Jordan Peterson's Shaky Qualifications
Should it be a requirement to live up to your own advice?
Once a guy gave me some advice which I’ve never forgotten. “You know something successful people do,” he said, “they make their bed every morning.”
I’ve never forgotten it not because it was especially good advice or thought provoking in any way, but because I couldn’t believe this guy, a co-worker who was arguably the biggest loser I’ve ever met, had the nerve to give me life advice.
He was a stubby white guy who thought he was awesome because he spent some time in Asia, and he co-opted some Asian customs, such as making a big show about wiping his feet and not wearing shoes indoors, and his stoic demeanor while wiping his feet suggested he found some spirituality in the act.
Once he walked into an empty conference room where I was eating Panda Express and he informed me that it was not “authentic Chinese food.”
He was thirty-five and had a seventeen year old girlfriend who he’d tricked into thinking he was a movie director. He once used a jigger to mix himself a Bacardi and coke at a party.
As I recall this was his birthday party and I showed up early so that I could stay ten minutes and leave early, and witnessed him hanging his own Happy Birthday banner above his front door.
He was fired from his job in a casting studio shortly after for hitting on actresses via Instagram, and I have never seen him again.
Jordan Peterson likes giving people advice too. It’s his job.
He uses the same technique as most every charlatan of the televangelist ilk, which is to state basic moral certitudes, which typically takes up a few minutes, and then, having run out of material, pontificate on them with religious metaphors for any number of hours.
Often times you need to search for any tangential connections in Peterson’s ramblings, often no different than listening to a guy wearing eight layers of clothes ranting outside of a 7-11. If you concentrate you can get the gist of what he’s trying to say although it’s schizophrenically scattered.
In this video you can truly taste the insufferability of it, and you can get a sense of why he generally looks unwell, because the more mentally unwell a person is, the more they will look it, and these days he looks like Ichabod Crane on speedballs.
I’m convinced most of Peterson’s fans are fooled by his rhetorical hopscotch, as evidenced that much of it, outside of his repurposing the Ten Commandments, is unintelligible.
Take this passage from his book titled Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief:
I dreamed I saw my maternal grandmother sitting by the bank of a swimming pool, that was also a river. In real life, she had been a victim of Alzheimer’s disease, and had regressed, before her death, to a semi-conscious state. In the dream, as well, she had lost her capacity for self-control. Her genital region was exposed, dimly; it had the appearance of a thick mat of hair. She was stroking herself, absent-mindedly. She walked over to me, with a handful of pubic hair, compacted into something resembling a large artist’s paint-brush. She pushed this at my face. I raised my arm, several times, to deflect her hand; finally, unwilling to hurt her, or interfere with her any farther, I let her have her way. She stroked my face with the brush, gently, and said, like a child, “isn’t it soft?” I looked at her ruined face and said, “yes, Grandma, it’s soft.
If someone said anything approaching this to you at a party you’d say, “Right on man, I’m going to go stand over here now.”
You would not say, “You should really be getting paid for this.”
It’s unclear what psychological condition Peterson suffers from, but I’m inclined to listen to advice from sane people as opposed to clearly deranged ones, much like I’m not as impressed by people who redeem themselves after committing several murders than I am people who have never murdered anyone.
Here are Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life, taken from his 2018 self help book of the same name:
"Stand up straight with your shoulders back."
"Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping."
"Make friends with people who want the best for you."
"Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today."
"Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them."
"Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world."
"Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient)."
"Tell the truth – or, at least, don't lie."
"Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don't."
“Be precise In Your Speech.”
"Do not bother children while they are skateboarding."
"Pet a cat when you encounter one in the street."
Act respectfully and respect yourself. Got it. Thank you Doctor Peterson.
Speaking of acting respectfully and respecting yourself, a few years back Jordan Peterson became chemically dependent on benzodiazepines, which is another way of saying he was just another drug addict even though he had taken to dressing like George Washington.
After failing several times to kick the habit through traditional detoxing methods, he went to Russia to undergo a treatment dangerous enough to only be legal in Russia, which entailed putting him in a medically induced coma to rid his chemical dependence to the drugs.
His daughter Mikhaila Peterson, also a self-styled self-help person, traveled to Russia to support her father. A few true facts about his daughter:
She claims to eat only beef, and that any other food will inflame her autoimmune disease, but claims she can drink whiskey and vodka.
In 2017, when she was twenty-five years old and nine months pregnant, she married a Russian guy who was twenty-eight years her senior.
The guy was so old that he competed in the 1988 Olympics.
This is the type of thing her father gets paid to tell people not to do.
While Jordan Peterson was recovering in Russia, Mikhaila Peterson took an extended trip to Romania and engaged in a sexual tryst with fellow ‘influencer’ Andrew Tate, a vile misogynist — and much like her father, a voice for disaffected men — who is currently in a Romanian prison awaiting trial on charges of rape and human trafficking.
So, the guy who tells people how to live, with a strong conservative Christian conviction, became a drug addict who gave birth to a daughter who lies about her diet, who is a fellow charlatan supplement salesperson, who entered into a troubling marriage while nine months pregnant, who is now divorced, and hooked up with the biggest creep of all time.
If you left your kid to their own devices they wouldn’t come out this fucked up.
This should all sound familiar because it’s always the case. The people who think they have all of the answers are the least qualified to tell you anything.
Peterson’s life is proof.