Sorry, Jordan Peterson: rage isn’t a great look for a self-help guru

Why is Jordan Peterson so angry? For someone whose whole routine is based on telling men to “toughen up”, the clinical psychologist and author of the bestseller 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, who rose to prominence in the UK after his run-in with Cathy Newman on Channel 4, seems to unravel at the slightest provocation. After a brutal but perfectly polite and clinical takedown in the New York Review of Books by Pankaj Mishra, where the rudest thing said about Peterson is that his latest book is packaged for people who have grown up on BuzzFeed listicles, Peterson had a meltdown. He called Mishra a “sanctimonious prick”, an “arrogant racist son of a bitch”, said he would “slap him” if he was in the room, and rounded it up with a final “fuck you”. Somewhere along the tantrum, he tweeted that Mishra was a “dealer in lies and half-truths”. The responses that followed can only be summarised as a mass sideways look to camera.

There’s a lot going on here. Now I receive a lot of abuse over pretty much all media – none, alas, as prestigious as the New York Review of Books (they are mostly confined to the less august trenches of Twitter) – but nonetheless, I can assure you that I have never been tempted to call someone who has taken the time to engage with my writing, either constructively or by telling me to go home and marry Isis, a prick. And I am a woman, so according to Jordan, more likely to be emotional. Most criticism does not even extend me the privilege offered to Jordan, which is to engage with the merits or lack thereof of his work, rather than his gender, religion or person. I am also not in the lucrative business of advising anyone to develop a thicker skin, which would be even more motivation for me to keep it together. Every time I happen on Peterson, either on social media or interviews, he seems to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown. It’s just really bad advertising.

The dissonance is comical in a Judd Apatow movie kind of way, where a human oxymoron is the punchline. Jordan is The Angry Guru, The Pissed-Off Yogi, The Totally Untogether Psychiatrist. A fragile authority who spends his time dishing it out but just can’t take it. A brittle ego who exhorts his fans to find peace by accepting that life is tough – while losing it completely every time he steps barefoot on a metaphorical piece of Lego. A tragic physician who cannot heal himself. It’s so jarring. Reading Jordan is, according to the writer Hari Kunzru, “like being shouted at by a rugby coach in a sarong”.

Jordan reminds me of the youngish Muslim preachers who became all the fashion in the Arabic-speaking world after the proliferation of satellite TV in the 90s. They just wanted youth to live a better life by following the simple rules of submission to the natural order of things – the pain was in fighting it. These preachers, always men, and always appealing to other men to shoulder their responsibilities, had the preternatural calm of the faithful but when challenged, the temperament of the hysterical. They derived their status from the hierarchy, and so once it was questioned, they were all fire and brimstone. They had little intrinsic value to offer, and even less original thinking.

In that sense Jordan is less a person and more a physical and intellectual agglomeration of What We Are Up Against, which is resistance against nascent challenges to the status quo in which everyone finds their place without having to earn it. That’s why, despite how much his critics may want to, it is hard to ignore Jordan – his popularity is emblematic of a time when the discourse on women’s and minority rights is being corrupted by a political and social nostalgia for hierarchy. We have on our hands a fight, and Jordan’s platoon is an army of men sent to a training camp of bed tidying, emerging back into society armed with the certainty that affirmative action is racist and that women only exist to suckle their young.

There are many ways to skin a Jordan. Intellectually is the most tempting, because he spends so much time framing his views in terms of Marxism, a smattering of Jung, Christian philosophy, and postmodernism. But his regular pearl-clutching, skirt-gathering episodes of the vapours signify that he is a far more simple creature. He just wants to be taken seriously, goddammit. Being exposed by someone who is so obviously smarter than him and is therefore immune to his pseudo-intellectual schtick is Jordan Peterson’s Room 101, it’s entitlement Kryptonite. It re-erects the prison walls of his mediocrity and unoriginality. This is why he is forever posting items on how much he has sold, how many views his YouTube videos have had. The void must be fed constantly.

For men like Jordan, it’s not enough to just be a self-help guy, you have to be a philosopher, an intellectual, a movement. But in reality Jordan’s work is basically one part The Game and two parts Eat Pray Love for men. And that’s OK; God knows everyone is just trying to get through this wretched life and seeking self help to find some direction, but the skill in reading that map is in accepting that there are borders. Much of the existential fulfilment Jordan preaches comes from the small wins, and how they incrementally will simply lead you to a better place than you were before – the pursuit of happiness is a “pointless goal”. His disintegrations in the face of criticism thus may be the most instructive lessons that Jordan has offered his followers. They indicate that no matter how well you tidy your room, sit proudly with your back straight, sell millions of books and draw millions of views on YouTube, none of it will bring you peace and dignity if you do not accept your limitations.

• Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist