On Being A Conduit of Courage and Truth

I recently listened to a podcast called Modern Wisdom, wherein Chris Williamson interviews Dr. Jordan B. Peterson. I found it because I’m on a bit of a Jordan Peterson tear. I had not given him the time of day when he first rose to cultural prominence in 2016. I only got soundbites of his work through media, and he was portrayed as some kind of absurd anti-feminist intellectual. What moron would equate the complexity of human relationships to lobsters? 

I stumbled into his work earlier this year after the London Times published a hit piece on him profiling a several year health tragedy he went through. If you’re not familiar, he developed an unbearable, relentless withdrawal response to benzodiazepine that was prescribed for insomnia. The ordeal sent him around the world to Russia & Serbia to try and safely taper off the meds without dying during the plague, and from which he is just now recovering. It’s a bizarre and fascinating story, which is nowhere near as remarkable as the rest of his work.

The first interview I saw with him was with his daughter, Mikhaila, and I was immediately struck by their rapport. The accusation that he’s some pied piper of toxic masculinity was rather quickly dispensed with. He was so… loving. And supportive. Their banter was both substantial and easy. There was mutual respect. I was hooked.

I’ve now listened to at least 30 long-form interviews, most of his lectures on philosophy, and read his first book. I’ve read a lot of personal development throughout my life, and I find his approach stimulating, deeply synthesized and accessible in a way that is unique. He’s an excellent teacher and example of honesty, courage, and humility in a human being. I’m grateful I gave him a proper listen after my initial– naïve– dismissal.

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It’s a strange experience to open oneself up to be changed.

My recent persistence with his work has helped me bring to light certain ambiguities I hadn’t (haven’t) yet resolved, and given me supportive frameworks to reconsider old ideas. For example, I studied post-modernist philosophers in college at a time when I was in utter chaos personally. My family was spiraling in all different destructive directions, my closest grandmother passed away with dementia, I was drinking daily, behaving terribly in intimate relationships, and feeling extremely lost.

Maybe theories that dismantled all reality structures or sense of universal truths weren’t the best course of study for me at the time.

I graduated, somehow, but with no sense of direction, purpose or structure. I know this isn’t solely because of my major, or even uncommon in college students… but it took me years to claw my way onto more solid ground. Listening to Dr. Peterson’s podcasts made me realize part of my struggle was the lack of context or critique I had for those ideas. I was not yet a critical thinker (even a philosophy degree doesn’t guarantee that), and so I ended up absorbing a sense that all claims of knowledge, truth and value are (artificially and treacherously) manufactured by humans, a core belief that I’ve only started unpacking in the last year.

That’s just one example of the ways his own work has helped me better understand myself and initiate change in my life, which is a long preamble for the story I started this out telling you.

In his podcast, Modern Wisdom, Chris Williamson, who is a bigger fangirl than even I, tells Jordan that he (Jordan) can never truly know the impact of his own work, because the benefit ripples out from all those who grow in the exposure to their network in endless, countless ways.

And that infinite rippling is a true phenomenon with Jordan Peterson. Many people with interesting minds– Russell Brand, US Senators, college professors, actors – practically revere him for his presence and the scope of his impact. There’s a profound impact in sharing your ideas and work in a way that they can inspire change in other people, who can inspire change other people, who can inspire change in other people.

And it also made me realize that he’s not only sharing his own ideas, not even primarily sharing his own ideas… he is also a conduit of the thinkers he studies and so masterfully synthesizes. I’m not sure I would have picked up Dostoyevsky or Nietzsche or Jung in 2021 without his writing and lectures, but I’ve already gotten so much from his interpretations. He certainly has a way of making these classic figures seem more alive and enticing, and perhaps doing justice to their work in a way that makes them more fruitful for new readers.

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Learning certainly goes deeper when we share our newfound understanding, when we interact with other thoughtful people to flesh these things out. But there is some danger involved in this process. You might grow out of your current perceptions of good/bad, or wrong/right, and become someone altogether different.

Through the past year, I’ve started to understand the existential risks of censorship and propaganda in a way that feels incredibly urgent. Listening to so many people who have been censored in some way– books banned, YouTube channels shut down, personally slandered or accounts deactivated– I’ve been blown away by how undangerous they are… and by the vapidness of the few remaining “acceptable” viewpoints.

I don’t agree with every censored video I’ve seen, but I can tell you not a single one has turned me into an evil psychopath. Most of them are more thoughtful and well-researched than any news segment I’ve seen on mainstream media. Most of these “dangerous” people are more interested in honest dialogue, understanding evidence, or simply sharing their experience than forcing a belief down your throat. And they don’t assume you are incapable of understanding difficult things or making up your own mind about it.

In order to be changed for the better, we have to be exposed to honest work. Constant exposure to deceitful propaganda (I don’t know what else to call whatever has been happening on mainstream media the last year) will whittle us down to anxious, fearful, ignorant shells of ourselves. The more thoughtful, truthful points of view we engage with, the more likely our own conscience is to find its way, pursuing a courageous path that impacts others deeply.  

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One of the things Jordan said in the Modern Wisdom podcast that struck me most is that if you want adventure, you could try telling the truth. There’s no more unpredictable way to approach life than by being honest in our day-to-day. That this resonated so deeply is telling, an alarm bell of the little lies we exchange every day to ‘keep the peace’ or avoid confrontations that aggregate into monsters much larger and more sinister.

It’s been interesting to note that the monsters I thought lurked in Dr. Peterson’s ideas turned out to be canaries in the coal mine. And the very people filtering his ideas through their deceitful fingers are the ones we need to worry about. These are the types of things that we become aware of as we open ourselves up to honest ideas, and make the brave decision to be more honest in our lives.

And the danger involved in honest engagement with life is absolutely preferable to the danger of not engaging at all– of closing ourselves off from the flow of fresh thinking and challenging points of view. It’s preferable to the stagnation of our minds by homogenous ideologies or living in fear of having an original, inconvenient, gnawing thought.

I was surprised to find I was more than capable of assessing new ideas for myself, and I believe we mostly all are. We should be outraged at the assumptions of censorship, whether that is data the government makes mask & lockdown measures from or books that explore a spike in transgender identification in teenage girls. We are capable of nuance and difficult things.

And in fact, we must pursue nuance and difficult things, honestly and with courage. We are alive in this world, maybe just this once. How do we want to look back at our lives? That we were safe and did what we were supposed to and didn’t question the circumstances that shaped us? Or that we opened our eyes, opened our ears, dove in head first and made some impact with our precious time? Were we dead ends or conduits to infinite courage and truth?

Only we can decide.