Jordan Peterson’s Prophecies

At the end of We Who Wrestle with God, Jordan Peterson tells the reader that the book is a “response to the brilliant Nietzsche”. For the  Canadian psychologist and leading prophet of the counter-cultural right, the woke movements on which he wages war are not the fundamental cause of the crisis he believes has overtaken Western civilisation. The malady of the West is the collapse of meaning that befalls human beings when their values are unmoored from any transcendental order – the condition Nietzsche diagnosed as nihilism. The remedy is fearless self-examination, an agonising struggle against despair that points to a realm beyond the self. But is the realm Peterson discovers separate from his struggle? Or is it a therapeutic fiction, invented to rebuild a self shattered in traumatic encounters with the madness of the age?