See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/333498336

The Toronto Debate: Jordan Peterson and Slavoj Žižek on Ethics and
Happiness

Article  in  The European Legacy · May 2019

DOI: 10.1080/10848770.2019.1616901

CITATIONS READS

2 1,540

1 author:

Ania Lian
Charles Darwin University
23 PUBLICATIONS   51 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE

Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects:

Epistemological breakthroughs in thinking about learning: Toward the reconfiguration of the field of education View project

CALL and TESOL View project

All content following this page was uploaded by Ania Lian on 30 December 2019.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

 The European Legacy
Toward New Paradigms

ISSN: 1084-8770 (Print) 1470-1316 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cele20

The Toronto Debate: Jordan Peterson and Slavoj

Žižek on Ethics and Happiness

Ania Lian

To cite this article: Ania Lian (2019): The Toronto Debate: Jordan Peterson and Slavoj Žižek on
Ethics and Happiness, The European Legacy, DOI: 10.1080/10848770.2019.1616901

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10848770.2019.1616901

Published online: 30 May 2019.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 63

View Crossmark data

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=cele20
THE EUROPEAN LEGACY
https://doi.org/10.1080/10848770.2019.1616901

OPINION PIECE

The Toronto Debate: Jordan Peterson and Slavoj Žižek on

Ethics and Happiness
Ania Lian
College of Education, Charles Darwin University, Northern Territory, 0909, Australia

Barely a week after the meeting between Jordan Peterson and Slavoj Žižek in Toronto
(on April 19, 2019), held somewhat symbolically on Good Friday, a growing number of
commentaries flooded the Internet. Many of these comments gave the impression that if
only their authors had been there on the stage they would have set either Peterson or
Žižek straight. Those who were there had come to see what Žižek and Peterson could
create together with the conceptual tools each had at his disposal. Some of the
audience may have come to witness a “bloodbath,” others to see if the two speakers
could sharpen their own perspectives on the concept of happiness and on a system
better suited to “making people happy.” Whatever the expectations and however they
were addressed, the follow-up commentaries show that people hold strong views on
both the subject of human happiness and how to get there. But there is a more
important underlying question: What is the point of holding any discussion when an
agreement seems unlikely, including on things as fundamental to human existence as
happiness? Why, then, did these two prominent intellectuals engage in a widely pub-
licised discussion at all, and why did Žižek refer to it in his introductory lines as the “duel
of the century”? Was it merely a kind of dazzling “edutainment” or did he see it as
something more substantial?
Judging by the response to the debate, expectations were high. The Sony
Entertainment Center in Toronto, where the debate was held, was packed with over
3,000 people (less than half than at the International Convention Centre in Sydney,
where 8,000 gathered to listen to Peterson's second presentation in Sydney in 2019).
Jordan Peterson was introduced by the MC of the event, Dr. Stephen Blackwood,
President of Ralston College, Georgia, as an academic and clinical psychologist, professor
of psychology at Harvard University and the University of Toronto; the author of two
books and over a 100 peer-reviewed articles; a scholar steeped in Nietzsche,
Dostoyevsky and, above all, Carl Jung, whose reading informed his interpretation of
ancient myths, twentieth-century totalitarianism, and, especially, his endeavours to
counter contemporary nihilism. Peterson’s 2018 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
is a bestseller with over 3 million copies sold, and has been translated into forty-five
languages and published all over the world. To his fan base, Peterson is a courageous
intellectual who, in September 2016, took a public stand on compelled speech and
political correctness and stood up to his university administration. The media coverage
following this event attracted both support and criticism, and catapulted him into the

CONTACT Ania Lian Ania.Lian@cdu.edu.au

© 2019 International Society for the Study of European Ideas
2 A. LIAN

public arena as a role model and leading intellectual of our times. Today, Facebook has
a multitude of interest groups with the name of Jordan Peterson as their subject, some
of which are favourable to his ideas, while others are quite hostile. Those who support
him describe him as a “savior of Western culture,” “a hero,” “a free speech advocate,”
“the gateway drug for Christ,” “a revitalizer and aggregator of Virtue, Meaning, Truth,
Morality, Jungian thought and in-depth psychology,” “a godfather” and “a wise king
archetype” (all of which descriptions were offered to me by members of a closed Jordan
Peterson Facebook group and are published here with their consent).
Slavoj Žižek, on the other hand, was described by Stephen Blackwood as
a philosopher, with two doctoral degrees, one in philosophy from the University of
Ljubljana, Slovenia, and the other in psychoanalysis from the University of Paris VIII
(Sorbonne). Currently he is a professor at the Institute for Sociology and Philosophy at
the University of Ljubljana, and International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the
Humanities at the University of London. Žižek has published more than three dozen
books, mostly on the seminal philosophers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries;
he is a “dazzling theorist” and “a global figure” tackling issues of emancipation, ideology,
subjectivity and art. Žižek has his own broad base of supporters, albeit not as large as
Peterson’s, possibly because he is less active online. He considers himself a political
radical, challenging what he sees as the pathologies of modern societies. As an expert
on Marxism he was expected by the Toronto audience and worldwide to offer insightful
perspectives on Peterson’s views on Marxism today.
The debate was introduced as important “in an age of reactionary partisan and
degraded civil discourse,” and the questions of happiness, Marxism and capitalism as
“hard questions” demanding “real thinking.” The huge following, both scholars have
amassed, made the discussion even more pertinent, with all knowing full well that in
a few days millions would watch the debate and read about it. Indeed, in less than a day,
pirated copies of the livestream appeared on Youtube, with view counters quickly
nearing the magical first million. The Toronto debate was called the hottest event in
the city, and, as announced by Peterson, scalpers were charging as high or higher prices
than for the Toronto hockey Maple Leaf playoffs, which took place at the same time.
The massive interest in this debate, so contrary to the popular trend towards the
pedestrian and vulgar, is reflective of a new yet largely invisible preoccupation with
intellectual matters engendered by the widespread availability of information technol-
ogy. This availability encourages people to ask questions (and to get answers instantly,
Google alone receives more than 3.5 billion questions a day) by bypassing experts,
respecting privacy and facilitating communication among diverse groups, all of which
indicates that intellectual life is far from dead. It is just hidden. Ultimately, the availability
of the technology enables everyone to do their own research and to be disobedient (or
critical, creative, or to think divergently) on a scale never possible before, leading to
what some have called community intelligence, intelligence emanating from the har-
nessed intellectual energies of the masses.1
Despite these high expectations, the reviews of the event were mostly critical, with
each reviewer proposing how the question of happiness should have been debated.
Some were irritated by Peterson’s failure to demonstrate a deeper understanding of
Marxism not only as it was formulated back in the nineteenth century, but more recently
by social theorists and economists. The key criticism targeted his failure to draw on any
 THE EUROPEAN LEGACY 3

other socialist texts in his analysis of the Communist Manifesto or to expand the
discussion beyond Soviet-style institutions so as to include new proposals of social
scientists; to understand that human hierarchies are fundamentally exploitative and, as
such, inconducive to happiness; and, finally, to recognize that, sooner or later, like any
other economic system, capitalism will outlive its usefulness and be replaced by
a system more appropriate for the new social reality. According to his critics, to discuss
Marx and any tensions in his theory, including the removal of financial incentives as the
primary driver of productivity, one must be well-versed in Marx and socialist/communist
studies. These failures, his critics concluded, implied that Peterson’s own expertise was
apparently insufficient ground for seriously engaging in a debate on Marxist theories.
Yet, for Peterson, it is not those models that are an object of concern, but the realities
“on the ground”—how these models unravel in practice and why, in each case, the
grandiose promises turn into genocide and unfulfilled lives.
There were curious inconsistencies in the pro-Marxist commentaries on the Soviet
model of socialism/communism and in how they projected the image of a better future
as embedded in the volumes of Marxist theory, which, they claimed, Peterson appar-
ently failed to study. The arguments that the Russian Revolution was premature, or not
quite what Marx had envisaged, do not match the enthusiasm with which the Western
intelligentsia, evidently well-schooled in Marxist theory, welcomed the Bolshevik revolu-
tion or indeed, subsequent ones. As late as 1975-79, many Western academics (some
highly esteemed) doubted the claims of the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge
government in Cambodia, possibly without even bothering to verify their beliefs. Even
today, in one of the commentaries on the Toronto debate, one can find a statement
portraying Lenin as a peacemaker who apparently believed that “socialism was the only
thing that could put a stop to the endless imperial struggle that was World War I.”2 Yet
no reference is made by the author to the aggressive war of 1919-21 of Bolshevik Russia
against Poland. Is it lack of knowledge or simply an intentional omission? The aim of the
Bolshevik war of 1919 was to spread revolution across Europe, in Germany and England,
but the first step and biggest anticommunist opponent was the Polish Republic, a point
emphasized by Lenin himself: “We learned that somewhere near Warsaw lies not the
center of the Polish bourgeois government and the republic of capital, but the center of
the whole contemporary system of international imperialism, and that circumstances
enabled us to shake that system, and to conduct politics not in Poland but Germany and
England. In this manner, in Germany and England we created a completely new zone of
proletarian revolution against global imperialism.”3
By opening the debate with the Communist Manifesto, Peterson sought to illustrate
that any theory or call to action should be a synthesis of many voices, many models or
theories, precisely to minimise biases of the kind adopted by the twentieth-century
Western intelligentsia. A dialogue of this kind should enable the parties to confront their
truths and establish a common ground, however minimal. It would appear that Peterson
sought to orient the debate toward this kind of structure by questioning the evidence
used by Marxist ideologues in arguing that a communist society would be a happy
society. In his analysis, Peterson drew on his own research and challenged inter alia the
assumption that social hierarchies are attributable to capitalism or human societies only,
claiming that “organisms of all sorts organise themselves in hierarchies.” He then added
that “One of the problems of hierarchies is that they organise themselves into ‘the
4 A. LIAN

winner takes all’ situations,” and criticized the solutions based in ontologies that reduce
human histories to a class struggle: “There are far more reasons why human beings
struggle than their economic class struggle.” For example, people have internal strug-
gles, the struggle with the malevolence inside of themselves: “we come into life starving
and lonesome.” Human societies are way more complex than a social order based on
clear divisions between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, or indeed any other unam-
biguous categories invented to classify people into neat boxes that can be easily
shuffled around. For Peterson, the lesson to take home is that building a happy society
cannot discount the complexity of the factors that impact and interact with the pro-
cesses by which people organise their relationships: “Biological and anthropological data
on that are crystal clear on this. . . you don’t rise to a position of authority that’s reliable
in a human society primarily by exploiting other people.”
Online commentaries did not interpret Peterson’s introduction as an invitation to
a discussion of the foundations of a ‘happy’ communist/socialist order. Some simply
listed what Peterson said, only to criticise his arguments without engaging with them.
John Semley compared Peterson’s introduction to a “rallying pep talk of a minor hockey
coach, dressed up in references to the Bible and Nietzsche.” On his celebrity status, he
added, “Whatever his academic pedigree as a psychologist. . . his celebrity is the result of
his work as a self-help author, and his insights have all the depth and nuance of
something culled from Chicken Soup For The Morally Besieged Soul.” In case the readers
did not quite get the sarcasm, Semley then attacked Peterson’s supporters, claiming that
any of the “massive gaps” in Peterson’s knowledge that Žižek was able to demonstrate,
while “no doubt entertaining,” would be “likely insufficient to seriously destabilize
Peterson’s cult of celebrity,” his “fans” being uncritical in their blind adoration: “even
when made aware of their hero’s intellectual shortcomings, they will nonetheless act as
if they do not possess this awareness.” It is not clear what feeds this shallow criticism,
but for one, Semley certainly missed the moment in the debate when Peterson asked
Žižek the “So what?” question: “I didn’t hear an alternative, really, from Dr. Žižek.”
Indeed, in his introductory speech, Žižek offered no solutions. He showed that he was
sceptical of both communism and capitalism as pathways to secure a happy society. He
distanced himself from those who expected him to defend Marxism, while also pointing to
some of the ills of capitalism, as well as its (economic) successes, as demonstrated, according
to him, in the case of China. He was critical of biogenetic technologies and the ethical
challenges they present and the manner in which Western democracies respond to ecological
crises, warning that “the radical measures advocated by some ecologists can themselves
trigger new catastrophes.” He spoke about the effects of global politics and the selectively
applied values that guide them: “The solution is not for the rich Western countries to receive
all immigrants, but somehow to try to change the situation which creates massive waves of
immigration.” Regarding current global debates, Žižek pointed to the problems engendered
in ideologies such as religion, the Stalinist style of communism, and identity politics, each of
which was another tool to exercise power while evoking the apparent virtues they imply.
Later, he turned to Peterson and asked him to clarify his attack on the “postmodern neo-
Marxists” in academia and his belief that Marx supported egalitarianism.
While Peterson agreed with a number of points outlined by Žižek, he questioned the idea
of capitalism as their root cause, noting that “inequalities generated by capitalism, the
proclivity toward a shallow materialism, the probability of corruption, . . . those catastrophes
 THE EUROPEAN LEGACY 5

are part of a struggle for human existence.” On the issue of egalitarianism, Peterson drew on
Žižek’s own admission that Marx himself “did not have a clear theory of how social power
exists.” He suggested that implicit in goals such as working toward a social utopia or
a flattening of social hierarchies is the idea that “a certain form [of] equality” would come
about. Turning to the issue of postmodern neo-Marxists, Peterson referred to Greg Lukianoff
and Jonathan Haidt’s 2018 data indicating that at least a quarter of U.S. social scientists
identify themselves as Marxists, and hardly any as conservatives. Despite the obvious
contradictions between Marxism and postmodernism, once the atrocities of Stalin and
Mao became undeniable, the postmodern authors of the 1960s, specifically Jacque
Derrida and Michael Foucault, “smuggled” Marxism into their respective theories. This
turn was a kind of “sleight of hand” that replaced the oppression of the proletariat by the
bourgeoisie with the oppression of one identity group by another.” Although Žižek agreed,
he countered that there are very few true Marxists left in academia, among whom he
mentioned Professor David Harvey, though he didn’t elaborate on the impacts of Harvey’s
work. 4
At this point one might pause and reflect on the issue the debate was to address: the
relationship between a social order and human happiness. While the exchange between Žižek
and Peterson was interesting, Peterson’s suggestion that Žižek should create his own
framework (“Žižekism”), rather than position himself within Marxist Theory, was
a challenge for Žižek to formulate his own vision of an ethical society. Unfortunately,
Žižek once again set out to vindicate Marx. To me, and perhaps to others, this was no
different from a modern physicist claiming to be Aristotelian because, after all, Aristotle did
get some things right. Žižek’s refusal to offer any solid principles for a way forward—beyond
a mere “when we know we have to act but don’t know how to act, thinking is needed”—
opened the door for Peterson to explain his own understanding of the best path forward. He
quickly shifted the conversation to his own principles as developed in Maps of Meaning
(1999), where, by drawing on evidence from a multitude of disciplines, he demonstrated
that the challenges people experience in life are not a product of objective facts captured by
the language of formal disciplines. Rather, they are experienced as subjective judgments
that draw on shared community values that are passed on, over millennia, from generation
to generation, categories of experience that have motivational significance and that inform
people how to be or act in the world. When this individual dimension of experience is lost,
so too are the sources of values that give reason, and thereby meaning, to one’s actions.5
For Peterson, “A proper pathway forward is individual moral responsibility, aimed at
the highest good, rooted in an underlying Judeo-Christian tradition that insists that each
person is sovereign in their own right and a locus of ultimate value.” Western democ-
racies are already structured in such a way that the ultimate power, in the form of
voting, is vested with an individual: “We presume that each person is a locus of
responsibility and decision-making of such importance that the very stability of the
state depends on the integrity of their character.” Therefore, it is not necessarily the
system that we need to change to live “happy” lives, but our own participation in that
system for it to function in a satisfactory way at each level of the social structure,
individual, family, community and the nation, emphasizing that “this has to happen at
the individual level first.” This proposition, while perhaps not particularly original, is very
different from the propositions based on class and identity politics, enshrined in Marxist
6 A. LIAN

philosophy, that, as argued by Peterson, have been adopted by many philosophers and
social scientists, including Foucault.
Thus for Peterson the building of an ethical (and happy) society hinges on individuals
engaging in the process of shaping their personal ethics: “Best bet for most people is to
solve the problems that beset them in their own lives, the ethical problems that beset
them that they know are problems and that they can set themselves, so that they then
become capable of addressing larger scale problems without falling prey to some of the
errors that characterise, let’s say, over-optimistic and intellectually arrogant ideologues.”
This is not an easy task but one of responsibility-taking. He likened it to the Buddhist
concept of suffering, which encompasses the challenges involved in the process of
learning to live as an individual, a family member, and a member of the broader
community.6 “If you take a personal problem seriously enough you will simultaneously
solve a social problem.” The process is inherently dialogic, intrinsically meaningful and
free of “ideology”: “as long as people do not do what they know deep down to be
wrong or not truthful.” He concluded that “if you do that now and then you might be
happy and then you should be profoundly grateful because happiness as we already
agreed upon is something like a grace.”
Žižek echoed Peterson’s position along similar lines. By using the biblical metaphor of
the “Fall of Man,” he underscored the value of ethical judgment that resulted from it and
that can help us to manage ourselves and our relationships: “Your ‘fall’ retroactively
creates what you fell from, as it were, and that’s a tough lesson for cheap moralists to
accept.” He also cautioned against the false narratives of totalitarian ideologies, bent on
convincing individuals to do what they know is morally wrong in the name of some
“higher cause.” On this point, Žižek quoted Himmler who said: “it takes a truly great man to
be ready to lose his soul and to do horrible things for his country.” For Žižek the
Communists of 1930s were doing the same thing, denigrating compassion and comparing
it to “bourgeois sentimentality.” His concluding statements reiterated his introductory
speech, where, inter alia, he warned against becoming instruments of other people’s
objectives and agendas, and reaffirmed that “the main burden is freedom itself.”
The meeting concluded with both speakers affirming the value of communication
“across the boundaries of identity or belief. . . to come out of that communication
improved even though there might be some dissent” (Peterson). Communication should
not be expected to result in an agreement only but should “shatter you a little bit to
make you think” (Žižek).
What was not to like about a debate that brought happiness back to the level of the
individual, personal responsibility, and away from the hands of totalitarian ideologues
and their machinations? Yet judging by the various commentaries, it would appear that
for some people the message of personal ethics as a tool for conscious participation in
private and public spheres was too naïve or not worth attention. Nevertheless, it pointed
the discussion on human happiness in a new direction. The speakers were compelled to
agree that looking for the ills of the system is insufficient as it tends to alienate people
from asking questions on the issues that directly affect them and thus from generating
answers that can lead to (personal) happiness. It would follow that traditional models,
where a chosen few take on the role of spokespersons for a group, however unified the
group may seem, may in fact create more harm than good, when the goals of the
leaders go unchecked and the interests of those whom they represent remain
 THE EUROPEAN LEGACY 7

unexplored. On the other hand, public debates, like this debate in Toronto, are a clear
demonstration that what people value and seek is engagement. Public spaces, both face
to face and through modern technology, afford opportunities for people to draw on and
build community intelligence and, in the process, to develop their own respective
visions of happiness.

Notes
1. E.g., for crowd thinking, which is a little like crowdsourcing, see https://fold.it.
2. Studebaker, “A Missed Opportunity.”
3. Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime, 185–86.
4. In his 2015 lecture at the London School of Economics, Harvey had discussed his own
successes and failures, including his political lobbying for the banks to lend money to the
people who otherwise would be refused bank loans. In hindsight, it became obvious that
this advocacy contributed to the subprime crisis of 2008.
5. Peterson, Maps of Meaning, 20.
6. Interestingly, in “The Science of Art,” Ramachandran and Hirstein describe the process of
perception, or sense-making, as problem-solving (27). Thus both Peterson and
Ramachandran, see the process by which each and everyone of us, as individuals and as
a community, construct our world as involving creative investigation: “We ‘carve’ out the
world as a consequence of our direct interactions with the unknown” (Peterson, Maps of
Meaning, 66).

ORCID
Ania Lian http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7200-4877

Bibliography
Harvey, David W. The Power of Ideas: A Discussion with David Harvey. 2015. London School of
Economics and Political Science Youtube Channel. https://youtu.be/hFNZqbbeLiU.
Lukianoff, Greg, and Jonathan Haidt. The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and
Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure. New York: Penguin, 2018.
Peterson, Jordan. Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief. London: Routledge, 1999.
Peterson, Jordan. 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. Random House Canada, 2018.
Pipes, Richard. Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime, 1919–1924. New York: Vintage, 1995.
Ramachandran, Vilayanur, and William Hirstein. “The Science of Art: A Neurological Theory of
Aesthetic Experience. Journal of Consciousness Studies 6, no. 6-7 (1999): 15–51.
Semley, John. “Jordan Peterson vs Slavoj Žižek Was More a Performance than a Debate.” April 20, 2019.
Nowtoronto.com. https://nowtoronto.com/culture/books/jordan-peterson-slavoj-zizek-debate/.
Studebaker, Benjamin. “A Missed Opportunity to Respond to Facile Critiques of Socialism. . .”
April 21, 2019. Currentaffairs.org. https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/04/how-zizek-should-
have-replied-to-jordan- peterson.

View publication stats