A Last, Left-wing Defence of Jordan Peterson

Arturo Desimone

10 November 2024

Why the left needs to finally overcome its fixation on the Canadian hypnotist.

"And if you gaze long enough into the abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you." Nietzsche

Our precipitous moment has no shortage of demagogues and political entrepreneurs vying for the throne. Yet there are influential opinionmakers who, along with their large online followings, want to believe that the most notorious and representative example of right-wing demagoguery nowadays is be found in that moralizing Jungian psychologist rumored to be the Canadian man who grew a pair. Among Peterson’s alleged extremist tendencies, we quickly find one constructive trait that would have once interested a bygone left: he at times turns his young followers on to writers of books much better than his. Once having traversed the latrine-read-worthy and embarrassing 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos and its sequels, the sufficiently spanked initiates are encouraged to dig into Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, Hemingway, Nikos Kazantzakis, John Steinbeck, the holocaust memoir of psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, and even the unfairly neglected Canadian novelist Margaret Laurence, who wrote the postcolonial novel The Stone Angel. Which other mass-media celebrities are today promoting literacy amongst their tens of millions of followers? Do contemporary leftists remember a time when the objective of socialist activists was to foment reading habits among ordinary people who would otherwise be prone to mass culture intended for the plebs? Today’s left seems more content with spreading memes.

The mainstream understanding of what constitutes right vs. left, oppressor and oppressed, transformed radically under the second Obama administration, when the liberal commentariat had to suddenly accommodate the realization that the black man who they voted for—much like the black woman they voted for in November 2024—supported the industry of war and impunity for big finance. For anyone familiar with mainstream discussion in the West prior to 2011 (or the "Pre-Twitter Anthropocene" as future paleontologists might define it), Peterson sounds like a cut-and-dry centrist liberal, a fiscal conservative with some downplayed appetite for Calvinistic values, a likely closet reader of CS Lewis' The Narnia Chronicles, a nasal tone of voice. But our reading of the political map has changed, even and despite the growing plethora of people and opinions who are ever-farther to the right of Peterson. Still, somebody might insist on flattering JP by labelling him a dangerous radical. But how do these figures of the very-online left commentariat argue for this exaggerated, Rasputin-like aura of danger surrounding the Jungian? Firstly, by highlighting some of his controversial sources among dusty mid-20th and 19th-century writers who are unpalatable to today’s middle class, suburbanite sensibilities. And secondly, by invoking a stereotype of the median Peterson fan—a confused and angry young white heterosexual male from the upper castes, who wishes to regard himself as a disinherited prince of the patriarchy.

The writers he re-popularizes are canonical thinkers of the 20th and 19th centuries who even Peterson in his soberer moments has probably understood will outlive him and his fame once 12 Rules goes the way of DiAngelo's White Fragility and Kendi's Antiracist Baby mercifully toilet bound. Critics are so blinded with middle-class rage, that they tackle Peterson by flailing at one of the major thinkers he associates himself with: the suspiciously esoteric Carl Gustav Jung.

Those concerned with sounding the alarm about today's demagogic, frustrated intellectuals threatening to revive the Fascist terrors of the 1930s, are rightly worried about the global reemergence of Fascism. But we would do well to remember that the Swiss psychiatrist joined the Allied effort in the most engagé manner possible for an intellectual: Jung become a vital Western intelligence operative, "Agent 488" working day and night against the Axis. Jung's battle drew upon personal as well as political urgency: he understood that history would not look kindly upon those who remained idle. It was crucial not to allow Fascism to claim the mythologies and annex the powerful archetypes which Jung devoted his life to studying, as their Fascist territory. He understood that not doing enough to antagonize the Third Reich would tarnish him in posterity as a mere discontent of Freud’s, as one who had chosen complacency with Nazism in a petty personal vendetta against his Jewish former mentor. Becoming agent 488, however, proved sadly insufficient to posthumously redeem his good name. Peterson detractors like Pankaj Mishra in his classically sneering NYRB piece "Jordan Peterson and Fascist Mysticism"— the template for all future hit-pieces—falsely claim that Jung, who remains influential for mainstream psychology, has been declared obsolete, "disproven" or otherwise invalidated by the field. Years after Mishra pioneered the genre of the ineffective "Peterson takedown", pundits still reach for tawdry logical fallacies like "Peterson is Jungian and therefore a Fascist, because Jung flirted with fascism", or "Peterson is Jungian and is a reactionary, ergo any defense of Jung is reactionary". One of the ways in which pundits do this—thereby throwing the exquisite baby Jung out with the bestselling bathwater of 12 Rules—is by falsely assuming that the former Harvard professor’s reluctance to employ gender-pronoun neologisms in the classroom is because Jung was hostile to the trans. Nothing could be further from the truth:

Every man carries within him the eternal image of a woman, not the image of this or that particular woman, but a definite feminine image … The same is true of the woman: she too has her inborn image of man.

Jung, in The Development of Personality.

Clearly, Jung leapt lightyears ahead of his time and has stayed well-ahead of postmodern theorists of transgenderism like Judith Butler in his writings on the alchemy of love and sex, as he took a particularly keen and passionate interest in the phenomena of hermaphroditism. In Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, Jung insists that "[t]he hermaphrodite means nothing less than a union of the strongest and most striking opposites... The primordial idea has become a symbol of the creative union of opposites, a 'uniting symbol' in the literal sense."

Jung believed that hermaphrodites embody a valuable "non-dual" unifying positive force in all cultures. He theorized that most men have an inner female he called the anima, and that most women carry around an incubus-like inner male within their psyches: the animus. Among heterosexual couples, a good interaction depends on these powerful invisible operatives in the unconscious: how is the man's anima (his inner female) getting along with her animus (the woman's inner male)? Whether or not the two end up in bed or in love depends on that complex and hidden interchange. Jung also sympathetically included gays in this theoretical universe.

A Jungian revival, instead of making us more reactionary, could help us better put Western society's big trans-squabble into context. We can accept that some men contain an inner female that is so potent and predominant that they simply need to identify themselves as women. The archetypal is not the same as biology but is still important.

The interest in Jung and in myth is stigmatizing for reasons that remain unthinkable to those who are not inculcated in postmodern academic feminism, which teaches young people that all epics and stories about heroism recorded since humankind’s antiquity are "problematic grand narratives" which privilege white males’ point of view. The left would do well to instead turn to the work of Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui. Mariátegui, who championed the cause of Peru’s indigenous masses, understood that previous generations of Marxists had erred in assuming that the bourgeois elite is always mystical and inclined towards mythological thinking, whereas the proletarian masses’ values tend more naturally towards favoring science and logic. That antiquated worldview probably stemmed from an era unlike ours, when technology was more clearly improving the dignity of labor, rather than causing massive unemployment and making workers discardable. Mariátegui, in quasi-feudal Latin America, inverted his European comrades’ logic, by seeing the importance of myth for revolution. How do you expect to win the struggle against the most powerful group in the world history—the capitalists—if any rhetoric of courage is openly despised or reported as right-wing sentimentality? How to inculcate any appetite for counterhegemonic values without stories? Having adolescents be steeped in mythology (which is epic poetry) will produce more poets, survivors, and leaders of socialist movements.

One of Ben Burgis’ and late podcaster Michael Brooks’ major criticisms is that Peterson sees no contradiction in attacking Foucault—who on his deathbed declared "I am a Nietzschean|—while championing Nietzsche. Conventional academics make their careers by citing poststructuralists like Foucault, who will refer to Nietzsche, Heidegger and Spinoza as secondary sources, without ever disseminating texts like “What are Poets For?” in class. It is subversive to quote Nietzsche as Peterson often has, before crowded stadiums of people who otherwise would never have gathered to hear prose-poetry. During the 20th century, it was almost exclusively a feature of socialist societies where anyone citing poetry or philosophy could access a mass audience or a platform embedded the mass media.

Another source which Peterson’s critics underline as extremist is Aleksandar Solzhenitsyn. This is ironically where the scaremongers are the most accurate and yet again shortsighted. Yes, Solzhenitsyn glorified the ideal of an expansionist "Holy Russia" that would bring back feudalism and the Tsars. And yes, Solzhenitsyn made a significant intellectual imprint on the ideologues of the Putin regime, Aleksander Dugin in particular. But the Russian émigré Nobel prizewinner was once also The New Yorker's and New Republic’s darling and owes his posthumous fame to Cold War liberals who celebrated his books like The Gulag Archipelago and A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich as the exile relocated to Vermont in 1976. Did it shock liberals at the time that Solzhenitsyn championed theocracy and expounded jeremiads indicting Western decadence from a pulpit at Harvard?

While being dismissive of today's millennial and Gen Z protesters concerns over their futureless horizon in contemporary capitalism, Peterson is prone to pontificate, warning against the kids’ “communism” while quoting the Russian mystic, as he draws laughable analogies of the Canadian university campus to Solzhenitsyn's Siberian Gulag. But even here Peterson is not being radical: he is, rather, a Baby Boomer who doesn't notice how good he had it when he was a student entering academia. In the 1980s Harvard’s total tuition fees, including room and board, did not surpass $9500. His fellow Baby Boomer "edgelord" Bill Maher much more sternly excoriates students, notably for wanting debt-forgiveness. Neither of these men seem to have noticed how much the world's economy has transformed since 2008.

Like some figures on the anti-imperialist left, Peterson criticized the Ukraine war, reaching millions. Anti-imperial podcasters like Aaron Maté, of course, ignored his endorsement of their stance. He also generously interviewed critics of the establishment such as Stella Assange, Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi on his podcast with 8.25 million subscribers on YouTube alone. If today's global left wants to claim Julian Assange’s recent liberation as one of its last collective victories, the movement—if we can call it that—must stand corrected: Peterson's hugely-watched interview of Stella Assange gives an example of exceptional antiwar conservatives' solidarity for Assange after much of the left had ostracized or abandoned the Australian publisher altogether in the wake of the discredited rape accusations from Swedish feminists. Ensuing revelations about Sweden’s uniquely punitive feminist legislation called for a debate that was too uncomfortable for a left that had pledged unflinching support for #MeToo and #BelieveAllWomen.

The secret of "self-help" is that it's not really self-help: the average "self-discovery" manual—whether it's Osho or "Who Moved My Cheese?"—usually narrates with a stern, pedantic voice, disappointingly similar to Calvinism's Spartan injunction that we pull ourselves up "by the bootstraps" despite all the imported "Wisdom of the East" aromatizing such prose. Most self-help gurus sound a bit fascistoid and condescending in the tone their writings use. And most New Age Aquarian self-help lit is esoteric. Since its roots in the Theosophical society and other European occultists, New Age abounds with questionable political worldviews that conflict with the Western rationalist tradition. Peterson’s books are no exception to their market.

Why then would the left specifically want Peterson as their bogeyman, our antichrist? That question is answered by asking ourselves a more important one: who is the left truly afraid of facing, or of even noticing on the battlefield of contemporary politics? Who and what are the sundry proverbial elephants in the room?

There are, of course, many agitprop intellectuals today who are conversant with militant, violent and clandestine sectors of the right. The leaders of France’s Generation Identity movement, for example—according to Al-Jazeera journalists’ investigations—are responsible for a string of murders and gang-warfare and are simultaneously conversant with Great Replacement theorists of the kind endorsed by Victor Orban’s Danube Institute.

Jörg Baberowski, a German professor of East European Studies at Berlin's Humboldt University, has gathered a large following for his lectures promoting historical revisionist propaganda that "relativizes" the holocaust, all while seeking to prop up the worldview of the ascendant AFD. In 2014, Baberowski said to Der Spiegel: "Hitler was no psychopath, and he wasn’t vicious. He didn’t want people to talk about the extermination of the Jews at his table."

Ukraine's Olena Semenyaka, spokeswoman and PR operative of the Azov battalion, is beloved as Azov’s eloquent "charm offensive" in the global online right. In lectures, she interweaves different European 1920's occult fetishes—with titles like "Wotan, Pan, Dionysus: at the gates of the Grand European Solstice". She cites Jung in the way he had hoped to avoid when he became "Agent 488", along with a hodgepodge of Germanic intellectuals, as she calls for destroying cosmopolitan "liberalism". She has been photographed posing with Swastikas. As an effective strategist, Semenyaka does, however, understand the power of myth in motivating young, oppressed people to take on a much more powerful adversary like Russia.

Can we agree that the abovementioned group of people sound more dangerous, and more political than Peterson? It takes courage stare in the abyss. That is not to say that the left needs more scapegoats or devils. To the contrary: anxiety must cease to be a prime motivator if the left wants to be more than a movement of cultivated suburban reaction and moral panic.

Peterson is unpalatable to many of us who have little to learn from him, but his audience is more socioeconomically, ethnically and educationally diverse than what Nathan Robinson of Current Affairs claims. A left committed to hermeticism and self-consolation (and to failure) wants to believe that the glib man in colorful three-piece suits, the defanged Canadian who reminds boys to read their Dostoyevsky, is the true demagogic hellraiser of our time. Shouldn’t we be vying for that title, rather than awarding it to a milquetoast opponent?