Jordan Peterson's Bluster and Blarney...
Well before the daily Twitter meltdowns, a pre-fame appearance as an "expert" at a murder trial showed how far he'll go for the grift...
“It’s easy to assume Peterson is deserving of respect. A lot of what he says sounds, on the surface, like serious thought. It’s easy to laugh at him: after all, most of what he says is, after fifteen seconds’ consideration, completely inane.”
Tabatha Southey
“I’m only a provocateur insofar as when I say what I believe to be true it’s provocative. I don’t provoke. Maybe for humor”
Jordan Peterson, saying one thing and then immediately saying the other, during his Channel 4 debate with Cathy Newman.
“I’ve learned how to monetize social justice warriors.”
Jordan Peterson, in conversation with Joe Rogan
When Jordan Peterson said the above to Joe Rogan back in 2018, he did so with a smug smile and an arched eyebrow, from a position of huge financial comfort. He had begun to make multiples of what even a well-respected professor at a top university, with a thriving clinical practice on the side, could expect to make. This was largely achieved through donations via Patreon and ever-increasing fees for speaking engagements, not to mention the huge royalties for his best-selling book ‘12 Rules for Life’. In one self-satisfied moment of corporate-speak, he may have outed himself as the cynical grifter many suspect he is.
I happened to watch Peterson’s infamous interview with Channel 4’s Cathy Newman live on television. I was superficially impressed by the confident manner in which he approached that interview. He seemed to have an immediate answer for everything, which counts for a lot in our meme-led, attention-span-of-a-gnat era. If you weren’t really listening to everything he had to say, or fact-checking each misleading stat he used to hand-wave away Newman’s responses, you might have agreed he was “winning” the argument.
Then he started talking about transgender activists, and how “the philosophy that drives their utterances is the same philosophy that already has driven us to the deaths of millions of people.” Pushed further on this somewhat hyperbolic statement, he maintained that “Their philosophy presumes that group identity is paramount, the fundamental philosophy that drove the Soviet Union and Maoists in China. And it’s the fundamental philosophy of the left-wing activists. It’s identity politics. Doesn’t matter who you are as an individual, it matters who you are in terms of your group identity.”
Peterson has made this point over and over in interviews. He has a huge bee in his bonnet about “post-modernism.” He talks about how philosophers of that school like Foucault and Derrida supported the Communist regimes in Russia and China in their time, before it became obvious to everyone how psychotic and murderous the leadership of these societies had become.
He goes on to allege that once their true nature of these regimes became apparent, leftists turned to a generalized identity politics to distract from the horrors, and thus a woman complaining about the gender pay gap or a transgender person asking to choose their preferred pronouns equals MASS MURDERER. Of course, by that wobbly to the point of falling down drunk logic, you could say that anybody who supported free market capitalism in the 1960’s automatically supported the murder of women and children with chemical agents in Vietnam.
This may in fact be Peterson’s basic appeal – he presents vast grey areas of human thought and experience in dashing black and white hues - Us vs. Them, Good vs. Evil, Chaos vs. Order, Transgender Murder Commies vs. Free Speech Crusaders like his good self. As with all bullshitters, it becomes hard to tell whether these are sincerely held beliefs or just another performance in the gold-rush pantomine he’s putting on.
It became hard to bet on anything but the latter after seeing his pseudo-intellectual blathering about climate change when he returned to speak with Rogan in January 2022. As you can see, he put on a very nice tuxedo for the occasion.
Peterson was widely mocked for denying that complex modelling of future climate change could be broadly accurate. We now know that major polluters like Exxon Mobil were aware of their accuracy as far back as 1982, and expended much time and energy on denying it for the sake of short-term profit. We can look at Exxon’s internal models and see how similar they are to the models being produced by leading climate-change scientists at the time. We can now look back at those models from forty years ago and know how accurate they were. And when we do that, we can say with 100% certainty that Jordan Peterson is bullshitting on this issue. He doesn’t understand the first thing about it. To demonstrate this neatly, he made a fatuous comparison of climate models with the stock market.
Peterson’s go-to guy for his second-hand hot takes is Bjorn Lomberg, a Danish political science Ph.D and statistics lecturer who has made millions with a series of books with a shall we say, sunny-side-up view of climate science. His very opposition to the prevailing climate consensus brought him huge publicity, and consequently, huge sales. Lomberg’s critics, of whom there are many, describe him as using “flawed reasoning” and “cherry picking”, and being “misleading” and “biased.” Noticing how his citations often did not back up his arguments, one academic wrote a whole book about how sloppy and often downright misleading his use of secondary sources was. He does have big links with right-wing think-tanks in America, though, one of whom paid him 775,000 dollars in 2012. Which is a hell of a lot of money to pay someone with no proper academic or scientific expertise in the area he works in.
We assume that Peterson sees a kindred spirit in Lomberg, being a grifter who makes money talking about things well outside his area of expertise. Here he is with Rogan again recently, in an even more spiffing outfit, discussing how Greta Thurnberg is a “disturbed”, “neurotic” thirteen year old girl even though she is now nineteen. This is a classic tactic of the bullshitter - he cannot engage meaningfully with the arguments of his opponents, so he makes it weirdly personal instead. Rogan quotes the pseudoscientist Randall Carlson and his astonishing insight that there have been changes in the earth’s temperatures in the past that have also been quite extreme, as if this fact negates the possibility of catastrophe in our era, while Peterson mocks Thurnberg as someone yearning for the “The intrinsic paradisal stability of Mother Nature.” Of course, that’s not what she is looking for at all, but solutions to very real problems the entire human race is facing in the here and now. Peterson then repeats Lomberg’s bizarre argument that we need to raise the average GDP so there’s no more poor people and they won’t want to “burn everything up around (them) to stay alive” and will care about the “aesthetic quality of the local environment.”
There are two massive problems with this - it’s not poor people but extremely rich people who are doing most of the dangerous polluting. And we know those rich people don’t give a shit about the aesthetic quality of their local environment in the short or the long-term. We’ve seen how Exxon acted, and we’ve seen how people with vested interests in polluting, including state-sponsored corporations like Saudi Aramco and Gazprom, continue to pollute, and pollute, knowing full well the potential consequences for humanity. Peterson prefers not to get paranoid about this sustained and co-ordinated assault on the earth’s climate for profit, but he is hugely paranoid about “The idea that you have to impose limits on growth to have a sustainable planet”, ranting about population control whilst assuming that the fringe views of a 90 year old environmentalist somehow represent the broader movement today. The last two minutes here are a wild trip, to say the least.
It is interesting to note how little Rogan pushed back on this stuff, particularly in light of this argument he had with a black woman a few years back on his show spouting exactly the same sort of nonsense. Was he convinced in the meantime by Peterson railing against a “globalist utopian tyranny” which characterises “industrial culture as the tyrannical father raping and pillaging everything in its way”?
Is he impressed that Peterson read a single climate-change denial author whom he seems to borrow all his ideas from? Or is it something to do with tone? Peterson sounds like a professor, while Candace Owens says “Like” alot - which Rogan aggressively mocks her for around 4 minutes 25 in - and when pushed, and pushed again, admits to not knowing much about her subject. Peterson wasn’t pushed at all, so he sounds, on the surface, increasingly authoritative. Both, for the record, are equally stupid and unhinged in our book.
"Unhinged” is a word that increasingly describes Peterson in general. He is on Twitter all day every day, retweeting all sorts of madness, and spewing “anti-woke” invective at all who come in to his line of vision. He harangued a plus-size model who made the cover of “Sports Illustrated”, calling her an example of “authoritarian tolerance.” You do not want to see the follow up tweets he then sent out, reminiscing about how much he used to look forward to the swimsuit issue whilst a teenager. Jordan Peterson, lest you forget, is sixty whole years of age. He took it upon himself to have an animated conversation about social justice and personal responsibility with The Pope recently. He also has jumped wholeheartedly onto the post-Covid paranoia train, with hysterical tweets such as this to toy manafacturer Mattel:
For a man who claimed his objections to the C-16 bill in Canada were based on lofty ideals of “free speech” he certainly seems very preoccupied with the very existence of transgender people, a half-decade and the rest on. He compared transitioning to “satanic ritual abuse” with Rogan in the above interview. His preoccupation with “globalists” also led him to share the tweet below, which labels recent protests in France about the raising of the retirement age as Anti-Nato protests which have received “ZERO media coverage.”
If you think I’m shilling for the New World Order here, please just look on the front left hand side of the still video. You’ll see a woman with a sign that reads “Retraite à 64 ans? C’est non!”, a direct reference to the proposed raising of retirement age from 62 to 64. There is an anti-Nato flag in the middle of the screen, incidentally, but it’s just one flag in the middle of a crowd of thousands. Peterson seems unaware that different types of people might be united in protest over a single issue, and may bring different types of flag to the protest. Thus he is ready to uncritically tweet that this is an anti-NATO protest which is being covered up by the mainstream media. In doing so, he is displaying one of the major tell-tale signs of the conspiracist - a puppy-like willingness to lap up anything that confirms his worldview, and a steely ability to ignore anything that disproves it. Even when it’s on the nightly news every day for a week.
This tendency backfired spectacularly on him last week - and we mean spectacularly. He retweeted a fetish porn video of a row of men having their penises milked by suction pumps in the mistaken belief that it showed a Chinese sperm bank collecting supplies. He then subtitled it with the truly immortal words “Such fun in unbelievable techno-nightmare CCP hell." This, hilariously, led to the phrase "Chinese dick-sucking factory" trending on Twitter.
As entertaining as this all was, it’s also more than a little disturbing because we live in a world where this man was somehow elevated to the status of an intellectual guru and best selling author. His incessant, oh-so meme friendly tweeting may be turning him into the internet’s village idiot , but the man is still packing out arenas full of people who seem to want his advice on how to run their life. He is also preparing a new book for November with the working title “We Who Wrestle With God”, which should be a laugh-riot, intentionally or otherwise.
Peterson seemed to deftly pivot to an anti-globalist, anti-lockdown, climate change denialist position in the period after the release of “12 More Rules For Life.” Given the sheer absurdity of some of the positions he has taken, and the lack of critical thinking displayed, many people are now seriously questioning his mental health. The below is in response to the, ahem, dick milking storm, from someone previously sympathetic to his general worldview.
It is one of the quirks of our age, when everyone and everything is so out in the open, that people feel qualified to comment on people’s mental health in such a public forum. Then again, if you are going to stand in the middle of the town square frothing at the mouth and shouting at the top of your voice at everyone who passes, eventually someone might start to pass comment. In our completely unprofessional opinion, it seems likeliest to us that Peterson’s finely tuned grifting instinct is still working overtime, while the delicate balance of his mind deteriorates slowly but surely. Peterson has a long history of depression and became hooked on benzodiazepines throughout 2019, claiming to be unaware that such industrial strength sedatives could be in any way addictive. He then travelled to Russia in early 2020 to be placed in a medical coma to wean himself off the drugs. He was “misdiagnosed” as schizophrenic by one doctor before taking this drastic action. There was a long road to recovery on the physical level from this ordeal. He released a new book in early 2021 and continued a hectic schedule, leading to him spending a large amount of 2022 bursting into tears at the drop of a hat during interviews. When he spoke about his struggles with depression with Rogan in 2018, he counterbalanced the raw emotional honesty by evangelizing about his daughter Mikhaila’s beef-heavy fad diet business. He made sure to emphasize that he wasn’t recommending it to just anyone, but added that many of his fans were raving about it. With such a reflexive talent for self-promotion, it really is hard to draw a line between where the hustler starts and a very vulnerable person, with noted mental health issues, ends.
Having all said that, the hustle is increasingly leading Peterson to some extremely dark places. His deadnaming of actor Elliott Page, which saw him banned from Twitter, last year, was a particularly egregious example. "Remember when pride was a sin?” he tweeted, “And [dead name] just had her breasts removed by a criminal physician." He even went as far as to compare transitioning to the horrendous medical experiments of the Nazis. The timing of it all seemed a little too coincidental, given that Peterson was about to launch a new show on The Daily Wire. Thankfully, the whole ugly palaver also gave us this:
And so we return to the fundamental question here : Does Jordan Peterson say things that he does not believe one bit for the sole purpose of monetary gain? Is he, like all the other grifters, simply playing a part? Does he really believe himself when he says you can’t quit smoking without “supernatural intervention” via a psychedelic experience? Is he “unwell”, or is he simply quite, quite mad?
A quick and neat way of looking at these questions might be his testimony in a murder trial in Canada in 2012. It displayed a quite heroic level of delusional thinking and/or self-serving money grabbing.
The details of the case were an absolute horror. Two male friends and occasional lovers were involved in an argument after one told the other that he was HIV positive after they had just had a sexual encounter. The man who had learned this news flew into a rage and ended up attacking the other with the closest blunt instrument to hand, a golf club. He started striking the man, and didn’t stop for some time - over eighty times in all. The man subsequently confessed to police and was convicted of manslaughter in two separate trials. During the first trial, Peterson testified that it was the man’s “agreeableness” that led to him making a false confession.
“Agreeableness” is one of the “Big Five” personality traits – along with “Extraversion”, “Neuroticism”, “Openness to Experience” and “Conscientiousness” - which make up a personality test often utilized by human resource staff in selecting the best candidate for a role. These tests have been around for some time but grew in popularity in the 1980’s. Advocates of the tests argue that even a small advantage proffered by such a test in choosing the most suitable candidate could potentially save a company a large amount of money, particularly if the job is one that requires a lot of on-the-job training. Critics, by contrast, have pointed to its severe limitations – for example, Dan P. McAdams has called the “Big Five” a “psychology of the stranger” as they are more easily observed in someone you don’t know well, as opposed to deeper, more private traits that can be kept from view by those motivated to do so. For example, it doesn’t measure manipulativeness, or egotism, or sociopathy, or indeed dishonesty. It definitely isn’t a good measure of griftitude, a word I just made up to measure someone’s willingness to make up or generally propagate nonsense for money.
The most simple argument against these tests is that they are open to manipulation by those who can hazard a decent guess as to what are the most desirable answers. The level of manipulation employed, of course, would be fiendishly difficult to measure. Thankfully, during this court case Dr. Peterson came riding in on his trusty steed with a test he had developed called the “Unfakeable Big Five”, which he claimed lived up to its name and then some. And how can we be sure that you can’t the fake the funk on this one? Well, he did some pretty damn limited tests on some gawky university students, of course. None of that rigorous, peer-reviewed nonsense for our Jordan!
Unsurprisingly, in the original 2012 trial, 75% of his “expert” testimony was deemed inadmissible as evidence by the trial judge. A 2014 appeal rested on this supposed injustice. The panel of three judges was suitably withering in its assessment of Peterson’s submissions. It’s probably worth handing over to the esteemed lords and lady at this juncture:
“It is difficult to see how Dr. Peterson's technique of assessing the personality of a person for his private consulting business satisfies the Daubert factors to make it admissible for a forensic purpose. Dr. Peterson provided no evidence that his technique of personality assessment has been properly tested for the purpose it is being used for here, detecting when an agreeable person may falsely confess to the police. All Dr. Peterson could say is he hired university students to try and fake the personality assessment and they couldn't do it. That is not scientific validation. There has been no peer review of the technique of the “Unfakeable Big Five.” Dr. Peterson provided no rate of error or accepted deviations. In fact, he claimed, without any proof, that his assessment tool cannot be deceived while other personality assessment techniques can be. Finally, there is no evidence that the “Unfakeable Big Five” is generally accepted as a forensic tool.”
Note not the just that withering tone, but the “private consulting business.” Peterson did indeed run a private consulting business, ExamCorp, which according to his LinkedIn biography, “Developed and marketed a set of sophisticated tools for psychometric analysis and employee selection.” Of course, the standard set by LinkedIn for use of the term “sophisticated” is different to that set by a court which handles matters of life and death. The “Daubert” standard referred to sets standards for admissibility of expert testimony in cases in the USA, which is often used as a checklist in other jurisdictions. It will ask the following:
1: Whether the theory or technique in question can be and has been tested;
2: Whether it has been subjected to peer review and publication;
3: The known or potential error rate;
4: The existence and maintenance of standards controlling its operation;
5: whether it has attracted widespread acceptance within a relevant scientific community.
Even those in the back who haven’t really been paying attention will know that Dr. Peterson’s test did not satisfy a single one of these requirements.
So, what we have here is a man who is prepared to testify at a trial, presumably at corporate rates, where his evidence could potentially deny justice to a grieving family and allow a man who has committed a serious violent crime to get off scot-free, using a supposedly “sophisticated” tool that in fact does not have one scintilla of scientific validity whatsoever. This is Jordan Peterson’s modus operandi in a nutshell.
Given that the hourly fees for pre-trial reviews come out at an average of well over three hundred and fifty dollars in the USA these days, we’re presuming Dr. Peterson did alright out of this chicanery. In the best-case scenario, his guy gets off and the company gets a big fat chunk of publicity into the bargain. Worst-case is the company name still gets out there due to the public prominence of the case and Peterson still gets his fat fees. These sound to us like the actions of a man far more interested in the heft of his own bottom line than loftier ideals like justice, science or reason.
The flippancy inherent in Peterson’s testimony here was bewildering. He hadn’t even watched the video of the interview where the confession was made. He was unable to demonstrate any expertise at all in witness interrogation methods. His supposed “expertise” was in another area altogether, that of job interviews, which he was confident could be transferred to this incredibly sensitive and serious matter. The judge disagreed, bemoaning the “concerning inconsistency” that riddled his testimony.
It was no one-off either. In 2009, he was involved in a child custody case where the tone of the judge is filled with scorn and barely concealed contempt, and is again worth quoting at length here: “I will deal next with Dr. Peterson's report entitled “Multiple rater response to play assessment description From Kawartha Family Court Assessment Service Report.” It comes as close to “junk science” as anything that I have ever been asked to consider (author’s emphasis).”
That title is somewhat misleading in that it contains less than two pages of references to articles that Dr. Peterson found by doing an on-line search of on-line material on that topic. Dr. Peterson has no expertise in that area. If he had, then he might have known that the proposition that fathers play a key role in proper development of children in both intact and non-intact families, and that mothers have no legal “leg-up” when it comes to deciding custody cases, have long since been accepted by our courts here. I do not need to consider any of the articles referred to by Dr. Peterson to accept that.
The apparent but unfounded arrogance of Dr. Peterson found throughout this report [and for that matter in some of the other reports] is troubling and give rise to the question of whether his reports are not biased in more than one fashion. That there can be more than one type of bias when it comes to experts is explored by Professor David Paciocco in his article “Taking a “Goudge” out of Bluster and Blarney: an “Evidence-Based Approach” to Expert Testimony” On page 18 of his paper, Professor Paciocco lists and defines many possible types of bias, including: lack of independence bias; adversarial bias; selection bias; team bias; professional interest bias; association bias; and noble cause distortion bias. I venture the opinion that Dr. Peterson suffers from at least two, if not three, of those.’
It is indeed telling that Peterson presumes to tell a judge the basics of his business after doing a bit of a Google search. It is even more telling that Peterson’s pervasive cognitive biases were laid so bare by his work here, well before they were obvious to so many on a worldwide scale.
Returning to the murder trial, those biases went further into what you could only term complete incompetence. At one point in his report, he contends that the defendant’s confession was unreliable because he only admitted to attacking the victim with a golf club after police had told him that the murder weapon was a golf club. This was flimsy enough stuff, as the evidence showed there would be many further particulars that he wouldn’t have been able to confirm unless guilty. It was all academic, as in fact the defendant was the one who first “told police about the golf club earlier in the interview.” Imagine paying someone 350 dollars an hour for that non-existent “Gotcha!” moment.
Press Progress also reported that the judge “restricted Peterson’s proposed evidence “significantly”, even recommending he use “scripting” to prevent him from rambling to the jury on topics “not pertinent to the matter before the court.”
This one had his Gish Galloping number, it would seem, referring to the “detrimental impact on the justice system of attempting to use dubious expert opinion” in their judgement. However, although the appeal court agreed the trial judge “properly understood and fulfilled her role as a gatekeeper of expert evidence”, it concluded that the defendant’s right to a fair trial was compromised since the jury did not receive adequate information on “the phenomenon of false confessions”, and a new trial was ordered, proving that even the flimsiest of Petersonian flim-flam can have huge real-world ramifications.
In 2016, the defendant was convicted of manslaughter all over again, fully eight years after the crime was committed and four years after his original conviction. A long time indeed to be waiting around for justice denied.
We return again to the question about Peterson’s motivations. How on earth did he expect to get taken seriously? To convince a judge and jury that he had special powers of divination, hitherto unrevealed to the world? The answer may lie close to home. For years, Peterson’s main professional activities were dealing with undergraduate psych students and his clinical patients. Both strands of his professional life would have put him in a position of elevated authority. Peterson used this authority disingenuously, as he does to the present day. A former colleague recalled how “one astute student” bemoaned Peterson’s constant use of “delivered truths.” The colleague went to see for himself and was horrified to see how he consistently “presented conjecture as statement of fact. I expressed my concern to him about this a number of times, and each time Jordan agreed. He acknowledged the danger of such practices, but then continued to do it again and again, as if he could not control himself. He was a preacher more than a teacher.”
Perhaps due to this tendency, he evidently believed this new, particularly virulent strain of bullshit he was trying out would wash, even in a court of law. Thankfully, there was at least one adult in the room this time out. Looking at the undignified mess he makes daily on Twitter really would make you wonder if there’s any adults at all in his inner circle right now.
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Each week we cleanse the taste of bullshit from your mouth with some sweet funky joyous music with an appropriate theme. This week’s is a cheap-shot for the king of the psychological cheap-shot.
