I really do think there’s a very definite before and after. At one point he seemed to figure out exactly the cadence and wording that young men especially wanted out of a wisdom-giving father figure. I think he got a lot of mileage out of whining about that one Canadian law proposal at a time when transgendery things were (for better or for worse) less understood by most people. So even if you were sympathetic to them, there was a chance that what he was describing would raise your eyebrow. Didn’t matter that the narrative he was peddling was pretty much fiction.

And then COVID broke his brain, and he was suddenly terrible at hiding his power level. I think selling increasingly political books titled “All you need to do to live (part 4, final, this is the last one I promise)” and “All you need to do to live (part 5, okay no this one is the last one)” also tired another part of his audience.

Right now most of the people who looked up to him at the time, even those who both are (and acknowledge) that they are right wing, think he’s lost the plot.

It’s not a great reassurance that those who let go of him may still have probably been swayed net-rightward by his stuff. But his spiral and widespread perception as a laughing stock, and as a clear example of lack of moral integrity on the right, that’s also a factor. His red crying mug in his messy room is a meme on its own now. This is what he really is: a pompous, pontificating, fragile prick who can’t even use the good parts of his advice for his own sake. Even if it’s as simple as touching grass and cleaning up your shit.

At one point in my life, during his rise, I had a vaguely positive view of him, and I even bought his book. I viewed myself squarely as an open minded liberal person, and thought of him as relatively moderate. I come from an extremely conservative (in some ways) part of the world, so no alarm bells rang. But with continued learning and meeting new people I was able to rebuild a much more robust and morally sound view of the world and how it works. I recognized how caustic a lot of my beliefs that he influenced me actually are. One of the few things I miss from the old site is /r/ExLobster, it was so enlightening to see how many others went through the same process I did with this guy. It also took off the edge from the embarrassment I felt about falling into this in the first place. I was just vulnerable to his shit at that point in my life and there’s no shame in picking yourself up and moving forward. Then COVID happened, and while he put himself in a coma and wrecked his brain, my country had a multidimensional meltdown, and I did charitable work and mutual aid work and came out the other side with a radically new and solid foundation for my beliefs.

But you know what was the tipping point for me? It’s a very silly little thing I saw, I don’t recall particularly when. I intentionally avoided his subreddit because I thought I was an enlightened centrist who was above those weird right wingers who dominated that community. But I opened it on a whim once. And someone was asking about “Jordan-Peterson ideology compatible Anime”. Not sure what the exact words were. But there you go. Sometimes you need to see a word salad like that to see how ridiculous the company you’re keeping actually is.

I think he’s a fascinating case study of the grift economy. I genuinely think that if he was truly the conservalib old-soul psychology professor with an interest in the way Christian theology and vague folktale cosmology influence modern worldviews and narratives, he would definitely be someone I’d pay attention to. At least for his areas of expertise.

But we know now that he was always mad as a hatter, that he was trying to get famous a decade before he actually did, and that his actual beliefs don’t deserve an iota of public recognition. That the ways he couched them are the sum total of what he was bringing to the table.

The mythological Jordan Peterson isn’t necessarily a bad guy, the original character, as played in like 2016. The actual one is a pathetic, and now failed cult of personality grifter, an enabler of great evil.

I hope he feels a fraction of the pain he has caused before he kicks it.