You expect a Jordan Peterson audience to be mostly men. After all, the provocative Canadian academic – in Dublin this weekend for his show at the 3Arena tonight – has been called “the custodian of the patriarchy”, who speaks of a “crisis in masculinity”.
hen he last visited the city, four years ago, men’s rights groups handed out leaflets outside his show. A young man in the crowd said he wanted to hear the speakers (Peterson and American philosopher Sam Harris) address “the decay of Europe and how feminism has caused that” – to cheers from the audience. Another attendee wrote on Twitter about the overwhelming stench of male body odour in the crowd.
A more deeply male event was hard to imagine.
But Peterson is many things to many people. While many come for his pot-stirring philosophising, and provocative videos, his career-defining bestseller, 12 Rules for Life, is, essentially, a self-help book, with deceptively simple edicts – like ‘stand up straight with your shoulders back’, and ‘clean your room’.
For Jenny Mulhall, from Laois, the book had a huge impact on her life. “I am a person who has had many years of an anxiety disorder, and those rules have helped me a great deal”, she says.
“I’m not great with people. I’m on the spectrum, I have ADHD. I spend a lot of time minding family at home – and getting out in the world is very, very tricky for me.
“The message of that book is nearly like ‘fake it ’til you make it’. He also writes that you should treat yourself like someone you’re responsible for helping. That sounds obvious, but it was big-bang news for me.”
She credits Peterson with giving her the courage for a lot of personal growth. “I took my medication for ADHD and my medication for anxiety. And I did go back to work. And I do have a job. I am going to college. I’m putting my best foot forward. And I’m brave. And I put that at Mr Peterson’s door.”
Peterson became a rallying figure for those who railed against so-called woke politics
Peterson’s own story might give hope to late bloomers everywhere. He grew up in a religious household in the small Canadian town of Fairview, Northern Alberta. As a child he turned away from religion. “Religion was for the ignorant, weak, and superstitious,” he later wrote. “I stopped attending church, and joined the modern world.” He went to study to become a corporate lawyer.
During this period he became fascinated with the anti-totalitarian writings of George Orwell. He transferred into a political science degree, and focused on totalitarian regimes and the psychological underpinnings of the Cold War. Later he would say he sought reasons for “the general social and political insanity and evil of the world”.
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University challenge – Peterson resigned from the University of Toronto in protest at the policies of diversity, inclusion and equity. Picture by Richard Lautens/Toronto Star
After that he returned to undergraduate studies to do a degree in psychology, and eventually became a professor of psychology, first at Harvard, and then at the University of Toronto, as well as maintaining his own clinical practice.
By the time he published his first book in 1999 – the knotty 600-page Maps of Meaning – he was developing a reputation as an acerbic and highly quotable media performer and frequently appeared on TV shows in Canada.
But it was 2016 before he became well known outside his native country. In that year, the Canadian parliament debated a law known as C-16. This proposed an expansion of an existing Canadian human rights law to encompass discrimination on grounds of “gender identity and gender expression”.
Peterson, in a series of lectures, argued that such a change would constitute a serious attack on free speech.
Peterson became a rallying figure for those who railed against so-called woke politics.
When the Ontario Human Rights Commission noted that refusing to refer to a trans person by their chosen name and pronoun would likely constitute actionable discrimination, Peterson derided the group as “authoritarian” – and in a public debate at the University of Toronto he announced he was “not going to be a mouthpiece for language that I detest.”
The video of the debate went viral, and Peterson became a rallying figure for those who railed against so-called woke politics.
Pedigreed, cultured and combative, he was an entertainingly provocative interviewee. In a landscape in which conservative blowhards are a dime-a-dozen, he also seemed to have an intense sincerity – born, he says, of counselling patients.
When in 2018 he published 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, it sold by the million. His leap from the groves of academia into the centre of the public square was complete. Mixed in with the self-help exhortations and autobiographical asides were mini-treatises on gender politics.
Peterson believes there is a movement afoot, driven by the ‘radical left’, to eliminate hierarchies, which he considers part of the natural order of the world. In 12 Rules for Life he uses the example of lobsters – a species with hierarchies – to illustrate this point. The lobster has become a kind of symbol for Peterson’s fans, and appears on all manner of merchandise – T-shirts, coffee mugs, baseball caps.
David Walsh, the chairman of Irish men’s advocacy group, Men’s Voices, says that it was Peterson’s challenging of some of the tenets of modern feminism which brought him Peterson’s work.
“There is a lot of negative comment in Western media, our own included, around men, much of which centres on ideas like toxic masculinity. Peterson is one of the very few academics who will take on the myths around these issues, and speak about them in public.
“Many men want to ingratiate themselves with women and display their feminist credentials, and I don’t believe women want that. They want men who will stand up and speak their minds on issues.”
“I mentioned I’d read his books and she rolled her eyes. I felt like she thought, ‘This guy sitting across from me is at the very least a conservative and could be a fascist as well.
There is a taboo about liking Peterson. Actor Dominic MacHale, who played Sergeant Healy in The Young Offenders, says that as soon as someone becomes aware you are a fan, presumptions are made.
“I’ve had that. I was chatting to a woman who was introduced to me through a mutual acquaintance. I’m not sure how Peterson’s name came up, but I mentioned I’d read his books and she rolled her eyes.
“I felt like she thought, ‘This guy sitting across from me is at the very least a conservative and could be a fascist as well.’
“I was ok with it, because I am quite familiar with his work. I think 20 years ago he would have been considered middle-of-the-road, neither conservative nor liberal – but now he’s become a supposed figure of the Alt-Right.” (Peterson has referred to himself as a “classic British liberal… Philosophically I am an individualist, not a collectivist of the right or the left.”)
Peterson has become a kind of “de-facto father figure” for modern men, MacHale says. “And the advice he’s giving isn’t revolutionary. It’s take responsibility for yourself, be useful. He thinks that if more men were like that, society would be better – and that’s a message that’s really resonated with people.”
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A still from one of Jordan Peterson’s YouTube videos
Much of Peterson’s work, including last year’s Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life, asks us to cast our minds back. He draws on myth, biblical references and folk tales – which, he says, contain traditional core values that have been neglected.
For young men this translates to a kind of tough love – or what one young man who will attend tonight’s show calls “what men need to hear, not what they want to hear.”
The lesson people need to hear, Peterson once said, is “grow the hell up, accept some responsibility, live an honourable life.
“We just haven’t talked about that in any compelling way for three generations,” he says. “Probably not since the beginning of the Sixties.”
Diane Walsh, from Dublin, will also attend tonight’s show and is a member of an online fan group for Peterson. His focus on traditional gender roles is something that resonated with her.
“People are coming away from traditional values, but really they’re the thing that holds society together.
“When I was younger, I’d have been quite feminist, thinking women should be able to do everything. But as I grew older and had children, I came to realise that most of the women I know don’t want to be working – they’d rather be at home.
“The feminist movement is pushing us all into the workplace – and that’s not somewhere we really want to be. I have a law degree, and that’s a good career – but I really want to be at home minding my babies.
“I think men, these days, have to apologise for being masculine,” she adds, “and I don’t think that’s helpful.”
If Peterson were merely a traditionalist – harking back to a supposedly simpler time and advocating for embattled young men – he wouldn’t incite the outrage he routinely provokes. Earlier this year an Irish change.org petitioned to bar Peterson’s entry to this country, claiming the academic’s “secret sauce is to provide an academic veneer to a lot of old-school right-wing cant”.
But what could be described as cant? For some, the best example is his views on male violence. Peterson believes that much of such violence is driven by the fact that men do not have partners. In a New York Times interview, he said the case of Alek Minassian – convicted last year of killing 10 people by driving his van through a crowd in Toronto – occurred in part because Minassian was “angry at God because women were rejecting him”.
“The cure for that is enforced monogamy,” he added. “That’s actually why monogamy emerges.”
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Jordan Peterson. Picture by Carlos Osorio/Toronto Star via Getty
These provocative pronouncements have been criticised by many commentators. “Claims that churches and traditional marriages were necessary tools to channel the aggressive tendencies of young men towards responsible activities seem very out of place”, says Dr Tina-Karen Pusse, a lecturer at UCG.
“Even basic comparative data on marriage and crime rates show no negative correlation between these figures.
“It’s baffling how he preaches radical individualism whenever he argues against the progressive left when they call for solidarity and equity,” she points out, “and then he jumps to a call for collectivism when it comes to causes that matter to him, such as the nuclear traditional family, or Christian churches. The cognitive dissonances should be obvious.”
For all his talk of toughening up and pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps, Peterson himself has come across as a curiously vulnerable figure. He frequently cries in public. Two years ago he also posted an emotional video online, explaining that he was back home in Toronto after months seeking medical treatment for withdrawal symptoms related to benzodiazepine use.
Peterson said he began using benzodiazepines and “never gave it a second thought”. His daughter Mikhaila said his physical dependence on clonazepam, a type of anti-anxiety drug, first became apparent to his family in 2019 – when Tammy, his wife of 30 years, was diagnosed with terminal cancer.
He had been consuming the drug for years to alleviate persistent anxiety in the wake of a severe autoimmune reaction to food. Mikhaila said her father had “nearly died several times”, and that he had received treatment in Russia after a number of US hospitals wrongly diagnosed him.
Peterson said that during his treatment, which he said took him from Connecticut to Russia to Serbia and back home to Canada, what kept him going “during what was certainly the worst period of my life”, was family and work.
Despite media reports calling his issues with benzodiazepines an “addiction”– Peterson has preferred to call it a “dependency” – which to some seemed a contradiction of one of his own tenets: ‘you must take responsibility for your life’.
Dependence simply means that someone experiences withdrawal symptoms when they stop taking a drug, whereas America’s National Institute on Drug Abuse defines addiction as “compulsive use despite harmful consequences”.
Given the importance of grit and self-reliance to Peterson’s brand, it may have been an important distinction for him to make – even if it does strain credibility that a practicing clinical psychologist who has done research into addiction would not have been aware, as he claimed, of the addictive potential of the medications he was taking.
In recent months, a change in style has been discernible in Peterson’s pronouncements. Whereas before he tended to release long-form videos of his academic lectures, his recent uploads have been straight-to-camera monologues, which address aspects of the culture wars.
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The Sports Illustrated cover that Peterson labelled ‘not beautiful’
In May he wrote a now-infamous Tweet declaring a plus-sized Sports Illustrated cover model “not beautiful”.
“No amount of authoritarian tolerance is going to change that,” he added.
“The use of that model, who was not athletic (remember: SPORTS Illustrated) was manipulative economically and in relation to the model herself (although she participated in her own exploitation),” he wrote in a clarification. “Beauty is an ideal. Almost all of us fall short of an ideal. I am not willing to sacrifice any ideal to faux compassion. Period. And certainly not the ideal of athletic beauty.”
One fan who will attend tonight’s show with several friends calls this “a bad move”.
“I don’t think he should have gotten involved,” they say. “It would be different if he was directly involved in the conversation or was brought into it, but he decided to insert himself into it – and then complained about the backlash.”
“Since his return to the limelight, Peterson has been clearly radicalised,” Dr Pusse says. “Long discussion formats are replaced by theatrical and vitriolic short clips… He uses the most fringe views of the political spectrum he opposes, and presents these caricatures to his audiences as ‘mainstream leftist’ positions.”
In July of this year Peterson was suspended by Twitter for “hateful conduct”, for dead naming and misgendering the transgender actor Elliot Page. He has since been reinstated, but the perception of him as an extremist has perhaps hardened.
“I think that he is no longer particularly concerned with his academic career, as he can now make his living elsewhere”, says MacHale. (And Peterson is no longer a tenured professor at the University of Toronto). “He feels he can say whatever he wants and doesn’t have to apologise for it.”
Love him or loathe him, Peterson has shown himself to have a singular ability to rile people up.
Mike Sheridan, an Irish journalist who interviewed Peterson in 2018, says Peterson warned him that “I would get s**t from both sides” – which ultimately proved to be the case after the interview went viral.
The huge crowds he continues to draw worldwide, are evidence of something positive, says MacHale, whatever your feelings on the content of Peterson’s talks.
“Here at the 3Arena, you have people paying money on a weekend night to watch an intellectual speak.
“For a generation of people who’ve supposedly no attention span, and in an era when ideas have supposedly been dumbed down, that’s remarkable. And it’s a positive thing.”
