Rejection of the unknown is tantamount to “identification with the devil,” the mythological counterpart and eternal adversary of the world-creating exploratory hero. Such rejection and identification is a consequence of Luciferian pride, which states: all that I know is all that is necessary to know. This pride is totalitarian assumption of omniscience—is adoption of God’s place by “reason”—is something that inevitably generates a state of personal and social being indistinguishable from hell.
—JORDAN PETERSON, MAPS OF MEANING: THE ARCHITECTURE OF BELIEF
At twenty-one, still plagued with self-doubt, Jordan returned to his family home in Fairview for the summer break. He had decided to continue his education in psychology in the fall at McGill University in Montreal, and awaited their reply to his application.
Meanwhile, he rested among his family and childhood friends. One of his oldest friends and earliest romantic crush, Tammy Roberts, still lived just across the street from his parents’ house. They were childhood playmates and adventurers who could play rough outdoors like boys, or whisper naughty secrets and laugh like girls with equal ease. They’d gone their separate ways during their tumultuous teenage years but now as young adults seemed to share a growing attraction.
Tammy was a warmhearted and unpretentious character, quite different from some of the frivolous sorority girls Jordan had encountered at University of Alberta. She was more like the plainspoken pioneer women of the northern plains but with a vicious sense of humor. She particularly loved crushing his chances at croquet by sending his croquet ball into the far reaches of the prairie with one mighty blow, followed by a merciless taunting. He laughed at her fiendish glee in beating him so soundly.
As the fireflies rose in the early evenings, she was quietly intent on his muted recollections of the terrible events and inner trials he’d gone through. She listened to his continuing battle with good and evil, a familiar theme since childhood. Jordan was a slightly quieter version of his young self—intense, popping with ideas, shy, and polite like many prairie cowboys and with an easy smile whenever she wanted to divert him.
She reminded him of a time when they were eleven or twelve years old. He’d just gotten a pair of horn-rimmed prescription eyeglasses and was quite proud to show them off, parading out into their street so everyone could admire them and him. Tammy came out of her house and inspected his new fashion accessory closely as he asked, “What do you think of these?” with great pride.
She stepped back to view his full face and thought for a moment before replying, “I think you look really funny in those.” She pointed at him and ran back into her house.
Now, in the gentle prairie evening ten years later, Tammy finally admitted that she had wanted glasses too and was jealous. She teased him instead of swelling his head even more. A wavy half smile stretched across Jordan’s face, and his dark mood disappeared.
At McGill, he began formal training to become a clinical psychologist. Although Freud and Jung had validated his symptoms and theorized solutions for his postmodern nausea, and Solzhenitsyn and Dostoevsky had provided their personal solutions in Christianity, he still had his doubts, recalling, “I could not distinguish the basic elements of Christian belief from wishful thinking.”1
It was 1984, the year of Orwell’s imagined dystopian society. Ironically, totalitarian socialism was gaining a foothold throughout Western culture and particularly on American and Canadian college campuses. Senior Russian KGB agent and recent defector to Canada, Yuri Bezmenov, elaborated on Russian psychological warfare or “active measures” that were presumably a large part of the reason for this activity,
It takes from fifteen to twenty years to demoralize a nation. Why that many years [is] because this is the minimum number of years which [is required] to educate one generation of students in the country of your enemy exposed to the ideology of the enemy.
In other words, Marxism Leninism ideology is being pumped into the soft heads of at least three generations of American students without being challenged or counterbalanced by the basic values of Americanism, American patriotism. The result you can see [in] most of the people who graduated in [the] sixties, dropouts or half-baked intellectuals are now occupying the positions of power in the government, civil service, business, mass media, educational system. You are stuck with them, you cannot get rid of them, they are contaminated, they’re programmed to think and react to certain stimuli in a certain pattern. You cannot change their mind even if you expose them to authentic information, even if you prove that white is white and black is black, you still cannot change the basic perception and the logic of behavior.2
In spite of the fact that at this point Jordan had only contempt for “soft-headed” socialist students and the apparatchiks in the National Democratic Party, the movement was growing all around him. Apparently, as Bezmenov said, “they [the soft-headed students] are contaminated, they’re programmed to think and react to certain stimuli in a certain pattern.”
This was apparently accurate since, in spite of their belief in it, socialism was collapsing in front of their eyes. Even the Chinese Communist Party recently repudiated their founder, Mao Tse-tung, and his Cultural Revolution. In 1966, they called the Cultural Revolution, “a great revolution that touches people to their very souls and constitutes a deeper and more extensive stage in the development of the socialist revolution in our country.” Now, eighteen years later, they were saying, “The Cultural Revolution was responsible for the most severe setback and the heaviest losses suffered by the Party, the country, and the people since the founding of the People’s Republic.”3
Yet five-pointed red stars on clothing and red fists of solidarity on posters were popping up all over college campuses at the usual grim events promoting solidarity with the oppressed. The KGB and perhaps even the reformed Chinese communists were making steady progress in the West.
Content to ignore these Marxist “useful idiots” on campus, Jordan returned to his studies buoyed by his flirtation with Tammy and relieved of his compulsion to attack fellow students. But bloody dreams still haunted his nights and a deep-seated fear of nuclear war shadowed his days.
His advanced psychology studies at McGill quickly brought him to another lonely island of lost souls like the prisoners at Edmonton Institution. Originally filled with hundreds of people suffering from all types of debilitating mental illnesses, the sprawling Douglas Mental Health University Institute, a teaching hospital affiliated with the university, now housed only the most severely mentally ill. In the late 1960s, the advent of antipsychotic drugs and government mandates “freed” most of Douglas’s patients to a dangerous, unforgiving life on the streets.
Those who remained were strange, much-damaged people. They clustered around the vending machines scattered throughout the hospital’s tunnels. They looked as if they had been photographed by Diane Arbus or painted by Hieronymus Bosch.4
As Jordan and a young female classmate were standing together waiting for the humorless director of Douglas’s clinical training to issue their assignments, a fragile, older woman approached and asked the classmate in the voice of an innocent, friendly child, “Why are you all standing here? What are you doing? Can I come along with you?”
The classmate, a cautious type, turned to Jordan for help: “What should I say to her?” Both students were at a loss for words in front of someone so trusting and obviously in need of a friend. They didn’t want to say the wrong thing and hurt the poor woman any further than she had obviously already been.
They were novices, in no way prepared to deal with an actual mental patient in need. But she was just asking them for information and wondering if they could be friends. Was a white lie appropriate? Would that calm and divert the woman, or would she see through that and be driven back into her eternal nightmare?
Jordan thought he could spin a reasonable white lie, We can only take eight people in our group, that would avoid hurting her feelings. But maybe he heard the faint echo of the voice that had saved him from madness just a few months ago. He told the woman that they were new students in training to become psychologists. And so, she couldn’t join them.
His answer hurt. The woman was clearly dejected and hurting along some old and private wound. The moment hung heavily in the air between them. Then, in a moment of grace, she understood, accepted the truth, and everything was suddenly all right. The voice inside Jordan’s head had stayed silent. In his first unofficial therapy session, a nightmare had been temporarily checked by the unadorned truth. It became item number one in his clinician’s mental notebook.
Not only did truth telling become a bedrock personal principle, but, like a surgeon’s scalpel, the truth would become his best clinical instrument to cut through a person’s natural defenses and reveal the problems of a damaged psyche. This would be particularly true when dealing with future paranoid and dangerous clients who were, “hyper-alert and hyper-focused. They are attending to non-verbal cues with an intentness never manifest during ordinary human interactions.”5
In other words, they could smell a lie and tended to severely punish any authority figure who lied to them. The truth would become his shield as well as his sword.
With only the truth as his weapon against several twentieth-century demons, he’d fought them to a draw and so had earned a meeting with the Queen Goddess of the World. In the daylight world, she was called Tammy Roberts. He would now have to earn her love to survive in hell and someday, if he was brave and strong enough, fight his way back to the daylight and present her with the golden fleece of wisdom and protection.
But while still in his private hell, a legion of doubts, like small, fiendish imps, descended on him prodding, confusing, and laughing at him as he tried to fight his way back to the world. But there was no fighting them, they were too fast, too small. The truth had no effect on them; they just laughed. They flew in his ear, whispering insults and nonsense. They sat for a moment in his mind chattering and laughing, distracting him, drawing his anger, and then vanishing, leaving only their echo of doubt.
He challenged and cursed them. He began to doubt himself for having doubts. He got drunk to drown them out, but it was hopeless. He had no weapon against them and could only run. Mythologically, it might be said he was attempting to recross the River Styx from hell back toward the daylight world of the living. But he was crossing in defeat and surrender. As in Dante’s vision of hell, perhaps he was wading through the river up to his waist as the river was beginning to freeze. Unless he could find an ally or summon the power of the gods somehow, he would be locked in ice in the ninth level of hell forever.
Clinically, being pursued and wading against a current or through mud was often a patient’s hellish image of clinical depression. Extending back to his grandfather, depression was a constant in the Peterson line. Compounded by the lack of sunlight during the long, empty winters at the subarctic tip of the North American prairie, Jordan’s grandfather had suffered severely from depression. Once an energetic and powerful blacksmith, after the death of his own father, Jordan’s grandfather never again walked more than half a block. Only forty-five years old at that time, Jordan’s grandfather spent the rest of his life practically frozen in ice, laying on the couch in his darkened living room, smoking. This sudden collapse had a nightmare effect on Jordan’s father who eventually left his own successful career as a teacher and school administrator because of depression. Young Jordan would also not be spared. Perhaps depression was behind his lifelong obsession with bad guys, political oppressors, and eventually the common demons of mental illness. Neither would Jordan’s daughter be spared.
In the daylight world, he appeared to be his usual focused and diligent self. Perhaps a bit more intent in his studies, a bit more moody in the local bars, but on the whole, quite normal. Inside however, he was frantic. If he didn’t resolve his nagging doubts, everything he had learned, everything he had built, and everything he was, could suddenly vanish into a sinkhole of doubt and depression. He still had not found his bedrock to build on. The voice of truth inside him seemed solid, but how could he be sure it would always be? He needed to find the foundational source behind the voice. He needed to find objective truth, not his truth, the truth, the bedrock and the only hope for heaven.
He found his rescuing ally in an ancient book once condemned as black magic by the Catholic Church. Three hundred and forty-three years earlier in Holland, perhaps also driven by depression after the death of his five-year-old daughter, French philosopher René Descartes dared to write his Meditations on First Philosophy. In it, Jordan found the magic words that could dispel doubt by systematically challenging everything he was taught and, so, everything he believed. It was pure heresy and exactly the weapon Jordan needed. He could scatter the imps of doubt and dig down to bedrock and certainty where he would build his tower out of hell.
Descartes argued that all humans were born with a spark of God-given knowledge that could not be learned. It simply existed, had always existed, and therefore would always exist, whether men ever understood it or not. It was outside of humankind, behind and beyond the world they lived in. It was in fact God himself, the Word that had been spoken across the waters in the beginning and had created the world.
It was known to every civilization of mankind and fundamental to their understanding of themselves. Different cultures had different mythologies around it, but they all referred to the existence of a god or gods just as mythology and psychology described identical phenomena in different terms through time. Nonetheless, the book begins with a method to severely test all these beliefs, and an admonition to discard any that weren’t absolute certainties. He went on to reduce even the activity of human belief to its essence. He wrote in Meditations, in Latin because it was intended for the learned classes of Europe, “Cogito ergo sum,” translation: “I think, therefore I am,” implying that humans were not primarily their physical bodies in a physical world, but were fundamentally “thinking things” connected to a physical body, but existing primarily in an ephemeral world with God. Descartes reveals his thinking on doubts in the first lines of Meditations that may have captured Jordan’s attention:
Several years have now elapsed since I first became aware that I had accepted, even from my youth, many false opinions for true, and that consequently what I afterward based on such principles was highly doubtful; and from that time I was convinced of the necessity of undertaking once in my life to rid myself of all the opinions I had adopted, and of commencing anew the work of building from the foundation.
Descartes was a devoted Catholic, probably even more so after the recent cruel death of his young daughter, so God was then probably fixed in his mind. Jordan was a lapsed Catholic, brimming with doubts and resentments about the state of humanity, and so wasn’t ready to accept even the existence of God. The philosopher’s Hyperbolic (Extreme) Doubt method was a four-step process:
It quickly becomes obvious that this is a huge amount of mental work that only a person consumed with doubt or compelled by unanswerable questions would want to attempt. It is an exhaustive mental exercise intended to build a reliable belief system from the ground up, exactly what Jordan was looking for. We can hear echoes of this disciplined, meticulous approach to the truth in Jordan’s certainty about his beliefs:
Suffering is real, and the artful infliction of suffering on another, for its own sake, is wrong. That became the cornerstone of my belief. Searching through the lowest reaches of human thought and action, understanding my own capacity to act like a Nazi prison guard or a gulag archipelago trustee or a torturer of children in a dungeon, I grasped what it meant to “take the sins of the world onto oneself.”6
In his reference to the distinctly Christian idea to “take the sins of the world onto oneself,” it seems certain that Jordan at least recognized some of the value of Descartes’s bedrock belief in God. But he never, at least as of this writing, came to Descartes’s certainty. He came only as far as to accept the value of believing in God. In later years, in answer to the often-repeated question, “Do you believe in God?,” he was able to answer, “I can’t really say … but I act as if there is a God.”
In 1985, at least then certain about some of his beliefs and perhaps inspired by Descartes, he began writing his first book, Gods of War, a philosophy of religion and belief. In it, he explored ideological possession, calling it a pathology that replaces a person’s individuality with his or her belief in an ideology such as Nazism, communism, or Western democracy. His use of the word possession, of course, evoked the still powerful Christian belief of demonic possession. Attesting to the enduring grip of demonic possession on the public imagination, the film The Exorcist had been released over a decade earlier to huge commercial and critical success, which continued for decades after to become one of the highest grossing films of all time, and was entered into the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”
Demonic possession was still a powerful current in the sea of human affairs. In Gods of War, Jordan argued that when individual reason is sublimated to any ideology, it emerged in genocidal impulses so profound, so demonic, that even an annihilating global nuclear war seemed reasonable. In this, he struck the first blow against his own lifelong demonic possession by the specter of nuclear war. He was now on the offensive, armed with the truth and a few unshakable beliefs. He was building his tower out of hell.
But the Prince was not amused. He still owned the night and filled Jordan’s dreams with more bloody terrors. He struck at Jordan’s Achilles’ heel, depression, sending the young graduate student tumbling down into the freezing, numbing mud of social withdrawal, like his father and grandfather before him. Days and weeks passed with Jordan slogging through psychic, frozen mud, unable to rest at night and sleepwalking through his days. Only his extraordinary personal energy and dogged commitment to fight off his depression allowed him to continue in his studies and write Gods of War at night. He would work for the next thirteen years writing the book, saying, “I am writing my book in an attempt to explain the psychological significance of history—to explain the meaning of history.”7
At McGill University, Jordan began his advanced studies in psychology by examining substance abuse, alcohol-induced aggression, addiction, and behavior modification. He studied primarily under Professor Robert O. Pihl, an American who was celebrated for his world-changing work on children with learning disabilities. Using analysis of the children’s hair, he had found high levels of lead and cadmium in children who had problems learning. This influenced the US Congress to ban lead in all paint beginning in the 1970s. He went on to find similar levels of the toxins in the hair of violent criminals.
His work with environmental toxins and violent criminals led him into further study of human aggression from other toxins including alcohol. When Jordan arrived at McGill, Pihl had most recently published “Effects of Alcohol and Behavior Contingencies on Human Aggression”8 and was a codirector of the Alcohol Studies Group at the Douglas Institute.
Pihl’s study of aggression was closely related to Jordan’s interests in social conflict and psychological pathologies. Jordan and Pihl began an eight-year working relationship that continued through the completion of Jordan’s master’s degree, PhD in Clinical Psychology, and postdoctoral fellowship at the Douglas Institute until June of 1993.
Jordan would witness quite a bit of human aggression in his years at Douglas Institute including several potentially dangerous encounters with patients who shared violent and bloody nightmares like his own, who harbored serious depression like his own. He used Leo Tolstoy’s account of depression in his Maps of Meaning to describe the condition that he and his patients continued to suffer from:
It had come to this, that I, a healthy, fortunate man, felt I could no longer live: some irresistible power impelled me to rid myself one way or other of life. I cannot say I wished to kill myself. The power which drew me away from life was stronger, fuller, and more widespread than any mere wish. It was a force similar to the former striving to live, only in a contrary direction. All my strength drew me away from life. The thought of self-destruction now came to me as naturally as thoughts of how to improve my life had come formerly.9
Jordan’s ongoing depression was so painful that even years later recalling the cost of depression to himself and his family brought instant tears to his eyes. As he counseled an online follower about the depression-driven suicide of the follower’s daughter, he broke down and cried, yet managed to recover his composure and continue his counsel for her:
FOLLOWER: Our daughter ended her life at 24 due to depression. If someone is determined to end their life how can one change their mind?
JORDAN: Oh well first of all that’s … I’m very sorry about that. That’s a terrible thing. Look I had this friend her … [he begins to cry] … sorry. There’s been a lot of depression in our family so it’s a question that cuts close to the bone.10
In his earliest work on depression as a suspected precursor to alcohol addiction and aggression, he and Professor Pihl focused first on a new antidepressant as possibly the quickest way to address potentially life-threatening depression.
Fluoxetine, a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, or SSRI, had been developed in the 1970s and was the most recent antidepressant being used in clinical trials. But first, they had to try cognitive therapy, essentially their own therapeutic advice, to lead suffering patients back from the brink of self-destruction, a path Jordan himself was walking. The first step was to gain the patient’s absolute trust. Jordan describes this process in a YouTube video:
One of the things I do with my clients all the time especially if they’re really in trouble is to tell them, “Look, I don’t know exactly what’s going to help you.” But [I] don’t arbitrarily throw out any possibilities because you might not have that luxury.11
He gives an example in his book 12 Rules for Life,
I had a client who was paranoid and dangerous. Working with paranoid people is challenging. They believe they have been targeted by mysterious conspiratorial forces, working malevolently behind the scenes.… They make mistakes in interpretation (that’s the paranoia) but they are still almost uncanny in their ability to detect mixed motives, judgment, and falsehood.
You have to listen very carefully and tell the truth if you are going to get a paranoid person to open up to you.
I listened carefully and spoke truthfully to my client. Now and then, he would describe bloodcurdling fantasies of flaying people for revenge. I would watch how I was reacting.… I told him what I observed. I was not trying to control or direct his thoughts or actions (or mine). I was only trying to let him know as transparently as I could how what he was doing was directly affecting at least one person—me.… I told him when he scared me (often), that his words and behaviour were misguided, and that he was going to get into serious trouble.
He talked to me, nonetheless, because I listened and responded honestly, even though I was not encouraging in my responses. He trusted me, despite (or, more accurately, because of) my objections.… He was paranoid, not stupid.… There was no chance of understanding him without that trust.12
After earning their trust, he developed a standard list of questions based on his studies with Pihl, and also, presumably, from his own experience. To help sort through the many possible reasons for depression, he would often probe into the orderliness of the person’s life since many depressives are simply overwhelmed by the disorder in their lives. He asks, “Do you have a job?” He explains why that question is important:
If you don’t have a job you’re really in trouble in our society.… Sometimes you see people who are depressed, they have no job, they have no friends, they have no intimate relationship, they have an additional health problem, and they have a drug and alcohol problem. My experience has been if you have three of those problems it’s almost impossible to help you. You’re so deeply mired in chaos that you can’t get out because you make progress on one front and one of the other problems pull[s] you down.13
Then he digs a little deeper: “Let’s figure out what your aims are, you’ve got to have some aims.” And he explains a possible solution,
They might say, well, I’m so depressed I don’t have any aims. And then I say, “Well, pick the least objectionable of the aims and act it out for a while and see what happens.”14
In this method, he was gently nudging his depressive patients back on track toward a meaningful life. But this early in his studies, he hadn’t yet found the primary importance of meaning in a human life. His manuscript-in-progress was still called Gods of War, but was not yet the book Maps of Meaning. He explains, as an older man, what he was soon to discover about meaning and human suffering:
Once I started studying these mythological stories and I got this idea about the fact that life can be meaningful enough to justify its suffering, I thought, God, that’s such a good idea!, because it’s not optimistic exactly.
You know some people will tell you that you can be happy. It’s like, those people are idiots. I’m telling you, they’re idiots! There’s gonna be things that come along that flatten you so hard you won’t believe it, and you’re not happy then.… Well, in those situations what are you doing? Why even live?… If you’re happy, you’re bloody fortunate and you should enjoy it, you should because it’s the grace of God.15