Imagine if Jordan Peterson Wrote Novels
How the IDW Failed us
Jordan Peterson, the Novelist
I sat down one evening, as I usually did in those times, to watch a discussion between members of the ‘Intellectual Dark Web’, the likes of Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, Ben Shapiro, the Weinsteins, etcetera.
Jordan Peterson’s book, 12 Rules for Life, sat on my makeshift bookshelf, and had now for the past half-year been gathering dust - in that curious way where it seems to spawn from the oxygen molecules in the air. It had utterly failed to invigorate me, and after several attempts, I had put the white tome, with its golden emblazoned letters, down for good.
That evening, which isn’t really a specific time I can remember, more a vague recollection that probably occurred around five years ago, I had come to a realisation as to why 12 Rules for Life was so boring.
Now, given it’s popularity, that isn’t to say it helped and did inspire hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people, but at the time, I wasn’t in need of the so called ‘help’ in the book. I had been watching Peterson’s lectures for a few years now too, and most of the written content was regurgitated - but, it being a glorified self-help book wasn’t really the point, the genesis of the realisation.
Jordan Peterson had filled my living room TV screen, and was pontificating in his esoteric, occasionally precise, often oblique, manner. Phrases of deep meaning, were imbedded within sentences and paragraphs of multiple interpretations, and as I found as often happened when I listened to him, my imagination had begun the laying of roads in several directions at once.
He mentioned his book, and I thought with a wry smile on my face, how it had failed to inspire me. And then the interviewer brought up Sam Harris, Jordan’s Peterson’s quasi-arch enemy.
Sam Harris had been influential on me when I first left school in 2010. As I got older, and started to get metabolic issues of mind as to his overly secular - and to me highly contradictory - worldview, I still listened in to most of his ‘Waking Up’ podcast episodes - they helped keep me in the right space of mind for meditating, which I had done for three years, every morning without fail, at that point.
On one occasion, he had said that he always wanted to be a novelist, but that he had somehow got ‘tied up’ in the New Atheist movement, and quickly became a public intellectual, and ending up writing books to that effect, like the Moral Landscape.
I remember the acute sinking feeling I experienced, when I discovered that one of my intellectual and spiritual idols at the time had once wanted to be a novelist: The dream I had had for many years. I thus imagined what he could write, the types of stories he could tell, and the depth of meaning he could imbue - and felt, even if you thoroughly disagree with Sam Harris now, as I tend to do, that we as a society had lost something potentially great.
And Jordan Peterson was still filling my TV screen, still pontificating. What of him? Imagine if Jordan Peterson wrote novels?
What if, instead of writing a glorified self-help book - two of them in fact - he sat down, and tried to write a mythology for our age? With all his esoterism, knowledge of sociology, clinical psychology, and theology? Imagine that?
Whatever you think of his views, his contradictions, do you not think he might be better suited to fiction than to non-fiction? If he had instead learned to tell stories, develop character, and build a fantastical world whereupon our imaginations can live and thrive?
That evening, with the combined sinking feelings of knowing that two of my intellectual and spiritual inspirations could have been novelists, I allowed myself to step back, and critically analyse their ‘mission’.
For years, especially Sam Harris, they had been ‘on the intellectual circuit’, as it were, doing talks, interviews, and now podcasts. They were involved in controversy, getting into arguments with fans and trolls, and generally as plugged into the matrix as anyone could be. They, in their different ways, were attempting to get people to transcend their ‘little lives’, or as Jordan Peterson might say, “reach for the divine”, yet they were bickering like the minor demons who were supposed to be guarding the back entrance to hell.
And look at them now? Five years on and they’re still bickering, becoming more and more irrelevant as they do so.
I begun to think of the point of the novel. The 18th and 19th century novel was in part a romantic invention, designed to be a reaction to industrialisation and modernisation. The fantasy of every novel was supposed to bring us nearer to our ‘natural state’, and the very best did more than that - they excited ‘awe’ within the reader, a transcendental experience outside of time, reduction, measurement, quantification - the things that so define modern society.
In their own ways, both Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris, their entire ‘brand’ was organised around the escape from modern society. But their behaviour, their productions, their digital projections, were the epitome of modern society.
Of course, I am being overly harsh to these two men. First, though I rarely follow and listen to them now, it is true that first Sam Harris, and then Jordan Peterson, were incredibly important for my intellectual and spiritual journey - and I suspect for many disaffected free-thinking minds. Secondly, I am likely projecting my own vision of what it means to an aesthete of some kind, onto them - not everyone who is creative and intelligent needs to be a novelist, and not all of them could or should be.
Yet - and I think I am right about this - the Intellectual Dark Web contained political actors and cultural warriors, and nothing more - important yes, but they failed to generate any lasting mythology for our age. Some, like Peterson, were portals to depth - but only portals. A hundred years from now, I doubt any of them will be read - like seriously, are people really going to be reading 12 Rules for Life?
I believe it is warning for all those in the current intellectual and spiritual sphere that sees themselves in some way or form opponents of materialist modernism and industrialisation, with all its ugliness and superficiality, cynicism and two-dimensionality.
Certainly, it is attractive to be front-centre of the political and cultural battle we have online, that seems to lay the ground for grand future events - though this may be an illusion. If you are successful, you may become rich, gain dramatic status, be paraded around and highly sought after: You will be a ‘thought leader’, after-all.
But - and especially to those who want to create art, not just narrative art, but music, painting, and architecture - the repetitive and tireless exercise of the ‘battle online’ may cause evaporation of your transcendent creative energy, of your potential to generate something irreducible, unqualifiable, immeasurable and outside of time. Eventually, you may become but a digital manifestation of yourself, like Peterson and Harris, nothing more.
Of course, even if you dedicate your life to creating art, this doesn’t mean you will produce ‘the mythology for our age’, or anything close - but, if you aspire to create some form of transcendental art, grand or small, in your daily lives, even if it is to enjoy someone else’s and discuss the meaning of it, then in some way you are behaving outside the soulnessness of our world and indeed, “reaching for the divine”.
On Substack almost daily, in this broadly dissident sphere, I worry there is incredible talent that has been lured away from their true path: That of creating a mythology for future generations. You will be less famous, at least for now, and you will get less likes and all the other metrics of social media, certainly, but you may create something that lasts. And really lasts too.
Where is that Tolkien of our age? He might be lurking on here, among us, you know - but I just hope he hasn’t be lulled into too much ‘dunking’.
Thank you all for reading!
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Chur, and have a good day and night,
The Delinquent Academic
Brilliant article. I’m going to stop YouTubing Israel-Palestine nonsense and start the thing I’ve been wanting to write!
Interesting take. I feel similarly about Peterson’s books. I forced myself through 12 Rules, didn’t bother with the sequel, and haven’t found the will to begin his latest effort, which I received for Christmas. I still appreciate Peterson a lot, especially his better podcasts, where his powers are on full display. But his books — yes, they don’t translate so well.