Among the writers who uploaded to this column last year are Yoram Hazony ( The virtue of nationalism ), J.D. Vance ( Hillbilly Elegy ), Rod Dreher ( Benito Option , Live without lies ) and Patrick Deneen ( Why liberalism has failed , Regime change. Towards a postliberal future ). The group photo of the orchestra of post-liberal conservative intellectuals who animate the parties of the new right would be incomplete if the profile of Canadian Jordan B. Peterson, psychologist, cultural critic, YouTuber and author of best-selling self-help books such as Twelve rules to live by. An antidote to chaos (Spanish translation in Planeta and Catalan in Columna).
Peterson’s brand image is the use of biblical passages to think about perennial problems that endure in new forms in modern life, a formula for success that has not taken long to be copied by publishers here and there that deploy strategies to religion recovers the positions it has been losing during the process of secularization of society and cultural debate. In the case of Peterson, this resource is explicitly based on the assumption that the Bible is the core of Western civilization and that its stories offer almost exclusively, without classical literature representing real competition, not only schemes of a deep psychological meaning that They help us better understand ourselves and the world around us, but also behavioral patterns that explain how we behave and how we should do it.
The author uses biblical passages to think about perennial problems that persist in modern life
Unlike Rod Dreher, who casts the net of new conservatism among Christians of one denomination or another who feel persecuted, Peterson’s fishing for men (and the cultural initiatives that share his roadmap) is aimed at another sector. of decisive citizens in the cultural war in which the political future is settled, the group formed by those who, despite considering themselves atheists or agnostics, may come to assume that, leaving aside the theological virtue of faith and its dogmas, being Catholic or Christian is a way of being in the world that allows one to adopt a mental position suitable for putting backtracked lives or societies with which they can identify through family and national tradition.
Peterson, who has shown great skill in the art of exploiting the politically correct discourse as a martyr of dissent, has become one of the main baits for this fishing. And, perhaps for this reason, last year he received from President Katalin Novák the order of merit of Hungary, a country where he returned last week to participate, as a guest star, along with Giorgia Meloni, in the Demographic Summit that Prime Minister Viktor Orban had called to consider which are the most persuasive policies for Europeans to obey the divine command “be fruitful and multiply.”
