Jordan Peterson: Thinking Clearly In A Neurotic Age

In a small production studio in South Florida Jordan Peterson is sitting alone, motionless as Rodin’s Thinker, on a podcast set lined with bookshelves when he directs a question about sound levels to a crew of unseen technicians.

They are watching him via four different cameras in a nearby control room, tightening shots and adjusting angles on what the kids might describe as his “resting melancholy face.” But with the concern about sound, Peterson’s famously hangdog features spring to life. He’s worried that the volume in his miniscule IFB earpiece will be too low for him to properly hear his guest, Canadian journalist Rex Murphy, who will be linking in digitally from Toronto. He also doesn’t want interjections from producers to derail the natural flow of their dialogue.

What he wants, he emphasizes, is to be able to concentrate on the conversation.

Even Peterson’s fiercest critics must acknowledge his prodigious academic achievements. (Gregory Woodman for DailyWire+)

While Peterson has given hundreds of lectures in sold-out concert venues and been interviewed on numerous high-level productions like Bill Maher’s “Real Time,” a scroll through his five-million-subscriber-strong YouTube channel showcases more stripped-down arrangements. Usually, it’s just him on a webcam speaking directly to someone on the other end of an equally simple set up.

He’s not opposed to bells, whistles, and aesthetic upgrades as such, but he’s cautious with anything that might interfere with his ability to subsume himself in his interviewee’s ideas. The solution he negotiates this time: Two IFBs instead of one, minimal direction from the sound booth. 

The conversation is everything.

How We Think

“I only invite on guests who I want to learn something from and to share that opportunity with other people,” Peterson tells me the next day in his airy, canal-side rental that currently serves as home. “I suppose that is the pearl in the oyster of woke diversity philosophy. You want a range of viewpoints on any difficult topic. There’s no sense talking to people who think exactly the same way you do, because that’s not informative.”

Certainly, it’s hard to find much agreement on who Peterson is and what his rise from obscure psychology professor to intellectual icon represents. Depending on the kind of cultural waters you swim in, you might see him as a self-help guru or a slayer of sacred leftwing shibboleths or an ideologue of patriarchy.

Today, sitting on a white linen couch, he looks like a man out of time and place. His assistant, who answered the door, sports swimming trunks, as befits a Florida forecast of 91 degrees with 68 percent humidity. Peterson is wearing his customary three-piece tweed suit. I can tell when he’s most focused on a question because he stops looking at me and leans forward, eyes fixed on the ground as if to block out any sensory information beyond my voice. The reverse process occurs when he’s listening to his own answers. He straightens up, head tilted back, eyes pinched close as he formulates sentences.

And this, Peterson tells me, is how we think.

“Thought is an analogue of dialogue,” he explains. “The reason that free speech isn’t just a freedom or right among many rights is because we navigate the shifting horizon of the future by thought.”

It’s not much surprise, then, that Peterson came to fame, after a lifetime in academia first at Harvard then at the University of Toronto, for raising the alarm about assaults on public discourse. He refused to follow dictates to use certain words (preferred pronouns) and just as stridently refused to ignore certain topics (struggling young men), seeing such restrictions as assaults on thinking itself, on the autonomy to develop ideas and assess solutions. “I think the biblical phrase would be the ability to test the spirits to see if they are of God,” he says with a wry smile.

Peterson is gratified to meet fans helped by his books and lectures, but he wants to hear what they’ve been through, not simply praise. (Gregory Woodman for DailyWire+)

He goes on to explain that interaction and debate are so necessary for arriving at truth because people aren’t very good at posing questions to themselves, and they’re even worse at listening for answers. Talk to the people who have observed Peterson up close though, and they’ll tell you this is not a problem from which he suffers. 

In 2021, James Orr, professor of religious philosophy at Cambridge, arranged to bring Peterson to the campus for a series of lectures. The effort was, in itself, a reaction to speech suppression.