36) Jordan Peterson: Prologue - A personal note

To help guide your expectations of what we'll explore in this series of posts:  there are 8 key points of contention with the teachings of Jordan Peterson, that I'd like to raise. Granted, this is just scratching the surface. Especially over the past decade (adding this sentence in 2025), Jordan has…devolved intellectually. He has slid into sloppy thinking, foolish logic, right-wing grifting, and …well, bullshit, to such a degree I can only say I’m deeply disappointed in the person he turned out to be. Maybe he was, all along. (Bernie Schiff, one of Jordan’s former close friends, wrote an excellent warning to the public about Jordan’s dangerously unhinged personality.) But in the beginning, when I met him in 2002, I didn’t think he was “all that bad”. In fact, I had a decent amount of respect for him. In the beginning.

Since then, it’s been a long slide downwards, and I think he has done a ton of damage to society with his teachings. His legacy is, at this point, disgraceful, although many people still hold him up as some kind of intellectual giant and moral exemplar. So, let’s take a look at some of his teachings. Because to put it mildly, they’re not all they’re cracked up to. In fact, oftentimes they are the opposite of how they appear. So let’s try to undo some of that damage.

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Here's a Table of Contents.

Prologue:  (i.e., the part after the Table of Contents...)  :)

Part 1) Problems with Fundamental Assumptions: Dominance Hierarchies

Part 2) More Problems with Fundamental Assumptions:

A) the naturalistic fallacy;

B) issues of scale

Part 3) The Bucko Mistake:  why telling Bucko to straighten his shoulders, clean his room, and sort himself out can cause bigger problems

Part 4) The Problem of Collective Assholeification:  the much bigger, much subtler, but even more important mistake in telling Bucko to sort himself out

Part 5) The Perfect House Problem:  why being told not to try to change the world until you have your house in perfect order is a murderous, society-wrecking ideology

Part 6) The Myth of "The myth of white/male privilege"

Part 7) Psychology at the Ending of the World

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Now let's get started.

Prologue:  A Personal Note

This might not be the right way to get this message out.  I don’t know.  I sure ain't perfect.  I am a bit concerned that something I say comes across the wrong way, or people think I have unsavoury motives of some kind or other.  This is something that, more often than it should, holds me back from doing things.  I'm sure you've felt that way before.  Who hasn't?  Heck, it can be scary just talking to a person at a dinner party; walking into a public debate that often draws highly extreme reactions out of people?  yikes...

But, I feel it's important to try here, and share a few thoughts about the whole phenomenon of Jordan Peterson.  It's…complicated to get into, personally, for a bunch of reasons. Which is why I'm starting this series of essays with this 'personal prologue', because I think it is important to contextualize my views.

On a personal level, I genuinely liked Jordan when I first met and go to know him (way back in the naive ol’ days of 2002).  We have never been personal friends per se, but were always friendly and collegial.  I believed in him as a person (more on that later), and totally got a kick out of talking to him.

More than that, I did, at the beginning, feel quite an intellectual kinship with Jordan, despite the fact that we seem to disagree about some Pretty Big Things (*cough cough* -- climate change...).  But we have quite overlapping intellectual backgrounds and interests; in our University teaching, we drew from many of the same sources, and we even taught some of the same courses in university.  We also had fairly similar early lives, childhoods, teen years, etc., coming from similar sub-cultures, and having absorbed similar philosophies while growing up.

Of course, we've always disagreed about certain things, as I mentioned.  But whatevs, right?  That's what science and learning and being a curious person are all about -- exposing yourself to the unknown, being open to differing perspectives, especially well-reasoned ones, thereby challenging yourself to consider things in new ways.

And like Hamilton, "man, the man is non-STOP!".  Jordan is a super-smart dude; he thinks, and talks, and listens, and reads and learns, ALL the time.  He works like mad. So let's not straw-man Jordan Peterson and write shitty essays where we try to tear him down and call him names.  I've read a few of these online that have made me feel disappointed.  Sure, people are upset and concerned about his public teachings, but personal attacks and ad hominems are just low-quality 'arguments' that go nowhere except to further polarization.

Let's do better than that.

Jordan and I had adjacent offices for about a decade, which was great; every now and then would come a rare opportunity, when both of us happened to be in our offices and neither of us was immediately involved in a meeting or prepping for class.  In these opportunistic moments, I would stick my head in his doorway, and say "hey Jordan, you got a couple minutes?  I got a question for ya...".  I would ask him some deep, thorny question, and inevitably he would respond, without hesitation, "You know, I've thought a lot about that, because it gets right to the heart of….blahblahblah", and I’d sit down, buckle up, and hang on for the ride.  I totally understood why so many students and others were captivated in his lectures and got so much out of them. 

I also believed, in the beginning, in his integrity as a person.  I want to be really clear about that. I wholeheartedly believed that Jordan was fighting for The Good as he perceived it, and was doing so out of genuine caring for people to live better lives. 

For anyone who has criticized Jordan at a personal level, written nasty things, etc., you have to remember, even if you disagree radically with his conclusions (which I do, in many cases that I will articulate), this is a person who has devoted many, many years, thousands and thousands of hours, to helping people -- in his clinical practice, as an educator and advisor to countless students, as a colleague and collaborator on a many different research projects and collaborations. 

I have 'overheard' through the wall between our offices, the research meetings and Skype meetings and phone calls and interviews, and indeed, therapy sessions he gave in his office for many years.  The guy works his butt off. 

And sure, being a psychologist or a scientist or a teacher doesn't immediately mean you're a good person, and counter-examples are easy to find.  But you have to give a person the respect they deserve.  Someone who has spent their proverbial 10000-hours on studying and working directly with human suffering and growth, deserves some respect for, if nothing else, the sincerity of their efforts. 

(On the other hand, according to Jordan's own logic, it is highly possible that he's not actually trying to help people, but just trying to advance himself due to his own needs for power. We talk about this in future essays in this series, and it’s a possibility I rejected at first. Now, in 2025 as I am editing this post, I have to say that the possible Jordan is serving his own narcissism has become increasingly compelling over time.…)  

Having said all this, I do want to spend some time developing a critique of some of Jordan's key arguments, because these have formed the foundation of a whole body of teaching that many people take to be “the Gospel truth”, so to speak. People pattern their lives around his teachings. Many young men have had their development…changed…by Jordan Peterson. And while I’m sure it wasn’t all harmful (that would be insane), I’m also sure much of it was. ESPECIALLY to the people most in need of good teaching, most deeply struggling, most ardently looking for guidance. To those people, the people Jordan was presumably the most keen on helping, I think he has done a deep disservice. 

I hear a lot of people say things like "Yeah, he makes a lotta sense, but you know, I don't agree with him on everything...".  But if you press people for precise points of disagreement, you don't find many, or at least many that aren't based on a misunderstanding of what Jordan has actually said. And he, and other influencers in his largely right-wing sphere, use these misunderstandings to their advantage. “You’re taking me out of context”.

Well, like I said, I have a highly similar intellectual and educational background as Jordan. And I’ve read most of his work (although thank God I stopped myself from watching all of his videos; life is worth more than that.) I can confidently claim that I have a good sense of what Jordan has said, where he’s coming from, and what he means. 

And I will try to convey as clearly as I can, the important points of divergence.  I think I have sufficiently expressed, here and in other places, my appreciation with much of his teachings, but it's time to look at the other side.  As I said, much of it is, perhaps unintentionally, downright dangerous and harmful. Which is why I feel it's necessary to talk about all this.