His publisher has preferred to gloss over his reputation as an internet controversialist, characterising him tactfully as a “modern day truth teller” and furnishing him with a page-long biography that begins: His baroque style combines pull-your-socks-up scolding with Blavatskyesque metaphysical flights It is a book that combines sensible advice gleaned from his clinical practice with inspirational anecdotes from his personal life, accounts of his academic work in the field of psychology and a lot of intellectual history of the “great books” variety, which he interprets in highly tendentious ways.
This response captures much of what, for good and ill, informs 12 Rules for Life, his long and often peculiar foray into the self-help genre.
Metaphysically I am an American pragmatist who has been strongly influenced by the psychoanalytic and clinical thinking of Freud and Jung.” Philosophically I am an individualist, not a collectivist of the right or the left. In an emailed rebuttal to a journalist who termed him a figure of the “far right”, he described his own politics as those of a “classic British liberal … temperamentally I am high on openness which tilts me to the left, although I am also conscientious which tilts me to the right. His work on the psychology of political correctness has raised eyebrows, given his recent proposal to purge “corrupt” academic departments of courses and teachers he deems infected by this pathology. His academic work includes many papers in which he seeks to understand political and religious belief in terms of the so-called “big five” personality traits – openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.
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