In the Hereditary House of Satan

Jordan Peterson is taking on all comers

I’ve long been fascinated with Dr. Jordan Peterson, the cranky Jungian psychologist who first became a rightwing internet darling in 2016, after getting upset about Canadian pronouns. His lectures became must-sees for a generation of aggrieved young men (and his audience is almost entirely male, as he himself laments) who found an unlikely movement leader in a gaunt college professor who dresses like a foppish steampunk gunslinger.

In the years since he first popped onto the internet, his fame and rage have expanded in equal measures. He wrote a best-selling book entitled 12 Rules for Life: an Antidote for Chaos, though he himself was suffering from the chaos of benzodiazepine addiction. In 2020, after “nearly dying several times,” Peterson was put into a medically-induced coma in Moscow to treat pneumonia (?). Since his stay in Russia, he has returned to his normal public life of debates and cigar-chomping on the Daily Caller.

“Say it to my face”

The Russia connection is curious to me because Peterson is the closest Western analogue to Alexandr Dugin, the Russian Orthodox philosopher most closely aligned with Putinism.

Although he espoused no particular religion when first appearing on the public scene, Peterson’s rhetoric has become increasingly Christianity-centered in recent years and he has referred to himself as a Christian on at least a couple occasions. Hilariously, he even got into a Twitter beef with the Pope. According to Anglican.ink, in March of this year, the Twitter account of the Pope wrote:

“#socialjustice demands that we fight against the causes of poverty: inequality and the lack of labour, land, and lodging; against those who deny social and labour rights; and against the culture that leads to taking away the dignity of others.”

To which Professor Peterson (never short on self-confidence) replied: “There is nothing Christian about #socialjustice. Redemptive salvation is a matter of the individual soul.”

 A tweeter called “George” summed it up for the anti-Peterson brigade tweeting in confident riposte: “I don’t know what’s funnier, you trying to lecture the Pope on what Christianity is, or that you’re loudly proclaiming that acting like Jesus is wrong.”

It’s typical Jordan Peterson grandiosity, and it’s what his followers love. But it also speaks to the darker truth of the Peterson phenomena. It’s derision cloaked in the garb of piety. For Peterson, “redemptive salvation” arises not from the traditional Christian understanding of charity and goodwill towards all, but through the hard work of scorn. In this view, denying social rights and taking away the dignity of others is actually the moral path because it is only through the rigid application of orthodoxy that “others” can know themselves to be in the wrong. The hardhearted are doing the rest of us a favor with their opprobrium. Without their example, we will all fall into that eternal liberal fire.

A critique of “liberalism” is also at the heart of Dugin’s work, whose criticisms of the West are centered on consumerism (no argument there) and cultural diversity. “Diversity” can, of course, be taken to mean many things. Both Dugin and Peterson call for a return to “traditional values.” What exactly does this mean? In these parts, it tends to mean a return to a time when straight white dudes ran the show. No wonder straight white dudes love him.

It also means a rejection of the squishy and messy parts of human sexuality. Gender fluidity, after all, contains the word “fluid,” a state of matter which does not neatly conform to the hard forms of Peterson’s worldview. In fact, he said in a recent editorial that gender-affirming care is “a problem so serious that it threatens not only the utility and integrity of both the clinical and medical professions, but the stability of society itself.”

His pompousness has now extended into pugnaciousness. Just yesterday, he tweeted “call me cis to my face and see what happens.”

What will happen? I assume we’ll find out in the coming days when his detractors will no doubt take him up on his challenge.  His bizarre threat underscores for me the queerness of Peterson and enforces my fascination with him. For decades, he was just an unheralded professor at a good Canadian university. Now he’s a former benzo addict threatening to take on all comers Fight Club style.

What the hell happened to this man?

I read an article on psychcentral.com about the Jungian view of narcissism, which describes Peterson almost to a T.

Think of a person with the personality disorder of narcissism as having two ego states one, the Self, we will call this person, Bob; the other, angry and abusive person, Not Bob. With respect to the above descriptions, Bob is the Ego, and Not Bob is manifesting as the Shadow of the Magician persona.

Add another component to the problem. Lets say that Bob is an alcoholic and he decides to go to AA and work a program of recovery.

Now, lets put Bob in a job and he gets fired. Now Bob has what can be termed a, life altering event.

Bob starts acting differently. He becomes more irritated than usual. He doesnt start drinking again, but he stops going to his regular meetings and quits calling his sponsor.

People in the program of AA start saying that Bob is a dry drunk. Bobs wife and children do not know what to make of Bob. They know he has become moody and unpredictable, and lately they notice his behavior is even overtly abusive. They begin walking on eggshells, doing anything they can to keep themselves from having to face the wrath of their loved one, Bob.

Bob has been replaced by Not Bob, but no one realizes this because both Bob and Not Bob appear the same. This was triggered by the precipitating event of having the humiliation of losing his job, causing Bobs alter ego to show up as a defense to protect Bob from having to feel the insecurity and vulnerability of having failed. As long as Not Bob is in the picture, he can be angry, punitive, self-absorbed, and entitled.

Doesn’t Bob, too, sound like somebody spoiling for a fight over the word “cis”? Maybe this bullying narcissism doesn’t matter much when it’s one dude with a Twitter account. But it matters more when he’s become the go-to intellectual poster boy to justify the darkest impulses of the American right. His fight as his bitchy retort against the Pope shows, is fight against #socialjustice, which in a very real and direct way is a fight against modernity itself, the same fight Dugin is fighting in the East. If you can’t connect the dots from transgenderism to traditional values to Christian nationalism, I don’t know what to tell you. One has to wonder if Peterson would agree with Dugin’s statement that the West is “the hereditary house of Satan.” One has to wonder where all of this ends up.