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The phenomenon of Jordan Peterson is a historical accident. As a relatively obscure psychologist from Alberta, Canada, who made a small number of public appearances, few people anticipated his rise to fame. But a few random events, such as the explosion of Youtube as a social media platform, and a law that compelled people to use new gender pronouns, in addition to a disenchanted and apathetic new generation of young men, have catalyzed the growth of the Jordan Peterson brand.
Understanding Jordan Peterson
In his Youtube lectures, he spoke clearly about harsh truths that young people cared about – naivety, responsibility, willful blindness, relationships, and self-deception.
What separated Peterson from his colleagues was not his charismatic style – he is not very charismatic, and his voice has been comically compared to Kermit the Frog. The reason why Peterson’s Youtube lectures got so much attention was because of how he was able to relate intellectual ideas with everyday concerns.
Peterson is not your typical intellectual. He grew up in a rough town, with people who had real problems. Before he spent a considerable amount of time trying to help low-IQ individuals hold a job, and become a practicing psychiatrist, he spent his days in a freezing cold part of Canada with people who pissed their lives away on drugs and alcohol.
Peterson, despite his high degree of openness to new ideas, could never get away from his roots, from where he grew up, and what he knew about the real world. If you want a lesson in post-modernism, or Jungian psychology, or Marxist ideology, there are plenty of academics who will do a much better job than Peterson in explaining these ideas.
If, however, you are not an academic, and you are just looking for someone who speaks to your immediate concerns, and who addresses your desire to improve your own life in simple and tangible ways, then Peterson can help.
He will tell you things you have been told repeatedly as a child, such as “clean your room”, but he will frame the advice in mythological, psychological, and philosophical language, so that by the time you are done listening to him, the prospect of cleaning your room will no longer seem like the boring chore it once was, but as a profound battle against the eternal forces of chaos in the universe.
Like Tom Sawyer, he will make you want to do things that you previously thought you did not want to do. But unlike Sawyer’s friends who got a bad deal, many of Peterson’s recommendations are truly good for you. The best his detractors can say about him, is that he is wrong about his intellectual criticisms. But they cannot take away from him the fact that many people have benefitted from his advice practically, and many others will continue to do so in the future.
In that respect, Peterson represents an ideal that is rare to find, someone who makes accessible to the regular person, powerful ideas that will genuinely be good for them.
He has written three books so far.
Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief
This is Peterson’s first book and it took him decades to write By his account, he spent 3 hours a day for fifteen years writing this book. That’s a lot of hours. The book was inspired by reading the works of Carl Jung, Mircea Eliade, modern psychological literature, and the myths of various cultures across time. Peterson realized that similarities existed between these myths, just as Joseph Campbell did. And these similarities mattered, they shaped our morality, and what we oriented ourselves towards, what we valued and denigrated, and what gave life its meaning.
You Will Learn:
- What do archaic myths teach us about ourselves?
- How did different cultures form a common ethos?
- What does neurology teach us about how we pay attention to the world?
- What kind of wisdom, if any, can we derive from myths?
- The need to preserve order in the way we conceptualize the world partially explains how Nazism could have come about.
12 Rules For Life: An Antidote to Chaos
The book that sold 5 million copies, and Peterson’s first breakthrough success. It was based on a Quora request for simple rules to live by. In 12 Rules for Life, Peterson gives you advice that will help you avoid the traps of modern industrial society, including delayed adulthood, coddled children, censored speech, helicopter parenthood, Oedipal complexes, resentfulness men, and the pursuit of the frivolous over the meaningful.
You Will Learn:
- Why order is preferable to chaos, and the simple steps you can take to put your life together.
- The dangers of compelled or controlled speech, and how innocent intentions can lead to a dysfunctional world.
- The importance of mythological and religious ideas as a foundational structure for how we choose to behave in the world.
- The need for courage in the face of adversity. You need to be willing to fail, if you are going to succeed.
- How you can undergo self-transformation, and how you can benefit from Jungian ideas such as the shadow and individuation.
Beyond Order: !2 More Rules for Life
The danger of too much chaos is nihilism. The danger of too much order is totalitarianism. In 12 Rules for Life, Peterson emphasizes the need to avoid falling into either extreme, with an emphasis on fighting chaos. In the sequel, Beyond Order, Peterson tells us about what could go wrong when we become pathological in our pursuit of order.
You Will Learn:
- Why you should pursue things you love rather than the things you hate, even if the latter provide more structure and order.
- The importance of great art and literature, and why we should not be content with mere pragmatism.
- While chaos threatens us with instability and anxiety, unchecked order can petrify us into submission.
- Why we should be grateful in spite of our suffering.