In response to my review of Vox Day's Jordanetics, Vox Day kindly averred as how Immanuel Kant was "wrong, completely wrong, and utterly wrong... And the Jungians are not merely wrong, they are mad."
But here is a Rex Murphy piece in the Canadian National Post on Jordan B. Peterson, about how the left too has a problem with Jordanetics, about how the whole Peterson phenomenon started with a bunch of U of Toronto students that tried to get the prof fired for crimes against leftism.
The answer, as you would expect, is completely comprehended by my reductive Three Peoples theory. That's the one with the People of the Subordinate Self, workers and peasants, the People of the Responsible Self, the ordinary middle class, and the People of the Creative Self, everyone from artists and writers to start-up businessmen and political activists and revolutionaries.
See, the point is that lefties see the world as creative revolutionary activists like them making the world safe for their "little darlings," the People of the Subordinate Self -- the workers, peasants, and historically marginalized people like blacks, women, gays -- from the depredations of the evil bourgeois middle class and the worst thing in the world, Christianity. But Peterson defends the right of the ordinary middle class to pursue its destiny of responsibility and even regards religion as a Good Thing.
Now, chaps like Vox Day believe that the middle class of the nation state, the People of the Responsible Self, and reason and logic are the good guys. The lefties of the People of the Creative Self are the bad guys, and the workers and peasants of the People of the Subordinate Self, are the foolish dupes of the lefties.
My Three Peoples theory takes the reductive position that all three of the Three Peoples are perfectly natural and physical. There are tons of people in the world that just want to be safe and leave all the heavy lifting to their lord or their political patron. So be it. There are lots of people that want to get a job, get married, have children, and retire in good time with a nice little nest egg. More power to them. Then there are creative geniuses on the border between the known and the unknown that bring new inventions and economic revolutions. They are amazing.
So you can see that my theory of the world is a sophisticated and balanced view of the world that understands that there are all kinds of people in the world and they have a perfect right to be who they are. In any case, we can't be sure about who has the inside track on Truth, Justice, and the American Way. That really is the point that Kant is making with his notion that we can't know things in themselves, but only start guessing from what we pick up with our senses. My Three Peoples theory also tracks with Jung, because Jung proposes that all religions are attempts by historical peoples to make sense of the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, and that the same themes keep coming up in every religion. With the left, we are saying that all religions are superstition and bigotry. But with Jung we are saying that all religions are an honest attempt to get to the heart of things.
So of course Vox Day would be anti-Kant and anti-Jung.
Now, I'm not sure what Jordan Peterson has to say about the People of the Subordinate Self, but he clearly in his 12 Rules says that the first thing to do is get out of the basement, stand up straight with shoulders back and discipline yourself to become a responsible person. In Maps of Meaning, his first book, he proposes that the highest and best thing is to be a sacrificial hero trying to make sense of the border between order and chaos. That is a celebration of the creative self.
So of course I think that Jordan Peterson is a good guy. He is saying what I am saying, only better.
See, my world view is that for most of history, and certainly since the dawn of the state-based agricultural age nearly everyone was a subordinate peasant or a slave. It was the genius of Christianity and the other Axial Age religions to develop the idea that humans were responsible to God for their lives, not subordinate to their lords, and ought to do something about it. But now, in my view, we have entered into a creative age, where people think that the highest and best thing is to be creative. The last 200 years of the capitalist explosion is nothing if it is not a creative explosion.
This means that the old religion of responsibility, Christianity, no longer can win the hearts and minds of people that yearn to be creative. They all want to be artists and writers, and activists and start-up entrepreneurs, not mere deplorable responsibles. Now modern leftism, in my view, is the idea that only political creativity is meaningful, and that responsibility is for the birds. So their religion excludes responsibility as a good.
But I think that the religion of the future must combine a faith in responsibility with a faith in creativity, rather than choose one or the other, and I think that Jordan Peterson's ideas are a sensible step in that direction.
On my view you can easily see that it makes perfect sense that Vox Day, with his faith in responsibility, and lefties, with their faith in political creativity, would think that Peterson is a dangerous crank that ought to be vilified and suppressed.
My only complaint is that the woods are not full of Jordan Petersons celebrating a combination of responsibility and creativity.
But we can't have everything. Not right away.
But here is a Rex Murphy piece in the Canadian National Post on Jordan B. Peterson, about how the left too has a problem with Jordanetics, about how the whole Peterson phenomenon started with a bunch of U of Toronto students that tried to get the prof fired for crimes against leftism.
[They were outraged by] Peterson’s “gross misconduct,” his “efforts at agitation … inflammatory denunciations … evident connections to white supremacists … disruptive behaviour.”In response, Peterson
more or less told the pack of puerile leftlings chasing him with pitchforks and torches that their grandmothers wore severely unstylish army boots.OK, so why do both left and right disapprove of Jordan B. Peterson?
The answer, as you would expect, is completely comprehended by my reductive Three Peoples theory. That's the one with the People of the Subordinate Self, workers and peasants, the People of the Responsible Self, the ordinary middle class, and the People of the Creative Self, everyone from artists and writers to start-up businessmen and political activists and revolutionaries.
See, the point is that lefties see the world as creative revolutionary activists like them making the world safe for their "little darlings," the People of the Subordinate Self -- the workers, peasants, and historically marginalized people like blacks, women, gays -- from the depredations of the evil bourgeois middle class and the worst thing in the world, Christianity. But Peterson defends the right of the ordinary middle class to pursue its destiny of responsibility and even regards religion as a Good Thing.
Now, chaps like Vox Day believe that the middle class of the nation state, the People of the Responsible Self, and reason and logic are the good guys. The lefties of the People of the Creative Self are the bad guys, and the workers and peasants of the People of the Subordinate Self, are the foolish dupes of the lefties.
My Three Peoples theory takes the reductive position that all three of the Three Peoples are perfectly natural and physical. There are tons of people in the world that just want to be safe and leave all the heavy lifting to their lord or their political patron. So be it. There are lots of people that want to get a job, get married, have children, and retire in good time with a nice little nest egg. More power to them. Then there are creative geniuses on the border between the known and the unknown that bring new inventions and economic revolutions. They are amazing.
So you can see that my theory of the world is a sophisticated and balanced view of the world that understands that there are all kinds of people in the world and they have a perfect right to be who they are. In any case, we can't be sure about who has the inside track on Truth, Justice, and the American Way. That really is the point that Kant is making with his notion that we can't know things in themselves, but only start guessing from what we pick up with our senses. My Three Peoples theory also tracks with Jung, because Jung proposes that all religions are attempts by historical peoples to make sense of the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, and that the same themes keep coming up in every religion. With the left, we are saying that all religions are superstition and bigotry. But with Jung we are saying that all religions are an honest attempt to get to the heart of things.
So of course Vox Day would be anti-Kant and anti-Jung.
Now, I'm not sure what Jordan Peterson has to say about the People of the Subordinate Self, but he clearly in his 12 Rules says that the first thing to do is get out of the basement, stand up straight with shoulders back and discipline yourself to become a responsible person. In Maps of Meaning, his first book, he proposes that the highest and best thing is to be a sacrificial hero trying to make sense of the border between order and chaos. That is a celebration of the creative self.
So of course I think that Jordan Peterson is a good guy. He is saying what I am saying, only better.
See, my world view is that for most of history, and certainly since the dawn of the state-based agricultural age nearly everyone was a subordinate peasant or a slave. It was the genius of Christianity and the other Axial Age religions to develop the idea that humans were responsible to God for their lives, not subordinate to their lords, and ought to do something about it. But now, in my view, we have entered into a creative age, where people think that the highest and best thing is to be creative. The last 200 years of the capitalist explosion is nothing if it is not a creative explosion.
This means that the old religion of responsibility, Christianity, no longer can win the hearts and minds of people that yearn to be creative. They all want to be artists and writers, and activists and start-up entrepreneurs, not mere deplorable responsibles. Now modern leftism, in my view, is the idea that only political creativity is meaningful, and that responsibility is for the birds. So their religion excludes responsibility as a good.
But I think that the religion of the future must combine a faith in responsibility with a faith in creativity, rather than choose one or the other, and I think that Jordan Peterson's ideas are a sensible step in that direction.
On my view you can easily see that it makes perfect sense that Vox Day, with his faith in responsibility, and lefties, with their faith in political creativity, would think that Peterson is a dangerous crank that ought to be vilified and suppressed.
My only complaint is that the woods are not full of Jordan Petersons celebrating a combination of responsibility and creativity.
But we can't have everything. Not right away.
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