How Jordan Peterson fooled young men into thinking he’s the world’s smartest man

The pop psychology superstar has decided it’s high time his voice was heard on the most grandiose of subjects: God. But as he’s neither a theologian nor even vaguely adept at making complex ideas accessible, the question Helen Coffey keeps coming back to is – why?

I already know it’s unwise to state this on the internet, but what the hell – I’m angry with Jordan Peterson. I’m angry because he inflicted a virtually unreadable 505-page book about God upon the world; I’m angry because I was forced to attempt to read it; and I’m angry because I now have a splitting headache and, worse, a head full of verbose sophistry and stupid misogyny from a Russell Brand-style big-word spouter, dolled up in the robes of a would-be St Augustine. 

“Set yourself straight in intent, aim and purpose, as you begin to more deeply understand the structure of your society and your soul. Journey with Jordan Peterson through the greatest stories ever told. Dare to wrestle with God.”

So reads the self-aggrandising press release that accompanies We Who Wrestle with God, Peterson’s new, hefty doorstopper that’s as lofty in ambition as it is impenetrable to the casual reader. A lesson, if ever there was one, in overpromising and underdelivering.

I’ll say this for the wildly divisive pop-psych “public intellectual” who switched from lecturing to making obscene amounts of money telling young men to “straighten up and fly right” on YouTube: he’s not afraid to aim high. There could scarcely be a more formidable topic to tackle than that of the Creator Himself.

The book takes us on a journey through some of the key bits of the Old Testament, arguing that the archetypes contained within are the lens through which we are programmed to understand the world. From these stories, Peterson attempts to extrapolate fundamentals about the character of God and, therefore, humanity: Adam and Eve as eternal father and mother of all and originators of sin; Cain and Abel as the cautionary tale about not giving your all (and, of course, the perils of sibling rivalry); Noah as the one Good Man in a sea of chaos; the Tower of Babel as a timeless lesson in hubris; Abraham as the first true adventurer; Moses as hero and saviour of the oppressed; Jonah as the ultimate warning against shirking responsibility.

If it seems an odd decision to focus on the Old Testament and not Jesus when arguing that Western society as we know it is predicated on the tenets of Christianity fear not! Peterson is planning a whole other book, presumably equally hench, on the New Testament. That aside, as I gamely try to drag my brain kicking and screaming through the tangled mixture of waffle and bluster, needlessly archaic language and sweeping, unequivocal statements posing as absolute truths, I keep coming back to the same questions: who is this book for? What is its purpose? And why on earth did a disgraced former psychology professor feel compelled to write it?

On this last point, a quick look back at Peterson’s trajectory over the past decade provides some clues. Until the mid-2010s, he was a clinical psychology professor at the University of Toronto, largely unknown outside the realm of academia. In 1999, he published his first book, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief; in 2013, he started a YouTube channel where he uploaded some of his academic lectures. So far, so blah.

Then, in 2016, Peterson began making social media videos railing against Canada’s Bill C-16, a law that prohibited discrimination against gender identity and expression. Within two years, these anti-trans forays into the culture wars had earned him nearly two million subscribers on YouTube.

Jordan Peterson has gained a global following as a ‘public intellectual’ (Channel 4)

Peterson’s star continued to ascend in 2018, when his second book hit shelves and bestseller lists around the world. Twelve Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, a collection of self-help essays combining a blend of commonsense advice and pseudointellectualism that particularly appealed to disenfranchised young men, was a roaring commercial success. A global book tour saw him sell out 1,000-seat venues; he was profiled by the New York Times and invited to spout his views on podcasts like the Joe Rogan Experience (during which he revealed he subsists on a meat-only diet of beef, salt and water, presumably in a bid to Make Scurvy Cool Again).

Meanwhile, Peterson’s proclamations that “enforced monogamy” was a reasonable solution to lonely men committing mass murder, and that the current hierarchy that sees men dominate positions of power “might be predicated on competence”, prompted accusations of misogyny and raised him up as unofficial patron saint of the manosphere. In the blink of an eye, “Jordan Peterson” went from internet-only sensation to household name.

As a backdrop to all of this, his own profession turned on him. In 2020, the Inquiries, Complaints and Reports Committee of the College of Psychologists of Ontario investigated statements made by Peterson which were alleged to be “transphobic, sexist [and] racist”. In 2022, it ordered him to complete specific training after concluding that his language in public statements was “disgraceful, dishonourable and/or unprofessional” and “posed moderate risk of harm to the public” by “undermining public trust in the profession of psychology”. He refuted the claims and denied all wrongdoing.

Perhaps, given the parallels – a whirlwind that propelled him from relative nobody to revered influencer with millions of modern-day disciples and, subsequently, “martyr” persecuted for his beliefs – it’s unsurprising that Peterson would feel emboldened to take on the topic of the Messiah. It’s certainly not the first time he’s weighed in on the subject of God or biblical allegory, but this latest effort is the first time he’s dedicated a whole book to it.

Reading We Who Wrestle with God is, it must be said, a particularly curious experience for a practising Christian. Surely I, of all people, should be grateful that Peterson has decided to bring his considerable clout to bear on an endeavour as worthwhile as championing biblical wisdom to a contemporary audience? After all, I don’t disagree that the Bible and its teachings underpin Western civilisation in a way that’s been all but forgotten in an increasingly secular society. I am, in theory, all for the lessons of the Good Book finding their way back into mainstream culture. But I only needed to get as far as the first few pages to realise that Peterson’s latest work is extremely unlikely to help the cause.

This isn’t someone who appears to want his reader to understand – there’s no attempt to make ideas concise, digestible or even discernible

Firstly, I must return to my original question: who is this book for? I can’t for the life of me work it out. It’s hardly aimed at academics – a niche literary market that doesn’t tend to warrant extensive and expensive promo and marketing. If it were, some questions might reasonably be raised about Peterson’s suitability to author it as a psychology, rather than theology, professor. (In a moment of presumably unconscious irony, Peterson writes at one point: “Genesis 2 therefore extends the characterization of God, presenting him as the spirit that warns against overreach – against the cardinal sin of pride. What might overreach mean?” Hmm, perhaps the belief that you can sweep in and publish the next Very Important Book about the Divine simply because you’re interested, rather than expert, in it?)

The assumption must be, then, that this is a book for laypeople – bringing fundamental truths about the human condition as revealed through the stories of the Bible to the masses. But that interpretation doesn’t hold up to scrutiny either.

Struggling through We Who Wrestle with God is, at its most basic level, a deeply unpleasurable experience. If you really wanted to turn a new generation on to the benefits of placing God and biblical morality at the centre of an orderly society, writing a bafflingly dense tome seems a weird way to go about it. Wading through the quagmire-like muddle of academia-babble and self-important bombast, one feels compelled to keep pausing to absorb sentences once, twice, three times – and still the meaning remains elusive.

I can feel myself slowly descending into madness upon reading lines that sound like they’re conveying grand truths about the universe but, on closer inspection, mean… what, exactly? Lines like, “The Great Father is the a priori structure of value, derived from the actions of the spirit that gave rise to such structure, and composed of the consequences of its creative and regenerative action.” Come again?

Little wonder the thing’s more than 500 pages long; at almost every opportunity, 100 words are used where 10 would suffice. It’s perhaps the literary embodiment of the new intellectual style that Peterson represents. This isn’t someone who appears to want his reader to understand – there’s no attempt to make ideas concise, digestible or even discernible. It’s the style, rather, of someone who wishes to prove themselves very clever indeed by obscuring meaning, hiding it beneath an esoteric “word salad” that would likely collapse under questioning if only you could ever get to the nub of what was being said. Unfortunately, that’s as fruitless an endeavour as trying to nail mist to the wall.

Peterson’s video have garnered millions of views online (YouTube/Jordan B Peterson)

When quoting from the Bible in We Who Wrestle with God, Peterson tellingly and deliberately uses the King James version, not the much more commonly used New International Version. The former translation was done in the early 1600s and, while a lot of literary types love its lyricism and poetry, it’s all “spaketh” this and “goeth” that – old words that fell out of use centuries ago and serve only as an immediate and unnecessary barrier to comprehension for the modern reader. It’s hardly surprising considering that Peterson himself often opts for language that was last popular 200 years ago (think “import” instead of “importance”, “privation” instead of “deprivation” – it’s like stepping into the pages of Pride and Prejudice).

In this way, the book echoes the playbook that has elevated Peterson to his current position of “public intellectual”: a projection of intelligence built on the shakiest ground, a heady mix of antiquated language, whataboutism, posturing and obfuscation. “I can’t really understand what this guy is getting at – therefore he must be smart!”, the audience assumes, instead of wondering why a man so smart can’t express himself coherently. When he throws out the occasional statement that is graspable, then, it’s hard not to cling onto it like a life raft amid the sea of confusion – a dangerous circumstance when what’s being said is as likely to be some deeply sexist bit of rhetoric as it is a good-sense piece of life advice.

Debating such a person, as atheistic scholar Richard Dawkins recently discovered, is like combating an opponent made of shape-shifting sand – there’s nothing solid to get a grip on. When asked straightforwardly by Dawkins whether, for example, he believes in a literal Virgin birth, Peterson gave a masterclass in straw man arguments posing as answers, eventually conceding, “These questions… They don’t strike me as… They’re not getting to the point.”

In fairness, just as in many of Peterson’s writings and lectures, there are some good, solid truisms and nuggets of advice buried beneath the book’s flabby prose and arcane vocab. I’ll happily nod along with sentiments like “there is no sense in establishing a society that fails to care for the people who compose it at every stage of their development, from vulnerable to able, productive and generous” – a profoundly socialist-sounding worldview that Peterson derives from Deuteronomy.

Just as in many of Peterson’s writings and lectures, there are problematic ideologies buried beneath all the guff

And yet, just as in many of Peterson’s writings and lectures, there are problematic ideologies buried beneath all the guff too. His very method of “interpreting” the Bible raises huge alarm bells. Instead of looking at the stories and archetypes to discover something of what humans might be like, he reverse-engineers theories, looking at the world around him, deciding what he thinks men and women are like, and applying this confirmation bias retroactively to the Bible. A case in point is Peterson’s take on Adam and Eve and the Fall, where he concludes that Eve’s decision to succumb to temptation and eat the forbidden fruit is motivated by the sin that “all” women are susceptible to: a prideful and “all-encompassing” compassion. But we don’t know Eve’s motivation; the story doesn’t tell us. It’s less like adding 2 + 2 and getting 5, and more like starting with 5 and stating definitively that the sum must have been 2 + 3 – when it could just as easily have been 1 + 4, 2.5 x 2, or even 20 ÷ 4.

While we’re on the subject of Eve – Peterson also uses her as a jumping-off point to share a worldview in which women are deemed to have little inherent worth independent of their role as mothers. “It is no coincidence, perhaps, that the sacred image of woman is not so much woman as it is woman and infant. What is a woman, alone? A target of short-term sexual gratification,” he writes. Ah, the old Madonna/whore paradigm! A cliche as damaging as it is pervasive.

I’m sure Peterson’s fans, of which there are plenty, will disagree with me – but I can only surmise that he isn’t anywhere near as clever as he thinks he is. The true mark of intelligence in a public intellectual is, to my mind, the capacity to apply that intellect to presenting complex arguments in an accessible way. It’s not a case of dumbing things down, but of figuring out how to clearly communicate ideas to ensure your audience can follow, understand and, therefore, potentially be convinced by the points you’re advancing. When looking at theology, CS Lewis, for example, was a master at this – able to convey the highest of concepts and deepest of truths about the character of God through his allegorical fiction and theological essays. I’m sceptical that anyone would get to the end of We Who Wrestle with God knowing anything more about God (though they might have more sexist ammunition to throw at childless women).

The saving grace in all of this? I don’t believe for a minute that many people will read Peterson’s book. They’ll buy it, sure, and display it on coffee tables and bookshelves, and occasionally misquote from it down the pub. But plough their way through those miserable 505 pages? I doubt it. After all, wrestling with God himself would surely be a less taxing experience than wrestling with Peterson’s unwieldy, unintelligible “magnum opus”.