What Path Should We Follow?

I am working on a long think piece that is trying to solve the mystery of the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.

Of course, I am making the whole thing revolve around my reductive Three Peoples theory and the notion of three layers in general.

And, it seems to me, the whole thing comes down to "which path should we follow?" And naturally, it should be different for each of the Three Peoples. And, I propose, for each of them there is a good path and a bad path.

For the People of the Subordinate Self -- and for Curtis Yarvin's Clients -- the path is obvious; it is Follow your Leader. But, of course, you should understand that your Leader, whether the tribal leader, the Olympian gods, or President-for-life Xi, doesn't really care about people like you. He is using you as a path to power. You are, as I say, a Little Darling, like the mistress of a rich guy, who is liable to age out and get dropped. And it is one thing to follow your traditional tribal leader and another thing to follow some chap like Adolf Hitler with some cockeyed notion of world domination. But how do you tell? Good question.

For the People of the Responsible Self -- and for Curtis Yarvin's Commoners -- the path is: Follow the Rules. At the prosaic level this is the "obey the law, go to work, follow the rules" that I first heard from FoxNews Sean Hannity. At the higher end it is the notion of God's Divine Law, and the Paradise that await believers that follow the Divine Law. But, obviously, there is a limit to this. Do you damn to personal hell someone that doesn't follow your rules? Do you belong to a church with very rigid rules and roles? Following the Rules is the center of the market economy, where everyone follows the rules and is trustworthy, and where we make our living by working for others, whether as an employee or as an entrepreneur that makes his money by making products and services demanded by the market.

So far so good. But now we come to the People of the Creative Self -- and Curtis Yarvin's Gentry. Whatabout them? Well, I know what I want to say. The path of the creative is the path of the Sacrificial Hero. Then there is the other guy, who Jordan B. Peterson calls the "eternal adversary." Let us expand on Peterson's notion of the Hostile Brothers.

One of these "hostile brothers" or "eternal sons of God" is the mythological hero. He faces the unknown with the presumption of its benevolence -- with the (unprovable) attitude that confrontation with the unkown will bring renewal and redemption. He enter[s], voluntarily, into creative "union with the Great Mother," builds or regenerates society, and brings peace to a warring world.

The other "son of God" is the eternal adversary. This "spirit on unbridled rationality," horrified by his limited apprehension of the conditions of existence, shrinks from contact with everything he does not understand. This shrinking... makes him rigid and authoritarian... His weakness, in combination with his neurotic suffering, engenders resentment and hatred for existence itself.

Peterson calls these Hostile Brothers "archetypes of response to the unknown." I consider the mythological hero as the Sacrifical Hero, and the eternal adversary as the Egoist Hero. And it occurs to me that the path of the Sacrificial Hero is the Path into the Unknown. The true hero has the courage and the humility to follow the path of the Unknown, and accept the fear of the Unknown as a fact of life. The eternal adversary wants to make the Unknown known before he is willing to take th path into the future. And this is why the past two centuries is littered with ideological narratives that pretend to resolve the question of the Unknown: Comte's Positivism, Marx's Communism, the Frankfurt School's postmodernism, the Wokerati's political correctness.

I would say that the story of the last century is the story of the Gentry failing to face up to the frightful truth of the creative life, that it is a journey into the Unknown -- where there be dragons. The Gentry wants its creative life on the cheap, paid for by the Commoners. Or it wants to practice its creative notions on the Commoners, because Gentry is special and Commoners are deplorable. You can see these conceits in everything the left does, from socialism to politics to art. It is all a denial of the truth of the creative life, that it is a terrifying journey into the Unknown.

You can see that Nietzsche had a glimmering of this truth; that is why he proposes his Übermensch who is brave, creative, able to handle "a fair amount of accidents and nonsense," who is bigger than the descent from decadence to nihilism and the terror of the eternal recurrence in the hope of a future of ascending strength and achievement. But I think that there is probably too much of the Egoist Hero in Nietzsche's Übermensch to qualify him as a true Sacrifical Hero that walks, overcoming his fear, into the Unknown.

So that's all settled.

If you are one of the People of the Subordinate Self you follow the path in the footsteps of your Leader.

If you are one of the People of the Responsible Self you follow the Rules.

If you are one of the People of the Creative Self you follow the path into the Unknown.