Jordan Peterson Is a Danger to Society

After watching Andrew Huberman interview Jordan Peterson I felt the need to write this.

Peterson, like anyone else, starts with a problem. Although he doesn’t explicitly state his view of the problem, he sprinkles his diagnosis throughout the interview. In my own words, Peterson sees the state of the world as being unsuitable for the human animal. With our monkey brains, the alienation of late capitalism leaves people with a sense of purposelessness, causing a nation of lost consumers chasing cheap highs and turning into desperate junkies in search of a remedy to the chaos of existence. In many ways, the problem Peterson identifies is what Durkheim called anomie.

One note about anomie: while most people wouldn’t raise much of a fuss about the idea that society is disintegrating, I think one of Peterson’s most successful tricks is reframing what exactly constitutes this disintegration. Peterson and other conservatives frame anomie in terms of postmodern art, anti-capitalism, and deviation from stereotypical gender norms. Talk to the average person on the street, and I don’t think this is how they’d describe the decline of society—unless they’ve been consuming the ideas of people like Peterson. What I imagine the average person would bring up when asked about the decline of society is the widespread sense of loneliness, an increased sense of narcissism, economic precarity, and global warming. To take things further, I’d posit these aren’t so much symptoms of anomie but rather the effects of culture catching up to the institutional changes of late capitalism.

Unlike Durkheim, who saw anomie as being caused by the rapid changes to social institutions, Peterson attributes the chaos of everyday life to the erosion of grand narratives by postmodernists. To solve the disintegration of society, Peterson can be understood as being on a mission to restore a grand narrative that unites society and gives meaning to the lives of all individuals who buy in. Obsessed with order and integration, Peterson’s thought can be broken down into three areas that, when united, create a worldview that sees difference as a threat, domination as acceptable, and conflates adventure with entrepreneurship.

Akin to another dangerous man in history, Peterson bases his idea for society on a view of a group from history when everything was "the way it should be." Throughout the interview, he cites the behavior of apes as evidence that there is a natural way for humans to relate. Two particular areas where he applies this are gender and hierarchy. For those who want to subscribe to the view that our behavior is biologically determined, as Peterson would like them to, it is important to understand the issue: what happens when one adopts the belief that there is a "right" way to live and everything else is a disorder or a form of deviance. That sort of thinking allows for the control of bodies, imprisonment, surveillance, and even eugenics. Foucault documents this in his books like The History of Madness, The Birth of the Clinic, Discipline and Punish, and The History of Sexuality.

While Peterson could give his attention to the research on mutual aid in the rest of the animal kingdom, he, like someone else in history, isn’t interested in truth—he’s interested in creating a grand narrative that can unify society and establish a homogenous social order. At the social level, Peterson’s obsession with order frames hierarchy as a mechanism for creating and maintaining stability. If humans can accept that hierarchy is in our DNA, then, like the few at the top of the hierarchy, the millions at the bottom can find a sense of purpose, knowing that not only is hierarchy normal but that their place within it serves a greater purpose for the survival of the species. This idea—that a worker’s small contribution, like loading cargo onto a train, serves a greater purpose—is literally the logic behind Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil, which explains how the Holocaust could be carried out by normal people.

At the level of the individual, Peterson argues that a healthy person has integrated what he calls their subpersonalities into one superordinate personality. Unlike Freud, who believed our inner world was a conflict between the superego and the id, Peterson sees our inner world as a hierarchy, where conflicting desires are integrated into one stable desire. For Peterson, this ultimate desire must fit into the larger social order if we are to be considered normal members of society.

For those who aren’t willing to subsume their inner desires into a socially acceptable 9-to-5, Peterson introduces the notion of adventure as a way of finding meaning in life. Like hierarchy and gender norms, adventure is, according to Peterson, part of our human nature. But what adventure do we go on? Peterson says that to figure that out, we must find our calling. To support this idea, he cites fictional stories. He tells us about how Abraham from the Bible followed his calling, how James Bond followed his, and how Bilbo Baggins followed his. Unfortunately, I’d argue that no one in 2025 is going to go on an adventure like Bilbo Baggins. Towards the end of the interview, Peterson mentions his own career and Andrew Huberman’s success as two examples of adventure. These examples are great because they illustrate that what Peterson is arguing for isn’t actually adventure—it’s entrepreneurship. In our capitalist society, there are no Bilbo Baggins; instead, adventure has been reduced to being an influencer, having a podcast, or starting a tech company.

People can find meaning in their actions without aspiring to conquer the world, believing their life choices are the only right ones, or trying to create a society where everyone thinks and lives the same. The danger of Peterson’s ideas lies in how they enable a type of thinking and behavior that not only fosters a dogmatic life but also views difference as a threat. Seeing difference as a threat seems like a clear symptom of insecurity—making it unsurprising that Peterson would promote such ideas and that millions of aimless young men would embrace them.