Filter bubbles and guru effects: Jordan B. Peterson as a public intellectual in the attention economy

ABSTRACT

In this article, we critically reflect on the role of Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson as a public intellectual in an increasingly hybrid, interconnected, and plural public sphere. In today’s attention economy, and in the face of a general climate of scepticism and crisis of expertise, we are faced with the limits of the liberal ideal of the public intellectual who filters information for the public. In fact, we argue, the public intellectual can in some cases come to function as a creator of filter bubbles instead of furthering democracy. We analyse Peterson’s writings and public performances in order to illustrate this, focusing on the particularities of his rhetoric and dramaturgical strategies. First, we discuss his misreadings and misrepresentation of ‘postmodernist’ thought. Then, we examine the non-verbal aspects of his performance, in order to unpack his appeal by examining his affective strategies. Last, we apply theory from the cognitive sciences, most notably relevance theory and the guru effect, to examine Peterson’s rhetoric and the strategies he uses to inspire trust in his audience.

KEYWORDS:

• Attention economy
• public intellectual
• Jordan B. Peterson
• performance
• relevance theory

Public intellectuals in the attention economy

In an interview for Diggit Magazine (2018), Odile Heynders argues that in today’s online public spheres, public intellectuals are needed to filter out information in times of overload. A public intellectual, she explains, is an educated person with cultural authority, who can assist and guide the public in forming an informed opinion on societal matters. (S)he is highly visible in the media and offers an in-depth perspective on current affairs. Public intellectuals are able to intervene in socio-political debates, especially when they voice a committed, provocative, or even compromised standpoint. In her book Writers as Public Intellectuals, Heynders sides with Jürgen Habermas who characterises intellectuals by their ‘avant-gardistic instinct for relevances’ (Heynders 2016, p. 10), a ‘sense for what is lacking and “could be otherwise”’ and a ‘modicum of the courage required for polarizing, provoking and pamphleteering’ (Habermas 2009, p. 55). She argues that the public intellectual can take on the role of mediator, informing a non-expert audience and stimulating them to participate in the public debate.

Of course, in Habermas’ day, the public intellectual had a smaller range of media to choose from; since then, the public sphere has become more complex, to the point where it no longer make sense to speak of a public sphere in the singular (Marshall 2016). What is new compared to Habermas’ time is the algorithmic agency that determines many of the intellectual’s online interactions and transactions. Today’s e-platforms shape highly complex and flexible public spheres and specific, algorithmically configured publics. Contrary to the lecture room, newspaper or TV talk show, online ‘stages’ have platform structures that do not correspond to the more traditional ones. It is the algorithmic dimension that accounts for the dissipation of ‘publics’ and that shapes a crucially different ‘public’ environment from that of the previous generation.

As we know, attention is quantified and monetised in a world saturated with media. Much of this revolves around self-representation, around the cult of personality over message, and around clickbait titles and the role of extreme emotions. The increasing commercialisation and personalisation of political discussion in the public spheres is exacerbated by a crisis of expertise, a culture of doubt and scepticism. Since the 1960s, academics, traditional news outlets, and scientific research alike are faced with an erosion of trust from the public. Being educated is not in itself enough to warrant authority and inspire trust (Bialik and Matsa 2017, Gallup and Knight 2018). As Humanities scholars, we have to grapple with ‘post-truth’ sentiments and reliance on algorithms to filter out information for us on the one hand, and this crisis of expertise and erosion of authority of once-trusted information sources on the other.

Stressing the need for public intellectuals today automatically invokes questions as to the readiness of readers and viewers to pay attention to them. Further, it requires reflection on media literacy, and understanding how digital ecologies format content. After all, public intellectuals are by no means exempt from this situation: entering the public debate through the whole spectrum of available media, they vie for our attention. In the face of these issues, what media strategies does an influential figure like Peterson have at his disposal to generate a large and devout following in a cultural context marked by scepticism and doubt?

We argue that Peterson filters and misrepresents information for his audience, creating distorting ‘filter bubbles’ of intellectual content. Then, we take the affordances and the algorithmic nature of web 2.0 into consideration and reflect on how these feed into his popularity. Further, we analyse the affective impact of non-verbal aspects of his positioning, including rhetoric and dramaturgical strategies. Last, we examine his writings and argue through the lens of relevance theory, that his notoriously opaque style of expression in written discourse has brought him the status of an intellectual guru. As a case study, Peterson offers unique insight into the limits of the liberal ideal of the public intellectual in an algorithmic public sphere.

The world’s most influential intellectual?

Jordan B. Peterson is a Canadian professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, and a practicing clinical psychologist specialising in abnormal and personality psychology. He takes a particular interest in the psychology of religious and ideological belief, and the assessment and improvement of personality and performance. After obtaining his PhD in Clinical Psychology, Peterson made a career working at Harvard’s department of psychology from 1993 to 1998.

In 1999, he published his first book, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief, which examines several academic fields in order to characterise systems of beliefs, the structure of myths, and their role in the creation of meaning and the regulation of emotion. At that time, the book barely sold over a hundred copies. When it was released as an audiobook 2018, it quickly became a bestseller. Peterson’s second book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, was published in 2018 and was promoted with a world tour that generated a lot of attention resulting in interviews with, for instance, Channel 4 News and The Guardian. The book is a bestseller in Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom.

How did a psychology professor attain this stardom and status, after a long and steady, yet unremarkable, career as an academic? This started in 2016, when he created a series of YouTube videos criticising political correctness and going against Bill C-16, which sparked a media hype with people from all sides of the political spectrum voicing fierce critiques of his views, but it also resulted in many public letters of support. Many of these early supporters came from the male-dominated message boards of 4chan and Reddit, leading some to associate Peterson with the alt-right; a connection that he always disavowed, by for instance pointing to their diverging views on identity politics (Yang 2018).

Soon after Peterson expressed worries about the future of his academic career because of his critique of Bill C-16, donations to his Patreon, a crowdfunding platform where he regularly uploaded free academic lectures, exceeded his salary (Beckner 2018). His book sales rocketed and the number of subscribers and views on his YouTube channel increased dramatically: 2.6 million subscribers and almost 141 million views as of 24 March 2020 (Socialblade). Furthermore, several subreddits are attributed to him, e.g. Maps of Memeing, exclusively devoted to Peterson memes (e.g. Figure 1); and fan art (Figure 2). The subreddit r/jordanpeterson has 232 K subscribers to date. In 2018, economist Tyler Cowen named Peterson ‘the world’s most influential intellectual’; echoed by David Brooks (2018) of The New York Times who called him ‘the most influential public intellectual in the Western world right now’.

Figure 1. Meme based on screenshot from the Channel 4 interview with Cathy Newman.

Figure 2. Peterson as the ‘patron saint of sorting yourself out’.

Heynders characterises the public intellectual as a mediator between a non-expert audience and topics of public interest: someone who provokes and titillates, but also unites and builds bridges. Public intellectuals need to popularise their ideas to a certain extent in order to render them accessible and attractive to the public. Peterson does exactly that. By uploading videos of his psychology lectures on YouTube, appearing on podcasts from The Joe Rogan Experience to Pangburn, and television programmes from BBC News to Channel 4 News, he intervenes in public debates on global issues. By speaking in understandable language about both Fyodor Dostoevsky and the perils and benefits of smoking weed, Peterson is able to draw enormous audiences. He can indeed be said to filter an overload of information on complicated subjects for his public. In doing so, he helps them form an informed opinion on all sorts of (societal) matters. Yet, his particular way of ‘filtering’ information for his audience at times leads to misinformation, as we put forth in the following section.

Misinformation and not-reading: the Peterson filter bubble

Peterson is, like most of the public intellectuals that Heynders (2016) analyses, ambivalent and provocative. He points us to the limits of the liberal ideal of public intellectuals as media figures that filter information for the public. His discourse is instrumental in determining what information his followers should and should not receive, and what alternative scenarios are appropriate for them. This is not uncommon: it also holds true for figures like Noam Chomsky and Richard Dawkins, who are equally selective.¹

In Peterson’s case, it has often been remarked that he himself is not always well informed about the matters he informs his readers on. As his fame and media visibility grew, he used his expertise in clinical psychology to become an all-round public intellectual, commenting on a broad range of topics that surpass his disciplinary background, including religion, economics, and political philosophy. Peterson was able to convert his media visibility into ‘celebrity capital’ which in turn won him economic and arguably even political capital (Driessens 2014).

His book recommendations and readings of (scientific) literature are often limited, one-sided, and at times demonstrably incorrect. His 12 Rules for Life are not firmly anchored in scientific insights from clinical psychology, and his sources from biology are often outdated (Derksen 2019). His treatment of Sigmund Freud and Carl Rogers is superficial at best (Burston 2018). To illustrate Peterson’s strategies of filtering information, we outline two exemplary arguments that run throughout his lectures and texts: his argument against postmodernism, and his case for the inevitability of hierarchies. We show how these lines of reasoning are based on misrepresentations of source texts, and when predicated upon each other, together serve to legitimise his (political) project.

Peterson loosely uses the term ‘postmodernism’ as a referent for a wide range of trends in (French) philosophy, including neo-Marxism, structuralism, post‐structuralism, and deconstruction (c.f. Klein 2018). In a lecture titled ‘Why You Have To Fight Postmodernism’ (2017), he claims that ‘the postmodernists completely reject the structure of Western civilisation’. Exemplary in this regard is his reading of Jacques Derrida, who he deems the ‘main trickster of postmodernism’. According to Peterson, Derrida’s take on Western society as phallogocentric and patriarchal ‘does not have a shred of gratitude,’ and is ‘pathological to the core’. His reading is not only inaccurate, but reflects a lack of reading altogether. There are no references to Derrida’s works in any of Peterson’s writings or lectures. He occasionally references Stephen Hicks’ Explaining Postmodernism (2004), which does not offer an adequate account of postmodernism, as Hicks likewise seems puts his distorted version of postmodernism in the service of a specific political agenda.² Derrida by no means propagates an oppositional stance to either society or democracy (as evidenced by his notion of ‘democracy to Derrida 2002, 2003). One only needs to read the prefaces of Derrida’s texts to find many heartfelt expressions of gratitude (Derrida 1999, 2002).

In Twelve Rules for Life, Peterson further writes that ‘although there are a myriad ways to interact with – even to perceive – even a small number of objects, that does not mean that all interpretations are equally valid,’ in response to Derrida, who, according to Peterson, propagated that ‘everything is interpretation’ (2018, p. 311):

[Postmodernism] puts the act of categorization itself in doubt. It negates the idea that distinctions might be drawn between things for any reasons other than that of raw power … science is just another game of power for Derrida and his postmodern Marxist acolytes … there are no facts. (p. 312)

Again, it is illuminating to revisit Derrida’s writings. During his life, he has often been accused of disregarding science and arguing for an extreme form of relativism. In his paper titled Sokal and Bricmont Aren’t Serious, Derrida replies to the claim that he defends a relativist position: ‘[a]s for the “relativism” they are supposed to be worried about – well, even if this word has a rigorous philosophical meaning, there’s not a trace of it in my writing. Nor of a critique of Reason or Enlightenment. On the contrary’ (2005, p. 71). Peterson’s reading of postmodernist thought is flawed, or rather; his critiques are not grounded in any reading.

This practice of misreading becomes problematic when he bases his political project on this wrongful assessment of postmodernist thought. A large part of his discourse is dependent upon this antagonist and strawman. By convincing his audience that the postmodernists and neo-Marxists are invading the university, the government and the public sphere, Peterson is able to push his conservative political agenda. After all, when anarchism and relativism dominate and chaos reigns, his call for order is exactly what is needed. To draw political consequences from such misreadings comes dangerously close to a conspiracy theory, as Slavoj Žižek has pointed out (2018).

In order to grasp how this proposal for order is set up to answer Peterson’s self-construed problem of the dangerous dominance of postmodern influence, we highlight a second example of his style of interpretation: the famous ‘Lobster Argument’ from 12 Rules for Life (2018).³ Here, he draws on psychological research to devise an argument that transcends psychology. In the first chapter, titled ‘Stand up with your shoulders straight’, Peterson describes the neurological makeup of lobsters, their behaviour in fights, and the forms of hierarchy in their social milieu. According to Peterson, the neurological makeup of humans originally stems from that of lobsters, the crustaceans that have been in existence for over 350 million years. For him, this implies that:

[d]ominance hierarchies have been an essentially permanent feature of the environment to which all complex life has adapted. A third of a billion years ago, brains and nervous systems were comparatively simple. Nonetheless, they already had the structure and neurochemistry necessary to process information about status and society. (p. 11)

Simplified, Peterson’s argument is that hierarchies exist, they have good reasons to exist, and that they will continue to exist. Every attempt and hope to abolish all hierarchies is vain. These are views that not many would readily contradict, which renders the argument vacuous. Why would Peterson put in the effort to forge this extensive analogy between humans and lobsters, only to arrive at commonplace conclusions? Here again, Peterson is arguing against positions that no scholar or critic is taking.

When connected to the postmodernism strawman argument, the lobster analogy allows him to inscribe his own political agenda. Hierarchies are natural and unavoidable; we need order, and therefore conservativism in times of chaos, change, and relativism. In light of a world dominated by ‘postmodernists’ and ‘neo-Marxists’ sketched by Peterson, the reader is nudged to believe that Western society is endangered by chaotic and anarchist forces, and thus in need of new ordering principles. Based on this set-up, he then offers his readers and listeners his own proposals for order, clear-cut advice, and a black-and-white narrative. This accessible narrative offers aimless, dissatisfied young men first a rationalisation for their discontents, and then a sense of purpose and an exemplary model for masculine gender identity. The crowds at his lectures are overwhelmingly male, white and in their twenties, although it also includes women and minorities (Bartlett 2018).

Peterson’s narrative and his misinterpretation of information exemplify how this particular public intellectual filters information for his audience. He creatively assembles pieces of evidence from different scientific disciplines, distorting information in the process. The reassuring narrative that is the outcome goes some way to explain the viability of his rhetorical strategies, yet it cannot fully account for Peterson’s popularity. Therefore, we need to examine his demeanour and performance. More than from the content of his lectures and books, we argue here, his status derives to an important extent from his rhetorical style and manner of presentation. In order to understand his appeal, we will analyse his public image, rhetoric, and the strategies he uses to inspire trust in his audience: the non-verbal aspect, and in the last section his writings. First, we need to address the role of digital media and how it contributes to the creation of his fan base.

The role of digital media in Peterson’s success

Of course, Peterson’s visibility and popularity did not come about in a vacuum; it needs to be understood in context. His status as celebrity professor partly results from his operationalisation of the infrastructure of the online public sphere, reshaped by an increasing replacement of human editors by algorithms. Whereas in its early days, the internet was thought to have potential for enhancing democracy, it has turned out to curtail this potential by creating echo chambers (Papacharissi 2002). These changes in the movement of information obviously affect the nature of the visibility, the ‘public-ness’ of the intellectual. In this new context, Peterson’s messages resonate well, as we will explain.

Communicating in traditional media such as print-based publishing or broadcast television, intellectuals are separated from their publics by technically equipped mediators, which impose time lags (Baert and Booth 2012). To reach out to, and cultivate publics through online platforms, a more sophisticated technical capacity is needed on top of writing or arguing skills. The public intellectual needs to have knowledge about the medium itself as well as the algorithms and affordances that organise the dissemination of posts (Maly 2018). Every post needs to reach an audience that interacts with the public figure, to make sure the algorithm pushes it into relevance.

Not many professors of Peterson’s stature are versed in these tactics, and he understands the implications well, with YouTube as his primary platform. The account through which he personally uploads his videos has over 3.1 million subscribers. Peterson is media-literate in optimising and spreading content (using for instance Instagram stories to alert his fans to new videos of him uploaded by other accounts, and for updates on his health), and taps into popular items in the media system like political incorrectness or anti-SJW.

YouTube’s algorithms are not neutral; they have agency (Tufekci 2015). They ‘select and prioritize content by translating user activity into “most relevant” or “trending” topics’ (Poell and van Dijck 2014). These algorithms are biased towards a particular type of content: extreme, polarising, conspiratorial, and generally anti-mainstream. YouTube’s suggestions for individual users follow this principle as well, readily offering niche, anti-mainstream ideas. Once these are normalised, the user is nudged towards more edgy and radical content. This process creates social, political, and epistemological filter bubbles.⁴

Peterson’s fans increase his visibility by uploading videos with hyperbolic and aggressive titles like ‘Angry Jordan Peterson TRIGGERS French Journalist’ (2018); ‘Jordan Peterson Destroys Islam in 15 Seconds’ (2018), ‘JP Calmly dismantles feminism infront [sic] of two feminists’ (2019); or ‘FUCK YOU’ – JORDAN PETERSON DESTROYS PANKAJ MISHRA ON TWITTER (2018).⁵ Such a manner of framing his media moments unites Peterson’s fans as a counterpublic to ‘mainstream SJW discourse’. A naive newcomer with a mild interest in Peterson can click on one of his videos and in no time be submerged in a flow of one-sided media sources. Disenfranchised men find each other on these platforms and connect based on emotion, a powerful catalyst in the unification of digitally networked publics (Papacharissi 2014). What unites this particular publics (which, it should be noted, is only one segment of Peterson’s audience, albeit the most visible part) is a reactionary position: opposition to feminism, social justice, globalism ‘cultural Marxism’, or generally left-wing politics. Even though Peterson is a known champion of the individual and speaks against such collective identities,⁶ his appeal to this particular group is far from inexplicable.

Peterson’s performance: father, leader, martyr

Peterson makes a claim to what Max Weber called ‘charismatic authority’: a ‘certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is considered extraordinary and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers’ (2012 [1947], p. 241; Robinson 2018). Charismatic leaders brand themselves as visionary heroes who dare to go against the cultural current, especially in times of rapid social change, when established social identities are vulnerable. Peterson’s fame at times has taken rather intense forms, with fans attesting to effects surpassing the powers of argumentation and influence usually ascribed to public intellectuals: effects more akin to gurus. On his website, Peterson displays testimonials from YouTube viewers: ‘[i]t’s heartbreaking to finally see the light and look back at 41 years of suffering’ and ‘[y]our lectures are pure inspiration to me’ (cited in Robinson 2018). His disciples compare him to Plato, Diogenes, and Gandhi (Bartlett 2018). This charismatic authority stems to an important extent from the affective impact of non-verbal elements in his positioning, including rhetoric and dramaturgical strategies.

In recent years, several theorists have underlined the importance of performativity in analysing the impact of public intellectuals (Heynders 2016, Baert and Morgan 2017). This includes rhetorical strategies and literary devices, written texts and public performances. Such intellectual interventions are performative in that they bring something into being: they do something. ‘Persona studies’ (Marshall and Barbour 2015, Marshall et al. 2015) foregrounds the Jungian concept of persona in the analysis of private and public self-representations. Latin for ‘mask’ and originally used for theatrical productions, for Jung et al. (1966), persona indicates a way to manage the self in the social. The concept ‘scholarly persona’ (Paul 2016) more specifically denotes a set of virtues and skills pertaining to a specific discipline, deemed necessary to be recognised as an academic professional in the field. In this section, we focus on three performances – a lecture, a debate, and an interview – to examine how Peterson creates his scholarly persona.

As the point of this section is to get grip on Peterson’s charismatic appeal to his fan base, we simply selected the video lecture that YouTube marks as most popular. This video from 2017 is not about pomo-bashing, triggering feminists, or anti-political correctness, as one might expect. The video, titled ‘Introduction to the Idea of God,’ has 6.5 M views, 1.6 K likes, and 14.426 comments at the time of writing. It is a registration of a lecture in his series Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories, recorded at Isabel Bader Theatre in Toronto (16 May 2017). Peterson here outlines his understanding of the notion of God.

The setting in what looks like a modest lecture hall, lacks theatricality: a black curtain as backdrop, a simple wooden lectern, a very simple PowerPoint presentation: nothing distracts from Peterson’s words and delivery. The audience is not in view, not even during the Q&A. This creates an ‘aura’ (Baert and Morgan 2017) that manifests as a distance between actor and audience, a spatial separation reinforced by the video’s framing. This lecture is as far removed from a Ted Talk as can be; it is old school, evoking a university lecture in an ‘80s or ‘90s movie.

His presentation is highly skilled, and he speaks confidently, passionately, and calmly.⁷ With a steady gaze, he ignores the presence of the camera, seemingly too focused and too immersed in his own thought process to notice. He speaks clearly and articulately, not needlessly complex. His physical appearance is photogenic, well groomed, with a self-assured posture. He is wearing his typical shirt and jacket, a little on the loose side, emphasising his thin frame, creating the impression of a disciplined professor who forfeits epicurean pleasures. These are all elements of the way Peterson strategically ‘enacts’ his persona.

In terms of gender identity, his performance and posture conveys a traditional type of masculine authority, following his own first rule in 12 Rules for Life, ‘Stand Up Straight With Your Shoulders Back’:

Quit drooping and hunching around. Speak your mind. Put your desires forward, as if you had a right to them—at least the same right as others. Walk tall and gaze forthrightly ahead. Dare to be dangerous. Encourage the serotonin to flow plentifully through the neural pathways desperate for its calming influence. (p. 55)

Everything about Peterson’s aesthetic is performative, in the sense that it performs his ‘life rules’. Yet, other aspects of his physical appearance are not necessarily reflective of hegemonic masculinity (Connell 2005). He is thin and he has a slightly high-pitched voice (his fans lovingly compare him to Kermit the frog in memes), often weak in the higher regions (exacerbated by his recent illness). Despite his grounding his ideas on sex in biological theory, his masculine stance does not seem to come naturally to him. He is in fact practicing as well as preaching the performativity of masculinity in claiming that body language can initiate a positive feedback loop, not only making one feel more confident but also asserting one’s dominance to others. This aspect of gender performativity might then explain his appeal to the ‘new hybrid masculinities’ (Ging 2017) such as incels and geeks: if their teacher’s ‘alpha’ stance is an effect of his performance, then maybe there is still hope for them to rise in the hierarchy.

As a second media moment, we focus on the debate between Peterson and Slavoj Žižek on 19 April 2019, because of the informative contrast between the two celebrities. The event, announced as the debate of the century, took place in a fully booked Sony Centre in Toronto, in front of a live audience of over 3000 people. The topic was ‘Happiness: Capitalism vs Marxism’. The mise en scène was much less modest than that of aforementioned lecture: dramatic, grand, and theatrical, with a huge stage framed by heavy curtains, an enormous poster displaying the faces of the academics was suspended. Classical music was playing before both heavyweights entered the arena.

Peterson is wearing an impeccable blue fitted suit, posing an amusing contrast to the shabbily-dressed Žižek. Where the latter seems completely at ease, Peterson seems a bit awkward and stiff at first. He looks stern, rarely smiles; yet, his overall attitude is humble, expressing incredulity about the magnitude of the event. His delivery seems loose, with lots of expressive hand gestures. He paces back and forth introspectively, rarely looking at the audience and often looking down towards his feet. When he gets agitated, his voice becomes higher and gains in intensity. His audience cheers and applauds consistently every time he raises his voice. This dynamic cadence, modulating from calm to almost angry and back again in waves, typifies Peterson’s way of positioning himself.

Žižek and Peterson’s performances feed off each other because of their contrasts. Žižek speaks about a wide range of topics with a moral perspective. In that sense, he performs as a traditional authoritative public intellectual, but with a comic twist, an often ironic, self-conscious stance that draws attention to the artificiality of his performance (see Baert and Morgan 2017). Peterson has the positioning of the unironically traditional, authoritative intellectual, who rarely jokes and receives praise for his sincerity.

The third media occasion we select for scrutiny is an interview that took place July 2019, but was uploaded on YouTube by vpro documentary on 15 September 2020. It had 485.340 views times at the time of writing, with 4700 comments. We chose this particular interview since it was made public relatively recently, and since it was one of the last media moments before Peterson was treated in a hospital in Russia for a benzodiazepine addiction after an illness. It stands out for the fact that the interviewer, Emy Koopman, does not interrupt him but lets him speak for great lengths of time. It is not a standalone interview: it was conducted as part of the Dutch documentary series Paradijs Canada (VPRO), for which only short fragments were used. The conversation mostly dwells on topic related to gender.

Peterson looks unwell, which is to be expected. He is irritable and agitated, which is all the more remarkable since the interviewer, as said, gives him free range and rarely cuts him off. He is confrontational and dominates the encounter by quickly moving into unexpected territory and new directions of conversation: a tactic that disorients his interlocutor (who remains out of view). He often sighs and generally acts wearily, as if he has had to explain certain points many times before, and finds them obvious. He is emotional: when talking about his family, he seems on the verge of crying. It is not unusual for Peterson to show emotions, especially anger and sadness. The combination is effective as anger plays into his persona that asserts male authority, while his sadness signifies to his followers that, like a strict but loving father, he truly cares about their fates, and that of the world.

We also examined the YouTube comment section for this interview, to see what elements of his performance his fans consistently remark upon. Many note that he looks sick and tired, and express worries about his health and wellbeing. Some connect his suffering to his plight of educating his following. Comments like ‘looks like his fame has taken its toll on him’, ‘being Jordan Peterson is killing this man’; ‘you can see the burden of carrying the weight of the world on his face’; or ‘I can’t help but wonder how many years of his life he sacrificed to help the rest of us.’ These remarks effectively construct his persona in terms of the ‘sickly genius,’ one of the archetypal public intellectuals of the twentieth century (Niskanen et al. 2018). They display traces of the Romantic sensibility that elevated artistic heroes who were neglected by society, the doomed, Promethean, struggling martyrs of literary creation whose art is created at great cost to themselves (Mathijsen 2013). We also see this image in the (self)branding of contemporary twenty-first-century authors (van de Ven, 2019, p. 33–4, 2018). This element of sacrifice adds another layer to Peterson’s persona.

In sum, Peterson’s charismatic authority does not reside in any static element of performance and rhetoric, but rather a number of tensions. These include strength and fragility, hegemonic and hybrid masculinity, emotion and calm rationality (which in itself can be triggering), as well as an ability to control and modulate a range of affective intensities (see also Crociani-Windland and Yates 2020). The way in which his fans position him, his persona, has slightly shifted throughout the years, from father to martyr. His appeal for his (mostly male) audience lies in a performativity of masculinity that can be described as aspirational. In uncertain times of change, he gives off a vibe of reassuring order and authority.⁸

Guru effects

In a letter to his father featured in Maps of Meaning, Peterson attests to having attained extraordinary insights: ‘I think I have discovered something that no one else has any idea about, and I’m not sure I can do it justice. Its scope is so broad that I can see only parts of it clearly at one time, and it is exceedingly difficult to set down comprehensibly in writing’ (1999, p. 473). This obscurity leaves a mark on his writings, which are often far from easily comprehensible. In this section, we examine them through the lens of relevance theory.

Obscurity of expression would normally be considered a deficit in a speaker, but not in the case of the discourse of intellectual gurus: where readers fail to grasp the meaning of these discourses, they often judge them profound. Cognitive scientist Dan Sperber (2010) calls this form of over-appreciation the ‘Guru Effect’. Linguistic communication is not a straightforward matter of coding and decoding messages. Even the most ordinary phrases are ambiguous and undermine their own meaning (Grice 1989, Sperber and Wilson 1990). They contain referential expressions (like ‘it,’ ‘she,’ ‘this,’ and ‘that’), the referent of which is not linguistically determined. What is more, sentences are ‘multiply ambiguous’: they have different meanings and are open to a range of construals – from literal, to loose, to figurative. Utterances never completely encode the speaker’s intended meaning; rather, they provide a piece of evidence from which the recipient can infer this meaning.

How do humans determine the intended meaning of a sentence in any given context of communication? That is the question relevance theory aims to answer. Developed by Sperber and Wilson (1986), it deals with the allocation of cognitive resources in understanding written and oral communication. It holds that these resources are allocated based on the presumption that it will be worth the expended effort in terms of the cognitive effects they produce. When determining what interpretation of a sentence would be most appropriate, interpreters follow the so-called Communicative Principle of Relevance, which holds that ‘[e]very ostensive stimulus conveys a presumption of its own optimal relevance’ (Sperber and Wilson 2004, p. 612). Considerations of relevance steer the inferential process of determining the intended meaning of a linguistic utterance, as they guide the comprehension process towards an interpretation that fulfils expectations of relevance.⁹ To use an example: when a student comes into my office five minutes late for an appointment and tells me, panting, ‘I missed the bus,’ I will almost immediately infer that she was supposed to come to our appointment by bus, and she was late for it. I will reject all other possible meanings of the word ‘miss’, knowing she was not trying to hit the bus with a thrown projectile for instance; neither did she miss a much-beloved bus from her childhood.

When it comes to public intellectuals held in high regard by their audience, who are deemed authoritative on the issues they discuss, this inferential process can be susceptible to what in psychology and media studies is called confirmation bias (Nickerson 1998, Sperber 2010). This principle is notable in Peterson’s reception, both on the side of fans and critics. While Peterson himself welcomes debate about his world views, critiques of his ideas only substantiate and congeal his followers’ beliefs. When an interviewer disagrees with him, that is to be expected because they fall in derided categories like ‘feminist’ or ‘social justice warrior’. By framing interviews and debates in aggressive terms (‘Peterson DESTROYS … ’), rather than as a dialogue and an opportunity to understand the other, his fans create a strong sense of polarisation (‘us’ against ‘them’). The effect of this confirmation bias is a powerful echo chamber, exacerbated by YouTube’s algorithms. We see it on the side of his opponents too, when interlocutors misrepresent his words based on their preconceived image of Peterson as right-wing misogynist (the most well-known example being Cathy Newman’s oft-parodied ‘so you’re saying … ’). Paying more attention to justifying than falsifying their beliefs, devoted listeners and readers of Peterson’s books and lectures end up paying more attention to confirming rather than disconfirming evidence, and so strengthening their initial belief becomes a self-fulfiling prophecy.

We expect that what people tell us is relevant, and we interpret it in a way that confirms this expectation, relevance being the trade-off or balance between cognitive effort and cognitive effect; the higher the relevance, the more beneficial an attempt at interpretation is (Sperber and Wilson 1986, 1990, 2004). We expect what we are told or what we read to bring sufficient effect to be worthy of our attention, without causing us unnecessary effort of comprehension. So far, these mechanisms apply to all popular media figures. In this sense, confirmation bias is a rational and often helpful way to reach coordination and understanding (Nickerson 1998). Yet, the more evidence is open to a variety of interpretations, the bigger the chance of a confirmation bias; and this is where Peterson’s writing style comes in. Uttered by trusted speakers, obscure statements can inspire a response of ‘interpretive charity’ (Sperber 2010, p. 585).

With this in mind, it might be an asset of Peterson’s writing that it allows for multiple, often contradictory interpretations, as the following sample from a lecture that mixes folklore and fiction with Jungian philosophy:

[t]he thing that announces itself as error has a two-fold nature. Because it’s chaos and order at the same time. Or its all the archetypal structures at the same time. It’s the dragon of chaos, it’s the great mother positive and negative, it’s the great father positive and negative, it’s the individual. Hero and adversary. All of that manifests itself in the moment of error. … what do you encounter when things fall apart? You encounter the adversary, you encounter the tyrant you encounter the catastrophe of nature, and you encounter the dragon of the chaos. … That’s what happens to Alice when she goes down the rabbit hole. (TheArchangel911 2018)

Besides asking for interpretative charity, this semantic slipperiness allows him to argue that a sceptic or critic will simply have misinterpreted his words (Robinson 2018). When asked to defend or elucidate a proposition, this multi-interpretability might allow Peterson to later insist he intended a different meaning. In the case of obscure expressions by intellectual gurus, then, the greater effort required for interpretation is taken to be an indication of high relevance, and leads the reader to interpretations consistent with this indication. Our trust in the authority then gives us sufficient reason to accept the validity of an argument without fully comprehending it.

In Maps of Meaning (1999), Peterson’s discourse is marked by a high density of platitudes, presented in a complex and verbose manner, and larded with technical jargon from different academic disciplines. Typographically, he makes excessive use of italics, which lends his texts a sense of urgency and preciseness lacking in the sentences themselves (‘I could not see how there could be any alternative to either having a belief system or to not having a belief system – and could see little but the disadvantage of both positions,’ 1999, p. 473). Key terms of the discourse are rarely stated in a transparent manner. Throughout Peterson’s writings and lectures, ‘meaning’ is defined and redefined in a diffuse manner.

‘Meaning is manifestation of the divine individual adaptive path’ (1999, p. 481); “It is during contact with the unknown that human power grows, individually and then historically. Meaning is the subjective experience associated with that contact, in sufficient proportion (482); “Meaning emerges from the interplay between the possibilities of the world and the value structure operating within that world” (Peterson 2018, p. 197); “Meaning is the ultimate balance between … the chaos of transformation and the possibility and … the discipline of pristine order” (2018, p. 201); “Meaning is when everything there is comes together in an ecstatic dance of single purpose” (Peterson 2018, p.201.)

Twelve Rules for Life (2018) deviates from these strategies. Peterson has described it as a ‘book of philosophical self-help’ (Read 2018). It includes references to the great philosophers, classics of literature, and the Bible. It relates ancient stories, fairy tales, personal anecdotes, and simple life lessons like (ironically) ‘Be precise in your speech’ (p. 259); ‘Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world’ (p. 147); or ‘Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street’ (p. 355). Some pieces of wisdom, like the latter, are in fact so simple that the reader is again urged to look for deeper, allegorical meanings there. Peterson reanimates dead metaphors and presents commonplaces (free speech is an essential value; men and women are, in certain respects, different) with such emphasis that they are brought under fresh attention. These simple life rules are then dressed in a certain grandeur and mystification.¹⁰ The failure to correctly interpret the meaning of such utterances without unusual effort might cause a reader to be awe-struck by the depth of Peterson’s thought and knowledge, heightening his authority and possibly marking his genius, whereas similar words, uttered by an eccentric person in the streets, would likely be ignored.

As examples of intellectual gurus, Sperber (2010) mentions figures from the continental tradition in philosophy like Sartre and Derrida. These are usual suspects, because of their hermetic writing styles – Camille Paglia, in conversation with Peterson, likens them to high priests ‘murmuring to each other’; and Peterson agrees: ‘[i]mpenetrable language can be used as camouflage’ (Peterson 2018). As we have argued, the guru effect also accounts for the success of his own rhetoric, in which obscure statements and arguments are held as signs of depth and proof of the sender’s genius, and can become the object of collective interpretation. In Peterson’s case, this happens at online forums like his subreddits.

Conclusion

In order to understand why Peterson appeals to so many today, we analysed his public image, rhetoric, and the strategies he uses to inspire trust in his audience. When we now answer the question what makes the Peterson hype, we see it is not attributable to one single factor. We discussed a range of factors. These included a general background of epistemic uncertainty and polarisation; a publics of disenfranchised young men in need of a father figure; Peterson’s media literacy and resulting visibility in online culture, aided by YouTube’s algorithms, a highly effective posture that makes a dominant masculine stance seem like an attainable goal and, finally, vague obscure writings that lend the author the aura of the guru. As we have stressed, none of these elements are unique (Ben Shapiro and Russell Brand also use YouTube to present a collective psychology for men; Derrida and Lacan have also been considered intellectual guru’s). It is their combination that has allowed Peterson to accumulate celebrity capital.

In a general climate of scepticism and doubt, he has created the reassuring persona of a man who has all the answers. Therein lies a difference between liberal and conservative public intellectuals today: traditional conservatives like Peterson are on a mission to make things simpler, to offer ‘an antidote for chaos’ as the subtitle of Maps of Meaning goes, and go about this mission in a rather sweeping way. The motto of his YouTube account is ‘Exploring the Nature of Truth’. The authority (bordering on the Messianic) with which he does this is something that sits uneasy with liberal publics, especially in a time of epistemic uncertainty, when people are aware of the subjectivity and fallibility ingrained in any type of knowledge system, even scientific ones. Moreover, generalism has become less viable since the professionalisation of the social sciences and increasing level of education of the public (Baert and Morgan 2017). Last, as we discussed, this particular style of forceful and absolute claims is more apt to be taken up by YouTube’s algorithms, warranting visibility and the accrual of celebrity capital.

The case of Peterson as the ‘most important public intellectual’ of the present moment points us to some of the limits and shortcoming of this figure of the public intellectual as a liberal ideal. In critically examining and questioning topics, studies, and currents of thinking, public intellectuals do not only imagine alternative scenarios and bring them to the public’s attention: they eliminate other perspectives and alternative scenarios from our (imaginative) worldview. We have seen this in the case of Peterson, who selectively reads and interprets, and ignores studies that offer counter-evidence to his statements. We do not disagree with the idea that public intellectuals filter information for us; we argue that they might be a bit too successful in this regard. Intellectuals like Peterson function as gatekeepers and filter information for the lay audience, yet they do so with the risk of creating powerful filter bubbles. As proponents of a selective form of critical reading and ciphers of a culture marked a profound doubt and scepticism towards authorities, such figures can inadvertently have an opposite effect, of misinforming the public. Intellectuals like Peterson have an impressive scope and breadth of knowledge in several fields, yet for the lay audience, it is almost impossible to determine the scope of these fields and to check the facts. Based on the status and authority of the speaker, the audience takes a leap of faith.

It has to be noted that we oppose the idea of refusing conservative speakers as a visiting speaker at universities, forbidding teachers to show their videos, or any other form of censorship. In times of polarisation, we deem it important that university life exposes students and teachers alike to people with an ideological and epistemological outlook that differs from their own. As Psychology professor Daniel Burston notes, based on recent studies, the majority of tenured faculty in the liberal arts adhere to leftist political views, and as a result, many disciplines and departments might not be open to classical liberals and conservative faculty members (See Shields and Dunne 2016). Despite the omnipresence of policies promoting ethnic, religious, and gender diversity on campus, he worries that this claim to diversity often does not encompass, or even allow, an effort to attract a politically diverse academic community.

Instead, we deem it important to analyse and understand the celebrity capital of different types of public intellectuals across the political spectrum in terms of style, rhetoric, and the publics they create for themselves. Further research could include a data analysis of the comment sections of the YouTube channels of popular contemporary intellectuals, as well as how they collectively engage in interpretation of their discourse on discussion forums like Reddit, in order to map what these media figures mean for the personal lives of their public.

Acknowledgements

A first version of this paper has been discussed at a PEERS meeting in our department of culture studies in September 2019. We would like to thank our colleagues for providing constructive comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Inge van de Ven

Inge van de Ven is Assistant Professor at the Department of Culture Studies at Tilburg University, the Netherlands, and Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow at UC Santa Barbara. She was a Core Fellow (2018-'19) at the Institute for Advanced Study in Budapest. She holds a PhD from Utrecht University, where she also completed postdoctoral research on creativity in education. Articles appeared in journals such as European Journal of English Studies, Journal of Medical Humanities, Narrative, Digital Humanities Quarterly, and Journal for Creative Behavior. She wrote a monograph titled Big Books in times of Big Data (Leiden UP, 2019).

Ties van Gemert

Ties van Gemert is a PhD candidate at Tilburg University, the Netherlands. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Psychology and Master’s degrees in Clinical Psychology, Culture Studies and Philosophy from Tilburg University and Erasmus University. He is currently working as a researcher at the Tilburg Center for Moral Philosophy, Epistemology and Philosophy of Science (TiLPS). His PhD-project ‘Who is Afraid of Psychology? Reconstructing and Reconsidering the Psychologism Debate’ is funded by the Dutch Research Council (PGW.20.021). His main research interests are epistemology, philosophy of science, and history of psychology. Other interests include comparative literature and 4E Cognition.

Notes

1. Chomsky in his display of aversion to and neglect of reading ‘postmodernist’ philosophers like Michel Foucault, whom he describes as ‘intellectuals who are talking to each other in very obscure ways and I can’t follow it and I don’t think that anyone else can’ (2011, p. 241). Dawkins is strongly influenced by evolutionary biology in his preference for authors. He would certainly never recommend to his readers the books of wisdom by Church fathers like St. Augustine or Thomas Aquinas.

2. See for a critique: Cuck Philosophy (11 September 2018). A Critique of Stephen Hicks’ ‘Explaining Postmodernism’ [video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHtvTGaPzF4.

3. This argument has been criticised on grounds of misrepresentation of scientific literature (e.g. Gonçalves 2018, Genetically Modified Skeptic 2018).

4. For an explanation of the workings of YouTube algorithms’ deep neural networks, see Covington et al. (2016).

5. Respectively:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HkG3YyfF3Y&ab_channel=DannyDohertyhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTlPmeun8ig;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrLoFzKhE-o&ab_channel=Acts17Apologetics;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2XXeZXVtzE/ See also: SJW TRIGGERED- Jordan Peterson on Black Lives Matter (2020): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85caIvIylxA; Jordan Peterson: Praising Hitler, Part One https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yjlhh2YvteQ; SJW and FEMINIST OWNED by Jordan Peterson Compilation 2020 | SJWS TRIGGERED: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UExxaYYsfI.

6. In the terms of Swiss literary sociologist Jérôme Meizoz (2007), Peterson’s ‘auto-representation’ is not fully congruent with his ‘hetero-representation’ by these groups that are part of the alt-right community.

7. Peterson’s trademark calmness is actually an effective way to assert dominance over an interlocutor, especially one that is already triggered. Lita Crociani-Windland and Candida Yates who studied his videos coming from a feminist perspective, attest that they ‘often felt angry when watching his seemingly calm exterior, whilst communicating in a very directive manner those views which challenged our own’ (2020, p. 110).

8. Of course, he is not the only contemporary charismatic male figure who employs online platforms to reach out to large groups of mainly young men: other examples of such media figures communicating to the same target audience include Russell Brand, Alex Jones, Joe Rogan, Dave Rubin, Ben Shapiro. To some extent, these male public figures all attempt to serve as role models for a lost generation of men in need of someone to ‘set their houses in order’. Clearly, there is a market for this type of self-help.

9. Relevance theory is applicable to all acts of communication: in earlier research, they have been applied to literary texts (Wilson 2012; Cave and Wilson 2018) and to museum art (McCallum and Scott-Phillips 2020). The goal of these studies is not to produce better interpretations, but to obtain insight into the process by which people arrive at the interpretations they construct, be it successfully or unsuccessfully.

10. I hope that these rules and their accompanying essays will help people understand what they already know: that the soul of the individual eternally hungers for the heroism of genuine Being, and that the willingness to take on that responsibility is identical to the decision to live a meaningful life. (xxviii–xxix).