he confrontation has worked wonders for Peterson.

His new book 12 Rules for

Life: An Antidote to Chaos has become a runaway bestseller in the UK, US,
Canada, Australia, Germany and France, making him the public intellectual du
jour. Peterson is not just another troll, narcissist or blowhard whose arguments
are fatally compromised by bad faith, petulance, intellectual laziness and blatant
bigotry. It is harder to argue with someone who believes what he says and knows
what he is talking about – or at least conveys that impression. No wonder every
scourge of political correctness, from the Spectator to InfoWars, is aflutter over
the 55-year-old professor who appears to bring heavyweight intellectual armature
to standard complaints about “social-justice warriors” and “snowflakes”.
Two years ago, he was a popular professor at the University of Toronto and a practising
clinical psychologist who offered self-improvement exercises on YouTube. He published
his first book, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief, in 1999 and appeared
in Malcolm Gladwell’s bestseller David and Goliath, talking about the character traits of
successful entrepreneurs. The tough-love, stern-dad strand of his work is represented
in 12 Rules for Life, which fetes strength, discipline and honour.
His ballooning celebrity and wealth, however, began elsewhere, with a three-part
YouTube series in September 2016 called Professor Against Political Correctness.
Peterson was troubled by two developments: a federal amendment to add gender
identity and expression to the Canadian Human Rights Act; and his university’s plans
for mandatory anti-bias training. Starting from there, he railed against Marxism, human
rights organisations, HR departments and “an underground apparatus of radical left
political motivations” forcing gender-neutral pronouns on him.

Not everybody is persuaded that Peterson is a thinker of substance, however. Last

November, fellow University of Toronto professor Ira Wells called him “the professor of
piffle” – a YouTube star rather than a credible intellectual. Tabatha Southey, a
columnist for the Canadian magazine Macleans, designated him “the stupid man’s smart
person”.
“Peterson’s secret sauce is to provide an academic veneer to a lot of old-school rightwing
cant, including the notion that most academia is corrupt and evil, and banal self-help
patter,” says Southey. “He’s very much a cult thing, in every regard. I think he’s a goof,
which does not mean he’s not dangerous.”