Maps of Meaning: What Failure to Respond to Chaos Looks Like

I'm only part way through the first part of Maps of Meaning, where Jordan B. Peterson is setting up his view of reality, so I really don't know what I am talking about yet.

But Peterson's basic line is that we are not rational actors living in a world of scientifically understood objects. We are really just rats.

You put a rat into a new cage, or introduce a cat into its life and it freezes up in terror. For a while. But then it starts to explore and figure out what the new situation means and where the dangers are, and it starts to relax.

In other words, any living thing goes along as unconcerned as a seagull until something unexpected happens. Then the living thing has to figure out what that unexpected experience means. Is it nothing? Is it a potential mate? Is it a threat? And what should the living thing do about it?

It is just like Anne Elliott at the climax of Persuasion. when she gets the all-important and utterly unexpected letter from Captain Wentworth.

On the content of that letter depended all which this world could to for her. Anything was possible, anything might be defied rather than suspense.

So then Anne reads the letter, in which Captain Wentworth renews his offer of marriage. She finds herself overwhelmed with emotion.

Such a letter was not to be soon recovered from. Half an hour's solitude and reflection might have tranquilized her; 

But it was not to be. She has to pull herself together so that she could go out and meet Captain Wentworth and communicate her acceptance of his offer. And of course, she did.

Now, in Jordan B. Peterson's world view, we have a sudden unexpected event that pitches Anne Elliott into emotional turmoil. How will she act? Well, we already know that Anne Elliott is a dab hand at dealing competently with an unexpected event. Thank goodness, for it would not do for our heroine to collapse onto a fainting couch.

Now, just today I ran across a piece in the New York Post by a woman diagnosed as "borderline personality disorder" of BPD. Her problem is that she gets overwhelmed by everything, and has difficulty managing her emotions.

Borderline Personality Disorder is described by SANE, a government-run mental health advocacy group in Australia, as a mental illness where the “people affected have difficulty managing their emotions and impulses, relating to people and maintaining a stable self-image.”

In essence, it’s the inability to regulate emotions appropriately.

Now this ties in completely with Peterson's model of human response and action. The whole point of emotional response is that you realize that something has happened and life ain't gonna go on like it did.  The flood of emotion stops you in your tracks. But obviously, if you are going to make a sensible decision that will make things better for you then you need to manage your emotions and your fight/flight instincts.

However, there is a problem. We rich westerners,

the civilized, amiable, and admirable part of mankind, well brought up and not constantly in a state of fear... [live in] an environment in which the stimuli to excessive emotional response are at a minimum.

That is nice; we humans like to live in "safety." However, the safe and predictable social environment "will make small deviations from custom appear increasingly strange and thus... increasingly intolerable." In other words our safe and predictable environment ill-prepares us for the inevitable vicissitudes and setbacks of life. I find in my own life that I absolutely hate to be pitched out of my routine, but once pitched out am able to reconcile to a period of actual action and decisions and stay out of my normal-life rut.

Our NYPost BPD sufferer explains the things she struggles with.

• Skewed sense of self
• Maintaining personal relationships
• Splitting
• Engulfment and abandonment
• Self-destructive behaviors
• Intense emotions and anger

All of these things, it seems to me, align with the failure to do the basic thing we living things are designed to do, which is to react when something changes, and then make a successful adaptation.

You can see that the culture of the modern helicopter parent is not going to do a very good job of rearing a child that can adapt to shocks and setbacks, because Mom is raising her children in a cocoon of safety and predictability that extends into college and its dormitories. It cannot be surprising that these children are then unable to deal with "microaggressions" and demand "safe spaces."

The problem is, in addition, that the left encourages helplessness and rage and the victim culture. Because people with BPD syndrome are useful political fodder for the left to use in its power project.

So it is not surprising that Peterson, in talking to a nice center-lefty is telling young people to forget activism and changing the world and change themselves first.

Because the first thing you need if you want to act in the world is to train yourself to deal with the unexpected and respond successfully rather than collapsing into a heap of self-destructive behaviors, intense emotions and anger.

It is notable, I should think, that modern armies have found it necessary to train up recruits to the frightening experience of combat soldiering with "boot camp" and "basic training." It is, you might say, a sensible way of preparing the raw recruit for the terrors of uncertainty and the necessity for instant adaptation in the world of armed conflict.

Maybe the same is needed for young women: basic training for the endless Battle of the Sexes in the post-sexual revolution world.