Jordan Peterson’s viral interrogations of college students—particularly his relentless questioning of what it means to “believe”—have become internet catnip. But underneath the theatrical Socratic method lies something more troubling: a fundamental misunderstanding of truth that threatens the very foundations of democratic discourse.
Peterson’s approach reveals a philosopher manqué, someone with instincts but no fully developed position. When pressed to articulate what belief actually means, he’d likely stumble. What emerges instead is a hodgepodge of pragmatist philosophy mixed with conservative nostalgia—a view that treats beliefs as true if they serve certain purposes rather than if they correspond to reality.
This isn’t merely academic hairsplitting. The stakes are genuinely democratic. As one critic puts it, democracies survive only when tethered to the practiced virtue of truthfulness. Peterson’s project, intentionally or not, severs that connection.
Consider what belief actually requires. First, you need to grasp the distinction between true and false—a concept Peterson seems oddly reluctant to defend. Second, you must understand the difference between holding something as true and something actually being true. These aren’t philosophical luxuries; they’re democratic necessities.
Peterson’s pragmatist lean suggests that beliefs earn their keep through utility rather than accuracy. A belief becomes “true enough” if it promotes order, spiritual navigation, or meaning-making. Under this framework, self-deception isn’t about getting the world wrong—it’s about having an inadequate relationship with suffering, beauty, and transcendence.
The problem becomes stark when you consider social critique. Imagine two people disagreeing about whether a particular social arrangement is just. Without some notion of truthfulness—without the possibility that one person might simply be getting the world right while the other gets it wrong—how do you arbitrate? You can’t. Every claim becomes just another exercise of power.
This isn’t theoretical. When someone claims their political system has treated them unfairly, that complaint either corresponds to reality or it doesn’t. Strip away the concept of truth, and you’re left with competing power moves. The victim’s cry for justice becomes indistinguishable from the oppressor’s defense of the status quo.
What’s particularly striking about Peterson is how transparently his intellectualization serves as psychological self-rescue. His elaborate theoretical constructions seem designed to ward off disorder he finds unbearable. There’s something almost touching about this fragility, but it makes for terrible philosophy and worse civic discourse.
The mature view—the one democracy requires—treats belief as fundamentally aimed at getting the world right. This doesn’t mean we always succeed. Beliefs form under social and historical pressures that push us toward self-deception by default. But acknowledging this pressure is precisely what allows us to resist it.
Peterson’s conservative ethical nostalgia has its place in the conversation. But when it masquerades as philosophical rigor, it becomes something more dangerous: a sophisticated form of relativism that undermines the very possibility of holding power accountable.
The college students Peterson interrogates often lack the philosophical vocabulary to articulate what they intuitively grasp: that beliefs matter because truth matters, and truth matters because democracy depends on our collective capacity to distinguish between accurate and inaccurate claims about the world.
Frankly, a robust professional philosopher would have made quick work of Peterson’s position. Not through aggressive demolition, but through patient explanation of what’s at stake when we abandon truthfulness as a regulatory ideal. The irony is that Peterson, despite his protests against postmodern relativism, has constructed his own version of it—one that’s arguably more corrosive because it wears the mask of conservative respectability.
You get the picture. When intellectual positions become forms of self-rescue rather than genuine attempts to understand reality, democracy suffers. The capacity for social critique withers. Power becomes its own justification.
The solution isn’t to silence Peterson or dismiss his concerns about meaning and order. It’s to insist that those concerns be grounded in something more solid than psychological need—namely, in the difficult, ongoing work of trying to get the world right.
