The Prophet is a Clown
On the modern worship of the visibly unhinged
ADDENDUM: This essay contains a link to a study on the link between gender-affirming care for transgender people and improved mental health outcomes. A reader correctly pointed out to me that the source of this data was from a decidedly partisan trans-advocacy group, and this led me to do more reading on the state of research into the link between gender-affirming care and mental health. While gender-affirming care is standard practice within the medical and psychiatric fields, it remains highly unsettled science, and my tone in this essay doesn’t reflect that in a way which I feel gives the reader an accurate impression of the state of research. In other words, there are indeed quite a few of those postmodern cultural Marxists about in the research community, and anyone who wishes to consult science on these issues has to keep an eye out for them. That’s a shame in that it distracts from what should be the central goal, which is helping people with gender dysphoria.
To be sure, this doesn’t change my position in relation to Peterson’s views on the subject, which remain outlandish, and for which he doesn’t even attempt to provide evidence. But I feel it necessary to add this note, lest I become guilty of the exact behaviors I’ve attempted to critique.
"Up yours, Woke Moralists! WE’LL SEE WHO CANCELS WHO!”
That is an actual quote from a recent video posted on Youtube by Dr. Jordan Peterson, in which he achieved something that has lately come to seem sadly unremarkable: he officially became too absurd to parody.
Sitting on a leather chair, looking just a little too put together in his usual three-piece, and framed by an unsettling blue drapery background which gives an appropriately David Lynchian sense of horror to the whole scene, Peterson launches into a tirade against twitter for suspending his account over a tweet in which he deadnamed Elliot Page and described the surgeons who performed top surgery on the actor as “criminal.”
I don’t simply say that Peterson is beyond the point of parody because of the self-evident ridiculousness of his presentation-his seething demeanor, demagogic rhetoric, and what eventually devolves to school yard threats against “woke moralists”.
And I don’t really want to engage with the content of Peterson’s video-there’s really nothing new there, just the usual howling about how trans people are actually just misled sheep who were the victims of their Gender Studies classes, and are now being financially exploited and butchered by surgeons and the gender-affirming care of mental health practitioners. It should be said that, as is typical of anti-trans arguments, there’s no evidence presented about the supposed harm being done by such care-nor any attempt to refute research demonstrating the benefits of gender-affirming surgeries in mental health outcomes, research presumably conducted by the postmodern cultural Marxists and thus not worth reviewing. Nor is there any meditation upon how insistently dead-naming transgender people who have made it abundantly clear they’d prefer you didn’t might evince a lack of concern for their mental wellbeing, apart from being pretty fucking rude. Peterson appears to regard himself to be above such earthly matters.
I don’t want to dwell too much on any of these things because I think it’s self-evident to anyone who doesn’t have their head neck deep up Dr. Peterson’s ass that he’s simply a deeply and quite visibly unwell individual who never fully recovered from his nervous breakdown some years ago, and this presentation isn’t a brave rejection of the pressures of woke culture to silence the truth, but rather the reckless raving of an addict who has been cut off from his supply-not to put too fine a point on it, the supply here being likes and retweets. He had briefly announced he was leaving Twitter in May, incidentally, after receiving a flood of hate mail over describing a plus-size Sports Illustrated model as “not beautiful”. That obviously didn’t last, so perhaps on some level he realized he needed to be cut off from outside.
But several Euthyphro-style dilemmas sprout up here-has Peterson slid further and further to the right because of his audience, as so many have, or have they slid further and further right because of him? And has he become a twitter addict because he is a moral leader, or is the quest for likes and retweets at this point the main driver for his quest to lead a moral revolution in the West? He (or at least someone on his staff) clearly has no scruples with engaging even with mindless trolling, as I recently found out in the comments of the aforementioned video:
Peterson, like Trump, has thus joined the ranks of those too ridiculous to be effectively parodied, and that’s a bad thing. David French, a conservative who is roundly despised on the right for his rare insistence on the threat Donald Trump poses to American democracy (a term I use advisedly), recently explained the dynamic prophecy played in the role of Trump’s capture of the evangelical community in 2015 and 2016 in a way that I hadn’t fully appreciated before:
And then the other thing that was really important to this sort of faith and prophecy-based mindset was the shocking victory-the fact that nobody predicted that he’d win and he did win sent a message to millions of Christians that this was divine intervention. And I think that was the moment where a lot of this loyalty locked in in a way that a lot of people don’t truly appreciate. I saw it happen in my community and I saw it happen with my own eyes.
In essence, precisely the fact that Trump was such an out-and-out bastard, so utterly contrary to America’s supposedly Judeo-Christian values, and still managed to eke out a victory, served as proof to many evangelicals that he was in fact sent by God to save America. His perversity became evidence of his holiness. This is one of the remarkable bait-and-switch aspects of religious faith-as Slavoj Zizek brilliantly put it in his debate with Peterson, “If God exists, everything is permitted.” The normal rules of morality, that is to say, simply don’t apply to God-He writes the rules, and whatever He is or does becomes good by virtue of the fact that it reflects His will. By osmosis, His followers too become immune to natural morality, and thereby a sane man can as surely fly a plane into a skyscraper as feed a beggar with a clean conscience.
When Zizek pitched this argument to Peterson, I’m frankly not sure if he understood it (it was fairly obvious that he understood almost none of what Zizek said in that debate-he simply wasn’t used to engaging with real philosophers). But he has slowly but surely enacted it. Watch him here wrestle mightily against his desire to declare himself a prophet in a bizarre exchange with an interviewer:
Peterson often refers to the “Dostoyevskyan critique” to be found in Crime and Punishment-the book’s protagonist, Raskolnikov, becomes convinced through his atheistic intellectual theorizing that he is in fact a sort of ubermensch, one of a class of men who exist above the realm of moral law, and tests out his theory by committing a murder. Peterson misses the point, however- Dostoyevsky embraces religious tradition precisely because it is, as Marx called it, the “opium of the people.” Dostoyevsky embraces religious tradition precisely because it presents a barrier to religious extremism. We can’t know how someone like Dostoyevsky would process the ascendance of a figure like Donald Trump, but it demonstrates another historical truth. Raskolnikov’s theory and organized religion are built around the same impulse-the tendency to attach oneself to a transcendant dogma. Certainly this is a persistent bug of secular reason, but it’s also a critical feature of religious faith.
Peterson himself seems well on his way to becoming a modern Raskolnikov, clearly convinced of his own brilliance and unique position as a defender of Western cultural values, and of his wisdom allowing him to dictate not just to transgender individuals, but also the medical professionals who treat them, just who they are and how they ought to be handled. His position as an extramoral individual is cemented by follower counts, speaking engagements, and the like.
I have argued before on this blog that the whole dynamic of intellectual leaders and their followers is dysfunctional, and this dysfunction is magnified by the internet and the conditions of profilicity-the follower inherits their identity from the leader, and the leader derives theirs from the adoration of the follower. I’ve argued that what people need to do is stop taking the words of people like Peterson, or for that matter any other popular intellectual too seriously, and instead put their real mental energy towards study and discussion amongst one another. These figures are at their best as stimulants for conversation, not as preachers. In this respect, Peterson is certainly interesting, and has generated no shortage of conversation. As cliche as it sounds, people really must learn to think and critically analyze thought for themselves, as a function of their own role in their own intellectual communities. I defer to the words of Leo Tolstoy, speaking of a follower of the short-lived “Tolstoyan movement” that had cropped up around Russia towards the end of the author’s life:
To speak of "Tolstoyism," to seek guidance, to inquire about my solution of questions, is a great and gross error. There has not been, nor is there any "teaching" of mine. There exists only the one eternal universal teaching of the Truth, which for me, for us, is especially clearly expressed in the Gospels...I advised this young lady to live not by my conscience, as she wished, but by her own.
It has been suggested that in prehistory, ancient societies may have worshipped schizophrenics and developmentally disabled people as shamans, people with unique access to the world of spirits. At least the results of that, from what our archaeological findings have show, were interesting and fairly unique. In our era, to be “touched by God” is to be a clown. Like ‘70s era Eastern gurus, flown in from a cave in India to start rampaging through unsuspecting middle-class adherents who thought letting an old man molest them or their wives was the sole path to Enlightenment, we worship them for their perversity, their stupidity, or their obvious mental instability. Peterson wins followers by breaking down into tears; Trump wins them by telling them to their faces that he doesn’t believe a word he says.
This path will lead where it has always led, and that is nowhere good. Watching lunatics move millions by the power of a tweet is often hilarious, but it’s mostly sad and exhausting. It’s been a hell of a ride, but I’d love to get off now, please.
07/03/22 edit: edited to fix the mispelling of “Raskolnikov” (which I had spelled as “Roskolnikov”). The price one pays for using audiobooks.
Good article! I also really like the drawing of Jordan Peterson!
You realize how insane you sound. Right?