If his popular Twitter account is to be believed, on the morning of Jan. 9, 2018, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson woke up, opened his laptop and immediately Googled the word "bikini." Then, he opened another tab and, using Microsoft's Google-rival search engine Bing, executed a new query, also for the word "bikini."
Peterson arrived at the conclusion that the difference between Google's and Bing's respective results of bikini photos revealed the former's apparent desire "to shape our perceptions themselves in the politically correct manner." Here is the defining image of Jordan B. Peterson, the menacing academic rock star and father figure: staring daggers at digital photos of bikinis to lay bare the tyranny of political correctness.
Google (or Bing) "Jordan Peterson" today and you'll find a bestselling author, whose new pop-psychology, self-help tome 12 Rules for Life is making its debut at No. 1 on The Globe and Mail's non-fiction bestseller list and is already topping the Amazon.com non-fiction list, edging out Michael Wolff's trashy Trump tell-all, Fire and Fury. That any university prof, let alone a Canadian, should achieve such popularity is frankly unfathomable. How can such an absurd figure be taken so seriously? It is, as with most things about Peterson, a paradox.
Read more: How U of T's Jordan Peterson has made money from online notoriety
Jordan Peterson is a tangle of contradictions, inconsistencies, and seeming improbabilities: a famous academic; a middle-aged man with a spookily intuitive mastery of the vicissitudes of social media; a Christian in the thrall of Nietzsche; a self-styled individualist free-thinker who calls for the mass sackings of fellow academics; a wholly unimposing specimen who insists on the moral necessity of physical strength and bemoans the social taboo against becoming physically violent with "crazy women."
Peterson's lectures, YouTube videos, and new book contain wisdom that ranges from the incendiary (that sexual assault is a consequence of the decline of traditional marriage), to the obvious (skateboarding is cool), to the vacuously pithy ("Start to stop doing what you know to be wrong"), and utterly ponderous ("cats are a manifestation of nature, of Being, in an almost pure form"). He has been called a "dangerous scholar" (the Chronicle of Higher Education), "Canada's newest intellectual star" (the National Post), "YouTube's new father figure" (the National Review), and, in an acerbic turn that cuts to the heart of the Peterson Paradox, as "the stupid man's smart person" (Tabatha Southey in Maclean's).
Unlike other thinkers historically vaunted in conservative circles, from Francis Fukuyama back to Allan Bloom and William F. Buckley, Peterson seemingly arrived out of the blue. This dark horse quality accounts, in no small part, for the cultural phenomenon that is Jordan Peterson. Through social media, he has circumvented the traditional pathway to academic and intellectual prominence. He speaks directly to an audience that has found him: his 703,000 YouTube subscribers, 394,000 Twitter followers, and thousands of Patreon contributing to upward of $62,000 monthly he rakes in crowdfunding his mission to "take the humanities back from the corrupt postmodernists."