Politico-Psychological | Notes on Jordan Peterson, Nietzsche, and politics

A selection of thoughts.

Tom X Hart
Sep 7, 2018 · 7 min read

1. I like Jordan Peterson a great deal, and he does a great deal of good for people and society in general. I could certainly have done with his video lectures ten years ago. I believe he could even mark the beginning of a new global religious revival based on a form of experiential Christianity mixed with elements of Native American religion.

2. One aspect of Peterson that concerns me is that he is a very anxious person. He is very anxious about the possibility of a new Nazism or Communism emerging in the Western world. This is a legitimate fear, but it sometimes feels to me that he is so anxious about this possibility that he might actually make it happen. This is often the way with anxious people, who will attempt to make the thing they fear happen to escape their anxious anticipation of it happening.

3. Peterson is not a joyful person, despite his affection for Jung and Nietzsche and his religious sensibility, and he takes everything in a very serious and melancholy way. He is correct in reminding us that life is dangerous and hard. However, there is a way to transform the suffering and hardship of life into a joyful struggle. An interest in Nietzsche, in particular, would predispose a person to a joyful approach to life, but this seems to be lacking in Peterson’s case.

4. I suspect this is because Peterson is quite a repressed person. This is partly a source of his power, and it allows him to be very effective, focussed, and contained – essential traits for a psychologist and academic researcher. The downside is that he has less joyful potential than many other people. He does not enjoy public struggle, and he has been brought into the struggle reluctantly due to taking a stand over speech regulations at his university. He is very conscious that he may make mistake or slip up in an interview. The journalists are, of course, maliciously trying to catch him out. He is not, however, a figure like Trump who relishes struggle and taking “the fight” to his enemies. He is not comfortable with contradiction, and he is very keen to keep his “story straight” – although he is very open to new evidence and reasoning using an intellectual framework he accepts. He could, possibly, benefit from loosening up and becoming a little more flexible and contradictory.

5. Peterson’s constraint is partly because he has a deep commitment to the truth as he understands it. This is a rare quality in general society and any individual. It is a stance that requires courage. It means that his speech is constrained, because he actually takes what he says very seriously insofar as it relates to what he understands the be true about the world. This honesty is part of the reason why people respect him, but it does make him less able to speak from gut experience.

6. A great many people claim that Peterson is “in it for the money”. When they say this I detect bitterness, envy, and a desire to con people out of money on their part. They are the people who live only to make money. Peterson is, in my view, being driven down this path by fate or destiny. His demeanour is strictly sincere, and his entire public career is built upon taking a stand over speech codes that was completely unnecessary from a strictly utilitarian perspective and could have lost him his job. If Peterson was such a cynic, he would have swallowed the speech code to keep his job. Instead, he spoke out when, on any rational analysis, he stood to have lost out financially. These are not the actions of a man motivated by money, and his decision to enter academia in the first place indicates that money is not his primary motivation in life. His decision to take a stand on speech codes is where we see Peterson beginning to embrace the courage of joyful struggle, possibly against his more rational instincts. He is in the second stage of life where, having completed raising a family and establishing a career, he is moving towards a sort of deeper reflection on the wider purpose of his life.

7. However, there is a danger for Peterson regarding money. I notice that in a recent interview he had bought a new suit, a very nice suit the host noted. He sees this, quite legitimately, as a professional expense required to perform in public. However, there is always a danger for a person who has repressed one aspect on their personality, in this case the financial or avaricious, who is unexpectedly presented with temptation. Peterson seems to have been strictly disciplined in life to follow a fairly ascetic path in academia – perhaps there is a desire for wealth lurking in him.

8. Peterson is often described as preacher, but he is actually a prophet. A preacher is a nag or a scold – and often a hypocrite. A prophet speaks eternal truths that have been forgotten by a society and is consequently mocked for doing so. The prophet notes that straying from the path will leads to disaster, and that people have strayed from the path and encountered disaster before. The prophet reminds people of the simple truths that have been forgotten, such as the biological differences between men and women in our world.

9. One point that annoys people about Peterson is that, in a very dead and materialist world, he actually speaks of dreams and myths and all the aspects of the psyche that everyone experiences but are neurotically repressed by our consciousness. This makes some people very, very angry and it makes them angry because it reminds them that there is more to life than the “official story” of science.

10. Peterson’s weak point, politically, is that he is a classical liberal. His interests in Nietzsche, Jung, and evolutionary biology do not really fit with classical liberalism. The innateness of the spiritual and biological nature of these beliefs implies a much more authoritarian path than he is on. This means that his political thought can be contradictory, and not in a useful way. He is a conservative, but he doesn’t see that his classical liberalism degraded into the very system that we live in today. As someone with reactionary sensibilities, I want him to see that many of the problems of contemporary society emerged from the Enlightenment and classical liberalism itself. I suspect that, being a conservative, Peterson will simply be swept away politically, since much of what he says today was on the left circa 1960 or 1970 and conservatism never conserves anything – except the mistakes of liberals and the left.

11. In line with Jungian psychology, Peterson conceptualises politics as a matter of finding balance between the left and the right. He sees the right as creating inequality and tyrannous order (if this goes too far) and that this has to be corrected by the left. The left, for its part, can create a tyrannous equality and unproductive disorder. This is in line with other dichotomies in life: male and female, chaos and order, and so on. However, there is another Jungian interpretation: the left is the shadow of the right and needs to be integrated into the whole. On this reading, the Enlightenment split the West’s political personality and we have, ever since, been searching for integrity. The nature of this integrity is legitimate authority, otherwise known as kingship. Peterson maintains that the opposition between left and right is productive. But it seems to me that the nature of Nietzschean and Jungian “self-overbecoming” is to integrate the errant element, namely the political left, into the whole in order to create power. The West has been badly split since the Enlightenment, and, from a reactionary perspective, the chaotic and female element needs to be subordinated to the male, though not in a tyrannous way. I don’t think Jung advocated finding a “balance” with the shadow side of the personality. He wanted people to integrate the shadow.

12. A further intellectual problem with Peterson is that, insofar as he is influenced by Nietzsche, he does not acknowledge a similarity between the “social justice warriors” and himself. The SJWs are influenced by a leftist reading of Nietzsche that seeks to break down all barriers and categories based on Enlightenment science and thought. There is more truth to this “perspectivalism” than the conventional right acknowledges. Indeed, insofar as Peterson accepts religious and numinous influence on the world he does so on a Nietzschean or pragmatic basis, i.e. as a pragmatic good for an individual and a particular truth for an individual or collection of individuals. Peterson’s political struggle could be seen as a fight between two sets of partisans for Nietzsche. In this respect, there is nothing but a power struggle to impose an interpretation of reality upon other people and the SJWs are right – or as right as their ability to wield power allows them to be. However, Peterson is closer to Nietzsche’s original intent because he retains a biological and hierarchical view of the world that the SJWs have abandoned. The situation is analogous to the emergence of the “left Hegelians” (aka Marx, Engels, and others) in the 19th century. All that has hanged is that we live in a world of “left Nietzscheans” rather than “left Hegelians”.

13. It could well be Peterson’s fate to be martyred, possibly by a deranged fan or political opponent. I’m not sure on this point. Is he a martyr? He was not martyred during his first encounter with the left, by which I mean he was not fired from his position at his university – but his martyrdom may come later. One of his heroes is Solzhenitsyn, a man who was not martyred through death but had to suffer in the Gulag system. Perhaps Peterson’s fate is not literal imprisonment, but rather to be persecuted for many years.

14. It’s unlucky to only have 13 points.

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