The Fall of the Prophet

What Jordan Peterson's Collapse Taught Me About Living Tradition

Jordan Peterson changed my life—and the lives of millions of men searching for meaning in a rootless world. His lectures were the bridge that connected my secular, progressive worldview to the ancient wisdom I'd abandoned. For that, I remain eternally grateful.

But Peterson's own dramatic collapse in 2020 revealed something crucial about the limitations of intellectual understanding alone. Even the most brilliant analysis of traditional wisdom can't replace the lived practice of participating in it. Even the clearest articulation of meaning can't substitute for the communities and practices that sustain us through life's inevitable storms.

This is the story of what I learned from Peterson's fall—and why it convinced me that men need more than ideas. We need embodied practice, genuine community, and the humility to submit to something greater than our own understanding.

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"Uncontrollable panic". "Suicidal". "Coma". In early 2020, I listened in shock as Mikhaila Peterson described her father's condition. The words sounded like they are coming from another world as Mikhaila mechanically reads them up sitting in what appears to be a tacky hotel bathroom. Jordan Peterson—the commanding intellectual who had helped millions find meaning—lay unconscious in a Russian hospital, in a medically-induced coma to treat his dependence on benzodiazepines. The man whose words had guided so many through darkness was now fighting for his own life.

This was the thinker who had changed my life—a bridge between my progressive materialism and the traditional wisdom of my childhood I'd abandoned up to that point.

Peterson had accomplished something remarkable: as a respected academic, he approached ancient stories with reverence instead of dismissal. He mined Biblical narratives and mythological archetypes for psychological truth rather than treating them as primitive superstitions.

"Life is suffering. You can't escape it. But you can transcend it through meaning," he had once said. But this was not just suffering. This was collapse. Humiliation. Surely it couldn't be the end?

Two years before this crisis, I had attended one of Peterson's sold-out lectures in London. The theater had been packed with young men—many like me who'd, like me, traveled hundreds of miles to see him. We sat forward on our seats, notebooks open, eyes fixed on the stage to catch the words of salvation emerging from his carefully articulated sentences.

Peterson stood tall at the podium, his angular frame draped in a tailored suit, commanding the room with precisely calibrated gestures and that distinctive Canadian accent. Alone on the stark stage, his presence filled the space completely as he wove together evolutionary psychology, Biblical narratives, and political commentary. He was at his peak—topping bestseller lists, filling arenas, his Patreon account swelling with support from devoted followers.

Right at the end of the Q&A session, a young man asked Peterson about psychedelics. I instinctively reached for my phone to record his answer—this question had been burning in my own mind. Peterson paused, his expression thoughtful.

"Beware of unearned wisdom," he quoted Jung, his voice carrying a peculiar weight. Yet beneath the caution, I noticed something I recognised—a glimmer of fascination, perhaps even familiarity. He spoke of mystical experiences with the careful precision of someone who understood more than mere theory. He expanded, turning to describe an Eastern Orthodox icon of "Christ Pantocrator". He described the icon in his typical freewheeling terms - "It represents the fact that half of Christ was divine and half of him was human." he insisted. "I'm not religious myself, but people built whole cathedrals to house that representation."

Peterson mentioned that this image was from the 14th century in his talk. In fact it is from the mid 6th century, making it approximately 1480 years old. It is the oldest icon of Christ we have today, and it is preserved at St Catherines monastery at the foot of Mt. Sinai in Egypt, where I had the priviledge of visitng long before I become a Christian mysef.

As he connected this icon to the neurological capacity for religious experience—experiences that "psychedelics can produce"—I felt a surge of affinity. Here was the intellectual I admired most, essentially describing psychedelics as a material key to divine consciousness.

The crowd listened, captivated by his speculations, while I sat with a growing sense of affirmation. Peterson had been the father figure that helped me to abandon many self-destructive patterns I had gotten myself into since my breakup. Yet psychedelics remained my one "spiritual technology." Now he seemed to be offering a sophisticated rationale for continuing my chemical explorations of consciousness—a shortcut to God wrapped in Jungian caution and Orthodox imagery.

The whole experience of Peterson did not disappoint in any way. Here was someone who took seriously the emptiness that modern men felt—the purposelessness, the lack of clear social roles, the absence of initiation rituals. He articulated what I had been experiencing my whole life but couldn't name.

Yet beneath this triumph, warning signs were appearing. His schedule was punishing—hundreds of appearances in dozens of countries. His social media accounts updated constantly flooding my feeds with new content, new appearances, new commitments. He spoke of sleeping only a few hours each night, his mind racing with ideas. His diet had narrowed to only meat to control autoimmune issues that plagued him.

Then came the breaking point. His wife's cancer diagnosis shattered what remaining equilibrium he had. The man who had counseled millions on handling life's suffering found himself overwhelmed. Prescribed benzodiazepines for anxiety, he quickly developed a physical dependence that spiraled into a medical crisis.

When conventional Western treatments proved insufficient, Peterson made the decision to seek alternative treatment in Russia—a medically induced coma to drain the drug from his system. Russian doctors pointed out to his family how often they see that regular use of common psychopharma, seen very regularly in patients from the West, induced clear changes in brain structure. MRI scans showed exactly such changes in Petersons brain.

One could imagine him in that hospital, his own admonition to "Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world" echoing through his unconscious mind.

What struck me most powerfully about Peterson's struggle was how it reflected the broader crisis of modern masculinity. Here was a man with every intellectual tool—professor at a prestigious university, clinical psychologist, bestselling author—yet all that knowledge couldn't insulate him from catastrophe.

A capture from the scene in London of Jordan giving his answer on the question of psychedelics.

Peterson had brilliantly articulated traditional wisdom. He could lecture eloquently on the psychological significance of Biblical stories, but he wasn't embedded in the lived practices and communities that have historically sheltered men from life's storms. In an interview with Jonathan Pageau, he admitted to having fans, but outside of his immediate family, he had no real fellowship. He spoke of sacrifice but had no liturgy to embody it. He praised hierarchy but had no elders to submit to. He valued tradition but approached it primarily as an individual thinker rather than an inheritor. Perhaps most concerningly, he was not only advocating the use of psychedelics as a shortcut path to spirituality, but perhaps he was also taking the shortcut.

"The purpose of life is finding the largest burden that you can bear and bearing it," he had told countless young men. Yet when his own burden grew too heavy, there was no brotherhood to take on the load, no father figure to guide him, no higher power to turn to and no traditional practices to steady him.

Peterson has helped countless men, including me, begin asking the right questions. His work remains invaluable as a gateway to deeper thinking. But the story up to this point reveals something crucial: knowledge alone is insufficient without practice, individual striving needs community support, and intellectual understanding must be embodied in tradition.

Modern men, even brilliant ones, remain vulnerable when disconnected from traditional masculine roles and the communities that support them. We seek answers in books and lectures and we consume hundreds of hours of podcasts and YouTube videos. What we need is apprenticeship in relational living and fellowship. We accumulate information when what we need is transformation.

Peterson's ordeal illustrates the core crisis this book addresses: men cannot think their way back to wholeness. Success, fame, and intellectual mastery provide no shelter in life's storms. For that, we need something older and deeper—the traditional paths of masculine development that have guided men for millennia.

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Peterson opened the door for countless men to reconsider tradition and meaning. But as his own story tragically illustrates, we can't think our way to wholeness. We need to live our way there.

That's why I've spent the last decade building what Peterson's work inspired but couldn't provide: practical, grounded communities where men move from analyzing principles to living them. Our Core accountability groups started with Peterson's insights about responsibility and hierarchy, but they're built around the ancient practices that actually transform lives—not just understanding.

If you're tired of consuming more content about masculinity and ready to start practicing it, join our next group. We meet weekly, check in with a buddy daily, holding each other accountable, and we focus on action over analysis. Because the goal isn't to understand tradition—it's to live it.

Ready to move from theory to practice? Join a Core accountability group here.