8/12

Read the Book for the Four Other Rules!

In the prior instalment I spoke of how self-help mantras are best interpreted as a guide to the charlatanism of self-help gurus themselves. You may not be able to improve your life in the real world following the advice of Anthony Robbins, but you might just be able to formulate a successful seminar series on self-actualisation, or perhaps even improve the marketing for your latest ponzi scheme.

Jordan B. Peterson’s career, on the other hand, has been built not by following his own rules, but by judiciously avoiding them. Let’s examine eight out of the 12 rules with this in mind.

Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient) and Tell the truth—or, at least, don’t lie

Peterson first came to prominence through his commentary on Bill C-16 which, according to most legal experts, he misrepresented. Did he do so deliberately, or out of incompetence? Without this feat of untruth-telling, he would not have become an important public figure beyond his YouTube channel.

But even on his YouTube channel which featured a mix of biblical commentary, literary analysis, unhinged political commentary and hack psychology, he was intellectually dishonest at times. There was a noticeable difference in the quality of his literary and biblical commentary, as is often the case with Christians. Yet it smacked not of blind devotion, but self-censorship. And so it was: prophets might be able to get away with prophesising on community TV, but on YouTube you’re more likely to be shunned when you talk about how you’re going to save the world with your New Testament interpretation than you are to be propelled to fame via the algorithm.

In growing his reputation as a fearless intellectual agitator speaking truth to power, he relied on a blatant lie: that no Marxist would debate him; a claim he repeatedly made in spite of the fact that several Marxists with a similar public stature (he had not yet become a bestseller) offered to debate him but he declined!

Eventually he did debate one (the Stalinist Slavoj Zizek: chosen as an acceptable opponent because Dostoyevsky’s—another of Peterson’s heroes—and Stalin’s idea of justice is the same: only the gulag can redeem a sinner), confirming once and for all that his reputation had been founded on two impressive lies.

This combination of intellectual and factual dishonesty also epitomises prioritising the expedient over the meaningful!

And the latter lie itself is a skilful one.

If you claim your opponents are cowards while carefully avoiding confronting any of them even indirectly, then you will appear to be a formidable opponent. An added bonus is the fact that a lie built on projection is doubly effective, as if your opponent accuses you of something you’ve already accused them of they will look like they can’t come up with a proper rebuttal and have resorted to I know you are, but what am I?

Additionally, only your enemies will care if you are a hypocrite—indeed, hypocrisy can be used as an effective status display: if you can get away with hypocrisy, you can get away with anything; so if you have the moral fortitude to be aware of your own hypocrisy without any qualms, signal it to your audience and opponents alike as a way to assert your dominance.

Be precise in your speech.

While this is the go-to-dogma of any style guide, the reality is that this is bad advice, aesthetically and didactically; Jordan B. Peterson is right to flout it. A truly precise statement is either so uninteresting it induces amnesia in the audience or so confusing to anyone who is not an expert in the field that they will learn nothing.

Aesthetically, George Orwell (one of Peterson’s heroes, though they should be enemies: Orwell hated sensitivity and pretension even more than he hated capitalism!) only resorted to a plain style after the failure of A Clergyman’s Daughter; and even his simping it up has not stopped him from being comically misrepresented by Cold War nostalgics like Peterson—perhaps it has, in fact, encouraged it. Indeed, his most influential work, Nineteen-Eighty-Four, is stylistically denser and more opaque than the impressive fable-like simplicity of Animal Farm, yet it is Nineteen-Eighty-Four which has proven longer lasting and more often quoted.

Nineteen-Eighty-Four’s ad-like slogans are imprecise to encourage the imagination of the audience: double-think, for instance, is equally referenced when people speak of effortlessly holding two contradictory ideas in one’s head as when they refer to cognitive dissonance, the unpleasant feeling some associate with this mental feat, yet rarely used to refer to the process of social indoctrination in which people reach a consensus based on whatever the highest status person in the group claims, even if the lower status members of the group know it to be false—the process described as double-think in the actual book. If terms like newspeak or metaphors like 2+2=5 were more precise, how can we explain the double-think of people like Peterson who embrace the anarchist George Orwell as if he were a capitalist ally? If Orwell were precise, how could they ignore statements such as this:

“To recoil from Socialism because so many individual socialists are inferior people is as absurd as refusing to travel by train because you dislike the ticket-collector’s face.”?

The answer is that while the statement is aesthetically simple, it is complex in its content—through this discordance it is rendered imprecise. Some socialists are degenerate dweebs, if we are so inclined, we may as well stop reading there! (Plenty of people avoid public transport due to fear of their fellow man, after all.) Thus Orwell’s writing is used by comrades, capitalists, and even the fascists he went to war against alike; rendering his legacy not only imprecise due to his writing’s discordance between style and content, but also in its cultural influence—all the better for Orwell’s estate!

As for Peterson’s own aesthetic, it’s fair to say that he succeeds by being as imprecise and complex in his expression as he is simplistic in his thinking. In fact, it is partially through imprecision that Peterson can so effortlessly censor himself, allowing him to make seemingly complex and provocative statements like the feminine is symbolic of chaos without looking like the simpleton he would if he revealed that the reason he believes this to be true is simply that the penis goes in the vagina.

Two of his most successful anti-Semitic canards (I don’t mean to imply that Peterson is an anti-Semite, merely that much of his success was built on the back of an audience hungry for anti-Semitic canards) were on the Jewish Question and how it relates to success and IQ and the Cultural Marxist cabal conniving to take over universities as part of their plot to destroy Western Civilisation.

In the case of Jews and IQs, it’s fair to say he was not being deliberately dishonest in feeding his audience’s desire for him to talk about how high Ashkenazi Jews’ IQs were, how disproportionately successful they were, and what we needed to do about the fact that they’re kicking our lily-white arses, but merely noticed that it got him a lot of attention and inflamed much of his audience. By being imprecise in answering The Jewish Question yet noting with much affectation that this was a tremendously difficult question to grapple with, he was graced with an air of alt-right edginess until he declined to answer the question long enough that they got bored with him and moved on. Nevertheless, by never precisely answering the question and thus revealing that he was or was not a Nazi, he was able to attract the evangelical attention of liberals and Neo-Nazis alike, propelling him to international stardom.

By the time he got around to debating Slavoj Zizek, it was time for the likes of Richard Spencer to denounce him when once they had tolerated him, as he not only failed to critique Marxism coherently, but was also presenting to the world a vision of Cultural Marxism that was not led by Jewish Bolshevists—or anyone else, for that matter.

Yet it was the Quixotic nature of his crusade against Cultural Marxism that had gained him the greatest base of support outside of misunderstanding Bill C-16 (to be fair, law writing due to its extreme precision is, to the layman, gobbledygook): posing as a saviour fighting against a vague sense of unease with a named yet undefinable causation is the cement with which the bricks of any cult are bound. (If the rhetoric stops here, however, it is not very conducive to setting the scene for ritual sacrifice; which is the goal of death cults such as the alt-right.)

The closest thing to a concrete definition of Cultural Marxism he could muster up was the Frankfurt School and Michel Foucault. Unfortunately all members of the Frankfurt School are dead. So is Michel Foucault. (Thus there is no one to sacrifice!) Their work is also presented openly as part of the curriculum of many universities. Worse still, there are numerous openly Marxist academics the world over, working in a variety of fields.

(A blank canvas, then, is the easiest surface for an anxious audience to project its insecurities on—and the easiest intellectual opponent to debate. As an added bonus, dead people can’t respond to criticism!)

While the prior existence of the Frankfurt school and Michel Foucault and their presence on numerous curriculums might seem to actually support his hypothesis, it does not. To repeat, his claim is that a shadowy cabal of post-modern Neo-Marxists (a term he started using after enough people had pointed out that Cultural Marxism roughly translated into German is Kulturbolschewismus) are conspiring to destroy Western Civilisation by secretly infiltrating education to indoctrinate children.

Living Marxists such as my personal favourite Grover Carr Furr III (a medieval professor who moonlights as a denier of the crimes of Stalin!), disprove rather than support the notion that there is some sort of secret Cultural Marxist conspiracy: If Marxists (or Jews for that matter) are taking over education, then they’re doing so in the open and if you wish to criticise their campaign to destroy Western Civilisation, then you must name names and attack their academic work directly to be anything approaching precise in your speech.

Incidentally, this is why the anti-political correctness spectre of Cultural Marxism is even more incoherent (and imprecise!) than the Nazi version, allowing it to achieve greater mass appeal: if you are telling a story about a conspiracy but remove the conspirators from the story because it’s too politically incorrect, then your story makes no sense. But a story must make sense! So how can you have a conspiracy without conspirators? You encourage the audience to participate by inventing their own!

The wonderful thing about post-modern death cults driven by a mass audience is that they do away with the death part: the CIA backed the right horse in supporting post-modernism if their goal was a more peaceful world! People are still sacrificed, sure, but all they face is a tarnished reputation or a little gaol time.

(1,000 years of sentences in the one witch hunt in Canada for Satanists might sound like a lot—and it is—but it’s still better than, say, hundreds of thousands of pagans being burnt to death!)

Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t

But not if they are a Cultural Marxist. Let’s be honest, anyone who builds their career on a strawman of their own invention knows full well that it’s best to live your life arguing not against others, but versions of others you yourself have invented. Not only will this be a lot better for your sanity, it will make you look smarter as you heroically crush your invented opponent’s pathetic arguments. And in the vein of reducing all self-help to projecting confidence and being assertive, what could make you more confident and ready to assert your dominance than practicing against weak opponents of your own invention.

I may or may not have slightly misinterpreted this rule to prove a point. But Peterson doesn’t act as if the person he is talking to might know something he doesn’t if they disagree with him and are not of higher social status than he is; brashly disregarding any criticism a lower status person has of him is another tactic he has used to successfully build his brand.

Even I could make some poor kid on a college campus look like an idiot! You could, too; you just have to be precise in your speech and stand up straight with your shoulders back!

Set your house in order before you criticize the world.

Addicted to benzos, incapable of filing his own tax returns, and unable to function after a single sip of orange juice, I think it’s fair to say that this is not advice he himself has followed; much to his own benefit.

But it’s more interesting to apply this to the bogey men that haunt him, and in turn to contrast them with their liberal contemporaries.

Before Lenin criticised the world, he managed to grow into a well-adjusted adult in spite of the premature death of his father, even going on to graduate with honours, marry as well as maintain a mistress as was expected of the bourgeois, and find success in the legal profession; all while being an enthusiastic amateur athlete, economist, philosopher and chess player, not to mention one of the greatest ever geniuses of political activism, and a highly accomplished politician, too.

Mao might have been a bit naïve, but he was also the epitome of traditional masculinity. A Solomon-like lover, a ruthless and yet compassionate leader and a poet-king who built his kingdom on the glory of battle and aphorism. One can’t help but think the lovers of traditional masculinity who are so infuriated by Mao are probably more than a little envious of his extraordinary achievements as an absolute mensch.

Conversely, the “classical liberal” Churchill was an alcoholic always on the verge of bankruptcy who could barely put two sentences together when he wasn’t praising himself (though, in his defence, he was narcissistic enough to write literal volumes of self-praise and even win a Nobel prize for literature for it!), and although he had an unquenchable bloodlust, was a terrible soldier and general (hence the volumes of self-praise to restore his reputation). His was not a kingdom earned through battle and lyricism but cowardice and babbling.

FDR was a degenerate cripple and Stalin was literally a choirboy, maintaining a monk-like austerity throughout his life—so I suppose Stalin actually had his shit together, too.

Though not related to this rule specifically, it’s worth bringing up Peterson’s obsession with the mystical power of delayed gratification here: Stalin, Mao and even Lenin’s interpretation of Marxist revolution was one based on mystical delayed gratification. By finding the correct mathematical historical equation, no matter how much suffering was to be endured during the shuffling of the holy abacus beads, at some point socialism was guaranteed to usher in the new millennium. Just as, for Peterson, no matter how much suffering inequality brings about, the dangers of doing anything about it are too great a risk—eventually the benefits will trickle down to the lower castes, anyway!

Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them and do not bother children when they are skateboarding

Okay, admittedly this doesn’t have much to do with his success, but what if you dislike skateboarders, and your child wants to skateboard?

But let’s end on a rule that he did follow—although it wasn’t much to his own benefit.

Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping.

This advice has led, more than anything else, to Peterson’s fall from grace. Addicted to benzos, he—incomprehensibly for someone who claims to be a clinical psychologist—tried to beat his habit cold turkey in Russia, and after coming out of the resultant coma and related near-fatal case of pneumonia, went on a corona-virus contracting tour of quack medicine in Eastern Europe.

This might sound as if he was not treating himself like someone he was responsible for helping, but when you read 12 Rules for Life, it’s clear that he holds people who might need help in utter disdain. Thus in treating himself as someone for whom he was responsible for helping, trying to treat benzo addiction cold turkey is exactly what the good would doctor prescribe.