Beyond Order: crypto-fascism masquerading as self-help

This review is primarily meant for Jordan Peterson’s critics, not his followers, whose maniacal reverence for and untutored defense of their omniscient leader chiefly serves to intimidate the skeptical and clog up the internet with paragraphs teaming with illiteracy accompanied by avatars of superheroes and unicorns.

Yes, Jordan Peterson is a leading figure of the alt-right; yes, he is nasty business who disparages women, journalists, lawmakers, educators, egalitarians, environmentalists, members of the LGBTQ+ community, and anyone who opposes him or his oddball brand of neo-fascism; correct, he is a grifter who peddles truisms and garish merchandise; to be sure, he has drug issues; and bingo, he is a weirdo of the first order. However, these oft-repeated assessments barely hint at the scope of the problem.

Jordan Peterson is a neo-Nazi. By extension, his movement, dubbed “the Jordan Peterson phenomenon” by the media, is a neo-Nazi cult. From reading the pro-Hitler and anti-Semitic comments under Peterson’s YouTube videos, it’s obvious that some cult followers are receiving the message. Nonetheless, many acolytes seem oblivious to their idol’s intentions, because 1.) he identifies as a self-help guru who claims to be helping them get their lives “in order,” and 2.) he usually communicates with them—seriously—through the medium of a crypto-fascist code. Given that Peterson’s fans tend to craft remarks like “JP is the bestest teecher I ain’t never had,” their failure to comprehend his real aims is understandable.

Think what I’m saying sounds crazy? In a sense, I would agree. When Peterson was in his early twenties, the wheels fell off his tricycle. In Maps of Meaning, he documents how he experienced a “split” from reality, a descent into schizophrenia, and a rebirth facilitated by a voice with eyes which began judging and regulating his speech. For nearly thirty years, he’s been ruminating on schizophrenia in ways that are clearly autobiographical, yet no one seems to notice.
Before I offer evidence to support my claims, please know that I’m not the first to make them. Historian Mikael Nilsson has accused Peterson of making a “barrage of revisionist falsehoods about Hitler and Nazism,” noting his “strangely generous framing of the Nazi leader” and his “reluctance to use the word ‘Holocaust.’ ” The CBC’s Wendy Mesley and British GQ’s Helen Lewis have questioned Peterson about why he posed with a Pepe the Frog flag, which has been identified by the Anti-Defamation League as a hate symbol. Peterson filed a lawsuit against Wilfrid Laurier University after a staffer compared him to Hitler; and Noam Chomsky has likened him to Hitler. Unsurprisingly, Peterson has denied such allegations, saying, “I’ve been lecturing about the dangers of Nazi totalitarianism… for almost three decades.”

It’s true that Peterson has been lecturing about Nazism for almost three decades, but not its dangers. Criticism of the Third Reich is fleeting, shallow, and offset by commendation. Jordan Peterson praises, defends, and empathizes with Adolf Hitler, downplays his malevolence, and routinely admits that he (Peterson) could have gleefully worked Jews to death at Auschwitz-Birkenau. He could have enjoyed it, he says, and routinely tells his devotees that they could have enjoyed it, too. It’s not a warning. It’s a suggestion. He’s as mad as a hatter.

Jordan Peterson defends other Nazis, including Martin Heidegger and Adolf Eichmann, as well as neo-Nazis, such as Ernst Zündel. He has come to the rescue of Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh, Donald Trump, and Tommy Robinson, and he networks with white supremacists like Faith Goldy (who was outed as a neo-Nazi), Lauren Southern (who was barred from the UK under a terrorist act), and Stefan Molyneux (to whom Peterson identified as “alt-right”). He does interviews with other racists and far-right cranks, like Douglas Murray, Jonathan Pageau, and Gad Saad, and has agreed with the views of white nationalist Ricardo Duchesne, author of Canada in Decay: Mass Immigration, Diversity, and the Ethnocide of Euro-Canadians. He has courted Charlie Kirk, who helped foment the 2021 storming of the US Capitol, and has characterized that attack as “events,” criticizing the government for imposing a curfew after such “events.” Peterson teaches that the alt-right project is “incomplete” and is fond of demonstrating the goose-step and Sieg Heil to his students at the University of Toronto. However, propositions which deviate from the neat liberal narrative that Peterson could be anything worse than a conservative fraudster are met with disinterest and disdain.

Peterson has repeatedly called Hitler “brilliant” and an “organizational genius.” He has said that the Führer burned things he found disgusting “beautifully,” adding, “The Nazis were unbelievably great at using fire of purification [sic] as a symbolic message.” He has referred to Hitler as “the jovial father of the race,” “[the] knight of the faith,” “the knight of the blood,” “a master of speech,” “tremendously artistic,” “charismatic,” “compelling,” and “captivating.” Moreover, he has asked: “Granted the opportunity, how many of us would not be Hitlers?” He reminds his listeners that “Hitler… won a medal for heroism” and has falsely claimed that Hitler “served in the trenches” on “the front lines of the authoritarian struggle.” He has perpetrated the lie that Hitler was elected in a “landslide vote, the kind no modern democratic leader ever gets,” and has labeled the dictator a “quasi-deity,” “the Great Father,” “[the] wise Father,” and “God the Father,” who “climbed up the ranks of the hierarchy in a remarkable manner.”

Peterson urges his cult followers to climb the dominance hierarchy and be respectful of the figurehead at its pinnacle: God the Father. In 2017, he said, “The Father was right a hundred years ago… but he’s dead… and so, your moral duty… is to rescue your dead Father…” By heroically rescuing their dead Father, who was “right” in 1917, Peterson’s principally white, male, working-class base can “rejuvenate the state” and “re-establish order.”

You see, within the dominance hierarchy (a metaphor for the state), there are two opposing forces: order and chaos. As Peterson explains in 12 Rules for Life, order can be defined as “tribe... home and country,” “the greatness of tradition,” “trains that leave on time,” “the flag of the nation,” and “living room.” This is intriguing, because Hitler conceptualized order as “Tribes, Folks [and] States,” “the home country,” “the cultural traditions of a great people,” a “train [that] departed punctually,” the “national flag,” and “living space.”

Hitler used the word “order” interchangeably with Nazism. He used “chaos” to mean “negrification” or “Jewish Marxist Bolshevism,” what Peterson labels “Cultural Marxism” or “the radical left.” Hitler declared, “I overcame chaos in Germany. I restored order,” whereas Peterson cryptically informs his followers that order is white, chaos is black, and counsels them to “confront… chaos” and “transform chaos into order.” He writes, “The Great Father is order, placed against chaos… The Great Father is the tyrant…”

We can assume Peterson means the tyrant who burned things he found disgusting “beautifully,” because he has said to his students: “[Hitler’s] the Great Father! He’s the all-seeing Great Father in the background. He’s like the Wizard of Oz, fundamentally, ya know? So… he’s partly order, and that was a huge part of Hitler, and that’s partly [what] was attractive, because Germany was absolutely in chaos. So that made order more and more attractive, right?” While raving about a Nuremberg rally, Peterson has said, “The Germans are good at order.” He has also said, “Certainly, what happened to the Germans could be regarded as immensely chaotic. In a society that’s collapsed into chaos you’re going to get … [a] demand for the imposition of order, and one thing Hitler was good at was order.”

Peterson has recurrently specified that Hitler went beyond order, for instance when he said, “Now, the question is… why did [National Socialism] go so pathologically wrong? Well, that’s part of what we’re going to untangle… because… you might have benevolent motives in establishing order, but order shades into tyranny (i.e. order goes beyond order) and then your motivations for establishing tyranny might be completely self-serving and cruel… Certainly, it’s what happened with the Nazis.”

Beyond Order is a clandestine allusion to Hitler’s order. The book was originally called Beyond Mere Order and Peterson has discussed a collection of Hitler’s speeches called My New Order. When Peterson says he’s helping people get their lives “in order,” he means he’s priming them to become neo-Nazis.

Peterson: “you might have benevolent motives in establishing order”
Hitler: “a new order will be established”
Peterson: “Clear rules and proper discipline help the child, and the family, and society, establish, maintain and expand the order that is all that protects us from chaos” (he means racial chaos)
Hitler: “the main difficulty is not to establish a new order of things but to clear the ground for its establishment.”
Peterson: “new and benevolent order”
Hitler: “new and better world order”
Peterson: “Conversely, just when everything seems lost, new order can emerge from catastrophe and chaos.”
Hitler: “a new order has begun to crystallize from a state of chaotic conflict”
Peterson: “This individual… (re)establishes social order”
Hitler: “establishment of an entirely new spiritual order”

Plagiarizing Mein Kampf is a neo-Nazi tradition. Indeed, neo-Nazis occasionally communicate with each other by quoting and paraphrasing Adolf Hitler. This is what resulted in Jordan Peterson’s friend, Faith Goldy, being outed as a neo-Nazi. But Goldy was merely a Canadian journalist. Certainly, a Canadian educator wouldn’t plagiarize Hitler, would they?

At least two have done just that: Malcom Ross, who taught Nazi propaganda to high school students in New Brunswick, and Ricardo Deschene, who was outed by his peers at the University of New Brunswick. Another neo-Nazi educator from Canada, James Keegstra, did not plagiarize Hitler, although he was supported by Ernst Zündel, who Peterson defended while omitting that Zündel had served five years in Germany for violating hate-speech laws and two years in Canada for posing a threat to national security. During a talk in which Peterson stood up for the alt-right “comedian” Mark Meechan, who was fined for training his dog to give what resembled the Sieg Heil upon hearing “Gas the Jews,” Peterson implied that Zündel had been the victim of governmental malevolence and advised his listeners to “wake up and push back.” The phrase “wake up” is a neo-Nazi dog whistle. “Germany Awake!” was a National Socialist slogan and Hitler was forever banging on about awakening the German Volk to the danger of the Jews.

Beyond Order is riddled with plagiarism, crypto-fascism, and occultism. To cite an example, in describing a Rider-Waite Tarot card designed by Arthur Waite, Peterson writes, “The Fool is a young, handsome man, eyes lifted upward, on a journey in the mountains, on a sunny day—about to carelessly step over a cliff…” And Aleister Crowley wrote: “The Fool of the Tarot… In the common interpretation of the card, the Scholiasts say that the picture is of a gay, careless youth, with a sack full of follies and illusions, dancing along the edge of a precipice…” I ask you: why would a self-help book contain an image and explanation of an occultic Tarot card?

Arthur Waite was a demonologist and associate of Aleister Crowley, who wrote about Waite several times, even basing a character on him in a novel. Waite penned books on black magic, alchemy, Rosicrucianism, and devil worship. Aleister Crowley hated Arthur Waite, but copied several of his tarot cards for his own deck which was published posthumously. One card that Crowley paid a designer to imitate was The Fool. And Peterson (or Penguin) paid a designer to imitate the Rider-Waite Tarot card, The Fool, because the original was still protected by copyright.

A fervent anti-Semite, Aleister Crowley was obsessed with Hitler’s Mein Kampf and tried to send the Führer his Book of the Law in the hopes that his Satanic religion could serve as the “philosophical basis for Nazi principles” and the “base for [a] Nazi New Order.” Maps of Meaning is overflowing with Crowley plagiarism (e.g. Peterson: “the many-breasted Greco-Roman Goddess Diana… mistress of the animals”; Crowley: “the Great Mother of Fertility, Diana of the Ephesians, Many-Breasted.”). Crowley wrote, “I have always considered [Hitler] a prophet in the Old Testament sense of the word, a more or less inspired madman who brings about the things that he… desires by exciting mass hysteria.” And Peterson has said to his students: “Then there’s Hitler… a person who was able to produce mass hysteria in his followers.” Much of Peterson’s Crowley-plagiarism comes from The Confessions of Aleister Crowley. One of Crowley’s German followers sent a copy of the autobiography to the Gestapo. Many top Nazis, including Adolf Hitler, were influenced by the occult. Heinrich Himmler was an occultist and a Luciferian.

Beyond Order is published by Penguin, a company that put into circulation Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. But hey, thoughtful critiques no longer pay the bills and fascism is gaining on democracy. The American president recently tried to topple democracy with the help of neo-Nazis and QAnon, but there’s no need for alarm. As conservatives kept telling concerned liberals while Trump demonized foreigners, put children in cages, ordered the Proud Boys to “stand by,” and called neo-Nazis “very fine people”: “Everyone I don’t like is Hitler.”

This is the stock rejoinder used when someone has the temerity to point out that a neo-Nazi is a neo-Nazi. It implies that no one is like Hitler and no one ever was. With few ideas of their own, Peterson’s cult members are wont to regurgitate this tired phrase. If you inform them that their leader has said, “No one likes to think they’re a Nazi, but everyone is one,” they’ll counter with: “He never said that.” If you show them the source, they’ll say, “He didn’t mean it that way,” or “You’re taking him out of context.”

Here’s some context: before JP identified as a life-coach, he identified as an expert on evil and said that Maps of Meaning was chiefly about why seemingly ordinary people would participate in an event like the Holocaust. Naturally, listeners would assume that Peterson’s Holocaust interest would stem from concern, but such an assumption would be incorrect. Peterson has admitted that 12 Rules for Life was essentially a rewrite of Maps of Meaning, raising the question: how could a self-help book—nay, two self-help books—be about the Holocaust? And how could books about the Holocaust barely mention the Holocaust? But then, why would they contain occultic poetry (e.g. Yeats’s “The Second Coming”; Yeats was also an associate of Crowley) and so many references to schizophrenia, demons, and Satanic possession? Why would they include praiseful remarks about Lucifer? And why would they include numerous references to Egyptian pyramids and the all-seeing eye of Horus (Aleister Crowley’s logo was a pyramid containing the all-seeing eye of Horus)?
Here’s what Peterson has said about “Rule 7—Do What Is Meaningful, Not What Is Expedient”:

“You have to understand that you could not only do what the Nazi camp guards did in Auschwitz, but that you could actually enjoy it, and then you have to decide that you’re not going to do that anymore, and that’s not an easy thing to figure out. Well, and that’s what [Rule 7 is] about. So, that’s a rough chapter, man.”

Rule 7 hardly touches on Nazism or Auschwitz, but it really is about those subjects, because (to restate) it’s rendered in a crypto-fascist code.

Feel free to disbelieve me. Instead, believe the big lie. As Hitler writes in Mein Kampf, and as Peterson reproduces in 12 Rules for Life:

“In the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses… are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously… and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation.”

When Peterson says, “One of the things I’ve always thought about Hitler is that, you know, people... you have to admire Hitler. That’s the thing, because he was an organizational genius,” perhaps it would be best to doubt and waver and continue to think that there may be some other explanation for what is obviously manic praise. I mean, apart from Peterson’s small lies about Hitler, he wouldn’t tell the big lie. After all, he has taught at Harvard and has spoken at Oxford, and in the (sorry) realm of public intellectuals, his is the dominant discourse. Besides, Rule 8 is “Tell the Truth or at Least Don’t Lie,” and Peterson learned to tell the truth from the voice with the eyes that appeared in his mind after he experienced his schizophrenic “split.” The truth is: for JP’s groupies to go “beyond order,” they first need to get their lives “in order.” And that’s what their leader is helping them to do.

Troy Parfitt is the author of The Devil and His Due: How Jordan Peterson Plagiarizes Adolf Hitler.