The Problem with Jordan B. Peterson
“Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself.”
(Walt Whitman)
OK, OK. He has many problems, but I’ll try to focus on just one of them for the moment.
To begin with, I had no idea who he was. He wasn’t really even on my radar. I do recall hearing something about a debate with Slavoj Žižek, though I didn’t pay any attention to it. I am not really on the Žižek bandwagon, either. (Did someone win?) But then a grad student started doing research on right-wing media figures, and I began watching a few video clips of Peterson. Oh, my (as George Takei might say). Now I know what people were talking about.
But to be clear, I don’t disagree with everything he says. The old videos, in particular, when he is filmed in front of a class giving a lecture contain a lot of common sense ideas. My guess is that these early videos was when he really was a practicing clinical psychologist and really was interested in teaching. In the years since, however, he seems to have fallen victim to the very same trap that he has diagnosed in other celebrities. He has stated that too many celebrities seem to buy into their own hype. They begin to think too highly of themselves. Well, if that doesn’t describe Peterson, I don’t know what does. Take, for example, the video where he protests being kicked off of Twitter. He describes in hyperbolic terms his own cultural relevance and his own “frightening” rate of trending. Yeah, he drank his own Koolaid. More recently, his videos seem contrived to appeal to a certain constituency and to support his lecture series and his book. Even more recently, he seems to spend most of his time railing at the College of Psychologists of Ontario that is considering revoking Peterson’s license to practice.
And also to be clear, I’m not interested in cancelling Peterson. He has the right to say these things. But here’s the thing that Peterson and so many others in the “party of personal responsibility” seem to get wrong: you are free to say these things; you are not free from consequence from saying them. That’s not cancelling. That’s free speech. Those are “natural consequences,” as we like to tell children — and as a psychologist Peterson should well know! If I own a bookstore and I go on the radio and say “I hate x,” and if people stop coming to my store, then it’s simply a natural consequence of stating my opinion. No one says I can’t have that opinion. No one says I can’t say it. But I’m NOT free of the consequence of saying it out loud and in public. So, if Peterson suffers natural consequences, then that’s the system working as it should. But the real irony here is that Peterson is doing very well financially. (He’s happy to tell you just how well he’s doing.) He’s found his market, and it’s paying off. So, he’s far from cancelled.
One issue with Peterson is the way he is fast and loose with simple facts — despite the fact that he has said he will never talk about something unless he’s thoroughly researched it. I heard a clip (of him speaking to Matt Walsh) where he claims that “as many as 1 in 10” boys will be feminine and 1 in 10 girls will be masculine. That really sounded like a statistic that he pulled out of his … um … hat. Now, generally speaking, he will throw in the obligatory qualifier “studies show.” He didn’t even bother. In another clip, he decries women and feminists who talk about “power” and “power structures.” He then attributes those claims to Marxism and the reliance on a 150-year old, out-dated book. Well, I don’t think he’s researched that very well. For one, women have been talking about power and unequal power for centuries (at least). Go back and read the 15th century French writer Christine de Pisan. She knew very the power of the monarchy; she knew very well that she was powerless in that society. And when both of the connected men in her life died, she lived the effects of that powerlessness. And then she wrote about it. As another example, go back and read the letters of US writer Abigail Adams in 1776 where she begs her husband, founding father John Adams, to not put such power into the hands of husbands. At the time, John Adams was away from home writing the Constitution. She knew that the Founding Fathers were reimagining the relations of power. She asked her husband not to codify men’s power over women into the Constitution. (By the way, John Adams writes back, “I cannot but laugh.”) Both of these texts long predate the writing of Karl Marx. Peterson’s simply dead wrong on that “fact,” but making such a claim does further his agenda.
That leads to another issue: Marxism. Peterson really has it in for Marxism. Now, he says proudly and forthrightly that he is an “evil capitalist.” (To be fair, I am certain he is being a bit tongue and cheek with that characterization, but even so, he IS a capitalist.) As such, it predisposes him against Marxism just a bit. And he is all too eager to attribute all manner of things TO Marxism. Or “neo-Marxist ideology,” as he likes to say. One problem with that is that very, very few people in public life ARE Marxists. If he doesn’t like a monetary policy, it’s quite easy to smear it by calling it Marxist. If he doesn’t like a social change, he attributes it to Marxism. After all, Marxism has long had a bad rap in the US. It’s an easy target. Peterson has also said repeatedly that the motivating factor for Marxists is “jealousy.” Sorry, but that’s laughable. It wreaks of a first-year undergrad taking Intro to Psych. The best he can come up with is “jealousy”? No, as he should well understand, anti-capitalist sentiments derive from an ethical sense of inequity. Now, Peterson is likely to say that that sense of inequity is misguided, but that’s a very different argument. But to attribute it to “jealousy” is the worst kind of reductionism. For another, he points out failures in Marxist societies (generally more likely socialist societies). Fair enough. Socialist societies HAVE had some failings. But one must also acknowledge the failings of capitalist societies. You see, the problem is not so much the ideology, as the people. As I have long said, societies are fraught with people. People will manipulate and take advantage in a socialist society — or a communist society. They will manipulate and take advantage in a capitalist society. One has to sort out what is attributable to the system and what is attributable to the people in the system. And we have seen some very bad socialists and some very bad capitalists along the way.
And that brings us back to his point about women pointing out unequal and unjust power structures: Peterson (falsely) says that women are basing their complaints on an outdated text, one which he clearly does not appreciate. Now, Peterson seems to be well read. He encourages us to teach young people to read. I couldn’t agree more. Most of the texts he pushes are from the Western canon. I disagree with that. The wisdom of the entire world is worthwhile, not just the West. But the text he relies on most, the source he cites the most (at least in the clips that I have watched), is Karl Jung. He gleefully cites Jung as though whatever Jung says is divine law. I assure you, Jung did not carve out his texts on slabs of stone. To begin, Jung’s Psychology of the Unconscious was published in 1912. Not quite 150 years old, but all of 110 years old. And severely out-of-date.
More seriously, Jung had ties to Nazi Germany, and some scholars argue that Jung was sympathetic to the Nazi movement. Jung led the International General Medical Society for Psychotherapy. One of the functions of that body was to publish the Zentralblatt für Psychotherapie. In 1933, the journal, which Jung oversaw, published a statement endorsing Nazi claims and endorsing Hitler’s Mein Kampff. Now, to be fair, Jung distanced himself from those claims; he arranged a new editor, and the journal later endorsed the contributions of Jewish doctors. Jung himself continued to deny any anti-Semitism. And, yet, in 1934 Jung himself wrote: “The Aryan unconscious has a greater potential than the Jewish unconscious.” He also wrote that the Jew has not, nor ever will, create a “cultural form of his own.” Fairly damning statements.
Jung’s influence has waned — I dare say much more so than has Marx’s. Psychoanalysis has changed a great deal over time. Jung’s archetypes have been used and abused by Nazis and neo-Nazis. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) was developed based on Jung’s model of psychological types. It is pseudoscience, at best, and a late-night internet distraction, at worst. Similarly, socionics was also built upon Jung’s psychological types. It, too, is considered pseudoscience. To be fair, MBTI and socionics were not developed by Jung, but built upon Jung’s work. But the point is that Peterson continues to draw inspiration from and promote ideas from Jung’s work.
Let’s again be clear. I am not saying Peterson is a Nazi sympathizer. I am not saying that Peterson ascribes whole-scale to Jung’s writings. Nevertheless, he does seem to continue to draw uncritically from a writer whose texts are sorely outdated, misused, and misguided. In other words, he was wrong about feminist relying on an out-of-date text (Marx) to ground their arguments of power. And he himself has done what he claimed that feminists were doing (relying on an old, out-of-date book).
It’s time and past time to put Jung’s ideas to rest. One might say the same for Jordan Peterson’s public ideas about feminists and power inequality.
Ritch Calvin is an Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at SUNY Stony Brook. He is the author of Queering SF: Readings, Feminist Epistemology and Feminist Science Fiction, and edited a collection of essays on Gilmore Girls. His most recent book is Queering SF: Readings (Aqueduct Press).
