Today, Explained - Jordan Peterson explains himself

Episode Date: May 14, 2018

Jordan Peterson has gone from being an obscure Canadian academic to a kind of political rock star for the right. Overnight. Vox’s Zack Beauchamp unpacks Peterson’s controversial ideology and explains how the clinical psychologist gained a following of millions. Then, Sean Rameswaram gives Peterson a call and asks him to explain himself. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Mattress Firm is a place that sells mattresses all over the country. Some of them are cheap, some of them are expensive, but that just depends on your perspective. However, either way, cheap or expensive, you can go to mattressfirm.com slash podcast and using the coupon code podcast10, get 10% off your mattress purchase, so long as you use that code, before June 5th. Earlier this year, an editorial in the New York Times suggested that a Canadian university professor named Jordan Peterson might be, quote, the most influential public intellectual in the Western world right now. You know, that's not my take, but he is profoundly influential. Zach Beecham covers Jordan Peterson for Vox. I am a senior correspondent where I cover the world.

And part of the world is Jordan Peterson. Correct. He is in, on our earth. I asked him how this sort of random Canuck became such a divisive political figure, how he amassed an army of mostly young men, millions of followers, basically overnight. There's no doubt that he's been elevated for a reason.

It's because this guy who was prior to recently a fairly obscure Canadian academic specialist in psychology has built this giant audience. This is somebody with an almost cult following. And I don't mean that in the sense of pejorative cult. I mean it more in the sense of like, I'm a big Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan. And there are dudes who feel the same way about Jordan Peterson as I do about Joss Whedon's television shows. Fair enough. A fair comparison. Who is he? Where did he come from? So Peterson is a professor at the University of Toronto, and he specializes in the study of personality. According to all of the psychologists I spoke to when I've been reporting on him, very well respected in the subfield, which is, by the way, something that nobody outside of academic psychology cares about.

It's just like this is not the kind of thing that makes you a rock star most of the time. So then how did he get from there to the top of Amazon's bestseller list? It was October 2016 when he really started to become famous. And what happened is that at the time, the Canadian parliament was debating a bill called C-16, which was an anti-discrimination bill. Meaning, for instance, you can't be fired, refused an apartment, or service at a restaurant for being transgender. Also, changes to the criminal code, adding hate crime sentencing when someone is targeted for their gender identity or gender expression. And in September of that year, Peterson released a series of YouTube videos analyzing the law. The laws scare me. The doctrines behind the laws scare me.

And the people behind the doctrines also scare me. I think that generally they're a very bad combination of resentful, uninformed, and that's good enough. Resentful and uninformed, that's good enough. Now, he's not a lawyer. Yeah. He, in fact, kind of made a pseudo-mandatious argument, which is that the bill would prohibit anyone legally speaking from using someone's non-preferred pronoun. So if somebody wanted to be called he and you called them she, then you would be thrown in jail. This was the argument that he

was making. This is not what the bill actually does. But in a certain sense, it didn't matter. The high profile opposition to this bill and what he saw as the excesses of political correctness made him super famous. Right. He went on TV all the time. At one point in one TV interview, he said, and this is a direct quote. If they find me, I won't pay it. If they put me in jail, I'll go on a hunger strike.

I'm not doing this. That's that. I'm not using the words that other people require me to use, especially if they're made up by radical left-wing ideologues. And this vehement opposition, including some highly publicized confrontations with student protesters at Toronto where he teaches, where he refused to call one of them by their chosen pronoun. I don't believe that using your pronouns

is going to do you any good in the long run. I think it'll do quite the contrary. And so that's what really catapulted him from Canadian fame to international fame, and especially American fame, is that he became a kind of conservative cult icon who, because he's articulate and smart. And like I said, he's a really well-established academic with good credentials. So he makes these arguments with a sense of authority and verbal dexterity. You don't often see from like right-wing identity pundits. And so it's helped to make him super internet famous.

Let's talk a bit about his ideology more broadly. I'm sure you can't just hang your hat on saying, I don't want to use gender pronouns. You have to have a little more there. Yeah, it's built out. And this is just complicated and weird and I want to foreground it by saying it's mostly not accurate as far as intellectual history.

Okay. Just because I'm going to have to run through all of this without being able to debunk specific parts of it. So just full disclaimer. Yeah, this is weird stuff. So like reading a bit of what Jordan Peterson's all about like at least his ideological underpinnings for everything we've talked about so far it feels like it comes down

to two big ideas which is how he feels about marxism and post-modernism and how these two things are very different from how i don't know the rest of like established academia feels about them is that fair? Wrong? Yeah. Yeah. That's accurate. The mainstream understanding of this distinction is Marxism is a theory about the economy and

class and history. You know, things are about who has control over what tangible resources. Whereas postmodernism is in many ways in reaction to Marxism. It's a focus on how things operate on the basis of people's relationship with each other, on social identity, and how reality is not as knowable as we think it is. And so it's in tension with Marxism,

which is like, you know, we know how the world works, and it's through class oppression. So how does this look through the eyes of Jordan Peterson? Jordan Peterson thinks that postmodernism, which again is a very, very broad term for lots of different things, and I was giving you a very simplified version of the ideas. Thank you. He thinks that postmodernism is just secret Marxism. It's a Marxism that replaces the

discussion of the capitalists as the oppressors with identity-based groups as the oppressors. So society is structured along the lines of oppression on the basis of gender and sexual identity and sexual orientation. And so he thinks that if the postmodernists get their way, it'll basically be the equivalent of a Soviet-style communist state just on the basis of gender identity and sexism. It's like, I don't know, woke Stalinism. Woke Stalinism. So, wow, just to be sure here, you got your regular Marxism, like, oppression-based, it's all about class. Peterson who thinks people fighting for gender or racial equality are like secret Marxists trying to

create some like identity-based communist state. That seems sort of extreme. It is. I mean, he doesn't – it's really important to get that his expertise as an academic is not in this stuff. He's not a political theorist. He doesn't have a background in political theory. He claims it sometimes, but he doesn't. And the actual experts would dismiss all of this as ridiculous. But it makes a certain kind of sense if you look at things from a particular angle. Yeah. And has proved extremely popular.

Today, I'm going to be talking about why I love Professor Jordan B Peterson. Despite what you think about him there is no denying the professor's impact. His videos amassing more than 45 million views on YouTube. I believe that we are fully right now in an idea revolution. Wow, like I think I'm pretty good with articulating my thoughts but I'm not great. But he's like perfect. And he just came out with this book that's sold like almost a million copies, right?

Yeah, the book's called 12 Rules for Life, An Antidote to Chaos. And it was published in January of this year and it skyrocketed to the top of international bestseller lists. Like it got super popular on Amazon. The rules are weird. Each chapter of the book has a title, which is one of the rules.

So the first chapter, for example, is stand up straight with your shoulders back. Good advice. And the last chapter is pet a cat when you encounter one on the street. It sounds pretty reasonable. That does not sound like using they to identify a transgender person will lead to Soviet style gulags. No, like, look, that's the thing, right? The rules in and of themselves can be separated from the weirdo political ideology.

Like, you don't have to believe that Michel Foucault is secretly trying to create gulags to believe you shouldn't lie. Okay. But the way he goes about justifying the rules is very much connected to, like, his weirdo set of ideas.

So, for example, the first rule first rule thing about standing up straight. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Which. Yeah. So this is all about lobsters. Pardon me?

Yeah. Lobsters. I beg your pardon? The crustacean. They live in the sea and they pinch things. Sorry. Dominant lobsters. They stand up straight and big and as much lobster stand up.

You know what I mean? Sure. Sort of lie. Yeah. Straight Yeah. I don't know. And lobsters who have lost dominance competitions or struggles, they like scrunch up and try to make themselves smaller and less threatening. I see. And so

Peterson says that this actually matters for people too. People are a lot like lobsters. He says this very explicitly. If you do not stand up straight, it actually causes your brain chemistry to change. It causes your serotonin levels, one of the chemicals that makes you happy, to go down. And so he thinks that posture is directly related to your success and quality of your life. One time a Jordan Peterson fan got mad at me for coverage they didn't like

and sent an email to me and the text was just bad lobster, lying lobster, low serotonin lobster. Whoa. I want to emphasize that this is, again, pseudoscience. Yeah. People are not like lobsters. Lobsters technically do not have brains. They have another thing that is roughly analogous to a brain. But the point is they're so dissimilar from us that you can't draw conclusions about human society from lobster posture. Right. Like that's very silly. It sounds like the kind of thing that would make for like a good thing to put in your book to sell some copies. Exactly. It's very easily digestible and, you know, gives people a clear framework for understanding how to act. Yeah.

But the other thing that this links to is it's kind of a naturalization of hierarchies. So he says in the book, we were struggling for position before we had skin or hands or lungs or bones. There was little more natural than culture. Dominance hierarchies are older than trees. So the dominance hierarchy, the standing up straight stuff, that's what it's about. There was little more natural than culture. Dominance hierarchies are older than trees. So the dominance hierarchy, the standing up straight stuff, that's what it's about. It's about asserting your position in the human dominance hierarchy. But this also serves to subtly say that if you're in a subordinate position, it's your fault. Let's say you feel like you're a woman and you're oppressed by virtue of your gender.

It's your fault. You really should be taking responsibility for your actions. Now, he's speaking mostly to young men, but there's kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy about it, right? Because I don't think a lot of women want to be told that being sexually harassed is their fault. But that's the upshot of his ideas. Now, he would deny believing this if you asked him. He would say this is all misrepresentation. You're putting words in my mouth. He loves to do that. It's one of his favorite argumentative tactics. Maybe I'll ask him. You should ask him. I'll try and ask him.

Please do. That's going to be a killer transition if we get him. Yeah. But that's the logical conclusion of his ideas is that oppressions are natural. And so that's how the stuff, the anti-identity politics stuff and the advice for life blends together and connects into a kind of ideological tapestry. After the break, we go straight to the source. Jordan Peterson himself. This is Today Explained. We'll see you next time. guarantee. So in theory, you can sleep on this mattress for like three months and then change your mind and they'll figure that out for you. And if that isn't nice, I don't know what is. Hello, Jordan. This is Sean. How are you?

Hi, Sean. How's it going? Not bad. Thanks. Thanks for making time for us again. Yeah, my pleasure. I guess you've gone through a bit of a transformation recently, I think, from being, you know, a psychologist at the University of Toronto to being sort of a celebrated author and a celebrity and someone who has a huge following online. I wonder just briefly if you could tell me a bit about how that transition has been for you. Well, it's gone from rocky to quite good. I mean, initially, when I made my first videos, it was rocky because my job was at risk and perhaps my practice as a clinician as well. But as this has progressed over the last year and a half, it's become increasingly positive. And I think the reason for that is because what I'm saying is being listened to by lots of people and it's not fundamentally a political message.

You know, Justin Trudeau once tweeted out earlier this year, it's incredibly inspiring and motivating to see so many people come out to support women's rights. We see you, we hear you, and Maryam Monsef and our government will keep fighting for gender equality in Canada. Hashtag Women's March 2018. Your response to that tweet was, is that the murderous equity doctrine, Justin Trudeau? Do you understand where that leads? Yeah. Or do you think you'll do it differently? Sure. My question is, you know, sometimes I read things you write, and they seem to incite the sort of toxicity we see on the internet that you seem on some level to want to avoid. You seem to want people to live their best possible lives. And then when I see tweets like

that or hear some of the speech you use sometimes, it feels opposed to that self-betterment. I think that's because, with all due respect, that you fail to understand the danger of the equity doctrine. Look at it this way. In the 20th century, we saw mass murders take place on the right and the left. And we have some sense of when the right goes too far. Now, we know perfectly well that in the 20th century on the left, about 100 million people were killed in the name of political repression. But we don't have any clear guidelines for deciding when people on the left go too far, although clearly they can go far. And my study of totalitarianism, both on the right and the left, has indicated that the

left go too far when they start to push equity doctrines. So you might think that all that Trudeau's doing is trying to be nice to women, but I see something far darker underneath that. And with all due respect, I suspect I'm more informed about that particular element of history than you are. That might be fair, but I feel like with all due respect, you might incite more hateful feelings on the internet than I do, too. It's possible, but I would also take issue with that. I think that the bulk consequence of what I've done so far is that I've convinced thousands of young men to stay away from the alt-right, for example, and move them much more towards an individual sovereignty and liberal position.

I want to talk about oppression for a moment, if you don't mind. Sure. I'm going to play a little clip here from one of your lectures so that we're really grounded in what you said. You're oppressed, you're oppressed, you're oppressed, you're oppressed. God only knows why. Maybe you're too short or you're not as beautiful as you could be. You know, your parent, your grandparent was a serf, likely, because almost everybody's great great grandparent was. It's like, you know, and you're not as smart as you could be. And you have a sick relative and you have your own physical problems.

And it's like, frankly, you're a mess and you're oppressed in every possible way, including your ancestry and your biology. And the entire sum of human history has conspired to produce victimized you with all your individual pathological problems. It's like, yes, true. Do you ever worry that saying something like that might create a false equivalency between different kinds of oppression? No, no, because I'm not willing to view the world through the oppression identity politics lens. And I think the fact that we do that virtually reflexively now is extraordinarily dangerous. You know, and even if there are ethnic differences in historical oppression on some timescales, which is undoubtedly true, that doesn't mean that we divide people into tribes now and we assign blame for those historical inequities. All it'll do is tribalize us. And you can see that happening like mad in the West and in Europe right now. It's very dangerous. I grew up in Toronto, and I'm just speaking from the perspective of someone who experienced, you know, like sort of systemic racial prejudice everywhere I went. You know, that's my framework. I don't know if it's neo-Marxism or post-modernism or if it's just my reality.

I mean, there is obviously there's arbitrary obstacles standing in people's ways. Some of those have to do with gender, some of them have to do with race and prejudice and bias and all that. But the landscape around us with regards to those things is improving very rapidly. It's much better than it has been in the past. And I still think that the proper way to construe the situation is to look to yourself as an individual. Don't you think that that worldview doesn't necessarily apply to every situation? I mean, you're saying we're doing better, but, you know, New York's doing better than Alabama. Toronto's doing better than Wisconsin. There's just any number of experiences there that you're not really considering.

Yeah, but Alabama is doing a lot better than Alabama was 30 years ago. The fact that there are still places where prejudice is a problem is self-evident. People are tribal by nature, but we don't contend with it by turning to an identity politics view of the world. It's not going to help. And I see Trudeau doing that all the time. To return to your initial question, I don't think he has any idea what sort of fire he's playing with. When I see that tweet from Justin Trudeau, I see a guy who's

saying like, hey, it's great to see all these women out in solidarity, supporting equal rights for women. He wasn't supporting equal rights. He was supporting equality of outcome. And he was the same person who formulated his cabinet, was one of his first acts as leader to ensure that his cabinet was 50% women and 50% men, despite the fact that only 25% of the elected people were women. He selected his cabinet on the basis of their genitalia. That's not an appropriate use of discriminative power. It's not the way you select competent people. But Jordan, haven't men been selecting cabinets based on genitalia for like centuries? No, I think that's an insane way of looking at

the world. I really do believe that, you know, you really think that the right way to look at the world, the entire history of the world, that was up until we became enlightened in like the year 2000, what men were primarily doing was repressing women. I don't think women were even allowed to be in these rooms for much of the entire history of the world. You accept, you accept this oppression narrative without question. You know, 120 years ago- I don't, I don't accept anything without question. I'm just telling you a fact. That's not a fact. Yes, it is. No, it's not. Women were, women were expected to stay home and take care of the kids and cook a meal.

Women didn't have reliable birth control until 1960. You know, don't you think that played a role? Don't you think the fact that they didn't have reliable care for their menstrual cycle? Are you blaming women for not being allowed to lead countries, to lead nations? Because they didn't have... They were allowed to lead nations. There were queens in many countries. I think you have no idea how much this oppression narrative has saturated your thinking.

Even though it's self-evident that what happened for most of human history was that men and women were terribly oppressed by the conditions of nature and not by each other. Do you think, is it not true that in the United States and Canada at least, women weren't allowed to vote until much later than men? They weren't allowed to hold elections? What's your point? You think that was merely a consequence of men's oppression of women? You think that's the only causal factor at play? No, I mean, my point is that to see Justin Trudeau say, I'm going to make a point of appointing a cabinet that's equally male and female

might just be Justin Trudeau saying, like, wouldn't it be nice to have women in the room? Yeah, it might be, but it might be his absolute naivety and his swallowing of the victimization narrative and his inability to properly formulate a cabinet because he didn't want to do the difficult decision-making and would rather look good on a virtue-signaling basis, too.

I agree. It could be that. And I can have mine. We'll see how it plays out. I'm a person of color. I went to college with a white man. We shared a bedroom. We were very close. We were roommates. And he had a pretty tough childhood. And he would often lament that the university we went to considered a person of color's story more compelling than his. And I would sometimes find it difficult to have that conversation with him because I too felt like a person of color's story in a country that practiced slavery for a very long time was pretty compelling. What percentage of Eastern Europeans were serfs before 1880?

I don't have that information with me right now. Right. Well, it's a relevant piece of information if you're going to talk about historical inequality. I mean, like I said, the past is absolutely dreadful and most people lived under absolutely brutal conditions. Are you kind of saying like everyone's been a slave at some point? Well, read your history and find out. That isn't what I'm saying. That's how it was. It just feels like a little slippery because then everyone's always on the same playing

field and that's just not the reality of our society. It's your theory, but it's not mine. There's some systemic bias in favor of the majority in all countries, and that accounts for a proportion of people's failure and success, but it certainly doesn't account for all of it. And yes, the farther back you look in history, the more terrible you find human people's situations to be. And if you're going to bring all that forward into the future in the form of guilt, there's going to be real hell to pay. Okay, well, thanks again for making time for Today Explained today, Jordan.

No problem. I hope we didn't just, you know, butt heads the whole time. I don't think so. Yeah. These aren't straightforward issues, and they're going to cause some heat and noise when they're ironed out. Conversations don't have to be easy to be worthwhile. That interview got more contentious than any we have ever done on this show. Jordan Peterson and I both see the world as fundamentally unfair, but in two totally different ways.

I think at times I could see his point. I'm not sure if he ever saw mine. But the conversation felt like a start. It felt like a start, definitely not an end. But one thing I think Jordan and I can both agree on is that it's an important conversation to have. I'm Sean Ramos-Verm. This is Today Explained. Thanks for listening to our show. And here's one last reminder that if you go to mattressfirm.com slash podcast before June 5th and use the coupon code podcast10, you can get 10% off your next mattress purchase. Another option going into a mattress firm. Turns out they're all over the place. There might even be one in your neighborhood.

Thanks for listening.