They worship at altar of the Left because they don't know what Stalin was like

Jordan Peterson is the leading voice in the fight against cancel culture. He tells Evgeny Lebedev of the many challenges ahead

- Evgeny Lebedev

JORDAN PETERSON is opening the Peterson Academy. “Affordable to all, taught by the best,” it launches in 2024 with the promise of a rounded education in the arts and sciences. For Peterson, the world’s most famous public intellectual, general knowledge is power. “Why should you be generally educated?” he asks his daughter and co-founder of the Academy, Mikhaila, in a promotional video. “Because otherwise you’re going to be a useless, resentful, bitter, pointless, counterproductive lump.”

Such language has become typical of Peterson. Once known for the cool, icy logic he used to deconstruct feminist truisms around the gender pay gap, he’s better known today as the Right’s most passionate culture warrior, and a leading voice in the debate around freedom of speech. “I take no pleasure in the catastrophic and unprecedented decline of institutions such as Harvard,” he tells me, “or, for that matter, the collapse into ideological idiocy that has characterised once-great institutions such as the BBC.” He goes on: “I think, however, that we’re past the tipping point, and no recovery, other than that provided by alternative institutions, is now possible.”

Peterson is a staunch traditionalist. He believes in the virtue of self-sacrifice, the power of the nuclear family, and claims that taking any other approach to life makes us “anxious”, “hopeless”, and “narcissistic”. An almost Franciscan streak emerges through our conversation today, one he’s nodded to in the past when he said, “The most fundamental reality is pain”. On other occasions, he has claimed that meaning can only be found through suffering.