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While I wait for my meatloaf to cook, I am going to write about Jordan Peterson.

If you don’t know who he is, you must not be an incel, a white supremacist, or a man who is paying alimony to a woman who is currently sleeping in a house you paid for, with the better-looking man who broke up your marriage. I know other types of people listen to him, but these three types are pretty much locks.

He’s some sort of professor. Psychology, I think. He defends masculinity and Western culture, and he debates wooly-minded leftists on Youtube. He comes off looking great in these debates, but that shouldn’t surprise anyone, because leftism is not fact-based, and the far-out types with whom he argues are not the sort of people who win arguments with intelligent, truthful people.

He’s very, very smart, he thinks very well on his feet, and he also talks over people, so he’s like a Bill O’Reilly who actually knows a lot. Trouble is, some conservatives are turning him into a secular messiah. They seem to think that if Jordan Peterson wins enough debates and SHUTS DOWN or SCHOOLS enough leftists on video, Trump will be reinstated, women’s suffrage will magically vanish, and we will once again be able to buy .44 Magnums at K-Mart without background checks.

Youtube keeps throwing Peterson videos at me. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because I subscribe to a few gun channels, or it could be because I looked up “Let’s go, Brandon.”

I watched one yesterday. It was really disappointing. Peterson appeared to be telling everyone how to spend their autumn years correctly. I’m not sure. He started with the premise that men lose their will to live upon retiring and then die. After that, there was a lot of rambling about stopping and smelling the roses, going to your kids’ school plays, and so on.

I believe the person who presented the video did some editing, because it seemed pretty incoherent.

If I had to summarize the message and the plan he seemed to be presenting, here is how I would try:

1. You probably think retirement will be great because you will be able to rest and do what you want.

2. If you retire and get to do as you please, you will probably be miserable and die a few months later because you will have lost your reason for living.

SO:

3. Decide what kind of life you want to have.

4. Make a plan to get that life.

5. Stick to the plan until you succeed.

6. While doing this, make absolutely sure your family isn’t dysfunctional.

7. Have a fantastic, extremely fulfilling life.

He was talking to Joe Rogan. Now, Joe Rogan seems like a guy who wants to do right, but he is not Solomon. He is not Socrates. He is supposed to be an expert on two things: comedy and the martial arts. Without getting into a discussion of his standup act, which doesn’t have Dave Chappelle worried about his place at the top, Joe Rogan is the fight expert who told us Ronda Rousey was, essentially, a once-in-a-lifetime athlete.

We all know that Rousey did very well until she ran into a lady who fought the person, not the hype. Holly Holm beat her decisively in under two rounds, knocking her unconscious and injuring her so badly she couldn’t eat properly for months. In her next and last match, Rousey lost again, in under one round, and people realized she wasn’t very good. She wasn’t the G.O.A.T. She wasn’t even good enough to be competitive.

So that’s Joe Rogan. A man who consumes a gigantic amount of pot and pot-related products, who may not be the least gullible person alive.

Rogan seemed awestruck with Peterson, but we have seen that before.

By the way, Peterson has had a cradle-to-grave support system. He has been in school since he was in kindergarten, apart from one year off. He went straight from college into work as a paid academic, so he has been insulated from life’s bumps and bruises at least since 1984, when he became a grad student. Academics are as institutionalized as prison inmates and career military men. They are looked after by others. They never have to learn how to survive outside the incubator. Yet he is giving advice to people who live in the real world.

My take was that either Peterson had a grossly inflated opinion of the value of his advice, or the person who posted the video cut out some really important stuff.

The theory that not having a career will destroy you is just plain fatuous. I don’t have a job, and I love it. The thought of going to work is appalling. I would have to use the right pronouns. There would be office politics. I would have to go to seminars to learn why white people are bad. I would have to watch people with much less ability get things I deserved because they were more diverse than I was. I would never be able to speak the truth. I would be afraid to. And there is a good chance I would have to get whatever shots Joe Biden thinks are important.

I wish I had never had to work at a secular job. I don’t care about leaving my stamp on the secular world. I don’t feel I owe the world my contribution as a lawyer or anything else, because I don’t. It’s amazing that anyone could think anything that stupid.

My dad practiced law from 1959 until 2015, when dementia got him. He was a superb lawyer. He was the top dog at one of the nation’s finest labor firms. He was Order of the Coif. He was third in his class. He beat Ivy League lawyers left and right. Now, 6 years after he quit, he is dead, and no one cares. No one ever says, “Thank God that lawyer changed my life.” The firm he ran no longer has his name on it. No one but me misses him. It’s like he never existed.

He had a rotten marriage, he had two dysfunctional kids, and he died without seeing a grandchild. But he was great in his career.

That’s what fulfilling your debt to society by distinguishing yourself in your secular career gets you. It’s a little different if you invent the polio vaccine, but if you’re a typical person, this is what you can expect.

Forty years from now, Jordan will be dead, and he will be in the same boat as my dad, except one hopes his family will be in better shape. More people will know his name, but he will not have changed the world.

I almost never get bored. I never ask myself what my purpose is. I never feel that my life is meaningless. I never feel empty. There are more great things to do than I have time for. And I don’t use an alarm clock. If you use one, you know how wonderful that is.

Here is what I say: if not having a job bothers you, it’s because you are your job. Lose your job, lose yourself. I am not a job.

Two things that expose people are solitude and freedom. If you can’t handle either, the problem is inside you.

I commented on the video, saying Peterson seemed like the Leo Buscaglia of conservative intellectuals.

Leo Buscaglia was a Special Education professor at USC back in the Sixties. Right away, you may see reason for concern. After one of his students committed suicide, he became very concerned about love and smelling the roses and so forth. Like Peterson, he became a motivational speaker. I don’t know if Peterson bills himself as a motivational speaker, but that’s the function he performs.

Buscaglia, who seemed to be in very good touch with his feminine side, used to go on tours in which he appeared before crowds, sweating aggressively, and charged them money to tell them they needed to love more and act sort of flamboyant. I think you get the idea. “Dance like nobody’s watching, love like you’ve never been hurt, dye one side of your head blue and eat Quorn,” et cetera. Give your secretary roses. Buy the old lady next door a new car. Let your dog eat at the dinner table. Hug a hundred mortified strangers every time you go to the grocery store.

He must have worked in the same factory with the guy who designed the “Live Laugh Love” sign.

When I was a kid, my family, which did not have the benefit of Peterson’s advice, was very dysfunctional. Love was lacking in my life. I used to watch Buscaglia on PBS, and I thought he was great. He made me feel better. I was a kid, however. I thought John Denver was great. I thought the Billy Jack movies were great. I thought George Carlin was clever, not bitter and sophomoric. I owned an ABBA cassette. I had a lot of maturing to do.

I’m an adult now, and I realize Buscaglia was not really changing the world or helping many people. He didn’t help me, for example. He made people feel bad about not being more effusive and affectionate, and then he sent them out into the world, where they behaved much as they had before, only they were out the price of a lecture ticket.

Buscaglia had good intentions, probably, but all he did was tell us we should be better, by his standards, without telling us how to do it. Seems to me Peterson does the same thing.

He confuses goals with methods. He also gives people tasks they can’t realistically be expected to perform, unless the video is wildly misleading.

He says you should figure out what kind of life you want to have. If I had done this early on, and I had succeeded, I would now be Superman. My goals changed, so if I had started a few years later, I would have been a surgeon. And miserable, like most surgeons. I eventually decided I wanted to be a physicist. Nearly all physicists are miserable. They work in leftist hives, they have no freedom, their work is extremely hard, they are surrounded by people who are incapable of normal relationships, no one understands them, they repel most women, and they don’t make a lot of money.

If you try to choose the right career path for yourself, you will probably pick something that won’t make you happy, and you may very well pick something you’re not good at. Look at Joe Biden.

Peterson says you should make a plan to get the life you want. That may work, if you have a simple goal, like becoming a lawyer. If you want to do anything unusual, you will probably be unable to come up with a good plan at the start. I admit, though, making a plan is the least challenging thing he mentioned.

Sticking to the plan, like Peterson says…okay, just do that. Like you stuck to your New Year’s resolutions. Like you eat salad twice a day and run 70 miles a week and never file an extension on your taxes. Just make a multi-year plan and execute it. Because everyone can do that. Nothing will happen to mess with your plan, and you will never lack motivation or self-discipline. Why didn’t anyone else think of this? The truth was staring us right in the face, and we missed it.

Here’s another problem: your plan may not work, even if you make a good effort. My plan to become a physicist didn’t work, even though I was smart enough. I got burned out and then fried my mind with ADD drugs, trying to stay in the game. Hillary Clinton’s plan to be president didn’t work out, and she really tried. Ronda Rousey’s plan to retire undefeated and become a major movie star didn’t work out. Things often don’t work out. Then you’re back to the challenge of trying to choose a destiny.

Telling people not to screw up their families is not helpful at all. Having a healthy family is not a method you can apply. It’s a goal you want to attain. Saying, “Treat your family right so they won’t be dysfunctional,” is like coaching a football team and saying, “Let’s win by carrying the ball across the finish line more than the other guys do.” The players already know they’re supposed to do that. Every man knows he’s supposed to treat his family right and try to keep everyone functioning, but there is no standard, reliable method for doing it. Peterson doesn’t provide one.

The other day I was writing about Dave Chappelle, and I compared him to Eddie Murphy and Elvis Presley, who went nuts because they believed what their sycophants told them. Like Presley and Murphy, Chappelle is starting to wear weird, unique clothing, as if he were a superhero. Chappelle Man, visiting briefly from Mount Olympus to save the world with edgy observational humor no white man can utter without being destroyed by the agents of evil.

Peterson may be dealing with similar issues. All sorts of angry men, especially single ones who deserve to be single, are telling him he’s their voice, their oracle, their deliverer, their testosterone singularity, and based on his performances, I get the impression he’s buying it. He is really, really certain he’s right about things. He sounds as though he thinks what he does is extraordinarily important.

I’ll tell you what. There are Christians out there baptizing other people with the Spirit of Holiness. There are Christians making tumors disappear and healing kids of autism. Christians have ended addictions permanently. Christians cast demons out of people. They connect people with God so they can hear him and be guided by the best plan-maker on Earth. It’s hard for me to be impressed by a psychologist. I am old, I have known a lot of people, many of them have been to psychiatrists and psychologists, and I have never heard one person say a shrink fixed his problems for good.

You can’t fix the world’s problems, or even your own, by being smart and going to college. Making plans with your unaided mind won’t make your life work.

Peterson says he’s a Christian, but it’s not the kind of Christianity we see in the Bible. The Bible’s Christianity is about miracles and supernatural knowledge, coupled with ridding people of demons and filling them instead with God’s Spirit. Peterson’s Christianity is like C.S. Lewis’s. It’s the kind of Christianity that doesn’t embarrass snobs. It’s filled with all sorts of excuses. “I know brilliant people like me aren’t supposed to be Christians, but…” What you’re really saying is, “World, please love me and admire me, even though you hate Jesus.”

Peterson has explained his conversion in intellectualspeak, and that’s distressing to read, because a much smarter person than either of us said this: “Truly I say to you, unless you are converted and become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.”

You can’t become a real Christian and hold onto the pride you take in your mind. You have to give up some dignity. You have to be willing to speak in tongues and sound like you’re babbling. You have to let people command demons to come out of you, in front of other people. You have to get down on the floor and put your face on it while people watch. You have to tell God you’re disgusting and low, and that you deserve hell. These things are facts.

You have to believe Noah’s ark was real.

Christianity is embarrassing to many smart people. They have to make excuses for it. They have to have arguments that make them sound clever. They’re just bringing attention to their pride, and pride is the worst quality a person can have.

The man who was probably the greatest Christian of the last century was an illiterate plumber who didn’t learn to read until he was married. The disciples were uneducated country boys. Amos was a farmer. Elisha was a teamster who stopped plowing and killed two of his oxen for a goodbye feast when he was called.

The high priest and his father-in-law, with the consent of most of the Jewish sages in Jerusalem, had Jesus murdered. Solomon, the wisest man who lived before Jesus, became an idolater and died in disgrace. Paul was a disciple of a top rabbi, and he rounded up Messianic Jews so they could be murdered. It wasn’t until he was humbled that God saw fit to use him. Paul cast out demons and spoke in tongues. He didn’t scare demons by memorizing the Talmud. Not that it existed yet.

Paul said, “not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called.” If you’re bright, you should be glad you made it instead of trying to distinguish yourself from all the NASCAR-watching mouth-breathers who believe for foolish, tribal reasons.

Christianity isn’t something you have to apologize for or explain sheepishly as though you were telling people why you never change your underwear. The excuses don’t make you sound smart. They prove you’re insecure or ignorant.

Here is a quotation from a Peterson interview:

Sometimes, the objective world and the narrative world ‘touch’—you know, that’s Jungian synchronicity—and I’ve seen that many times in my own life. And so, in some sense, I believe it’s undeniable. You know, we have narrative sense of the world. For me that’s been the world of morality, that’s the world that tells us how to act. Its real, we treat it like it’s real. It’s not the objective world, but the narrative and the objective world touch.

And the ultimate example of that in principle is supposed to be Christ. But I don’t know what to do with that…it seems to me to be oddly plausible. But I still don’t know what to make of it. Partly because it’s too terrifying a reality to fully believe. I don’t even know what would happen to you if you fully believed it.

I think he’s trying, but honestly, it’s like something you would hear at a cocktail party on the Upper West Side. Everyone knows you’re smart. You don’t need to keep proving it. Just BELIEVE and surrender. Get used to having blue collar friends who buy their furniture at Costco. Lay hands on somebody. Jesus was smarter than Peterson, and he communicated like a regular person. He wouldn’t have dropped Jung’s name.

By the way, synchronicity is supernatural. It happens because we are surrounded by spirits. It happens a lot to Spirit-led Christians.

Jordan Peterson, Donald Trump, Thomas Sowell, Milton Friedman, and the Proud Boys couldn’t fix the world, or you, if they got together and worked at it every day. The Holy Spirit is our prescription. We shouldn’t be self-medicating.