyed at his fame, given his unfalsifiable approach in some of his lectures.

Nevertheless, at that time the 2010s, a good number of us empirically-minded psychologists were concerned with what were called “social-justice-warriors,” and cancel culture, and Jordan seemed to be helping expose and explain some of that at the time. For the friend that was recommending Jordan, I think it was more to do with Jordan’s advice on how to live a clean and orderly life, and was especially important to him after a lot of chaos and travel in early adulthood. It was not bad advice, either. At that time, I recall that Jordan was becoming famous for telling young men to clean their room and take on responsibility. He was, in effect, encouraging people to do well in quite a fatherly way. That role he took on as a replacement father figure—encouraging responsibility—had a deep and emotional effect on many young men, (and a lot in other demographics as well: older men and women). To use his own framing, and that of Jung, he was becoming an international archetype of an encouraging father.

Years later, Jordan’s story became even more captivating as he struggled with ill health and sought out alternative remedies. He emerged after an absence of ill-health, and was back promoting freedom of speech, which he argued was equivalent to the freedom to think.

Then, we observed him tearing up on prime time television as he recounts his role in trying to help young men who might be lost and suffering. You cannot fake that, and as an empathetic person who also chose psychology as a profession due to empathetic goals, I think Jordan is motivated to help others. Hence his choice of clinical psychology. No amount of cancel culture or character assassinations will deter freethinking people from seeing the genuineness of Jordan. I will embed the clip below.

And recently, his far reach became evident to me as I travelled to a conference in Australia. After a beer (and after an alcohol-free beer for me), a brilliant young forensic psychologist started to tell me how much he liked Jordan Peterson. He told me how he was careful not to say anything politically incorrect in the workplace, but his group of male friends who got together on weekends he told me all talked about the oppression of wokeness in private. He commented on the problem of compelled speech in Australian land acknowledgments. Later that week, on a layover in Abu Dhabi, after a missed flight, I just happened to sit next to a professional couple who were also stranded at a hotel. I don’t recall how it started, but when they asked I first revealed I was a psychologist coming back from a conference. The couple then revealed after a time how much they liked Jordan Peterson. The financial professional then told me that he thought Jordan would go down in history as a great psychologist or philosopher. As far as I can tell, Jordan has a few grievance-oriented detractors who are loud and determined, and millions of admirers. It is hardly believable how many people know him now in every corner of the English speaking world, and the vast majority seem to like him enormously.

I actually like hearing what Jordan has to say, even in the realm of the unfalsifiable, because I am a fully educated psychologist who can reject anything I don’t agree on. His ideas, even if he gets them wrong, are of no threat to me because I filter things out using a few critical thinking tools. I scan his work for empiricism, and I find it and take that on, and look out for ideas in the realm of ideology or religion, and I take them with a pinch of salt. I understand these ideas are not scientific, but I keep an open mind as to think: maybe they are cultural ideas on how to live in a way that brings meaning and solace.

Nevertheless, I do understand why some people feel they have to stop themselves from listening to him. They may think, with some justification, that if they listen to him they may come to believe everything he says, and as a result they themselves may be dragged into beliefs they do not want to hold. They may fear that they too will be rejected by the class of person that denigrates Jordan as a very bad person. Indeed, there was a time I felt similarly about popular psychologists who ventured into the world of opinion and unfalsifiability. There were years and years in which I just had to get away from pop psychologists who write for the public, from Freud, from Jung, and the whole branch of theoretical psychology that was not grounded.

If readers are in that place of not wanting to listen to pop psychologists, or famous psychologists, I understand and was there myself for many years. But it is possible to build a set of critical thinking tools, and to not be gullible to the mistakes of famous gurus, and actually enjoy their work. In the process of listening and sorting the wheat from the chaff, what one discovers is new data or theory that actually is valuable, and often uncovered by flawed people, like Jordan, who are very motivated to find that data. This is why you should learn critical thinking, and do listen to all sides. Even somewhat biased sources can be valuable because they can be so motivated to dig up important data that others are not motivated to find. You should find yourself doubting and rejecting some things, and that is healthy. What you should not be doing is trying to silence or cancel people, or calling people names, or judging people by who they listen to.

As an atheist who has found a moral system of belief out of the remnants of really justifiable work, I perhaps would be more critical of Jordan’s work on religion. But I might be right in theory, but wrong in practice. What if, I wonder, Jordan’s work on religion helps millions of disaffected young men and women go on to have lovely and healthy lives as moderately religious people? It might be the case that I am literally correct that Jordan is being unscientific here, but some of the stories Jordan emphasizes might have important moral lessons in them that could raise thriving.

I am skeptical, though, because I see some lovely thriving in many in the atheistic scientific skeptical community that I spring from. I have come to acknowledge, though, that most humans have a religious tendency that needs some kind of direction to help thriving. For me, that semi-religious tendency tends to be more towards the story of Socrates and the skeptical schools of Athens, and then the Enlightenment. When combined with justifiable moral philosophy and law, logic and empiricism, I and many others are not morally deficient to religious folks, and nor are we lacking in awe for the world.

The idea that new-atheism failed to produce generations of people thriving seems to be a message that Jordan has embraced. He may be right, but I love the pursuit of what is literally true. For Jordan, he seems to find a lot of solace in talking about religious stories, and indeed I might as well if I ever get the time. But for me, I find a lot of solace in the work of Plato, Aristotle, Milton, Locke, JS Mill, Popper, and in the experimental branch of sociocognitive psychology (and the other sciences). I’m happy with that because I have a high tolerance for putting the truth above feelings, but I understand that for some a religion is more desired. If somebody really needs religion, I would much prefer they turn to some enlightened version of a well-tested and reformed religion that has embraced ethics of freedom, than they go without and become vulnerable to cultic neo-religions such as critical social justice.

So I am open minded and skeptical of some of Jordan’s work, and I know my tight adherence to falsifiability is going to be about as compelling to audiences as a nerd in a library would be. I do happen to think falsifiable theories are more moral than unfalsifiable ones, but I do wonder if Jordan is carefully picking stories in the world of religion which in some strange way have survived hundreds of years of a loose kind of empirical testing. Those stories that survived this process of empirical testing may have led to thriving in populations that then reproduced the religious stories. I cannot be sure, though, if all of those stories are as morally defensible as the last few hundred years of rational moral philosophy. For now, with me, the latter seems better, but I still have a great deal of respect for Jordan as he creatively works with both religious stories and moral philosophy to help others.

Nevertheless, I admire Jordan more for his defense of free speech, his insights into the evils of compelled speech, his commentary of postmodernism, his explaining of how the Soviet Union and Fascism were horrific, and his empirical work in psychology. All I would say, though, is use critical thinking, think for your self, and do not follow pop psychology gurus (listen, but do not follow). There usually are trade-offs or side effects to following psychology gurus without critical thought, at least with past psychologists that has been true. With past unfalsifiable psychology gurus such as Freud, I think the side effects were not worth it. Nevertheless, with better psychologists like Jung or Peterson, I do not yet know what those trade-offs might be, if any.