Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life, review: Jordan Peterson is back with a self-help book that is not here to hug you better – Telegraph.co.uk

This book does not arrive like other books. This book is very self-important and hard to get a glimpse of, a sign of Jordan Petersons global celebrity and the psychodrama that surrounds him. Either he is the worlds greatest public intellectual( er, really?) or he is that strange, driven Canadian shrink who found fame in his fifties by writing a book that reached those who dont normally read self-help books: men.

Not since I had to go and sit in an office to leaf through Madonnas Sex book and promise not to reveal anything about it (guess what it was about!) have I felt so much nervousness around a book.

The success of his earlier book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, was phenomenal, selling millions globally. Overnight this stern-looking clinical psychologist became a guru for men who felt dispossessed by modernity, and feminism in particular. His lectures were packed out. His YouTube channel a huge success.

His advice stand up straight (this is how lobsters establish dominance, apparently), tidy your room, treat yourself like you are someone you are responsible for helping was obvious and underpinned by stories from his clinical practice and his reading of the Bible, Jung, Russian literature and mythology.

In an age of moral relativism he was giving his readers a compass. He spoke about the poor self-esteem of young men and took against the aggrieved victimhood of campus culture. He reminded me a lot of Camille Paglia, whom I interviewed in the 1990s. Punchy and utterly at odds with kids raised in soft play areas.

For this he became a figurehead for the alt-Right when he is not that at all. Rather he is an old-fashioned liberal with a conservative attitude to the family, a man who doesnt believe in patriarchy but acts precisely as a paternal authority to all the lost boys.

Watching him, it is apparent he cannot obey his own rules, but in telling us that life is suffering (as all major religions do) and that the goal is to find meaning rather than happiness, he does have something to say. Within him, one feels chaos is near the surface. He often cries and is crumpled with emotion.

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Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life, review: Jordan Peterson is back with a self-help book that is not here to hug you better - Telegraph.co.uk