So spoke Jordan Peterson

Two years ago, Jordan Peterson was a very unknown psychology professor at Toronto University with a single published book, Understanding maps: Architectural Faith [ang. Maps of Meanwhile: And with some other scientific public that bear his name on political psychology, personality, and other topics ʹmeinstreem of psychology.

Today, Peterson is famous. His second book, 12 life rules: An Antitode on Chaos [ang.12 rules for Life: An Antitode to Chaos, published in January, soon entered the best - selling Amazon books. His public laws are much followed, YouTube videos have received over 40 million views, and he already has over 500 thousand followers on Twitter. Its eight thousand supporters give it $660,000 per month, or an average of $10.93 per person, on the website created by them Pantero. In exchange, they get a Q&A session with their mentor on YouTube.

The psychologist's call depends on his ability to speak on what one would call a masculity crisis in the West: the deep sense of futility and weakness that a growing number of men say is the cause of globalisation, technological changes, and civil rights acquired by different ethnic feminists and minorities. Tyler Cowen and David Brooks call Peterson the present public intellectual. They may be right. But his fame is a symptom of the crisis he claims to solve. And his style and success are miniature repetitions of populist authoritarian policies that are rising across the West.

Peterson's new mediocre book on rules is not particularly radical. Most of these rules come from ancient ethical traditions or are simply part of what we call conglomerates. Number 3, for example: “Be friends with people who want the best for you” It's perfectly reasonable, but also an aphorus dating back to Aristotle and Confucius. Much more interesting than the text itself is the stage show that is accompanying Peterson: lecture tours, self-help web site, Internet memes, and social media presence.

The international marketing campaign to help publish the second book became far more important than its own book. In January, an interview in Channel 4, in which Peterson embarrassed the presence of Kathy Newman when he asked him about his refusal to respect the preference over the individual names of the transplantors became viral on the internet. Peterson's followers quickly distributed it on the internet, placing such titles as “Jordan Peterson is being broadcast in the Transgier debate, leaving the television conference speechless. ”

Peterson is highly trained in such things. A 13-part TV series based on his 1999 book, Understanding Maps, offered the audience a brief presentation of his thinking and personality, but it was a series of videos that attacked the political accuracy published on YouTube in 2016, which first received widespread attention. His rise in fame continued in 2017, when he appeared in the Canadian Senate and denounced the C-16 Bill, which stipulated that Canada's Human Rights Act in 1977 added gender identity and gender expression in forbidden spaces for discrimination. Peterson portrayed it as the latest attempt by elites to undermine Western civilization. “One thing I won't do is use the words made by neo-marketers postmodern, who are playing a special gender identity game as an addition to their punishable philosophy,” he said at a event sponsored by the Harvard University Open Camp Initiative in April 2017. He was later publicly denounced as a fanatic but also praised as a hero of free speech.

Peterson's philosophy is hard to grasp because it has been constructed by equal parts of an apocalypse alarm and simple advice. Like Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, whom Peterson cites as an intellectual influence, he wants to think about the great dualities of order and chaos. Randy, according to him, consists of everything that is routine and predictable, while chaos corresponds to everything that is not predictable and that is new.

For Peterson, living well requires walking between the two. He is not the first thinker to have spoken of such a thing; another his hero, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, returning to ancient Greece, suggests that life is best lived between Apollo's harmony and Dionysus' madness. But while Peterson claims that both chaos and order are equally important, he is largely focused on the dangers of the second and therefore legitimizes his rules.

In his book and speeches, Peterson describes chaos as <x0femin.” Order or order, of course, is “masculin.” Thus, the threat of being overwhelmed by chaos is a threat to being dominated by female girls. The tension between chaos and order is played both in the personal sphere and in the wider cultural sphere, when chaos is promoted by what he calls postmodernmarkists “

At the heart of Peterson's social program is the idea that the feminist attack must be resisted. A man needs to be strong and dominant. And, for Peterson's mind, even women want it. He tells us in 12 life rules: If they're healthy, they don't want guys. They want men... if they're strong, they want someone stronger for them. If they're wise, they love someone even wiser. The women of the “healthmaker” want men leaving behind. This is the reason Peterson repeatedly refers to the motive of Jung's hero - a warrior who submits the female power of chaos. Be a real man, he tells us.

This mechanism relates to Jung but also makes a cartoon of Nietzsche's philosophy, especially of Ubermansch, or overhuman, the dreary effects of a decadent culture. “I'm not human,” said Nietzsche once. I'm a dynamite! ” Dynamite, from Greek dunamis, means “Power/power.” That's what Peterson's men are after. It's no coincidence that one of his lecture videos is called “How to get up to the top of the dominant hierarchy. ”

But although he condemns the ideology of victimism, Peterson is inclined to almost sorely speak of young people in a difficult situation in Western community culture. He describes them as objects of a great postmodernist conspiracy, thrown into a world in which they are denigrated as devil's incarnation, oppression, patriarchal pathological order.

Peterson's tears reveal the fraud involved in his work. Persisting that his listeners are in need of guidance, Peterson puts himself in the position that the social theories call the charismatic “.” Max Weber, who introduced the concept around 1920, described it as “a certain quality of an individual from whom it is seen as extraordinary and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least more specific power.” charismatic leaders like Peterson promote themselves as visionary heroes, lonely voices shouting in savagery. Uncounted with self - doubt or self - criticism and then failing to endure intellectual care, their rhetoric is large, intense, and apocalypseic.

This is the style by which Peterson addresses and fosters uncertainty among men who view their traditional identities as they slip and are moved by the idea that they will be displaced by members of the sub-combined or marginalized groups. Trapped into a network of performance contradictions, he condemns ID policies, declaring the individual's “Sovietity,” but his rhetoric leads to traditional group identities of white male followers against postmodern chaos. He condemns the culture of victimisation by encouraging young men to see themselves as victims.

But the charismatic leadership has never been about logical consisting or even rational timing. The charismatic leaders hold functions in time of the violent social changes, when long-standing social identities are threatened. They promote a glorious future in which the groups they speak of take the right place and that their enemies may be able. In exchange for these promises, charismatic leaders feel worship, and even delusional devotion by their supporters.

Peterson is no exception. Following his course was like taking psychedelic drugs, but without drugs,” said a former student. I remember students crying because they wouldn't listen to Peterson anymore. Instead of resisting such idealization, Peterson encourages it. I think I've learned and discovered things that people of our time desperately had to know,” he writes in Patreon.

There is, of course, an indigenous relationship between the charismatic leadership and political authoritarianism. Peterson, as an academic with a deep professional interest in propaganda and psychoanalysis, must read essay, “Psicology of Propagande” by British psychoanalyst Roger Money-Kerle, who visited Germany during the 1933 elections that brought Hitler to power. After hearing him speak this last, Money-Kerle concluded that charismatic authoritarian leaders initially feel depression and despair in their audience, then paranoid terror from a killer enemy, before talking about offering salvation through a rule that does not take into account the reasonable disk. Money-Kerle thought our anxieties made us touch on some kind of rhetoric that charismatic leaders explode at. At this point, Peterson resembles populists, such as US President Donald Trump.

Unlike Trump, Peterson at least gives a little intellectual finish, boasting Nietzschen as a prominent thinker. But he fails to give this dignity enough consideration. For Nietzschen, power is a source of salvation, but it rejects the mind of revenge and sacrifice. That is clear in the attacks made by Nietzsche to the image of the church priest. Nietzsche understood the temptations of such a leadership on men by encouraging their inadequacy. Unlike Peterson, however, Nietzsche knew the personal and social cost of such a feat.

Peterson would do well to read more closely from “chapter 78 so Zarathustra”, entitled “The Donkey Festival.” Here we find Zarathustre, the teacher of the superman, at the end of his lectures on self-confidence and perfectionism, surrounded by a mass of willing worshipers to bow down to the young master. Zarathustra hates overlapping like that. And at the end of the festival, the disgusting Zarathustra abandons its supporters. What Zarathustra finally says about his worshipers ' ears is a reminder that the journey of a hero can easily inspire blind worship for the hero.

Remember, Dr. Peterson.

Translating from Periscope, taken from Foreign Policy