Lessons from the school of Jordan Peterson

The Canadian culture warrior launched an online academy promising to dispense with 'woke nonsense.' I enrolled.

- ALEX BOYD

Jordan Peterson's online Peterson Academy is a thumb of the nose to his previous employer, the University of Toronto, which he parted ways with due in part to the "appalling ideology currently demolishing the universities and, downstream, the general culture," he wrote in 2022.

Alone in my home office, I feel unprepared to be wrestling with the death of God.

On my computer screen, Toronto-based psychologist turned conservative culture warrior Jordan Peterson paces and points and gestures as he begins his eight-hour deep dive on Friedrich Nietzsche, the 19th-century German poet and philosopher whose career burnt brilliantly but short. Nietzsche famously declared God a fiction and, as Peterson tells it, predicted an unravelling of meaning and morals from which we're still trying to dig ourselves out.

As anyone who has watched one of his many YouTube videos knows, Peterson speaks with a gravelly intensity, and here he has centre stage. The reaction from many of my fellow online students is gushing. "I have tears in my eyes," one person posts in the video's comment section. "Thank you for your work Jordan," writes another. "I got goosebumps and a hungry brain to feed." I start counting every time Peterson says "axiomatic" (an average of once every six minutes). The in-person audience sits impressively still.

Peterson Academy, his eponymous new online school that promises to dispense with "woke nonsense," is officially open for business. A beta version of 18 on-demand video courses on everything from nutrition to neuroscience was soft-launched to early enrollees in late August, with the full version set to roll out Sept. 9. The cost to subscribe is $499 (U.S.) - roughly $670 (Canadian) - per year.