For Neumann, and for Jung, consciousness—always symbolically masculine, even in women—struggles upwards toward the light. Its development is painful and anxiety-provoking, as it carries with it the realization of vulnerability and death. It is constantly tempted to sink back down into dependency and unconsciousness, and to shed its existential burden. It is aided in that pathological desire by anything that opposes enlightenment, articulation, rationality, self-determination, strength and competence—by anything that shelters too much, and therefore smothers and devours. Such overprotection is Freud’s Oedipal familial nightmare, which we are rapidly transforming into social policy.
—JORDAN PETERSON, 12 RULES FOR LIFE: AN ANTIDOTE TO CHAOS
Radical feminists had been teaching Women’s Studies at the University of Toronto since 1971. At that time, Jill Ker Conway and Natalie Zemon Davis offered the first class in Women’s Studies called HIS 348H: The History of Women. Conway, a Harvard graduate, in 1969 said about herself, “I was a good historian, but I couldn’t pretend I was going to be Marx or Hegel, someone whose interpretation of history changed the way the world thought.”1
Appropriately then for Conway, she became part of a teaching collective on the UT campus concerned with the postmodernist perspective that saw the world as divided between oppressed women and oppressive men. Other factions such as race, culture, gender identity, and disability would soon be discovered and added to the curricula of social division.
Apparently radicals of the 1960s, like Conway, had decided to take control of the children, particularly the girls, and lead them into the ahistorical, classless future of equality. This became the stated mission, supplanting traditional, biological motherhood, of many radical feminists throughout secondary and higher education. They would tear down the old, oppressive patriarchy for the new world of equal opportunity, employment, speech, dress, and eventually even biology. To scholars of this phenomena, like Jordan, this was a historical nightmare repeating itself. The posters of Soviet inspirational art he’d begun to collect were full of muscular, working-class women standing shoulder to shoulder with muscular working-class men depicted as nearly sexless comrades staring separately and triumphantly toward the future, fists raised in solidarity. As in all Marxist cultures, the children, the young pioneers of a new age, needed to be closely controlled and properly educated. And starting in the 1970s in the Western world, they were.
Conway elaborated on her personal perspective in educating young women but avoided using any recognizable Marxist or postmodern terms. This obscuring “thrashing of the language,” as feminist Camille Paglia suggested, was the same linguistic dodge used since the 1960s to make radical concepts seem more acceptable.
Conway intended to teach young women, dismissing young men almost entirely. She wanted young woman to avoid falling into the social norm of marriage (paired couples) and instead to pursue social justice (the civic virtues) in capitalist (commercial) societies:
It seemed to me that the cozily domestic, introduced too early in youthful development, had the effect of obliterating or muting civic and social responsibility. My nineteenth-century feminist theorists about social evolution had all worried about where and how commercial societies could instill social values that went beyond personal satisfaction and self-interest. I agreed with them that the development of the civic virtues tended to be slighted in exclusively commercial societies, and that leadership and the talent for action came from an education which did not take the paired couple as its social norm.2
But when professor Jordan Peterson arrived at the University of Toronto, thirty years into the reign of the postmodernists, he was one of the few people to openly oppose what he considered to be Conway’s unfounded curriculum and dangerous worldview. Conway had by then moved on to become president of Smith College in Massachusetts, but the concept she shared with other radicals of an overwhelming, oppressive patriarchy was well established. It was only a matter of time before his outspoken criticisms of Women’s, Gender, and Race Studies and his increasing public profile touched off an intramural war at UT and brought the global culture war home. It didn’t help his case that he often ridiculed his antagonists:
It’s so comical watching the feminist postmodernists, in particular, rattle on about the absence of gender reality and act out the archetypal devouring mother at exactly the same time. For them the world is divided into predators and infants and the predators are evil and need to be stopped, and the infants need to be cared for.3
To Jordan, postmodern radical feminism was not only an attack on him, it was an attack on vital concepts like capitalism, marriage, and the remarkable advances of civil rights underlying Western civilization. It was particularly poisonous to the fundamental Western concept of the sovereign individual that always drew Jordan’s ire:
In the postmodernist world there are no sovereign individuals. That’s a Judeo-Christian, oppressive, Western, patriarchal, arbitrary presupposition. It’s your group identity that’s primary and paramount. You don’t have ideas and thoughts, you have what you’ve been socially conditioned to believe, and the exchange of ideas is nothing but a power game that’s played between groups of people who are opposing each other for predominance on the world stage. That’s it.4
Rejection of individual sovereignty was really the end of the world as Jordan knew it. Because it was the foundation of all Western law; the entire canon of Western civilization would collapse if it was dismissed. But that was exactly what was happening.
Mythologically, these overbearing postmodern educators were also a twentieth-century reincarnation of Jung’s archetypal Devouring Mother, represented in the East by the fearsome Hindu goddess Kali, and in the West by Freud’s Oedipal Mother.
According to Jung, this is an all-powerful dominating mother who clings desperately to her children during childhood, controls them completely through adulthood, and insists on defending them, even against their wishes, as adults. In the process, she devours every scrap of personal strength and individual initiative, and prevents her children from developing the ability to even defend themselves. She ends up killing them, either by making them too weak to survive, or by devouring them herself if they disobey. It is the witch in Hansel and Gretel who invites the infantile children into her safe gingerbread house to fatten them up for the oven. It is the quite grim fairy tale of the goddess Kali in the East as told by Paramahansa Yogananda, a respected teacher of Western audiences:
Kali stands naked. Her right foot is placed on the chest of her prostrate husband. Her hair streams out, disheveled, behind Her. A garland of human heads adorns her neck. In one of four hands she brandishes a [bloody] sword; in another, a severed head. Her tongue, usually painted a bright red, lolls out as though in blood-lust.5
Challengers in the modern world, like Jordan, who could see Conway’s obscured motives clearly, were destined to become another severed head on Kali’s necklace. He was the snake in Conway’s walled garden of Eden for young women. This archetypal behavior was likely not intentional or even conscious to Conway. Like all Devouring Mothers she was doing everything for the children. That was the authentic impulse, certainly. But her conscious goal was to destroy the oppressive patriarchy and so, she must have known her efforts were all about power.
Jordan clarified how Devouring Mothers actually operated in current Western society,
The devouring mother archetype is one that can be described as a woman who selfishly loves her children, “protecting” them from the real world to such an extent that they become permanent infants—incompetent wards of the mother for life. She is only loving when her children do what she wants, and she is hateful, cruel, and even homicidal when they don’t.
She is the various so-called civil rights movements that seek to suppress free speech in the name of political correctness. And she is the unacknowledged social policy that implores parents to lie to their children in an effort to “keep them safe” all while robbing them of the very life experience they need to face the world with wisdom.6
Modern Devouring Mothers, such as university professors and administrators acting in loco parentis, would soon provide safe spaces, trigger warnings, speech codes, banishment of controversial speakers, and free coloring books, milk, and cookies for young adults who had been offended or might feel unsafe with opposing points of view or microaggressions on campus. These same young adults would also be encouraged to skip classes and engage in emotional direct action demonstrations for the rights of the oppressed. Of course, if they challenged the wisdom or motives involved, they were punished with lesser grades, possibly even banishment, forfeiting tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars paid toward a degree that was promised to provide them with the key to wealth for life.
This was a complete and convincing fairy tale, often lived inside the ivy-covered walls of replicas of medieval castles. They, the children, were fed, attentively cared for, and adopted into an academic family that stretched back generations. They were clothed with the venerable family crests of the University of Toronto, Yale, Dartmouth, and Harvard. They were given champions, warriors in shining helmets, to cheer for on fields of contest. But, like all fairy tales, a dark secret lie in wait, hidden by an enchanting dream.
The promised power to control their lives was being drained day by day. They were being educated with a road map to a life that in no way matched the world outside the fortified walls. Some realized this and rebelled. They were punished. But for most who continued to believe, they were inescapably trapped inside the castle walls, eventually isolated on their cell phones, and the tragic results soon became obvious.
The bloody goddess Kali began calling on families around the world. In the years between 2000 and 2017, she delivered tens of thousands of corpses to parents. The suicide rate had increased 43 percent among those aged twenty to thirty-five. By 2015, suicide became the second leading cause of death for college students. Ironically for radical feminists and tragically for all, in the later years of this trend, the rate of suicide among young women increased by 70 percent.7
The Family Policy Institute of Washington, a pro-family, pro-religion organization published “4 Reasons Suicide Is Increasing Among Young Adults.” The four reasons were,
1. Delayed Marriage: These unmarried (unpaired) millennials sacrifice the benefits that come with being united to a committed partner in marriage. A survey of scientific literature conducted by the Marriage and Religion Research Institute found that married individuals are healthier, happier, and more financially secure than their unmarried peers. They experience greater emotional and psychological well-being than those who are unmarried. Notably, married individuals are less likely to commit suicide.
2. Increased Worker Mobility: Researchers have discovered a link between residential mobility and suicide. “Indeed, residential mobility can be associated with higher levels of stress, crime, poor health, and what sociologists call ‘social disorganization,’” writes Ryan McMaken for the Mises Institute.
3. Decreased Religiosity: A Pew Research Center study published two years ago found that only 28 percent of millennials born between 1981 and 1996 attend religious services weekly, significantly less than 51 percent of the Silent Generation (those born between 1928 and 1945). Younger millennials are also less likely to believe in God (80 percent) or consider religion to be an important part of their lives (38 percent).
Unsurprisingly, religiously unaffiliated individuals had “significantly more lifetime suicide attempts” than their religiously affiliated peers, according to a study published in the American Journal of Psychiatry. The study’s authors also concluded that “subjects with no religious affiliation perceived fewer reasons for living, particularly fewer moral objections to suicide.”
4. Postmodernism: Millennials attain higher levels of education than previous generations. This makes them more susceptible to postmodernism, the prevailing worldview taught in higher education. Postmodernism posits that reality is unknowable and meaningless. In attempting to overthrow traditional values, postmodernism dispenses with objective and transcendent truths that provide individuals with a realistic framework through which to perceive the world. Postmodernists sort everyone into one of two groups: the oppressors and the victims, the latter of which suffer from systemic societal and cultural oppression at the hands of the former.
Survey data indicate a considerable number of millennials have bought into the postmodern worldview propagated by their colleges and universities. Only 40% of those under age 35 believe “right and wrong never change,” and just 4% of millennials hold to a biblical worldview.
Philosopher Richard M. Weaver observed decades ago that “ideas have consequences.” Teaching the next generation that life is meaningless, truth is unknowable, and that tradition and conventional wisdom must be discarded yields predictable results. Such a corrosive worldview will only produce rotting fruit.8
In 2004, as tensions on campus and online escalated around Jordan, Tammy convinced him to attend a craft fair in Comox, British Columbia, on Vancouver Island. She hoped to distract him for an afternoon and help him relax. Jordan wasn’t anxious to see old hippies scratching out a living selling dreamcatchers and perfumed candles, but it was a beautiful, sunny day, so for a moment he put down his endless labors and let Tammy have her wish.
As they wandered around the festival, listening to live music, they came upon an open-air display of striking carved images—eagles, ravens, crooked beak masks, sun masks, a wild woman. Jordan was struck by the craftsmanship and the dreamlike quality of these images. They were in fact the dream images of tribal chief Charles Joseph of the Canadian Pacific coast Kwakwaka’wakw tribe. Charles’s wife had also dragged him to the festival but to display his carvings, hopefully speak to a few interesting people, and enjoy himself for a little while. Not totally cooperating, Charles sat inside a dark tent nearby letting his carvings speak for themselves.
Outside, Jordan saw Charles sitting in his tent and, excited to meet the artist, walked in and struck up a conversation. It was clear Jordan was a genuine fan of Charles’s work and had admired other Pacific coast tribal art for a very long time. Charles caught some of Jordan’s enthusiasm and guided him through a thick photo album of his other carvings for close to an hour.
The two bonded over their mutual fascination with archetypal characters revealed through dreams and visions—the source of Charles’s art. Eventually, Charles recounted his horrifying Canadian residential school past. The brutality inflicted upon Charles and other young wards at St. Michael’s shocked Jordan in spite of his decades of work with psychologically traumatized people.
Jordan bought a few small pieces, cementing their friendship, and then made a long-term deal with Charles. The artist could send Jordan a major piece every three to six months at whatever price Charles thought it was worth, and they would see how that went. The deal continued for close to ten years and included several extra pieces Jordan bought for his family. It was all added to the Soviet-era propaganda art also in a growing collection in Jordan’s house. Perhaps unconsciously, his collection was of his personal images of heaven and hell. It was a collection of the powerful, unadorned archetypes of the feared Russian Marxist and beloved native Canadian cultures.
Charles shared more intimate details about his terrifying experiences at St. Michael’s, and how his dreams were filled with the characters he carved. Jordan listened to the story of each dream character, comparing them to Jungian archetypes and trying to piece together their psychological meaning. They talked about Christianity, its helpful and destructive influence on the Kwakwaka’wakw people, including many of Charles’s own relatives. They spoke for hours about art and how it had at least partially redeemed Charles. They became active in promoting Canadian/First Nations interests, traveling together to Ottawa to attend peace and reconciliation ceremonies.
Eventually, Jordan was invited into Charles’s family. They held a traditional adoption ceremony where Jordan was required to perform the ancient dance of the tribe to show his commitment to tribal tradition. Over time, he transformed the third floor of his Toronto home into a tribal Big House. He filled it with traditional carvings and totem poles. Big Houses were used to gather together and celebrate potlatches where gifts and offerings were exchanged between and among tribes. He was given the Kwakwaka’wakw name Alestalegie, or “Great Seeker,” and Tammy was given the tribal name Ekielagas, or “Kindhearted Woman” in two extensive ceremonies.
Yet much of this goodwill, friendship, and love would come to a bitter end by poison-tongued enemies now whispering against Jordan. This was the hidden price of his outspoken loathing for the Devouring Mothers and their Oedipal obsessions. It was the price he reluctantly paid to raise his voice against those purveyors of suicidal nihilism who were usurping his students’ freedom of speech, individual autonomy, and more often now, their lives.
At fourteen, Mikhaila was still sleeping much of the day even with stimulants to keep her awake during school. Now to add even more misery, she was beginning to itch all over. As the winter of 2006 rolled along, the itching increased until “it was like mosquitoes everywhere.” A more hellish existence was hard to imagine for Mikhaila and her parents.
A saving grace was the brave, tireless support everyone received from twelve-year-old Julian, truly a champion-hearted brother and son. Julian dedicated himself to Mikhaila’s care and faultlessly did his part in every emergency. Especially during the longest, darkest nights of the winter, his strength of character held the line against the freezing winds of chaos whistling in the cracks around his family’s front door.
In June 2007, Jordan’s detractors were dismayed to review the just published book Better Together by Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam. The book, six years in the making, was an unsuccessful attempt to shoehorn the discrediting facts from Putnam’s original 2000 study into a support of postmodern concepts of inclusion and diversity. A summary of the original study by Michael Jonas of The Boston Globe includes,
The greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings. The study, the largest ever on civic engagement in America, found that virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings.9
Putnam was a liberal academic at Harvard, a contemporary of Jordan’s when he discovered the bad news in his data in 2000. He spent several months attempting to disprove his facts. He was unsuccessful at this, so published the results of the study in a brief press release in 2001. No doubt as he expected, howls of scorn descended on him from his fellow postmodernist diversity fans. He then spent several years testing other possible explanations hoping to find errors in his work. The facts stubbornly remained the same. After this final attempt to find an alternative explanation for his facts, he spent the last years of his seven-year odyssey to prove himself wrong by writing a scholarly analysis to theorize some redeeming value in diversity. Unfortunately for his reputation as a topflight scientist, he was unable to restrain his compassion for the oppressed and attempted to create value where there was none. His final, editorialized version of the study done in 2000 was published in the journal Scandinavian Political Studies and as a book in 2007. He faced even more heated criticism from social scientists and academics for attempting to skew the implications of his data to suit his personal politics. He hypothesized that the negative effects of diversity could be remedied and that eventually it might fade in importance—two untested assumptions that did little to bolster his credibility.
Columnist Ilana Mercer in her opinion article “Greater Diversity Equals Greater Misery” in The Orange County Register wrote of Putnam,
Like many social scientists living in symbiosis with statists, Putnam doesn’t confine himself to observations; he offers recommendations. Having aligned himself with central planners intent on sustaining such social engineering, Putnam concludes the gloomy facts with a stern pep talk. Take the lumps of diversity without complaining! Mass immigration and the attendant diversity are, overall, good for the collective. (Didn’t he just spend five years demonstrating the opposite?)10
This bitter diversity pill for the postmodern Marxists, like the collapse of the Marxist Soviet Union itself, did nothing to slow them down. This is little wonder considering the extraordinary efforts and risks a brilliant, highly regarded professional like Putnam was willing to undertake. It seems to give greater credence to Jordan’s concept of ideological possession. How else could the unshakable commitment to obviously false and destructive ideas of postmodern neo-Marxism be explained?
This degradation of consciousness accelerated throughout Western universities, large and small. They had been offering courses in subjects like Women’s and Gender Studies for years. Now preeminent schools were offering courses in the original class consciousness philosophy of Marxism itself. The 2003 annual report Comedy & Tragedy published by Young America’s Foundation said,
Amherst College offers Taking Marx Seriously. The University of California at Santa Barbara offers Black Marxism. Rutgers University offers Marxist Literary Theory. University of California at Riverside offers a Marxist Studies minor.11
The other leading universities offering Marxist courses included Brown University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, Princeton University, University of Pennsylvania, Yale University, Bucknell University, Carnegie Mellon University, Duke University, Emory University, New York University, Stanford University, Syracuse University, University of Chicago, Amherst College, Carleton College, Oberlin College, Reed College, Vassar College, Wellesley College, University of Arizona, University of Colorado, University of Florida, University of Iowa, University of Kentucky, University of Massachusetts, University of Michigan, University of Minnesota, University of Missouri, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Pennsylvania State University, Rutgers University, University of Texas, University of Virginia, University of Washington, University of Wisconsin, and virtually the entire University of California system.12
Jordan’s concern was now bordering on alarm. The intellectual roots of the hideous, human catastrophes of the twentieth century were spreading at lightning speed throughout academia. The obsolete missiles of Armageddon were replaced by universities promoting Marxist lesson plans to once again elevate the proletariat. As always, their primary targets were impressionable and easily impassioned young people.
The Millennial generation, deprived at an early age of much of Western history, were now condemned to repeat it. As in generations past, they were entranced by the tens of thousands by the old sirens’ song of justice for the oppressed, updated to the irresistible tune of compassion for the less fortunate. As before, at the heart of this new compassion was the highly motivating resentment for the rich and powerful.
With the explosive reach of the internet, the immersive promotion within academia and hundreds of millions of dollars of intentionally divisive propaganda coming from Western enemies including Russian and China, postmodern neo-Marxism was once again chic and, au courant, and nearly universal.
One of several aggressive enemies at the University of Toronto, Dr. Nicholas Matte, was beginning to emerge with accusations directed at Jordan personally. Originally accused of misogyny, racism, and lack of compassion, Jordan was increasingly facing accusations from various sources of Nazism, white supremacism, fascism, and promoting hate speech.
Eventually face to face on the TVO program The Agenda, Dr. Matte said to Jordan in regard to Jordan’s concern over the new radicals’ attacks on free speech, “I don’t care about your language use. I care about the safety of people being harmed.”13
Clearly compassion for the less fortunate and the assumption of “harm” was overriding any concern for freedom of speech, a common and growing sentiment among Dr. Matte’s colleagues on the political left. Free speech was the sacrifice necessary to protect vulnerable people, of which there were many and a growing number. Yet, Dr. Matte, as with white-privilege inventor Peggy McIntosh and other fringe academics, had no evidence and almost no expertise, other than as an activist, to justify his attack. The University of Toronto’s Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies’ introduction of Nicholas Matte describes him primarily as the curator of a museum collection: “Nicholas Matte is a politically-conscious interdisciplinary historian who curates the Sexual Representation Collection and teaches in the Sexual Diversity Studies program.”
The first descriptive term of Dr. Matte is politically-conscious. That seems unusual, unless that was his primary job. Curator of the Sexual Representation Collection is quite clear, but “teaches in the Sexual Diversity Studies program” apparently means that he taught as a curator and not as a professor. The description of historian seems a bit thrashed or obscure in the postmodern tradition since he referred to himself as a medical historian, but the collection he curated was primarily of pornography of the twentieth century.
As a teacher of Sexual Diversity Studies, Dr. Matte seems to be in the postmodern school of thought on diversity and also to have extended the theory on diverse sexual identities. He was indeed quite politically conscious to the point of being a busy activist. The university description continues,
Dr. Matte has worked on and been involved with numerous community-based organizations, events, and research and education projects and teams, including feminist working group Emilia-Amalia, Transforming Justice, TransEd, LGBT Digital Archives and Oral History Collaboratory, and others. Matte also sits on the Advisory Board of Digital Transgender Archives.14
To get a better idea of the type of activism that appealed to Dr. Matte, the conclusion of his online biography seems to the point,
Matte’s teaching and research reflect longstanding interests in how sex, gender, sexuality, health, disability, race and capitalism inform individual desires, embodied social experiences, identities, relationships, community formations, and socio-cultural advocacy.15
His longstanding interests in disability, race, and capitalism seem a bit remote for a sex historian, but are exactly aligned with postmodernist class distinctions. As far as a teacher, he seems to have been quite unsuccessful. On ratemyprofessor.com, Dr. Matte scores a disappointing 1.5 out of a possible 5 rating. Jordan is rated 4.3 by comparison.16 The very few student comments on Dr. Matte’s page are uniformly negative; in fact, they are uniformly awful in the classifications of the site, including this one that states,
Awful professor. Was required to take this course by the administration and it was a miserable experience. Very slow in grading and handing back papers/disseminating information. I asked him to explain why there’s no such thing as biological sex and he said he couldn’t unpack it for me in the interest of time, and then proceeded to never do so.17
In spite of Dr. Matte’s obvious unpopularity as a teacher, the UT administration apparently made his course a requirement in certain cases. Another student comment with the rank of awful seems to clearly indicate Dr. Matte was aggressively promoting his personal political views in class as an activist, writing, “Forces politics and his ideals onto others in class. Bad ideology in my honest opinion and he is not willing to accept the opinion of others and only views people with different opinions as enemies.”18
By the administration’s slanted description of Dr. Matte and their active promotion of his course, it appears that they supported his political activism and even favored it over his value as an educator. This seems undeniable when realizing that the administrator over Dr. Matte was David Rayside, the founding director of Matte’s employer, the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies.
Rayside created the center as society was being carved up into new social classes by Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality. It opened just after Jill Ker Conway created her courses in Women’s Studies at the university. Like Matte, Rayside was a committed activist. He belonged to the Right to Privacy Committee, a response to police raids on gay bathhouses; contributed to The Body Politic, one of Canada’s first LGBT magazines, the Citizens Independent Review of Police Activities, and the campaign to add sexual orientation to the Ontario Human Rights Code as a special protected class. He also cofounded the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Studies Association and the Positive Space Campaign at the University of Toronto.
The Positive Space Campaign seems to have been the forerunner of the now ubiquitous safe spaces on many college campuses. The Conference Board of Canada, an independent, evidence-based applied research organization describes it this way, “A Positive Space is a designated area with an indicator showing that the space is one with a trained Positive Space champion who is sensitive to LGBT concerns.”19
Rayside served on the boards of the Canadian Political Science Association and the American Political Science Association promoting equity in academic life. To demonstrate Rayside’s postmodern neo-Marxist bona fides, consider the definition of equity by Independent Sector, a collective of community and charity organizations:
Equity is the fair treatment, access, opportunity, and advancement for all people, while at the same time striving to identify and eliminate barriers that have prevented the full participation of some groups. Improving equity involves increasing justice [emphasis added including below] and fairness within the procedures and processes of institutions or systems, as well as in their distribution of resources. Tackling equity issues requires an understanding of the root causes of outcome disparities within our society.20
Clearly, Professor Rayside was a postmodern neo-Marxist collaborating with Dr. Matte who, like Matte, focused primarily on political advocacy over education.
But by far, the most disturbing element of their popular concept of equity for Jordan was the focus on “outcome disparities.” They did not want equal opportunities for people, they wanted equal outcomes. This was the intellectual red line for Jordan. There could be no quarter given to people who insisted, like nearly a dozen murderous Marxist regimes around the world before them, on equality of outcome. Jordan addressed the issue this way on Joe Rogan’s popular podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience (episode #1070), to over five million listeners and viewers,
Thomas Sowell (American philosopher) has talked about this a little bit too he said, “… what the people who are agitating for equality of outcome don’t understand is that you have to cede so much power to the authorities, to the government, in order to ensure equality of outcome, that a tyranny is inevitable.” And that’s right.21
Unlike Matte and Rayside’s dedication to advocacy over education, the same cannot be said for Harvard professor Putnam, who unwittingly exposed the disastrous outcomes of diversity. Putnam clearly dedicated his life to science and education. Yet all three men were, by Jordan’s definition, ideologically possessed.
Tellingly, they all used the same postmodern term of diversity as the focus of their work. It seems they were all possessed by the old Marxist ideology of oppressed classes of people in a neo-Marxist diversity package. As Jordan often paraphrased Jung, “People don’t have ideas, ideas have people.”
In direct opposition, Jordan was committed to the idea of the sovereign individual rather than social classes. One could argue that he was also ideologically possessed, except that he was not in lockstep with anyone of any political or social movement. He was not advocating for protective laws or attempting to justify contradictory data. He was instead in constant open inquiry about the concept of individual sovereignty. He welcomed contradictory data and viewpoints. He was educating himself and his students, using his own evolving, unique arguments. And, unlike Dr. Matte and Professor Rayside, he was committed to education over advocacy.
In one of his earliest online videos, he lectured about the transcendental and unifying power of music on individuals, the opposite of the rational and divisive power of diverse classes, genders, and races. In the video, Jordan appears deeply tired, this being a sleepless time at a new crisis point for Mikhaila, but his energy rallied as he delved into the subject:
The reason music plays such a powerful, such a popular role in our culture is because the meaning that music speaks of is beyond rational critique. And we’re very rational and very intelligent, so we’ve been able to make intellectual hash out of most of the things that had traditionally offered people a grounded sense of meaning (i.e., postmodernism).… It [music] seems to have been able to maintain its experiential connection with transcendental meaning despite the fact that our rational mind seems to have destroyed everything else that is transcendental.22
He goes on for nearly an hour, as usual without notes, on how an individual perceives meaning in faces, images, and life experiences. It was typical of his convoluted, interconnected lectures. And in spite of the fierce antagonism now being directed at him and his supporters, certain brave students wrote of him,
He was one of the most intelligent and eloquent people I have ever had the chance to meet. Provides space for discussion, deliberation, and disagreement, and respects differing points of view. Fantastic person and profound speaker.23
Jordan’s research output was a prolific seven academic papers in 2007. One in particular marked a significant new direction in his search for the healing qualities of personal meaning. It was entitled “A Psycho-ontological Analysis of Genesis 2–6.” The edited abstract reads,
Individuals operating within the scientific paradigm presume that the world is made of matter.… Individuals within the religious paradigm, by contrast, presume that the world is made out of what matters. From such a perspective, the phenomenon of meaning is the primary reality. This meaning is revealed both subjectively and objectively, and serves—under the appropriate conditions—as an unerring guide to ethical action.… Genesis describes the primary categories of the world of meaning, as well as the eternal interactions of those categories.… Eden is a place where order and chaos, nature and culture, find their optimal state of balance.
Because Eden is a walled garden, however—a bounded state of being—something is inevitably excluded. Unfortunately, what is excluded does not simply cease to exist. Every bounded paradise thus contains something forbidden and unknown. Man’s curiosity inevitably drives him to investigate what has been excluded. The knowledge thus generated perpetually destroys the presuppositions and boundaries that allow his temporary Edens to exist. Thus, man is eternally fallen. The existential pain generated by this endlessly fallen state can undermine man’s belief in the moral justifiability of being—and may turn him, like Cain, against brother and God.24
His immersion into Christian thought brought him full circle, thirty-two years later, back to his mother’s faith. He was still not a believer in her God as were his heroes Carl Jung and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, but he’d found the source material for many of their ideas and a path toward deeper meaning in life.
Exactly six months after “A Psycho-ontological Analysis of Genesis 2–6” appeared, Jordan’s next paper “The Meaning of Meaning” was published with the abstract (edited for brevity):
The world is too complex to manage without radical functional simplification. Meaning appears to exist as the basis for such simplification … consisting of three classes. The first class … are meanings based in motivation, emotion, and personal and social identity … grounded in instinct and tend, at their most abstract, towards the dogmatic or ideological. The second class … are meanings based on the emergence of anomaly, or ignored complexity … also instinctively grounded, but tend towards the revolutionary. The third class … are meanings that emerge first as a consequence of voluntary engagement in exploratory activity and second as a consequence of identifying with the process of voluntary exploration. Third class meanings find their abstracted representation in ritual and myth, and tend towards the spiritual or religious.25
Jordan identified meanings that tend toward the dogmatic or order, toward the revolutionary or chaos, and toward the mediation between order and chaos provided by religion. This is the dance of the yin and yang and the divine path of the individual at the border- line of order and chaos that provides a harmonious life. From this abstract idea Jordan found the concrete value for an individual in his conclusion to “The Meaning of Meaning,”
Our greatest stories therefore portray the admirable individual, engaged in voluntary, creative, communicative endeavor; they portray that individual generating a personality capable of withstanding the fragility of being, from such endeavor. We are thus prepared to find sufficient sustenance in stories portraying the eternal confrontation with the terrible unknown, and its transformation into the tools and skills we need to survive. If we act out such stories, within the confines of our own lives, then the significance of our being may come to overshadow our weakness. It is in the hope that such a statement might be true that we find the most profound of the many meanings of meaning.26
At sixteen Mikhaila was told she would need a hip replacement by the age of thirty. The Enbrel and methotrexate were giving relief, with the side effects of endless itching all over her body, the risk of fatal infection, and exhaustion, but they were not stopping the progression of arthritis in her right hip. Within months of her prognosis, her hip locked in place while shopping at a market, paralyzing her in agony. Her hip was not going to make it to thirty; a replacement surgery was scheduled.
The surgery, although “intense” and terrifying, went well. Oxycontin was added to her medications for pain while recovering. As recovery progressed and the pain in her hip began to subside, the cartilage in her left ankle “just disappeared.” This too became a crippling bone-on-bone agony. A second replacement surgery was scheduled.
By this time Mikhaila had missed a full year of school. As the list of medications and their side effects mounted, the progression of her disease accelerated and her energy waned, depression began creeping back into her thoughts despite the Cipralex (SSRI) medication for it. The emotional strain on her immediate and extended family was taking a steady toll on everyone. Her ankle replacement was done. She faced several months, possibly another year, of hobbling on essentially two broken legs before she would have complete recovery.
Jordan did not publish anything on his own in 2008. He was second or third author on four academic papers that weren’t published until the last quarter of the year. The papers were incremental technical achievements with titles including “Cognitive Abilities Involved in Insight Problem Solving: An Individual Differences Model.” They lacked Jordan’s soaring ambition to explore the core of existence like the previous year’s “The Meaning of Meaning.”
At this time, in September, he was interviewed again on TVO’s The Agenda program concerning the recent financial crisis in the United States and the possible collapse of the global banking system. The subject was trust. He was asked by host Steve Paikin, “A rapid movement on this issue seems to be impossible. How important would you gauge trust to the smooth operation of a modern Western society?”
Jordan replied, “All the abstractions that we use to keep track of what constitutes value … are all based on interpersonal trust, so I think it’s the most fundamental of natural resources. It’s a psychological resource but it’s the most fundamental thing.”
Paikin summarized, “I think that answer goes a long way to explaining why the Washington bailout package failed because apparently there is zero trust between Republicans and Democrats.”27
The world, by most accounts, seemed to have slipped into another Cold War of ideologies complete with intractable and blind adherents on both sides. A bitter resentment had again seeped into conversations turning vitally important discussions into arguments that led nowhere. People were again left waiting for Godot, as in Samuel Beckett’s absurdist play representing mankind’s inability to resolve the original Soviet-American Cold War, with many again steeped in nihilistic nausea as a result. For the second time in Jordan’s life, the world faced mutual assured destruction, this time financial destruction.
It may have seemed to Jordan at this point that nihilism and resentment had once again overwhelmed mankind’s weakness in resolving its own problems. The universities were breaking into warring factions, the media and popular culture had largely fractured into opposing points of view, and the government was now reflecting this disunity. The Devouring Mother was descending on her weak and wayward children.