https://youtu.be/\_tt\_-vUh1jk

In early 2017, my friends and I discovered Jordan Peterson. As young college students, we eagerly shared his lectures, drawn by his intellectual rigor and clarity. His Jungian-inspired "Maps of Meaning" was dense but insightful, and when "12 Rules for Life" hit the shelves, we all secured copies. Attending his live shows in Austin, some of us even had the chance to shake his hand. It felt like we were part of a meaningful intellectual journey.

Peterson's appeal was his ability to articulate complex ideas with nuance. He argued convincingly that the political left and right were essential to each other, each bringing necessary perspectives to vital discussions. This balance made his critiques particularly potent; he wasn't just another commentator but a thinker who bridged divides.

However, a shift occurred, encapsulated by Peterson's own words in a later political stunt: "up yours, woke moralists, we'll see who cancels who." This marked a departure from the thoughtful intellectual to someone resembling the very caricature that his harshest critics had always painted. It was a moment of disillusionment for many who had admired him.

One can see this schism clearly when comparing his "Genesis" lecture series to his later "Exodus" series. The former is profound, filled with timeless insights and discussions that feel alive with exploration and discovery. In contrast, the "Exodus" series, while still containing sparks of the original brilliance, is marred by the inclusion of political figures whose interventions feel more like hackery than genuine inquiry. These sessions, unfortunately, will not age as well as his earlier works.

The reasons behind Peterson's shift could be manifold. Some speculate about audience capture, others point to an unhealthy addiction to the reactions he garners on platforms like Twitter. Regardless of the cause, what is evident is a change that has moved him away from the nuanced thinker who once captivated audiences to a figure now mired in controversy and polarization.

For those of us who once revered him, the change is both profound and personal. We do not merely observe the transformation of a public figure but feel the loss of a philosophical anchor. His early lectures helped many navigate through complexities with balance and depth, qualities that seem overshadowed by his recent persona. While the reasons for his transformation might be complex and multifaceted, what remains is a simple wish among many former admirers: a hope for the return of the Jordan Peterson who once inspired us with his insights and respect for diverse viewpoints.

David Fuller's essay from Rebel Wisdom is now gone from the internet. I think it was a biting yet heartfelt call to Peterson asking him to stop gazing into the abyss. I'm republishing his essay here in the interest of rekindling this discussion.

What Happened to Jordan Peterson?

by David Fuller

Jordan Peterson is back in the news again, with a ban from Twitter following a series of increasingly polarizing messages on the platform, culminating in one about the trans actor Elliot Page that Twitter judged to have broken their terms of service.

He just put out a video on YouTube where he angrily reflects on his Twitter ban. He rails against Elliot Page (“he/she/whatever”) and compares the “criminal” doctors conducting gender surgery to “Nazi physicians”.

The reaction to this and other recent content seems to me to signal a watershed moment, judging from the unusually critical comments there from his viewers, and the comments in some of the Jordan Peterson groups on Facebook, Reddit and elsewhere. There seems to be something of a turning of the tide in terms of his audience. Or at least a splitting off of those who were initially attracted to a nuanced and fascinating thinker on religion and culture, and those who were mainly attracted to him as a culture war political fighter.

As an admirer of much of his work, and someone who has tracked the Peterson story over the last years, it seems like the right time to take his advice and speak the truth as best as I can. Everything I am about to share has been checked by trusted friends who are familiar with (and sympathetic to) Peterson’s work and the trajectory of the last years. I will try to outline how and why we might have got to this point, what was valuable about his work, and also where things have gone off course.

Over the last five years he became something like a 'one-man lightning rod for the culture war', a catalyst and recipient of an immense amount of cultural energy, analysis, projections and much more. While Rebel Wisdom critiqued and moved away from the Peterson phenomenon some years ago, and tracked other thinkers, as the project moves towards completion, the 'Peterson story' seems like an open loop that needs closing, and it also seems to me that the 'morality tale' of the trajectory of this story has something valuable for us to learn from.

In my work with Rebel Wisdom I have tried to follow journalistic practice and make any criticisms or questions in an interview directly to the person concerned. For some time this was impossible as Peterson struggled with his health issues. Since then I have now made multiple approaches to conduct another interview with Peterson with no success. So I release this critique. There will be things I get wrong or fail to contextualise properly, but the following comes from a long engagement with his work and many conversations with others who have tracked the journey from close and far.

Becoming a Caricature

In short, the tragedy for those of us who valued his contribution is that over time he has become more and more the caricature that the worst of the media coverage always said he was. While some of the reasons for this are entirely understandable related to his ill health, for me, his current disposition, and reduction to a political culture warrior risks contaminating much of his legacy and value to the conversation.

Talking this through with a friend and former guest on Rebel Wisdom, the critic Damien Walter, he argued that the trajectory of Peterson shows what happens in this culture to a public intellectual who tries to steer between the Scylla and Charybdis of the culture war dynamic, and under the intense, magnified pressure of social media feedback inevitably gets drawn into the whirlpool.

At the start of Rebel Wisdom, after the two documentaries about his work, we attracted a number of admirers of Jordan Peterson's thought. Far from the classic image of the male loner, these were a mix of men and women from every different background, and all walks of society. The main feature was that they had heard aout this guy, portrayed as a reactionary by the mainstream media, and then checked him out directly and found something totally different. Back in 2018, Jordan Peterson was something of a filter for freethinkers, those who were prepared to question the media narrative. This is no longer the case.

My Story With Jordan Peterson

I'm a journalist and filmmaker, I've made dozens of films for BBC and Channel 4 News. This was the background I brought to my approach to the Peterson phenomenon.

When I first discovered his work in mid-2017, I had an instinctive and overwhelming sense that he was headed for the big time. In many ways I placed everything I had on this bet.

Why? It seemed like exactly the right key for the particular lock of the moment. The excesses of post modernity had been storing up a backlash of traditional values, and most importantly for me, I had seen how the secular, rationalist assumptions of the new atheist worldview had been a narrow and deadening influence on the culture, and here was a man who was fuelled by a deep appreciation of religion and mythology, the return of the archetypal and the deep mythos of the culture.

While working in newsrooms I have always been frustrated by the narrowness of the conversation, how stories invariably revolve around shallow metrics like GDP or finance, rather than engaging with the deeper questions of what a human life is for, or whether there is a meaning to life. I'd also become very attuned to how the reductive perspective of the 'new atheists' like Richard Dawkins had a stranglehold on the media conversation, shutting out these deeper questions. Peterson was challenging this consensus.

I travelled out to listen to one of Peterson's Bible Lectures in October 2017, and was fortunate enough to secure an interview with him the day after the talk.

Our interview was mostly focused on these topics of Jung, the Shadow, the process of transformation and Jung's concept of 'synchronicity', of seeming coincidences that have a deeper meaning and for Jung, somehow reveal the structure of being itself.

I took this interview and turned it into the first documentary on his work, released on 4th January 2018 as 'Truth in the Time of Chaos'. And then the most amazing synchronicity, on the 6th of January Peterson had his viral moment, in an interview with Cathy Newman on the programme, Channel 4 News, where I had been working for a decade. I had continued to work there as a freelance producer up to just a couple of weeks beforehand.

Shortly after watching the interview I messaged both Peterson and Cathy Newman to congratulate them on a brilliant piece of TV. In the aftermath of the interview things became increasingly acrimonious between Peterson and Channel 4 News, and he was publicly requesting a second interview to discuss the controversy sparked by the first one. I tried to liaise between the two and see if this would be possible, but C4N made it clear this wasn't going to happen.

I was struck by the bizarre nature of the situation, that my conversation with Peterson was mainly on the topic of synchronicity, and then this incredible coincidence takes place on the show I had worked on for over a decade. Given that my mediation attempts were rejected I decided that the best thing I could do was to turn this into a film. I unpacked the different dimensions of the clash, the contrast between legacy and alternative media, the gender dimension, the cultural and political, and splurged it all out into the documentary that became "A Glitch in the Matrix".

In the documentary I was critical of Channel 4 News, and knew that this would end my career with them. This was a huge risk at the time as I had nothing to fall back on, but I felt compelled to make and release it. Sure enough it ended my association with the programme, and I later heard on the grapevine that I was "banned from the building". So I have some skin in this game.

Peterson took the documentary and put it up on his own YouTube channel, where it became a huge hit, and remains the third most popular video he has ever put out there.

Appreciation

Well before he rose to stardom, Peterson was known as being a life-changing professor at Toronto. Some of his previous students described his lectures as something like a psychedelic trip. Listening to his Maps of Meaning series from 2017, or his Biblical series from 2018 is an intoxicating experience.

He spoke for the reality of spiritual and religious experience, and the importance of the transpersonal unconscious. How the work of Jung in particular was of immense value in tying together the worlds of science, psychology and mythology. This was despite being warned that his career would be at risk if he spoke too much about Jung in the academy.

He tied the Jungian insights to leading neuroscience, evolutionary psychology and biology. He was saying that there are some patterns of being that are persistent for a reason, and we ignore them at our peril. It's not simply enough to tell people that they 'can be anything they want' as it tends to leave them overwhelmed with choice and without a clear sense of direction. He was happy to provide that direction. In a culture that, as Warren Farrell says, is suffering 'father hunger' he stepped willingly into the archetype of the father.

Paradoxically given his age and background, he actually became the perfect YouTube celebrity, because he willingly opened his entire world to the viewer. He shared his family, house and innermost thoughts with the world. If authenticity is the currency of the internet, he delivered in spades.

He saw that the increasingly social justice oriented climate was selective in its ‘inclusivity’, and came from a place of genuine and deeply felt compassion for the increasing number of young men in particular who were left directionless and ignored, the ‘neets’ (not in employment, education, or training). He gave them practical, actionable steps to improve their lives and encouraged them to see themselves as having meaning and purpose in the world.

It's undeniable that Peterson's philosophy, and the way he broke it down into easily enacted and simple steps like 'clean your room', and the way he managed to reframe the everyday struggles of life into a heroic journey, has helped thousands, if not millions of people. The mainstream portrayal of him always failed to acknowledge how his comments threads and personal appearances were filled with testimonies from people saying how his work had saved their lives, reunited their families, even preventing them becoming a mass shooter.

I saw how influential his work became online, almost overnight shifting the argument from a default 'new atheist' rejection of anything to do with religion or spirituality to a new appreciation for the evolved truths of religion. The balance of the argument shifted, and it was now the new atheists who looked naive in their rejection of millennia of evolved practice and mythology.

Of course, it was not primarily the mythological work that thrust him to public attention, it was the political dimension, and the controversy over pronouns, compelled speech and Bill C-16. And it was this tension, and the gravitational force of the political realm, that ended up proving his downfall.

The Critique

The current incarnation of Peterson for me is unrecognisable from the man I interviewed in 2017. However I must ask if I misjudged him back then, given he was already a controversial figure for many. Many of his critics on the left will say that he hasn't changed and was always a toxic figure.

My view is that there were always multiple different Petersons cohabiting at the same time, the thoughtful scholar and the academic alongside the reactive political culture warrior. I was definitely selective in seeing the best version of him. Over time the latter became more and more rewarded and prominent until it became the dominant persona. How and why that has happened, to Peterson and to many other public intellectuals, is one of the major problems of our social media age.

As 2018 went on, I continued to track the Peterson phenomenon on Rebel Wisdom, and as time went on found him increasingly reactive and contrarian. All through this time, I would send on any videos and articles to him and his wife Tammy, and they would react positively, even tweet out critical ones like 'The Peterson Paradox: It Doesn't Matter if You're Right if People Stop Listening'.

Rereading my piece from May 2018 is fascinating: "I no longer think that all the criticism is unfair, and I think the time has come to offer a constructive critique of his blind spots.

I still believe the depth of his thought transcends opposites and offers the clearest map forward that we have — but it’s equally clear to me that the way he is delivering it is not working, and is adding to the polarisation."

In it I talked about how he was going off track, and predicted a burnout.

I have held back from criticising him since then partly because of the bias of having gained so much from his work and philosophy, and a residual sense of journalistic values that I wanted to make any criticisms in an interview with him.

I will try to avoid repeating too much of the critique from then and instead try to summarise the journey looking back from 2022.

Audience Capture and Feedback Loops

From my perspective the trajectory he has followed over the last few years says something profound about the culture we are now in, and particularly the warping effect of the social media platforms we are using. In short, surrounded by high octane dopamine feedback loops and intensely sped up audience dynamics, we are all trapped in a hall of mirrors that distorts our perceptions and we can easily lose our way.

We end up giving the audience more and more of what it wants. The morality tale of the last few years for me is watching many of these public intellectuals become more and more extreme, primary colours, versions of themselves and go more and more off track over time. The concept of 'Flanderisation' is useful here, named after the neighbour in the Simpsons, Ned Flanders.

"The act of taking a single (often minor) action or trait of a character within a work and exaggerating it more and more over time until it completely consumes the character. Most always, the trait/action becomes completely outlandish and it becomes their defining characteristic.

The trope is named for The Simpsons character Ned Flanders, who was originally depicted as a friendly, generous Christian neighbor and a model father, husband and citizen, making him a contrast to Homer Simpson. As seasons progressed, however, he became increasingly obsessively religious to the point where he eventually embodied almost every negative stereotype of the American Christian evangelist." TV Tropes.

For Peterson this has meant leaning more and more into the reward circuit of the right side of the culture war, and increasingly losing any desire for nuance or even mutual understanding of the other side. As I said earlier in the piece, the most difficult thing for those of us who were fascinated by his work that, to follow him on Twitter over the last years, has been to see Peterson become this angry caricature of himself.

Back in 2017 he seemed to me and many others to be an unfairly maligned thinker, someone who was critical of the growing intolerance of the censorious left, and someone who was bringing a huge amount of value in his analysis of myth and story, and the foundations of culture.

The Jungian perspective he was bringing seemed to be a powerful way of bringing a synthesis view, seeing the culture through the lens of archetypes that showed each had a positive and negative dimension and that we couldn't have one without the other.

I spoke recently to the integral philosopher Ken Wilber and he had very interesting reflections on how Peterson initially tried to synthesise different perspectives, mythic, traditional, modern and postmodern, but over time became increasingly captured by reactive traditionalism.

"Don't Explain Your Philosophy, Embody It"

This is the greatest ongoing paradox with Peterson, the level to which his actions increasingly contradict his own philosophical rules and maxims. None of us are perfect, and all have our little hypocrisies, but the gap between words and deeds has become a cavern with Peterson.

Peterson does not embody his philosophy, in fact his actions are is in direct contradiction with so many of its core tenets. Most clearly there is a serious lack of personal responsibility.

Just in the time that I have been considering this piece, his public behaviour has been getting more and more erratic, with multiple outbursts on Twitter that verge on the personal attacks (on plus size swimwear models), pledges to leave or reduce his use of Twitter that last mere hours before returning to more compulsive tweeting, with a recent tweet that Twitter judged broke their terms of service leading to a temporary ban.

Contrast his recent aggressive, unapologetic and deeply unlikeable response to his Twitter ban with how he responded to a sense in 2018 that he was getting more reactive and angry in his relationships with journalists.

"Because I've been on guard it's easier for me to become snappy and unpleasant, and that's bad, I don't want to do that. I want to stay calm and tell the truth ... I've noticed that I'm becoming increasingly on guard and I've noticed a developing sense of impatience within me, and some suspicion, and that's not good. It's a sign of a certain amount of internal corruption on my part."

Jordan Peterson Q&A, August 2018.

Now by contrast he seems to have settled on a philosophy of 'never apologise', never explain, never to self-inquire and always to double down, and to deliberately steer into the angry conservative commentator persona, in his latest pieces to the point of self parody.

Incidentally I also think the aesthetics of his latest video, high definition, multi camera and glossy, undercuts his core appeal with his internet fans. He used to look like the underdog, generally with low fi webcam recordings, versus the high production values of the mainstream. Now in his latest piece he looks every inch the mainstream conservative commentator he has become, and the overall effect is more ‘Empire’ than ‘Rebel’.

I spoke to a long time Rebel Wisdom viewer and Jordan Peterson admirer, Mario Spassov, who had also tracked his trajectory with disillusionment and he brought up some very thoughtful points:

“A sense of disgust and obsession with order was a major driving motivation for Hitler’s atrocities”: Peterson has fleshed out the role of dehumanisation and and generalisation when talking about authoritarianism. It is a dangerous tendency to lose the individual out of sight and treat it as a mere instance of a pattern that you impose. Yet when he talks about ‘radical leftists’ his face turns all bitter, resentful and disgusted. It expresses precisely that dehumanising disgust he warns us about without much of a filter. Despite all the talk about individualism all we then get are sweeping generalisations about how half the population is sick, evil, what-not. I’ve never seen this degree of polarisation resolved in anything else but war.

And also:

“No-one has the higher moral ground, by virtue of being human we all can become part of destructive forces despite our best intentions”: Peterson has been very explicit that all of us have the basic emotions and mental patterns within us that make authoritarianism and social disintegration possible. And even worse, no set of ideas is immune from being abducted into becoming destructive either. We could all end up being the baddies without even noticing it. Everybody can contribute to catastrophic changes, no matter how noble their language and ideas. I have been somewhat surprised that Peterson has not taken up the topic of how his own ideas are not immune from becoming destructive given the proper context; after all this has been his core-critique of leftists, that they don’t ‘own’ their ideas but take them out of context and too far. One is never too old and wise to make the Vader-move.

Necessary, but not Sufficient

Over time I have come to the conclusion that Peterson's philosophy is necessary, but not sufficient. I still believe his premise of living out the deeper narrative of our culture in one's actions, and orienting to the highest truth in our lives is fundamentally correct. Also the need to develop a strong inner core of truth and honesty, while taking responsibility, is necessary.

It's not so much what he says, it's what he leaves out. And these missing aspects are important and necessary to know about for those tempted to follow his advice, and, I would argue, it is these missing aspects in his philosophy that have led him to the place he now finds himself.

Peterson willingly stepped into the role of the one who knows, the 'epistemic authority'. And there was much that he did know, particularly from his work as a clinical psychologist and student of belief and extremism.

But over time he became trapped by this role, he stopped listening and stopped growing. He broke his rule on assuming that the person he was speaking to knew something he didn't.

One of the most tragic arcs has been what looks from the outside like an increasing and painful isolation. There was always a clear prophetic or messianic streak in his delivery, and this increasingly looked like a doomed solo mission.

In his last outing with Joe Rogan earlier this year, Peterson came across alternately eager to impress Rogan, and trying to prove himself with long tangents on topics outside his area of expertise, most of all, there was no sense of talking to the person that he was sitting across from. There was little connection between the two men and a real sense of isolation.

Disconnection From Source

In his lectures from 2017 and 2018, there is a sense of something deeply alive in Peterson's tone and delivery. The urgency with which he is speaking is one thing, another is the way that he seems to be exploring territory in real time, even though the form is a monologue, there is an interaction with the audience that turns it into something more like a dialogue.

For me, there was a sense of a connection to a source energy that was fuelling his speech. There was something compelling about the connection between the man and his message, the way he acted out the subject matter of embodying the logos, the spoken truth.

But over time as he repeated the same basic themes, the story began to grow stale and routine. In both his stage performances and his podcast appearances, the same basic stories and themes would re-emerge, even though most listeners had heard them multiple times.

Similar to the identification with the 'one who knows', there was a lack of curiosity about what he didn't know, or a desire to enter into genuine exploratory dialogue with peers to upgrade his map, and a growing tendency to try to impose that map on others.

He was always unapologetic about his comfort with financial reward, but the nature of the lecture tour as a commercial enterprise has proved a double edged sword. It pushes Peterson into more and more of an isolated role, repeating many of the same talking points that the audience have heard before. The finances of it push towards the model of a single person on stage, in 'broadcast mode' and trap him in a pattern of repetition.

This seems to be increasingly reflected in the reaction of the audience to his ongoing tour, a recent Medium post from a fan in Copenhagen described how the atmosphere was flat and he was surrounded by people looking at their phones during the talk.

Necessity of Practice

Peterson's colleague John Vervaeke has talked about how he believes Peterson's thought is a "doorway", but not "a way". He spoke of how many students at Toronto were turned on by Peterson's thought, but found it difficult to put into practice. John combines the philosophical explorations of Peterson with a strong focus on practice, both meditation and embodiment (tai chi).

Much of Peterson's message is intellectual (propositional knowledge in Vervaeke's language). Without the practices to encourage self reflection and inner awareness, we struggle to embody any of these insights, and are much more likely to be led off track by our unexamined emotional biases and blind spots.

Another great irony is that Peterson talks about embodiment a great deal, in the interview I conducted with him in 2017 he repeated the idea that the archetype of Christ was the "fully embodied person". That the soul 'flees from the body in terror', and that the task was to reinhabit the body. Yet discussion of any of these embodiment techniques is absent from his philosophy.

It seems to me that Peterson found himself as the 'one man lightning rod for the culture war', without the inner practices of self awareness or embodiment to help conduct that much 'electricity'. It seems almost certain to me that part of his subsequent burnout was related to this.

I spoke with the spiritual teacher David Deida a couple of years ago, and he reflected on how one very important aspect of Peterson's teaching was to open the door for people to understand the inner 'felt sense' of truth in the body, and to begin the process of orienting towards it. He also talked about orienting to truth as a process of growth, or 'burning off dead wood'. However, Deida also noted that this is an early stage in the spiritual journey, not the final destination.

One of the other crucial practices that Vervaeke talks about is 'Dialogos' which is a form of live conversational exploration between two or more people. There are many different forms, from Circling to Authentic Relating to Inquiry, but the loose definition is that it is a conversation that goes somewhere new, and that all parties can get somewhere they otherwise wouldn't be able to go on their own.

It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that this is the opposite of how Peterson has been showing up recently. Instead of exploration and novelty, it has felt like ever decreasing circles and repetition for years.

The Addiction Spiral

Since Peterson has (thankfully) returned from his myriad health crises, he and the family have been very careful to frame his experience as a "drug dependency" and not an "addiction". He has had an incredible number of personal crises to deal with over the last years, including the near death of his wife.

The addictions specialist Gabor Mate describes addiction as "any behaviour" that is causing short term relief and long term problems, and that the person cannot stop. And that addiction takes many forms, from drugs to alcohol to compulsive behaviour of any kind. Like Twitter use that leads to negative outcomes, and cannot be stopped despite multiple public commitments to do so.

One of the most powerful and passionate criticisms I have heard from those close to Peterson is that his refusal to admit and deal with his addiction(s) is a contradiction of his fundamental message of personal responsibility, and is a dangerous message of denial to send out to other addicts. That a public acceptance of his personal addiction and journey to health would be of huge value to others.

Another person I spoke to a while ago who was very close to the IDW action over the last years met Peterson in 2017, recognised the addictive personality and predicted a major public implosion.

The writer Helen Lewis had a famous and combative interview with Peterson for GQ magazine that has as many views as his breakout viral moment with Cathy Newman, in her review of Beyond Order, she makes the following observations:

"The Peterson of Beyond Order, that preacher of personal responsibility, dances around the question of whether his own behavior might have contributed to his breakdown. Was it really wise to agree to all those brutal interviews, drag himself to all those international speaking events, send all those tweets that set the internet on fire? Like a rock star spiraling into burnout, he was consumed by the pyramid scheme of fame, parceling himself out, faster and faster, to everyone who wanted a piece. Perhaps he didn’t want to let people down, and he loved to feel needed. Perhaps he enjoyed having an online army glorying in his triumphs and pursuing his enemies. In our frenzied media culture, can a hero ever return home victorious and resume his normal life, or does the lure of another adventure, another dragon to slay, another “lib” to “own” always call out to him?"

"Either way, he gazed into the culture-war abyss, and the abyss stared right back at him. He is every one of us who couldn’t resist that pointless Facebook argument, who felt the sugar rush of the self-righteous Twitter dunk, who exulted in the defeat of an opposing political tribe, or even an adjacent portion of our own. That kind of unhealthy behavior, furiously lashing out while knowing that counterattacks will follow, is a very modern form of self-harm. And yet in Beyond Order, the blame is placed solely on “the hypothetically safe but truly dangerous benzodiazepine anti-anxiety medication” he was prescribed by his family doctor. The book leaves you wishing that Peterson the tough therapist would ask hard questions of Peterson the public intellectual."

Peterson's response was to tweet "Why do you hate me so much" at Lewis.

Lack of Responsibility

This lack of personal responsibility has become something of a defining characteristic for Peterson now. In the aftermath of his health crisis and recovery it was understandable that he may have been too fragile to accept his part in what happened to him, but the lack of acknowledgement of any ownership or fault has now become almost pathological.

In the aftermath of the public outcry over his clumsy attack on a plus size swimwear model ("Sorry, Not Beautiful") he had many options, most obvious of which might have been to accept that the tweet was rash and easily misunderstood, and to say that a conversation about the nature of beauty and society should not be conducted on Twitter, and would be better suited for another medium where more context could be given. He could even have apologised to the model herself.

"Sorry. Not beautiful. And no amount of authoritarian tolerance is going to change that."

However instead he solely painted himself as a victim of abuse on Twitter, and declared that he was leaving the platform. A commitment that lasted hours at most.

"So I told my staff to change my password, to keep me from temptation, and am departing once again. If I have something to say I'll write an article or make a video. If the issue is not important enough to justify that then perhaps it would be best to just let it go."

"The endless flood of vicious insult is really not something that can be experienced anywhere else. I like to follow the people I know but I think the incentive structure of the platform makes it intrinsically and dangerously insane."

It's fascinating to compare Peterson's words (to Cathy Newman) after their interview in 2018 and his actions now.

Peterson: "When you receive overwhelming public criticism like that, the right response should be... careful reanalysis of what you did."

Interviewer: "That's hard."

Peterson: "It's not as hard as the alternative, because if you're riding high and there's a correction coming, and you keep forestalling it, the correction will get larger and larger and larger and larger and finally when it comes you will not be able to tolerate it."

Mood and Delivery Matters

The conversation between Peterson and Cathy Newman went viral not only for the content, but because of the style. It was about how Peterson remained calm despite extreme provocation, and managed to laugh, to defuse her hostile questioning, and to remain magnanimous throughout. This version of Jordan Peterson has not been seen for many years, and he now seems determined to steer firmly into his final form of the irascible and angry conservative commentator, easily dismissed and something of a figure of fun on Twitter, if you look at the responses to his tweets.

This again seems to have torpedoed his legacy, and makes it hard for those of us who found value in his work.

It's increasingly hard to remember the first wave of Peterson, when he was arguing how we needed both the left and the right, and made criticisms of both, while arguing an essentially synthesis position. Over time he started taking sides in the war more and more fiercely.

As the Damien Walter said recently on Twitter, it seems that Peterson only had the strength for half the task. He was willing to speak the hard truths of the failures of the left and pay the price, however he was seemingly unwilling or unable to do the same of the right. He is now little more than a boilerplate conservative commentator, stoking the culture war dynamic for those already deeply embroiled in the conflict.

Lost in the Political

This is one of the greatest tragedies of the Peterson trajectory. In an interview with his colleague John Vervaeke in 2019, Vervaeke said that what was fuelling Peterson's rise was the deeper sense that we are in a deep philosophical and cultural crisis, what he termed the 'Meaning Crisis'.

There are political dimensions to this crisis, but fundamentally it's about far more than just politics. However the political dimension is where most of the heat and the attention is placed. And it is this political level that Peterson was continually dragged down to time and time again, like a moth to a flame, and paid the price.

Yet his greatest contribution is not, and should not have been, political. It was the deeper mythological dimension and the Jungian depth psychology, and how these deeper strands are playing out through culture.

Fans, not Friends

There was a telling moment in one of Peterson's first dialogues after his illness, with his regular conversation partner Jonathan Pageau. He spoke about how valuable the support of his fans had been, and Pageau pointed out that fans are not friends, and hinted that he felt Peterson needed the support of a community of peers, not fans.

We are all prone to having our needs met by what psychologists call 'narcissistic supply', and the unquestioning devotion of fans is an addictive substance, but one that is unsatisfying and ultimately leaves us craving more, and fails to puncture a sense of loneliness.

A core tenet of Jordan Peterson's philosophy has been the motif of trying to "rescue the father from the underworld". This emphasis now seems more like a prescient foreshadowing of his fate. It may sound presumptive, but the question that comes up is "how could that be done?".

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The Tradgedy of Jordan Peterson

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