The nights have drawn in, the rains have come, and it is time to start unveiling some of the lines in the Lost in Showbiz Winter Collection. Let me say right now that one of our absolute key pieces will be Jordan Peterson.
Quite how it’s taken this column so long to alight lovingly on the winningest public intellectual of our age is unclear, but please now consider me officially very into him. This week, I read Jordan’s most famous book, 12 Simple Rules For Dating My Teenage Daughter, and found it an absolute scream. Forgive me – the opus is actually called 12 Rules For Life, but it certainly forced me to tear down every other thought leader poster peeling off my bedroom wall. I am highly excited to get around to Jordan’s only other published book, some kind of vast theory of everything which took him 12 years to write. Oscar Wilde wrote The Picture of Dorian Gray in about a fortnight, so imagine how much better Jordan B Peterson’s Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief is going to be.
But we race ahead. Are you even familiar with Peterson? A University of Toronto psychology professor, his raging stage show involuntarily reminds me of that incredibly moving speech from The South Park Movie: “This is aboot dignity. This is aboot respect. [Laughter] This is aboot – [More laughter] What’s so goddammed funny?” Anyway, you may simply know Jordan as “the lobster guy”, after his most famous proposition/abstraction: the idea that lobsters and their serotonin levels explain why human hierarchies exist and are good. But were better in the 1950s. Put simply, you’re really doing this wrong if your first thought on seeing a lobster is: “I’d like to eat this thing, not surrender my abortion rights to it.”
Owing to his sell-out speaking tours, huge YouTube following and multimillion book sales, Peterson is frequently described as a “Pied Piper” of angry and disaffected men – though my understanding of the original Pied Piper was that he took all his followers away into some kind of mountain from which they never returned. Yes please! Except, how come Peterson’s followers continue to wander around our metaphorical Hamelin, explaining stuff like there is no patriarchy because of crustaceans? Can we try DynoPest instead?
Anyway, Peterson is also a leading member of the arseoisie, or the “intellectual dark web”, as they prefer it. Again, are you familiar with the “intellectual dark web”? I do hope not. It’s a self-styling by a loose group of soi-disant intellectuals you’d cross continents to avoid having a pint with (although they didn’t go with that tagline in the end). There isn’t space for a full passenger manifest, but they include Peterson, talkshow host Dave Rubin, Newsweek columnist and perma-pundit Ben Shapiro and a bunch of other people bizarrely obsessed with what students do, even though we’ve known since time immemorial that students often act like idiots, and mostly grow out of it unless they’re Hamlet or whatever. Think of the intellectual dark web as a very whiny superhero team. Marvel’s A-Whingers. Guardians of the Galaxy Brains. The League of Extraordinarily Fragile Gentlemen.
Like the rest of the gang, Peterson apparently imagines himself “locked out” of the mainstream media, despite having sold 2m books and being interviewed every 10 minutes by actual international media outlets. I can’t help feeling that Jordan is “locked out” of the mainstream media in the same way that Justin Bieber is “locked out” of pop music.
As I am given to understand it, all these chaps ply their trade in the “marketplace of ideas”, which largely seems to be grown men shrieking “Not the face! Not the face!” at their detractors. Truly, to watch their online arguments is to clamber inside the Athenian agora simulator.
I’m not even being sarcastic. A lot of those guys who hung around the ancient Athens debating society (while helpmeets of one sort or another took care of their day-to-day shit for them) were quite clearly insufferable edgelords. Come on – Diogenes lived in a large urn and would absolutely have been into bitcoin. In some accounts, the Oracle told him to deface the currency, which seems not entirely Delphic of her, though he found a way to make it so and decided she meant he should deface the currency of prevalent ideas. Arguably, then, Diogenes is the Jordan Peterson analogue, as he was the agora’s leading NoFapper. Hang on, that’s wrong – he was the agora’s leading scourge of pleasure-seeking. But I’m pretty sure he’d have been one of the senior thinkers in today’s anti-masturbation movement.
If you need a further Peterson catch-up, can I recommend a video posted by GQ magazine this week, in which Jordan is interviewed by the New Statesman’s Helen Lewis. It’s hard to pick my favourite moment from the nearly two-hour-long encounter, but I very much enjoyed the bit where Lewis reasons: “Lobsters don’t get depressed. I think you’re anthropomorphising to a ridiculous degree. These are creatures that urinate out of their faces.”
Then again, it must be said that Peterson spends most of the interview looking like he’s about to urinate out of his face. In the entire exchange, he smiles about once, at some perceived irony in something wistfully arch that he has just said. One’s primary takeout is not: here is a man who can laugh at himself. Which is such a missed opportunity. I am reminded of the time when Jeffrey Archer told Dame Edna Everage that “the most important thing is to be able to laugh at yourself”. “You’d have to do that,” came the deathlessly sympathetic reply, “otherwise you’d be missing the joke of the century.”
Other takeouts from the GQ interview? Peterson dresses and looks like the third Gruber brother from the Die Hard franchise. As all world cinema fans will know, the first brother to lose to Bruce Willis’s grubby-vested cop was played by the late great Alan Rickman in Die Hard, while the second was played by Jeremy Irons (himself blue-vested) in Die Hard With a Vengeance. Peterson very much presents as the third sibling that Mother Gruber kept at home because he was “chesty” – though without the self-knowledge to accept he is a character actor rather than a leading man.
Perhaps it might be kinder if his agent or publicist helped him to come to terms with this? As things stand, each of the several times Peterson intones “life is suffering”, all I could think about was how very much hotter it was in The Princess Bride, when Cary Elwes’s character Westley goes to Robin Wright: “Life is pain, highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.” I mean … I’ll take that sort of line off Westley all day long. But this guy? This 56-year-old adult in the steampunk-lite outfit who cries on stage at his own rightness? I am – how to put this tactfully? – not feeling it in quite the same way.
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