Jordan Peterson Does Not Understand Mythology

In case you’ve had the extraordinary good fortune of having never heard of him, Jordan B. Peterson is a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. He largely rose to fame in 2016 over his vocal opposition to an act passed by the Parliament of Canada to prohibit discrimination on the basis of “gender identity and expression.” Since then, Peterson has developed an enormous cult following as a self-help author and YouTube personality. His followers generally tend to be young, heterosexual, cisgender men who come from middle-class backgrounds and have conservative political leanings.

Peterson calls himself a “classical British liberal” and a “traditionalist”—both terms that are commonly used as euphemistic self-descriptors by members of the far right. As we shall see shortly, he has publicly promoted various misogynistic, transphobic, and white supremacist claims. Much of what Peterson has written and said has already been thoroughly analyzed and debunked. In this article, however, I want to especially focus on an aspect of Peterson’s work and activism that I don’t think has been adequately addressed: his interpretation of mythology.

Peterson has made the psychoanalytic interpretation of myths into a major backbone of his work. Peterson’s first book, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief, which was first published in 1999, talks about mythology extensively, and he routinely uses mythical examples in his lecture videos and in his 2018 book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. This is all in spite of the fact that he clearly does not understand mythology and much of what he says on the subject is incorrect.

Jordan Peterson’s sources for mythological interpretation

Before I talk about how Jordan Peterson uses mythology, I want to address the sources Peterson relies on for mythological interpretation. Peterson is, after all, a psychologist with no formal academic training in folklore studies or mythology, so it is especially important to consider where he’s getting his ideas from.

Peterson relies extensively on the work of the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung (lived 1875 – 1961), the Romanian religious studies scholar Mircea Eliade (lived 1907 – 1986), and the American author Joseph Campbell (lived 1904 – 1987). All three of these authors are privileged white men with right-wing or at least conservative political leanings who lived in the early twentieth century and came up with highly speculative “universalizing” theories about the nature of mythology.

Carl Jung had no formal background in the study of mythology or literature. He was, however, a student of the Austrian founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud (lived 1856 – 1939) and he shared his mentor’s penchant for engaging in wild speculation about the “unconscious,” unsupported by any kind of empirical evidence. Unlike Freud, who was mainly interested in the individual unconscious, Jung believed that groups of people can share a collective unconscious.

There is, of course, no empirical evidence to support this notion, but Jung believed that he could discover information about the human collective unconscious by studying mythology. Jung’s work was influential on some mid-twentieth-century scholars of mythology, such as Carl Kerényi, but is generally repudiated by most present-day scholars of mythology, since, as I have mentioned, the fundamental assumptions behind it lack empirical support.

ABOVE: Photograph of the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung, whose work on mythology and the supposed “collective unconscious” has been a huge influence on Jordan Peterson

Mircea Eliade is not nearly as famous as Jung or Campbell, but his work is in a similar vein. He espoused the belief that myths reflect universal aspects of the human condition. He is most famous for his idea of the “eternal return,” which holds that, through certain ritual actions, a religious believer symbolically returns to a long-ago mythical age and is able to thereby participate in the mythic world.

Although scholars in the field of religious studies still sometimes cite Eliade, many scholars have criticized his work for overgeneralizing and making unsupported claims of universality. Eliade is also controversial because he was a fascist and white supremacist who was an avowed public supporter and registered member of the Iron Guard, a Romanian fascist party, in the 1930s.

Although Eliade later came to regret his support for the Iron Guard, he maintained white supremacist and fascist sympathies throughout his life, which are evident throughout much of his work. For instance, Eliade was deeply influenced by the work of the self-described “superfascist” Italian writer Julius Evola (lived 1898 – 1974), whose writings have formed the basis for much of modern Neo-Nazi and neo-fascist ideology.

ABOVE: Photograph of the Romanian religious studies scholar Mircea Eliade

Joseph Campbell is probably the most famous of all the scholars on whose work Peterson most heavily relies. He is best known for his hypothesis that all stories that humans have told throughout history—or at least the vast majority of them—follow the fundamental template of the so-called “hero’s journey.” Despite the enduring popularity of the “hero’s journey” with high school English literature teachers and with the general public, contemporary folklorists and scholars of mythology almost universally reject this model.

I published an entire article back in December 2020 explaining in depth why the “hero’s journey” is nonsense. I won’t summarize the whole thing here, but the gist of it is that the “hero’s journey” as it is articulated by Campbell is at best so vague and overgeneralized that it isn’t really useful. Moreover, it encourages people to ignore the ways in which myths are shaped by the specific cultural and historical contexts from which they originate. As we shall see in moment, these are also major problems with Peterson’s own work.

ABOVE: Photograph of the American writer Joseph Campbell, whose hypothesis of the “hero’s journey” I attempt to debunk in this article from December 2020

In addition to the big three of Jung, Eliade, and Campbell, Peterson also frequently cites the work of Camille Paglia, a professor at the University of Arts in Philadelphia who describes herself as a “feminist,” but spends most of her time attacking mainstream feminism, post-structuralism, and modern academia at large.

Paglia is best known for her 1990 book Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickenson, which, as I discuss in fairly extensive detail in this article from November 2020, presents a lot of claims about history and mythology that are really garbage. Her interpretations of myths are generally untethered from historical context and based on Freudian pseudoscience and sexist assumptions. For instance, here is a real quote from page nine in which Paglia bizarrely claims (without any sufficient evidence) that men invented civilization as a defense against women:

“Woman was an idol of belly-magic. She seemed to swell and give birth by her own law. From the beginning of time, woman has seemed an uncanny being. Man honored but feared her. She was the black maw that had spat him forth and would devour him anew. Men, bonding together, invented culture as a defense against female nature.”

“Sky-cult was the most sophisticated step in this process, for its switch of the creative locus from earth to sky is a shift from belly-magic to head-magic. And from this defensive head-magic has come the spectacular glory of male civilization, which has lifted woman with it. The very language and logic modern woman uses to assail patriarchal culture were the invention of men.”

In addition to talking about which authors Peterson cites, it is also important to talk about the authors he doesn’t cite. Quite noticeably, Peterson never or almost never cites the work of any professional specialist scholar of mythology or folklore who lived more recently than the 1980s. Meanwhile, other than Paglia, Peterson also rarely cites the work of women approvingly and he almost never cites the work of scholars of color.

ABOVE: Photograph of Camille Paglia, a professor at the University of Arts in Philadelphia whose work Jordan Peterson cites fairly frequently

False claims about universal associations

Seeing how Jordan Peterson relies so heavily on the work of early-twentieth-century writers who promoted “universalizing” theories about the nature of mythology, it is hardly surprising that he is in the frequent habit of inaccurately claiming that certain qualities are universally associated with each other in all mythologies throughout human history. For instance, most notoriously, throughout his works, Peterson explicitly equates femininity with chaos and masculinity with order. He claims that this is a universal association that is present throughout every human society throughout history.

In general, Peterson has a very negative view of chaos. He acknowledges that there can be positive forms of chaos, but he invariably emphasizes what he sees as the negative side of chaos far more than what he sees as the positive side. He literally titled his second book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. When Peterson equates chaos with femininity and portrays it as something that apparently requires an “antidote,” it is really hard to escape the conclusion that he thinks femininity is generally a bad thing, or at least inferior to masculinity.

ABOVE: Front cover of Jordan Peterson’s 2018 book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

On 18 May 2018, shortly after 12 Rules for Life was released, The New York Times ran a scathing profile piece about Jordan Peterson, written by the journalist Nellie Bowles, titled “Jordan Peterson, Custodian of the Patriarchy.” The piece contains some direct, glaringly misogynistic quotes from Peterson himself.

In one quote, Peterson defends his association of femininity with chaos and masculinity with order by insisting that this is the natural way of things, that this identification is found in all cultures and mythologies throughout history, and that it is impossible to be human without associating femininity with chaos. He says:

“You know you can say, ‘Well isn’t it unfortunate that chaos is represented by the feminine’ — well, it might be unfortunate, but it doesn’t matter because that is how it’s represented. It’s been represented like that forever. And there are reasons for it. You can’t change it. It’s not possible. This is underneath everything. If you change those basic categories, people wouldn’t be human anymore. They’d be something else. They’d be transhuman or something. We wouldn’t be able to talk to these new creatures.”

What Peterson says here, however, is quite demonstrably wrong. It’s true that it is possible to find examples in world mythology of chaos being represented as feminine, but a person can just as easily find examples of chaos being represented as neuter or even masculine.

The English word chaos itself is derived from the Greek third-declension noun χάος (cháos). In Ancient Greek, there are three grammatical genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter. Every noun in the Greek language belongs to one of these three genders. Guess which gender the word χάος is? It’s neuter. This does not fit very well with Peterson’s claim about chaos supposedly being regarded as inherently feminine in all cultures throughout history.

ABOVE: Screenshot of the entry for the word χάος in the Liddell—Scott—Jones (LSJ). Note the presence of the neuter article τό (tó), which is listed here next to the word specifically to indicate that it is neuter.

If we look at where Chaos appears in Greek mythological texts, we find that it is not consistently (or even usually) represented as feminine. The most famous appearance of Chaos in all of Greek literature is in the poem Theogonia, which was probably composed in around the eighth century BCE or thereabouts by the poet Hesiodos of Askre. In the poem, Chaos is portrayed as the primordial entity from which the earliest divine beings emerged. Lines 116–125 of the poem read as follows:

“ἤτοι μὲν πρώτιστα Χάος γένετ’· αὐτὰρ ἔπειτα
Γαῖ’ εὐρύστερνος, πάντων ἕδος ἀσφαλὲς αἰεὶ
ἀθανάτων οἳ ἔχουσι κάρη νιφόεντος Ὀλύμπου
Τάρταρά τ’ ἠερόεντα μυχῷ χθονὸς εὐρυοδείης,
ἠδ’ Ἔρος, ὃς κάλλιστος ἐν ἀθανάτοισι θεοῖσι,
λυσιμελής, πάντων τε θεῶν πάντων τ’ ἀνθρώπων
δάμναται ἐν στήθεσσι νόον καὶ ἐπίφρονα βουλήν.
ἐκ Χάεος δ’ Ἔρεβός τε μέλαινά τε Νὺξ ἐγένοντο·
Νυκτὸς δ’ αὖτ’ Αἰθήρ τε καὶ Ἡμέρη ἐξεγένοντο,
οὓς τέκε κυσαμένη Ἐρέβει φιλότητι μιγεῖσα.”

This means (in my own translation):

“Truly, first of all, Chaos was born; then
Gaia the wide-breasted, the always unmovable seat of all
the deathless ones who possess the snow-clad peak of Olympos,
and Tartaros, murky in the depths of the broad earth,
and Eros, who is the loveliest among the deathless deities,
the loosener of limbs, he overpowers the mind in the breast and the thoughtful counsel of all deities and all human beings.
And out from Chaos Erebos and dark Night were born;
and from Night Aither and Day were outborn,
whom she sired, conceiving them after mixing fluids with Erebos in love.”

Here Chaos is not clearly gendered as feminine or masculine. Indeed, it is unclear what Hesiodos even thought Chaos was. Did he consider Chaos a divine being who gave birth to the other primordial deities or simply a vague, amorphous void from which the earliest deities emerged? We don’t know. Hesiodos never explains what any of this means; he simply assumes that his audiences already have some idea of what Chaos is.

Of course, someone might argue that, contextually, in the Theogonia, Chaos is kind of feminine because things are born from it and, in the biological world, women are usually the ones who give birth. This is, however, not an argument that Hesiodos himself makes. Therefore, when someone says that Chaos in the Theogonia is feminine, they mean that it subjectively seems feminine to them; we can’t prove that Hesiodos or his original audience would have thought of Chaos as feminine.

Interestingly, the earliest author in the Greek tradition to clearly ascribe any gender to Chaos is the archaic lyric poet Alkman of Sparta, who lived in around the seventh century BCE. According to a scholion, or ancient scholarly commentary, on Aristophanes’s comedy The Birds, line 14, Alkman identified Chaos with the male god Poros, the divine personification of contrivance. In other words, according to Alkman, Chaos is masculine.

If we look at other figures in Greek mythology, we find that figures associated with order are not necessarily male and the figures associated with chaos are not necessarily female. For instance, Athena is a major figure in Greek mythology who is generally associated with order, but she’s a goddess, meaning she’s female. Meanwhile, most of the figures in Greek mythology who are associated with chaotic impulses are male, including the god Dionysos, satyrs, centaurs, and Gigantes.

ABOVE: Statues of the goddess Athena, who is associated with order, and the god Dionysos, who is associated with chaos

Other, non-Hellenic mythologies only further refute the notion that chaos is inherently feminine and order is inherently masculine. Notably, in Egyptian mythology, order itself is personified as the goddess Maʽat, who is usually represented in Egyptian art as a beautiful young woman who often has wings on her arms and an ostrich feather on her head.

Meanwhile, the main representatives of chaos in Egyptian mythology are both male: the god Set and the chaos serpent Apep (who is sometimes known by his Greek name Apophis). In other words, in Egyptian mythology, order itself is gendered as feminine and chaos is gendered as masculine. This is the exact opposite of what Jordan Peterson claims is the natural order.

ABOVE: Ancient Egyptian relief carving currently on display in the Louvre Museum depicting the goddess Maʽat, the divine personification of order

Jordan Peterson’s misleading use of statistics

Of course, Peterson also occasionally tries to justify his claims about universal mythological associations by citing “facts” about the human condition that supposedly underlie these associations. For instance, he writes in 12 Rules for Life, on page 41:

“Chaos, the eternal feminine, is also the crushing force of sexual selection. Women are choosy maters (unlike female chimps, their closest animal counterparts). Most men do not meet female human standards. It is for this reason that women on dating sites rate 85 percent of men as below average in attractiveness. It is for this reason that we all have twice as many female ancestors as male (imagine that all the women who have ever lived have averaged one child. Now imagine that half the men who have ever lived have fathered two children, if they had any, while the other half fathered none).”

“It is Woman as Nature who looks at half of all men and says, ‘No!’ For the men, that’s a direct encounter with chaos, and it occurs with devastating force every time they are turned down for a date. Human female choosiness is also why we are very different from the common ancestor we shared with our chimpanzee cousins, while the latter are very much the same.”

“Women’s proclivity to say no, more than any other force, has shaped our evolution into the creative, industrious, upright, large-brained (competitive, aggressive, domineering) creatures that we are. It is Nature as Woman who says, ‘Well, bucko, you’re good enough for a friend, but my experience of you so far has not indicated the suitability of your genetic material for continued propagation.’”

Peterson’s description here, however, is not even accurate for twenty-first-century North American society—let alone all human societies throughout history.

For one thing, Peterson’s claim that a man being rejected by a woman is “a direct encounter with chaos” only really makes sense from the perspective of a man who sees women collectively as some kind of vague, mysterious, impersonal force of nature that denies men what they want for seemingly arbitrary and capricious reasons.

In reality, women are individual human beings who have thoughts, feelings, and opinions of their own and are capable of making independent rational decisions. When a woman rejects a man, she invariably has some kind of reason for it. I don’t see how a woman deciding not to have a sexual relationship with a man can be seen as any more “chaotic” than any other decision that a human being might make.

Peterson seems to be implying that it is “order” for a woman to consent to have sex with a man and “chaos” for a woman to reject a man—but the only difference between these two scenarios is that, in the first one, the man gets what he wants and, in the second scenario, he doesn’t.

This reveals Peterson’s extremely androcentric conception of the world; from his perspective, what the woman wants doesn’t seem to be a relevant factor for consideration. This is an deeply twisted worldview. After all, it is only a short leap from a man believing that what the woman wants isn’t relevant to a man believing that it is morally acceptable for him to take what he wants from a woman by force.

ABOVE: Tarquin and Lucretia, painted in 1571 by the Italian Renaissance painter Titian

Peterson also seems to assume that men are naturally the ones who do the courting, that women are naturally the ones who do the rejecting, and that sexual rejection is therefore “a direct encounter with chaos” that men generally experience and women generally do not. I don’t think that this assumption is warranted.

Nowadays, it is fairly common for women to court men (and, indeed, other women) and for women to experience rejection. When I was in middle school, no less than three girls in my class tried to ask me out in apparent earnestness—which I at the time actually found rather strange, considering that I was an unusually tiny, very nerdy, and (quite frankly) very feminine boy who did not fit any conventional standards of masculine attractiveness. I suppose they must have thought I was cute or something.

In any case, I turned all three of them down. I felt really bad about it and I tried to explain that it wasn’t that I didn’t like them personally or that I didn’t think they were attractive, but rather simply that I wasn’t interested in dating anyone. I really hope I didn’t hurt their feelings too much.

I’m actually almost curious what Jordan Peterson would make of a scenario like the one I have just described. Was I an agent of chaos because I said “no” to those girls—or is there some way in which their experience can be construed as fundamentally different from the “direct encounter with chaos” that Peterson claims men experience when they are rejected?

ABOVE: Assorted photos of me from when I was in middle school—and apparently an agent of chaos.

“85 percent of men as below average in attractiveness”

Now, Peterson cites a few statistics that are clearly meant to insinuate that, most of the time, when a woman refuses to have sex with a man, it’s because she’s too “choosy” and she’s only willing to have sex with the biggest, sexiest Chads. I really don’t see how this argument, even if it were true, would support Peterson’s association of femininity with chaos, since, after all, only wanting to have sex with the biggest, sexiest Chads is an entirely rational motive for rejecting someone. It’s not exactly a nice motive, but it’s definitely a rational one.

But let’s ignore that and look at the statistics Peterson cites, because these don’t hold up to scrutiny either. First, Peterson cites the statistic “women on dating sites rate 85 percent of men as below average in attractiveness” and claims this as evidence that women in general are “choosy” about who they have relationships with. This statistic comes from a real study, but there is a lot of context that Peterson doesn’t acknowledge.

First of all, according to a survey conducted by Pew Research Center, only 28% of all women in the United States have ever used a dating site or app. People who use dating apps are not a random sample by any means; they belong to a specific type. Any statistic about women who use dating sites is therefore inherently only applicable to less than a third of all women at best.

Furthermore, Peterson’s statistic is an average based on aggregate data. If we looked at the ratings of the individual women who made up the sample group in the study Peterson cites, we would most likely discover a great deal of diversity—with some women having a tendency to rate men as more attractive and some women having a tendency to rate men as less attractive. The average statistic tells us very little about the thoughts and attitudes of individual women.

Finally, Peterson does not give any statistics about which men the women in the study actually messaged. I suspect this is deliberate, because, if he had given this data, it would have completely destroyed his narrative that women are much “choosier” than men.

In 2009, OkCupid released a report that, on average, women rated 80% of men as “below average” attractiveness. The same report, however, found that the vast majority of messages actually sent from women to men were sent to men whom women rated as less attractive, with the curve for messages sent being only slightly ahead of the curve for perceived attractiveness.

This seems to suggest that, although women on dating sites tend to rate men harshly in terms of their attractiveness, they tend to focus their attention on men whom they consider somewhat less attractive whom they are presumably interested in for reasons other than raw physical attractiveness.

ABOVE: Graph from the 2009 OkCupid report showing that, although women tended to rate men’s attractiveness very harshly, they were far more likely to actually message men whom they considered less attractive

The same report contains comparable statistics for men. The report found that, although men rated women’s attractiveness on average in a neat bell curve, the overwhelming majority of all messages sent from men to women were sent to women whom men rated as most attractive. The women whom men rated as most attractive received five times as many messages as the average woman and two thirds of all messages sent from men to women went to women whom men rated in the top third of attractiveness. Women whom men rated as least attractive received almost no messages from men.

In other words, it seems that, in general, men on dating sites generally tend to prioritize physical attractiveness much more highly than women. This is the exact opposite of what Peterson leads his readers to believe. By only citing one statistic out of context, Peterson has created a false narrative. In reality, men on dating sites are the “choosy” ones—not women.

ABOVE: Graph from the 2009 OkCupid report showing that, although men tended to be more generous in their ratings of women, they were more likely to focus their attention on the women they considered most attractive

“Twice as many female ancestors as male”

Next, Peterson cites a statistic about modern humans supposedly having twice as many female ancestors as male ancestors and presents this as evidence of women’s “choosiness.” The accuracy of the statistic itself is factually rather dubious, but, even if we ignore that and we simply take it for granted that the statistic is accurate, Peterson’s conclusion that this statistic is evidence that women are too “choosy” is unwarranted.

Peterson seems to be ignoring the fact that, in most cultures throughout human history, women have generally had little-to-no say over which men they produce offspring with, because, globally speaking, in most cultures throughout history, it has been the norm for parents to force their daughters into arranged marriages, in which the bride herself has very little control over who she ends up marrying.

The concept of “marrying for love” is not entirely a modern western invention; it is notably a recurring trope in surviving ancient Greek romance novels, such as Daphnis and Chloë by Longos of Lesbos and Leukippe and Kleitophon by Achilleus Tatios (both of which I discuss in this article I wrote last year about ancient novels). Nonetheless, for the majority of women throughout history, arranged marriages have been the unfortunate reality. It has only been in the past few centuries that it has become the norm for women to have agency over who they have sex with and who they produce (or don’t produce) offspring with.

Thus, if it were indeed really true that human beings have twice as many female ancestors than male, the most likely explanation for this statistic would not be that most women are “choosy” and categorically refuse to have sex with anyone but the hottest, sexiest, and most masculine men, but rather that, historically, most women have been forced into polygynous arranged marriages with men who are rich and powerful and literally never had the option of marrying anyone else.

ABOVE: Detail from a late fourth-century CE Roman marble sarcophagus depicting a husband and wife holding hands

There have been real cases of societies throughout history in which it has been virtually impossible for men of low social status to marry, but, in every single case, the root cause of this has been misogyny and the oppression of women.

In China during the Qing Dynasty (lasted 1636 – 1912), men were expected to support their parents when they grew old. When women married, however, they were considered to leave their natal families to join their husband’s family. As a result of this, many Chinese parents came to believe that raising daughters was a waste of time and resources because those daughters would only end up marrying into other families. It therefore became shockingly common for Chinese parents during this period to murder their own female infants immediately after they were born so that they wouldn’t have to raise them.

As a result of this, there were vastly more men in Qing Dynasty China than women. Because respectable parents generally forced the daughters they did have to marry into families that were relatively well-off, it became virtually impossible for men below a certain social status to marry and have children.

These poor men who could not get married because of their social status became known as 光棍 (guāng gùn), which literally means “bare sticks.” They often moved around from place-to-place looking for work and often worked hard jobs as manual laborers, masons, or barge pullers on the Grand Canal. Because marriage was seen as an important part of a man’s social status, these men who couldn’t get married were distrusted and looked down upon by society. And the root cause of their suffering was, in fact, the patriarchy itself.

Women’s liberation should actually be a cause of huge celebration for underprivileged men who are interested in having sex with women, because it means that women should be allowed to do what they want with their own bodies and have sex (or not have sex) with whomever they want. This means that, in a society where women are free, they are not institutionally forced into arranged marriages to privileged men and are therefore free to have sex with less privileged men if they so choose. This inherently gives underprivileged men better chances.

ABOVE: Illustration from a Qing Dynasty Chinese anti-infanticide tract from c. 1800, depicting a husband and wife preparing to drown their own female infant

Unfortunately, Jordan Peterson does not seem to realize this. In April 2018, a self-identified “incel” (i.e., “involuntary celibate”) named Alek Minassian committed a terrorist attack in Toronto in which he killed ten people (eight of whom were women) and injured sixteen others, because he was angry that women weren’t having sex with him. Jordan Peterson responded to the attack in the same interview with The New York Times I mentioned earlier, saying:

“He [i.e., Alek Minassian] was angry at God because women were rejecting him. The cure for that is enforced monogamy. That’s actually why monogamy emerges.”

Peterson goes on in the interview to clarify that he believes the reason why men commit acts of terrorism is because women have too much choice in who they have sex with and, therefore, “a small percentage of the guys have hyper-access to women.” Peterson seems to believe that the obvious solution to this problem is that women should not be allowed to have so much choice in who they couple with.

Peterson seems completely blind to the reality that a system of “enforced monogamy” in which women are forced into arranged monogamous relationships only benefits men who are already very privileged.

ABOVE: Collage from this article in the National Post showing the ten people whom the self-identified “incel” Alek Minassian brutally murdered in April 2018, eight of whom were women

Ignoring myths that flout modern gender norms altogether

We can go even further than this, however. Peterson is not only wrong in his claim that femininity is universally associated with chaos and masculinity with order, but also in his assumption that mythological gender can be accurately discussed in terms of strict, immutable binaries of “male” and “female” altogether. Peterson completely ignores the fact that myths about gender-bending are widespread throughout human cultures all over the world throughout history.

As I discuss in much greater depth in this article from August 2020, stories about people changing genders are all over the place throughout ancient mythologies. It’s a notion that ancient people seem to have been quite fascinated by. Even if we go back to the very oldest surviving mythological texts from ancient Sumer in the third millennium BCE, we find gender-bending. The Sumerian goddess Inanna, who was one of the most prominent figures in the Sumerian pantheon, is said to have had the power to confound traditional gender distinctions by turning men into women and women into men.

The Akkadian poet Enheduanna lived in around the twenty-third century BCE. She was the daughter of King Sargon, the founder of the Akkadian Empire, and she worked as a priestess of Inanna in the city of Ur. She wrote a hymn to Inanna in the Sumerian language titled “Great-Hearted Mistress,” in which she makes the following declaration to the goddess, as it is translated in the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (ETCSL):

“To run, to escape, to quiet and to pacify are yours, Inanna.
To rove around, to rush, to rise up, to fall down and to …… a companion are yours, Inanna.
To open up roads and paths, a place of peace for the journey, a companion for the weak, are yours, Inanna.
To keep paths and ways in good order, to shatter earth and to make it firm are yours, Inanna.
To destroy, to build up, to tear out and to settle are yours, Inanna.
To turn a man into a woman and a woman into a man are yours, Inanna.”

Enheduanna is widely considered to be the oldest great author whose name and writings have survived to the present day. The human literary tradition therefore begins, quite literally, with a woman who wrote devotional hymns to a powerful and dangerous goddess who, among many other things, was apparently known for altering people’s genders.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the “Disk of Enheduanna,” a bas-relief carving bearing a representation of Enheduanna, the ancient Sumerian priestess and poet

People who are described as neither male nor female also appear in ancient Sumerian myths about Inanna. An ancient text in the Sumerian language titled Inanna’s Descent into the Underworld (ETCSL 1.4.1), which was most likely written during the Third Dynasty of Ur (lasted c. 2112 – c. 2004 BCE), describes how Inanna once descended into the Underworld, which was ruled by her sister Ereshkigal.

A group of gods known as the Anunna, who are described as the “seven judges” of the Underworld, put Inanna on trial and deemed her guilty, so they struck her dead and hung her corpse on a meat hook in the Underworld. Inanna’s divine attendant Ninshubur went to all the deities and begged them to rescue Inanna from the Underworld. Eventually, the god Enki agreed to rescue her.

There is apparently a rule that no male or female entity can enter the Underworld and return from it alive. Enki, however, found a clever way around this rule. Using the dirt from under his fingernails, he created two beings that were neither male nor female—known as the kur-jara and the gala-tura—and sent them into the Underworld bearing the plant and the water of life in order to revive Inanna from the dead.

ABOVE: Impression from an ancient Akkadian cylinder seal dating to between c. 2334 and c. 2154 BCE, depicting the goddess Ishtar wielding a weapon while resting her foot on the back of a roaring lion, which she holds on a leash

Stories about changes of sex also occur in Greek mythology. For instance, the best-known version of the myth of Teiresias holds that he was the son of a mortal shepherd named Eueres and a nymph named Chariklo. One day, when he was walking on Mount Kyllene, he discovered two serpents mating. He struck the female serpent with his staff and was instantly transformed into a woman.

Teiresias lived as a woman for seven years until, one day, when she was walking on Mount Kyllene again, she found the same pair of serpents mating again. This time, she struck the male serpent and was instantly transformed back into a man. Later, Zeus and Hera got into an argument over whether the woman or the man experiences greater pleasure during sexual intercourse. Zeus insisted that it was the woman, but Hera insisted that it was the man. They summoned Teiresias to answer their question, since he was the only person they knew who had had sex as both a man and as a woman.

Teiresias replied that, as a woman, he experienced nine times greater pleasure during sex than he did as a man. Hera, angered by Teiresias’s reply, cursed him with blindness, but Zeus rewarded him by granting him the gift of prophecy and declaring that he would live seven times the lifespan of a normal human being.

ABOVE: Engraving from c. 1690 by the German illustrator Johann Ulrich Kraus depicting Teiresias being transformed into a woman

Another famous story is that of Iphis and Ianthe, which is told by the Roman poet Publius Ovidius Naso (lived 43 BCE – c. 17 CE) in his long narrative poem Metamorphoses, which he wrote in Latin in around the year 8 CE. The story goes that, on the Greek island of Krete, there lived a husband named Ligdus and a wife named Telethusa. They were desperately poor. Telethusa became pregnant and Ligdus ordered her that, if the child she gave birth to was male, they would raise him, but, if the child was female, they would abandon her in the wilderness to die. (This was a very common practice in the ancient world.)

The Egyptian goddess Isis appeared to Telethusa in a dream and told her that, no matter what sex the child turned out to be, she was to raise the child as a boy. Thus, although Telethusa gave birth to a female child, she told Ligdus that the child was a boy. They named the child Iphis and raised him as a boy, despite the fact that he secretly had female anatomy.

When Iphis reached maturity, Ligdus—who still had no awareness of Iphis’s true anatomy—arranged for him to marry a beautiful woman named Ianthe. Iphis and Ianthe fell madly in love, but Iphis knew that he could not marry Ianthe, because he had a vagina and not a penis. Telethusa delayed the marriage as long as possible by pretending to be ill and claiming to witness various ill omens, but, eventually, she could put it off no longer.

On the day before the wedding, in a final act of desperation, Telethusa brought Iphis to the temple of Isis and prayed for Isis to replace Iphis’s vagina with a penis. The goddess granted Telethusa’s prayer and, as a result, Iphis was able to marry Ianthe, the love of his life.

ABOVE: Engraving from 1732 by the French illustrator Bernard Picart depicting Isis and the other Egyptian deities appearing at Telethusa’s bedside, as described by Ovid in the Metamorphoses

Even if we eliminate stories involving miraculous acts of divine creation and transformation, ancient myths can still be used to argue against Peterson’s gender essentialism. In the modern world, most cisgender people assume that gender is determined before a person is born by their chromosomes and remains the same throughout life regardless of how their body may change. As I discuss in this article from March 2021, however, no one in the ancient world ever believed this, because no one in the ancient world had any idea what chromosomes were.

Instead, people in the ancient world generally believed that a person’s gender was determined by the present state of their external genitalia. For this reason, people in the ancient world generally believed that people who had been born with male anatomy whose testicles and/or penis had been removed were more like women than non-castrated men. This view manifests in their mythology.

The Roman poet Gaius Valerius Catullus (lived c. 84 – c. 54 BCE) wrote his “Carmina 63” about Attis, a figure from Phrygian mythology who, according to Catullus’s telling of the myth, deliberately cut off his own penis and testicles in a fit of religious frenzy. What is interesting is that, in the poem, up until the moment of emasculation, Catullus refers to Attis using exclusively masculine forms, but, from the moment of emasculation onwards, he refers to Attis using exclusively feminine forms. Catullus does this to really drive home that idea that, as soon as Attis no longer has a penis and testicles, he is no longer male.

For better or worse, Catullus’s poem very much reflects the way that many people in the ancient world thought about gender. The ancient idea that people born with male anatomy who have been castrated are automatically no longer male isn’t one that I think we should bring back, but it does illustrate that, in ancient mythology, even if we ignore stories involving miracles and fantastic occurrences, gender is portrayed as far from immutable.

ABOVE: Photograph of a marble statue of the Phrygian mythological figure Attis, who is said to have cut off his/her penis and testicles in a fit of religious frenzy

Ignoring context and changing myths

I think that, through this one example, I have illustrated how Jordan Peterson claims universal mythological associations that don’t really exist and attempts to back up those supposed associations by citing misleading statistics. This is, however, far from the only problem with Peterson’s handling of mythology.

Peterson doesn’t just fail when he’s making broad generalizations about supposed universal correlations, but also even when he’s talking about specific myths. He routinely interprets myths in ways that ignore the specific historical and cultural contexts from which the myths in question originate.

Indeed, sometimes he even completely changes details of the stories themselves in order to make them suit the interpretations he has already come up with. Rather than changing his interpretations to fit the stories, he changes the stories to fit his interpretations. Allow me to illustrate what I mean with an example.

The story of Jonah

In a lecture video posted on YouTube on 6 February 2017 titled “2017 Personality 02/03: Historical & Mythological Context,” Peterson talks about the story of Jonah from the Book of Jonah in the Hebrew Bible. His interpretation of the story, however, deviates wildly from the actual story that is presented in the Book of Jonah.

The Book of Jonah is a short work that was originally written by an anonymous Jewish author in the Hebrew language. Internal evidence suggests that it was most likely written during the period when Judah was ruled by the Achaemenid Empire (lasted c. 539 – c. 332 BCE). In the book, YHWH, the God of Israel, tells Jonah, an Israelite man, that the people of the city of Nineveh (an Assyrian city) are sinful and that he will destroy the whole city if the people do not repent of their sins. He commands Jonah to go to the city personally and preach to the Ninevites to repent. (The actual sins of the Ninevites are, interestingly, never specified.)

Jonah hates the Ninevites and he thinks they all deserve to die, so he refuses to do what YHWH tells him to do and, instead of going to Nineveh, he boards a ship that is headed to the far-away city of Tarshish. YHWH sends a storm that threatens to sink the ship and Jonah, realizing that the storm is his fault, tells his crewmates to throw him overboard. To prevent Jonah from drowning, YHWH sends a giant fish to swallow him. Jonah spends three days and three nights in the belly of the fish before it finally crawls up onto the shore and vomits him out onto the beach.

ABOVE: Jonah and the Whale, painted in 1621 by the Dutch painter Pieter Lastman (lived 1583 – 1633)

Finally, Jonah agrees to go the city of Nineveh. He shows up and starts half-heartedly preaching that the city will be destroyed if the people do not repent. Despite Jonah’s lack of enthusiasm for his own message, the people of Nineveh instantly repent without any hesitation and the king commands that all the people and even all the livestock must abstain from all food and water, must wear nothing but sackcloth, and must continually cry out to YHWH for mercy to show that they have truly repented. Thus, YHWH decides to spare the whole city and Jonah throws a whiny temper tantrum because he wanted to see the city destroyed.

This has been a very brief summary of the Book of Jonah. A person interpreting the full story in light of its original historical and cultural context would recognize that the author is making a point within the Jewish religious tradition about the relationship between the Jewish people, the God of Israel, and foreigners. The personality of Jonah, who is at best stubborn, selfish, uncaring, and outright xenophobic, is strongly contrasted with the more merciful personality of YHWH. (Indeed, as I discuss in greater depth in this article from May 2020, I think there is a strong case to be made that the Book of Jonah is at least partially meant to be satirical.)

Jordan Peterson, however, completely disregards the character of YHWH in the story altogether. He also mostly disregards the fact that Jonah is an Israelite and the Ninevites are complete foreigners living in a distant land. Instead, Peterson interprets the whole story as a universal allegory about the role of an individual living in a corrupt society. He is only able to arrive at this interpretation by ignoring important aspects of the story.

ABOVE: Illustration from c. 1866 by the French illustrator Gustave Doré, depicting Jonah preaching to the Ninevites

Peterson’s handling of the role of YHWH in the story of Jonah is especially interesting because he not only ignores the importance of YHWH in the story, but also blatantly inserts his own reductive capitalist economic theory into the story as a substitute for YHWH. Around twenty minutes into the lecture video I referenced earlier, Peterson says this:

“Now, God threatens to destroy this city because of its corruption and I don’t think you need to presume anything particularly metaphysical about that to understand it. It’s very straightforward that, the more corrupt the culture is and the less trust is possible between individuals, the less productive the culture’s going to be, because why do anything if some corrupt person is just going to come and take it?”

“You know, it might even be that the culture is so corrupt that, if you are good for something and you produce resources, you’re actually more likely to get killed because you have something of value! So, like, you’re just not going anywhere with that.”

“And why would you work if you didn’t have any sense that you could store up the value of your work for some reasonable time in the future? So, if the society is corrupt and there’s no trust, it’s degenerate. And, you know, it might live for a while, but it isn’t going to last very long. And so that’s the idea: corrupt societies collapse.”

Notice how the story Peterson is telling is radically different from the one that is actually in the Book of Jonah. The actual Book of Jonah says absolutely nothing about corruption leading to cultures becoming “less productive” and this leading to their eventual decline. In the actual book, the immediate threat to the city of Nineveh is not declining economic productivity as a result of political and economic corruption, but rather the terrifying divine wrath of YHWH, the God of Israel, as a result of the vague “sinfulness” of people.

Peterson summarily dismisses elements of the story that actually appear in the text and introduces new elements that are never even hinted at in the text. In doing this, he is actually changing the story itself in order to make it fit his interpretation.

ABOVE: Jonah Preaching to the Ninevites, painted by the Italian Baroque painter Andrea Vaccaro (lived 1604 – 1670)

Also notice that the Book of Jonah never specifies what the Ninevites were doing that was sinful. All it says is that they were being sinful. Peterson assumes that there was political and economic corruption and that the common people were being lazy and refusing to work because this is apparently what he immediately thinks of when he thinks of sin.

Peterson even imposes his own capitalistic values onto the text by saying that people who work for a living and produce goods and services for the economy are “good for something” and insinuating that people who do not produce goods and services for the economy are thereby worthless. The Book of Jonah says absolutely nothing whatsoever about producing goods and services for the economy being a determining factor in the value of a human being. On the contrary, the idea of the intrinsic value of all human and animal life is a core idea of the book.

At the very end of the Book of Jonah, when Jonah is throwing his tantrum about how mad he is that the city of Nineveh isn’t getting destroyed, he sits down outside the city and YHWH causes a plant to grow over him to shade him from the sun. Then YHWH causes the plant to wither and Jonah gets even more upset, demanding that YHWH kill him, saying “It is better for me to die than to live.”

YHWH responds by pointing out that, if Jonah cares so much about a plant that he didn’t even do anything to make grow, he should care even more about his fellow human beings and animals, who are more important than the plant. YHWH tells Jonah in the Book of Jonah 4:10–11, as translated in the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV):

“You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labor and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?”

These are the very last words in the entire Book of Jonah. The book literally ends with YHWH pleading Jonah to recognize the value of the lives of sinful foreigners.

Jordan Peterson’s imposition of the idea that a person’s worth is determined by how much they benefit the economy onto the Book of Jonah is especially strange considering the fact that literally five minutes earlier in the exact same lecture video he claims that the idea that all human beings have “transcendent worth” is the “metaphysical idea that underlies western civilization.”

Thus, Peterson can’t even seem to keep a consistent position on this very basic issue within the same lecture. On the one hand, he suggests that every human being has “transcendent worth,” but, five minutes later, he makes it sound like he really thinks that people should be deemed “good for something” on the basis of whether they provide goods and services for the economy. These positions are very difficult to reconcile.

ABOVE: Manuscript illustration from the Augsburger Wunderzeichenbuch dating to c. 1552, depicting Jonah sitting under the plant, which is depicted in this illustration as a gourd

“Western civilization” and the concept of “individual sovereignty and worth”

But let’s go back to what Peterson says about the supposed connection between “western civilization” and the concept that all human beings have “transcendent worth,” because this is a claim that Peterson seems to be especially fond of making. Peterson goes into more detail talking about how “western civilization” is supposedly predicated on the idea of “individual sovereignty and worth” in another video in response to a question about the resurrection of Jesus. Here is what he says in the video:

“…our functional legal systems—like the legal systems of the west—are predicated on the acceptance of its reality. And it was an idea that took many, many thousands of years to emerge. You know, first of all, the only sovereign was the king and God and then the nobles became sovereign and then men became sovereign and then, with the Christian Revolution, every individual soul became sovereign. That idea of individual sovereignty and worth is the core presupposition of our legal system—and our cultural system.”

Peterson manages to mangle intellectual history so badly that it’s almost surreal. The claim that it took “thousands of years” for humans to develop a concept of “individual sovereignty and worth” and that this is a concept that is primarily associated with “the west” is entirely false.

The idea that all human beings have inherent value is widespread throughout human cultures and is attested remarkably early in human history. For instance, even if we set aside the appearance of this idea in the Book of Jonah, the ancient Chinese philosopher Mozi (lived c. 470 – c. 391 BCE), who lived around the same time that Socrates was alive in Athens, espoused a philosophy that was founded on the idea of 兼愛 (jiān’ài). This word is usually translated as “universal love,” but is perhaps more accurately translated as “impartial caring for all people.”

Mozi believed that every person should not only respect and care for those whom they were obligated to respect and care for, but respect and care for every other person equally. His ideas are described in a text titled Mozi, which may have been written partially by him and partially by his later followers.

The Mozi 4.14.3–4 describes how the world’s problems are caused by people who only care for those whom they are obligated to care for and proposes that all the world’s problems would be solved if everyone cared for everyone else without discrimination or partiality. The text reads as follows, as translated by W. P. Mei:

“This is true even among thieves and robbers. As he loves only his own family and not other families, the thief steals from other families to profit his own family. As he loves only his own person and not others, the robber does violence to others to profit himself. And the reason for all this is lack of love. This again is true in the mutual disturbance among the houses of the ministers and the mutual invasions among the states of the feudal lords.”

“As he loves only his own house and not the others, the minister disturbs the other houses to profit his own. As he loves only his own state and not the others, the feudal lord attacks the other states to profit his own. These instances exhaust the confusion in the world. And when we look into the causes we find they all arise from lack of mutual love.”

“Suppose everybody in the world loves universally, loving others as one’s self. Will there yet be any unfilial individual? When every one regards his father, elder brother, and emperor as himself, whereto can he direct any unfilial feeling? Will there still be any unaffectionate individual? When every one regards his younger brother, son, and minister as himself, whereto can he direct any disaffection? Therefore there will not be any unfilial feeling or disaffection.”

“Will there then be any thieves and robbers? When every one regards other families as his own family, who will steal? When every one regards other persons as his own person, who will rob? Therefore there will not be any thieves or robbers. Will there be mutual disturbance among the houses of the ministers and invasion among the states of the feudal lords? When every one regards the houses of others as one’s own, who will be disturbing? When every one regards the states of others as one’s own, who will invade? Therefore there will be neither disturbances among the houses of the ministers nor invasion among the states of the feudal lords.”

Now, someone who supports Jordan Peterson might try to argue that Mozi is arguing for universal love, not the universal worth of all human beings. I, however, would counter that a person can’t really argue for universal love without having first accepted the premise that all other human beings are worth loving, which requires a person to accept that every human being has some kind of inherent worth.

So, if the concept of “individual worth” is one that has supposedly only emerged in “the west” relatively recently, would Peterson mind explaining how an ancient Chinese philosopher apparently came to believe in it over 2,400 years ago?

ABOVE: Modern imaginative illustration showing what the artist imagined Mozi might have looked like. (No one knows what he really looked like.)

What Peterson is really doing with myths

Jordan Peterson often speaks as though he derives his ideas from studying world cultures and mythologies. In reality, in most cases, he is actually using myths to present his own views in a way that makes them seem as though they are based on the traditions of different cultures around the world and are therefore wise, thoughtful, and worthy of contemplation.

Unfortunately, the views that Peterson routinely uses mythology to promote are extremely socially regressive ones. Everything Peterson says seems to suggest that he believes men are, at least in general, superior to women and that so-called “western civilization” is, at least in general, superior to other civilizations.

Indeed, Peterson is actually remarkably regressive even when compared to a lot of other online right-wing pundits posing as intellectuals. Most of these pundits make at least some vague pretense of supporting the gains in civil rights made through the civil rights movements of the late twentieth century, but they try to insist that there are simply no more gains to be made. Peterson, however, makes it pretty clear from the start that he doesn’t really think the civil rights movements of the late twentieth century were necessary to begin with.

For instance, in the interview with The New York Times that I have referenced several times already in this article, Peterson severely criticizes the 1963 book The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan—which critiques the fact it was not widely socially acceptable for a woman in the early 1960s to do anything else with her life other than remain a housewife. Peterson says:

“I read Betty Friedan’s book because I was very curious about it, and it’s so whiny, it’s just enough to drive a modern person mad to listen to these suburban housewives from the late ’50s ensconced in their comfortable secure lives complaining about the fact that they’re bored because they don’t have enough opportunity. It’s like, Jesus get a hobby. For Christ’s sake, you — you —”

It is certainly true that, as an upper-middle-class white woman, Betty Friedan was writing from a position of relative privilege. It is also true that the form of feminism she promoted focused primarily on upper-middle-class white women and did not adequately address the situations of women who are relatively more marginalized, including women of lower-class backgrounds in general, women of minority ethnic backgrounds, women who are recent immigrants, lesbian and bisexual women, transgender women, and so forth.

This does not, however, mean that Friedan did not have any valid points. Friedan’s main point in her book is that many women don’t find life as a housewife fulfilling or desirable and they feel trapped by social expectations. Unfortunately, Peterson doesn’t seem to understand this point. He seems to think that women who don’t want to be housewives in general are simply unbearably “whiny” and that they should just be housewives and “find hobbies.” In other words, even one of the blandest proposals of early second-wave feminism is apparently too radical for Peterson!

Similarly, in the same interview, in response to the fact that most of the people in the highest positions of power in most areas of society are men, Peterson is quoted as saying this:

“The people who hold that our culture is an oppressive patriarchy, they don’t want to admit that the current hierarchy might be predicated on competence.”

In saying this, Peterson is obviously implying that men are not in power in most areas of society because social oppression makes it hard for women to get ahead, but rather because men are just naturally more competent than women. (Also notice how Peterson automatically leaps from one supposition to the other without considering any alternatives. He ignores the fact that, even if the first proposition is false, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the second proposition is true.)

ABOVE: Staged photograph from 1941 depicting the ideal of the mid-twentieth-century suburban housewife

Even the way Peterson tries to demonize those who disagree with him is so atavistic and bizarrely out-of-touch with the reality of the twenty-first century that it comes across as downright quaint. He frequently claims that progressives and leftists are promoting an ideology based on “Postmodern Neo-Marxism.”

This label is, first of all, a very strange oxymoron, considering that Marxism is such an inherently Modernist ideology that it is very hard to imagine what a “Postmodern” form of it might look like. There is a real trend in political and social philosophy known as “Post-Marxism,” which seeks to deconstruct Marxism using the toolkit of Postmodern critique, but that’s clearly not what Peterson is talking about when he uses the phrase “Postmodern Neo-Marxism,” since he applies this label generally to anyone with vaguely progressive-sounding ideas, including people totally unaffiliated with Post-Marxism.

It also seems like a strange anachronism that Peterson is still fearmongering about freaking Marxism in the third decade of the twenty-first century—as though we were still living in the early 1950s, with the Second Red Scare at its height and the Soviet Union still in existence, ruled by Joseph Stalin. Most of the world has moved on since then and we’ve found new and different things to be afraid of.

ABOVE: Photograph of Karl Marx taken in 1875

Somehow, though, this isn’t even the most hilariously out-of-touch effort on Peterson’s part to make people with progressive social values sound scary. On 18 June 2018, the right-wing propaganda network calling itself “PragerU” released a video featuring Jordan Peterson titled “Who Is Teaching Your Kids?” in which Peterson tries to argue that evil radical leftist professors are indoctrinating college students into their harmful ideology. He declares:

“Their thinking took hold in western universities in the ‘60s and ‘70s, when the true believers of the radical left became the professors of today.”

As Peterson speaks these words, a cartoon appears on the screen depicting a long-haired, bearded man who is clearly supposed to be a hippie sitting on the grass playing a guitar. This is swiftly followed by a cartoon of a long-haired, bearded man with rose-tinted John Lennon glasses and a red T-shirt with a peace sign on it who gradually turns into a grey-haired professor.

Now, it’s true enough that a handful of the very oldest professors who are still teaching were involved to some degree in the counterculture during the 1960s and ‘70s. For instance, I was personally fortunate enough to have the eminent Edward T. Linenthal as my professor for a class sophomore year. He’s currently seventy-three years old and one of the oldest professors still teaching, but the entire class thought he was the coolest professor in the world after we found out that, in the 1960s, he was the drummer in a rock band called “The Thyme,” which, at various points, opened for Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, The Who, Cream, and MC5.

What baffles me, though, is that Peterson evidently thinks he can make professors with progressive social values sound scary by linking them to… hippies??? Truly, what decade does he think we are living in? Peterson himself was born in 1962, which means he wasn’t even in his twenties until the 1980s. He is actually significantly younger than most of the people who were hippies. It seems like he’s trying to pander his fearmongering to people who are at least a generation older than himself—but yet the people in those older generations who are still alive are precisely the people who are least likely to be watching PragerU videos on YouTube.

As quaint as all this is, it’s all part of the ideology Peterson is selling—and he’s using mythology he doesn’t really understand to do it.

ABOVE: Screenshot of the cartoon of the hippie playing the guitar from Jordan Peterson’s PragerU video