In the YouTube video “Rex Murphy Interviews Jordan Peterson,” Peterson speaks of the hundreds of people, many of them young, who stop him in the street or send him messages online thanking him for helping turn their lives around. At approximately 24 minutes into the video, Peterson, speaking of the cumulative effects their comments have cast on his “general state of mind,” begins weeping. “I had no idea the degree to which people were dying for a word of encouragement,” he says, adding that so many suffer from a “despair that can be ameliorated with not much more than words of encouragement.”
This scene deeply touched me. There was Peterson, a psychologist, a renowned intellectual, author, and speaker, shedding real tears and sharing real emotions over the despair he had witnessed in others, anguish that might be overcome with simple encouragement.
