As an introduction, this research project took on a mind of it’s own. What was once a bit of a cheeky final assignment landed me in a sea of Christian word clouds and disenfranchised nervous men. My initial reasoning behind wanting to ‘investigate’ Jordan Peterson at all was due to his apparent cultural effect. Being that he was a mid-range Canadian psychologist I found his growing fanbase a bit concerning.
I was originally hoping to study 4Chan and the ‘Incel‘ however upon further reflection it maybe seemed unwise to attempt to data mine a foreign server with no laws or restraints. So I chose someone a little closer to home that if I had to defend myself against, would feel safely doing so.
I was personally seeing a frequency of his fans ALSO support certain right-wing or extreme conservative view points. I saw them arguing online about ‘strawmen’ and spoken of as a mentor on chat boards with rape jokes.
The goal of this project was to attempt to understand this cultural phenomena using data analysis. I wanted to follow the trends and sentiments within Dr. Jordan Peterson’s personal speech and writings and the potential effect on the public as a whole based upon these initial research questions:
What are his most used words, topics?
What is their sentiment and is this stable or changing over time?
Does Jordan Peterson’s language mimic known alt-right language or sentiments?
Is his language becoming more negative or political over time?
Is he having a political effect on his fans?
What kind of effect are his books, lectures and videos having on his fans and opposers?
Jordan Peterson was a University of Toronto Clinical Psychology professor between 1998-2021 who over the better part of the last decade has become a guide to an increasing number of young men around the world. Initially causing local controversy in 2016 at UofT with his refusal to adhere to the administration’s potential use of new gender pronouns, he became an outspoken media hungry critic of ‘woke’ and ’cultural-Marxist’ agendas sweeping the universities of Canada and abroad.
He soon landed himself on the Joe Rogan podcast in the U.S. quickly rising as a conservative ‘rational’ intellectual celebrity. Bolstered by the American male audience, the renewed interest in his 1999 book ‘Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief‘ led to the writing of his second book ‘12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos‘ that supposedly went on to sell over five million copies, however this figure could not be cited.
His books gained him critical media acclaim from the New York Times going as far as to affirm him as one of the great intellectuals of our time. This has since led to an almost prophetic presence among his young impressionable fans and rumored praises within the “Incel” community, but also of right-wing media and politics. He has since become a contributor to the Daily Wire, where his biblical lectures and selected videos are now available. Thus, solidifying his Conservative political views and embedding him into the American alternative media cycle.
He continued gaining controversy with another Rogan appearance questioning climate change research and for being banned from Twitter for feuding with fellow Canadian actor Elliot Page over pronoun usage.
His Clinical Work:
Peterson’s educational background began with his doctoral dissertation from McGill in 1991 focusing on genetic alcoholism among males and their offspring. His work has since continued towards research on personality typology, a large and somewhat controversial field within Cognitive Psychology pioneered by Peterson’s proclaimed influence Carl Jung. Though Jung was highly influential on the current field of psychology he was/is not without controversy or critique.
Peterson’s most recent research and the bulk of his academic career has centered around the Big Five personality model, a personality metric designed originally by Raymond Christal for assessing/influencing academic success in the military and beyond.
The majority of Dr. Peterson’s academic pursuits have focused on the testing and validation of the Big Five model and quantifiable personality typologies. His work is mostly catered to the business world though has occasionally focused on defining academic achievement goals for those of us who have a ‘gender or ethnicity gap’. Even before he began seeking media presence his clinical interests had financial hustle.
Peterson et al. currently run a profitable website using the Big Five model principles. With more and more corporate entities rely on these metrics for their hiring practices and employee structures these sorts of proprietary tests could be quite lucrative. Potentially more so than the peasantry of clinical practice.
In my initial ‘hypothesis’ I expected to see an increase of right-wing rhetoric and propagandized political speech within the available writings of Jordan B. Peterson over time. The was entirely based on my own personal interpretation of his persona.
Though it was clear there were some religious aspects to his views and opinions I initially felt that this element of his popularity was the smallest contributing factor. Assuming mostly that his fanbase came more from extremist libertarian-esque men, the type of guys who liked Elon Musk and crypto.
My bias was based primarily on Peterson’s video interviews, debates and statements I’d seen but in large also due to the left-wing media portrayal of him. While researching this project it was easy to see the online discourse attempting to classify Dr. Peterson’s ideologies, methods and stances. Often to opposing degrees. One could essentially find all opinions occurring at once, a hero to some a villain to others. Both cases citing multiple verified sources.
Since this whole shebang started over a year ago Peterson is no longer quite the enigma that he once was-he’s come out quite clearly as a sort of evangelical pundit. His showmanship and ability to ride the wave of populism has at the very least now led to the College of Psychologists and Psychological Associates in Ontario (the issuer of his medical license) forcing him to complete a ‘media training course‘ in order to maintain his ability to practice. Though truly I think he understands social media I appreciate the attempt to reign him in.
I needed to make sense of what the fuck was going on. I needed to analyze his words en masse. I couldn’t sift through all the chatter.
So, I began by using his own books, speeches and articles then contrasted this with his fanbase using Reddit as a community source, because Reddit is a homie. Beginning with his 1999 smash hit:
Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief
“Why have people from different cultures and eras formulated myths and stories with similar structures? What does this similarity tell us about the mind, morality, and structure of the world itself? Jordan Peterson offers a provocative new hypothesis that explores the connection between what modern neuropsychology tells us about the brain and what rituals, myths, and religious stories have long narrated. A cutting-edge work that brings together neuropsychology, cognitive science, and Freudian and Jungian approaches to mythology and narrative, Maps of Meaning presents a rich theory that makes the wisdom and meaning of myth accessible to the critical modern mind.”
Goodreads
As Peterson in the summer of 2021 had already made quite a splash of public life I wanted to start as cleanly as possible. I began by finding his book in a format that would be appropriate for compiling. Blessed be the great library of Internet Archive.
As part of my project I ‘built’ (cobbled together) a decent text cleanser and made peace with the ways of html requests. This is probably what gave me enough to pass.
Though this is relatively simple procedure in the grand schema of data engineering, it’s an incredibly useful tool for someone looking for cultural needles in digital haystacks.
This can be a little boring to look at but what you’re seeing is the conversion and removal of extraneous texts like printing information and bibliography. I wanted to have his own words as uncorrupted as possible.
I then broke down his sentences into individual speech tokens. As this was a learning project (Capstone as they call it) I was new to all of the tools I was dealing with. I had an idea and had to figure out how to make it work. If I’d known what I know now I would have probably gone about my tokenization differently and apply more precise classification using existing datasets…but honestly at the time I was just keeping my head above water.
The goal was to gain knowledge in the least bias way I could.
The echo chamber of his persona made it almost impossible to garner any legitimate viewpoint of this dude.
Once completing tokenization of the text this was where personal bias and choice did come in to play. I needed to make choices as to what I considered to be superfluous language. Shit we didn’t need like ‘and’, ‘the’, and ‘is’. These intermediary words give us nothing in way of context but needed to make hard cuts to other words that I found to be congestive such as ‘time’, ‘maps’, ‘should’. You could derive some meaning from these words however I was looking for more concrete evidence.
After compiling all the data I sat stunned staring at the jumble before me.
I appreciated going into this that this man had a lot of religious comparison and allegories in his repertoire but for a book being touted by a clinical psychologist from an institution as venerated as the University of Toronto I was pretty surprised to see the word “god” said 350 times. Especially considering he wasn’t even in the Theology department, like, he could have been they’re right next door.
For the sake of the initial project I performed other techniques such as k means clustering and sentimentality scoring which led to varying results. Throughout the process the name Eliade kept popping…just never quite enough to end up in the final analysis. So I did a little more digging using a text concordance…it was…kind of okay.
Eliade was new to me but upon learning about him a bit, I’m happy to have pulled this particular reference. The whole reason I embarked on this mess was due to what I felt harkened to propaganda techniques. His repetitive language and potential ‘dog-whistling‘ to extremist groups was too large for me to ignore.
While after first analysis there seemed to be no linguistic evidence of hate speech, the frequency of seeing Eliade’s name seeing as he was also greatly involved with similar political trickiness in his time riled me up.
Digging into the lore of Eliade seems to almost present a mimicking of his life against Peterson’s. Especially in the context of not falling into obvious ideologies while still associating with right-wing propagandizers and religious figures. The parallels even go as far as both Peterson and Eliade causing explosiveness around academia and free-speech in their times. Though Eliade was anti-Nazi, he was pro-Mussolini and an ardent supporter of the Iron Guard/Legion.
They are currently an active organization in Romania, and abroad.
Fortunately for my sanity I was not the only person to make this connection and seeing as I ain’t never heard of this Eliade dude before-Peterson’s favoritism of him did not go unnoticed.
Jordan lists Eliade’s works 6 times on his personal blog’s recommended reading section.
It didn’t take long to start building a bit of a case against Eliade as many academics, artists, and activists have done over the years. Being an academic himself, surely Peterson would have been aware of these associations. While I am not one to criticize one’s book collections, if you recommend someone so vehemently you probably enjoy that person’s work. So much so you want others to as well.
12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos(2018):
Barnes and Noble lists the synopsis for his second book as follows:
“Humorous, surprising and informative, Dr. Peterson tells us why skateboarding boys and girls must be left alone, what terrible fate awaits those who criticize too easily, and why you should always pet a cat when you meet one on the street. What does the nervous system of the lowly lobster have to tell us about standing up straight (with our shoulders back) and about success in life? Why did ancient Egyptians worship the capacity to pay careful attention as the highest of gods? What dreadful paths do people tread when they become resentful, arrogant and vengeful? Dr. Peterson journeys broadly, discussing discipline, freedom, adventure and responsibility, distilling the world’s wisdom into 12 practical and profound rules for life. 12 Rules for Life shatters the modern commonplaces of science, faith and human nature, while transforming and ennobling the mind and spirit of its readers.”
If someone were to choose this book knowing nothing of Dr. Peterson solely based on this synopsis, they might think that this would be a somewhat anthropological book covering many faiths and ethnographic approaches. You could think science would be the focus but with words like ‘faith’, ‘tradition’, and ‘rules’ it is fair to assume this book would have some globally religious topics.
But once again, god and belief occur quite a bit here in his 12 Rules for Life book-“god” appearing 220 times, which for being touted as a doctor written psychological manual of sorts is interesting to see in this day and age.
Though I understand that Western religious terminology is often using Christianity as a reference point of comparison, the word “god” itself is inherently Christian. If global religion was being spoken about one would think bare minimum Allah or Yahweh, Buddha or Brahma would be seen along side God. Though point to him the yin/yang concept from Taoism was mentioned.
At this point I started looking for Christian related/associated posts about Jordan himself, finding a vast amount online. They seemed predominantly leaning towards Catholicism. This was surprising as I’ve found his methods to be more evangelical in media presence/style. Within the Catholic world his name has begun to float around with Bishop Robert Baron the auxiliary Bishop of Los Angeles, California who currently heads ‘Word on Fire’ ministries.
“In a June 2019 speech to the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, Bishop Barron used Peterson as an example of someone who talks about the Bible in a way that is engaging and helpful for his audiences, who tend to be young and curious about religious matters, but not actually observant.“
I would argue though as Bishop Baron is clearly aligned with the Church and Peterson has been somewhat open about his Catholic leanings, the methods of which they are pontificating, disseminating and behaving is more evangelical in nature. One could say there’s more of a parallel between the methods of the Jesuits, an evangelical Catholic order and alma mater of current Pope Francis.
As a large portion of the American media audience considers itself ‘Christian Evangelical‘ it would make sense to try to appease the more modern style of ‘spreading the word’ if that was your intention.
I was not able to easily pull his most recent book Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life in a legitimate manor, so it unfortunately will be left out but many positive reviews exist and it has a supposed 4.2/5 rating with 15k user reviews.
The overall language was going to be difficult to analyze from a sentimentality perspective as the majority of his speech appears to be neutral. There are pretty major contextual considerations to make and on an individual word basis but it’s safe to say his works do not contain direct hate speech.
However as I continued over time and started to include some of his more recently published articles and blog posts you could see a more political change in his language, specifically within local politics.
I was pleased to pull the reference of “Eliade” as his work has had a lot of low level association with fascist groups in Europe and is currently going through a bit of a resurgence with the disrest and free time we’ve all be subjected to as of 2020. This helps maintain a bit of my hypothesis of his association with particular groups though once again not entirely damning, but does lead to more questions.
There can feel to be an almost preacher-like quality to his personal writings with his political articles tend to focus specifically on “individual rights” and the “world/people” at large. Such a broadness is hard to categorize but as I continued his public influence became a little more clear.
As a teacher, father and Canadian his slow trickle into local politics has not gone without effect. Discussing topics such as gender identity and public education became a high priority of his speaking points.
When speaking about diversity on his personal blog his words are necessarily subversive but thrown together seem a little….intense.
As he graduated from the local to Federal level of public criticism his political leaning became less vague and his conservatism began seeping through.
At the point where he began writing National Post articles he was a known name among my peer group with a growing sense of division. People you wouldn’t have previously expected began coming to his aid in conversation, using similar language or talking points. I was seeing his influence in real time.
Once again, Reddit became the go to.
I started with the most active posts, ‘hot’ posts as Reddit calls them. It can be a little crazy to go through but with some threads containing over 300 comments and large scale community participation the data was irresistible. This required doing some pretty hefty word tuning as there were a lot of little net related artifacts and in-between words. With this much data, I need things to be as obvious as possible.
I expected to find a hostile, woman hating potentially bigoted space and while I found a few of those what I overwhelmingly was faced with…was sadness. Despair. Discontent. Confusion at the changing tides.
I found men of ALL ages pouring their hearts out in praise of Peterson and his influence. Many of them spoke of his role in their religious discovery or re-awakening. They felt scared and saw Peterson as a source of validation and confidence, absorbing his teachings as doctrine.
This is where I started to realize the effect. Typically we currently view men who align with certain popular group think as being threats and while that can be true when you look at what people here are expressing, it’s fear. They don’t know what their place is, they feel ‘disenfranchised’. These are the sorts of feelings that left unchecked, could become violent anger. The proverbial threat.
Peterson providing a neatly packaged Christian-lite solution to their woes is doing something. It’s resonating with millions of men around the globe. If their anger and feelings of alienation were genuinely addressed I would say ‘maybe this is a good thing’ but in reality it has created an echo chamber of lossless men attempting to support themselves with no tools or actual guidance outside of the texts and videos of their Prophet Peterson.
I then repeated the same process for ‘new’ posts. At the time of data collection it was incredibly active space and many of the ‘new’ and ‘hot'(most trending) posts were one in the same so there was a lot of crossover in the word counts. However, they were not identical.
Running the top posts was somewhat scarce but when combining the ‘top’, ‘hot’, and ‘new’ posts the word ‘God‘ was used 533 times. ‘People’, ‘life’ and the ‘world’ were also huge themes found amongst the static.
There’s both an ambiguous nature to the word pairings and a parroting of Peterson himself. Within the cultural zeitgeist he was/is becoming a prolific character garnering documentaries and massive public speaking engagements. Somehow he is continually filling arenas with predominantly young men, looking for guidance.
As this project initially started with the intention of tracking potential hate speech, I needed to get a sense of the current state of things but what I encountered was far more nuanced than a Kekistan proud boy. I and many others could see a correlation between his fanbase and extreme social positions but not in a directly quantifiable way. As we could with hate groups and Trump supporters.
Jordan’s speech is at best dog-whistling to potential groups but I don’t see evidence for specified targeting despite my bias. His followers are broad spectrum but clearly all share the experience of being disenfranchised males. His ideology has helped to bolster conservatism among youth of all classes and backgrounds.
It could seem bizarre for so many men to find this sort of rhetoric appealing-but when you look at men as a whole we don’t give them much space to have feelings. So they explode.
Most violence is committed by men but we forget, men hurt other men. Across the board men do not have as many outlets to safely express their feelings so there can be deep levels of compartmentalizing. This leads to some of the mass violence we see today.
People who feel stuck, trapped, unheard, unsupported. They eventually can’t take it anymore. If someone like Peterson comes along and you suddenly are able to make your bed maybe read some books and find a community of others who also were changed by Peterson…it could maybe really help people.
The problem is though that the platform that he’s built has not been used to better the lives of his followers, but, to rile them up. There is a growing power that he holds over his rising base and what he chooses to do with it could have genuine societal consequences.
Jordan’s descension into a media figure has been shown with intense emotionality.
First it was arguing with female journalists about his comments. Then it became political op-eds. Then it became crying on webcam after he fled to a Russian Federation rehab because he was so stressed from his wife’s cancer that he got hooked on psych meds. Soon after came the rants.
As he received backlash for some of his actions and words his social objection only increased, slowly turning the circus into a Biblical martyrism. With every ban or consequence he only becomes stronger in his public conviction. The sacrifices of his career and reputation being for a greater cause.
Jordan of Arc.
By 2022 the Canadian academic systems could no longer support Peterson in the public eye and his offensive strategy of attention took flight. He quickly became a political pundit having already amassed large scale social backing. If he says that modern medicine is wrong, people will believe him. With his own family being involved with local right-wing media , proselytizing potentially harmful diets, and promoting climate denial he is no friend to modern science.
WordCloud of National Post Article
It has now been a year since I began this project and my viewpoint is not where I expected it to be. Truly in my naiveté I was assuming (hoping) that I would be able to neatly prove the social tension we were seeing, as this is one of the current methods for tracking hate groups, especially over time. I thought I would see increases in racist and anti-feminist language and though it existed it was not the overall conversation point.
Without fail “God” appeared to be one of the top words in all Jordan Peterson focused forums with the final combined data frame yielding “god” 547 times. Considering the somewhat small dataset, that takes up quite a large portion.
The more I ingested Peterson’s work, saw his interviews, his losses and health troubles, the whole Serbia thing-I began to feel bad for him. It was becoming clear during my research that he was in distress. That he had always been in distress but this ego fulfilling infamy was becoming an addiction. It probably does not feel very good to be him most of the time. All the power in the world can’t heal whatever did or didn’t happen to him when it should have.
He touched upon what many men were afraid to say out loud, he’s shown vulnerability and open anger. Things not usually praised in our ‘Western’ societies. So while many more liberal people may feel it is simple to decry his general practice and demeanor the scope of the effect needs to be addressed.
The amount of individual personal confessions on his pages are staggering, and often related to religion or ailing mental health and discomfort in changing times. Many posts had the similar theme of feeling empty and disenfranchised in society and upon hearing/reading Peterson’s work, have now converted to Christianity. Often Catholicism.
In other cases I found young international kids of other Abrahamic religions praising him for his religious leanings and adherence to “tradition”.
Though it seems to be predominantly male I don’t think it’s fair to say there are no women in the group, though it’s difficult to assess given the data I did see several comments supposedly from self proclaimed ‘females’ and considering the forum assumedly female assigned at birth. There is a sense of hopelessness and fear from his fanbase, which again was somewhat surprising to me.
I expected that most of his fanbase would be quite angry or self-righteous, and easily pinned down but there was much more neutrality and open pain than expected. This is not to say that there is not some blatant right-wing rhetoric and bizarre racial theories but it cannot be said to be the majority. What is obvious is the incredible amount of religion that actually occurs in the data.
Not only is his fanbase interested in Christianity, they may not have been before introduction to Jordan Peterson. He is more than a public figure to them he is akin to their personal father of spirituality. As if to live life with the idea of ‘What would Jordan Peterson Do?’. The church of Peterson. There’s a messianic quality to how he’s spoken of by his fans and a pushback of non-traditional roles (opposing biblical standard) being publicly supported by liberal governments.
There’s a sense that this community feels lost in this new world, and are becoming more confused about how to understand and know themselves within it, so they are turning to Peterson for answers to their feelings. Feelings being the optimum word here, as they are turning to him as a Doctor of Psychology.
While researching, every article, comment, or interview Jordan was always introduced as “Clinical Psychologist Dr. .Jordan Peterson” and this detail is massively important to his success. His fans see him as a psychologist first so when their preferred psychologist recommends “God” and Christian archetypes to organize one’s “individual self” they may take that as doctors orders. If he says an all meat diet might cure your anxiety…you might try it.
At the time of my final project presentation I concluded with the questioning of his medical credentials, the troubles I was raising have since been addressed. So what now? What did I learn?
I learned that though we might inherently disagree with ideology and tactics of a particular figure, there is often more than meets to eye when it comes to iconographic fan obsession. Much like the Andrew Tates and Derrick Jaxns of the world take over the minds of young men, people like Jordan can appear to be a voice of rationale amongst the chaos. What ends up happening though is a cycle of indoctrination against the identity changes happening within society and is repacking Jesuitism into a modern form.
His support may be wavering in academia but within the Holy See his presence is becoming more and more legitimate. With numbers of parishioners increasing annually across the globe, the church might be willing to embrace someone like Peterson if he has proven himself to the cause of growth. He has a great potential to convert a large number of people.
There is a history within the church to utilize modern medical technique to their practices. Even the current Enneagram test provided by many corporate firms against their employees were initially used as a tool by the Jesuits. There has always been a link between religion and psychology. At one point, people believed everything to be caused by demons so much of the frameworks for modern psychology were founded by staunch Catholics who sometimes believed that ‘pain brings you closer to God‘.
There is already an established archetypal role of the Catholic Psychiatrist Evangelizer.
“The Roman Catholic Church has sounded the clarion call to duty: Conserve Truth; preserve the family. She has singled out the laity as a major player in rebuilding the Mystical Body of Christ and uplifting society from its moral turpitude. The lay person, in the midst of the world, has a unique vocation, whatever the state of life or whatever the expertise. We are to proclaim and put into practice the Gospel of Christ in the classrooms and tribunals of justice, in the family abode, in the marketplace and in clinics and hospitals. Psychiatrists, too, are not to separate the Catholic Faith from daily life but to unify our natural existence with the supernatural vision, in ourselves and in the patients we treat.
Evangelization for the Catholic psychiatrist implies assent to the authoritative and irrefutable definition of man, a being at once corporeal and spiritual (CCC, no. 362), equipped with intelligence and a free will, with the capacity to ponder and to choose. This authentic model of the human person is the logical and sane replacement for the rampant deterministic, absurd and purposeless psychological and psychiatric theories…”
With fMRI’s so widely available, surely he’d be able to reference more modern research, even in his favor. With his initial research being related to genetic alcoholism there have also been incredible medical strides in the field of addictions through modern science and methodologies. Though none of the newer methods would obfuscate religion, these current recommended practices are seldom if ever mentioned in his speeches.
From a local perspective, I have watched this honky Toronto professor become a global sensation in one of the strangest ways possible. I have followed his rise since day one as I personally knew people encountering him on their campus. At first it was a bit of joke but once the ball got rolling his rise to fame has become practically untouchable. I’m not too sure what it would take at this point to dethrone him, but to ignore his influence would be a folly on our parts.
Jordan Peterson does not need media training, he is a master of the medium. He has no reason to alter his approach as it’s garnering millions in revenue, mountains above what he could ever make teaching or even in clinical practice. The drive of power, wealth and infamy are obvious but for what cause? I believe he does partially represent a large subset of society that left unchecked/unsupported may disrupt things on a grand scale.
As he slowly initiates into the greater Catholic community his abilities and influence will only solidify and grow. We could fuck up and end up with a pretty hefty little mess on our hands if we don’t pay attention and understand where these feelings are coming from. He resonates with too many people. If someone like this is able to take over the minds and hearts of so many and become a beacon of identity what does it say about us? It’s more than traditionalist kickback, these dudes are stressed.
There needs to be the acceptance that different types of people exist simultaneously, we don’t need to denigrate our neighbors because they don’t agree with us. We’re all in varying degrees pain and we often don’t know how to cope with it.
I will no longer immediately judge the young man interested in these modern ‘Alpha males‘ as pure ignorance-I now assume that boy/man is not being heard or supported in his life.
The attachment to Peterson shows an attempt at trying to cope with these feelings, a willingness to try to get better. It’s not their fault the Riddler studied psychology, is obsessed with propaganda and knows all the right words to use.
So while my personal opinion of Peterson’s tomfoolery has only deepened, so too has my empathy for this poor strange little man. I hope my work will be helpful for those who were as confused as I was or those looking to not have to read his actual books while still knowing why they’re so popular.
Only time will tell how Jordan Peterson will go down in history, but by golly I think he might just make it to the big leagues like his inspiration Eliade. God speed to us all.
Hoodrat Anthropology 