Jordan Peterson

Jordan Bernt Peterson (born 1962 in Fairview, Alberta) is a Canadian clinical psychologist, professor and author who drew wide attention in the late 2010s. He is often described as conservative, although he calls himself a classical liberal and traditionalist. His main interest is less politics than the psychology of belief: why people build systems of meaning and what happens when those systems collapse. His thinking belongs to the traditions of personality and religious psychology, drawing on Jung, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky.

He grew up in a mildly Christian household. At thirteen he read Orwell, Huxley, Solzhenitsyn and Ayn Rand, and he worked for the New Democratic Party until he left it at eighteen, disillusioned. He began with political science and English literature before turning to psychology. After a year travelling in Europe, where he became concerned with twentieth-century totalitarianism and the nuclear arms race, he earned a PhD in clinical psychology from McGill University in 1991. From 1993 to 1998 he taught and researched at Harvard, and then took a professorship at the University of Toronto, from which he retired as professor emeritus in 2021.

His first book, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief (1999), took thirteen years to write and offers a theory of how people organise their beliefs. For Peterson, life moves between chaos, associated with the unknown, and order, associated with what has been explored and understood. Beliefs act as maps that regulate emotion; when an important belief is challenged, the response can be a rigid defence that blocks revision. The logos, meaning conscience and the search for meaning, mediates between these forces, and the myth of the heroic explorer offers a model for facing them. The book also examines how ideological identities can harden into collective atrocity.

His second book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (2018), is more accessible and sets out practical ethical principles; it was promoted with a world tour. His third, Beyond Order (2021), continues the same line. His influence spreads mainly through YouTube and his podcast, and his views on political correctness and climate change have drawn both loyal support and sharp criticism.