Jordan Peterson

What makes Jordan Peterson a Global Shaker?

Canadian clinical psychologist and author, Jordan Peterson has been hailed as “the most influential public intellectual of the Western world” by the New York Times. His critically acclaimed 2018 book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to the Chaos provides life advice through essays on abstract ethical principles, psychology, mythology, religion, and personal anecdotes and became a #1 international bestseller.

His main areas of study are in abnormal, social, and personality psychology, with a particular interest in the psychology of religious and ideological belief, and the assessment and improvement of personality and performance.

In 2016, Peterson released a series of highly popular YouTube videos that analysed classic and biblical texts, identity politics and political correctness, and he provides stern fatherly lectures to young men on how to be upstanding members of society and take responsibility for their own lives.

His videos criticizing political correctness and the Canadian government’s Bill C-16, which added gender identity as a prohibited ground of discrimination, due to free speech implications, received significant media coverage, attracting both support and criticism.

Peterson considers that the universities should be held as among the most responsible for the wave of political correctness which appeared in North America and Europe. According to Peterson, he watched the rise of political correctness on campuses since the early 1990s, and considers that the humanities have become corrupt, less reliant on science, and instead of “intelligent conversation, we are having an ideological conversation”.

From his own experience as a university professor, he states that the students who are coming to his classes are uneducated and unaware about the mass exterminations and crimes by Stalinism and Maoism, which were not given the same attention as fascism and Nazism.

Last updated: May 29, 2019

Next Profile