I’ve been fascinated by the figure of Jordan Peterson for a few years now. I’ve started by diving into his psychological and self-help content, which I found immensely helpful. Then I went on being regularly challenged on my core beliefs by his more political stances.
For those who don’t know, Jordan Peterson is a clinical psychologist and was a professor at the University of Toronto. He’s been a prolific researcher and best-seller author, and now more of a public figure.
His political stances deserve, in my opinion, to be read through the lens of what he things psychologically, philosophically and spiritually.
The TedX he’s done does a good work at describing those things. I will try to distill the nectar of his teaching in this post, so hopefully it’ll help you see things more from his point of view.
If you don’t know this guy, it’s probably a good introduction to his level of thinking.
If you hate this guy, it might help empathise with his worldview and understand him better. Isn’t it always helpful to better understand your enemy… 😉
Meaning isn’t illusory, matter isn’t the only thing that exists
It’s the third time I’m watching his talk, and I’m still learning from it. It’s probably one of the best TedX you can listen to, even right now, 10 years after it was recorded.
His thesis goes as follows.
From birth, reality is constructed through meaning. All your brain does is create a map of reality, which contains direction, values, objectives. At first you learn to move an arm. Early objective. Then you learn to set a table. Then to be a good partner. Later objectives. Those constitute your reality. It is what matters to you. It is what matters to other people about you.
It’s all that matters. In a very profound way, these things that matter are more real than (concrete) matter: your brain is wired to make sense of things rather than see them as they are.
One of the key problems of our society, according to him, is that we have taken as assumption that only matter is real. The rest is fake. It has lead us to pathological behaviours.
Being a good citizen isn’t enough. Become a good person.
The conclusion of his TedX goes as follows
Follow what you're interested in, it will lead you to and through adversity, and will transform you from a citizen, to an individual. Then the doors will open again. And at that point you're strong enough to have your life. At that point you're strong enough not to fall prey to pathological beliefs systems and work towards the destruction of things.
What follow from what I’ve described above is that as a person, you tend to become very narrowly defined. You see reality through a narrow lens, which has been defined by what had meaning for the people around you. The best you can do is being a good citizen. Citizen means different things depending on where you’re from though.
You can start to see where this leads. People are essentially meaning sponges. What that means is you’re designed to get meaning from inter-subjective relationships. So if you’re in a pathological, tyrannical system, you might not even think it is, because you would adopt those values as the reference towards which to be good. You would aim at being this good citizen. Which might be doing a LOT of harm.
Peterson’s was driven by the need to understand how could people do such horrors during the 20th century. How could people hurt others so much? How could they go along with it and not rebel? This is his explanation. They were being good citizens of pathological nations.
So how do we solve it?
There is actually higher meaning than being a good citizen in being a good person. This is what enables you to see through the map of meaning that has been constructed around you. It enables you to see things as they are, and not as they seem to be, by mutual acknowledgment.
How do I become this good person then? First, you need to go through the developmental stages. You get to take responsibility for obtaining what matters to you. Only through this quest of becoming a good partner, a good citizen, can you realise it’s not all there is.
Then, it’s about following what interests you, what guides you. Peterson advocates that what is appealing to you is like a light shining forth through the map, and guiding you to what’s real. It’s essentially the world talking to you, or God, depending on your beliefs. You don’t get to choose! it’s your own voice, your own intuition, and you’ve got to trust it.
The challenge about following that intuition is baked in the definition: it doesn’t respect the map! So it doesn’t respect consensus or convention. It might be very far off from what your culture is preaching as good. It’s super hard, yet it’s the best you can do. No enlightened individual in the past has ever only been respectful of status quo… Think Jesus, Socrates, Ghandi… Some of them died for their beliefs.
Being a good person is something that transcends matter and all meaning so much that it’s something that is worth dying for.
How does that help read Jordan Peterson political stances
Jordan Peterson is a fierce combattant against ideologies, that he deems pathological. He pushes back strongly against centralised forms of meaning-making, especially as they try to enforce and quiet divergent forces.
His combat is usually on what he calls post-modern neo-Marxism ideologies. He believes it is the belief system that caused the wars of the 20th century, which thus has to be fought against as fiercely as possible.
He presses on personal responsibility, as it’s how you can check all those meaning boxes, and eventually become a good (/real) person
He is definitely unconventional, which is following his own advice: he follows what seems real to him and not what is real and conventional to society
What should I do to become a good person?
Spend a great deal of time trying to locate that light shining forth. What makes you feel alive? Keep a journal of that. Don’t neglect it, it might well be your purpose right there. Nihilism and depression are lurking in the shadow of that light… I’ve been there.
Spend even more time locating that light. Everyday, it specifies, the callings get sharper. Reality shifts then progresses. Keep track. Don’t lose sight, it’s possible to go back to dark moods.
Personally for instance when I do follow my need to be productive, to be useful to people, to actualise, I’m full of energy. One day when I don’t follow up on my own commitments and I become slightly depressed. Why? I don’t know. But I can’t ignore it. In some ways, I don’t have a choice.
At some point, your truths will be making you uncomfortable with society. It’s ok. It happens to everyone who asks the right questions. Of the people who have revolutionised science, or theology, or anything, no one did that by following society’s injunctions
It’s ok to change and loose an identity. You were interested in success and gained a lot of recognition from it? Great for you! You’re afraid to lose that now that you’re interested in other things, being more ethical, having more relationship with manual work, doing spiritual work, living a simpler life? Well, I understand. But here you risk missing what you were meant to grow into. You are obstructing the very life that is running through your veins. Do you need booze to keep up? Maybe it’s time to move on, abandon your pride and control, and trust the meaning that shines forth for you. Identity is very addictive. You will get emotional bumps. But you’ll emerge in a much better place 😊
Meditate in the morning. Get attuned to yourself. I wrote here about intuition and it relates nicely to this “shining forth” concept. Learn to spot the light and follow it.
Actualise: look for what you could be then actualise this potential in your life and other’s. Get those in sync. Surrender to what you could be. Don’t worry, if you have a why, you can bear any how (Nietzsche).
Pursue (especially) when it gets hard. This is where you’ll learn the most.
Read Jung. Individuation is the way to go to truly become an individual.
One last departing quote from the talk:
Said differently: the veil of reality will be lifted through your relentless effort to make sense of things.
I hope you enjoyed this piece, and if you did, it would mean a lot that you liked it and shared it with other people!
Cheers
If you want to watch the whole TedX, here is the link 🙂