Jordan Peterson and 2020

Over the last few years I’ve listened to hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of lectures and speeches by Canadian clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson. He is a very, very brilliant man, one of the most mesmerising public intellectuals in the world today, with a dazzlingly wide range of knowledge encompassing, besides psychology, philosophy, history, politics, science, literature, scripture, popular culture, and much more. Sadly he has been unwell for much of the last year (but is thankfully recovering) and so we have not had the privilege of hearing his thoughts on the worldwide Covid crisis. The extraordinary reaction to it will still be getting written about by psychologists a thousand years from now, so it’s likely that Peterson, who contracted Covid-19 over the summer, will have much to say about what 2020 has revealed about human beings, and we can only hope that it isn’t too long before we hear from him.

Peterson’s previous teachings are nevertheless germane if we are to look for an understanding of why the world has found it necessary to destroy itself to ‘save’ itself, and why populations have gone along with astonishing curtailments of their personal liberties. I feel that Peterson also explains why our leader acted as he did.

One theme the professor repeatedly returns to is how a person needs an aim in life; they need a target because this focuses them and drives them forward. If you do not have a target to aim for, whether it be big or small - looking to become the boss of your company or just wanting to read every single book by a certain author - you are literally aimless, you meander through your existence, you never find any sort of satisfaction because you don’t really care about anything. (Peterson in part derives this insight from humans’ literal aiming at targets when we were in our hunter-gatherer phase, spearing that bison with a well-aimed throw, and in the modern-day with, say, the joy of scoring a goal in football - hitting the target.)

Boris Johnson, while clearly having had the ambition to become prime minister (when he was child he said he wanted to be ‘world king’), doesn’t appear to have had much more than that. Churchill, Thatcher and Blair, whatever one might think of what they achieved, all clearly had a plan and stuck to it, resulting in the transformation of the UK, presumably to their satisfaction (and in Churchill’s case, saving the world from fascist dictatorship). Johnson, besides being bereft of courage, foresight and humanity, also appears to be an empty, directionless vessel with no underlying philosophy and no precise vision of what he wants to achieve, besides a vague ‘levelling up’ agenda and a fondness for flowery infrastructure projects. What the hell is he? In 2020 he has proven himself to be neither a conservative nor a libertarian and, as Lord Sumption told Allison Pearson he is perhaps just a ‘Johnsonite, and that will lead him in different directions depending on the circumstances’. Sumption went on: ‘Boris Johnson’s main problem is that he is obsessed with PR and he is not intelligent enough to study a problem carefully and in depth.’

Peterson also talks of the importance of facing your fears; we must 'slay the dragon', we must not run away from what we fear - we must confront it. I'd say that Johnson, time after time, has run away from this problem. He has certainly changed his tactic from 'we must take this on the chin', as he said in early March, and his latest inane pronouncement about a 'rule of six' just confirms that he cannot face this virus, he always wants to 'delay' it somehow; that indeed is what 'squashing the sombrero' was originally about, slowing the rate of infections. And while at the time there might have been some justification for that, dozens of announcements since tell us that this is a prime minister on the run and has not the courage to go through what the Swedes did to be on the way to achieve herd immunity, the only way to halt this virus. Instead he takes what you could say was the 'easy' option of attention-grabbing lockdowns and quarantines, that do nothing except delay the pain for another day. This is replicated by his economic policy which has no thought for the horrors of tomorrow but merely seeks to be expedient and be popular in the present day. Such a pitiful performance from the man charged with leading England.

We are all suffering the consequences of Johnson’s Covid policies: regressive lockdowns, anti-human rules and regulations, a blind adherence to a very narrow band of scientific thinking and an inability to see unintended consequences. This is the result of various character flaws, but perhaps the most salient is him not having a true, worthy ambition in his political life - and his chaotic romantic life over the years is surely not unconnected to his vacancy either. Johnson has lurched from one self-inflicted crisis to the next this year. Nothing displays better his lack of an intellectually backed up philosophy than the way at the start of March he was merrily washing his hands while singing happy birthday, then a couple of weeks later putting most of the population under house arrest. His messaging has been laughably inconsistent: one minute he tells us we should return to offices, the next he tells us we must not meet more than five of our friends and family at once; he incentivises us to go out and eat government-subsided meals, the next minute he warns of over-eating; in the past he has spoken of fiscal responsibility (come to think of it, citation needed!), now he talks of a madcap £100bn testing scheme. ‘Take aim, even badly,’ Jordan Peterson has said. With Johnson, we just get the ‘badly’ bit.

In another lecture I listened to, Peterson talks about certain political leaders who have done things so catastrophic that they will never admit to them, because to do so would mean confronting their own inadequacies. He wasn’t talking about Johnson of course, but I’d put him in that category.

Enough about the psychology of our comedy dictator; what has 2020 done to the people he rules over? Peterson speaks of some people as essentially naive when they start out in life; they can then be betrayed; then they become cynical; then they become bitter and resentful. People back in March were in the naive, innocent phase, helpless and looking for guidance from authority. As has now become evident, they were hideously betrayed by that authority: the economy collapsed, health care was made piecemeal, education was torpedoed, civil liberties smashed, communal existence made ghastly, and for what? To control a virus that was never nearly as bad as they told us it was. Sweden has achieved better results in every single sphere with virtually none of the hideous destruction of everyday life that Britons have had to endure. Here’s a reminder of a few facts about the coronavirus:

• If you get it, you have a 99.9% chance of recovery
• 99% of those who have died with it were very old, very ill or morbidly obese
• In fact, a recent CDC report claimed that just 6% of Covid fatalities were caused by Covid alone - the other 94% were killed by co-morbidities
• If you are a healthy working age person you have more chance of dying in a road accident than from Covid
• The UK’s mortality statistics have recently been below average for this time of year
• You are currently 14 times more likely to die of flu than Covid
• Of the 141,000 beds in NHS hospitals, currently around just 400 are occupied by Covid patients
• The vast majority of people who have died with Covid would have died this year anyway
• The IFR (Infection Fatality Rate) of Covid seems to be roughly the same as seasonal flu - around 0.01%
• Not a single child worldwide has transmitted the virus
• Not a single child in Britain has died of Covid alone

There is more, much more in this vein. Which is why I brand what the government has done as nothing more than a betrayal of Britain - they have suckered a hapless population, terrified them and impoverished them materially and mentally for years to come. They cannot admit their mistakes (as the Norwegian prime minister did), it is too risky, so they double down and spin their deceit out for longer. But there will come a reckoning, and it will be a bloody one. There are going to be a lot of cynical and bitter people at the end of this, and the consequences will be terrible: we are already seeing it, but a total shattering of faith in the governing classes will have enormous repercussions for every single aspect of our future lives. People hate it when they’ve been lied to and, as Peterson says, when they are subject to malevolence it tears them apart like nothing else. While you might dispute that the government have actually been ‘malevolent’, it has often seemed that they have adopted a sort of ‘be kind to be cruel’ strategy.

You might reasonably ask why so many people, the vast majority of people, have gone along with this horrific experiment, why so few have rebelled against the extreme psychological warfare that the government has been waging, and goes on waging, a full six months after deaths from Covid peaked in this country. Well, that’s easy, any psychologist should be able to tell you that bit. The Milgram Shock Experiment, despite being very well known to many people, does not appear to inure them from being manipulated by authority figures, possibly because the reasoning behind the claims always varies.

The experiment, which involved subjects being ordered to give electric shocks to participants if they gave incorrect answers to questions, has been widely replicated, including by Derren Brown in 2006. Milgram’s conclusion was as follows: ‘Ordinary people are likely to follow orders given by an authority figure, even to the extent of killing an innocent human being. Obedience to authority is ingrained in us all from the way we are brought up. People tend to obey orders from other people if they recognize their authority as morally right and/or legally based.’

This surely explains the widespread continued adherence to whatever crackpot and horrible new diktats the government issues, despite huge and growing evidence that the government’s policies are fuelling a big rise in mental health problems, most tragically manifested in growing rates of suicide and a terrifying increase in the number of patients not receiving cancer checks. Then there’s the mass unemployment and company collapses that will come about due to shutting down and muting the economy, the possible life-long psychological damage being done to children due to over-zealous management of their lives, the extra motoring deaths that will arise because people are shunning public transport, elderly people literally dying of loneliness and much, much more besides.

Will people ever see this as the Milgram experiment that it is? Maybe not, as Milgram proved that participants would literally kill if they were ordered to, as of course they always have done for real under totalitarian regimes (the experiment was set up to examine the horror of the Nazis).

I am not Jordan Peterson. He is twenty times more intelligent than I am. Or perhaps a hundred times, or is it a thousand times?! (One day, a verifiable test would be of great interest to me.) We wish for and await his full return to public life just as we wish for a return to normal life, whatever the hell that can be now, and it will be fascinating to hear what he has to say about 2020’s mind-boggling global hysteria. Was it because of group-think? Health and safety gone (genuinely) mad? The product of complacent, lazy, ignorant societies? The domino effect? The year the petty authoritarians gloriously triumphed? It will be fascinating to see what conclusions Peterson comes to, and I hope that my small-fry, partial pontificating has not been too wide of the mark.