If you want to appear very profound and convince people to take you seriously, but have nothing of value to say, there is a tried and tested method. First, take some extremely obvious platitude or truism. Make sure it actually does contain some insight, though it can be rather vague. Something like “if you’re too conciliatory, you will sometimes get taken advantage of” or “many moral values are similar across human societies.” Then, try to restate your platitude using as many words as possible, as unintelligibly as possible, while never repeating yourself exactly. Use highly technical language drawn from many different academic disciplines, so that no one person will ever have adequate training to fully evaluate your work. Construct elaborate theories with many parts. Draw diagrams. Use italics liberally to indicate that you are using words in a highly specific and idiosyncratic sense. Never say anything too specific, and if you do, qualify it heavily so that you can always insist you meant the opposite. Then evangelize: speak as confidently as possible, as if you are sharing God’s own truth. Accept no criticisms: insist that any skeptic has either misinterpreted you or has actually already admitted that you are correct. Talk as much as possible and listen as little as possible. Follow these steps, and your success will be assured. (It does help if you are male and Caucasian.)

Jordan Peterson appears very profound and has convinced many people to take him seriously. Yet he has almost nothing of value to say. This should be obvious to anyone who has spent even a few moments critically examining his writings and speeches, which are comically befuddled, pompous, and ignorant. They are half nonsense, half banality. In a reasonable world, Peterson would be seen as the kind of tedious crackpot that one hopes not to get seated next to on a train.

But we do not live in a reasonable world. In fact, Peterson’s reach is astounding. His 12 Rules for Life is the #1 most-read book on Amazon, where it has a perfect 5-star rating. One person said that when he came across a physical copy of Peterson’s first book, “I wanted to hold it in my hands and contemplate its significance for a few minutes, as if it was one of Shakespeare’s pens or a Gutenberg Bible.” The world’s leading newspapers have declared him one of the most important living thinkers. The Times says his “message is overwhelmingly vital,” and a Guardian columnist grudgingly admits that Peterson “deserves to be taken seriously.” David Brooks thinks Peterson might be “the most influential public intellectual in the Western world right now.” He has been called “the deepest, clearest voice of conservative thought in the world today” a man whose work “should make him famous for the ages.” Malcolm Gladwell calls him “a wonderful psychologist.” And it’s not just members of the popular press that have conceded Peterson’s importance: the chair of the Harvard psychology department praised his magnum opus Maps of Meaning as “brilliant” and “beautiful.” Zachary Slayback of the Foundation for Economic Education wonders how any serious person could possibly write off Peterson, saying that “even the most anti-Peterson intellectual should be able to admit that his project is a net-good.” We are therefore presented with a puzzle: if Jordan Peterson has nothing to say, how has he attracted this much recognition? If it’s so “obvious” that he can be written off as a charlatan, why do so many people respect his intellect?

Before we address the mystery of Peterson’s popularity, we need to examine his work. After all, if the work is actually “brilliant” and insightful, there is no mystery: he is recognized as a profound thinker because he is a profound thinker. And many critics of Peterson have been deeply unfair to his work, mocking it without reading it, or slinging pejoratives at him (e.g. “the stupid man’s smart person” or “a Messiah-cum-Surrogate-Dad for Gormless Dimwits.”) This has irritated Peterson’s fans, and when articles critical of him are printed, the comments sections are full of people (usually correctly) accusing the writer of failing to take Peterson seriously. An infamous Channel 4 interview with Cathy Newman, in which Newman repeatedly put words in Peterson’s mouth (“so you’re saying X”), confirmed the impression that progressives are trying to smear Peterson by accusing him of holding beliefs that he does not hold. Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic said Peterson is the victim of “hyperbolic misrepresentation” and encouraged people to examine what he is “actually saying.”

But, having examined Peterson’s work closely, I think the “misinterpretation” of Peterson is only partially a result of leftists reading him through an ideological prism. A more important reason why Peterson is “misinterpreted” is that he is so consistently vague and vacillating that it’s impossible to tell what he is “actually saying.” People can have such angry arguments about Peterson, seeing him as everything from a fascist apologist to an Enlightenment liberal, because his vacuous words are a kind of Rorschach test onto which countless interpretations can be projected.

This is immediately apparent upon opening Peterson’s 1999 book Maps of Meaning, a 600-page summary of his basic theories that took Peterson 15 years to complete. Maps of Meaning is, to the extent it can be summarized, about how humans generate “meaning.” By “generate meaning” Peterson ostensibly intends something like “figure out how to act,” but the word’s definition is somewhat capacious:

• “Meaning is manifestation of the divine individual adaptive path”
• “Meaning is the ultimate balance between… the chaos of transformation and the possibility and…the discipline of pristine order”
• “Meaning is an expression of the instinct that guides us out into the unknown so that we can conquer it”
• “Meaning is when everything there is comes together in an ecstatic dance of single purpose”
• “Meaning means implication for behavioral output”
• “Meaning emerges from the interplay between the possibilities of the world and the value structure operating within that world”

Peterson’s answer is that people figure out how to act by turning to a common set of stories, which contain “archetypes” that have developed over the course of our species’ evolution. He believes that by studying myths, we can see values and frameworks shared across cultures, and can therefore understand the structures that guide us.

But here I am already giving Peterson’s work a more coherent summary than it actually deserves. And after all, if “many human stories have common moral lessons” was his point, he would have been saying something so obvious that nobody would think to credit it as a novel insight. Peterson manages to spin it out over hundreds of pages, and expand it into an elaborate, unprovable, unfalsifiable, unintelligible theory that encompasses everything from the direction of history, to the meaning of life, to the nature of knowledge, to the structure of human decision-making, to the foundations of ethics. (A good principle to remember is that if a book appears to be about everything, it’s probably not really about anything.) A randomly selected passage will convey the flavor of the thing:

Procedural knowledge, generated in the course of heroic behavior, is not organized and integrated within the group and the individual as a consequence of simple accumulation. Procedure “a,” appropriate in situation one, and procedure “b,” appropriate in situation two, may clash in mutual violent opposition in situation three. Under such circumstances intrapsychic or interpersonal conflict necessarily emerges. When such antagonism arises, moral revaluation becomes necessary. As a consequence of such revaluation, behavioral options are brutally rank-ordered, or, less frequently, entire moral systems are devastated, reorganized and replaced. This organization and reorganization occurs as a consequence of “war,” in its concrete, abstract, intrapsychic, and interpersonal variants. In the most basic case, an individual is rendered subject to an intolerable conflict, as a consequence of the perceived (affective) incompatibility of two or more apprehended outcomes of a given behavioral procedure. In the purely intrapsychic sphere, such conflict often emerges when attainment of what is desired presently necessarily interferes with attainment of what is desired (or avoidance of what is feared) in the future. Permanent satisfactory resolution of such conflict (between temptation and “moral purity,” for example) requires the construction of an abstract moral system, powerful enough to allow what an occurrence signifies for the future to govern reaction to what it signifies now. Even that construction, however, is necessarily incomplete when considered only as an “intrapsychic” phenomena. The individual, once capable of coherently integrating competing motivational demands in the private sphere, nonetheless remains destined for conflict with the other, in the course of the inevitable transformations of personal experience. This means that the person who has come to terms with him- or herself—at least in principle—is still subject to the affective dysregulation inevitably produced by interpersonal interaction. It is also the case that such subjugation is actually indicative of insufficient “intrapsychic” organization, as many basic “needs” can only be satisfied through the cooperation of others.

What’s important about this kind of writing is that it can easily appear to contain useful insight, because it says many things that either are true or “feel kind of true,” and does so in a way that makes the reader feel stupid for not really understanding. (Many of the book’s reviews on Amazon contain sentiments like: I am not sure I understood it, but it’s absolutely brilliant.) It’s not that it’s empty of content; in fact, it’s precisely because some of it does ring true that it is able to convince readers of its importance. It’s certainly right that some procedures work in one situation but not another. It’s right that good moral systems have to be able to think about the future in figuring out what to do in the present. But much of the rest is language so abstract that it cannot be proved or disproved. (The old expression “what’s new in it isn’t true, and what’s true isn’t new” applies here.)

Another passage, in which Peterson gives his theory of law:

Law is a necessary precondition to salvation, so to speak; necessary, but insufficient. Law provides the borders that limit chaos, and allows for the protected maturation of the individual. Law disciplines possibility, and allows the disciplined individual to bring his or her potentialities—those intrapsychic spirits—under voluntary control. The law allows for the application of such potentiality to the task of creative and courageous existence—allows spiritual water controlled flow into the valley of the shadow of death. Law held as an absolute, however, puts man in the position of the eternal adolescent, dependent upon the father for every vital decision, removes the responsibility for action from the individual, and therefore prevents him or her from discovering the potential grandeur of the soul. Life without law remains chaotic, affectively intolerable. Life that is pure law becomes sterile, equally unbearable. The domination of chaos or sterility equally breeds murderous resentment or hatred.

Again: it’s not that he’s wrong when he says that law has a disciplining function, or that too much law is stifling, while not enough is anarchy. But all this stuff about “intrapsychic spirits” and “the flow of spiritual water” is just said, never clearly explained, let alone proved. If you asked him to explain it, you would just get a long string of additional abstract terms. (Ironically, Maps of Meaning contains neither maps nor meaning.) Sociologist C. Wright Mills, in critically examining “grand theorists” in his field who used verbosity to cover for a lack of profundity, pointed out that people respond positively to this kind of writing because they see it as “a wondrous maze, fascinating precisely because of its often splendid lack of intelligibility.” But, Mills said, such writers are “so rigidly confined to such high levels of abstraction that the ‘typologies’ they make up—and the work they do to make them up—seem more often an arid game of Concepts than an effort to define systematically—which is to say, in a clear and orderly way, the problems at hand, and to guide our efforts to solve them.”

Obscurantism is more than a desperate attempt to feign novelty, though. It’s also a tactic for badgering readers into deference to the writer’s authority. Nobody can be sure they are comprehending the author’s meaning, which has the effect of making the reader feel deeply inferior and in awe of the writer’s towering knowledge, knowledge that must exist on a level so much higher than that of ordinary mortals that we are incapable of even beginning to appreciate it. In fact, Peterson is quite open in insisting that he has achieved revelations beyond the comprehension of ordinary persons. The book’s epigraph is comically grandiose (“I will utter things which have been kept secret from the foundation of the world” — Matthew 13:35) and Peterson even includes in the book a letter to his father in which he tries to convey the gravity of his discovery:

I don’t know, Dad, but I think I have discovered something that no one else has any idea about, and I’m not sure I can do it justice. Its scope is so broad that I can see only parts of it clearly at one time, and it is exceedingly difficult to set down comprehensibly in writing…. Anyways, I’m glad you and Mom are doing well. Thank you for doing my income tax returns.

(It’s fun to read the letter for yourself and imagine being Peterson’s dad trying to figure out what his son is doing with his life.)

Needless to say, when someone is this convinced of their own brilliance, they can be unaware of just how far afield they have drifted from the world of sense and reason. The diagrams and figures in Maps of Meaning are astonishing. They are masterpieces of unprovable gibberish:

How does one even address material like this? It can’t be “refuted.” Are we ruled by a dragon of chaos? Is the dragon feminine? Does “the ‘state’ of preconscious paradise” have a “voluntary encounter with the unknown”? Is the episodic really more explicit than the procedural? These are not questions with answers, because they are not questions with meanings.

The inflating of the obvious into the awe-inspiring is part of why Peterson can operate so successfully in the “self-help” genre. He can give people the most elementary fatherly life-advice (clean your room, stand up straight) while making it sound like Wisdom. Consider this summary of principles from the end of 12 Rules for Life:

What shall I do to strengthen my spirit? Do not tell lies, or do what you despise.

What shall I do to ennoble my body? Use it only in the service of my soul.

What shall I do with the most difficult of questions? Consider them the gateway to the path of life.

What shall I do with the poor man’s plight? Strive through right example to lift his broken heart.

What shall I do with when the great crowd beckons? Stand tall and utter my broken truths.

These are pompous, biblical ways of saying: tell the truth, be true to yourself, see challenges as opportunities, set a good example, and, uh, give confident and long-winded lectures to your adoring crowd of fans. (Note the response to the “poor man’s plight,” which is not to actually help him but to show him what a better person you are so that he will have a model to emulate.) Peterson’s writing style constantly adds convolutions to disguise the simplicity of his mind; so he won’t say “the man’s cancer metastasized,” he will say the man “fell prey to the tendency of that dread condition to metastasize.” The harder people have to work to figure out what you’re saying, the more accomplished they’ll feel when they figure it out, and the more sophisticated you will appear. Everybody wins.

A few more Petersonisms:

• “There is no being without imperfection.” No shit.
• “To share does not mean to give away something you value and get nothing back. That is instead what every child who refuses to share fears it means. To share means, properly, to initiate the process of trade.” Could mean anything, depending on interpretation: if I share my food with a hungry person, and ask for nothing in return, I may still have “gotten something.” But the maxim could also be interpreted as a defense of avarice. You can find a justification in it for whatever your worldview already is.
• “You can’t make rules for the exceptional.” By definition.
• “The future is the place of all potential monsters.” The future is the place for all potential everything.
• “People do not care whether or not they succeed; they care about whether or not they fail.”  Which is apparently different.
• “People aren’t after happiness, they’re after not hurting.” I’m actually after happiness, thanks.
• “Life is suffering. That’s clear. There is no more basic, irrefutable truth.” Anything is “irrefutable” if it’s not clear what we mean by it.
• “You cannot be protected from the things that frighten you and hurt you, but if you identify with the part of your being that is responsible for transformation, then you are always the equal, or more than the equal of the things that frighten you.” Unless you are frightened of leopards, and are subsequently eaten by leopards.

The multiplicity of possible interpretations is very important. It makes it almost impossible to beat Peterson in an argument, because every time one attempts to force him to defend a proposition, he can insist he means something else. For example, he sees the world as fundamentally divided between the forces of “chaos” and the forces of “order,” and explains the difference:

[Chaos is] what extends, eternally and without limit, beyond the boundaries of all states, all ideas, and all disciplines… It’s the foreigner, the stranger, the member of another gang, the rustle in the bushes… the hidden anger of your mother… Chaos is symbolically associated with the feminine… Order, by contrast, is explored territory. That’s the hundreds-of-millions-of-years-old hierarchy of place, position, and authority. That’s the structure of society. It’s the structure provided by biology, too…It’s the flag of the nation… It’s the greatness of tradition, the rows of desks in the school classroom, the trains that leave on time… In the domain of order, things behave as God intended.

It’s very easy to hear the echoes of authoritarianism, even fascism, in this: strong men create order, which is what God intends, and the social structure is preserved by deference to authority, tradition, hierarchy, flags. (Heck, he even talks about the trains running on time!) But the moment one tries to critique this, to talk about the dangers of adhering to flags and traditions for their own sake, Peterson will angrily insist that you have misunderstood his theory: order is symbiotic with chaos, not superior to it! (“Order is not enough.”) The feminine is necessary as well, because chaos is associated with “possibility itself, the source of ideas, the mysterious realm of gestation and birth.” If you try to suggest that he has justified patriarchy, he will tell you that when he refers to the “symbolically masculine” he does not mean “men.” But it’s usually unclear what he does mean, and any attempt to figure it out will be met with a barrage of yet more jargon. (What, for example, are we to make of his interpretation of The Simpsons, which stresses the importance of having a cruel bully around to keep the soft effeminate kids from taking over: “Without Nelson, King of the Bullies, the school would soon be overrun by resentful, touchy Milhouses, narcissistic, intellectual Martin Princes, soft, chocolate-gorging German children, and infantile Ralph Wiggums. Muntz is a corrective…” An endorsement of bullying the weak, surely? But Peterson would deny it.)

Consider the way Peterson talks about the “threat of physicality”:

I know how to stand up to a man who’s unfairly trespassing against me. And the reason I know that is because the parameters for my resistance are quite well defined, which is: we talk, we argue, we push, and then it becomes physical. If we move beyond the boundaries of civil discourse, we know what the next step is. That’s forbidden in discourse with women. And so I don’t think that men can control crazy women. I really don’t believe it. I think they have to throw their hands up in. . . In what? It’s not even disbelief. It’s that the cultural. . . There’s no step forward that you can take under those circumstances, because if the man is offensive enough and crazy enough, the reaction becomes physical right away. Or at least the threat is there. And when men are talking to each other in any serious manner, that underlying threat of physicality is always there, especially if it’s a real conversation. It keeps the thing civilized to some degree. If you’re talking to a man who wouldn’t fight with you under any circumstances whatsoever, then you’re talking to someone [for] whom you have absolutely no respect. But I can’t see any way… For example there’s a wom