This is a line in the g-ddamn sand:

Several Penguin Random House Canada employees confronted management about the company’s decision to publish a new book by controversial Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson at an emotional town hall Monday, and dozens more have filed anonymous complaints, according to four workers who spoke to VICE World News.

On Monday, Penguin Random House Canada, Canada’s largest book publisher and a subsidiary of Penguin Random House, announced it will be publishing Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life by Peterson, to be released in March 2021. The book will be published by Portfolio in the U.S. and Penguin Press in the U.K., both part of the Penguin Random House empire.

Four Penguin Random House Canada employees, who did not want to be named due to concerns over their employment, said the company held a town hall about the book Monday, during which executives defended the decision to publish Peterson while employees cited their concerns about platforming someone who is popular in far-right circles.

“He is an icon of hate speech and transphobia and the fact that he’s an icon of white supremacy, regardless of the content of his book, I’m not proud to work for a company that publishes him,” a junior employee who is a member of the LGBTQ community and who attended the town hall told VICE World News.

Another employee said “people were crying in the meeting about how Jordan Peterson has affected their lives.” They said one co-worker discussed how Peterson had radicalized their father and another, who is talked about how publishing the book will negatively affect their non-binary friend.

Read it all. 

The company should not indulge this bullsh*t for one second. It should tell these people that either they grow up and do their jobs, or they go find another line of work. Publishers publish books. Period. The end. I guarantee you that there are thousands of young men and women who would love to break into publishing, who don’t have thin skins and an enormous sense of entitlement.

Neither publishing, nor journalism, nor universities can do what they are supposed to do if they cater to these wretched whiners. I am sick to death of the veto power they exercise over freedom of thought and expression. What is it going to take for the adults who run these institutions to assert authority, and protect writers from these piss-ant Robespierres?

If you are crying in a meeting at the office because of how you think Jordan Peterson affected your life, then you are not mature enough to work in publishing, and you ought to be sent away. Honest to God, I would be ashamed of myself if that’s how I behaved. What the hell is wrong with these people?! Who failed them?

Excuse me for getting so emotional about this, but I see my own future as a writer at stake here. If they can do this to Jordan Peterson, and get away with it, who can’t they do it to?

This past summer, I wrote a blog post about the psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist’s much praised book The Master And His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, about the imbalance between the analytical left brain hemisphere, and the intuitive right brain hemisphere. McGilchrist argues that in the West, we have become stranded in our left brain, and have denied the life-giving connection with the right. In a society in which this has happened, we should expect to see an impulse to control anything that violates the order that the left brain seeks to impose on society. He predicted in 2009 that in such a society:

Resentment would lead to an emphasis on uniformity and equality, not as just one desirable to be balanced with others, but as the ultimate desirable, transcending all others. As a result individualities would be ironed out and identification would be by categories: socioeconomic groups, races, sexes, and so on, which would also feel themselves to be implicitly or explicitly in competition with, resentful of, one another. Paranoia and lack of trust would come to be the pervading stance within society both between individuals, and between such groups, and would be the stance of government towards its people.

This is where the soft totalitarianism I write about in Live Not By Lies comes from. This is what these squalling victims are trying to do: use their weakness to strongarm dissenters into silence. They must not be allowed to succeed! When I wrote this summer to Dr. McGilchrist to share with him my thoughts about his 2009 book and soft totalitarianism, he responded:

Thank you for pointing out the parallels between what I seemed to predict and the current circumstances.  I say ‘seemed to predict’ because, of course, it was already happening.  But the rapidity and totality of the loss of free speech – which means precisely nothing unless it means that you respect the right of people to say things of which you disapprove – is far more serious than I could have anticipated then.  With that falls what we mean by civilisation.  And, to their eternal shame, the great institutions of learning are conniving at, even accelerating, that downfall.

Another problem that I indicated is that the left hemisphere mode of thinking is not only out of touch with reality, but cannot even understand a nuanced position, in which there are degrees of truth.  All context is ignored and only rigid doctrine permitted.  Life however is, and always will remain, complex.  Which is why we must all be allowed to say what we think without fear of bullying and intimidation.  There is much to criticise in modern Western society, and you will know from reading my book that I am hardly blind to it.  But free speech, and a passion for fairness, are two of its most valuable and irreplaceable qualities: almost unique in the history of the world.  If misunderstood, they contain the seeds of their own destruction.

The Dutch have a saying, ‘trust comes on foot and departs on horseback’.  I can hardly see it now for dust.

You may not like Jordan Peterson, but he is not the threat to civilization. These crybaby Stalinists are. They must be resisted without apology or hesitation by all of us — right and left, religious and secular — who cherish freedom of thought and expression. Enough is enough! Live not by lies!

Pre-order Beyond Order: 12 More Rules For Life for March 2, 2021, delivery.