#52: Myth and Mayhem: A Leftist Critique of Jordan Peterson | Matt McManus

Is Jordan Peterson a prophet of the secular age — or a symptom of its deepest contradictions?

In this episode of The Prometheans, Ali Zaka (AZD) sits down with philosopher and political theorist Matt McManus — co-author of Myth and Mayhem: A Leftist Critique of Jordan Peterson (Zero Books, with an introduction by Slavoj Žižek) — for a rigorous, sympathetic, and unflinching examination of one of the most influential and contested thinkers of our time.

Peterson rocketed to global fame on the back of YouTube lectures, 12 Rules for Life, and a culture-war persona that made him both a hero to millions of young men and a lightning rod for fierce criticism. But beneath the controversy lies a serious philosophical project — one rooted in Carl Jung, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Viktor Frankl — that deserves serious engagement rather than dismissal or uncritical adulation.

We explore:

→ What Peterson actually argues in Maps of Meaning — his full cosmological framework of Order, Chaos, and the Hero archetype

→ McManus's critique of how Peterson naturalizes the existing social order through Jungian mythology

→ The "postmodern neo-Marxism" myth — why Peterson's central intellectual enemy is largely his own invention

→ The central contradiction of Peterson's thought: bemoaning the collapse of tradition while defending the capitalism that destroyed it

→ Peterson's God: is his Jungian-functionalist theology a sophisticated form of atheism?

→ His latest book We Who Wrestle with God (2024) and what it reveals about his religious journey

→ What Peterson's mass appeal tells us about the genuine failures of progressive intellectual culture

→ And what Islamic and Sufi thought — largely ignored by Peterson — offers as an alternative vision of meaning, order, and the sacred

This is not a takedown. It is an honest philosophical reckoning with a figure who has touched something real in the modern crisis of meaning — and an inquiry into why his remedies may leave the disease untreated.

Matt McManus is a Professor of Politics and International Relations. He is the author of The Rise of Post-Modern Conservatism (Palgrave Macmillan) and co-author of Myth and Mayhem: A Leftist Critique of Jordan Peterson (Zero Books, 2020). His work on postmodern conservatism, human dignity, and political philosophy has appeared in Jacobin, The Philosophical Salon, and numerous academic venues.

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