The devil led him up to a high place and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. And he said to him, “I will give you all their authority and splendor; it has been given to me, and I can give it to anyone I want to. If you worship me, it will all be yours.”
—LUKE 4:1–13, NIV
It was 1992. Jordan was twenty-nine years old, a new father in his young, healthy prime, relatively financially stable, and in love with the love of his life. His reputation was advancing as research papers written with Pihl and others were being well received and widely cited. His career track seemed set, and Tammy was an adoring, affectionate mother and wife. His demons were often down to just a whisper.
He could imagine his future, laid out before him as if he’d been led up to a high place and was overlooking a valley that contained all that the world had to offer. A promise seemed to be implicit in this vision. He could have it all, everything he ever wanted. All he had to do was drift into the comfortable folds of academia and settle in for a long, quiet cruise up to tenure. Just be quiet, believe in the vision, worship it. The rest would take care of itself. It was very, very tempting.
At first it was just a tremor. Barely noticeable. The world was at peace. The missiles of Armageddon had been set aside to rust in their silos; the armies of renegade tyrant Saddam Hussein had been easily crushed after invading Kuwait; and the People’s Republic of China had signed on to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. The United States, Canada, and a coalition of over forty nations that had just rescued Kuwait from dictator Hussein now stood united, astride the globe as a colossus of peace and prosperity.
But the recent, sudden collapse of the West’s mortal enemy, the Soviet Union, was like a sudden crack in the tectonic plates under everyone’s feet. Just a little wobble. Nothing to worry about. The ripples from communism’s collapse were lost in the general relief of world peace, except in certain circles.
Certainly in Russia it became a catastrophe. President Yeltsin stood in the ashes of communism desperate for a plan to restore his shocked nation. He grasped for the shock therapy of American economist Jeffrey Sachs to jump-start a free market economy. Prices on nearly all consumer products would be allowed to rise to market levels, but there would be no immediate rise in wages and few if any regulations on capital and investment. It was the wild west of free markets. It was radical surgery without anesthesia.
But instead of being seen as a catastrophe among global communists, as David Horowitz points out in his book The Black Book of the American Left,
In articles, manifestoes and academic texts, leftists the world over claimed that the Marxist economies they had supported and defended did not represent “real socialism” and were “not what they had meant to defend.”1
In Europe, Jutta Ditfurth, a member of Germany’s Green Party, made it plain there was nothing to learn from recent events:
There simply is no need to re-examine the validity of socialism as a model. It was not socialism that was defeated in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union because these systems were never socialist.2
Revered British historian Eric Hobsbawm remained unfazed. He reflected on the inspiration that set the course of his life and was still available for all true believers even in the wreckage of the Marxist experiment:
The months in Berlin made me a lifelong Communist, or at least a man whose life would lose its nature and its significance without the political project to which he committed himself as a schoolboy, even though that project has demonstrably failed, and as I know now, was bound to fail. The dream of the October Revolution is still there, somewhere inside me.3
In the United States, Samuel Bowles, a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, bravely admitted among all the denial that some “rethinking about socialist economies but little about capitalist economies,”4 was needed. Like George Orwell, who denigrated the herds of resentful British socialists in his The Road to Wigan Pier, Jordan may have also recognized that socialists didn’t really love socialism, they just hated capitalism. Their true motivation wasn’t to help the poor, it was to destroy the rich.
And so the abject, universal failure of Marxism was not going to be a problem for the new or neo-Marxists. Of course, to almost everyone else, including Jordan, Marxism as a belief system and socialism as an economic system were provable nonsense. Yet Hobsbawm, being in his eighties and too old to change, did his best to restart the fires of social and economic justice:
Capitalism and the rich have, for the time being, stopped being scared. Why should the rich, especially in countries like ours where they now glory in injustice and inequality, bother about anyone except themselves? What political penalties do they need to fear if they allow welfare to erode and the protection of those who need it to atrophy? This is the chief effect of the disappearance of even a very bad socialist region from the globe.5
Hobsbawm’s proof was that Russia was adapting poorly to American-imported shock therapy for its economy. President Boris Yeltsin found himself presiding over the wholesale plunder of national assets by wealthy investors using gangster tactics to gain control of entire industries such as oil and gas production. Again capitalism, not Yeltsin’s imprudence, was blamed for this piracy of Russian wealth. This fueled even greater resentment of the West, particularly of America.
But the fracturing of the old world order wasn’t over. It was just beginning. A second crack formed at the very foundation of human social life that sent a shock wave out from academia to every part of the world. This signaled the beginning of radical or third-wave feminism, fueled again by the trademark of revolutionary Marxism: resentment disguised as compassion for the oppressed. More than anything else, this movement would embroil Jordan in a clash of cultures for decades to come.
Radical feminist Gerda Lerner, a onetime communist in the 1930s and pioneer of the new movement, was a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin when she wrote one of the movement’s defining works, The Creation of Patriarchy. As Horowitz noted in his The Black Book of the American Left, Volume II, the recent fall of the Soviet Union prompted her to reflect on her past:
I have striven to lead a conscious, an examined life and to practice what I preach. It now appears that, nevertheless, I failed in many ways, for I fell uncritically for lies I should have been able to penetrate and perceive as such.6
But, like Hobsbawm, this realization did nothing to dissuade her from promoting the trademark of all Marxist revolutionaries, overwhelming emotion.
Like all true believers, I believed as I did because I needed to believe: in a utopian vision of the future, in the possibility of human perfectibility.… And I still need that belief, even if the particular vision I had embraced has turned to ashes.7
At this time, another fracture suddenly split Western society, particularly in America, that would soon bedevil Jordan as well. It snaked out from the Crown Heights neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, on August 26, 1991, when “the most serious anti-Semitic incident in American history”8 killed 2 people and sent 152 police officers and 38 civilians to the hospital. One hundred and twenty-two blacks and 7 whites were arrested.
Resentment had festered in the mixed black/Jewish neighborhood for years until it erupted into a frenzy of race hatred. Conditions in the government-subsidized housing of black neighbors had become intolerable and oppressive when compared to the tidy private homes and thriving businesses of their Orthodox Jewish neighbors. It was a cauldron of resentment that devolved into violence when a Jewish driver accidentally hit and killed one and injured a second young Guyanese child in the neighborhood. This touched off three days of rioting.
In his eulogy at the children’s funeral, the Reverend Al Sharpton further enflamed black resentment by referring to Jewish neighbors as “diamond dealers” and then, typically, disguised this resentment behind a curtain of compassion for black residents by referring to the Jewish ambulance service that had attempted to save the children’s lives by saying, “It’s an accident to allow an apartheid ambulance service in the middle of Crown Heights.”9
Not far from his podium, a banner was raised confirming that Sharpton had achieved his goal to lead the movement against black oppression. It read, HITLER DID NOT DO THE JOB.10
This third crack in civilization soon exploded across academia. The magazine Race Traitor was founded just a few months later by Harvard students and alumni under the blatantly racist motto “Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity.” Even decades later, as a testament to its enduring destructiveness, an Amazon reviewer wrote, “The journal Race Traitor began in 1992 with one lofty ambition: ‘to serve as an intellectual center for those seeking to abolish the white race.’”11
And so the bloody wheel of social revolution turned again, powered by the inexhaustible resource of human resentment. The new middle-class leaders of the oppressed again demanded equality, liberty, and brotherhood as their forebears had in Paris, St. Petersburg, and Beijing. They rushed in a wave toward the compassionate promises of Marxism for a just and equal society. Jordan Peterson knew the promises of Karl Marx were obvious and murderous lies, but the new wave was headed right for him as well. If he spoke up against it, his own future, his family’s future, and all that he had achieved might easily be swept away.
As a postdoctoral fellow at McGill’s Douglas Hospital with a new daughter, twenty clinical patients per week, a soon-to-be peer-reviewed research paper in the works, and three hours a day dedicated to writing Gods of War, Jordan didn’t have a lot of spare time. His life was necessarily quite orderly. Practically every minute and every dollar was assigned to one good purpose or another. He did, however, encounter chaos every day in the lives of his clinical patients and even in his own deep-seated personal depression, but it was, for the time being, manageable. At least until chaos knocked again on his front door. This time it was not Denis but Jordan’s high school buddy Chris, in Montreal for a visit all the way from Fairview.
He (Chris) was a smart guy. He read a lot. He liked science fiction of the kind I was attracted to (Bradbury, Heinlein, Clarke). He was inventive. He was interested in electronic kits and gears and motors. He was a natural engineer. All this was overshadowed, however, by something that had gone wrong in his family. I don’t know what it was. His sisters were smart and his father was soft-spoken and his mother was kind. The girls seemed OK. But Chris had been left unattended to in some important way. Despite his intelligence and curiosity he was angry, resentful and without hope.12
Jordan welcomed his old friend into the apartment. It was soon apparent that things had not improved much for Chris over the twelve years since high school, and that he’d traveled over two thousand miles from Fairview not just for a friendly visit but seeking help. Jordan offered a sympathetic ear and hours of his precious time to his old friend. Maybe now that they were older and Jordan had some practical experience sorting out wrecked psyches, some of Chris’s problems could be sorted as well. He certainly wasn’t looking for more work, but as a committed healer Jordan naturally wanted to help, especially an old friend. Tammy had also been friendly with Chris in high school so the troubled young man got a warm, small-town welcome into the tiny Peterson home.
The days rolled out and often after Tammy and one-year-old Mikhaila had gone to bed, the talks between the two old friends stretched into the late hours. There was hope that a fresh start in Montreal would bring Chris out of the aimless, drifting life he’d fallen into. The visit stretched into weeks.
But even after all the talks, the laughs, the dinners, and recalling old times and adventures together, there it was. At rock bottom of Chris’s dissipated and chaotic life resentment swirled like a black hole consuming everything. All of Jordan’s precious time, all of Tammy’s kindnesses, all the love shown to Chris and even whatever pitiful respect and love he could muster for himself, weren’t enough to overcome the psychological gravity.
Chris started by hating men, but he ended by hating women. He wanted them, but he had rejected education, and career, and desire. He smoked heavily, and was unemployed. Unsurprisingly, therefore, he was not of much interest to women. That made him bitter. I tried to convince him that the path he had chosen was only going to lead to further ruin. He needed to develop some humility. He needed to get a life.13
But the only life Chris saw was a pit of cruelty and barbarism, something to be despised and avoided. It was once again Sartre’s nausea, Nietzsche’s nihilism, and Marx’s world of oppression. It was philosophers Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault’s postmodern, deconstructionist view of a world drained of meaning and without possibility of spiritual redemption. It was 180 degrees opposite of Jordan’s emerging worldview. It was the approaching cross of Chris’s crucifixion.
The gaping black hole of chaos that Jordan had let into his home in friendship began to shake the orderly, loving life he’d built with so much sacrifice and effort. Jordan liked Chris and knew him as well as he knew any of his old friends. They were so close in interests and temperament, they’d spent as much time together as almost anyone outside of his immediate family. Yet, Chris had already slipped beyond reach.
One evening, it was Chris’ turn to make dinner. When my wife came home, the apartment was filled with smoke. Hamburgers were burning furiously in the frying pan. Chris was on his hands and knees, attempting to repair something that had come loose on the legs of the stove. My wife knew his tricks. She knew he was burning dinner on purpose. He resented having to make it. He resented the feminine role (even though the household duties were split in a reasonable manner; even though he knew that perfectly well). He was fixing the stove to provide a plausible, even creditable excuse for burning the food. When she pointed out what he was doing, he played the victim, but he was deeply and dangerously furious.
Part of him, and not the good part, was convinced that he was smarter than anyone else. It was a blow to his pride that she could see through his tricks.14
Tammy was tiring of Chris but Jordan continued to hope for the best, perhaps allowing himself to be flattered by Chris’s deference or worse, allowing himself the arrogance of thinking he could resolve his friend’s issues. In either case, the demands of family life and career on the Petersons allowed Chris to avoid the normal alarms and permit a guest in their house. This was the perfect condition to low Chris’s stunted ambition to survive intact; no one was challenging him or watching too closely. And so, from the chaos of human potential, Chris chose to continue his slide hellward while the Petersons continued, obliviously, to live a near perfect life.
At Christmas that year, 1994, Jordan’s brother, Joel, and his wife arrived to celebrate the holiday. Although Chris knew the couple, their arrival meant fresh eyes on his situation, new scrutiny, more humiliation. They were intruding on his space.
For fun, everyone decided to take a walk through old, charming downtown Montreal. Christmas joy sparkled everywhere and traditional music, sights, and treats livened everyone’s spirits, except Chris’s. He trudged along, mostly mute, clad in funereal black from head to toe. Back at the apartment, the light and warmth of Christmas seemed to leak out of the apartment from every crack as a deathly stillness settled in. Their festive dinner ended, conversation waned, and everyone said goodnight, settling into their beds, all snug, well-fed, and thinking of happy Christmases past. But no one would sleep that night. Something very like murder was afoot.
Something wasn’t right. It was in the air. At four in the morning, I had had enough. I crawled out of bed. I knocked quietly on Chris’s door and went without waiting for an answer into his room. He was awake on the bed, staring at the ceiling, as I knew he would be. I sat down beside him. I knew him very well. I talked him down from his murderous rage. Then I went back to bed, and slept. The next morning my brother pulled me aside. He wanted to speak with me. We sat down. He said, “What the hell was going on last night? I couldn’t sleep at all. Was something wrong?” I told my brother that Chris wasn’t doing so well. I didn’t tell him that he was lucky to be alive—that we all were. The spirit of Cain had visited our house, but we were left unscathed. Maybe I picked up some change in scent that night, when death hung in the air.15
Jordan wasn’t speaking metaphorically. He had been aware of Chris’s scent for some time and noted it well.
Chris had a very bitter odour. He showered frequently, but the towels and the sheets picked up the smell. It was impossible to get them clean. It was the product of a psyche and a body that did not operate harmoniously. A social worker I knew, who also knew Chris, told me of her familiarity with that odour. Everyone at her workplace knew of it, although they only discussed it in hushed tones. They called it the smell of the unemployable.16
A few months later, after Chris had left their home, a letter arrived from him. Jordan saved it and quoted it in full years later in Maps of Meaning. In the letter, we can glimpse a promising young man’s mind at the end of the twentieth century in the midst of being torn apart by the received wisdom of that age. Chris would never recover from his ideological possession as Jordan would come to call it. Chris wrote,
I hope you will have patience while I unburden myself on you, because I need desperately to confess my sins to someone.…
Imagine if you can a grown man who harbors in his heart the most vicious resentment for his fellow man, his neighbor, who is guilty of nothing more than embodying a superior consciousness of what it means to be a man. When I think of all the black, scathing thoughts I have directed at those who I could not look in the eye, it is almost unbearable.17
It may be worth noting below the similar murderous resentment in the journal entries of Columbine mass killer Eric Harris. It seems that postmodern social disintegration was effecting young white men in particular. Harris wrote,
One big fucking problem Is people telling me what to fuckin do, think, say, act, and everything else. I’ll do what you say IF I feel like it. But people (I.E. parents, cops, God, teachers) telling me what to just makes me not want to fucking do it! thats why my fucking name is REB!!! no one is worthy of shit unless I say they are, I feel like GOD and I wish I was, having everyone being OFFICIALLY lower than me.18
Chris continued, detailing the mile markers on the road to hell that were all too familiar to Jordan.
I equated independence and success with egotism and selfishness, and it was my fondest hope, my highest ambition, to witness and participate in the destruction of everything that successful, independent people had built for themselves. This I considered a duty. In fact there was a decidedly fanatical element in my urge to cleanse the world of what I perceived to be selfishness.… It makes me wonder that I have even one friend in this world. But of course I had friends before. Anyone with enough self-contempt that they could forgive me mine.
I was sitting and thinking about what course my life should be taking … to the point where it was unacceptable to consider any career at all because just by being alive I would contribute to the destruction of the planet … so one is then faced with the need to accept on faith that things will turn out for the better with some luck and perseverance. And being a fine upstanding modern mouse with an enlightened rational mind, I have no use for faith and other such religious sounding claptrap and nonsense. Faith is obviously irrational, and I’ll not have any irrationality influencing my behavior.19
Chris closed by acknowledging Jordan’s guidance and the cost of ignoring it,
Your ideas are starting to make sense to me now—at least I think they are. Faith in God means faith in that which kindles one’s interest, and leads one away from the parental sphere out into the world. To deny those interests is to deny God, to fall from heaven and land squarely in hell, where one’s passions burn eternally in frustration.20
For years afterward, in spite of his glimpse of Jordan’s path to redemption, Chris continued to drift from one menial job to the next, never finding the relief or a compelling meaning that could sustain him through the predictable catastrophes in every life. Even so, Jordan never abandoned Chris over the years.
Chris called Jordan the day before his fortieth birthday and the two spoke hopefully about the possible publication of Chris’s writing in a local paper. Things were looking up. Maybe the fires of youth had died out and progress could now be made.
The following day, on his fortieth birthday, Chris drove his battered pickup truck to the edge of the empty prairie outside of Fairview, ran a hose from the exhaust pipe of the running engine through the driver’s side window, climbed in, closed the cab door, and smoked a cigarette while he waited for the end.
It had been eight years since Jordan began writing his book Gods of War, his attempt “to explain the meaning of history.” He’d committed himself to writing three hours a day, seven days a week—a huge commitment that he protected fiercely even through his marriage, demanding career, and birth of two children—Mikhaila and his new son, Julian. Soon after he began the work, he quit drinking beyond an occasional social beer, sacrificing most of his social life. His full focus was on integrating his clinical work, research, wide reading, and life experiences into a concise story about how evil continued to thrive in the modern world. Now his manuscript was nearly complete and he found the work trending toward a conclusion. His final chapter, “The Hostile Brothers,” seemed to zero in on the individual and societal cost of a postmodern godless and perceived hostile universe. It seems more than possible, that his near-death experience as a young man, and most recently Chris’s fatal one in the clutches of nihilistic resentment, may have shaped his thoughts.
In the opening of this final chapter Jordan wrote,
One of these “hostile brothers” or “eternal sons of God” is the mythological hero. He faces the unknown with the presumption of its benevolence—with the (unprovable) attitude that confrontation with the unknown will bring renewal and redemption. He enters, voluntarily, into creative “union with the Great Mother,” builds or regenerates society, and brings peace to a warring world. The other “son of God” is the eternal adversary. This “spirit of unbridled rationality,” horrified by his limited apprehension of the conditions of existence, shrinks from contact with everything he does not understand. This shrinking weakens his personality, no longer nourished by the “water of life,” and makes him rigid and authoritarian, as he clings desperately to the familiar, “rational,” and stable. Every deceitful retreat increases his fear; every new “protective law” increases his frustration, boredom and contempt for life. His weakness, in combination with his neurotic suffering, engenders resentment and hatred for existence itself.21
Acknowledging the inexhaustible potential for evil in the world, Jordan began to fear for his own very young children. With the birth of Julian, he held in his hands the tiniest living representation of human fragility. Almost anything, the slightest noxious breeze, an innocuous insect bite, or any number of unknown reasons could end the youngster’s life in an instant, taking part of him, Tammy, and older sister, Mikhaila, with him. Wasn’t everyone in the world, in their own way, just as vulnerable? Perhaps it was his ever-present depression speaking, a postpartum reaction to the awesome responsibility he now added to his load, but it wasn’t wrong. Perhaps he was overly sensitive because they had also noticed something was wrong with Mikhaila.
Tammy saw that something was off about Mikhaila’s gait, the way she walked. She attributed it to the rides on Jordan’s shoulders that seemed to cause the child pain when they were over. He stopped giving his daughter the rides that they both enjoyed so much. This was the feather’s edge of a painful and prolonged battle with childhood rheumatoid arthritis that would afflict Mikhaila for years to come.
He would later write of this moment in 12 Rules for Life,
What sort of God would make a world where such a thing could happen, at all?—much less to an innocent and happy little girl? It’s a question of absolutely fundamental import, for believer and non-believer alike.22
And if that was the actual state of the world, he wondered, how could a normal human being, even a political zealot, willingly promote even more tragedy and malevolence than already existed? Hadn’t every legend, fairy tale, and religious story warned them for millennia that they would get caught in their own web of evil? Did they even know what evil was, or had it died a hundred years ago and been forgotten along with God?
In all his work and years of deep contemplation on this, it seemed as if there were very few even talking about such things beyond immediate outrage. Hideous new levels of malevolence were blooming with every mass shooting, every violent riot, and every new, hateful demonization of a social or political group. It was springtime in hell.
Whatever was operating now in the Western mind, after the collapse of the old world order, was something deeper than surface consciousness. It was deeper than biology because it overrode even the instinct to survive. It was at the very core of being.
Would the Petersons’ tender-aged children even survive? And what was his part going to be in all of this? Would he stay safe behind the ivy-covered walls of academia? Would he say yes to the comfortable life he was promised and join the long, gray line of tenured professors? Or would he pitch everyone he loved back into the depths with him for another round with the Prince of Darkness?