The rise of Dr. Jordan B. Peterson is the result of a single person resonating with different groups of people paying attention to (seemingly) unrelated events. While on the surface, Dr. Peterson seems to be reaching different audiences around political correctness, free speech, dangers from changes in law, misuse of gender, corruption of the university system or ideological possession, these issues end up having something unexpected in common.
That similarity is around meaning, which, in fact, Dr. Peterson is the foremost expert in by way of his book and YouTube lecture series called Maps of Meaning. With this base as a starting point, he placed himself at the center of the crisis of our age. When he then starts to use his scientific tools and Carl Jung to explore the topic more deeply, ethics and religion are inevitably brought to the fore.
As a deeply personal exploration and experience, Dr. Peterson would have gone largely unnoticed but for the rise of using online sources for information, driven largely by a generational change. As he is exploring meaning itself, he is also experimenting with getting his work out to a wider audience through academic debates, television, online forums and YouTube. The transition of the primary source of information from distributed cognition through mainstream media to distributed cognition through online media means that people are looking to bridge the gap in sense making. This happens in the midst of Gamergate (something we’ll cover in a longer article elsewhere), a clear injustice against an entire generation. Along comes a bona fide member of the old academic system, correctly criticizing it and warning of how the old system is being corrupted. Not only that, but why it matters, how it will spread and what that means, in terms of danger for society at large.
What happens, in a world split apart, paying attention to different topics, is that Dr. Peterson draws them together and upwards towards meaning. If you see a problem in the academy, or an issue with free speech, or you are curious about pronoun use, or why men are suffering, or have the sense that the mainstream media is lying – Peterson is talking about it. He is doing so in the places that a whole generation are now most likely to get their information from.
As his profile builds, other voices, familiar with different aspects of the meaning crisis, start to either follow Dr. Peterson or imitate what they see as his success. This results in the rise in profile around many forgotten concepts, such as symbolism (Jonathan Pageau), the Meaning Crisis (Dr. John Vervaeke), decline of religious engagement (Paul VanDerKlay, Bishop Barron) and a variety of minor figures talking about sense making, corruption, politics, academia, etc. This is the Peterson Sphere, where many voices are joining together in a common discussion. Welcome, please come participate in the exploration of the realm of virtues and values with us!