Wealth signified oppression, and private property was theft. It was time for some equity. More than thirty thousand kulaks were shot on the spot.
Many more met their fate at the hands of their most jealous, resentful, and unproductive neighbors who used the high ideals of communist collectivism to hide their intent.
—JORDAN PETERSON, 12 RULES FOR LIFE: AN ANTIDOTE TO CHAOS
In 1962, the year Jordan was born, the United States and the Soviet Union were locked in a warlike failure of morality called the Cold War that suggested both could never live together on the same planet. The best moral solution the Americans could manage was to settle on a war policy called MAD (mutually assured destruction) that promised both could die on the same planet. In reaction, the Doomsday Clock stayed frozen at seven minutes to Armageddon as did the rest of mankind. For the next eleven years the world remained on the brink, not out of caution or sensible reconsideration, but because no one could even imagine a shared moral resolution.
In 1983, just a month before Jordan entered McGill University, US president Ronald Reagan recognized that the Soviet Union was collapsing economically just as communist China had. He rolled the dice in the world’s first all-or-nothing crap game for existence and announced the Strategic Defense Initiative, a research program into ballistic missile defense against what he considered to be the Evil Empire. This was a coup de grace designed to bankrupt and destroy the Soviet Union. It succeeded by shattering Soviet counterpart Yuri Andropov’s “peace offensive” and prompted Andropov to say,
It is time [Washington] stopped thinking up one option after another in search of the best way of unleashing nuclear war in the hope of winning it. To do this is not just irresponsible. It is madness.1
Apocalyptic psychoses then being nearly universal, this drove a terrified population even further into panic. Twenty-one-year-old Jordan soldiered on somehow, containing his fear enough to focus on his studies with Professor Pihl. In the midst of this devilish new premonition of fire and brimstone, he shouldered the awesome responsibility of administering psychological therapy to about twenty severely mentally damaged patients per week at the Douglas Institute under Pihl’s supervision. He was now frequently distracted from his terrors and may even have felt the first small waves of solace in finding a deeper meaning for his life by helping others in such dire need.
Up to this time, Jordan had found temporary relief from anxiety in his practice of weightlifting. He realized as his studies intensified that the semi-solitary discipline also helped to clear his mind as it energized and calmed him. At thirteen, he’d begun lifting weights as the proverbial hundred-pound weakling with the added bonuses of being flabby and a chain smoker. He immediately mastered a bench press of fifty pounds. In spite of the humiliation of being offered assistance by weightlifters doing multiple sets of one-arm curls of fifty pounds, Jordan persevered. By the age of twenty-two, he had lost the flab and added thirty-five pounds of muscle. His weightlifting was now causing him to eat four or five meals a day that were costing him a large part of his graduate student income. It was also taking hours away from his studies, and that he truly couldn’t afford. He dropped his weights and continued to lift his books. His anxiety was further helped by his work with Pihl in alcohol aggression. He realized his customary relaxation of binge drinking to the point of stumbling and babbling nonsense wasn’t helpful, so he began to cut down on the booze as well.
At about this time, just as defected KGB agent Yuri Bezmenov said it would, the full twenty years of psychological warfare required to demoralize a society was beginning to bear the forbidden fruit of resentment against the West, and academia had taken a big bite. Inside universities across the UK, Canada, and the United States, professors who had been unwitting Soviet activists as students twenty years ago in the 1960s were actively undermining Western values to Jordan’s generation. Colleagues of these proletarian professors had achieved prominent positions in media, politics, and journalism. Suddenly, they were the “me” generation dancing to the disco inferno of the 1980s. They were everywhere, and the West would never be rid of them, as Bezmenov had foretold.
While Jordan was busy building his tower out of hell, a Western cornerstone of capitalism was taking a beating. It had become little more than the “compulsory hedonism of unplanned and irresponsible economic growth,”2 according to Michael Harrington.
In 1982, Harrington, the handsome, Kennedy-esque Yale Law graduate created the Democratic Socialists of America from a merger of the New American Movement (NAM), a coalition of intellectuals from the New Left movements of the 1960s, and former members, like Max Shachtman, of the Old Left socialist and communist parties. Shachtman was an American Marxist, associate of Leon Trotsky and mentor of senior assistants to AFL–CIO president George Meany. He convinced Harrington to cooperate with Meany’s union workers in penetrating the Democratic Party and pushing the Democrats to the left. This strategy was known as realignment.
Harrington was so successful at realigning the Democratic Party to the left that Democratic senator Ted Kennedy said at a party honoring Harrington, “I see Michael Harrington as delivering the Sermon on the Mount to America,” and “Among veterans in the War on Poverty, no one has been a more loyal ally when the night was darkest.”3
Harrington summed up his contribution to America in an interview cited in his New York Times obituary:
Put it this way. Marx was a democrat with a small d. The Democratic Socialists envision a humane social order based on popular control of resources and production, economic planning, equitable distribution, feminism and racial equality. I share an immediate program with liberals in this country because the best liberalism leads toward socialism. I’m a radical, but as I tell my students at Queens, I try not to soapbox. I want to be on the left wing of the possible.4
If one of Jordan’s guiding lights, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, an eyewitness to the horrors of Marxism who was then living in Vermont was aware of Harrington’s interview occurring a few hundred miles south in New York, he may have been somewhat unnerved by it. But if he read the review of Harrington’s most popular book, The Other America: Poverty in the United States, published by the Woodrow Wilson Institute that summarized Harrington’s view on American society by saying, “Values and moral responsibilities that once bound people together have given way to relativistic codes, all encouraging an unhealthy individualism,”5 he may well have panicked. It was then obvious that Marxism had fully infiltrated the West, claiming an emerging minority party in Canada, Jordan’s alma mater the National Democratic Party, and one of the two major political parties in the United States and England. It then boldly declared its collectivist condemnation of “unhealthy individualism.”
Jordan Peterson had no idea who was coming for him. At McGill, as at hundreds of other universities, neo-Marxists sprang up in the humanities and social science departments. They were determined to fight against oppressors—oppressors of women, brown and black people, poor people, working people, indigenous people, and homosexual people. Further fragmenting and codifying these fragments of society, feminist scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw developed the social theory of intersectionality that identified major social strata including class, race, sexual orientation, age, religion, creed, disability, and gender as overlapping oppressed identities. In years to come, gender would be divided even further into fifty-two separate sub-identities, each demanding its own unique, new pronoun. That’s when Jordan, an obscure college professor at the time, would return fully from his private hell to lead the battle for Western civilization. That was coming, and they were coming.
But until then, as a humble psychology student with a growing use for religious and mythological archetypes, Jordan found himself suddenly facing these identities like the multi-headed Hydra of Hercules’s trials in the underworld. He immediately recognized the familiar strains of resentment in student arguments and professors’ lectures, and may have recognized this emerging resentment as Jung’s “shadow,” the dark side of human consciousness that allowed all evils free rein.
Campus demonstrations for civil rights, human rights, gay rights, workers’ rights, and women’s rights became more frequent and more heated. These new Marxists armed themselves with Mao’s little red book; they raised clenched fists of solidarity and swore obedience in slogans like, “One world, one people!” as their belief in a just and perfect world turned slightly more strident. They rejected the highly effective peaceful revolutionaries like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi, and embraced the ruthless heroes of violent Marxist revolution like Huey P. Newton, former leader of the Black Panthers, and Fidel Castro and Ernesto “Che” Guevara of the Cuban Revolution.
Particularly Guevara, whose handsome, long-haired image became a universal icon and fashion totem of Marxist revolutionaries, held the new Marxists in sway. They called him by the familiar name “Che.” Che was deeply feared in Cuba for convicting intellectuals in mock trials and assassinating them by firing squad the same day. Yet, even with his power of life and death over all Cubans, he was deeply resentful after the Soviets backed away from nuclear war with the United States during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He said the cause of socialist liberation from global “imperialist aggression” would have been worth “millions of atomic war victims.”6
With each passing day it seemed like the new Marxists were adopting a slightly more militant, more malevolent stand. Jordan Peterson had only met this type of people in books. He had no idea they’d soon be his antagonistic colleagues in real life.
Tammy was well into her studies, also in psychology, at Jordan’s former school, the University of Alberta in Edmonton. Edmonton was over two thousand miles west of Montreal, so their courtship floated along, progressing slowly and primarily by telephone.
Holiday trips home were rare for Jordan due to the travel expense and nearly overwhelming demands of his research, his doctoral studies, and clinical practice. But it was a committed courtship. As he later happily confessed, “I think I fell in love with her from the first moment I saw her, although I don’t think the feeling was necessarily mutual and so I was about, like, seven, I think.”7
He also recalled that a bit later at age twelve,
I was sitting with her on this big armchair in our living room and she was sitting beside me on the armchair which I was pretty damn thrilled about.… And so anyway she left and I told my Dad that I was going to marry her. I remember that and he told that story at our wedding which was quite cute.8
And at thirteen or fourteen,
I also delivered [the newspaper] to her house and one day she was there with another of her friends who was kind of a cute chick too, and I liked her quite a bit and they were sitting around talking about … how they were feminists, roughly speaking … that neither of them were going to take their husband’s last name when they got married. And Tammy said to her friend, “Well, that really means I’m gonna have to find some wimp and marry him.” And she turned around and looked at me and smiled evilly and said, “Hey, Jordan, do you want to get married?” And of course I had heard the whole conversation and, you know, she knew I liked her obviously, and so that was a nice little comical date. She has a very vicious sense of humor.9
The comfort of their courtship was restorative and a welcome constant in Jordan’s life. As he grew closer to, gained stability, and drew power from Tammy, his personal, mythological Queen Goddess of the World, his challenges changed to match his circumstances.
His work on alcohol addiction under Pihl from 1985 to 1989 brought him face to face with dozens of Jekyll and Hyde monsters of the daylight world. Even at home, after work, the lost souls of alcoholism waited for him, including one of hell’s angels.
Jordan lived in a poor district of Montreal apparently with just enough money to clothe and feed himself. His landlord, a powerful, aging, former hell-raising president of the local Hell’s Angels, lived next door. Denis was a French Canadian and had spent time in prison as a young man, but then married and settled down as he matured. Over many years of married life he had moderated his drinking to a point where it was no longer a problem. He ran a small electronics business out of his apartment and tended to the repairs of his old building enough to keep his few tenants mostly satisfied. This provided a stable and sufficient income for him and his wife. Yet trouble was apparent in the various wounds from self-cutting that marked his wife’s arms and hands. If you believe such things, Denis’s demons who had created a king of hell-raisers, an angel of chaos, visited the domesticated Denis in his tidy, complacent new life. They were intent on exacting retribution for his betrayal.
His wife committed suicide, and Denis suddenly had no kingdom, nor any purpose. He was now just an old, gray landlord—abandoned and heartbroken. Whatever money he had was now given over to numbing alcohol. Within days he was back to drinking a case, or more, of beer a day.
At the witching hour, three a.m., the hallway outside Jordan’s door rang with the clash of battle. Denis’s curses, shouting, and roars of pain echoed throughout the building. Again, if you believe in such things, the demons had the old, blind-drunk king surrounded. He howled at his little dog, his one remaining friend, then laughed with his tormentors at the sheer joy of hell-raising again. Perhaps he would kill the dog, just for good measure. He hissed between his teeth, became incoherent, and finally passed out in humiliation.
Sometimes in the morning after a great battle, he would greet Jordan pleasantly in the hallway as they both began their day as if nothing had happened. He made an effort to befriend his young tenant, inviting him out for a night to one of his old haunts. Jordan accepted, in sympathy, and perhaps thinking he could offer the man some relief from his new store of clinical knowledge about alcoholism.
The night came and they climbed onto Denis’s 1200cc Honda with “the acceleration of a jet plane.” They charged into the night, Jordan clinging on for dear life and wearing only Denis’s wife’s tiny helmet perched uselessly on top of his head for protection.
In the dive bar, with the usual imps and minor demons lounging among the weakened souls, Denis sat impotent, reveling silently in his youthful atrocities as the beer loosened his inhibitions. Jordan drank with his grieving landlord in friendliness and compassion, until as innocently and naturally as walking, the old man magically transformed back into the king of Hell’s Angels. Adopting Jordan as his one and only subject, now to be protected, he attacked anyone incautious enough to say anything displeasing. No doubt some industrious imp of the underworld sat in the old king’s ear interpreting seemingly innocent comments for him. Soon, the screams of the wounded erupted in satisfying choruses as the king wore their blood once again in triumph.
With help, Jordan dragged his grieving landlord from the bar and somehow, Denis managed to navigate his motorcycle back over the icy streets of Montreal to home without killing them both. From then on, Jordan declined invitations but continued to help Denis through his suffering by remaining his friend.
Back behind the relatively safe and orderly walls of the university, Jordan continued his apprenticeship under Dr. Pihl. The abstract to their first paper together reads as follows:
Acute alcohol intoxication produces changes in the cognitive functioning of normal individuals. These changes appear similar prima facie to those exhibited by individuals who sustain prefrontal lobe damage during adulthood. In order to test the validity of this observation, and to control for the confounding effects of expectancy, 72 male subjects were administered a battery of neuropsychological tests, within the context of a balanced-placebo design. Each subject received one of three widely different doses of alcohol. Analysis of the results of the cognitive test battery demonstrated that a high dose of alcohol detrimentally affects a number of functions associated with the prefrontal and temporal lobes, including planning, verbal fluency, memory and complex motor control. Expectancy does not appear to play a significant role in determining this effect. The implications of this pattern of impairment are analyzed and discussed.10
After receiving her degree from the University of Alberta in psychology, Tammy began working as a massage therapist in Ontario, expressing her caring and sensitive nature, rather than pursuing the high-pressure life of a clinical psychology practice, academic research, and advanced degrees like Jordan. An empathetic healer, she remained grounded in the simple acts of listening and physical touch. She and Jordan shared the traits of empathetic healers, forging their personal bonds, Tammy in the physical world and Jordan in the world of the mind.
Fortunately, the debilitating depression and anxiety that had colored much of Jordan’s life and compelled him ever further into the darkest reaches of the human mind for their root causes, held little sway over Tammy. She was able to maintain the stabilizing counterbalance Jordan had come to rely on, both as one his oldest friends and now his committed girlfriend. Their long-distance courtship soon progressed to a love affair in spite of Jordan’s punishing schedule since Tammy had cut the distance between them from two thousand to just over five hundred miles by settling in Ontario.
In 1989 Jordan and Tammy were married in Fairview at the Peterson family’s St. Paul’s United Church. At the wedding, Jordan’s father, Wally, recounted the afternoon in the Peterson family living room fifteen years earlier, when he came upon Tammy and Jordan squeezed into a big chair, pressed against each other’s sides. The living room was empty otherwise. A large couch, open carpet area, and other chairs offered other places to rest, but there they were, wedged in, almost snuggling but not quite. Wally noted their comfortable connection without comment but spent a moment with them until Tammy got up and left for home, perhaps feeling the grown-up intrusion on an intimate moment. Wally turned to his twelve-year-old son and asked, “You kinda like that girl, don’t ya?” Jordan looked at his father and answered with typical seriousness and said, “I’m going to marry her.”
Now having secured the love of his life, a vital achievement in any mythological hero’s journey, Jordan gained her clear and grounded view toward everything in his crowded mind, but lost any refuge he may have allowed for old weaknesses. He no longer had to rely on his own skewed and emotional responses to get a clear perspective on things, but Tammy’s X-ray moral vision allowed no compromise.
In a sense, he had finally fitted the last cornerstone into the foundation of his tower out of hell. He had a partner in the work ahead, and Tammy had found the focus of her life of caring. The couple shared Jordan’s small apartment in Montreal next to Denis whom Tammy grew fond of and protective toward. The young couple immediately set to work, building the tower walls on the foundation Jordan had laid. Tammy’s first challenge as queen of their small realm came with a gentle knock on the apartment door late one night after the orderly daylight world had gone to bed.
Denis, bearing recent wounds of battle, stood unsteadily in the doorway, offering his toaster for cash. Up to this point, Jordan had been helping Denis out, he thought, by buying various appliances from him. This was a blind spot in Jordan that Tammy immediately recognized. Obviously, the man had drunk all of his money away and was selling his appliances so he could keep drinking. She demanded that Jordan face Denis, drunk and dangerous as he was, and stand his ground for what was right. Jordan dutifully accepted the command and stood in the doorway facing Denis after two a.m., trying to find the right words to avoid any violent reaction.
I said that he had told me he was trying to quit drinking. I said that it would not be good for him if I provided him with more money. I said that he made Tammy, whom he respected, nervous when he came over so drunk and so late and tried to sell me things.
He glared seriously at me without speaking for about fifteen seconds.
That was plenty long enough. He was watching, I knew, for any micro-expression revealing sarcasm, deceit, contempt or self-congratulation.… Denis turned and left. Not only that, he remembered our conversation, despite his state of professional-level intoxication. He didn’t try to sell me anything again. Our relationship, which was quite good, given the great cultural gaps between us, became even more solid.11
Tammy’s first edict as queen proved the wisdom and courage of her vision. Jordan, humbled before her, recommitted himself to telling the truth, banishing even little white lies to avoid discomfort. They began then in earnest to build their tower walls with truth and courage, as the walls of Jordan’s old enemy, totalitarian socialism, were beginning to crumble.
Following China’s lead, the Marxist experiment in Russia was coming to an end. In 1988, just months before Jordan and Tammy were married, Russian head of state Mikhail Gorbachev began poking holes in Stalinist state secrecy with his policy of glasnost, or openness. Russia’s wall of isolation soon collapsed and freedom of speech flooded into Russia for the first time in decades.
On July 19, American musician Bruce Springsteen bravely performed a live concert in Soviet-controlled East Berlin where he addressed a crowd of three hundred thousand, carefully parsing his words in German so as not to trigger a reaction from the still-active East German secret police, the feared Stasi: “I’m not here for or against any government. I’ve come to play rock and roll for you in the hope that one day all the barriers will be torn down.”
Springsteen’s carefully phrased hope was the fifty-year-old prayer of the free world. It was realized in November 1989 as the first sections of the Berlin Wall, officially known as the Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart between free and Marxist-enslaved Germany, were torn down.
It was a euphoric moment for the Petersons, and an end to madness for generations around the world raised under the specter of nuclear war. Karl Marx’s godless utopia died three days before Christmas with the signing of the Alma-Ata Protocol and was buried the day after at 7:32 p.m., December 26, 1991, when Stalin’s flag, the communist hammer and sickle that had flown over the murder of tens of millions, was lowered for the last time. Nine days later, the Peterson’s first child, a daughter, was born on January 4, 1992. They named her Mikhaila in honor of the Russian leader who had begun to lift Russia out of hellish Marxism and set an example for the rest of the world to follow.