HAVE ARCHETYPE — WILL TRAVEL

THE JORDAN PETERSON PHENOMENON

by Michael Shermer

When I was a lad one of the most popular television series

of the early 1960s was the western Have Gun—Will Travel,
staring Richard Boone in the title role as Paladin, a mercenary
gunslinger whose name echoes the knights in Charlemagne’s
court (he was the “knight without armor”). The chivalrous
Paladin wore custom-made suits, was schooled in philosophy,
classical literature, opera, piano, poker, and chess, and was
preternaturally gifted in fighting skills from Chinese martial arts
and western fisticuffs to swordsmanship and firearms. Paladin
usually tried to resolve his clients’ problems nonviolently, but
as signaled on his title business card embossed (see image at
top of this page) with the knight chess piece (also emblazoned
on his holster), more often than not he relied on his custom-
made Colt .45 single-action revolver with a unique rifled barrel
for increased accuracy.1 “With this gun, I could have stopped
murder tonight,” Paladin reflects in an early episode. “In all my
life I’ve only seen a dozen real killers, but I’ve seen ten
thousand people that would stand by and let it happen. Which
is the greater evil?”

The Paladin Archetype

Paladin is an archetype—a recurring symbol, a prototype,
a Platonic ideal—in this case representing the hero myth (in
black-and-white TV simplicity no less) that may well capture
the Jordan Peterson Phenomenon (JPP), which has arisen
around the Canadian clinical psychologist cum public intellectual
who has embraced the Paladin archetype of the hero in Paladin-
style dress, manners, and erudition. Given his professed
lifelong goal of understanding human evil—particularly that of
20th century Fascism and Communism—Paladin’s greater evil
question above may well have been asked by Peterson, who
has for the past several years been cajoling his fans to stand up
instead of stand by. More on this below.
I was first introduced to Peterson on Joe Rogan’s podcast
in 2016,2 shortly after I first appeared on the show, 3 when
podcast numbers were surpassing those of even the most
popular cable news and talk shows, launching what would later
become known as the Intellectual Dark Web, of which I am a
member.4 Peterson has his own podcast as well, 5 on which I
appeared as a guest in early 2018 in conjunction with the
publication of my book Heavens on Earth,6 just a few months
before his 12 Rules for Life was published, launching its author
into the cultural stratosphere.
This was a propitious time to enter the public arena, when
alternative and social media gave many people a platform
hitherto unavailable to all but a handful of noted academic
scholars and scientists. Where once only Kenneth Clark
(Civilization), Jacob Bronowski (The Ascent of Man), and Carl
Sagan (Cosmos) were able to land a documentary series on one
of only four networks (PBS), today anyone with a computer, an
Internet connection, and a few apps can become a media
sensation. As Peterson’s YouTube subscriber list exceeded a
million people, and many millions more tuned in to hear each
appearance on various popular podcasts, Peterson refined his
talking points and wove them into a narrative that seem to
resonate with a great many people. I wanted to find out why,
so in late spring of 2018 we determined that Skeptic magazine
should look into Peterson— not just his claims, such as doling
out self-help advice in podcasts and public talks or explaining
the meaning of myths and biblical stories in YouTube videos—
but the seemingly insatiable media coverage and public
consumption of everything he says and does. I arranged for my
contributing editor Stephen Beckner (see his accompanying
article in this issue) and I to attend Peterson’s public
performance at the 1800- seat Fred Kavli Theater in Thousand
Oaks, California (sold out, as most of his events are), and he
was generous enough to spend an hour in the green room
talking informally with us about his ideas and all that has
unfolded over the past two years (while signing 12 Rules for
Life posters). Our goal in this inquiry is not to “debunk”
Peterson, which many readers have asked us to do as if it were
a given that he’s a quack selling snake-oil, but rather to
analyze his claims and the JPP in the spirit of Skeptic’s motto
from the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza: “I have made a
ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn
human actions, but to understand them.”

Jordan Peterson, Bill C-16, and Freedom of

Speech
Before 2016 Jordan Peterson was indistinguishable from
any other relatively successful academic with a respectable
scholarly pedigree: B.A. in political science from the University
of Alberta (1982), B.A. in psychology from the same institution
(1984), Ph.D. in clinical psychology from McGill University
(1991), postdoc at McGill’s Douglas Hospital (1992–1993),
assistant and associate professorships at Harvard University in
the psychology department (1993–1998), full tenured
professorship at the University of Toronto (1999 to present),
private clinical practice in Toronto, and a scholarly book by a
reputable publishing house (Routledge). This ordinary career
path turned extraordinary in 2016 when the controversial Bill
C-16, a federal amendment to the Canadian Human Rights Act
and Criminal Code, was passed, “to protect individuals from
discrimination within the sphere of federal jurisdiction and from
being the targets of hate propaganda, as a consequence of
their gender identity or their gender expression.” 7 That sounds
reasonable enough: if we’re going to protect people from
discrimination based on race, age, sex, and religion, why not
gender identity or expression as well? Who would disagree with
this clause in the bill?
[A]ll individuals should have an opportunity equal with
other individuals to make for themselves the lives that they are
able and wish to have and to have their needs accommodated,
consistent with their duties and obligations as members of
society, without being hindered in or prevented from doing so
by discriminatory practices based on race, national or ethnic
origin, colour, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, marital
status, family status, disability or conviction for an offence for
which a pardon has been granted or in respect of which a
record suspension has been ordered.
To me this reads like another step on the moral arc
bending toward justice. But in a series of YouTube videos
Peterson outlined his concerns (dread really) that Bill C-16
could turn into “compelled speech” that, if not obeyed, could
land one in jail for not addressing someone by their preferred
pronoun (zie, xem, hir, ve, xe, xyr…). 8Peterson went on record
stating, “I’m not using the words that other people require me
to use, especially if they’re made up by radical left-wing
ideologues. And that’s that.”9 Even more emphatically, he told a
television audience, “If they fine me, I won’t pay it. If they put
me in jail, I’ll go on a hunger strike.” 10 The image of a Canadian
psychology professor on a hunger strike over gender pronouns
is a little hard to equate with Gandhi’s emaciating efforts to
break free his country from British rule, but it’s a sign of moral
progress that we’ve shifted from condemning colonization to
protesting pronouns.
 Jordan Peterson autographs copies of his 12 Rules for Life
poster in the greenroom before his lecture.
To his credit, Peterson has said that if he were asked to
address someone by a preferred pronoun he might oblige him
or her (or zhe or zher), assuming it was asked for the right
reasons; i.e., not for political motives or a Borat-like gotcha. 11
Fair enough. When I was an undergraduate at Pepperdine
University I had a roommate who changed his name from
Duane to D’Artagnan (the 4th member of the Three
Musketeers), after which he respectfully asked us to address
him by his new name—eventually shortened to D’Art—which we
did (after a few Spock-like raised eyebrows). But that’s a
personal matter. It is an entirely different issue for the
government to legislate speech, especially because the law is
backed by violence or the threat thereof (as in Max Weber’s
classic definition of the state as having a “monopoly of the
legitimate use of physical force”). Threatening people with
physical violence for refusing to address someone by their
preferred pronoun does smack of anti-Enlightenment
illiberalism, government overreach, and even tyranny.
Would Bill C-16 result in Canadian professors (or anyone
else) being fined, jailed (and, presumably, force-fed) at the
point of a gun for not using preferred gender pronouns? Is it, as
Peterson described it in an Opinion Editorial in the National
Post, “frighteningly similar to the Marxist doctrines that killed at
least 100 million people in the 20th century”? 12 I don’t think so.
As I read the Bill, as in most legislation there is much room for
interpretation and many steps between legal language and the
Gulag archipelago. I don’t think Peterson was ever in danger of
losing his job, much less residing in the Grey Bar Hotel.
Still, given the number of professors who have faced Title
IX inquiries, been shamed on campus and on social media over
political peccadillos, or even lost employment over ideological
conflicts, Peterson’s stated concerns about job security at the
University of Toronto (which helped propel his Patreon account
into numbers only one-percenters could identify with) are not
entirely without precedent. The highly publicized ousting of the
biologists Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying at Evergreen
University is the most blatant example, and many more have
been documented by Laura Kipnis in her 2017 book Unwanted
Advances and by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt in their
2018 book The Coddling of the American Mind. There is no
doubt that many college campuses today are being swept up by
an East German Stasilike climate of ideological conformity,
political suppression, speech censorship, interpersonal
suspicion, and preemptive denunciation—denouncing others
before they denounce you—leading to the unhealthiest climate
for free speech since 1950’s McCarthyism. So when Jordan
Peterson said “enough” to Bill C-16, it was symbolic of this
larger problem, and he became an archetypal hero willing to
stand up to this perceived evil. And just as Peterson’s critics
were accusing him of exaggerating the dangers of the Bill, in
2017 a graduate student at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada
named Lindsay Shepherd was formally censured by her
superiors for merely showing her class a video clip of Peterson
debating Bill C-16 on a television news program, accusing her
of creating a “toxic climate” and, in accordance to Godwin’s
Rule, comparing Peterson’s words to a “speech by Hitler.” 13
At this point Peterson would have been fully justified in
pronouncing “I rest my case,” and anyone who would join a Fair
Play for Political Correctness Committee would be seriously out
of touch with reality.

The Archetypal Theory of Truth

In an episode of Star Trek, The Next Generation titled
“Chain of Command,”14Captain Jean-Luc Picard is captured and
tortured by a Cardassian interrogation expert who has
implanted a pain generating device in Picard’s chest that can be
turned on with the push of a button, which will end if the
Enterprise Captain will reveal the Federation’s plans for
disputed space. Throughout days of agonizing torture Picard is
confronted with four blindingly bright lights and told there are
five. The torturer knows that he can break Picard if he can get
him to confess to the false number. Throughout the ordeal the
indefatigable captain grunts through the pain that “there are
four…four lights,” only to confess to the ship’s counselor at the
end of the episode that he actually came to believe that there
were five lights.
How many lights were there, really? Four, of course, but
I’m not at all sure Jordan Peterson would agree, given his
preference for a pragmatic interpretation of truth, which holds
that what works for an observer in a given context is what is
true. In two excruciating podcast episodes lasting over four
hours total,15 the philosophical realist Sam Harris could not
convince the philosophical pragmatist Peterson that there is, for
example, a correct order of U.S. Presidents if, in Sam’s thought
experiment, terrorists told their captive that disaster could be
averted if the correct order of U.S. Presidents were recited…
with this wrinkle: the terrorists have a mistaken order of the
Presidency, so their hostage would need to enumerate the
wrong sequence to forestall the looming calamity. Surely
Peterson would agree that there really is a correct temporal
sequence of Presidents and that the terrorists are simply
mistaken (and their prisoner knows he’s regurgitating an
erroneous list), but no! Instead, Peterson waxed archetypal,
calling religious claims, mythological stories, and literary
masterpieces “meta-true” and “more true than scientific truth”
inasmuch as they are mediated by socio-political and cultural
factors related to our Darwinian need to survive and reproduce.
There is no “truly independent” truth, he says, only useful or
not useful truths pertaining to our evolutionary needs. The use-
value of a claim at a particular time and place is what makes it
true.
Peterson’s theory—call it the Archetype Theory of Truth
(ATT)—is very much in line with that of the cognitive
psychologist Donald Hoffman’s Interface Theory of Perception
(ITP), which holds that percepts about the world are a species-
specific user interface that directs behavior toward survival and
reproduction, not truth.16Objects in nature are like desktop
icons, Hoffman analogizes, and the physical environment is like
the desktop. Our senses form a Biological User Interface (BUI)
—analogous to a computer’s Graphical User Interface (GUI)—
between our brains and the outside world, transducing physical
stimuli such as photons of light into neural impulses processed
by the visual cortex as things in the environment. GUIs and
BUIs are useful because you don’t need to know what is inside
computers and brains. You just need to know how to interact
with the interface well enough to accomplish your task.
Adaptive function, not veridical perception, is what is important
to evolution.

Michael Shermer (left) and Jordan Peterson (right) during a podcast

I’m skeptical of Peterson’s ATT for the same reasons I am

of ITP. My refutation of ITP in Scientific American17applies to
Peterson’s ATT:
First, how could a more accurate perception of reality not
be adaptive? Hoffman’s answer is that evolution gave us an
interface to hide the underlying reality because, for example,
you don’t need to know how neurons create images of snakes;
you just need to jump out of the way of the snake icon. But
how did the icon come to look like a snake in the first place?
Natural Selection. And why did some nonpoisonous snakes
evolve to mimic poisonous species? Because predators avoid
real poisonous snakes. Mimicry only works if there’s an
objective reality to mimic.
Hoffman claims, “A rock is an interface icon, not a
constituent of objective reality.” But a real rock chipped into an
arrow point and thrown at a four-legged meal really works even
if you don’t know physics and calculus. Is that not veridical
perception with adaptive significance?
Hoffman says perception is species specific and that we
should take predators seriously, but not literally. Yes, a
dolphin’s icon for “shark” no doubt looks different than a
human’s, but there really are sharks and they really do have
powerful tails on one end and a mouthful of teeth on the other
end, and that is true no matter how your sensory system
works.
This repudiation of Hoffman’s ITP (and, thereby,
Peterson’s ATT) is an expression of the correspondence theory
of truth, which according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy (SEP),18 “is the view that truth is correspondence to,
or with, a fact” and “more broadly to any view explicitly
embracing the idea that truth consists in a relation to reality.”
ITP and ATT are also refuted by scientific realism, which the
SEPcharacterizes as “a commitment to the idea that our best
theories have a certain epistemic status: they yield knowledge
of aspects of the world, including unobservable aspects,” 19 and
ontological realism, or the belief that there is a world external
to human minds, and that this world is knowable. The vast
majority of professional philosophers trained to think about
truth embrace these positions, as revealed in a 2009 survey of
3,226 philosophy professors and grad students asked to weigh
in on 30 different subjects of concern in their field, from free
will and God to knowledge and mind. 20 On the topic of the
external world, 81.6 percent accept or lean toward non-
skeptical realism, 75.1 percent accept or lean toward scientific
realism, and 50.8 percent accept or lean toward the
correspondence theory of truth. No matter what beliefs about
the world a torturer may evoke in his victim, if there are four
lights there cannot be five, and Washington, Adams, Jefferson,
Madison, and Monroe were the first five presidents. And that’s
that!
Nevertheless, I will grant Jordan his emphasis on the
power of literary “truths” to explore deep themes and move
people to change their lives. “There is great truth revealed in
Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Shakespeare,” Peterson proclaims. Of
course there is. That’s what makes great literature great. But
there’s that word again. Truth. Presumably there were no
brothers named Karamozov in 19th century Russia, but
whether there were or not is beside the point because
Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamozov is a novel exploring
profound philosophical issues of God, morality, volition, and the
human struggles with faith and doubt during a time of social
and political upheaval, not a scientific history of Russian
modernity. Here truth is symbolic, or archetypal, inasmuch as
the characters and plots of a novel reflect a type of reality as
the author interprets it, and to that end a new field of
Darwinian literary studies has taken root that explores why
certain themes appear again and again in fiction in the context
of our evolved nature, such as sex, love, jealousy, power,
hierarchy, aggression, violence, and murder. If Peterson would
be willing to forego his Archetype Theory of Truth, I will agree
that literature, myths, and even biblical stories add much value
to the understanding of the human condition.

The Architecture of Archetypes

During the hour and a quarter that Jordan and I talked on
his podcast he described a recently-published neuroscience
paper on the structure of neural cortical columns that shows
they’re not randomly connected to other neurons in the brain,
“and what this scan shows is an underlying superhighway of
built-in connections so that the columns themselves can wire
into the already existing superhighways, so it was like there
was an underlying architecture that was highly probable that it
would manifest itself, and I thought ‘well that looks like the
neuro-architecture of something like an archetype’.” To which I
replied, “Um…maybe.”21
Peterson’s magnum opus Maps of Meaning, in fact, is
subtitled The Architecture of Belief, a 564-page mishmash of
evolutionary theory, biology, psychology, philosophy, literature,
comparative mythology, theology, the bible, Nietzsche,
Dostoevsky, Jung, Freud, and others that may have been more
accurately subtitled The Architecture of Archetypes. I undertook
listening to the unabridged audio edition read by the author,
but the book is so dense and convoluted that I DNF’d after six
hours. Perhaps reading it makes more sense, or perhaps there
isn’t much sense to be made—at least for my more literalist
wired brain—but it’s hard to know what to make of passages
like these, which fill page after page, hour after hour…
The Great Mother aborts children, and is the dead fetus;
breeds pestilence, and is the plague; she makes of the skull
something gruesomely compelling, and is all skulls herself. To
unveil her is to risk madness, to gaze over the abyss, to lose
the way, to remember the repressed trauma. She is the
molestor of children, the golem, the bogey-man, the monster in
the swamp, the rotting cadaverous zombie who threatens the
living. She is progenitor of the devil, the “strange son of
chaos.” She is the serpent, and Eve, the temptress; she is the
femme fatale, the insect in the ointment, the hidden cancer,
the chronic sickness, the plague of locusts, the cause of
drought, the poisoned water. She uses erotic pleasure as bait
to keep the world alive and breeding; she is a gothic monster,
who feeds on the blood of the living.22
It goes on like this for over 30 hours. As Peterson told the
Chronicle of Higher Education: “I don’t think people had any
idea what to make of the book, and I still think they don’t.” 23
Whew! So it’s not just me.
I had more success with 12 Rules for Life, making it
through all 15 hours. Although still too long by half for my
tastes, most of the advice Peterson offers resonates reasonably
well with the findings of cognitive behavior therapy, as noted
by the clinical psychologist Jonathan N. Stea in his assessment
(in this issue of Skeptic) of Peterson’s advice: “The potential
benefits from understanding and consuming his material can
approximate what one can glean from successful
psychotherapy. Whether a person wants to mitigate mental
health concerns or improve their quality of life, self-help
materials can be thought of as the lowest rung on the ladder in
a stepped-care model of mental health treatment.” To that end
I recommend Jocko Willink’s 2017 book Discipline Equals
Freedom and Amy Alkon’s 2018 book Unfuckology: A Field
Guide to Living with Guts and Confidence, both of which I’m
confident Peterson would endorse given that so many of his
rules—such as “stand up straight with your shoulders back,”
“compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who
someone else is today,” and “set your house in perfect order”—
are similar to those outlined by Willink and Alkon and supported
by the findings of science, such as the value of “small wins”
(e.g., make your bed, clean your room) that build confidence
for larger challenges that can lead to big wins.

Entropy and Extropy, Chaos and Order

One friend and colleague described Jordan Peterson to me
as “one pair of mirrored sunglasses away from being a cult
leader.” This is unfair to his audience. The people I met at the
Thousand Oaks event were nothing like glaze-eyed Jim Jones
followers, nor were they mostly angry young white men as
Peterson’s critics repeat like a mantra. As I gazed around the
auditorium an informal head count put the gender ratio at
roughly 65:35 Male:Female, their ages varying wildly from
teenagers to senior citizens, and the evening wasn’t even
remotely political (observations that I confirmed about other
audiences with Dave Rubin, who has opened for Peterson in
dozens of cities). “They’re not coming for a political discussion,”
Peterson has said about his audiences. They’re “coming
because they’re trying to put themselves together. And there
isn’t anything about that that isn’t good.”
In point of fact, the subtitle of 12 Rules for Life is An
Antidote to Chaos, which leads me to a final point on the JPP,
namely his worldview, which is well aligned with the reality
most people experience and another contributing factor to his
popularity. Life can be, in the oft-quoted observation of the
political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, “solitary, poor, nasty,
brutish, and short.” The ultimate reason for this state of affairs
is the Second Law of Thermodynamics, or entropy. Without an
outside source (like the sun), energy dissipates, systems run
down, warm things turn cold, metal rusts, wood rots, weeds
overwhelm gardens, and…bedrooms get cluttered. Entropy
decrees that there are more ways for things to be disordered
than ordered, so Peterson’s counsel to get your life in order is
simpatico with a great many people. As I explained in Heavens
on Earth, the Second Law of Thermodynamics leads to the First
Law of Life, which is to get your life in order:
If you do nothing, entropy will take its course and you will
move toward a higher state of disorder (ultimately causing your
demise). So your most basic purpose in life is to combat
entropy by doing something extropic—expending energy to
survive, reproduce, and flourish. In this sense, evolution
granted us a purpose- driven life by dint of the laws of nature.
That a meaningful, purposeful life comes from struggle
and challenge against the vicissitudes of nature more than it
does a homeostatic balance of extropic pushback against
entropy reinforces the point that the Second Law of
Thermodynamics is the First Law of Life. We must act in the
world. The thermostat is always being adjusted, balance sought
but never achieved. There is no Faustian bargain to be made in
life. We may strive for immortality while never reaching it, as
we may seek utopian bliss while never finding it, for it is the
striving and the seeking that matter, not the attainment of the
unattainable. We are volitional beings, so the choice to act is
ours, and our sense of purpose is defined by reaching for the
upper limits of our natural abilities and learned skills, and by
facing challenges with courage and conviction.24
Which brings us back to the Paladin Archetype and his
ratio of real killers to bystanders who enable evil through
inaction (12:10,000). If we include entropy as a form of evil,
then as the original conservative Edmund Burke famously said,
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good
men do nothing.”25
Standing up to evil—and to entropy—is an antidote to
chaos.