The Watchman's Ground

Jordan Peterson, the individual he defends, and where a self actually comes from

August 2026

I have been listening to Jordan Peterson for years, and for most of that time I have carried two things about him that would not agree with each other.

The first is gratitude. When he lays out his central picture, order and chaos, and the individual who steps forward on purpose to turn a little of the second into the first, something in me settles that had been loose for a long time. The second is a small, stubborn itch. Somewhere near the middle of that picture, on the plain question of where the individual actually comes from, my footing goes soft, and for years I could not say why. This is my attempt to name the itch honestly and then to offer what I think is underneath it. I want to do the first part generously, because he has earned it, and the second part carefully, because it touches everything else I have been trying to write.

I have come to picture him as a watchman on a wall. The wall runs between the single human person and the collective that would dissolve him. Peterson has spent his working life on that wall, and to understand why a man would give his life to standing there, you have to go where he went first, which is straight down into the worst thing the last century did.

Honoring the watchman

Peterson's real subject, under all the others, is atrocity. He went looking, early and for a long time, into the psychology of the Gulag and the death camps, with Solzhenitsyn as his guide down. The question that organizes him is not political in the way his critics assume. It is this: how does an ordinary person, a person like me, end up as a willing hand inside a machine built for murder? That is the question of a man who takes evil personally, and it deserves to be met as seriously as he asks it.

His answer is where the wall gets built. The road into those horrors, he concluded, runs through ideologies that move guilt and virtue off the individual and onto the group. Once a person is good or wicked by category, by class or by blood, the individual conscience has nothing left to do, and a conscience with nothing to do is the most dangerous thing in the world. So the individual must remain the irreducible moral unit. Not because the group is nothing, but because the moment the person stops being the place where responsibility lives, the machine can start. The sovereign individual, for Peterson, is not a preference. It is the seawall against the flood he spent his youth studying.

This is also, and I want to say it plainly because his manner hides it from people, a position built out of compassion. The heat that comes off him, the low tolerance, the readiness to fight, is not contempt. It is love for the person on the receiving end of the abstraction, and a refusal to be polite about the abstraction that licenses the harm. Mercy toward the victim and severity toward the ideology are not two moods in him. They are one organ, seen from two sides.

From that single conviction his two great enemies follow, and here is the thread most people miss because they only ever see him fighting on one front at a time. He opposes Marxism, and he opposes what he calls postmodernism, and he opposes them for the identical reason. Both, in his eyes, dissolve the sovereign moral individual: the first into class, the second into discourse and power. One conviction, two heads of the same animal. When you see the thread, his apparent scattering of targets resolves into a single, steady aim.

There is an irony inside this that is worth slowing down for, because it is the hinge of everything that follows. Peterson fights postmodernism, and he fights it with existentialism. His own working picture, meaning that is not handed to you but has to be forged through the voluntary meeting of suffering and chaos, responsibility taken up freely, a life redeemed by how you carry your load, is existentialism with the aim put back in. He belongs, whether the label pleases him or not, to the line of Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard: the believer who has walked all the way through the modern loss of given meaning and come out the far side still holding an individual who must choose. Which means his great enemy is his own cousin. Postmodernism and existentialism are both children of the same wound, the loss of an inherited, external meaning, the death of God announced and absorbed. They simply answered the wound in opposite directions. Existentialism doubled down on the individual, condemned to be free, existence before essence, meaning made by the one who dares to make it. Postmodernism dissolved the individual instead, into language, into systems, into the play of power, the death of the author and the decentering of the self. The family fight between Peterson and the thing he hates is a fight over the self. He keeps it. They erase it. And he is right to keep it.

I should mark one honest limit here, in his favor and against a lazy reading of him. His linking of postmodernism to Marxism is his own coinage, and it is genuinely contested; many careful readers point out that Marxism is exactly the kind of grand story that postmodernism sets out to disbelieve. I hold his phrase, then, at the strength it has earned, which is as a description of how those ideas have often traveled together in practice, not as a settled fact of intellectual history. It does not change the thread. On the thread itself, that both movements end by dissolving the person, I think he sees clearly.

So I find that I stand with the watchman on most of the wall. The individual is real. Responsibility is real. The move that turns people into functions of a group is the beginning of the worst we do. I am not admiring this from across a distance. It is mine, and I stand on the wall beside him.

The one line where I cannot rest

And yet there is one line, and only one, where my footing goes.

It is not his defense of the individual. It is his account of where that individual comes from. In Peterson's picture, as in the existentialism it grows from, the self is finally self-made: forged alone, by will, in the private confrontation with chaos. The hero goes into the dragon's cave by himself and comes back having authored himself in the dark. That is the image under "clean your room," under "stand up straight," under the whole bracing summons to become who you could be. It is a summons I admire. But it leaves him standing, without quite noticing, inside the very assumption his enemies also hold.

Look at the three of them together and the shared floorboard shows. Existentialism says the self exists first and makes its own meaning. Postmodernism says there is no stable self, only meanings that systems make. Peterson says the self forges its meaning against chaos. All three assume the same thing before they start to argue: that the self is prior, a thing that is already there, or already gone, before the meaning question is even asked. The whole loud fight is about what the lone self does, or fails to be, once it finds itself alone. None of them stops to ask whether the self was ever alone in the first place.

I want to be careful about what that line was guarding, because it was guarding something true. The self-made individual is Peterson's bulwark precisely because a self that owes itself to no one cannot be handed over to the collective. If you made yourself, the group has no claim on you. I understand the instinct. I think the instinct is right and the mechanism is wrong, and that the wrong mechanism leaves the wall standing on sand.

What the wall is standing on

Here is the claim the whole essay rests on, and I want to say it plainly. The self is neither self-made nor dissolved. It is answered into being. It is given first, and then it becomes, and it becomes in relationship, and the whole of it is held up by a floor it did not lay.

Take that to the ground before trusting it, because a claim like this has to hold water. Watch what happens to an infant when the answering stops. In the experiment the psychologists call the still face, a parent plays with a baby and then, on cue, goes blank and unresponsive. The child does not simply lose interest. Within seconds it strains, protests, and begins to come apart, and what was removed was not food or warmth or safety. Only the answering was removed. The small self was being held in shape by a response, and when the response stopped, the shape began to fail. No one authored that child in a private cave. It was being called into a self, in real time, by a face that answered it. That is not a poem about babies. It is the most ordinary fact of how a person begins, and it is the exact opposite of the self-made hero.

Now watch what the relational picture does to the fight on the wall, because this is where it stops being a correction and becomes a reconciliation. It keeps everything Peterson was right to keep. The individual is still real and still irreducible. Responsibility is still the person's own. The dissolving of conscience into a group is still the door to atrocity, and still the thing to fight. I give none of that back. What the relational picture adds is the one thing Peterson cannot supply from inside his own frame: an honest account of where that precious individual came from, that is not the lonely miracle of self-creation.

And here is the turn, the part I did not expect when I started following the itch. The relational self is a stronger wall against tyranny than the self-made one, not a weaker one. Think about what a totalitarian order actually does. It remakes the person: it rewrites who you are, by pressure, by terror, by repetition, until the self it wants is the self you have. A self you authored by your own will is, in the end, vulnerable to exactly that, because a stronger will can overwrite it. What you made, another can unmake. But a self that was given, called into being by name, held in existence by a love that is not the state and not the mob and not your own effort, has a ground under it that no regime can reach. You cannot be dissolved into a class if the deepest fact about you was spoken by someone the class does not command. Peterson wants an individual the collective cannot claim. The self-made individual can always, tragically, be re-made. The given individual cannot. His wall has been standing on his own will, which is sand. Underneath it, the whole time, was rock.

The floor

This is where the essay joins the rest of what I believe, and where I have to name the lines that must hold, because on ground like this a picture is only sound while certain lines hold, and it becomes something I do not believe the moment any of them goes.

The floor is the oldest claim my tradition makes. Creation is spoken. "Let there be" comes before anything is there to hear it, and the world is answered into being before it can answer back. In the beginning was the Word, and not, in the beginning was the raw material that later learned to talk. A person made in that image would be exactly what the still face keeps showing us: a creature who comes to itself by being addressed, whose dignity is not a trophy it won by self-assembly but a gift it was handed before it could ask.

The lines that must hold are these. The relational does not dissolve the individual; if it did, I would simply be handing the game to the collectivists Peterson rightly fears, and I refuse to. Reciprocity does not require symmetry: the parent and the infant, God and the creature, are real relationships between unequal parties, and the giving runs mostly one way without becoming less real for it. And the first word is God's and is free. He did not need us in order to be complete, and the moment this becomes a God who finishes himself by making us, it has become something I do not hold. We are given being; we contribute only to our becoming. Keep those lines and the picture stands. Let any one of them go and it falls into either the collective Peterson fought or a sentimental haze that could never have fought anything.

The watchman, again

So I come back to the wall, and to the man standing on it, and I find I have not talked him down from it. I have tried to show him what he is standing on.

He is at the right wall, for the right reason, guarding the right thing. The individual he defends is real, and the flood he watches for is real, and the century that taught him to watch was not lying. I only think the person he is guarding is safer than he knows. That person was never his own to make, and so is not the mob's to unmake. He was answered into being, and what love speaks into being is the one thing tyranny has never once managed to erase, though it has tried in every language there is. The watchman can rest a little. The ground he is standing on will hold, because he did not pour it, and neither did the enemy at the gate.