As I understand it, the central piece of the wildly popular Jordan Peterson’s message is simply “take responsibility.” Make your bed, get out of bed, become good at something, don’t be a victim. That is a timeless and necessary thing to say and I have no problem with it.

But something else is beginning to be a problem for me: Time and again Peterson refuses to deal with the very real barriers and obstacles that people face.

It’s all fine and good to say that “hierarchies of competence are desirable and should be promoted” if you have progressed in such a hierarchy. But does a person’s competency and wealth depend solely on their brilliance and hard work?

It is difficult to trust a public figure, even one as charismatic and earnest as Peterson, over the reality of one’s own lived experience. Take, for instance, Peterson’s insistence that we focus only on equality of opportunity and stop worrying about equality of outcome. Fine. But if the same kinds of people always get the best outcomes, is that not proof that we have failed to create equality of opportunity? (Unless you are willing to say some races or groups of people are inherently superior to others, which seems a little regressive.) How can you separate equality of opportunity from equality of outcome?

Also, because of my commitment to following Jesus, I have to believe that even the desire and the energy to work hard is a gift. “The one bringing forth in you both the desire and the effort—for the sake of his good pleasure—is God” (Philippians 2:13, NET).

I worry that Peterson knows reality to be more complex, but that he continues trumpeting his Horatio Algerian, you-can-do-it trope because a more nuanced message would spell the end of his massive following. A more careful analysis is simply too unsexy to attract the fan base he has had up until now.

Further, it’s hard to believe that Peterson isn’t trying to be downright incendiary with some of his statements. There’s no truth to the idea that Western society is a male-dominated patriarchy? Really? What about laws as recent as 100 years ago that forbade women to vote (or in some cases, forbade the women who didn’t own land)? Maybe patriarchy is becoming less of a problem in some spheres of Western society, yes, but it is has been, and still is, a very real, live issue.

Or how about this one: “What happens in equity is that everyone gets to have the same depth of grave.” Peterson then goes on to display photos of dead people who starved in Stalinist Russia. That escalated pretty quickly, don’t you think? Striving for income equality inevitably leads to mass starvation? Maybe we should consider this: In the US the richest 20 percent of the population is 8.5 times richer than the poorest 20 percent, whereas in Finland that rate is 3.7 times. It is hard to believe that Finland achieved this without considering equality of outcome.

I have to give it to Jordan Peterson: he identified and articulated a real need. It appears that in some quarters of society people needed to stop whinging and get to work. But now it is time for Peterson to take the logical next step. He must give his eager audience a new rallying cry and take them to the next stage of the conversation.

This is what he should tell them. People who have the resources should work hard to improve themselves, yes, but after they have done this, they should focus their energy on the millions of people who will not rise above poverty without their direct and immediate assistance.