Reasons Why Jordan Peterson is “The Secret” for Men
On September 20th, Jordan Peterson’s daughter announced that her father entered rehab for klonopin addiction. Since then, many men who took comfort in Peterson’s words, approach, and unapologetic stance might be questioning their relationship with him. For him he was like a mentor, of which I’ve had my fair share. Before sharing more about my experiences I’ll share a few reasons for why Jordan Peterson is literally the Secret for men.
Reason 1: Both the Secret and Jordan Peterson’s advice are removed from genuinely helpful, empirically validated findings and over reliant on something called social proof.
The Pseudoscience of ‘The Secret’ and ‘The Power’
In Peterson’s case, he describes the benefits of psychologist Pennebaker…for a nominal fee. Maybe he is privy to information you do not know. Maybe your friends have registered for his writing program, but maybe you can read articles on Pennebaker and discuss them yourself. But if everyone is doing the thing, if everyone is reading their horoscope or talking about manifesting abundance, or taking the test, than perhaps you should too. This kind of compliance with group think is known as social proof.
Reason 2: Whether it’s the Secret or the viral Peterson video, having someone validate your emotions feels…good, especially during rough, transitional times.
Scenario 1
Guys, imagine if you’ve just broken up with an ex who’s primary complaint is that you played too much video games and didn’t make time for her. And let’s say that she cheated on you because she was feeling neglected. It can be simultaneously true that you were both wrong, for different reasons. But that type of reasoning comes later, after you’ve had some time to cool off and process things.
But when you’re mad, hurting, or lonely, you don’t necessarily want people to tell you what you did wrong. You want people to validate your side. So if your guy friends say, “What an ungrateful b*tch!” or or “Not worth it bro,” you may feel supported enough to overcome wallowing and eventually move on.
Scenario 2
Girls are not immune to the dark side of validation. It just tends to take a different form e.g. live your best life. Treat yourself to [insert x consumer product]. What incels might call “looksmaxing” under the guise of female empowerment.
Friends verses Therapists
So imagine two separate groups of friends here, the girls who validate the girl’s experience and the guys who validate the breakupee. In this scenario the girls are not likely to tell their friend, “If you communicated your needs more clearly, perhaps you would not feel the need to resort to this to make a breakup justifiable.”
The guy friends are not likely to tell the breakupee that maybe he should consider cutting down on screentime to improve the quality of his relationships across the board.
They’re more likely to tell their friends something along the lines of, “Live your best life.” “On to better things.” “You don’t need them.” They’re not likely to tell them messages in the paragraphs above because they are not therapists.
This is the dark side of validation, outside of a clinical setting. Validation that enables behavior that people have a right to be upset about. Validation that gives you the safety to feel you never need to reappraise the situation.
*Disclaimer: Friends are there for you, but if you routinely treat them like your therapist, it’s time to offload some of that emotional labor onto an actual therapist, who you like, pay. Even your closest friends are tired of your shit, Karen.
The Central Problem with Peterson: Validation Without Accountability
The kind of validation both Peterson and The Secret provide is a noted barrier to effective social change.
It is very hard to ask white men and women to consider societal issues or systemic injustices without them feeling personally attacked. This has been identified in the psychological literature as a noted barrier to active allyship and solidarity.
This phenomenon not confined to academia. It effects administrative levels as well.
I helped measure outcomes for administrators tasked with reading a book called witnessing whiteness.
One admin straight up walked out.
As a mixed methods research assistant, you can’t measure outcomes if you’re missing a before and after.
You can only speculate that the individual had a very strong reaction to a book meant to help people become more conscious of dominant power structures likely to effect decision making.
And that’s valuable, I guess. Leaving the conversation in a huff rather than working through the temporary discomfort surrounding these topics, however, should not be the default. Jordan Peterson primes men to engage in that default response.
Jordan Peterson can be viewed a the well meaning, yet ultimately unhelpful friend because he uses a patchwork of ideologies to validate your emotions without ever asking you to consider if you were perhaps, at least, a little, flawed in your assumptions. He validates walking out of a room in a huff because… “What about men?”
Afterthoughts on Mentors
I do hope that Peterson gets well, but for those considering the implications of their mentor needing help, I’d like to share my own experience with my mentor and the most valuable thing to come from that relationship.
In the beginning, when a mentor agrees to be your mentor, you can idolize them. Eventually, you learn and grow in your field, and when you learn enough, you move on. If you’re lucky, perhaps you pay it forward and help others the way your mentor helped you. That’s the typical life cycle of a mentor/mentee relationship.
And despite that cycle ending, more or less, if your relationship is strong enough, you can still come to them for advice. These parental relationships are not so neatly delineated in the real world, especially with actual parents.
If your father leaves, or is otherwise absent in your childhood, you might have been robbed of coming to see him as anything other than godlike. You might never move beyond idolizing them.
You might make figures like Peterson become the all seeing, all knowing father figure who can do no wrong and…you know…how dare you critique him because he’s helped you so much with [x] problem.
This was more or less the response from a friend who recently told me I did not understand how Peterson had helped him, or the things he struggled with before applying to advice.
I don’t negate the help or solace Peterson may have temporarily given men. I don’t negate his clinical background. I also don’t think he set out to be a controversial figure. I think Peterson was an older white male professor who became famous as the intellectual who misunderstood gender pronoun laws in Canada and found himself a figurehead of the outrage, Anti PC culture (and subsequent gateway to the alt right).
The absence of parental figures can send many of us down the rabbit hole, gravitating towards techno parents and online groups that may not know how to help men or women or trans people in the way they need.
I was one such individual, but I came to trust my emotions and instincts through unique experiences my academic career.
My father died when I was nine. I am lucky I had my grandfather to fill the gap in my father’s absence. My Grandfather is an amazing individual, but we did not see him every day, and he could not always be there. I grew up gravitating towards strong male figures, convinced that many knew what was best for me, or at least knew more about how to solve my problems than I did.
In 2017, during an ethnographic project, an older, far right leader attempted to discredit me as a researcher.
I was subjected to a six month long investigation by a research review board because this individual weaponized my university’s complaint system to to try and shut down my project. My advisor revoked her principal investigatorship. My new advisor took on the challenge of writing the new documents they needed to continue and my old mentor slowly drifted away.
Being forced to advocate for myself started more out of survival than a desire to be in a public space.
Being forced to advocate for myself was how I began to trust my own research instincts. Working up the courage to speak out against the chilling effect and advocate for academic freedom enabled me to trust my research expertise.
I am indebted to my mentor for making me into a researcher with a solid understanding of statistics and theory, but the most valuable thing he taught me had nothing to do with SPSS or Uncertainty Identity Theory. It was this simple realization.
Our mentors are fallible.
Sometimes our mentors are too bound by internal campus politics to engage in the way we need. Sometimes they are overworked and truly don’t have time to meet. Sometimes they are out of their depth and don’t know what advice to give you. Sometimes they are barely keeping it together too.
If you are struggling with the recent news about Peterson, maybe you are in a similar position to what I found in myself in my last semester of grad school.
I’ll tell you what I told myself.
Maybe you don’t need to defer to the experts this time. Maybe you have learned enough from Peterson, and know exactly what you need to do. Maybe you’ve known what is best for your for awhile and needed someone to give you permission to do what you were hoping to.
Maybe you don’t need to do things, respond to that email, stay in that job you hate. Maybe you need to just be your own parent, your own cheerleader, your own best friend for a while. In the absence of outwardly strong techno parents, our Petersons, our McInneses, our Molyneuxs…maybe you are enough.
If this is all hard to grasp right now and you need a sense of community, preferably one that doesn’t require a monthly streaming subscription, please reach out to Light Upon Light.
We’d be happy to hear from and support you.
You are enough for us too.
