It’s apparently bad manners to include an author’s medical details in a book review, but in this case the Foreword (sorry, the Overture) includes a lengthy description of Peterson’s many travails since we last encountered him. There’s no point in being respected if you can’t be respected by the Establishment.Īnyway, four years after the publication of his mega-seller 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, we find Peterson in a much denuded state. The fact that a deeply loathed bastion of liberal Mainstream Media is employed to sell a book that stands in opposition to the shibboleths of liberal Mainstream Media cuts to the heart of Peterson’s brittle contradictions: it’s lonely out there on the cultural precipice, guarded by Pepe the Frog memes and Twitter bots. He was a first responder in the Obama-era culture wars a crown prince of semi-mystical masculine regeneration a new media magnate a crustacean fanboy and a philosopher manqué obsessed with the sacred nature of old hierarchies.īut is he still relevant following the Trump revolution, now that the cheerless kente-wearing technocrats are back in charge? Keep in mind, the New York Times once referred to Peterson as ‘the most influential public intellectual in the Western world right now’, a quote that adorns the front cover of his self-help sequel, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules For Life.
His career does, however, serve as a précis for conservative intellectual adventurism in the twenty-first-century. He has never come close to inciting violence-although a rather absurd mini-revolt by some employees at his publisher’s Canada office might seem to suggest otherwise-and unless you’re a raw T-bone steak, he is not even vaguely bloodthirsty. Tempting as it is, you can’t blame the good professor for all of white male supremacy’s excesses.
You’ll have to forgive me: I’ve been reading Jordan Peterson. What remains to be said about Jordan B Peterson? These days, doesn’t he seem like a creature out of time, an impresario for a near-forgotten age that culminated in a cosplay insurgency over which his shadow darkly flitted? Didn’t it feel like those were some of his dudes out there during the Capitol riots in Washington, D.C., among the fulminating furries and gun jocks, the gamers and beta cucks, all driven into violent incoherence by a culture changing at warp speed, moved to reactionary performance art by a dour liberal orthodoxy they hoped could be LOLed into submission? No?
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