He is stern, sincere, intolerant of fools, sometimes hectoring, fond of communicating harsh truths by means of Bible stories, ancient mythology, the works of JK Rowling and JRR Tolkien, and lengthy flights of Jungian-tinged abstraction about the Dragon of Chaos, the Benevolent Queen, the Wise King, and assorted other archetypes. Hari Kunzru’s description of Peterson’s last book – 'like being shouted at by a rugby coach in a sarong' – has yet to be surpassedĪmid all this discord, it’s jarring to open Beyond Order to be reminded that Peterson isn’t best understood as a debater of politics or culture, but as a sui generis kind of personal trainer for the soul.
Likewise, his outlook leans conservative – but if the distressed employee of his Canadian publisher who recently accused him of “causing surge of alt-right groups” has any evidence for that claim, I haven’t been able to locate it. He comes across in writing, for instance, as a recognisable kind of self-help sexist, with a tendency to over-interpret the data regarding personality differences between women and men but there seems little reason to condemn him as a virulent misogynist. The result is that the Peterson vilified by his critics, and celebrated by his more reprehensible supporters, bears ever less resemblance to the one encountered in his books. The culture wars over identity politics, social justice and free speech that helped fuel his rise have only grown more entrenched since then. Yet it made the Canadian psychologist world famous, and established him as a substitute father for many rudderless young men. But then conventional wisdom wouldn’t have predicted many takers for his 2018 book, 12 Rules for Life, with its demanding message that readers stop blaming others and assume responsibility for their problems instead. They included his wife’s diagnosis with a rare and usually lethal form of kidney cancer, and his own downward spiral from severe anxiety and dangerously low blood pressure into benzodiazepine dependency and an acute withdrawal response, near total insomnia, pneumonia in both lungs, and “overwhelming thoughts of self-destruction”, culminating in his waking from a medically induced coma in a Russian intensive care unit with no memory of the foregoing weeks.Ĭonventional wisdom might envisage little appetite for a self-help book so relentlessly focused on what Peterson calls “the catastrophe of life” and “the horror of existence”.
I n the introduction to his new manual on how to live a meaningful life, Jordan Peterson sets the tone by recounting the hellish sequence of health crises that afflicted his family during 20.
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