TELL THE TRUTH —OR,ATLEAST, DON’T LIE;

ASSUME THAT THE PERSON YOU ARE LISTENING TO MIGHT KNOW SOMETHING YOU DON’T; BE PRECISE IN YOUR SPEECH

Rule 8 is about telling the truth, and the truth is I was feeling more and more apathetic about this whole thing. The more tangible rules seemed absurdly obvious to me. Clean your house. Don’t compare yourself to others. Stand up straight. Some of it is helpful, but I didn’t understand how this could be considered life-altering advice. (Rule 12 is to pet cats whenyouencounterthemin the street, which is so facile that I wasn’t able to think of a single thing to write about it. Peterson tries to dress it up by saying that playing with animals reminds us that “the wonder of Being might make up for the ineradicable suffering that accompanies it,” but I couldn’t be fooled into thinking this was deep.)

I decided to join some of the members of a local Jordan Peterson meet-up group outside an Ottawa Starbucks on a Friday afternoon. Rule 9 is about assuming the person you’re listening to knows something you don’t, so I figured they could help me understand Peterson’s appeal.

“He’s really capturing something that’s missing from the public discourse in our time,” said Sandra, who declined to give her last name. Sandra created the meet-up group over a year ago. She saw it more as a book club, for studying books that have shaped Peterson’s thinking, though it’s morphed into more of a self-help group since then. She’s interested in Peterson’s intellect, the way he weaves different ideas together. She calls herself a diehard liberal, but a contrarian.

“Fundamentally, it’s responsibility is what’s he’s selling,” said Xander Miller, the group’s other de facto leader. “Individual responsibility.” These days, one of the others chimed in, you can “get a trophy just for showing up.”

Xander takes this call to action seriously. At age 39, he’s married with two kids, works part-time from home and is the primary caregiver. This isn’t by choice, exactly, though his eyes welled up when he talked about being able to spend time with his young kids. He used to work two jobs, but that fell apart. He’s not been as successful as his wife, he said, but he’s now trying to find full-time work.

Since discovering Peterson, he’s taken to carrying a large notebook with him at all times, in which he lists everything he needs to do on a given day, including shaving and brushing his teeth. He makes lists of everyone he speaks to, as well, and puts checkmarks beside the names of those with whom he has meaningful interactions. “Before, I wasn’t taking control, and I wasn’t making decisions,” he said. “I’m becoming more the master of my own life.”

Xander organizes bi-weekly Sort Yourself Out meetings for the group.

Chris Yandt, 53, is a regular attendee. Chris spent seven-and-a-half years working at Loblaws and is now looking for something better. “I think I’ve lived most of my life by default,” he said. “It’s better to wake up eventually than not at all.”

Maybe the appeal is less about Peterson himself, I thought, and more about finding someone who can guide you in your time of need. For those seeking structure or a set of principles to live by, Peterson can deliver.

And yet there was something almost reverential in the way the men talked about him — especially Eric Dagenais, an earnest young man who listened to the others so intently that he confessed to being exhausted by the end of the meeting. Eric, 34, has recently decided that he wants to be a father, but he’d like his future wife to stay at home to raise the children. He’s been working hard, hoping to get to a sixfigure salary sometime soon.

I asked if any of them had ever met Peterson. Eric told me he’d been to see him talk, standing near the front of the crowd. “His presence and his stare was just like….” — he jerked back, miming being struck by an invisible force. “As I turned to stone,” he said.

They talked about religion a lot, the three men, though they weren’t all conventionally religious. They feel something is being lost as Western society becomes more secular: a moral compass, perhaps. “We threw out a very important baby with all that bathwater,” Xander said.

Enter Father Peterson and his 12 commandments, I thought. Yet I was enthralled by them, this community of disciples. They get together just to talk about ideas and improve themselves, and Peterson made that possible for them. I have nothing like that in my life — how many of us do, really? For the first time, I thought maybe I was starting to get it.