Cancel culture is personal for Jordan Peterson. His voice rises in emotion as he recalls the indignity of finding out on Twitter about his Cambridge lecture series – subsequently reinstated – being cancelled. “Sorry, it’s a bit of a sore spot,” he says, taking a drink of water.
But it’s also a great deal more than that to him. “This isn’t a battle between two viewpoints, it’s nothing that trivial.” Peterson, invoking his professional experience in clinical psychology, believes that “if you can’t say what you think, soon you won’t be able to think, because mostly we think in words”.
