Canadian psychologist and University of Toronto professor whom Bob and Cameron read as McLuhan's mirror image — another Alberta-born Toronto professor working the media interval, but from the opposite side: where McLuhan came out of visual space, Peterson asks whether visual space can be saved. Cameron even finds Peterson's restlessness foreshadowed in descriptions of McLuhan after his stroke.
Across the dialogues
McLuhan's mirror image — same media-interval terrain, opposite direction; even the restlessness rhymes
Peterson is McLuhan's mirror image — another Alberta-born Toronto professor on the same media-interval terrain.
"He's the mirror image — or the opposite — of McLuhan." Cameron: "Another Albertan-born University of Toronto professor."
Both are anti-environments to their age — but where McLuhan came out of visual space toward what's coming, Peterson works to save it.
"Jordan Peterson [is] providing an anti-environment like McLuhan, but in the opposite direction. Can we save visual space?"
Cameron sees Peterson's akathisia mirrored in the post-stroke McLuhan — Fitzgerald's description of McLuhan fits Peterson exactly.
"He cannot sit still. He cannot abide loud noises."
The mirror fully drawn and then turned critical — Alberta birth, the same Toronto attacks, illness at the very same age — yet Peterson stalls as a "Ewen Cameron hero" who repeats McLuhan's move (myth into a modern discipline) without ever engaging McLuhan, Innis, or the Toronto tradition he half-inherits
Cameron's verdict on the whole parallel — Peterson works McLuhan's terrain as a Ewen Cameron hero, so an encounter with McLuhan "would deepen his thought"; the wonder is that he has never had it.
"he's a Ewen Cameron figure."
The mirror itemized — both born in Alberta, both taught briefly in the US before the University of Toronto, both attacked there by colleagues, and both taken ill at the same age (Peterson 2019 / McLuhan's 1967 surgery), Peterson's akathisia matching the post-stroke McLuhan.
"there are so many parallels between the two guys."
The mirror turned to a live sighting — his 2022 Oxford and Cambridge lectures walking up to a McLuhan door he can't see, the exit named as the drop-out that is a drop-in
The live 2022 sighting — Peterson's Oxford and Cambridge lectures walk him "up to the point where he should be turning to McLuhan" to understand his own program, "but, of course, he's not doing it yet," stalled at a door he cannot see because it is behind him.
"he really should be turning to McLuhan."
Cameron's prescription — Peterson's contrarianism can only work if he "drops out," since "every drop out is a drop in"; the achievement he seeks as an end-goal "won't work," only the ceasing to be paid attention to will.
"the only way that he could genuinely do that is by realizing that he himself shouldn't be paid attention to."
The mirror pressed to its darkest register — Peterson recast as a talking head who "hogged" dialogue into passivity, his akathisia and mis-healed illness read straight onto the post-stroke McLuhan, both men lost in the tech body
Bob's ep53 charge — the long-lecture fad Peterson symbolizes keeps its audience passive, so Peterson "hogged" dialogue instead of spreading it, which Cameron caps by naming him "the Judge Judy of the Western tradition."
"So Jordan Peterson undermined the spreading of dialogue by hogging it."
The akathisia parallel sharpened — Peterson's condition (his daughter's word) is "an inability to relax," the "human jitterbug" Cameron matches to the post-1960-stroke McLuhan of Fitzgerald's and Coupland's biographies.
"And they both suffered from what Peterson daughter calls akathisia, which apparently is an inability to relax and to become a kind of human jitterbug."
Bob folds Peterson's illness into the Tech Body — he "got involved in how many viewers," fell ill, and "supposedly recovered" but came back someone else, so "he didn't heal right," the same shape as the post-stroke McLuhan whom Ted Carpenter no longer recognized.
"I wonder if anybody points that out, that he didn't heal right."
Connections
McLuhan's "mirror image" — another Alberta-born Toronto professor working the media interval, but from the opposite side.
Bob casts Peterson as McLuhan's mirror image — trying to save the visual space the exit leaves behind.
Cameron reads Peterson's Maps of Meaning as reaching back to the Cambridge school of Empson yet divorced from it.