Jordan Peterson: genius

Shrewd marketing taps modern global trends

J. Peterson. Source: University of Toronto

Like many, you may know Jordan Peterson only from what you have seen on social or conventional media.

It’s possible you caught him on a Munk Debate a few years ago alongside the unlikely ally polymath Stephen Fry arguing against political correctness. The links are to the video and a transcript, in that order.

But beyond that, you likely do not know much of Peterson and care even less.

You are in the majority, globally and likely in the majority in either the United States or Canada.

But millions of loyal fans in both countries wait for Peterson’s latest words.

To be sure, being a celebrity these days is not like it used to be.  We tend to think of fans as people who have a fanatic devotion – the word fan comes from fanatic – to the celebrity. Think of all the teenaged girls in the 1940s through the 1960s and pop music stars like Frank Sinatra,  Elvis, or the Beatles.

In Peterson’s case, as with many modern celebrities, the people who loathe Jordan Peterson are as important to Peterson’s celebrity as the people who buy his books and flock to his public talks.  Perhaps they are more important.  There certainly are a lot of them.  They are every bit as vocal about their dislike of Peterson as his disciples are in declaring their loyalty to him and his ideas.

Consider that Munk Debate as a good example.  The motion for debate was simple enough: “Be it resolved: what you call political correctness, I call progress.”  The wording was general enough so that the two Americans arguing in favour of it – Michelle Goldberg and Michael Eric Dyson – had plenty of room to find points to make and evidence to back it up. Instead, both Goldberg and Dyson made the debate about Jordan Peterson. They attacked him relentlessly. Such is Peterson’s power.

Both Peterson and Fry talked about other things and had no trouble doing better than the two Americans, who were also abysmal debaters.  Fry,  in particular, argued against the modern puritanism of political correctness his points made all the more powerful from the start by admitting that he disagreed with Peterson on many things.

I'm standing next to someone with whom I have, you know, differences, shall we say, in term of politics and all kinds of other things, precisely because I think all this has got to stop — this rage, resentment, hostility, intolerance; above all, this with-us-or-against-us certainty.

A Grand Canyon has opened up in our world. The fissure, the crack, grows wider every day. Neither side can hear a word that the other shrieks; nor do they want to. While these armies and propagandists in the culture wars clash, down below in the enormous space between the two sides, the people of the world try to get on with their lives, alternately baffled, bored, and betrayed by the horrible noises and explosions that echo all around. I think it’s time for this toxic, binary, zero sum madness to stop before we destroy ourselves.

Last week, Peterson declared in a poorly edited National Post piece that he had resigned from his position as a psychology professor at the University of Toronto.  “There were many reasons,”  Peterson wrote, “including the fact that I can now teach many more people and with less interference online.”

He then added specifics.  The first was that his “white, male, heterosexual” students had little prospect of getting a job due to the current political climate on university campuses. It was a moral issue, Peterson wrote:   “How can I accept prospective researchers and train them in good conscience knowing their employment prospects to be minimal?”

Peterson didn’t have to prove anything. His goal was to rile people. That’s why there were lots of triggers in the op-ed.  Peterson called his academic colleagues “craven.”  He attacked diversity, equity, and inclusion, what he described as the “Trinity” of woke beliefs.  And on it went.

Worked perfectly, too.  Social media exploded, mostly among the most important part of Peterson’s fanbase, that is, the self-described progressives, the woke, the social justice warriors.  They attack him and drive his supporters into an ever-tighter circle, more passionately committed than ever to support Peterson when they buy his next book or sell out his next speech.

Peterson is a psychologist.  He understands how people think.  He also understands group dynamics.  It shows in the way he has grown into such an international celebrity spouting what is really nothing more than the self-help drivel that used to be limited to late-night infomercials or interviews where an author matched wits with Ricki, Montel, Sally Jessie, Geraldo, and Maury. 

What none seemed to notice last week is that Peterson didn’t actually resign.  He is an emeritus professor, as he tweeted last fall and said again in the National Post piece.  That doesn’t go to quitters. It goes to people who retire.

The University of Toronto policy is absolutely clear on this. “Effective July 1, 2009,  the rank of Emeritus was extended to Professors, Associate Professors, Senior Lecturers, and Librarians (III & IV) in continuing appointments that [sic] have elected to retire or are retired.”  An emeritus professor gets some privileges and there may be pay involved beyond a pension. What’s happening as far as pay or perks goes in Peterson’s case isn’t clear.

Doesn’t matter. What does matter is that Peterson didn’t give up anything he valued.  To the contrary, he doesn’t have to teach classes, submit grades, deal with the university bureaucracy, and do any of the other things that make university life a drudge for the ambitious. Now he can count on a steady paycheque while he devotes his full attention to making much more money from books, speeches, and media appearances. Plus he can bill himself as an emeritus professor of psychology at the top university in Canada.  That just adds to his cred lecturing in Brisbane, Baton Rouge, or Bucharest.

Jordan Peterson is a genius self-promoter.  Last week, he launched the next phase of his career and his fanbase played their predictable part.

Peterson-haters are not stupid people. Many of them already understand or would have no trouble understanding that what they do helps him.  They just get greater psychological benefit out of expressing their hatred of him. It makes them feel good.  Most obviously, it gives them a social pay-off from their public displays of hatred. If their antics online, the extreme language, the intensity, the swooning, wrist-to-forehead drama of it strikes you as a bit too much, then you are on the right track.  It *is*a performance. It is a show.  A display to remind everyone they have the same views as the people they want to connect with.  All of that social and psychological need trumps any pragmatism.   

It is also very much the way Americans carry on these days. That’s not a coincidence.  Peterson’s key market is American and the folks that hate him  - genuinely or merely performatively – are either Americans or people who take their social cues from the United States.

This is nothing new.  American culture has long dominated the western world and since the Second World War Americans have set the trend and the tone globally. The Internet  - which is where Peterson and his fanbase spend much of their time. – just spreads American cultural norms farther and faster than ever before.

What is new, as noted here before, is that many of Peterson’s fans outside the United States no longer make any distinctions between where themselves and America. In France, some schools have been renamed for Rosa Parks, an American with no connection to France but who is well-known as a symbol of the struggle within the United States against racial segregation and anti-Black racism.

In Canada, we may not see that sort of thing but there are other signs. In Newfoundland and Labrador, there is the academic who retweeted a picture of a school fundraising event and adds the caption “we” could fund education instead. The original tweet was from South Dakota.  Another local activist found it offensive that a local company used the word “plantation” in reference to an early English settlement in Newfoundland because the word is synonymous with the enslavement of Africans in the United States.  There were no plantations in Newfoundland that relied on slave labour as in the United States or the British Caribbean, even though a recent CBC three-part documentary said otherwise.

The series claimed to unearth a pile of secrets. None of it was new information. It came off like a combination of The Valor and the Horror meets Al Capone’s vault. The series took a few isolated events in Newfoundland and overlaid them with a false narrative based on American experience. A list of books for further learning about Newfoundland and Labrador and slavery using books about the United States that were irrelevant to events in Newfoundland and Labrador in the present or at any point in the past.

While some people - especially mainlanders - were agog, the series ignored far more than it mentioned of actual events in Newfoundland history and ignored the most obvious question of all:  if – as the series claimed  - all colonies were built on enslaved Black labour, why isn’t there a single example of any plantation or fishing business in 17th or 18th century Newfoundland that used enslaved Africans as labour?

The fact there wasn't a Black-crewed fishing fleet or that enslaved Africans didn’t clear agricultural land in Newfoundland is actually bizarre given the prevalence of enslaved Africans in the New World and the role they played in the global economy.  But aside from a handful of individuals who brought to Newfoundland one or two enslaved people with them from elsewhere,  there simply were no Tara-like plantations here. Not a one, except in the imaginations of the modern-day Twitterati and CBC managers who need to fill up a quota of what is popularly known by the racist acronym BIPOC stories.

The CBC series even claimed a person who was not enslaved was a slave, just to fit it into the story the writers wanted to tell. It was a pretty naked falsehood to anyone who wanted to check. At the same time, the writers ignored the well-known story of Lanier Phillips as well as black-faced mummers in 19th century Newfoundland. They ignored the enslaved Africans deported from New York in 1741 to Newfoundland and other British colonies in the New World. They clearly didn’t know anything about nor did they care about Newfoundland and the history of the people who lived here. They just had a story to tell, in the same way an American sit-com a few weeks ago mentioned Newfoundland as the place a character wound up after cat-fishing another. Like the episode of Get Smart that featured Tom Poston as an evil scientist with his lair on an island off the coast of Newfundlund. Or Indiana Jones, who skipped through St. John’s with Marcus Brodie, on his way to find the Holy Grail.

via r/newfoundland

That shows not only how poorly researched the series was, but how easily it fits into the local elite trend of treating all things American as if they were the same in Newfoundland and Labrador, regardless of the truth. That trend is part of a global one.

It also shows how big a market of fans Peterson can tap now that he will be devoting all his time to self-promotion instead of torturing grad students. There’s a global pool of folks who adopt American ideas and behaviour as readily as they used to put on American jeans or smoke American cigarettes or lap up American movies and television. When people who think they are progressive or even communist are actually as Americanised as Donald Trump, Peterson could make a lot of money from both the people who love him and the people who loathe him, in that very modern, very American way.

---