It was, they said, wishful thinking versus science. Here, according to the fanatical reaction of his devotees, Peterson faced down liberal claptrap about the gender pay-gap, the patriarchy and the right to offend with evidence-based truths. 12 Rules for Life? Great!Īnd so to the second event behind Peterson's stratospheric celebrity: the now-infamous Channel 4 News interview with Cathy Newman on the day of his UK book launch, the full half-hour version of which hit 7 million YouTube views in a month. Self-help sells, and in the political as in the psychological realm, we are susceptible to authoritarians with facile answers. Call it the Cambridge Analytica strategy: sow confusion and anxiety through deliberate disinformation and watch people hanker after strongmen or gurus. The times are changing faster than ever – geopolitically, technologically, microbially – and we humans constantly look for guidance amid the uncertainty. Humanly impossible.'Īside from the fact his arguments naturally resonate with this generation of Reddit-schooled conservatives, it isn't too hard to fathom the more generic reasons for Peterson's appeal.

'Not being a Peterson fan,' tweeted Infowars conspiracy theorist Paul Joseph Watson, 'is like not being a fan of chocolate or sunshine. In Peterson, they found familiar psychological moorings, attracted to the patina of scientific rigour in which he dressed his advocacy of traditional gender roles. This made him a cause célèbre, and hours of his eclectic, freewheeling, evangelical YouTube lectures had soon been devoured by a predominantly young, male audience, rudderless amid the uncertainties unleashed by a new era of political correctness and changing sexual politics.

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