The Jordan Peterson phenomenon

Prague, 1.10.2019

Without wanting or looking for it, Jordan Peterson became the most influential intellectual in the world. No one like him attracts the attention and interest of tens of millions, through social networks and his publications. The trigger that motivated this Professor of Psychiatry to speak out was a law in Canada, which identifies with the ideology of genderism, seeking to impose the obligation to use, in dealing with others, the form that corresponds to the gender that person has chosen for himself. First from the chair, and then as a scientific authority, he became the irrefutable defender of the biological and psychic difference between women and men.

Prof. Peterson brings back to the fore the ancient wisdom of religion, especially that of the Bible, and this without being a Christian. Perhaps that is why he has more credibility.  He says things that after a short time have been proven to be values and truths for which there is a great hunger throughout the world. And this is because today’s way of thinking is moving further and further away from the healthy common sense, which continues to reverberate in people’s consciousness, even though it is suffocated by the deceptive show of a materialistic life, as an ideology that precisely reacts with great susceptibility against any vision of man composed of a mortal body and a soul, with a transcendent sense.

Profiles of the Hunger for Truth and Sense

The Jordan Peterson phenomenon in facts and figures:

His book ’12 Rules for Life. An Antidote to Chaos’ has become an unprecedented bestseller worldwide, with forty translations.

His Youtube channel has 1,400,000 subscribers, who follow his lectures on the Bible.

120 speeches all over the world in large public venues, always crowded and always immediately picked up on Youtube

Finally, a proof of his protagonism is the attacks against his ideas and his person, which only increases his prestige.

In defense of man’s dignity and identity

            The amazing thing is that, without being a Christian, from an anthropological point of view, he manages to recover the lost identity of man in coincidence with the Jewish-Christian teachings, which have made the greatness of the West possible. Although he still does not manage to grasp the totality of this truth, which is only possible from faith, he has managed above all to break down the barrier erected erroneously by rationalism, which for the last three centuries has sought to separate religion from science.  Peterson says that life is a hard fight, in which man has to assume all the responsibilities of life itself, finding in them their deepest meaning. He speaks of the moral weakness of man, so prone to give himself to the easiest and most pleasant, neglecting his obligations (he gives as an example the addiction to computer games or other things like that)

This weakening fissure would be like the shadow factor in each person, which keeps a remarkable analogy with the consequences left in the soul by original sin, according to Christian teachings. The wide gap in thought opened by Jordan Peterson is providing a door through which other intellectuals are now entering, determined to rethink the materialistic foundations of our thoughts and values.