© Lonneke van de WeijerDr. Jordan Peterson speaking in the Netherlands, January 19th, 2018.
As the day of the event approached, the Dutch media characterized the gathering as 'new-right' and 'far-right'. Author, freelance researcher, and teacher Chris Aalberts, for example, opined that the event's organizers could not claim that it would be an open debate because the whole line-up of speakers was 'right-wing'. Huub Bellemakers, a member of the left political party Groenlinks, noted that "From the look of the organizers, the speakers, the introductions and the definition of the problem, it is clear that it's a new-right meeting." Bellemakers was invited to attend the event, but declined to do so.
The left's characterization of the event is interesting because the organizers' original concept was to have both left-wing and right-wing speakers come together to discuss this important issue, and hopefully come up with possible solutions. But almost all left-wing guest-speakers declined to attend, which obviously left an impression of the event being a right-wing gathering. The left in the Netherlands - the most densely-populated country in the Western world - apparently doesn't want to discuss immigration in an open and honest way.
It's odd, indeed. Diversity of opinions, and the facts they marshal, is surely favorable for reaching a balanced solution on any topic. Sadly, some people believe otherwise. Users on Twitter used the hashtag #NedLeeuw to post kitten gifs in order to 'drown out' tweets by the 'racist' organizers and attendees.
We were there and, while there weren't many non-white Dutch people in attendance, everyone was polite and kind, and not a single racial slur was uttered, not even in jest. It's easier to dismiss events that discuss the socio-economic impact of mass immigration on a small country when you misrepresent them as 'Dutch racists having a get-together', even if ethnic Indian Adjiedj Bakas - something of a celebrity in the Netherlands - is on the list of speakers. A self-styled 'trendwatcher', 'futurologist' and corporate motivational speaker, Bakas voiced for some strange ideas, like installing cameras that scan people's faces and calculate 'exactly' who is a terrorist and who is not, paying Africans to sterilize them, and growing human babies inside artificial wombs.
As this was the first such event organized by DNL, there is certainly room for improvement: organizing a series of debates for 2,000 people can be rather chaotic. A sizeable chunk of attendees came to hear Peterson's keynote speech, and his book-signing for 12 Rules For Life overlapped with some of the debates. Nonetheless, DNL will soon publish a report on the event's findings. In the meantime, they have published '10 solutions for a multicultural society', which calls for implementing a more limited immigration policy in order to first solve the challenges of integration.
Enter Dr. Jordan Peterson
© Sott.netJordan Peterson, shortly before the start of the event.
Peterson's meteoric rise to fame is at least partly explained by the fact that his message is the antidote: that the pursuit of happiness is a pointless goal; instead, explore the things that are meaningful in your life. Be responsible for your family, education, career and your broader community. Life, he says, is about becoming a responsible human being for yourself and others and learning to shoulder the burden of life's inherent suffering. This is what brings fulfillment.
Clearly the main draw of the evening, Peterson was mobbed (gently!) by people eager to thank him for his work and tell him how it changed their lives. He was happy to do so, and humble about it, and when his turn came to talk, he received a standing ovation when he came onstage.
Peterson spoke about the underlying reasons why rules in a society make it function, and that collective abidance by those rules is important because it "keeps the lights on," meaning that civilization can and will rapidly devolve into chaos without them.
"In the West, I believe that we have fortunately managed to articulate the principles of fair, iterated play better than any society has ever managed in the past." This would explain why Western countries are generally more stable, and why so many people are migrating to them.
During 'The Dutch Lion' event he made the following point:
"One is that you should be proud of your culture. It's like... no! You shouldn't be 'proud' of your culture. You should bloody well recognize that it got some things right and that all of your good fortune is dependent on that, and then you should take the utmost responsibility for continuing to play the damn game properly.Peterson's message is that, as individuals and humanity as a whole, we are meant to move in a certain direction that is beneficial for all.
And you should have enough sense to be grateful for all the sacrifice that was made by all those people who came before you so that you could end up being the beneficiary of this eminently playable game."
"People ask me what the meaning of life is, and it seems to me that meaning is proportionate to the adoption of responsibilities."Peterson's popularity is based on the fact that millions of people, especially young adults, are starving for spiritual truths.
The spiritual famine is, at least in part, due to the post-modern radical leftist ideology that has been gaining ground in recent decades. This ideology, that permeates an increasing number of state and private institutions, holds subjectivity above everything else. Whatever you feel or think can be true and you are entitled to have that validated by others and society. If not, you're being oppressed and have a right to demand restitution. The problem with this ideology is that most people have little to no clue about how to manage their lives. Most people know (if only vaguely) that their own ideas and 'subjectivity' are the main source of the suffering and chaos in their lives.
In response to the post-modernist exhortation to embrace chaos, Peterson tries to bring order and he starts small: start with cleaning you room, as his slogan goes. Your outer life is a reflection of your inner life, life is suffering, yes, but if you grab life by the horns, don't run away from your responsibilities and learn to accept and bear your suffering, things can actually get better.
"People suffer more than they have to, because they fail to realize what is most genuine and important. The world is made out of chaos and order and the quality of our being is dependent on how we manage the balance between the two."Not everyone agrees with his message. Peterson is bursting a lot of subjective bubbles that are particularly inflated on the Left. He sees our individual human nature and personality (identity) as a vehicle that, while flawed, can serve as a learning tool to enable us to become better human beings, as long as we are willing to allow our flaws to be exposed, broken down and corrected.
"We like to watch people, in their normal life blindsided by something, experiencing this interregnum of chaos where they explore and gather new information and retool their character, or retool the world because either of those would work as a solution and then, come out the other side and things are better than they were to begin with or at least as good, better is better, that's a happy ending, right?"The Left instead sees subjectively flawed personal identity as something to be extolled for all its 'uniqueness', and that society must be forced to accept, and in no way discriminate against, the subjectivity of each individual. People attracted to this ideology are therefore seeking personal power rather than 'equality' as they claim. In their response to Peterson, the Left turns to their usual rhetoric of trying to paint him and everyone who criticizes their identity politics as a 'racist, nazi bigot.' This is a a tactic that the Left uses to convince the public that 'evil people' ('Nazis' 'racists' 'sexists', 'oppressors') are everywhere and, as a result, arrogate power to themselves. While the Left accuse their detractors of being Nazis, it is they who embody something similar to Nietzsche's 'will to power' while people like Peterson oppose them by advocating a version of Kierkegaard's 'will to meaning'.
But more to the point, while the Left tries to paint Jordan Peterson as a tool of the extreme Right, the fact is that he also speaks out against them.
"I don't like right wing identitarians, I think they play the same game as the radical leftists which is identity politics. They just play a different version of it, but I'm not fan of the radical right. I've been lecturing about the dangers of Nazi totalitarianism for example for almost three decades. It's been a major part of my life's work to inoculate people against the attraction of that sort of thing."While most people on the Right tend to be proud of their culture, Jordan Peterson advises against it, and instead promotes using culture as a learning tool. That is not to say however that pride in one's culture, or perhaps nationalism, is bad per se. As American social psychologist and Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University's Stern School of Business, Jonathan Haidt, said:
"Nationalists see patriotism as a virtue; they think their country and its culture are unique and worth preserving. This is a real moral commitment, not a pose to cover up racist bigotry. Some nationalists do believe that their country is better than all others, and some nationalisms are plainly illiberal and overtly racist. But as many defenders of patriotism have pointed out, you love your spouse because he or she is 'yours', not because you think your spouse is superior to all others. Nationalists feel a bond with their country, and they believe that this bond imposes moral obligations both ways: Citizens have a duty to love and serve their country, and governments are duty bound to protect their own people. Governments should place their citizens interests above the interests of people in other countries.Jordan Peterson offers perspectives and solutions for both sides of the culture war, but it all starts with straightening yourself out.
There is nothing necessarily racist or base about this arrangement or social contract. Having a shared sense of identity, norms, and history generally promotes trust. Having no such shared sense leads to the condition that the sociologist Émile Durkheim described as "anomie" or normlessness. Societies with high trust, or high social capital, produce many beneficial outcomes for their citizens: lower crime rates, lower transaction costs for businesses, higher levels of prosperity, and a propensity toward generosity, among others. A liberal nationalist can reasonably argue that the debate over immigration policy in Europe is not a case of what is moral versus what is base, but a case of two clashing moral visions, incommensurate (à la Isaiah Berlin). The trick, from this point of view, is figuring out how to balance reasonable concerns about the integrity of one's own community with the obligation to welcome strangers, particularly strangers in dire need."
"Make yourself into an individual and get the hell away from the ideology and so a lot of these kids are lost in the underworld let's say in nihilism and they turn to these ideological solutions because they don't know what else to do and they're angry. It's like I have something better for them to do: Grow the hell up and sort yourself out as an individual."We need to move beyond the poisonous aspect of ideologies in our current culture war and start with sorting ourselves out. Which seems to be our only hope as a society if we are to avoid falling into the beckoning abyss of social conflict and, potentially, collapse.
In trying to help others, Peterson isn't trying to get rid of suffering, but to alleviate suffering. Suffering can either make us terrible human beings, or it can transform us into better human beings.
Or as he once beautifully stated:
"Life is suffering. Love is the desire to see unnecessary suffering ameliorated.Suffering is part of life, there is no escaping it. Attempting to flee from your responsibilities only brings more suffering. Instead, we need to see responsibilities and suffering as challenges and realize that with every hardship comes the potential to learn lessons, where we can grow as individuals and as a society as a whole and become better human beings together.
Truth is the handmaiden of love. Dialogue is the pathway to truth. Humility is recognition of personal insufficiency and the willingness to learn. To learn is to die voluntarily and to be born again, in great ways and small.
So, speech must be untrammelled, so that dialogue can take place so that we can humbly learn, so that truth can serve love, so that suffering can be ameliorated, so that we can all stumble forward, so to speak, towards the kingdom of God."
Here's a video of his talk in the Netherlands. We've also included a transcript, below:
Transcript
I'm going to talk to you about identity. Whenever I talk to my son about what I should talk about, whenever I'm nervous about giving a presentation - and I was definitely nervous about this one, I can tell you - he always says: "Just make sure you talk about what you know." And that's great advice, everyone should follow that. So I'm going to try to talk about what I know, and I know something about identity anyways, and I'm very interested in helping people understand what identity means and also maybe how to strengthen their identity. And I can't think of anything better that you can possibly do than that and I think in some sense it's the answer to all the problems that plague us.
I'm going to tell you a story about how I came to understand the things that I've come to understand. Back in the late-mid 1970s, when the Cold War was raging and when the nuclear arsenal of the Soviet Union was in full force against the equally dangerous nuclear arsenal of the West, I had a series of very apocalyptic nightmares. I don't really know why I was so obsessed with the Cold War. I mean, it's not like I was alone. Everybody was as obsessed with it to some degree, it was a Cold War after all.
I couldn't understand that we would arm ourselves to the teeth and risk the destruction of everything just to buttress what we believed in. It didn't seem that the potential sacrifice was worth the gain. So I started to study belief systems from a psychological perspective. I was curious about what function they played, what role they served, and I was also interested in something else, which I didn't realize at the time, which was at the core of what I later understood as the postmodern conundrum.
The postmodern conundrum is roughly the fact that the world is a very complicated place and there are a very large number of ways to interpret it, and the postmodern conclusion is: because there are an indefinitely large number of ways to interpret the world, that no one solution is in any real sense preferable to any other, and that solutions are imposed by power.
When I was thinking about the Cold War, I was wondering about why it was occurring, and then I was wondering at the same time about the fact that these two opposed belief systems had emerged, and I thought: Well, is this war, this thing we're willing to put everything to the torch for, is it merely a matter of opinion? Is it the fact that human nature is infinitely malleable, and you can generate any number of axiomatic systems or any number of games that people are all capable of playing equally and that it is merely a matter of arbitrary decision 'which one gets played'?
Or is there something deeper going on? Is there a war of wrong against right? And the corollary I suppose of that is; there is such a thing as wrong and right, and if there is such a thing as wrong or right, and if the war is about that, then who's wrong and why and who's right and why?
So I started to dig into what I would regard as the metaphysical substrate of belief and I came to understand at least in part that the belief systems that we inhabit are like stories. Story is a description of how a person went from one place to another place. If it's a comedy, it's a better place. If it's a tragedy, it's a worse place.
But in any case, it's a story about how to go from one place to another place. One of the things that you begin to understand if you study stories is that there are worse stories and better stories.
There are certainly worse stories and better stories to live out, so for example, I would say, most people, if they made a conscious choice, would rather live in a comedy than a tragedy. They might not feel the same way about other people, they might condemn them to a tragedy, but they would pick comedy, perhaps.
So then I started to try to tease apart the story that the West lived by. I came at it from two very different perspectives. One was, essentially literary. It was literary in the same way the psychoanalysts were literary theorists. The psychoanalysts Freud and Jung in particular were very interested in the large-scale structures of the narratives of human life.
Freud was particularly interested in the narrative of the family. He thought that the primary narrative was the narrative of the family. And that was in some sense the emergence of the autonomous individual from his or her initial dependent state. Freudian psychoanalytic theory is full of observations about how that can go terribly wrong. Particularly in those situations where families are let's say overprotective, or rife with unresolved conflict.
Jung for his part broadened his analysis of the stories that people lived by. Outside the realm of the family into the realm of the literary and metaphysical. Jung was a student of religion and mythology. And from Jung I learned that stories contained a certain kind of truth and that great stories contain great truths.
And they are not truths like scientific theories are true, they are truths like great literature is true, they are truths like Dostoevsky is true or they are truths like Tolstoy is true or they are truths like the fundamental mythological stories that oriented culture are true. They are true in ways that we know, but don't understand.
At the same time that I was studying this, I was also reading Nietzsche, and Nietzsche of course, famously proclaimed in the late 1800s that God was dead. And people who regard themselves as acolytes of Nietzsche or maybe as admirers of Nietzsche, who never read him, claim or assume that he said that in some triumphalist tone, because Nietzsche in some sense did style himself, at least, a severe critic of Christianity. But nothing could be further from the truth.
Nietzsche said that God was dead, that we'd killed him, and that we'll never find enough water to wash away the blood. And that's not a triumphalist proclamation, and he said that approximately at the same time that the consequence of the death of God would be that European civilisation would vacillate between nihilism and totalitarianism. And that 100 million people would die as a consequence in the 20th century. That's a hell of a prediction for someone back in basically the mid-1860s.
Nietzsche, who didn't live very long, was looking for a way out of that conundrum - being neither a fan of nihilism nor a fan of totalitarianism, and he thought that human beings would have to metamorphose into creatures that could determine their own values. That's where Carl Jung encountered Nietzsche essentially.
Because Jung was also a student of Nietzsche, and a deep student of Nietzsche, but because Jung had been influenced by Freud, who is the great discoverer of unconscious mechanisms in the human mind, he understood that it wasn't possible for human beings to create their own values. And the reason for that was that we are neither our own masters nor our own slaves.
Our nature was not infinitely malleable. We could not simply tell ourselves what to do. And even if we did, we would not simply listen. That you have a nature, that everyone has a nature, every human being has a nature with which they must contend.
That's what took the Freudians into the study of the id, and that's what took the Jungians into the study of the collective unconscious and then into the study of literature and mythology.
I found that very compelling and very interesting. Jung believed that because the Gods had disappeared from the outside world that they would have to reappear in the inside world. That's not an easy statement to understand. But it's a statement that's true. Even though it's not easy to understand.
At the same time, I was reading a lot of straight psychology. Especially the animal behavioral literature, the neuroscience literature. Neuroscience of cognition, neuroscience of emotion, neuroscience of motivation, and then I saw this alliance between the psychoanalytic Jungian worldview and the more strict scientific worldview, because it turns out that if you carefully attend to biology and animal behavior, you also find that human beings have a nature.
And that animals have a nature, and that there's a nature that human beings share with animals as well. There is a researcher in the Netherlands, Frans de Waal, who has done great work with primates, laying out the biological emergence of the idea of morality among chimpanzees. Brilliant work, and this was very exciting to me, because remember I was trying to determine whether or not the war between the West and the collectivists, let's say, was merely a matter of opinion or whether there was something right somewhere that someone had.
Well, I started to learn from Jung and animal behaviorists and the neuroscientists, and also from one other source, Jean Piaget, who was a developmental psychologist who studied the origin of morality in children, and who in his way was attempting to sow up the gap between science and religion. That was Piaget, the most famous developmental psychologist to ever live, the most famous child psychologist.
That was his self-description of what he was doing. He was trying to understand how to rectify the gap between science and religion and so there were these three sources that I could draw from: there was the developmental literature, there was the psychoanalytic/literary literature and there was the straight biological literature, and they're all pointing to the same direction, actually. They're saying that living creatures have a nature, and human beings have a nature.
That nature finds its expression in stories, and why is that? Well, it's because we watch ourselves express our nature. And then we map that expression in drama. So, we capture ourselves in drama. We capture ourselves in drama before we understand who we are. That means that in drama, there is wisdom that we don't understand.
And then, over centuries, over thousands of years, we start to articulate that wisdom, and it becomes explicit, and then we start to philosophize with what's become explicit. And if we're fortunate, then what we philosophized, and what we've made articulate and what we've dramatized, and what we've acted out, and what's at the base of our social and biological nature are all the same thing - and then we've got it right. And that's what we've done in the West.
You know, one of the things I was thinking about, was this idea that... there are two ideas that people talk about, which I have a certain amount of sympathy for. One is that you should have pride in your culture, I understand the impetus for that. I told you how I feel when I come to Europe. I can hardly stand it. I really mean that, the ecstatic experience of being in the great cities of Europe is overwhelming. And I think it is because I do have a gift for perceiving the miraculous.
I think it's a miracle when the lights are on, and the reason for that is that it is a miracle when the lights are on. Because it is not the natural state for the lights to be on. The natural state of things is to fall apart and not to work. And yet, they work, and they work all the time, and our great societies work, and they work magnificently, and that doesn't mean they're perfect. But nothing is perfect. And you don't throw away the wheat with the chaff.
I'm going to tell you another story. There is this psychologist named Jaak Panksepp, he just died about a year ago. He wrote a book called Affective Neuroscience, it's a great book. It's a book about emotion, about the neurological basis of emotion. And Panksepp was kind of a romantic.
The scientists who involve themselves with the scientific study of emotion tend to be romantic types, interestingly enough. And he was a whimsical scientist in many ways. He discovered the play circuit, the mammalian play circuit. It turns out that we have a biological system that's independent, neurologically predicated, that does nothing but mediate play - which I thought was very interesting because of my interest in Jean Piaget, who believed that the morality of children, and the morality of adults, emerged out of the games that we learned to play as children, and Panksepp also discovered that if you take rat pups away from their mother, and you feed them and you give them water and shelter, they die.
Human infants are the same, by the way, they have to be massaged, touched, they have to be cuddled, they have to be interacted with or their gastrointestinal system shuts down and they die. And you can stop that from happening with rats if you just tickle them with the end of a pencil eraser, a little massage, and then he found out that they giggled if you did that.
No one knew that, because they do it ultrasonically, like bats, so you have to record it and slow it down. Panksepp discovered that rat pups laugh. And you might think: "Who the hell cares about that?" But that's not the right way of looking at things. Because he was looking at a continuity in our nature that was tremendously deep, that went way back down into the animal kingdom.
He also discovered this: if you take two juvenile rats and you put them in a pen, they will spontaneously wrestle, they will engage in rough-and-tumble play, and if one of the rats is 10% bigger than the other, then the 10% bigger rat will pin the little rat. And, then you think: "Well, that's a dominance challenge and the big rat wins, end of story." But it's not the end of the story, and here's why.
It's because most games don't only occur once. Most games are played many, many, many times. So, Panksepp decided that he would pair the rats, the same two rats, multiple times in play context, and so the first thing he found out is once the big rat had pinned the little rat, the little rat had to ask the big rat to play. That was his role in the next encounter.
The little rat would look playful, like a dog, and then the big rat would pounce on him and they would tussle around. Then he found that if the big rat didn't let the little rat win, 30% of the time, across repeated encounters, then the little rat would stop asking the big rat to play.
When I read that, it just knocked me off my chair, because what I realised was that Panksepp had put his finger on the emergence of morality. The same kind of morality that Jean Piaget had observed emerging in children. Piaget observed that sophisticated children like to play games that other people like to play.
That's kinda what you tell your kids when they're playing a game like soccer or hockey, you say: "It doesn't matter whether you win or lose, it matters how you play the game." And, really, what you're telling your children is: "Life isn't a game, life is a series of games and the rules that govern playing the series of games isn't the same as the rule that governs playing a single game."
You don't want to be the winner of a single game, you want to be the winner of the series of games, and if you want to be the winner of the series of games, then you have to conduct yourself in a certain manner. And that's not arbitrary. It's so far from arbitrary that it even governs the behavior of rats.
It's not sociological. It's not learned. It's not whim. It's not arbitrary. It's not opinion. It's an emergent property. Morality is an emergent property that emerges across a sequence of iterated, voluntary games. Then you might ask yourself: "How do you have to conduct yourself if you're going to be the person that emerges victorious across an indefinite sequence of games?" And the answer to that is: like the big rat, you have to play fair.
Then you might ask yourself: "Well, if you watch people trying to play fair over a 150,000 years and try to infer what it looked like to play fair, what would your descriptions be?" And the answer to that is: you would describe the hero, the individual hero whose positive actions are constantly represented in drama, and literature and mythology.
In the West, I believe that we have fortunately managed to articulate the principles of fair iterated play better than any society has ever managed in the past. I don't believe that that's because there's anything particularly special about us. Because I believe that the principles of fair play, as I said, even govern the behavior of rats. But knowing this, or even appreciating it as a possibility, puts a new twist on two ideas:
One is that you should be proud of your culture. It's like... no! You shouldn't be 'proud' of your culture. You should bloody well recognize that it got some things right and that all of your good fortune is dependent on that, and then you should take the utmost responsibility for continuing to play the damn game properly.
And you should have enough sense to be grateful for all the sacrifice that was made by all those people who came before you so that you could end up being the beneficiary of this eminently playable game.
So, I could say: "Well, what are the rules of the game?" There's an idea in Genesis: to the foundational story of Western culture, that being emerged from something like potential, from chaos, as a consequence of God's use of language, the Logos. Logos is the deepest idea of the West, and it means something like clear, competent truthful communicative endeavor. So, there's an idea in Genesis that that's the spirit that God used to bring forth order from chaos at the beginning of time. When God employed the Logos to extract order out of chaos, he extracted habitable order, and then pronounced that it was good.
At the same time, when God made human beings, he pronounced the maiden the image of God, which means that human beings have the capacity, that Logos-like capacity, to speak habitable order into being out of chaotic potential, and the deep idea is that if you do that truthfully, then what you bring forward is good. That's aligned very tightly with the principle of fair play. It's easy to play fair with someone who tells you the truth. You can communicate with them, you can trust them, you can take risks with them, you can cooperate with them, you can negotiate with them, and you can jointly engage in the endeavor to bring forth the habitable order that is good from the chaos of potential.
When we insist that the immigrants who come to our countries, to become beneficiaries of the game that we're playing, follow the rules, we are not merely saying; 'we have a culture, you have a culture, you're in our culture, so you should follow our rules', what we're saying instead is: 'We have inherited a culture and it seems to work. It works well enough so that we're happy to be here, and many people would like to be, and if you want to come to our culture and be a beneficiary of the game, then you have to abide by the rules that produce the game. We're not saying that you have to do it because it's ours, or because we're proud of it, or because in some sense we're right as individuals, or even as a culture. We're saying it because we've been fortunate enough to observe what the rules that make a functioning society actually are, and sensible enough, thank God, most of the time, to follow them well enough so that there are a few countries on the planet that aren't absolute pits of catastrophe'.
Now, I didn't know what to say about immigration when I decided to do this talk, but I don't think it matters, because there are many complex things that can be said about immigration, about many of the problems that face us, but there is a meta-question, which is not 'how do you solve a difficult question?', but 'how do you solve the set of all possible difficult questions?'
The answer to that is quite straightforward: Speak the truth and play fair, and that works.
So I have been communicating that as diligently as I can for the last three decades, predicated on my observation that we got some things right, we should do better with it even, and that if we transformed ourselves, each and every one, into better people, predicated on the observation of that core identity, that we would then become collectively the sort of people who could probably solve any problem that was put to them no matter what its magnitude. And so what I was hoping to do today to set off this discussion about identity and immigration in Europe in the 21st century is to say: Be the sort of people to generate the proper solutions, and then perhaps the solutions will arise of their own accord. Thank you.
Reader Comments
Oh-oh.
If-you-don't-like-Jordan-Peterson-then-you-must-like-Cathy-Newman.
Another one of poseur binra's third-force-blind knee-jerks from the bipolar mind of the non-duality salon 1999.
Yaw.
"78% of lobsters caught have a larger right claw."
Peterson's 'lab rat' set-piece doesn't look all that good back-engineered, if you know what I mean.
According to the Freudians, man has an "id," an "ego" and a "superego."
Thank you both!
But there’s this one particular little circle...
It is filled with fierce males who are very smart and who groom their unique strains of obscuria, who insulate themselves from the challenges of mixing with the impaired and lumbering masses. “See? I am smarter! Can you even grasp my brilliant meaning? Hah! -Except to clearly perceive that one of us is the better, the stronger, and that it is not you!”
And thereby, self-respect. And on a parallel developmental path.., self-identity.
And then.., (ouch) guys like JPB come along, clearly cut from the same cloth, except.., smarter, more articulate, better read, more successful, and (damn him!) on a worthy mission.
While growing up, I orbited for several years whole classrooms of what the education system termed “gifted” kids. And boy, did I pick up some epic observations: there are few creatures more bitter and desperate than high IQs when they take to measuring penis length. It is not about what is right, but who.
And, incidentally, this is why the forum represents a terror. With a shitty little predator coiling around one’s brain, the last thing it wants is anybody seeing. It’s rather a shame that the Gurdjieff window closed some time ago. That phase is done and cannot assume its genuine attraction again. It comes to cutting one’s teeth out in the wild now, against far greater odds.
That sucks. Probably for everyone.
I worked in UC Berkeley's Physics Department for many years. The guys who are professors/researchers are acknowledged worldwide as at the top of the game. Many of them are cited as the world's "leading expert or voice" in their field. Yup. A lot of pricks worked in the Physics Department.
I worked with one man who took early retirement and was the "Grandfather" (originator) of a theoretical subfield of physics. Very famous guy. Luckily, I worked with nonpricks. He pointed out a younger professor whom even he called in so many words a prick. He said that acquiring colleagues of that sort had convinced him to retire early.
This younger fellow was obnoxious. You'd get in the elevator, and most people would say "Good Morning" or something. He stared through you. Years passed. He married. He had a child. The baby developed a serious physical issue which nearly killed him. You know what happened? This fellow actually became human. (Btw, the son survived after multiple surgeries.) He had developed a heart through enormous suffering. You would enter an elevator, and he actually said something to you.
He's one of the lucky ones.
"And then.., (ouch) guys like JPB come along, clearly cut from the same cloth, except.., smarter, more articulate, better read, more successful, and (damn him!) on a worthy mission."
What I get from Jordan Peterson is Oprah Winfrey on a different frequency ledge. I'm getting the intended overall 'positive' message. I'm getting the image of heroic-figure-kicking-over-the-money-changers-tables, the 'liberator' schtick, but when I get past my initial thoughts of "Sounds good. I'm all for liberation", and start looking at the substance of what he's actually saying, and the language he's using, the gold paint starts flaking off. When I hear all this talk of 'games', 'lab rats' etc, and his somewhat comedic attempts to break the bank of history using Nietzsche/Marx/Freud/Sartre as a can-opener, my antennae start wobbling like crazy.
And that tendency people have of glossing over significant details and hitching their wagons to media figures who present publicly as 'some brave Apollo', and the automated "You're either with JBP or against JBP" shapes that follow, immediately make me want to start booting shins and kicking over tables myself. And you may have noticed, Peterson acolytes seem to have very little interest in what he's actually saying. They never talk about what the guy actually said, and don't appear to want to have that particular conversation. It's all just Bravo!!! Bravo!!! Divide and Conquer au go go!!! One regular contributor to the comments section more or less stated in so many words that disagreeing with Peterson was 'hate speech', one member of the SOTT Forum thought Peterson might be the returned Jesus. The results of SOTT pumping up Peterson Mania day in, day out, basically mean you end up dealing with the golden aura of personality-cult identity-politics talking about itself and not much else.
-Somebody willing to take the punches and stand up for rational principles. That he was also a person who had excruciatingly examined reasoning behind those principles, as well as the ability to communicate them effectively, made him the lightening rod we see today.
If he had decided to just keep his head down and keep his mouth shut, I have little reason to doubt that our current socio-political atmosphere would be significantly more intolerable and dangerous. -Just in my own life through 2017, I can detail numerous alarming examples of the effects on the people around me, including one (by now almost stereotypical) example of an academic hurt professionally and personally by the blood thirsty SJW witch hunt. Fear and anxiety were piquing; I was feeling the heat myself, getting probably my first taste of what a society is like when there is the real danger of being reported and castrated for believing the 'wrong' things. I think we were rather closer to the edge as a culture than many realize.
So it’s quite natural for people to express admiration and gratitude, -as well as the joy which comes from absorbing enlightening new ideas where there was only vast murkiness before. Learning is fun and knowledge protects.
Of course, it’s also clear that the enthusiastic public response to Peterson covers all bases, including ideological hero worship as well as those intent on subsuming convenient elements of his message into existing nonsense rhetoric. That’s also to be expected. -But I don’t think it accounts for everybody’s response, or even the bulk of it. Nor do I believe those aspects came about by design or desire on his part, nor does he appear to be acting in a way to deliberately appropriate the power which comes from those elements.
It is evident that Peterson is aware of those particular inherent dangers, addresses them openly, discussing both the dark parts within himself which hunger for them and some of his personal methods for mitigating them.
He has described leaning on his own network of people familiar with similar challenges which come with fame to help keep his ego in check. One interesting example of this process of working self-awareness came with his proposed idea for a website designed to list post-modernist professors and school courses (an effort to give new students a map through thorny patches of truly cult-like programming). -A plan which was met with intense criticisms from the Left. Rather than doubling down, he stepped back and gave the idea an honest re-evaluation, taking into account the sociological dangers pointed out by his critics. That’s both rational and fairly unusual to see, and leads me to believe that there’s more than just a power-seeking egoist ideologue inhabiting his skin.
When I see a video like the one attached in this article, I see a man who is running low on energy as his publisher’s promotional agenda advances; his body language and some of his missed words indicate someone who is pressing the walls of his limitations. That concerns me, and I hope he has the wherewithal to know when to step back. Because I'm sure his enemies will not hesitate to pounce.
Er... No. An inspiration, maybe .... But, admiration and gratitude too readily leads to idolising and hero worship. Very STS... No pedestals, please.
"his body language and some of his missed words indicate someone who is pressing the walls of his limitations. That concerns me..." Well... Lets see just how much strength-of-will a true believer he really is for 'the cause'.
"Because I'm sure his enemies will not hesitate to pounce." A rite of passage all must walk when chosen the spot-light.
It's an observation, not a prescription.
It sounds like you're eager yourself to see him fail.
The "Holy Cause", (which is an interesting choice of words, btw), might be understood as vibrating in resonance with the Creative Principle rather than the Anti-Creative. That's pretty much the battle for everybody.