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Jordan Peterson isn’t just a public intellectual, he is a cultural phenomenon.
He has a knack for getting into high profile confrontations with the liberal (and not-so-liberal) left – and winning.
Numerous attempts have been made to take him down – not least in magazine profiles: hit-jobs that invariably miss the target (which is what happens when you aim for a straw-man instead of the real thing).
One profile well worth reading, however, is by Wesley Yang for Esquire. Yang understands the apparent contradiction in Peterson’s message i.e. that it amounts to nothing more than good old-fashioned common sense, but is also hugely ambitious:
“His life advice concerns the necessity to defer gratification, face up to the trials of life with equanimity, take responsibility for one’s own choices, and struggle against the temptation to grow resentful. How such traditional values came to be portrayed as a danger adjacent to Nazism is one of the puzzles of our time.
”Viewed another way, Peterson’s intellectual project is exceedingly immodest, and can be stated in a sentence: He aims at nothing short of a refounding of Western civilization…”
But here’s another contradiction: Peterson’s project is indeed one of restoration, yet it is also hugely disruptive – in the sense that an innovative company disrupts a market. In fact, Peterson is in the process of disrupting several ‘markets’.
The first is the so-called alt-right. This always was a misleading label, because the alternative on offer is not to the conventional right. Rather, the variation is on the identity politics of the left. The alt-right offers a similar set of victimhood narratives, but with a different set of victims.
Peterson is accused by his stupider critics of having his alt-right tendencies of his own. They couldn’t be more wrong:
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