One of my hobbies is following the career of Jordan Peterson out of morbid curiosity. This interview in the Sunday Times is not the best, but it nails some of the dynamics which Peterson would prefer not to talk about https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/jordan-peterson-depression-drug-dependency-daughter-mikhaila-rehab-russia-0xtz2ph32 (non-paywall https://archive.fo/lizxI )

Why pay attention to Peterson? He became a hero to a lot of very lost people because of his message. The interview makes clear that he is now faking it until he (hopefully) makes it, stage-managed by the same daughter that flew him to Russia for a medically-induced coma holiday.

I am fascinated because Peterson is basically the first self-help guru to hit the jackpot on the internet. There are plenty of such gurus who use the internet, but AFAIK he's the first who exists because of the internet. The meme is the medium is the message.

Like all self-help gurus, his message is banal; the self-help guru game is all about window dressing, because the aesthetic is the thing that really distinguishes one self-help approach from another.

Peterson's aesthetic is (was?) fascinating because it dressed up the self-help banalities in "science" and "politics". Peterson's understanding of both of these is pretty rudimentary because he doesn't do the reading (as he revealed when trying to debate Zizek).

He doesn't do the reading because he has a colossal ego, but that's a different story. What he does is conflate "science" and "politics" in a performance of rationality, consisting of a flat affect, an insistence on precision and a reliance on evidence; but it's only performance.

He's the shadow of the rationalist movement; rationalism for people who don't, won't or can't do the reading. This of course gives him a far larger market than the actual rationalist movement, whose self-help aesthetic is frankly alienating even to somebody as rational as me.

Peterson's aesthetic is worth studying because it shows what kind of performance is successful in gaining traction on the internet, because that success shows the huge need out there for meaning, and because it shows that we need to provide alternative and better Maps of Meaning.

It's also worth studying because the whole story is a tragedy if you aren't familiar with Peterson; it becomes a dark comedy the more you know about him and his family; and the more you know about the context of his rise and fall, it becomes a morality tale for the internet age.

It's also pretty funny reading his subreddit, where his fans demonstrate every day just how lost they are in a world that they simply cannot understand. Their response to the Time interview is gold; apparently an interview only represents him correctly if it is just a transcript.

I hope he gets well; I suspect that he won't. I suspect he's been unwell for a long time, and that he's integrated "being unwell" into his sense of self. This can happen with long-term mental health problems; you start to define yourself by those problems as a coping mechanism.