Jordan Peterson

In 1989 he tied knot with Tammy Roberts with whom he has two children, a daughter and a son. In August 2017, he became a grandfather.

A philosophical pragmatist, Peterson elucidates himself as a classic British liberal politically. He called himself a Christian in a 2017 interview but did not identify himself as one in 2018. Responding to his belief on God, he mentioned “I think the proper response to that is No, but I'm afraid He might exist".

He was born on June 12, 1962 in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada to Walter Peterson and Beverley as the eldest of three children and was raised in Fairview, Alberta. His father was a schoolteacher and his mother a librarian at the Fairview campus of Grande Prairie Regional College.

The librarian of his school Sandy Notley (mother of Canadian politician and Alberta New Democratic Party leader Rachel Notley, the 17th and present Premier of Alberta) introduced Peterson to literary works of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Aldous Huxley, Ayn Rand and George Orwell.

In 1979 he graduated from Fairview High School and started attending Grande Prairie Regional College to study English literature and political science. All through his teens Peterson worked for the New Democratic Party (NDP) but later got disenchanted and quit the party at age 18.

He left Grande Prairie Regional College in-between and took transfer to the University of Alberta, from where he obtained his B.A. in Political science in 1982. He then visited Europe and became interested in psychological origins of the Cold War, especially on European totalitarianism of the 20th century.

The ability and scope of mankind for doing evil and destruction gradually started bothering him leading him to go through works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Friedrich Nietzsche and Carl Jung. He went back to the University of Alberta and studied psychology eventually earning a B.A. degree on the subject in 1984.

He conducted research as also taught in the psychology department at the Harvard University in the capacity of an assistant and an associate professor from July 1993 till June 1998. He examined aggression spurted from substance abuse and overlooked several unconventional thesis proposals. There he received nomination for the Levenson Teaching Prize in 1998.

He went back to Canada in July 1998 where he started working as a full professor at the University of Toronto, a post he holds till present.

The fields of his study and research includes creativity, political, religious, ideological, industrial and organizational, social, clinical, neuro, abnormal, and personality psychology and psychopharmacology. Over the years he wrote and co-wrote over hundred academic papers.

In 1999 he came up with a book titled ‘Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief’ published by Routledge. He penned down the book in an attempt to "explain the meaning of history". The book where he briefly reflected on his childhood and upbringing in a Christian family took him more than 13 years to complete.

In ‘Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief’ Peterson elucidates an extensive theory on the way meanings and beliefs are constructed by people and on how they make narratives applying concepts from different fields like psychology , religion, mythology, philosophy and literature that are in conformity with the modern scientific understanding of the way the brain works.