“Hey Dave.” I turned to see one of my students had stayed in the room as everyone filtered out. He was one of my most attentive and seemingly curious students, at least whenever philosophical questions were being discussed.
“What’s up?”
“Just curious if you’ve heard of this professor, Jordan Peterson.”
At the time, I worked for a few years as an adjunct instructor at Boise State University as part of a teaching team for an intro to college skills course. This was my third student to ask me if I had looked into the popular professor within a year’s time.
All three of the guys who asked me this question on different occasions were studying STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) while also being genuinely interested in the humanities.
I had not, at this point, actually taken the time to look into Peterson’s work, either in print or video. Nor had I, at this point, really developed any sense of understanding for why alienated guys were being drawn to the man.
My impression at the time was that Peterson was, as liberal leftists were so quick to accuse him of being, just another right-wing influencer personality. So I said, “Isn’t he just an anti-PC personality like Shapiro or Crowder?”
“That’s just the drama about him online because he said he won’t comply with a state mandate about using peoples’ preferred pronouns.”
As I looked into “the drama” more, I learned that my student’s description was the general way most people characterized Peterson’s beef with Canada’s Bill C-16. It’s not quite accurate though because his concern was with the principle of compelled speech being a tremendous breach of basic rights in Western Law. Peterson’s most vocal opponents claim he was just overreacting, saying stuff along the lines of “if someone wanted him to use their pronouns and he slipped up he could go to jail.” To be fair though, I think conservative or law-conscious folks tend to have longer-term concerns about how legal precedent spirals out of control over time, resulting in negative unintended effects. But this is just an aside. The real question is why do I care—or why should you?
“So if he’s not just the drama I’ve glimpsed, what are you saying?” I asked.
“You’ve got to watch his “Maps of Meaning” course on YouTube. It’s all about philosophy, psychology, meaning and nihilism—the kind of stuff you talk about.”
A whole lecture course on the kinds of stuff I talk about? That summer while working a construction gig, I put the earbuds in and started listening to his lecture course. I was taken with it almost immediately—not because I found anything he said to be groundbreaking in terms of substance, no, I was already more or less acquainted with most of his hidden sources in philosophy and had a basic sense for where he was coming from in psychology.
What I found so entrancing was Peterson’s ability to teach big ideas. It’s not every day you find a professor who can capture and maintain hold of a classroom of highly distractible college students, much less to get them to care about fundamental problems like nihilism and meaning.
“Nihilism” just means that nothing has any ultimate meaning or purpose. It is the mood characterization of depression put to theorizing the state of society—though it is less of an explicitly believed-in theory and more of the basic state of reality as diagnosed by theorists like Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Leo Strauss—each conservative in their own way, yet failure to engage with them for such reasons is fundamentally debilitating to any intellectual endeavor to follow in their wake.
So why care about nihilism? Is that not just a bunch of nostalgic fear-mongering? Perhaps this is projection, but I don’t think most people come to philosophy because they are happy and content with the world. It’s more often the case that one turns to philosophy in a time of crisis. An existential crisis can bring one to philosophy for answers when at a loss in terms of ways to move forward. Loss of purpose and meaning is no joke. Progressives especially downplay and dismiss these very real concerns as nothing more than “some white boy angst, now that women and people of color get to do stuff.” So Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are just white fragility in action? Excuse me while I take notes. I am not exaggerating. This is the stuff you run into teaching philosophy.
Progressives and leftists in my life and online have characterized fundamental concerns regarding nihilism as “nothing more than” reactionary. And, to be fair, I admit to having spent some time myself believing the Nietzschean or Sartrean catastrophizing about “the death of God” as just making a mountain out of a molehill. I used to just eye-roll and want to move on to more interesting stuff, but eye-rolling is not the best way of handling concerns—much less two of modernity’s most influential critics. How the conversations and arguments I had in multiple philosophy clubs or with different professors during coffee or office hours over time led me to take these things more seriously is the stuff of a future work. For the time being, let’s bring it back to why nihilism mattered to me at the time that I was diving into Peterson’s “Maps of Meaning.”
Philosophy and critical theory both matter to me first and foremost for the tools they offer to critique of ideology. Coming from a background that was expressly ideological, and having been naturally predisposed to question everything, I was often accused of “rebellion” for wanting to understand the reasons I was told to do this or to not do that. So authoritarian dogmatism has always rubbed me wrong, and when I finally discovered philosophy in my twenties, I realized I had been deprived of the basic tools used for digging oneself out of the ideologically-laid ruts of meaning that constrain the mind and its ability to comprehend other perspectives, much less to even just understand the basic coordinates of social life. As a result, from day one I have valued philosophy for providing us with the tools necessary for ideology critique.
Nihilism matters to ideology critique, not only because those social critics of nihilism often have their own ideology to peddle, but because I suspect all ideologies being sold to us, in some way, attempt to fill a vacuum left where belonging, purpose and meaning properly reside. Loss of meaning, purpose, and sense of belonging are all fundamental realities for anyone who ever found a new political or religious system to dive into and cling on to. A sense of nihilistic despair is also symptomatic of modern alienation.
A quick illustration of my take on ideology
Disclaimer: I am not using the strictly Marxist definition of ideology, but mean it in the sense of a system of answers to fundamental problems or questions that trouble most people at some point in life. The Marxist spin is that ideology, as a system of belief, serves to allow the unquestioned reproduction of the status quo and its power relations—this is where the idea comes from that ideology is a way workers work against their own interests. I am not limiting myself to this definition because to move through all the different ways of talking about this and how it has evolved since then is beyond the scope of this work. I do hope to someday write that book, but in the meantime…
My basic working theory of ideology is far from fleshed out, but it is nothing without the terms “hegemonic ideology” and “counter ideology.” Hegemonic ideology is the mass society you live in that most people more or less take for granted, with its norms, laws, and unchecked assumptions. In our case, since the end of the Cold War, hegemonic ideology is some kind of neoliberal corporate capitalism (but maybe that’s just my own counter ideological diagnosis?).
My approach to ideology critique wants to explore what our hegemonic ideology actually is and how it really functions, but counter ideologies are not interested in these questions beyond rhetorical purposes—they have it all figured out and are ready to sell every true believer a series of dogmas in the form of both diagnosis, prescription, and lifelong identarian subscription to an in-group of validation.
The diagnosis portion of an ideology interprets hegemonic ideology as being wrong, harmful, or even evil, and then proposes its solution in either reformist, revolutionary, or escapist terms. In any case, the interpretation of “mass society” and why it is harmful is always interesting to me, for both personal and research reasons. Most interestingly, ideology tends to prey on certain fundamental concerns.
Feelings of alienation and precarity are fundamental problems most ideologies are competing to provide interpretations of and solutions to. This should be of no surprise because any ideology ultimately serves an institution that has monopolized the production of some kind of community, or else it seeks to do so.
What I’m getting at is that, when an alienated 20-something who seems to be getting turned on to the life of the mind recommends a popular YouTube professor, I take interest. And when I see that professor is a skilled orator, proving himself capable of igniting the curiosity and interest in classrooms for decades, I take note. The kinds of people who scoff at the million views Peterson’s YouTube course had accrued before he went viral for his “anti-PC” opinions have underestimated the situation. This is not the same as some news pundit leaving corporate news to start a YouTube channel that appeals to right-wingers. The million plus views gained prior to Peterson’s viral explosion into the public eye speaks to the degree to which he was able to get people interested in philosophy and psychology. That’s not nothing.
So, if he is serious to me, why did I want to make a meme of him? To be fair, I only wanted to make a meme of the fact that he was dodging what I hoped would lead to actually productive dialogue. His fan base, an entire generation of people getting into philosophy, needed to know there was more to the story than what he was selling them. Still to this day, when I meet a Peterson fan, I do not see some lost cause or whatever—instead, I see someone who is potentially getting turned on to philosophy, and that is something that I get excited about! Ultimately, I suspect that most of Peterson’s more serious fans stand at a gateway to the life of the mind, so long as they do not fall into a paranoid Cold War structure that refuses to seriously dialogue with the Other.
On the construction of an elaborate meme
Because I would like to think I have maintained a foot in what gets called “the real world,” there are times that I say “meme” and someone stops me in my tracks to ask what I’m talking about. The term was coined by Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene where he talks about how ideas can proliferate and evolve like genes, which he suggested we call “memes.”
True to the unruly nature of words, meaning, and intent, Dawkins’ serious word itself “turned into a meme,” just not in the way he meant. Now when we say meme, we mean the viral form of a joke—though of course, one can also use “meme” as a verb. To say one is memeing just means they are riffing off of a running gag or inside joke.
There have always been jokes that stand alone, whereas other jokes are funny because they put a new spin on an old theme or formula, e.g. “your momma,” “knock knock,” and “blonde jokes” are just three classic popular genres that come with an expected format. Memes are basically the same, though the form being played with is usually an image.
Successful memes are, then, an image-joke format that can be filled in different ways. Diverse subcultures online will use a viral meme format to put their own spin on it, usually retooling the structure towards those “who get it” as a sort of inside joke. It can get pretty obnoxious, and, more importantly, memes can be outright hilarious.
When I say that I “made a meme” of Jordan B. Peterson dodging debates with Marxists and then lying about it, I mean that I took an actual and absurd situation (he canceled on a Marxist debate and then went on Joe Rogan a couple weeks later to tell millions of people that Marxists refused to debate him) and, for the sake of “The Discourse” and “the free marketplace of ideas,” made his evasion and apparent lie the point of a viral joke. To be fair, Peterson made a viral joke of himself—because it could have been avoided if he would have just had a little fidelity to the idea of principled dialogue or debate with one’s foes (something he professes an interest in).
So how did I make a meme of Peterson dodging debates and, more importantly, why? What follows is my summary of the events that led up to the conference used to focus national attention on his big lie and my reasoning for doing so. This was not what I would consider “cancel culture” because at no point did I or anyone involved in organizing this advocate for a complete renunciation or deplatforming of Peterson or his ideas. I mean, he was invited. He could have debated the ideas, but by first canceling Doug and then snubbing us, Peterson proved his interests to be otherwise than stated when on the Joe Rogan Experience.
I just wanted to encourage critical inquiry into some of Peterson’s unchecked claims and, ultimately, to instigate a real debate. We did not get the debate we wanted, but the one he ended up having with Žižek six months later would have arguably not happened if not for the conference.
Responding to Peterson: In lieu of a debate
Between December 2017 and January 2018, Jordan B. Peterson was going to debate Douglas Lain on Zero Squared, “a wannabe Marxist podcast exploring the possibilities for a new left.” What an exciting event! Having already spent the summer working while listening to Peterson’s lecture courses, I was excited to see how such a conversation would go between the famous professor and a leftist guaranteed to break his stereotype of Marxists being anti free speech or opposed to debate. I reached out to Doug and asked if, after the debate, he would like to join myself and others for a public post-debate analysis event.
Doug had previously joined myself and others for a different event on the topic of Mark Fisher’s book Capitalist Realism, published by Doug’s publishing company Zero Books. A post-debate debrief seemed like an exciting follow up event because, with Peterson’s rising popularity, one of the things people overlook most is Peterson’s staunch status quo liberalism that is capitalist realist as can be.1
Then Peterson’s people canceled that debate and did not, as originally planned, ever reschedule. This messed up our plans for the post-debate conversation, but more importantly it felt like a great opportunity for an important dialogue was missed. Instead of following up with Doug, Peterson went on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast to tell Joe Rogan’s millions of listeners “Marxists won’t debate me.” Quick aside: I inevitably run into a lot of people who want to downplay and dismiss Joe Rogan’s importance, but if you think going on Fox to reach their 2.5 million viewers is worthwhile if you have a message to spread, then realize that The Joe Rogan Experience has almost four times as many listeners as Fox does viewers. This is not nothing. You cannot claim to care about spreading any message in society, especially to the working class, while failing to take seriously the reach of such platforms. Especially not when the people he tends to attract are disaffected workers who are getting turned onto intellectual conversations and big ideas, usually while at work!
To Doug I said, “Hey, what if we flew you to Boise so you could give a response to Peterson and his fans in lieu of the debate?”
Doug said, “That sounds great. Can I invite some friends to also present?”
I was like, “Why don’t we just make it a full-blown conference and give professors, journalists, and activists the opportunity to submit papers to present at this event?” That’s how the conference titled “Responding to Peterson: In lieu of a debate” came about, taking place October 18-21st, 2018. Not only was Zero Squared there to record a panel on Peterson, Zero Books also planned to publish a bunch of the presenters’ papers in a forthcoming book.2
The express goal of the conference was to respond to Peterson as a cultural phenomenon in a more than less mature and rigorous manner that would be interesting and accessible to anyone coming into philosophy and psychology by Peterson’s influence. More importantly, though, in terms of experiments with meme warfare, we aimed to do this conference as a hybrid between “real world” and online.
Most of the presentations were aired live on Facebook and YouTube, many of which were later edited and published to NSP’s YouTube channel.3 We did this to raise awareness and to break from the traditional conference format that secludes proceedings from the public eye. By making it accessible to anyone online, we hoped to provide anyone coming to philosophy and psychology via Peterson resources to further their own learning. Our expectations were beyond exceeded.
As soon as we announced that the conference was going to occur, people started suggesting we invite Peterson to debate Doug again, only this time in person. Though this idea makes sense, I knew it would be a waste of time considering what had happened.
Peterson not only refused to reschedule with Doug for the debate on his podcast Zero Squared, but when he was asked about this by a fan during a Reddit “Ask me anything” (AMA) event, Peterson said that the reason he would not debate Doug was because his podcast was too small. Maybe then he shouldn’t have said on Joe Rogan’s podcast that Marxists won’t debate him…
Considering the fact that we wanted to invite Peterson to the event but knew he thought Doug too small, I knew we would need a bigger name. So, I reached out to one of the most well-known Marxist public intellectuals, Richard Wolff. I asked Wolff if he would be willing to debate Peterson and, if Peterson refused, then to speak in lieu of a debate. Most importantly, I asked Wolff to do this at cost of travel and housing (as a small campus club, we only had access to very low honorarium funding grants).
Wolff agreed to the proposal, so I sent the invitation to Peterson. This is where my reporting of the situation must be careful: Peterson himself did not outright say “no, I will not debate Richard Wolff.” Instead, one of Peterson’s representatives said that he would not do it for less than $50,000. Preferably $70k!
We obviously could not pay him what he was demanding, so we proceeded to carry out the conference in his absence. Richard Wolff came anyway and presented in lieu of a debate. Instead of trashing Peterson, Wolff spent his time educating the audience (both present and online) on what he figured Peterson’s fans need to know about “Marxism.” The video of that presentation has, to-date, reached over 300,000 people.4
Because I opened that event with an explanation of how the conference came about, Peterson’s debate-dodging became an inescapable meme arising in the comment sections of videos and social media posts across the internet for the better part of months. Six months later, under tremendous pressure, Peterson finally agreed to debate a Marxist—though it was Slavoj Žižek instead of Richard Wolff. That was still a fiercely interesting conversation, and I love Žižek, it was just hardly a debate. What was most revealing was Peterson’s ignorance of the things he spends so much time fear-mongering about. If you’re curious about what I mean, then check out the post-debate dissection of Peterson on Marx by Cuck Philosophy AKA Jonas Čeika, Anarchopac, and Red Plateaus.5
This was only one of many experiments that I have undertaken, but it was by far the most popular to-date. My hope is to inspire thought and action in new ways that will help us break out of old ruts, taking advantage of the new opportunities afforded by online media and IRL organizing. What other kinds of intervention strategies might be developed? While it is true that I had volunteer help with poster design and conference day logistics, the rest of the year spent organizing the event was all done by one person—me. Most universities offer the resources for small clubs to bring speakers, and everyone has access to the internet (if you want some ideas about how to go about it, I made a video with some tips linked below6). If a random pleeb like me could organize a conference that led to Peterson exposing his audience to Slavoj Žižek and Richard Wolff, just imagine what you could do.
1 Capitalist realism is a mood characterization of the neoliberal age wherein no alternatives to capitalism are seen as possible. Fisher, Mark. 2009. Capitalist realism: is there no alternative?
2 For reasons unknown to me, they ended up going in a different direction.
3 NSP stands for “The New Symbolization Project,” the club at Boise State primarily responsible for the conference. The event fell perfectly within our mission to grow a grassroots working class intellectual revolution.
4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdHO78PWr_8
5 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2hhrUHSD6o&t=1s
6 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4r-Yp__U168&t=16s
