A Dark Intellectual: Jordan Peterson and Conservatism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The article reconstructs the ideological project of the Canadian clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson, whose popularity as a public intellectual peaked in 2018. His project is a response to the Cold War and the ideas of economic equality as well as to doctrines that promote both economic and gender equality. Egalitarianism in all its manifestations is perceived as a threat to Western civilization because it contradicts natural laws and order. Peterson justifies inequality and meritocratic dominance hierarchies as natural by invoking Price’s law, the Pareto principle, and the “Matthew effect.” The article gives a brief overview of the history, content and the field of application of these laws and analyzes the structure and internal contradictions of the arguments from evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology which Peterson uses to prove the necessity and inevitability of patriarchal dominance hierarchies in human societies. The author concludes that Peterson’s ideological project is conservative, places it in the context of the culture wars in North America during the 2010s, and compares it to the ideology of the alt-right: they have similar views on the issues of “natural order” and “sex realism” but differ on the issue of “race realism.” The popularity of this project is due mainly to its advocacy of sex realism, which gives a quasi-scientific rationale for its public’s entrenched sexism.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".