- He says silly things.
It’s easy to google a bit for the many silly things he’s said. But it’s a mistake to extrapolate his entire philosophy from them.
1.a) The worst cases of silly things he says seem to be comments outside his main area of expertise. He’s right that certain ideologies are poison, but wrong to lambast entire fields of the humanities as having succumbed to a newly evolved form of it, as if the world is filled with crypto-Marxists.
- He’s temperamentally conservative.
He insults the alt-right and radical left.
There are many, many, many more people on the left than the alt-right, so most of the attacks on him come from the left. (He gives them plenty of ammo: he says silly things.) In fact, it’s possible that the only reason he’s popular is that attacks from the left have made him popular among segments of the right. But ironically, almost all of the fiercest critics of him make exactly the same mistake he makes. It’s uncanny.
He’s accused of being alt-right, of being crypto-fascist, etc. It’s just bizarre to see complaints of his ignorance of post-modernism, of how he broad-brushes the left, of how he simplifies complex ideas into an oversimplified caricature… immediately followed by the suggestion that he’s a neo-Nazi sympathizer and alt-right leader. He and his critics are like mirror images of each other, in this regard.
- He says some interesting things.
He’s read a lot, thought a lot, and concocted a sort of neo-Jungian worldview which manages to be both compelling and, astonishingly, seemingly self-consistent. That doesn’t mean it’s right, but – on this particular topic, if no other – he does start from solid foundations and builds up from them. That’s more than most people can say. The numerous silly things he says are when he departs from this foundation. And he has the knack for expressing the obvious in an evocative way. Most of us can’t manage that, either.
- He’s a clinical psychologist.
He’s basically a self-help guru expanding his professional history and experience onto the internet, and he seems to have struck a chord.
- His audience is overwhelmingly male. He has a small army of young men listening to him. I imagine most of them are white.
This is an extremely important fact about him, and his audience.
He tells his predominantly young male audience that they need to stop blaming other people (like women and minorities) for their problems and take responsibility for their own lives. This is what earns him attacks from the alt-right, who want to blame everybody else but themselves for their loser status. And frankly, this is exactly what those young men need to hear. It is exactly the right lesson for them.
- He seems to be… successful.
I don’t mean popularity-wise (although he is popular) or monetarily (although rakes in gobs and gobs of cash).
I’ve been fascinated by how this guy has taken off, and I’ve read, hell, I-don’t-know-how-many-stories like this of young men who say they used to be neo-Nazi, or alt-right, or white supremacist, and he just… managed to talk them out of it. This is, I think, the primary reason alt-right leaders are firing at him, too. Losing followers to the guy. Peterson is the one who is telling them to stop blaming others for the mess that is their life. And it’s like, well, I’ve never managed to talk back anyone from a hate group. Not once. Not ever. And basically zero of the people from the left who casually criticize the (very silly) things he’s said have managed to do that either.
Conservatism right now is an erupting volcano of pure unadulterated id. It is ugly and violent and destructive and evil.
Whatever his faults (and they are many – he is, after all, a human being), Peterson represents a legitimate alternative to that volcano of hatred. I regularly roll my eyes at Peterson, but I also roll my eyes at the people in such an opaque ideological bubble that they can’t discern the difference between him and the endless miasma of suck that conservative “thought” has become. There genuinely has not been a single conservative thinker I can think of in decades (excluding some libertarians, but they don’t want to be called “conservative”) who are even slightly worth listening to. It’s a pleasant surprise to come across someone from that end of the spectrum who has the capacity to surprise. It’s a nice change.
- He’s definitely channeling the current zeitgeist.
He is a product of our times. That means he might not have much staying power. But he still represents a positive change, from that end of the spectrum, and we can hope the change sticks.