The adventure [of the archetypal hero] is always and everywhere a passage beyond the veil of the known into the unknown; the powers that watch at the boundary are dangerous; to deal with them is risky.…
—JOSEPH CAMPBELL, THE HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES
It had been raining for a few days in Edmonton, the industrial heartland of Alberta, Canada, when Jordan Bernt Peterson was born on June 12, 1962. For his arrival, the rain clouds blew away and the early summer sun warmed the freshened air. As Wally and Beverley Peterson’s first child, Jordan’s safe arrival was an enormous relief and life-changing celebration all rolled into one. The sun was shining, the birds were singing, and they were now a real family. They’d been blessed.
On the seven-hour drive north, back to their home in Hines Creek, population around 380 or so, hypervigilant Wally no doubt focused all his attention on safety, driving carefully with a keen eye trained on any odd movement of approaching cars and trucks. Beverley naturally must have paid almost no attention to the road, the joy in her heart focused entirely on inspecting every tiny detail of her beautiful new baby.
For Jordan, growing up in the tiny, frontier village of Hines Creek was like being part of an isolated tribe. With only 150 families living together in the northern oilfields of Alberta, it was an extremely tight-knit community that had the basics of modern life but not much more. When his younger brother and sister arrived, they all enjoyed essentially the same rural lifestyle that children of prairie pioneers had lived for a hundred years. They were fed, clothed, and educated, but for entertainment they were generally on their own to make up games and run wild outdoors.
Especially during the six long, frigid months of winter, when one’s own imagination was the only movie playing. For that half of the year when night fell early and stayed seemingly forever, board games or reading were usually the only entertainment.
It seemed young Jordan was well suited to the spartan, somewhat cloistered aspects of Hines Creek. He was safe under his father’s rather serious but loving attention and buoyed by his mother’s playfulness. With few distractions, he developed a keen awareness of the world around him and the ability to study it in an orderly way from his educator father. He remembers learning to read at the age of three, and quickly polished off all the Dr. Seuss books. His father remembers,
He could read damn near anything. We went to visit his great-grandmother out on the coast when he was about five and she couldn’t get over it. She’d give the kid the newspaper and he’d read the newspaper to her.1
Hines Creek’s unspoiled northern plains landscape with its meticulous, reassuring order and sudden, explosive chaos, properly fascinated and frightened the boy. It formed the bedrock survival trait of watchful respect that helped harness his emerging, blazing intellect that tended to shoot off into fantasy. With his father’s patient guidance, he explored nature, learning to fish and hunt, and to pay proper respect as well for those gruesome sacrifices.
But Jordan didn’t share his father’s patience or his mother’s quiet resolve. He was an emotional whirlwind. His reading often produced outbursts of questions with tears of frustration filling his eyes as he waited for the answer. Even the excitement of childhood games could produce an emotional earthquake that soon drew teasing from other childhood friends that only made things worse. His emotions seemed to be amplified by his intelligence, like certain ideas came with sharp edges. It was a trait that would stay with him throughout his life.
Hines Creek was within walking distance of huge Lake George a little over a mile north, five miles north of the Sand Lake Nature Area, and just thirteen miles east of the Peace River and the Dunvegan West wilderness area. He learned of the roving tribes of Cree, Beaver, and Chipewyan natives who had hunted buffalo for thousands of years on those northern plains, far from the rich forests and easy summers of the south.
Books held all the stories, all the pictures of this other kind of people. They did everything differently; they spoke a different language, they didn’t have jobs. They wandered the plains following the buffalo herds, dragging their tents of sticks and animal skin behind them. They were even a different color. But they were almost all gone, and the buffalo with them. It was a mystery and almost too fascinating for him to manage. He needed more books.
More books explained the local gold rush, the coming of the railroad (Hines Creek being the farthest point north of the Canadian Pacific line), the discoveries of oil, then diamonds in the province. Then came the laws and treaties that gave the tribes land but not enough to hunt on like in the old days. The buffalo had all been wiped out by that time, so they had nothing to hunt anyway. Professional hunters from the cities had killed them all for money.
For money? His young mind that was just beginning to grasp the inner workings of a real and troubling world must have paused at this idea. All the buffalo were wiped out for money? In his books there were images of massive piles of bleached buffalo bones—three times the height of a man—and railroad flat cars stacked high with hides. This was not respect like he’d been taught. The lessons of his father and mother were clear—if you killed an animal you’d bloody well better be ready to eat it, bucko. Every hunter knew that. To kill an animal and not eat it was a sin. A big sin.
And if those hunters hunted just for money, why did they have to kill all the buffalo? This and an endless stream of other questions demanded answers that his parents did their best to answer. They spoke of greed and a kind of blindness inside city people that only created more questions. He knew it was some kind of sin, but that was all he knew. He returned to his reading with a sense of urgency and now, some sorrow.
The family, prompted by Beverley, attended the United Church of Canada, a collaboration of Presbyterian, Methodist, and other Christian protestant churches. It must have seemed like torture to hyperactive Jordan. For the longest time, he didn’t even know what the minister at the front of the church was talking about, but just had to pretend like he knew because he couldn’t ask any questions.
Sometimes it was about Jesus who got tortured to death by bad guys. They had a scary statue of him bleeding and nailed to a wooden cross hung up at the front of the church. Sometimes it was about people who God liked or didn’t like because they did certain things. There was this gigantic book that explained it all but it was in some weird, old language that he could hardly understand. It was just a nightmare, the whole thing—stand up, sit down, kneel down, stand up again, listen to the man tell a story about something—for an hour! There was no way out. He got the eye from this father and a tug on the sleeve from his mother if he even fidgeted or poked his little brother for fun. It was a disaster.
At ten, Jordan and his family moved from the little frontier village of Hines Creek fifteen miles south to the town of Fairview, population around three thousand. Fairview had high school baseball and ice hockey teams, hotels, movie theaters, and all kinds of fairs and parades. They had lots of oil patch roughnecks as in Hines Creek, but they also had farmers, cowboy ranchers, and small businessmen who made it seem like a big city.
The only problem with the place was that now he had to go to Sunday School where he sat behind a desk for an hour and listened to a minister talk. The man told Bible stories that were sometimes interesting and taught different prayers to memorize. When he got home, only his mother seemed interested in what he learned. Otherwise, religion wasn’t ever discussed in his house.
Since he had skipped a grade, he had only one year of elementary school left before he entered high school. As his classmates were beginning to shoot up in height and broaden into teenage bodies, Jordan remained small and thin for his age. His being a year younger made his small stature even more noticeable. Adolescent socialization with its ever-present threat of embarrassment, even ostracism, was beginning to take hold, shredding childhood friendships and forming alliances against attack. The cult of cool was coming but Jordan had no friends in the area to vouch for his coolness or ease his introduction into junior society. He would have to find a niche, an approving social group, and act fast to survive socially.
High school arrived without fanfare and he soon found himself spending time exploring Fairview with new friends. He wasn’t good at sports and so didn’t really fit in that group. He wasn’t particularly interested in art, so that group was out. Because he was physically small he began compensating by finding ways to prove his toughness. He was drawn to the misfits, the tough guys who tended to talk loud and play rough. Since this crew had no organized activity to help focus their energies, they tended to roam Fairview after school as a pack, finding mischief where they could. They wasted no time knocking the smaller Jordan into line.
A favorite pastime was hanging him, kicking and cursing, by his shirt collar in a hall locker. Another favorite was catching him on the stairway and tossing him back and forth from one boy to another. They soon found out that Jordan was small but extremely strong. They also learned that even though he was normally slow to enter the conversation, he commanded a remarkable range of opinions about their mothers’ sexual habits. He’d been well prepared by his father’s spare but insightful advice on dealing with large and small antagonists: “If something is bothering you, you don’t want to sit on it and let it sour you.”2
This rough treatment was the sort of swaggering, combative fun that won him his proper place in the tough guy gang, even though his eyes still occasionally filled with tears of emotion. In spite of his tears, he made the cut and happily ran with this crowd as just another one of the loudmouth boys looking for anything to pass the time in their little prairie town.
More than most Fairview preteens, Jordan was troubled about the world beyond his small-town pranks. The Fairview Post newspaper was full of obscure horrors and scandals from around the world, but he didn’t have enough context about these events to generate much interest. The who, what, and where just didn’t make much sense to him. Instead, he turned to books.
As fate would have it, his first books were science fiction. Extremely popular at the time was the brilliant Isaac Asimov, an admirer of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings series. Asimov had created the Lucky Starr young adult science fiction series that were thrilling adventure stories like The Lord of the Rings but instead of European mythology, Asimov’s stories were grounded in factual science. As Asimov said at the time,
I want science fiction. I think science fiction isn’t really science fiction if it lacks science. And I think the better and truer the science, the better and truer the science fiction.
The connection sparked between imagination and the real world! Jordan began to borrow five or six library books at a time through his avid supporter Sandy Notley. Asimov’s complete and fascinating worlds provided all the context needed, unlike the brief stories in the newspaper, so that Jordan could discover who was good, who was bad, and why. He was suddenly enthralled by science and its many connections to the workings of the human heart.
The year before his burgeoning mind was set spinning into other worlds of science fiction, Asimov’s publisher also published The Working Brain,3 a popular book by pioneering Russian neuropsychologist Alexander Luria. Jordan may well have stumbled upon, or been given, this work in his stacks of science-oriented borrowed books. His later references to Luria in lectures indicate the seminal place of Luria’s work somewhere in his formative years. As a precocious youngster, well aware of his own overactive brain, he could easily have comprehended the three basic systems of a working brain presented in the short book—the Attentional, or sensory system, the Mnestic, or memory system, and the Energetic maintenance system. Luria was also the likely precursor to Jordan’s enduring attraction to Russian literature and thought.
Now with his head full of spellbinding science fiction and fact, his withdrawal from frustrating Christian theology accelerated dramatically. But there was still the matter of maternal tyranny that controlled his Sunday school attendance. There was nothing for it but capitulation. He dutifully put on the mask of obedient son and learned how to endure boredom.
Jordan set out to master his own rioting brain by first increasing his memory in a practice called The Memory Palace found in Luria’s earlier, popular short book The Mind of a Mnemonist.4 The Memory Palace, Roman Room, or Method of Loci (places in Latin) is a technique popular since ancient Greece that uses visualized physical locations, such as shops on a street, to collect and recall information.
The book was written like a detective novel about a real person, Solomon Shereshevsky, a Russian journalist. Shereshevsky was of average intelligence, but had an awe-inspiring talent for memorization. Luria interviewed him soon after Shereshevsky got into an argument at his newspaper. At an editorial meeting, the journalist was pointedly criticized for not taking any notes. He shocked fellow journalists and editors when he instantly recalled the entire meeting verbatim! The unassuming reporter was also shocked to realize that no one else could do the same.
The story unfolds as Shereshevsky is asked to memorize ever more complex mathematical formulas, huge intersecting matrix charts, and even foreign language poems. He memorized them all, flawlessly, in a matter of minutes.
Luria diagnosed Shereshevsky with synesthesia in which the stimulation of one of his senses produced a reaction in the others. If Shereshevsky heard a musical tone he saw a color, the texture of an object would trigger a taste, and so on. When thinking about numbers Shereshevsky said,
Take the number 1. This is a proud, well-built man; 2 is a high-spirited woman; 3 a gloomy person; 6 a man with a swollen foot; 7 a man with a moustache; 8 a very stout woman—a sack within a sack. As for the number 87, what I see is a fat woman and a man twirling his moustache.
This was now real life appearing to be science fiction and was irresistibly magnetic to young Jordan Peterson. He was in; 100 percent passionately committed to exploring his own and other human minds. Perhaps in that moment, his life’s course was set.
Jordan practiced The Memory Palace diligently. It would prove to be a fundamental tool to help store the increasing volume of raw information and ideas now filling up every corner of his mind. His mind, always on a fast idle, now shifted into overdrive. He practiced the memory technique every spare moment when he wasn’t reading his extracurricular book a day, on top of his regular schoolwork.
On his frequent hunting and fishing trips with his father, his broadened mind could now make more complex observations of the natural world and how at least one human being acted in it. His father, being an introvert, demonstrated many fundamentals of wilderness survival without the need for conversation. A quiet and observant composure, regardless of the situation, was his baseline quality. High technical competency particularly as a gunsmith and a profound reliance on intuition, a sixth sense, the ability to think like a prey animal, completed his profile as a highly competent hunter. As a human being, his father’s respect for all life, animals, and plants, filled the spiritual place left empty by Christianity in Jordan’s life.
With ample quiet time to ponder his observations, Jordan may have noticed the similarities between his father and the heroes in his science fiction worlds. The planets and bad guys changed, but the good guys always acted in the same ways. Bad guys were always chaotic and cynical. Good guys were orderly and idealistic. He was beginning to gain firsthand insight into human nature and with it the wisdom to possibly affect the human condition.
In the critical year 1975, at the age of thirteen, Jordan had had enough of the Christian fables and refused to attend church or Sunday school any longer. Beverley recognized the futility of arguing with her headstrong son, and the subject was no longer discussed. Although his mother continued to attend church regularly with his younger brother and sister, Jordan’s Sundays could now be devoted to other activities including his new, inspiring volunteer work for the National Democratic Party run by his trusted mentors and neighbors Sandy and Grant Notley.
Other activities included drinking heavily and smoking cigarettes. These habits were acquired in order to maintain his place in the wolf pack of his tough friends—teenagers who often dropped out of high school to work in the oilfields. The first Middle Eastern oil embargo of 1973 had quadrupled the price of oil and caused a market boom that offered inflated wages for new oil workers. It drew thousands of able-bodied Canadians into the fields and Jordan soon followed, becoming a drill bit re-tipper.
His drinking, smoking, and lack of regular exercise, other than skiing for pleasure and the occasional wrestling match with his buddies, soon ballooned his small frame into an overweight, physically weakened, and generally unhealthy body. It wouldn’t be until twelve years later, at the age of twenty-five, when he managed to quit his teenage habits and force himself into a gym that he regained his health. With impressive personal discipline, he spent a year lifting weights that trimmed fat while adding thirty new pounds of muscle.
But at the age of thirteen and for the next five years through 1978, while his health deteriorated, a mental rot that could not be as easily reversed had also begun to set in. By the time his fervent, teenage dedication to Grant Notley’s political career had turned to complete disillusionment, and he saw that Notley’s socialist philosophy was really just a murderously naive mental trap, the psychological damage to Jordan had been done. He had been steadily losing confidence in the Notleys, the NDP, Marxism itself, and in his own judgment.
He had been preparing in his first two years of college at Grand Prairie to become a lawyer, to heroically right the wrongs and punish the bad guys of the world. But that dream crashed and burned by age eighteen. He seemed to be just another fool in a long line that stretched back seventy years—“a useful idiot” in Soviet socialist words and indeed in his own mind. He was not going to be someone who could help anyone.
Yet, while increasingly undermined by self-doubt, he still managed to do well in his studies and in his position on Grand Prairie’s Board of Governors. Under the surface, his shadow side was filling the hole in his soul left by his rejection of God, any god. Coincidentally, his comfortable, familiar personality began rotting away.
His social skills also began to rot as well, turning his usual hesitancy to join in conversation into a stony silence. He had nothing to offer, his beliefs had become meaningless. He thought people, obviously including himself, would believe whatever they bloody well needed to believe to climb the hierarchies of the world, even the corrupt hierarchies like Marxism. At that moment, as he would later learn, his life began to parallel the life of Roquentin, the fictitious main character in Jean-Paul Sartre’s seminal work on nihilism, the Nobel Prize–winning novel Nausea.
Roquentin’s nauseating realization, like Jordan’s, was that life and his role in it were meaningless. This was a common sentiment when the novel was published in 1938, particularly in Europe, as the world was being drawn into a second world war just twenty years after the first one had devastated modern civilization. Many writers, particularly the French like Sartre and Louis-Ferdinand Céline (quoted on the flyleaf of Nausea), correctly observed that the next stop after nausea was total despair, and despair then led directly to a belief in nothing, or nihilism. What Sartre and Céline couldn’t know at the time was that this growing nihilism, when combined with the different forms of Marxism that they both promoted, would soon produce as yet unimaginable evil in Germany, and then after the war in Russia. To his credit, only Sartre saw that the flash of recognition that produced this existential nausea was necessary to an individual’s development and would eventually lead to “a release from disgust into heroism.”
Jordan’s release from disgust wouldn’t come for years, until he had endured the complete rotting away of his life’s meaning and lingered at the nihilistic edge of insanity at age twenty.
At eighteen, when his belief in becoming a lawyer, “so I could learn more about the structure of human beliefs,”5 had evaporated, he transferred to the University of Alberta three hundred miles away in his birthplace of Edmonton, and focused on political science. Logically, this may have been to pursue his undergraduate degree at a more prestigious school. It could also have been to escape from the now loathsome Marxists or others, like the conservative lawyers and prosperous business owners on the Board of Governors, in front of whom he may have felt embarrassed.
After receiving his bachelor of arts degree in political science in one additional year of study, Peterson took a year off to work as a driver for various social and community service groups in Europe. He said of this time,
All my beliefs—which had lent order to the chaos of my existence, at least temporarily—had proved illusory; I could no longer see the sense in things. I was cast adrift; I did not know what to do or what to think.6
In country after country he saw, firsthand, the devastating aftereffects of World War II. His endless curiosity and avid reading led him to the foundations of the nihilism that had destroyed a generation and now threatened nuclear annihilation of the entire world. The threat was never more real or pressing than it was now. According to The New York Times, the Doomsday Clock from the Chicago Atomic Scientists was said to be set at seven minutes to midnight, i.e. time to hit the panic button.
The fear level had been critical for years, almost thirty-five in fact. The Doomsday Clock was the same in 1982 as it was in 1947 when it was created. Even during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, from development of the crisis, through the climax, and on to the resolution, the clock never moved. It didn’t really have to; people were terrified, argumentative, or, like Jordan, retreating into anonymity. No one was really checking. In fact, the designer of the cartoon for the cover of Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, artist Martyl Langsdorf said she drew the Doomsday Clock at seven minutes to midnight “because it looked good to my eye.”
The Atomic Scientists of Chicago, who reset the clock when they felt it needed it, were not really from Chicago. They were an international group of physical scientists, including several Soviet citizens, who had virtually no credentials in international affairs, but did have an office at the University of Chicago. As an accurate depiction of the probability of nuclear war, the Doomsday Clock was completely useless. But as a possible tool to advance destabilizing psychological warfare, it was exceptionally effective.
Under the usual threat of annihilation, Jordan urgently studied the psychological origins of the Cold War and twentieth-century European totalitarianism through the works of Carl Jung, Friedrich Nietzsche, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Fyodor Dostoevsky.
Not the most cheerful selection, it could only have created a deeper dread of nihilism and its effects. Yet, he was a nihilist. He had identified some part of his affliction but had no idea how to cure it. And by the appearance of things and the current situation, he might have felt it was too late to do anything about it.
But further reading and what he picked up from talking to the people he drove all over Europe revealed that nihilism didn’t die in the war with everything else—it got stronger. It grew a new branch called postmodernism among the French in the 1950s. Most postmodernists believed that truth was always contingent on context and subjective rather than being absolute and universal. They generally believed that truth was also partial, never complete or certain. Even without the truth, they believed they could build a better, more equitable world; a global, shared world. Everyone would work together and everyone would have enough, so there would be nothing to fight about. The natural results would be peace everywhere, and war would end. At the worst, it couldn’t possibly be any worse than living in a permanent nuclear nightmare.
Postmodernism was a hit in the art world where writers, musicians, and painters flocked to its promise of peace and freedom. It was a hit among the young, attracting tens of thousands of students who shared a growing mistrust of traditional Western civilization and an increasing taste for revolutionary ideals. It was a hit in academia, where university administrators were always keen to accommodate their young customers and prospects. The utopian promise of Marxism, at the core of postmodernism, was the rage.
Postmodernism had become the lingua franca of cool. The Morse Code of hip. It was fashion. And fashion according to postmodernists was, charitably, dour. Like its designers, the peevish sort of Marxian apparatchiks Jordan had disliked since adolescence, the art of postmodernism was infused with the grim, the soulless, and the banal. He heard it clearly in the voices of the Russian writers. Tantalizing views of its psychological roots were found in the writings of Freud and Nietzsche.
Particularly Frederich Nietzsche, who personally suffered a similar crisis of meaning as Jordan, became an important early guide. On the cusp of the blood-stained twentieth century, Nietzche correctly foresaw the coming catastrophes of mankind. He saw that Europe had largely abandoned or “killed” their traditional Abrahamic God who had provided meaning and value for over a thousand years. His most famous quote, “God is dead,”7 reflected this observation rather than his personal belief, as is often misunderstood. He believed that God was being replaced by the despair that comes from believing that nothing is sacred, and therefore life in general lacked a motivating purpose. This was another life-changing observation that perfectly described to Jordan the foundations of despair and nihilism, including his own. Jordan would later write,
What people valued, economically, merely reflected what they believed to be important. This meant that real motivation had to lie in the domain of value, of morality. The political scientists I studied with did not see this, or did not think it was relevant.8
Nietzsche was turning him away from politics toward psychology as the best way to find the answers to avoid a meaningless life that resulted in meaningless wars, including the pending nuclear one promising global self-extermination. Nietzsche summed it up, writing,
A nihilist is a man who judges that the real world ought not to be, and that the world as it ought to be does not exist. According to this view, our existence (action, suffering, willing, feeling) has no meaning: this “in vain” is the nihilists’ pathos—an inconsistency on the part of the nihilists.9
Certainly concerning to Jordan was Nietzsche’s remedy—Christianity. The philosopher wrote that Christianity was an antidote to the despair, the nausea, of meaninglessness, or Western Buddhism as he called it, the belief that separating oneself from will and desire reduced suffering.
To Jordan, this meant rethinking everything back to the very beginning, the earliest lessons of childhood. Even so, Nietzsche egged him on, challenging him to consider the Christian God as a savior, as the bringer of order and peace. All the things Jordan had heard over and over in Sunday school but in other words.
Nietzsche seemed to be speaking directly to Jordan, giving the young pilgrim no place to hide from his own internal crisis. A more complete excerpt of his famous “God is Dead” quote reveals the true sorrow and trepidation behind it:
God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, murderers of all murderers, console ourselves? That which was the holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet possessed has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off us? With what water could we purify ourselves?10
Nietzsche clearly feared the coming battles for mankind’s soul. His fear would be justified by the hideously bloody world wars of the coming twentieth century. Jordan had been fully engaged in his own private battle over the death of God for seven years at this point. He’d been steadily weakening under each new revelation of the meaningless, capricious, and malevolent world around him. He felt cut off from life and was losing hope.
In Portugal, realizing the full cost of Nietzsche’s premonition and seeing its many dismal outcomes throughout Europe, he made a small move back toward tradition. He bought a traditional Portuguese shepherd’s wool cape and the leather boots to go with it. This must have been an extravagance on his meager driver’s salary but even so, he then owned an excellent outfit for herding sheep in the nineteenth century. Maybe it was just profound fashion blindness. Or maybe it was a subtle signal of his fondness for his European passengers or respect for their history. But it certainly wasn’t going to help him connect with his own crowd, young people in their colorful, tight-fitting polyester doing the jungle boogie in overheated European discos to “Nasty Girl,” “Sexual Healing,” and “I’m So Excited.” No, 1982 was not a big year for traditional shepherd’s capes.
Clearly in his earlier reading of Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, he saw the end stages of a rampaging disease of the soul that had dehumanized, then murdered fifty million Russian citizens. That book made such a shocking impression on young Jordan not only because of the scale of the evil, but because it was undeniably true. The author actually lived, and lived to tell, the story of his own journey through the Marxist nightmare to the gulags.
Jordan then stumbled upon the beginning of Solzhenitsyn’s trek in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, a meticulous dissection of the Russian society that led up to the gulags. In this book, nihilist Rodion Raskolnikov, an impoverished ex-student like Jordan, finds himself overwhelmed with confusion, paranoia, and disgust for a murder he has committed. His nihilistic rationalizations for the crime disintegrate into Sartre’s familiar nausea as he confronts the horror and the real-world consequences of what he has done. Raskolnikov then joins the tens of millions of other Russian victims in the precursors of later gulags. With a few small adjustments of circumstance, Raskolnikov could be Jordan Peterson.
Finally, Dostoevsky’s Demons outlined the catastrophe of political and moral nihilism on everyone in an entire fictional town. The town descends into chaos as it suffers through an attempted revolution by nihilists. These characters are portrayed as the accomplices of “demonic” forces that come to possess the town, another reference to Marxism by way of Christian theology.
Although the Russian writers clearly indicated Christianity was the most likely possible salve for modern madness, Jordan was in no way ready to concede this. The fairy tale world of the Bible still seemed ridiculous. Maybe it worked for older people or those traumatized in the war, but for him, no, it didn’t work. His logical mind wouldn’t allow it. Even though he had no alternative, he couldn’t stop looking for another answer.
He sank further into isolation. Having cut himself off from friends, family, and even new friends by dressing in old-fashioned, unattractive clothes, all he could think to do was bear down even harder on the questions about evil that still haunted him. No one was coming to help him, to guide him, or to reassure him this time.
Understanding the Russian writers, it was now obvious that the problem couldn’t be in the externals like politics or economics. It couldn’t be a changeable class or social situation. The problem of intrinsic evil existed at all levels of humanity. It was internal, the Russians had shown that clearly. The problem was in everyone.
Logically then, the problem was also in him. He embodied the problem; it was actually his problem. This was observably true because he was the one who didn’t know what to make of the world, he was the one isolated from life, he was the one who had gotten himself, somehow, into his own personal hell.
Jordan’s hell at the age of twenty may have felt something like Dante’s Inferno. The true sinner, someone who had repeatedly denied God as Jordan had, was not burning in fire and brimstone, that was just the preparation on the way down through the top eight circles. At the bottom, in the ninth circle of hell, the sinner was frozen up to his waist in ice—isolated, immobilized, in agony, and forever without companionship or love. Jordan knew very little about mythology at this point. He was a pure scientist. All he knew for sure was that he and many people he met were isolated and often in agony, and he was still mystified as to why.
Later, to a lecture hall of his students, recalling this lonely period in his life when he first realized the unbelievable horrors people had committed, with emotion cracking his voice, he said,
I read a lot about the terrible things that people have done to each other. You just cannot even imagine it, it’s so awful … There’s this idea that hell is a bottomless pit and that’s because no matter how bad it is, some stupid son of a bitch like you could figure out a way to make it a lot worse. So you think, well, what do you do about that?
Well, you accept it. That’s what life is like. It’s suffering. That’s what the religious people have always said, life is suffering. You have to look for … that little bit of sparkling crystal in the darkness when things are bad. You have to look and see where things are still beautiful and where there’s still something that’s sustaining … be grateful for what you have, and that can get you through some very dark times and maybe even successfully if you’re lucky.11
But at this moment in his young life, Jordan didn’t understand suffering like he would later. He didn’t understand the mythological hero’s journey that he was on in order to gain such wisdom. He was Orpheus descending into hell to bring back his wife, the love of his life; he was Odysseus traveling through the land of the dead to learn of his future; he was Jason on his dangerous voyage with the Argonauts to bring back the golden fleece of knowledge.
He also didn’t know he was entering the most dangerous part of his particular journey. He had completed his descent into hell and crossed the River Styx into the land of the dead. Fifty million Russians and seventy million Europeans and others killed in the war now spoke to him from the pages of Solzhentisyn. Ghosts routinely went about their normal business in the shadows of villages across Europe. On market days, they shopped in sunny plazas with their still-living mothers who, inside, would never stop weeping for them. They stared mutely at the young Canadian from the dark corners of his desolate pensiones. By the time Jordan ended his year in Europe and returned to Canada, one might say that he was truly possessed by them.