Jordan Peterson is many things. His media exposure comes mostly from his position in the front lines of the Culture War, bearing the battle standard of individualism against social constructionist collectivists in a skirmish we've spoken about before on HWFO. But he's (at least) two other things.
He spends most of his life as a self-help public speaker, conveying a different if parallel message to a wash of youth abandoned by the collectivists, for whom his message of individual strength in the face of external chaos is beneficial. And he's also a husband and father.
I paid a lot of attention when Peterson's wife was diagnosed with terminal cancer, because his predicament and my predicament over the last several years were tangled together in a curiously parallel way. And because of this entanglement, I feel I have some unique perspectives on the fact that he recently checked himself into rehab for withdrawals from the anti-depressant Clonazepam.
My Dragon
My wife Buffy was diagnosed with stage four early onset colon cancer in August of 2017 at the age of 41, a hopeless initial diagnosis, with tumors on her liver and lungs on her first CT scan. This was irrecoverable, and our only available medical approach after the colectomy was to prolong her life as long as possible with chemotherapy. This threw our lives, as well as the lives of our three and five-year-old children, into nearly unbearable chaos.
My task and responsibility as the father and husband was to hold the family together through what I hope will be the darkest part of any of our lives.
Comment: See: Objective:Health #33 - Society Is Degenerating