Myth and Mayhem: A Leftist Critique of Jordan Peterson—Sample Chapter

“One can see here that Peterson, while even less convinced of the equitable distribution of competences than Hobbes, clearly shares his view that life outside the confines of society would necessarily be ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.’”

Reprinted below is a sample chapter from Myth and Mayhem: A Leftist Critique of Jordan Peterson by Ben Burgis, Conrad Bongard Hamilton, Matthew McManus, and Marion Trejo, which was published on April 24, 2020, by John Hunt Publishing’s Zero Books. The below chapter was written by Conrad Bongard Hamilton.

Chapter Seven: Exoteric and Esoteric, OR The Terrible Intensity of Peterson

“As a Swiss I am an inveterate democrat, yet I recognize that Nature is aristocratic and, what is even more, esoteric.” – Carl Jung

Janus-Faced Fascisms

Depending upon whom you ask—or read—you’ll normally find that Peterson is presented in one of two ways. On one side, as an unrepentant chauvinist (if not fascist), whose evolutionarily tinged self-help philosophy reprises the worst prejudices of Carl Jung’s pseudoscientific mysticism. On the other side, as a benign liberal-conservative, whose calls for men and women alike to toughen up (and for a revaluation of ideas that don’t mesh well with the politically correct consensus) represent a welcome corrective to decades of overstretching by meddlesome progressives.

As it turns out, neither of these positions does full justice to Peterson. There are, so it goes, plenty of vituperative chauvinists to go around, especially in 2019. Were this all Peterson had to offer, there’s simply no way he would’ve become a fraction as popular as he has (with three million copies sold, it’s safe to say that not everyone who bought 12 Rules for Life regularly marches around with tiki torches throwing Sieg Heils). On the other hand, portraying Peterson as a thinker devoid of any kind of higher-order ideological agenda, as one who evinces commonsense moderation, is similarly disingenuous. Were Peterson’s sole modus operandi simply to tell disaffected men to make their beds—something most women would surely be happy about!—he would never have become a crucible for activists at the University of Toronto, never have been valorized by the right-wing media, and never have attracted the rabble of the alt-right.