Jordan Peterson Biographer on Why People Hate Him So Much

“One can readily see why someone who has committed any part of his life to fighting ‘white privilege’ today would resent Peterson personally.”

Editor’s Note: In light of the recent news regarding the Penguin Random House controversy as reported in Vice, this article has been republished from June.

To understand why people hate Dr. Jordan Peterson, the subject of my recent book Savage Messiah, I think it is best to let Peterson himself introduce the subject, “I explore the dreadful socio-political consequences of the individual inauthentic life: the degeneration of society into nihilism or totalitarianism, often of the most murderous sort, employing as an example the work/death camps of the Soviet Union.”

Available on YouTube, this introduction describes a 2017 lecture Peterson gave at the University of Toronto called “2017 Personality 13: Existentialism via Solzhenitsyn and the Gulag.” And, when we get right down to it, hatred is a personal thing. For instance, those who fear or are disgusted by the Soviet death camps hate Joseph Stalin, who created them. It’s personal.

So when Peterson exposes the Stalinist mindset of today’s popular “woke” culture, it evokes a deeply hateful reaction. The fact that he will not back down or even soften his accusations escalates the hatred of the woke to the nihilistic rage we see being acted out on America’s streets today. This is, after all, evidence of how accurate Peterson has been all along.

Peterson suffers the pointed rage of these groups because he knows exactly who they are, their personalities, and where they come from ideologically.

Peterson’s thorough historical knowledge and detailed analysis of the tyrant’s personality leaves little room for rebuttal from its modern exemplars, whom Peterson calls “postmodern neo-Marxists.” These include Third Wave feminists, Black Lives Matter activists, and transgender zealots, the three legs of woke culture. Peterson suffers the pointed rage of these groups because he knows exactly who they are, their personalities, and where they come from ideologically. In effect, Peterson knows them better than they know themselves, and he knows they are akin to “…very, very seriously bad people,” such as Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Pol Pot.