“He sought to establish himself as a free speech warrior,” former colleague and friend Dr. Bernard Schiff writes in the Toronto Star. The professor emeritus at the University of Toronto continues on to say that Jordan Peterson is not a warrior of free speech but rather a warrior for social order. He asserts that his former friend, “…has a complex relationship to freedom of speech...For Jordan, it appears, not all speech is equal, and not all disruption and violence are equal, either.”
His supporters, however, rally under this free speech war banner. Barbara Kay, opinion columnist at the National Post and advocate of Jordan Peterson, says, “He is calling [people] back to the principles that should underlie life in an open and democratic society. And now [his supporters] got this guy who’s not afraid to speak up and holds extremely different views, who will listen to their views, and who respects them as human beings.”
Is Dr. Peterson a modern-day prophetic truth-sayer? Barbara weighs in, “...he is not afraid to smash idols and the idols that he says he’s smashing...are the philosophies that govern...which are post-modernism, relativism and Marxism.” She continues, “...he thinks people do have the capacity to choose the right way versus the wrong way. He feels that it is the responsibility of people to make themselves as competent as they can be at whatever it is they choose to do.” She concludes, “I think he has already changed the landscape in the free speech campus thing.”
But is there more than meets the eye? Are we instead dealing with a manipulative maniacal truth-slayer? Dr. Schiff writes this in his article, “[Dr. Peterson’s] messages can be strong and clear, oversimplified, as they often are, to be very accessible. He has played havoc with the truth...He frightens by invoking murderous bogeymen on the left and warning they are out to destroy the social order, which will bring chaos and destruction.” He continues this warning in our interview together: “I think the danger is the formation of groups of people who are bound by an idea, who have a leader who if their word leads them in that direction will become aggressive. They are already quite aggressive.”
The sides of this conversation go back and forth. Barbara Kay describes audiences of young men and women “hungry for redemption” and “yearning to be something bigger than themselves.” Dr. Schiff warns that this is the case but that it is an act of enabling larger groups of aggressive young people (mostly males) who feel entitled and, because of that learned entitlement, are “...now just lazy.”
This is a typical debate between Dr. Peterson’s supporters and opponents. There is a constant back and forth narrative, swinging like a pendulum, depending on who is talking about him and on what he himself is teaching others. In the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson writes, “I thus drew steadily nearer to that truth...that man is not truly one, but truly two.” Some agreement does exist between the two sides yet much of the debate is focused around his intent. So, the question now is whose version of him is going to prevail and what will that look like in the coming days?
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