White Zombie

Possession is 9/10ths of Murphy's Law.

Jordan B. Peterson’s recent appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience has sparked — or perhaps reignited — a debate, which could best be summarized as follows:

“What the fuck happened to this guy?”

Questions abound.

For instance, why is he dressed like Captain Kangaroo? Why do his eyebrows look perpetually surprised? How come he constantly bursts into tears, these days, like a toddler with a skinned knee?

But as interesting as those answers might be, they haven’t been the focus as of late. The controversy stems from Peterson’s correlation of antisemitism to psychopaths, Cluster B types, dark triad personalities and other pathological predators. Given his financial relationship with the almost¹ exclusively pro-Zionist Daily Wire (in June 2022, Peterson signed a multi-year content distribution deal with its subscription-based streaming platform, DailyWire+), suspicions about Peterson’s motives and incentives were inevitable. “He who pays the piper calls the tune,” in other words.

For example, in his recent article, The Disgracing of Jordan Peterson,

Keith Woods

set the stage this way:

Douglas Murray had warned Rogan that while critics of Israel and US foreign policy might sound reasonable, they are really charlatans taking advantage of people’s ignorance on these topics, and should be passed over in favour of established experts. Peterson now warned Joe that the problem is even more serious: critics of Israel are psychopaths who are taking advantage of his platform for their malevolent ends. How to identify these people? Presumably just avoid platforming anything you wouldn’t find on the Daily Wire.

Peterson explained how his latest research is focused on how dark personality types are drawn to the radical right, specifically anti-Semitism:

I’ve been watching these right-wing… they’re not right-wing… these psychopathic types manipulate the edge of the conservative movement for their own gain. And a lot of that’s cloaked in anti-Semitic guise.

This article references the nearest node, that being the April 10th debate between pro-Zionist journalist Douglas Murray and comedian Dave Smith on Rogan’s show. Due to the proximity of these episodes, and the general opinion that Dave Smith won the debate, many commenters theorized that Peterson was engaged in some form of strategic damage control. According to this theory, Peterson’s argument is designed to smear and pathologize critics of Israel’s actions in Gaza, or even of the project of Zionism more generally.

The roots of this Peterson-as-paid-stooge theory run much deeper, and include players who go unmentioned but are heavily implied.² As per Rogan’s usual format, the interview is long and multifaceted.

Harrison Koehli

has done us the service of transcribing and analyzing several of the relevant exchanges. It’s an excellent article, restoring some balance to what was threatening to devolve into yet another round of “He Said/Jew Said.” But I also think these nuances only make his dissonant tones ring louder. For instance, at certain points in their conversation, what initially sounded like a generalist argument Peterson was making against psychopathic infiltration of political movements veers jarringly into special pleading and ad absurdum fallacy when “antisemitism” is at issue.

Perhaps the biggest uproar was sparked by what seemed to be Dr. Peterson’s prescription for what ails us. Several of his statements heavily implied that some unmentioned fraction of these critics should have their voices actively suppressed or silenced. The notion of this man who built his notoriety as a Free Speech Champion suddenly advocating for “barriers” and “guardrails” threw even many of his longtime admirers for a loop. It probably shouldn’t have: free speech hypocrites and turncoats are a dime-a-dozen. Just look at Howard Stern.

But Peterson isn’t the typical celebrity, with their long-fed grandiose egos and mercenary ways. He rose to prominence relatively late in life, and seemingly without ambition or strategy. Peterson wasn’t handsome or particularly charismatic, either. Indeed, he was almost the opposite; a guy who looked like the C-suite villain in a Redbox action flick, and who sounded like Kermit the Frog with a case of strep throat. But he stood up to a bunch of woke bullies, and started telling young men they were actually worth a damn. For many observers at the time, that was more than enough to establish trust.

I liked a lot of what I heard from JBP in those first few years as well. But there was also something that I found deeply disturbing about him. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, back then. He had a knack for uttering pseudo-profundities, and tying them back to Jungian archetypes and other perverse psychological theories of mind. But his political rhetoric sounded almost reasonable at first blush, and he gained the affect of a Wise Man over time. He grew a speckled gray beard, forged a steeply arched brow. He started wearing sharp, expensive three-piece suits. I don’t think he ever quite made it to the monocle-and-watchfob phase, but I might have missed it.

There were changes in rhetorical style as well. Tired of being the prey animal for the umpteenth liberal hit-piece, he grew fangs and fur. In interviews, he started mounting strategic attacks on the simpletons across the table, like a heavyweight sparring bantams at a county fair. As a result, both his fame and his infamy ascended in equal measure. A hero of the dissident Right, a black beast of the bootlicking Left. He even seemed to be having fun, at times.

And yet, I couldn’t shake the feeling there was a gaping hole inside Jordan B. Peterson, which was bound to someday be filled by something. I also sensed that the “something” would not be the light of God Almighty. He was so busy scribbling his elaborate maps of meaning that he lost sight of the territory. In fact, the only significant difference I noticed between Peterson’s position and that of an antitheist like Richard Dawkins was that Peterson thought the “God delusion” was beneficial. It turns out that’s a much more perilous place to be.

That’s especially the case when you find yourself surrounded by both genuine believers and religious con-artists, as JBP eventually was. But these new fans, friends, and hangers-on didn’t fill that howling black void inside him either. Looking back on the early days of his notoriety, the problem was obvious. For all his learned knowledge and penetrating insights, Peterson saw the picture of causality upside-down.

“So the question is, how do you differentiate the utility of behavioral/psychotherapeutic treatments for conditions like depression versus medical treatments.

“Okay, so the first thing I would say is: don’t underestimate the utility of medical interventions. Depression is a catastrophe. It carries with it a very high suicide rate. And it also levels people out, and it’s really hard on their families. And it’s physiologically extraordinarily damaging.

“And so, if you’re in a depressive state, and it’s severe, you can try an antidepressant. You’ll know in a month if it works. If it works, well maybe it will help you get you’re life together!

“We could say, ‘Well, maybe you’re depressed because your life isn’t together.’ Could be. Sometimes people are depressed and their life is… it isn’t ‘fine’ because no one’s life is ‘fine’. Everyone’s life is a tragedy. But sometimes people have their life in order as much as you could expect anyone to have — they have friends, they have an intimate relationship, they have a career that the like. They’re qualified, industrious people, working hard on what they’re doing, and, really, playing a minimum number of games with themselves, and they’re terribly depressed.

“Antidepressant, man. Sometimes that will just fix it. And so, Hooray! You’re a biological entity. If there’s something out there that can help you strengthen yourself so that you can prevail, great!”

The key danger of science is that very smart people can convince themselves they know something that they do not actually know. Of all the sciences, I think psychology is the most treacherous to the soul, because what they convince themselves is that they know how minds work. They obviously do not, because no one does. People cannot even prove consciousness objectively. And so, they invent cosmological constants and secret “mechanisms” to fill in all those gigantic blanks.

For Jordan, it was the belief that biochemical compositions caused mental states, rather than being the output of those states, which is the fundamental error from which all other errors spring. He’s of course far from alone in this delusion. In fact, his entire industry of practice depends on it. Our minds are machines: constructs of hidden mechanisms in various states of malfunction. You can therefore gobble a carefully engineered happy pill, and that will “just fix it.”

This style of utilitarian thought is probably the most common gateway into darkness, in this day and age. The advertisements are everywhere.

This in turn led to the most serious error in Jordan’s thinking: that acceptance of God’s literal existence was the result of one of those secret mechanisms, revealed to him on account of his mighty intellect. And so, while he would wax poetic for hours on end about his “respect” for God-believers, deep down, in some grotto beneath language, he thought of us as fools.

To be constantly lionized by fools and self-hypnotized idiots, paid handsome sums to speak to them, paraded on their shoulders like a war hero, must be quite a strange way to live one’s life. I suspect that, at some point in that timeline, you will begin to see yourself as some kind of fraud.

If you’re not a psychopath — and, for all his flaws, I don’t think Peterson is — that’s got to take a heavy toll on you. But because this feeling of inner fraudulence is buried so deep, coated by so many layers of pseudoscientific bullshit, I think it would be very difficult for him to identify its source. Instead, it might manifest as some of that “free-floating anxiety” that’s been going around.

And apparently, it did.

“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?

“And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.

— Matthew 6:25-34 (NIV)

Christ tells us not to worry. Worrying is a sin. It misses the mark.

That sounds like strange advice, and not just to those pagan eardrums. After all, in a certain manner of speaking “worrying” can translate into greater care, closer attention to detail, a job well done.

But there is another kind of worrying that feeds on you like a blood parasite. It has no resolution in the material of spacetime, because there are in fact an endless number of things to potentially worry yourself sick about, on an infinite number of timescales. We are therefore called to live in the present tense, to handle what’s right in front of us. “Each day has enough trouble of its own.”

The dirty little secret behind psychopharmaceuticals is this: their mechanics emulate neurological effects that the mind associates with previous states of wellbeing. You can think of them as a somewhat heightened version of placebos with a touch of déjà vu, and a marketing platform designed to bolster the effect.³ A drug might therefore seem to “work” in some cases, but not in the mechanical sense of a particular molecular structure causing a feeling to happen. That’s a stupid way to look at it, but it’s also the most profitable. Even an old school witch doctor could tell you that.

And so, like all of these new (and highly profitable) mental “diseases”, “free-floating anxiety” inverts cause-and-effect, in order to peddle drugs to sad people. These drugs are addictive, but they are also massively destructive at the highest levels of perception of being.

Benzodiazepines — benzos, for short — are some of the most addictive and destructive of the lot. The causal inversion temporarily tricks the addict into feeling more artificially at ease, while never confronting the actual cause of his worry. When used over a long term, they can become a kind of depersonalizing acid, leaving you physically, mentally and spiritually vulnerable to many different flavors of harm, while drawing false maps of the way home. I suspect that's why the spell also sometimes works in the reverse; not all people are equally hypnotizable, and some aren't suggestible at all. That's why the side effects for antidepressants, for instance, include symptoms like "worsening depression" and "suicidal thoughts". The mind rebels against the fake reality, but has also been tricked to perceive the problem as innate and subconscious (i.e. beyond the patient’s ability to solve).

It’s uncontroversial to say this is what happened to Jordan Peterson, as even he sees it (partially) this way. They had this guy bouncing from happy pills to powdered courage to cat tranquilizers and back, all on his way to a sleep-of-death in Russia. He has certainly expounded on the physical and mental aspects of his meltdown. But what about the spiritual?

Let’s start with the dry, clinical version of his descent into Big Pharma Hell. Bear in mind this is a man who believes literally everything is the result of hidden mechanism, up to and including faith in God.

• 2016–2017: Peterson was prescribed a low dose of the benzodiazepine Klonopin in early 2017 to manage anxiety following a severe autoimmune reaction to food, possibly sodium metabisulfite, during the 2016 Christmas holiday. He reported feeling “acutely and continually anxious, as well as freezing cold.” As a clinical psychologist, he was aware of psychiatric drugs but later admitted he underestimated the risks of benzodiazepines, which he described as a “mistake.”⁴

• April 2019: Peterson’s dosage was increased (under “medical supervision”) after his wife, Tammy, was diagnosed with terminal kidney cancer. This escalation led to physical dependence, a common outcome of long-term benzodiazepine use, which can occur within weeks.

• May 2019: Peterson attempted to going “cold turkey” on the advice of a psychiatrist (more “medical supervision”), who also suggested trying ketamine, which is a substance I’m mostly familiar with from my days as a drug-dealing raver kid. He took two doses, which he described as “ninety-minute trips to hell,” exacerbating his anxiety with feelings of guilt and shame and, of course, severe withdrawal symptoms. These included acute anxiety, akathisia (uncontrollable restlessness), depression, and suicidal thoughts.

• Summer 2019: After a family friend (another physician) warned about the dangers of sudden benzodiazepine withdrawal, Peterson resumed a lower dose, alleviating some symptoms. He also tried an antidepressant that was previously effective for him, but it caused excessive sleepiness and increased appetite (presumably unhelpful amid his wife’s health crisis).

• Late 2019: Peterson’s health deteriorated significantly. He entered a rehab facility in upstate New York, but treatment failed to address his dependence effectively. His daughter, Mikhaila, reported he was misdiagnosed with schizophrenia in Toronto and nearly died multiple times in North American hospitals (i.e. under “medical supervision”), developing pneumonia and worsening his medication-induced akathisia, which made him suicidal.

• January 2020: In desperation, Peterson was flown to a clinic in Moscow, Russia, where he was placed in a medically induced coma for eight days for a rapid detox, a controversial and risky procedure not typically recommended for benzodiazepine withdrawal due to high mortality risks. The detox removed the drug from his system but caused neurological damage significant enough that he couldn’t type or walk unassisted for more than a year following the procedure.⁵ ⁶

• February–June 2020: Post-detox, Peterson sought further treatment in Florida and then Belgrade, Serbia, to address lingering neurological symptoms and weakness. He reported being unable to remember much of December 2019 to February 2020, describing the ordeal as “like a horror movie.”

• June 2020: Peterson appeared on The Mikhaila Peterson Podcast, discussing his experience and warning about benzodiazepine dangers, noting their catastrophic potential even for non-abusers. He expressed shock at his lack of prior knowledge despite his expertise. Good thing he had all those medical supervisors around him.

• October 2020: In an eight-minute YouTube video, Peterson announced his return to Canada, stating he was “back” but still recovering, hoping to resume content creation. He described the 18-month period as the “worst of [his] life”, but expressed optimism about returning to his normal routine.

• 2021–present: Peterson resumed public activities, including publishing Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life in 2021. It was during this window that he also minted his relationship with Ben Shapiro’s The Daily Wire, which correlates highly with various questions and criticisms from his fans on the Right.

One of those criticisms pertains to his seemingly incomplete account of his struggles of the past several years. For instance, while he has acknowledged the “ethically questionable” nature of his drug dependence, he has framed it as exclusively a medical issue instead of a moral failing.⁷ He has also, as far as I know, failed to acknowledge the extreme dissonance between the diagnosis of free-floating anxiety and the fact that he upped his personal dosage in reaction to his wife’s bout with cancer.

That’s how a physician might describe it. Depending on many priors, he may see fit to critique one or more decision nodes. If he himself prescribes benzos or other head-meds to his patients, any critique will be mild and marginal. But, so far, I haven’t heard a single physician, or anyone else, defend the decision to place this man in an eight-day coma.

Eight days.

Let that sink in for a moment.

Now: We need to talk about zombies.

Tetrodotoxin is a neurotoxin that can be extracted from pufferfish and certain marine toads. It has long been suspected to be the key active agent in the “zombie powders” manufactured by Haitian Vodou sorcerers (“bokors”). Ingestion induces a paralytic and catatonic state in the victim that so closely resembles death, he or she will often be buried or entombed alive for many hours before the bokor swings by for another visit. Among those who study the practice, there is still much dispute over whether tetrodotoxin is a “zombie-making” drug. That’s because the researchers themselves have submitted to the same inversion of causality that powers the psychotherapeutics industry.

While tetrodotoxin plays an important role, poisoning the body is only the first step in the zombification process. The bokor must also poison the victim’s awakening mind, supplying additional hallucinogens (namely Datura stramonium, aka jimsonweed, aka “the devil’s trumpet”) to enhance the effects of his technique. As with all magic spells, there’s plenty of razzle-dazzle and special effects to go along with it. The bokor calls out to his demon loa, invokes and incants, re-paralyzing his victim with dark visions of unholy power.

In the midst of this trance state, he convinces the zombie that he is truly dead, and that his soul has been captured by the bokor himself. The end result is a dehumanized slave of the sorcerer’s will. A robot made of meat.

That’s not the end of the spell either. Like all forms of hypnosis, it will eventually wear off. And so, the sorcerer feeds his slave a steady diet of psychotropics, while mentally reinforcing the conceptual framework of the soul-theft.

Here’s a question: Is the bokor’s theory accurate?

He is a monstrous psychopath, of course, who poisons his victim’s minds with lies about causes and effects. But has he also, in some real sense, stolen his victim’s soul?

No. Not even the Devil can steal your soul (though he may very well bargain for it). But I think if we change the word “stolen” to “blinded”, we might be on the right track. The ability for self-perception has been radically interfered with, and gaping wounds raked open in the psyche that the bokor fills with his perverse new theory of mind. If that sounds a lot like MKUltra, it should. But it should also remind you of Pfizer.

I suspect there’s one other key component to these kinds of spells, unmentioned in the literature. In order to function as intended, the victim must be at least somewhat open to the witch doctor’s twisted new map of reality. In the specific Haitian context, that might be as simple as growing up in an oral tradition that tells stories about zombies of the past. In the context of Jordan Peterson’s “medically supervised” journey towards a Moscow grave, it might be the result of a long, complex miseducation about the relationship between bodies, minds, and souls.

If you re-read the tale of Jordan’s journey as a road to zombiehood, assisted by bokors who tormented him with potions and warped theories about the flow of consciousness, then it might explain quite a lot of what we’re seeing. Maybe it would even explain those wacky suits and ties.

It would certainly explain tearful outbursts like this one:

“We have a narrative sense of the world. For me that's been the world of morality. That's the world that tells us how to act. It's real. We treat it like it's real. It's not the objective world, but the narrative and the objective world touch. And the ultimate example of that in principle is supposed to be Christ. But i don't know what to… and that seems to me oddly plausible, yeah… but i still don't know what to make of it. It's partly because it's too terrifying a reality to fully believe. I don't even know what would happen to you if you fully believed it.”

Like many observers, I have long wondered if Jordan B. Peterson would ever find his way into the light of Christ — even if he only stumbled and blundered his way into it, as I have. I still think that’s possible, of course. After all, in perhaps the most famous zombie case of Clairvius Narcisse, the victim was ensorcelled for more than two years before the spell was finally broken. But his journey home took much longer than that, as Narcisse believed his own brother was the man who hired the bokor, and worried he’d target him again if he returned.

There’s that sneaky sin again. Worry.

Worry about the worst things that may happen. Worry about matters that are out of our control, as Peterson worried about his wife’s cancer. We cannot know if he is still taking any of these zombie potions, but he still appears to be imbibing the sorcerer’s distorted vision of reality. After awakening from his slumber at the ledge of death, he’s gone from a man who speaks like a nerdy professor to one who speaks like a Pharisee. In the course of one lengthy exchange with Rogan, he reduces all Divine experiences to Jungian symbols and hallucinogenic drug trips, then repurposes it all as a self-help guide for incels. Oddly enough, all the stories he uses to advance these theories are from the Old Testament. Apparently, those are not so bloodcurdling as to make a grown man cry.

That stands to reason. No monster on Earth is more terrifying than Jesus of Nazareth.

Since Jordan seems to be a big fan of dispensing advice, maybe he’ll take some for a change:

Embrace the horror.

Also, stop writing rulebooks and doing interviews for a while. In fact, consider throwing away your life’s work, all those clever maps and their supposed meanings that led you straight into the dragon’s maw. Hurl them into a bonfire of your vanities, and flush all those soul-blinding potions down the tubes.

Once that’s finished, open yourself up to being healed by a medicine more real than the princes of this world can ever conjure or prescribe.

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1. There appears to some remaining heterodoxy on the Zionist question, as evinced by The Daily Wire’s self-proclaimed “America First chauvinist” Matt Walsh in a recent chat with Tucker Carlson. Still, it seems that the most aggressive critique TDW will countenance is: “I don’t care about Israel.”

2. For instance, in the three hours of their conversation,

Darryl Cooper

’s Mar 13, 2025 appearance on the show was never mentioned. While it could be evidence that Peterson doesn’t consider him to be in the pathological group, it is odd that his name doesn’t come up at all in the platforming discussion.

3. This really is how the psychotherapeutics “work”, by the way. It is similar to that old advice to “Think happy thoughts,” but with the added benefit of vaguely emulating past happiness -states by producing similar neurological and/or hormonal exhaust.

4. Sedarati, Jon (March 25, 2021), “Beyond Benzos: Jordan B. Peterson’s Trip to Hell and Back”, Mad in America.

5. Donnelly, Aileen, (Feb 11, 2020) “Why was Jordan Peterson placed in a medically induced coma? What we know about benzodiazepines and treatment,” National Post.

6. Oppenheim, Maya (February 8, 2020) “Jordan Peterson suffers year of 'absolute hell' and needs emergency treatment for drug addiction that forced him to withdraw from public life, daughter says”, The Independent.

7. Carey, Alexis (Nov 27, 2020) “Inside the private struggles of controversial author Jordan Peterson”, The New Zealand Herald.