Peterson's "Beyond Order"

I only realized that Jordan B. Peterson's follow-up to 12 Rules was to be published March 2 on the day before publication date. So I ordered my copy of Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life right away. For some reason the book is not yet banned on Amazon.

Hey, you good little girls at Penguin: how come I didn't know about the publication date? Are you still too triggered that, well, everybody knows that Peterson is a... well... something Eeeuww? 

But now I am half way through Beyond Order, and I'll tell you what surprises me. There's a lot of Nietzsche and Jung in it. And Dostoevsky. And then he tells the Mesopotamian myth of Tiamat and Apsu and Marduk. And when he is done with that it is on to the Egyptian Osiris, Isis, and Horus. And how Harry Potter fits exactly into the myth story arc. 

I would have thought all that would be a bridge too far for a best-selling self-help author. Anyway, the book is #8 on Amazon right now on March 8, 2021.

If the theme of 12 Rules was to get started in life, to get out of that proverbial parents' basement, the theme of Beyond Order is really more for mid-life adults that are afraid to take the next step out of a dead-end career. Or don't know what to do about the wokey co-workers at corporate HR. And Peterson recommends a blend of creativity, courage, and responsibility, and stick-to-it-iveness.

Of course, if you read Helen Lewis's review of Beyond Order in The Atlantic you won't be any the wiser about who Peterson is and what he is trying to do. Lewis is a Brit feminist lefty, that went to a private Catholic high school and then Oxford, darling, and you can understand that she would have No Clue about what Peterson is about, and what his ideas mean to his readers. To give you a hint, here is Lewis on Maps of Meaning, Peterson's 1990s book.

Maps of Meaning, published in 1999, built on the work of academics like Joseph Campbell, the literature and religion scholar who argued that all mythic narratives are variations of a single archetypal quest. (Campbell’s “monomyth” inspired the arc of Star Wars.) On this “hero’s journey,” a young man sets out from his humdrum life, confronts monsters, resists temptation, stares into the abyss, and claims a great victory. Returning home with what Campbell calls “the power to bestow boons on his fellow men,” the hero can also claim the freedom to live at peace with himself.

Know what I think? I think that Lewis hasn't read Maps of Meaning. But, of course, it is trite to call Peterson's work a rehash of Campbell, just as it is right out of the lefty catechism to refer, as Lewis did in her famous GQ interview with Peterson, to Nietzsche as the "Nazis' favorite intellectual." Earth to Lewis: Nietzsche was a pro-European and an anti-nationalist.

The message in Beyond Order is that if you are stuck in a rut, it isn't going to do any good to hide from your problems. And it isn't going to do any good to burst out into the stratosphere, and it isn't going to do any good to pick up on one of the modern isms. Lewis:

Peterson writes an entire chapter against ideologies—feminism, anti-capitalism, environmentalism, basically anything ending in ism—declaring that life is too complex to be described by such intellectual frameworks. Funny story: There’s an academic movement devoted to skepticism of grand historical narratives. It’s called … postmodernism. 

Ahem. Do not all the most advanced minds agree, Helen Lewis, that postmodernism is the grand narrative that all other grand narratives are, to use a Brit word, bollocks, and apologies for power. But postmodernism is pure as the driven snow.

Odd, isn't it, that postmodernism is a favorite with lefties for whom political power is not just the best thing but the only thing.

Here's an interesting moment from Beyond Order. Peterson talks about the 160 city speaking tour for 12 Rules. He mentions the need to keep the audience's attention, and how he learned to focus on one or two people in the audience.

What you want to see from the person you are facing is silence. What you want to hear from the crowd is dead silence. You want to hear nothing.

Because when people stop paying attention they shift their weight; they whisper to their neighbor; they think about tomorrow.

I became increasingly aware that the mention of one topic in particular brought every audience... to a dead-quiet halt: responsibility[.]

Well I never. Odd, isn't it that the one thing that our lefty friends are against is the notion of individual responsibility. Responsibility for lefties is all about the responsibility of the patriarchy or white supremacy for the misery of the oppressed peoples.

But responsibility for lefties is never about each individual, be xhe never so humble, seizing the nettle of life, overcoming adversity and fear, and just getting on with it.

Given how the ordinary People of the Responsible Self respond to Peterson's work, I would say that folks like Helen Lewis should spend a little more time trying to figure out why, and a little less time back-handing Jordan Peterson.

For me, the reason for Peterson's success is obvious. Peterson is laying out the road to creativity from rote responsibility. And it is a road that a lot of people in the world are ready to hear.

Now Penguins are Getting Triggered

Sooner or later it had to happen. Penguins down at the South Pole would want into the fun and games of micro-aggressions and taking offence.

And now it has happened, reported by the lefty wizards at Vice.com. The special snowflake LGBT+ staffers at Penguin Random House are all in a twitter because Penguin is going to publish the sequel to the #1 best-seller 12 Rules. The new book is titled Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life.

(That title is interesting, because in my reductive Three Peoples theory, the middle people are the Responsibles, the people of Order, and the Creatives are the chaps trying to live beyond Order.)

They are all in a twitter because Peterson, who opposed the Canadian C-16 law on preferred pronouns, has become the preferred target of hate for Good Little Girls that Literally Know Nothing. Here is one foolish young thing quoted at Vice.

“He is an icon of hate speech and transphobia and the fact that he’s an icon of white supremacy, regardless of the content of his book, I’m not proud to work for a company that publishes him,” a junior employee who is a member of the LGBTQ community and who attended the town hall told VICE World News. 

It is bootless to get into their whiny girly complaints, except to note that women have a Culture of Complaint.

But obviously Penguin has missed an opportunity to Send a Message to its employees. Something like this:

Hey snowflakes! Get a clue! The whole point of non-fiction publishing is to get new ideas out there. Guess what! New ideas are almost always deeply unsettling to the defenders of conventional wisdom and the status-quo: evidently chaps and chapettes like you.

If you feel that you are not up to the challenge of living and working in the public square where uncomfortable ideas are bruited about by thinkers and writers that may not be quite out of the top drawer I invite you to hand in your resignation. You are not a good fit at Penguin.

Not only that, but any student of The Ruling Class by Gaetano Mosca would know that a sensible ruling class always allows room for upstarts from the lower classes. They bring much needed vigor into the ruling class and help it avoid decaying into a sterile aristocracy that is closed to new blood. A sensible ruling class also keeps the vapid twitterings of upper-class girls on its staff well in check.

I checked over to my pal Vox Day who is a severe critic of Peterson. Of course he is crowing, and offering a copy of his Jordanetics to the snowflakes.

My problem with Vox Day is that when he says something like this that Immanuel Kant was "wrong, completely wrong, and utterly wrong... And the Jungians are not merely wrong, they are mad" he is telling us that he does not understand the German Turn that more or less invented the modern world.

And all Kant said was that we cannot know things-in-themselves, but only appearances. What is so wrong with that?

Jordan Peterson is saying that if we understand Kant and then go through the whole German Turn to Jung then, well then the Jungian archetypes give us a cloudy window into the goings-on inside our unconscious mind. Then if we want to understand hierarchy as a way to reduce violence we should take a look at lobsters, which have been doing hierarchy for 350 million years. Then 12 Steps and Beyond Order: 12 More Steps to Life. Then the idea of the Sacrificial Hero who gives his life on the border between Order and Chaos so that others may live.

We are at an interesting moment in the history of the world. We have a ruling class that just stole an election so it could install a vapid ageing idiot as president. We have chaps like Vox Day still flapping around in the age when reason and logic were going to save the world. We have lefties and their silly snowflake adepts running around trying to stop free speech. We have a clueless health bureaucracy flapping around with terminal incompetence.

And then we have you and me and that fellow behind the tree that hope that we will survive the current madness until a time that the world gets a clue again.

Rebuilding "The Meaning of Life" with 26-year-olds

Everybody is talking about religion. Or not. But whatever they are talking about we are all still concerned about Douglas Adams' recurring theme in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy: "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.

On the one hand, as I wrote last week, we have our lefty friends with their Original Sin of "systemic racism" and their Apocalypse that global warming that will mean the End of the World unless we act now.

On the other, we have the experience of a young woman acquaintance who found, after her traumatic brain injury, that she couldn't experience God and the divine any more. But slowly, that sensitive part of her brain is coming back.

On the other we have another acquaintance who notes that "The words superstition and religion are synonyms.  Yet everyone claims one and not the other." Whatever I believe it is the truth, and what the other guys believe is a lie.

Then we have the Zman today writing about the "aridity of the intellectual landscape."

Modern conservatives operate in the lowest tier of intellectual discourse, which is the practical. This is where they debate where to move commas around the tax code and how to tinker with existing structures. The Left operates at the next tier, which focuses on the process. For them, the administrative state is one item in the toolkit they have in the war on the general culture.

But what comes next?

[Conservatism] should be the engine producing a new moral and political paradigm to challenge the prevailing orthodoxy, but instead it is just an obstacle in the way of that process. This is why it has collapsed and is headed to the ash heap of history.

While Trump and the people around him are oblivious to his role in this historical period, their anti-intellectualism is the necessary agent to break the old dynamic. Conservatives have no answer for his blunt observations and the Left has had its skin peeled back to reveal its reptilian interior. Trump has been a clarifying event, one that will usher conservatism off the intellectual and political stage. What replaces it is something suited for the demographic age.

Yes, but what? Well, here is  Austin Schue, "a 26-year-old American, working-class college dropout who owns and operates a small business" in northern California. Who has read a book. Who has actually had an original thought. Who can actually write an article. And he is writing about his life journey -- on several levels.

He is writing about the necessity of earning a living. And he is talking of the necessity of a meaningful life. And this young man has actually read Jordan B. Peterson's Maps of Meaning.

In my private reading, I noticed that the heroes of my favorite books acted on the truth in accordance with their belief systems—as in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, wherein protagonist R.P. McMurphy is lobotomized after he attempts to liberate his fellow insane-asylum inmates from the tyrannical regime of Nurse Ratched. I heard echoes of Christianity, my past faith, in his sacrifice.

He observed the contradictions in the left wing message.

On one hand, they pushed a feminized and pacifistic ideal of society. Yet at the same time, they glorified any kind of violent resistance that presented itself as progressive—a pattern we’ve seen play out in spades over recent months.

How come I didn't think of writing that? 

So what did he do? He learned to become a farrier, shoeing horses! And "ran a brush-clearing and landscaping company as a side hustle." But what about the meaning of life?

As a straight white male, I was supposedly luxuriating in a life of privilege—a stereotype that had nothing to do with my experience as a blue-collar worker who’d faced debilitating family traumas. What I really wanted to do was forge a coherent centrist viewpoint—one that can accommodate personal responsibility, the search for truth, sincere compassion for the less fortunate, and a sensible commitment to preserving the Earth’s ecosystems.

 Remember, this guy is 26. Then he began listening to Joe Rogan's podcast. And his lefty girl-friend found out about Jordan B. Peterson.

I was particularly blown away by the depth of Dr. Peterson’s knowledge, and the way he coherently tied together ideas from psychology, history, evolutionary biology, neuroanatomy, and myth.

Exactly. Peterson is trying to construct a new "meaning of life" from all our knowledge, ancient and modern. 

I started exploring his writing. This is the way children feel when they first hear a kind of music that resonates deeply. It was my intellectual Led Zeppelin. Like many of Peterson’s other fans, I implemented his lessons in my own life, and became a more responsible and assertive entrepreneur as a result.

Yes, the world is falling apart like a toxic marriage.

[Yet] most people I meet in the world just smile and say hello, even with a mask on. They seem to find life tolerable and even enjoyable. I see people going out to fish or mountain bike. I see tradesmen hustling. The healthiest people are the ones who picked a real tangible goal in their own life, and are working toward it.

Engaging in that process saves lives. It certainly saved my life. And while it may be too late for my relative, it’s not too late for members of my own generation. Clean your room. Build a house. Shoe a horse. It doesn’t matter what you do, so long as you aspire to something other than burning down somebody else’s prosperity and happiness.

May I suggest that if there are young men like Austin Shue in the world, then we may concur with George Eliot in Middlemarch, that

the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

As everybody understands, we need to conjure up a new "meaning of life, the universe, and everything" in the face of an old order that stumbles along, using its power and its domination to keep the old order going, just one more cycle.

It is good to know that good people are working on it. 

The Three Peoples and Revolution

In this "summer of love" featuring "mostly peaceful protests" in Democratic governed cities across the USA, there is a question. 

What do the Three Peoples in my reductive Three Peoples theory think about it all? Perfectly simple.

The People of the Subordinate Self (and Curtis Yarvin's Clients) follow their leaders. They are subordinate, haven't really cottoned to the middle-class city and its individualism, and they feel left out. So they are often ready to be led to the barricades.

The People of the Responsible Self (and Curtis Yarvin's Commoners) expect the police to control the streets so they can live their responsible lives obeying the law, going to work, and following the rules. To the Responsibles all political disagreements should be sorted out in elections. That's what the bourgeois revolutions of the 17th and 18th century were all about: to curb the warlike nobles and gravitate power to the middle class where things would all be sorted out in frank and free discussions according to Robert's Rules of Order. So Responsibles really hate riots, demonstrations, mostly peaceful protests and all the rest. Because to them, what's the point? Everyone has a vote, and the time to change government is at election time. You want to change things? Then persuade a majority at the next election and bring your agenda to the legislature.

The People of the Creative Self (and Curtis Yarvin's Gentry) are special people. They regard themselves as a cut above the rest and are irritated by the comfortable blandness of middle-class morality and politics -- or of Trump Boat Parades. The whole point of being creative is to strut and fret your hour upon the stage, to think up something new, not get on with your work and tend to your family.

Actually, as Jung and Joseph Campbell and Jordan B. Peterson and I write, the real creative hero is the sacrificial hero. I develop this notion in my Good Life series.

But our Creative Class, our educated Gentry, thinks that the good life is bending the arc of history towards justice with politics and peaceful protest. That is where they get meaning in their lives. They live what I call an Activism Culture. It is what you might call a surgical culture where these Creative people are acting rather like surgeons in an operating theater, operating on society to remove its cancerous growths.

And notice how this surgical metaphor tracks pretty closely to the medical profession. Medical professionals are not emotionally engaged in the lives of the people they treat. Their patients are, for them, statistics. Of course, they like to do the right thing, but if someone dies on their watch, well, that's life. They are careful to observe the established protocols, but let's face it: today's patient is today's patient. Tomorrow there will be another one.

Thus, I argue, when you see a mostly peaceful protest on the streets of Portland, Oregon, or an earnest activist demanding we implement the Green New Deal to address climate change, you must understand that this is an ego trip. It is all about the protester, all about the activist: the play's the thing.

In my view the Creative Class and the educated Gentry really have no idea how their protests and activism are received and experienced by the ordinary Responsible Commoner. That's because it is not a dialog; it is a performance.

Back in the last eruption of left-wing culture, the Sixties, it took about 20 years before the Sixties Kidz realized that they had a problem, that the ordinary American commoner hated their protest culture, that if they wanted back into command they had to moderate their message and pretend to be moderates.

But all along they were still dreaming of being Ché Guevara, of setting the world aflame, of bending the arc of history: Revolution Baby!

Only the Age of Revolution is over. Surely anyone with half a brain can see that: all the revolutions since the bourgeois revolutions have been bloody failures that have not brought justice but bloody killing fields. Revolution has been replaced by ordinary corrupt politics, of loot and plunder by tax and spend rather than by conquest and subjugation.

Of course, my line is that the follow-on Age of Politics is over, too. Almost anyone with a brain should be able to see that anything and everything run by the government is incompetent and dysfunctional. We know why this is so: it is dictated by my Four Laws: that socialism cannot work because it cannot compute prices; that administrative government does not work because it does not have the bandwidth; that regulatory government cannot work because of "regulatory capture" of the regulators by the regulated; and that anyway, government programs cannot work because you cannot reform them, except by handing out more loot.

I interpret the current situation as the utter folly of the educated Gentry, thinking that a couple of nice peaceful protests can solve the injustices of the world. That, obviously, is what the Democratic mayors and councils of Seattle, Washington, and Portland, Oregon, thought when all this violence started with the death of a drugged up felon who had just passed a fake $20 bill. That's because they believe what they have been carefully taught, that the way to justice is through the annealing flame of protest, acting as "allies" of "oppressed peoples."

Of course, they have no idea about how they have buried the ordinary Commoners in injustice, how they have betrayed the support of the "oppressed peoples" over the last 50 years.

If there is any justice in the world then our Creatives, our educated Gentry, should be up before the Bar next.

But don't forget that they have No Idea that they have done anything wrong. Not yet.

Boy, that would be a Revolution, the day when our conceited Gentry gets a Bill of Indictment from the Responsibles, the Commoners, they have exploited and oppressed for so long.

The Terminal Bossiness of the Educated Gentry

A while back I did a piece on the problem of life as a creative person, "The Conflict of Interest of the Educated Gentry." Life is hard for the would-be creative person. Real creativity is almost certainly a road to failure.

So what does the Educated Gentry, my People of the Creative Self, do? It fakes it; it plays at being creative, ringing the changes on sex, fiddling with a thousand activist projects from automobile safety to trash Nazism. And the nauseating yard-sign virtue-signalling of the #WeBelieve and #BLM set.

There are, I believe, two agendas in our educated Gentry. Part One is the loot and plunder operation, buying the votes of the "oppressed peoples" with the taxes of the "white oppressors." Nothing new here; ruling classes have been playing this game since forever.

Part Two is the bossiness agenda, that we experience mostly through the Activism Culture. If you have been watching the Democratic National Convention this week you will notice that almost all the actors in the videos are "activists" that are passionately and selflessly advocating for some vital moral goal.

We are utterly inundated with the urgent projects of educated Gentry activists. There is the issue of auto safety, triggered in the 1960s by über-activist Ralph Nader. The result is that automobile manufacture is festooned with ten thousand regulations affecting safety, gas mileage, fuel composition, and now climate change. I wonder what the net effect of all that regulation is in lives saved and energy transformed. Trash collection is transformed by the agenda of a generation of environmental activists that want you to sort your garbage into at least three bins: yard waste, recyclables, and trash trash. Every coffee house has at least two bins for garbage festooned with incomprehensible instructions as to what belongs in each bin. Now we learn that it costs more energy to recycle than is saved by recycling. Especially since the Chinese are not accepting our recyclables any more.

Washers and dryers and all other home appliances are subject to energy-saving regulations. Roof-top solar cells are given astonishing subsidies, including paying the homeowner for energy generated at the retail rate. Home construction is subject to ten-thousand regulations, from earthquake strengthening to multi-pane windows to energy-saving insulation.

There is the urbanist movement that pushes regulations to encourage high-density housing, mass transit, and discourage suburban "sprawl." Whatabout bike lanes and transit-only lanes? Bike lanes are mostly used by single young men. Bus lanes take lanes away from ordinary commuters who might be lower-middle-class workers that can't afford gentry-neighborhood homes and commute an hour a day to their construction jobs in the city.

And of course all electronic gear is subject to various regulations designed to save energy.

And that is just scratching the surface.

Is all of this a Good Thing? Could be. Or not. How would we tell? For instance, it might be a good idea to mandate robust home construction with 2x6s instead of the old 2x4s. But whatabout the poor? Are the poor best served by cheap construction that gets them a home or by expensive construction good for the next century?

But we don't really get to have an opportunity to have a frank and fair discussion of the issues on any of these topics, because when it comes to political and moral dialogue the educated Gentry pretty well has the whole thing locked up, in part through their communication skills, in part through their effective moral posturing, and in part from their connections with politicians and bureaucrats in the deep state.

We libertarian types like to say that the market can make most of these decisions without the need for activist soyboys getting into the action. Let the market decide, we say, with the qualification that, of course, we should deal with "externalities" that enable market participants to push costs onto others without paying for them.

But, I like to say, we humans are not automatons going around experiencing life as a profit-and-loss statement. We search for Meaning. As Jordan B. Peterson says in a bunch of videos, you need an "Aim" for your life.

And one of the characteristics of our age is that educated Gentry are forever thinking up a thousand ways to make our lives "safer" and the planet "greener" -- and their own lives more Meaningful.

Ah yes. But what do we do about it? Good question.

I know what we need. We need the educated Gentry to get themselves a new religion, one that emphasizes the right of other people -- Commoners -- to live their lives according to their lights. We need something like the situation that arises in the novel Quo Vadis where the Roman high muck-de-muck sneaks into a Christian meeting outside the walls of Rome and is flabbergasted by the notion of forgiveness and the rejection of vengeance. And then he gets forgiven by a bunch of Christians that he has been harassing. What? It is just beyond his ken. Only of, course, he is in love with Ligia, a Christian girl princess from Lygia, so he has to try to understand.

Yeah. Imagine the flabbergastedness of an average educated Gentry grandee when first introduced to the idea that white-supremacist Commoners have right to live according to their lights, dim as those lights might be. You can't be serious, you racist-sexist-homophobe!

Actually we are seeing this flabbergastedness right now with the Trump Derangement Syndrome among the MSNBC watchers. They can't believe it. They can't believe that Americans could elect a guy like Trump. Forget a glitch in the Matrix. How about the dimming of Betelgeuse?

But really, are they dumb or something?

The Trump phenomenon is pretty simple, if you step outside of your educated Gentry bubble. Trump represents the average Commoner, a voter that is neither educated and plugged into the educated gravy-train nor an "oppressed peoples" victim looking for handouts. That is all. Not remarkable at all.

But if your reality is liberal bubble, then you are talking existential shaking of the foundations.

On the other hand, if you can't see what is right in front of your face you must be as dumb as an ox. Or at least an educated ox.

Yes. Until the day that the educated Gentry can see past their noses and understand that there are people out there that just don't see the world the way they do, we are going to get more of the same: more terminal bossiness from the folks that know that they have our best interests at heart, and know better than we do what is good for us.

See here liberals and educated Gentry and all the ships at sea. There is a word for people like you that know what is good for the rest of America: Oppressors.

Message to Lefties: The Age of Politics is Over

So, yesterday the Seattle City Council decided to Defund the Police. Next year. When you think about it, this is exactly how politics works. 

Some interest group gussies up a bunch of rage, and the politicians realize they have to Do Something about it. But they know, in their heart of hearts, that it's all baloney. So what do they do? They pass a bill to make it look like they are doing something but push the big stuff off till next year when, maybe, the patient's fever will have subsided.

Anyway, the black woman Seattle chief of police Carmen Best resigned. Or rather, retired.

Doesn't that make the whole Seattle City Council into racist sexists? You tell me.

But I think there is a bigger issue here. And I think it is this:

The Age of Politics is Over. 

You think? I think that the Age of Politics ended with the passage of the Civil Rights Acts 55 years ago.

I went to the website of my Seattle Councilman Dan Strauss and he says this.

My priority as a Councilmember will be to create bold solutions at the scale of the problems we are seeking to address. I will fight to ensure Seattle is a healthy city, one connected by transit, that supports our small businesses, that has accessible and affordable childcare, and has safe, affordable places to call home.

Know what, Dan? The Age of Bold Solutions is over. What we need is an absence of bold solutions, a long withdrawing roar of undoing the Bold Solutions of yesteryear. For the only Bold Solution worth thinking about relates to my maxim that "Government programs cannot work because you cannot reform them." Which is to say: don't even think of a bold solution.

Of course, you can reform government programs, but only when they are broken -- completely broken, as in government can't borrow money any more. 

But we are better than that. 

This is why I say that the left -- liberals, progressives, choose your poison -- is a Great Reaction, a lurch back to the primitive, where socialism is a return to slavery, the welfare state a return to feudalism, and the activism culture a replay of the medieval romance, when knights were bold and damsels were in distress.

See, the whole point about humans is that we are social animals. That means that we do a bunch of things in order to reduce violence and conflict. One of those things, highlighted by Jordan B. Peterson in his lobster thingy, is hierarchy. Male lobsters don't fight over every little thing; instead they have a hierarchy. So unless a male lobster just can't take it any more, he accepts his place in the hierarchy. Lobster Lives Matter.

Now, one of the Big Problems down the ages is that humans have lived by the food available to them on the land. They have attempted to secure this food supply be defending a territory. Men have specialized in territory defense. Because land, and the food grown there, was life.

But now things are different, as I keep saying. It doesn't matter where food is grown. You can buy it. You can buy it thousands of miles away and have 100,000 ton grain ships move it all over the world from where the food is grown to where it is wanted. It doesn't matter where any product is produced; it can be loaded into a container on a container ship and dispatched across the world.

The only real wealth in the world is "intangible capital," the knowledge and knowhow in human minds. And this knowledge and knowhow can create incredible fortunes: the Microsoft fortune, founded by a guy that bought an operating system for personal computers and sold it by the item to IBM; the Apple fortune, starting with the iPod music machine and culminating in the iPhone that has transformed the world.

Notice what is missing from these tales of fabulous wealth? Force. Government. Politics. Bold Solutions.

Now, all is not completely copacetic, not yet. It is true that we no longer need to live as the underlings or the thralls of a Strong Leader that will protect us from all the dangers of the world. Instead we now are subservient to the market, what other people are willing to pay for our services and our products. It is, many people think, a worse slavery than the old household slavery or plantation slavery. For there is no hiding from the market in some rural paradise. We must all mark to the market every day. We must all keep updating our skills and improving our products. If we don't then we will find that the market no longer rewards us very much for our trouble.

And we need police to bash the heads of knuckleheads that haven't yet got with the program. That still like to loot.

But is the new market order unjust? Does a social animal deserve to thrive even if it is unwilling to serve its fellows with services and products that those others want to buy? That, of course, is the Great Question that all of us are confronted with every day. By what right can and should we demand to be supported by others when we cannot provide for ourselves?

There's a yard-sign on my morning walk that declares "Equality Hurts No one" and it features the clenched fist of Black Lives Matter. Well. So equality doesn't hurt anyone but if you don't provide it we have a clenched fist ready to enforce the notion. Thanks, pal. 

I would say that the only way to have equality is to enforce it. And you'd have to do it every day because tomorrow some entrepreneur will have a remarkable idea that is worth millions -- or maybe trillions. And that would be the end of equality until you enforce it. So equality needs a clenched fist.

In fact, though, social animals have found that equality is impossible. The only thing that works is a benevolent form of hierarchy, just like the lobsters. In our society the chap that ascends the hierarchy is often an entrepreneur with a good idea that turns out to be worth trillions. Then there is the politician that ascends the hierarchy by promising Bold Solutions.

And there is the fact that young men are programmed, coded to be defenders of the border. That is what all the LARPing AntiFa warriors are doing. They are doing what comes naturally.

Only, in our day, we don't need no stinkin' border warriors. We have road warriors, professional sports stars, the chance to found a new business and take it public in an IPO, instead.

And a glorious thing it is, to be, not a pirate king, but a software billionaire.

But you tell Councilman Dan Strauss. Or Councilwoman Brahmin-from-Puna Kshama Sawant about that.

Because I don't think they would understand. They still live in the primitive world of the Age of Politics and don't understand that the world has moved on.

Think of them as primitive savages, or primitive progressives. What does a primitive progessive understand about the market and the idea of trusting anyone that acts trustworthy?

What I Believe

I'm going to lunch with some regular guys today, organized by a man that emailed me a couple of weeks back to thank me for my American Thinker articles. So maybe we will talk politics, not to mention "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything."

So I thought: what do I believe? What is "the meaning of life?" I think that my basic belief is that "we don't know." But everyone feels the need for a purpose, a meaning in life, so we make it up.

Correction: we don't make it up; we pick up someone else's belief system, a religion or ideology, and believe in it. Here is how a Portland stay-at-home mom experienced the woke belief system:

I started noticing [in 2016], throughout the neighborhood, a massive movement. Resistance to everything without an understanding of the issues themselves, the underlying data, what was really happening, it just felt so surface oriented, emotionally driven, and a repeat of media talking points. Yard signs popped up everywhere and are still on proud display. 

I believe that different people have different beliefs, and that this is natural and physical, and comes out of the modern understanding of the human psyche through things like developmental psychology. On this view, you would expect a hunter-gatherer to have a different world view than a college professor. You would also expect a construction worker with a mega pickup truck to have different ideas on transportation and grocery shopping than a college professor driving a Prius and shopping at Whole Foods.

I try to understand this "diversity" through my reductive Three Peoples theory. I use the word "reductive" because of course I know that things are not so simple that you can put all humans into three boxes. But, you have to start somewhere, and dividing humans into three parts is better than the more usual two-part "Us" and "Them."

Thus, I believe that we humans in the modern world come like this. There are, first of all, Subordinate people. These are people that experience themselves as victims, tossed around by indomitable powers. So the answer is to find a powerful lord or political patron and stick to him like glue. Then there are Responsible people. These are the middling sort of people that have a basic competence and skill set that enables them to make it in the market economy of the city. They think it is their responsibility to follow the rules, go to work, and follow the law. Finally, there are Creative people. For these people it is not enough to go out in the world and live a responsible life. As rich-kid Karl Marx wrote,

Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.

Now I think it is important for Creative people to understand that it's all very well to talk about "changing" the world. But what if you are wrong and your plan for change is a disaster? You got insurance for that, pal?

I also think it is important for Responsible people to realize that it is all very well for them to say "get a job" to the Subordinate people of the world. But there is a whole cultural transformation between the life of the subsistence peasant in the feudal countryside and the knowledge worker in the city. I discuss this in my book The Road to the Middle Class.

I also think that it is important for Subordinate people to realize that their feudal lords or elected politicians or woke "allies" don't really care about people like them. Subordinates are what I call the "Little Darlings" of the rulers, at best, and their cannon fodder, at worst. When the day comes that the Subordinates are no longer useful for the lordly political project, they will be cast aside like an aged mistress. Case in point, the white working class, that progressives once loved, and now dismiss as white supremacist bigots and fascists.

Like everyone, I do have plans for how other people should live. For Subordinates, that I experience as people learning how to make it in the modern city, I propose The Road to the Middle Class, a program to learn the ways and the culture of the city, that I define as learning the code of Axial Age religion, education in modern skills, mutual aid rather than government welfare programs, and learning to live under law rather than under a lord. In other words, I recommend growing from Subordination to Responsibility.

For Responsibles, I recommend growing from Responsibility into Creativity, to experience life as not merely living according to God's law and living within set parameters, but learning to create a little, as in creating your own business, trying out some idea of betterment, of doing things better.

For Creatives, I have a plan. See, I think that the wokies -- ever since Marx -- have made a fatal error. They think that the future will be made by Creative people like them "fighting for change." This kind of person I call the Egoist Hero and they think of as the Revolutionary Hero. It is the modern equivalent of the tribal leader leading his people to victory on the border against the dangerous tribe next door. So I have developed my own idea of "The Good Life" which comprehends the wokey approach but reaches higher. 

For Creatives, I propose, the highest goal should be to become a Sacrificial Hero. This notion comes out of Jungian psychology and his idea of "archetypes." As developed by Jungian adepts like Joseph Campbell and Jordan B. Peterson, the Sacrificial Hero means a person that conducts the Hero's Journey into the underworld of the unconscious, and if he survives this dive into the depths he may return to help his fellow humans, by illuminating the border between Order and Chaos, between the known and the unknown. And he probably sacrifices his life in the process.

The key thing to understand, I think, is that politics is not the way to the future. Politics, in my understanding, is the defense of our tribal patch of land from others that would conquer, plunder, and enslave us.

Only, in my understanding, conquest, plunder and enslavement are so yesterday. No, not immoral, so much as belonging to another age. For the point is that in our world, conquest, plunder, and slavery Do Not Pay.

Why? Because in modern developed countries 80 percent of wealth is "intangible capital" between the ears of intelligent creative responsible people. If you conquer, and plunder, and enslave, you have gained nothing. Because the wealth of the world is intangible.

If only our lefty friends would wake up one day and realize this.

What is the Good Life Better than the Left -- for Women?

I've established to my own satisfaction that the meaning of "life, the universe and everything" for educated male Gentry or People of the Creative Self is symbolized by the notion of the Sacrificial Hero that comes through the Nietzschean/Jungian tradition, and through adepts like Joseph Campbell and Jordan B. Peterson.

But whatabout women?

Truth is, women are not into heroes. You can see that in the whole "safety culture" that powers the "cancel culture." If you make me feel unsafe, well, your words are hurtful and you should be canceled. We have seen this in the resignation of Bari Weiss at The New York Times.

This safety thing, to me, is a girl thing. Being safe, intellectually and emotionally, is not something that occurs to a guy. "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me." That's the guy approach to wordplay.

And this takes us back to Georg Simmel's prediction a century ago, that with women coming into the public square, they would transform it to suit "a more feminine sensibility." I have been thinking about this for a few years and have come to the conclusion that women don't relate to the public square; they aren't comfortable at all with a frank and fair exchange of views; they don't believe in "debates." That's because women that have a disagreement don't have it out woman to woman. They complain to their friends about the woman they have a problem with, and the whole thing gets massaged by the neighborhood community of women and spat out, eventually in some collective decision of naming and shaming and shunning.

The proof of this is the "safety culture" that is emerging in universities and in the prestige media as women take over. Most of your university students these days are women; most of your university administrators these days are women. And it certainly seems that most of your young journalists are women. That is why you see the rise of the "safety culture." Women expect to be "safe;" they insist on being safe. Being a hero doesn't make sense. Not to a woman.

(Yes I know. There are exceptions. I know a few of them, personally).

So what is "best in life" for a woman?

The answer, I believe, issues out of the basic concept of honor among women. As James Bowman writes in Honor: A History, 

[In] spite of the discrediting that honor has undergone, the basic honor of the savage -- bravery for men, chastity for women -- is still recognizable beneath the surfaces of popular culture what has done so much to efface it. If you doubt it, try calling a man a wimp or a woman a slut. (p.5)

I think the woman's notion of honor comes out in the #WeBelieve yard-sign which usually closes with "Kindness is Everything."

Then, of course, we turn to My Girl George Eliot, Mary-Ann Evans that was. In Adam Bede, the heroine Dinah Morris is the kindest and most thoughtful person in the world. She is always thinking about other people and how she can help them. Her antagonist, Hetty Sorrel, is the most selfish person in the world who thinks of nothing but her beauty, her self-adornment and herself. You can see the question of chastity in women blazing across the sky: goodness, thoughtfulness, kindness.

In Middlemarch we have a rainbow of young women exemplars, from Dorothea Brooke, who really wants to do good in the world, to Rosamond Vincy, who is completely selfish and cannot see out of her needs and her truth of her eternal innocence, to Mary Garth, the Mary-Ann Evans name-alike, who is not to be dislodged from her determination that Fred Vincy has to deserve her before she will accept him as her affianced husband. Dorothea is the kindest, noblest, most thoughtful young woman in the world, and yet, as her uncle Mr. Brooke might say, she has a tendency to "go too far." Rosamond is a peerless beauty, yet frozen in place, determined never to do anything wrong, yet unable to see the wrongness of her mindless selfishness and sense of entitlement. Mary Garth is the balance between the two: kind but firm; thoughtful but not yielding; good, but no pushover.

So, after the alpha and omega of womanhood in Adam Bede George Eliot in Middlemarch gives us a spectrum of women and the opportunity to reflect on the question of woman's honor in more depth and breadth.

Now let us think about how this works out in the context of the modern educated woman in the educated Gentry or the People of the Creative Self.

Clearly, for such women, the need is for something original, something that steps out of the Commoner context of being good and kind and thoughtful by following the rules, going to work, obeying the law. We are trying here to think outside the box of goodness, thoughtfulness, and kindness, all the while avoiding falling into the trap of becoming a Lady Bountiful.

So, obviously, our Dorothea/Dinah/Mary would not be doing conventional things such as nice liberal women do, just aping the current liberal line and doing good, being kind and thoughtful and Lady Bountiful around the usual liberal victims.

In other words, the role of the creative good/kind/thoughtful woman is hard, as the role of the male Sacrificial Hero is hard.

OK. We have solved the whole problem and the future of womankind is set for the next millennium.

But what shall we call this paragon of femininity, the name, the feminine ideal corresponding to the male Sacrificial Hero.

Frankly, I don't have a clue. So I will just lay the question aside and leave it to my Jungian unconscious to rummage around in its archetypes to come up with the right answer.

Gorsuch Decision Means Back to the Drawing Board

With Justice Gorsuch legislating gay rights into the Civil Rights Act of 1965, another fantasy of conservatism bites the dust.

We are never going to win the culture war with conservative justices on the Supreme Court. Why?

Because the judicial branch is the aristocratic branch; it reflects the culture of the educated Gentry. And always will. Actually, that was the intention of the Founders.

Right now, the educated Gentry thinks that LGBT rights is a Good Thing that all Goodwhites agree on.

Let us be clear about what this means. It means that if you want to change the laws of the country you have to do more than win elections.

Because, as Andrew Breitbart said, politics is downstream from culture. Don't expect to win political battles unless you occupy the high ground of the culture.

But that is not enough for, as John C. Wright writes, culture is downstream from religion. 

Don't doubt me on this. And if you did, you might change your mind and get to see why Wright is right on this, in a moment when the devotees of the religion of Wokeness dominate the culture with their religious devotions and flagellations "mostly peaceful protesting" for Black Lives Matter and Defund the Police.

So is it all over? Do we all just take a knee, the baptismal rite of Wokeianity? Not at all.

Because there is something upstream from religion. And that is the classic line from Douglas Adams, that he repeats again and again in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. It is the eternal human search for the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything."

Let it be said that we are no closer to succeeding in this search than the first humans that developed the conceit of self-consciousness. And we never will. The closer we get, as we increase our knowledge and wealth and power and wokeness, the further the answer recedes into the depths of the universe.

For instance, just this week the "Physicists Union" -- that demands, if you remember, "rigorously defined areas of doubt and uncertainty" -- announced that the Hubble Constant isn't quite as constant as we thought, and this "bolster[s the current] challenge to the basic model of the universe."

Whatever it is that the universe is. If, indeed it is something rather than nothing.

So, what we need to do is to come up with a meaning of life, the universe and everything that will condense into a new religion for the educated Gentry that will change the culture that will change the politics and that will make it unthinkable for the aristocrats on the Supreme Court to continue with the current faith in finding new "rights" to enshrine in law and new "victims" to be inducted into the sacred hall of victims.

Should be a snap, right?

I mean, it shouldn't be that hard to find some sort of meaning of life that is higher and better than Wokeness, the religion of Activism that there are billions of helpless victims out there wallowing in helplessness unless straggly-haired Chés and Good Little Girls in face masks all get together and hand-letter signs and mostly peacefully protest and demand that we bend the arc of history towards justice for the helpless victims?

I mean, surely smarter minds that you and I should have figured this all out by now, and forged a new and better meaning of "life, the universe, and everything." Right?

Of course they have. And I have made it my life's work to sniff out these noble heroes. And now I have published my findings, "A Vision of the Good Life Better than the Left's," that begins here.

I warn you, it is an extremely sophisticated analysis that is way beyond the ken of the average Ché or Good Little Girl in a good little face mask.

Now I have come up with the Ideal of this new meaning of "life, the universe and everything." It is the Sacrificial Hero who dies upon the border between Order and Chaos.

This Hero is not the Warrior Hero of old, the Prince Harry or the Harry Percy of Shakespeare. He is not the Revolutionary Hero of leftist revolutionary fantasy literature. He is not the Activist Hero of the current Activism Culture.

But what is he, then?

I will tell you. He is rather like Jordan B. Peterson, author of Maps of Meaning and 12 Rules for Life. 

Why would I pick him, when tough guy Vox Day makes fun of him in Jordanetics: A Journey into the Mind of Humanity's Greatest Thinker? Two reasons:

1. Peterson came out against Canada's C-16 law that basically legislated the LGBT agenda. If you watch his testimony before the Canadian Senate you can see that he is basically offering himself up as a sacrifice.
2. His latest blog post, taking aim at the entire current culture in the university, "Missives of Appalling Idiocy and Envy Embarrassing to Behold," in which an eminent Canadian chemistry prof has been thrown to the woke mob.

When you do this you are offering yourself up to Pontius Pilate as a sacrifice to the search for the meaning of life. It means you are willing to sacrifice reputation, career, respectability, honor, everything.

But actually, of course, you are transcending the woke mob and its Cancel Culture, because in offering yourself as a sacrifice you are in fact daring the wokies to make you into a martyr. And that is something that they don't want.

But who really has the courage to stand up to the mob? Not me. But maybe you are. Anyway, Jordan B. Peterson is, in my opinion, an example of what it takes to be a Sacrificial Hero. Needless to say, his Maps of Meaning goes into great depth about the Sacrificial Hero and the whole question of the Hostile Brothers. 

I investigate Maps of Meaning here.

So, All we need to do is make the philosophy of the Sacrificial Hero a conventional wisdom among the educated Gentry. Then the whole religion and culture and politics of Wokeranity will vanish in a puff of smoke.

And we can start to deal with the next problem.

Three Religions for Three Peoples

Every human needs a way to cope with the experience of suffering, in other words a religion.

Now, I will tell you a mystery. Each of the three layers of people that we have described, with their three layers of culture, has a different religion. Of course they do. Each lives in a different world, and and each different world is experienced a different meaning of "life, the universe, and everything." The Subordinates or Clients tend to have a pre-Axial Age religion, with vengeful gods. The Responsibles or Commoners believe in a God that made the world, enacted his divine law and directed them to get on with it. There is a tendency among these folk to get beyond vengeance, as George Eliot taught her venerable Commoner Adam Bede to do with the help of that veritable saint, Dinah Morris.

Two Kinds of Hero’s Journeys

But what about the religion of the Creatives, the educated Gentry? That, of course, is the question before us.

The Creative class, the Gentry, the Somebodies, just know that they must have some vitally important role to play upon the stage of society. God, or rather Gaia, has decreed it. But what? This is where the brilliance of rich-kid Karl Marx, son of the leading lawyer in Trier, comes in. If you are a rich kid looking around for something meaningful to do why not gussie up a quick-and-dirty meaning of life, the universe and everything that explains the world as a sub-lunar battle between Us and Them: the capitalists vs. the workers, and then organize the workers and lead them to justice against the mean-spirited bourgeoisie? Or the minorities against the racists? Or the women against the patriarchy? Or the gays against the haters? Was Marx a genius, or what?

And what does it mean to make your religion about other peoples' suffering? Did Marx not feel suffering himself? Or was he sublimating his own sufferings onto others?

I find myself asking a question: Is this a rising to peaks beyond the “heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx,” or is it a lurch back to the primitive, to re-imagine that all suffering arises from a social or economic fault or from a “hater?” And that vengeance is the answer?

For in the primitive world-view Mircea Eliade teaches us that there “is always a fault at the bottom of it.” Really, if Marx hadn’t come up with this cunning plan, what else could the scions of the Gentry do with their primitive hate, poor things?

These Creatives sound to me like der Übermensch on stilts. But how can that be? Was not Nietzsche “the Nazis’ favorite intellectual?” How come our lefty friends are singing his song?

They are singing his song because the Nietzschean hero is an egoistic hero. That’s what our modern artists and writers and activistes and revolutionaries are all about: Ego Heroism. You solve the problems of the world in your creative manifesto or work of art or activist agenda and then demand the right to implement it, as activiste, or revolutionary, or expert, or Minister of the Department of Silly Walks, because the arc of history. And never mind the butcher's bill.

But whatabout yourself? Shouldn't the activiste heal himself before he heals the world? But that raises an agonizing problem: if the Egoistic Hero is not the answer, then what is?

The answer is as old as the hills and as new as yesterday: the Sacrificial Hero. We all know something about him because we all know about the iconic Sacrificial Hero, Jesus Christ, who died on the Roman cross, not to mention Moses who died before the Israelites reached the Promised Land. But the Sacrificial Hero is an archetype that shows up everywhere, and has been an especial interest of the followers of Carl Jung, including Joseph Campbell and recently Jordan B. Peterson. The whole idea of the Jungian archetype is that each archetype is encoded in our DNA, in our unconscious minds -- and has been, for aeons.

Earth to lefties: your activist, your Gramscian marcher through the institutions, your politician is not the Hero that will save the world. He is the monster, the dragon in the underworld, that sacrifices others to his fantastic dream of personal immortality.

The Hero’s Journey has been criticized: by academics that regard it as too general or too vague, by feminists that regard it as too masculine and privileged. But against them is George Lucas’s Star Wars phenomenon that was openly based on the Hero myth and struck a mystic chord that is still echoing. So the Hero myth clearly resonates with young men; Jungians might say that Star Wars activates certain archetypes in the male collective unconscious.

Perhaps the best place to start is to check off what the Hero is not. He is not the fanciful knight of the medieval romance, pace Wagner, the feudal princely raider dressed up as the servant of Christ. He is not the lefty activiste living the fantasy of revolution. He is not the leader of the nation, feted by battalions of flatterers or serviced by a 2,000 woman “Pleasure Squad.” He is not the ethnic leader warring against hate with an agenda of hate. He is not the peacocking journalist truckling to the powerful while imagining himself speaking truth to power.

And here is something else he, or she, is not, that I blogged about recently. He is not the expert that decides that a teenager is “psychosomatic” and should be taken away from her parents and confined in a hospital’s psychiatric unit. Nor is she the Harvard academic who believes that she ought to decide how other peoples’ children should be educated. This sort of thing is a plunge back into the past. This is what the Olympian gods were up to in The Iliad, deciding who would win and lose in each battle on the plains of Troy -- as the mood took them -- because they were gods. Surely, Mao, we are better than that.

The Hero is instead the mediator between Order and Chaos, and will probably die, a Sacrificial Hero, on that fateful border. But that is where the creative life must be lived, for life cannot long thrive in the arid safety and often the cruel hierarchy of Order and the experts. And life is unendurable as unmitigated Chaos.

So the Hero, privileged and masculine and Sacrificial, must descend from the safety of privilege and learn to navigate the dark realms of Chaos in a generalized and vaguely constructed archetypical journey into the underworld of the unconscious. For here be dragons.

But, what does the Hero's Journey mean, exactly?

Next: The Hero's Journey in Each of Us
Modern educated people are called on a creative life journey

Or back to Contents

The German Turn

The great question in every human life is the meaning of “life, the universe, and everything” -- for me. But this meaning has changed over the years and millennia, particularly in our own time. Many of us can’t accept the religion of our ancestors, and the religion of the Prophet Marx that they force-feed kids at our government schools and universities inspired the worst slave states in history. There seems to be a “glitch” in the Matrix. And yet still we yearn for meaning, for, as Roy Rappaport has written, “No society known to anthropology or history is devoid of what reasonable observers would agree is religion,” the attempt to find meaning in life.

I experienced my “glitch” in the Matrix decades ago when reading F.S.C. Northrop’s The Meeting of East and West. In Chapter V: German Idealism, he begins:

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature, which defined the foundations of traditional modern French and Anglo-American democratic culture, has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.

What did that mean, I wondered, a young man educated in the Newtonian mechanics of pre-relativity physics and perfectly content with the mechanical world view of the British empiricists? What was their problem? Well, I now understand, it means the German Turn: Kant and Hegel and Goethe and Schopenhauer and Marx and Wagner and Nietzsche and Freud and Jung and Heidegger and Marcuse and Habermas and their Anglo-Saxon adepts like Joseph Campbell and Jordan B. Peterson. They were all dealing with the fact that, for them, the “Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature” didn’t do the job of explaining the meaning of “life, the universe, and everything,” and they set out to do something about it.

OK, so what does that mean? For me, it means that after you have read all those Germans the problem of the meaning of “life, the universe, and everything” looks a lot different than the logic and reason and mechanical world of the Anglo-Saxons. And downstream from that, so is any religion, and culture, and politics that you might want to conjure up to solve that little problem of meaning.

And you appreciate, or at least I do, why there seems to be a bit of a cock-up these days on the religion, culture, and politics fronts, especially wherever lefties are involved.

And there is this: Downstream of religion, downstream of culture, there is the fact that nobody, but nobody, has yet come up with a politics that goes one better than the politics invented by our Founders 240 years ago. How come? But there have been a ton of people -- from Marx to Marcuse -- who have taken ideas from the German Turn and made a complete dog’s breakfast out of them: murderous religions, poisonous cultures, and dysfunctional politics.

What does that mean? That the German Turn was a wrong turn, or that Marx and Marcuse were wrong’uns? My faith is that the Marxes and the Marcuses were fools rather than wrong’uns, and made a very simple, and very foolish mistake: that the answer to the question of the meaning of life, the universe, and everything in the new world could be found in politics and political power, pretending you were some kind of an Earthly god. But for me, the German Turn is not about power, but everything else.

Indeed, I would say that the one thing to take from the German Turn is that politics and power are not the answer.

But what are the positive takeaways from the German Turn? It starts, at least, that with Kant we cannot know things-in-themselves, but only sense impressions conjured up into a theory of reality. It means, with the Romantics, that there is something that comes before logic and reason. It means, with Wagner, that there is a lot more in those ancient myths than mere superstition and something more in medieval romances than rescuing damsels in distress. It means, with Nietzsche, the Peck’s Bad Boy of philosophers, that any time a God is Dead the former believers cannot avoid a revaluation of all values, even though the journey leads through decadence and nihilism and will probably tip them into madness. It means, with Freud, that 90 percent of our mind is the unconscious mind, and that probably it is the unconscious mind that is directing our lives with its repressed mania and not the magisterial logical Ego of the conscious mind. It means, with Jung, that we’d better understand our unconscious and the archetypes with which it is programmed to interpret and interact with the world before we boldly head out to bend the arc of history towards justice. It means, with Horkheimer and Adorno, that “Enlightenment behaves towards things as a dictator towards men. He knows them in so far as he can manipulate them” and with Habermas that humans do not live in a mechanical world but in a “lifeworld,” Heidegger's being-there in a face-to-face culture of shared experience in the world.

All cool stuff, but does it matter? Well, here’s my take: you be the judge.

I’ve come to think, over the years, that Kant’s dictum about not knowing things-in-themselves is the most astonishing idea in human history. He was trying to synthesize the antithesis -- before Hegel! -- between Cartesian rationalism and Humean empiricism. 

In my view, Kant's dictum that we do not know things-in-themselves but only appearances gave physicists permission to break out of the certainty that we live in a world of matter and absolute space and time. It gave them permission to dare to suggest that space and time are relative. And his ideas also led to the mad, mad world of quantum mechanics where matter is no longer matter. Another thing: with the Uncertainty Principle we have a foundational reason to believe in Free Will, or at least unexpected accidents, again. I’d say that Kant matters.

But what does it all mean? The truth is that we still don’t have a clue: that is the point of saying that we cannot know things-in-themselves -- or, if you like, the man behind the curtain -- so we are reduced, we will always be reduced, to making it up as we always have, filling in the blanks with a Narrative. And that, I presume, is the meaning of Douglas Adams’ little joke about the meaning of “life, the universe, and everything.” Nietzsche is on to it in The Will to Power §853 with a characteristic insult:

Metaphysics, morality, religion, science -- in this book these things merit consideration only as various forms of lies: with their help we can have faith in life.

Nietzsche’s lie, his “faith in life,” his Narrative, is the free spirit, the Übermensch, with increasing vigor, will-to-power, exploding forth to overcome decadence, nihilism, and the Groundhog Day of eternal recurrence. Maybe that is a bridge too far; maybe humans can never become Übermenschen, since Nietzsche collapsed into insanity at age 46.

Maybe Nietzsche is giving us a clue, that he could not bear the weight of suffering in his life, and so retreated behind the cloud of insanity. For suffering seems to be front and center in human religion, ancient, modern and postmodern, in our human attempts to understand the meaning of life.

Next: The Question of Suffering
The question of meaning revolves around the differing analyses of suffering

Or back to Contents

The Sacrificial Hero Ancient and Modern

Recently I've been writing a long piece, that I submitted to the edgy conservative site American Mind, entitled "A Vision of the Good Life Better Than Leftism." Don't know if they'll publish it, but I've been thinking about what I wrote.

Because what I wrote about is trying to answer the question: what should educated scions of the educated Gentry aspire to? What should be the vision of the good life for an educated person?

My point is that the old culture of responsibility, of obeying the law, going to work, following the rules of God's divine law no longer resonates with the educated class.

The problem is that the highest and noblest vision of the good life for educated people, ever since Marx, has been to be an activist, nobly bending the arc of history towards justice for the oppressed and the marginalized. And I believe this is a monumental error.

Of course, I have developed a comprehensive and mandatory critique of the left, in my Great Reaction concept that experiences the left as a gigantic lurch back to the primitive. This has become understandable to me since I took a serious look at Jung through his adepts like Jordan B. Peterson. The point of Jung's "collective unconscious" and "archetypes" is to advance the notion that a lot of what we think and do and believe is imprinted in us through eons of evolution as "instincts" or "emotions," etc.

I use quotes because I am suggesting that we really don't have a clue what the so-called "collective unconscious" is. Nor yet an "archetype." Or "instincts" and "emotions." Obviously we have something that influences our actions, and that something is something other than our conscious mind. For instance, as I walked briskly up the hill on N 60th St this morning my breathing "automatically" became deeper and deeper as I struggled up the hill. I wasn't consciously doing that; but something was triggering it. Yes, Sherlock, just what was it?

So, when the educated elite decides that God is Dead, they embark upon a long and perilous journey, as Nietzsche argues, through decadence, nihilism, and the endless hell of the eternal recurrence. Until they find a new god to worship in the revaluation of all values. And that god is themselves.

But, obviously, there will be many mistakes and false turns and disasters on the Journey to a new faith and a new god. And I think that "activism" is one such false start.

My brilliant vision of the good life better than leftism is that the goal for an educated sprout should not be to become an activist, because activists are "Ego Heros." Activism is not really about saving the oppressed. It is about the educated activist feeling good about himself, massaging his Ego, making himself into a kind of Homeric god that orders the world around, not from Mr. Olympus but from Activist Central.

And I developed the notion that this notion of activism is an echo of the knight-errants of medieval romance. I first set this up a while back and now I am reading The Autumn of the Middle Ages by Johan Huizinga which deals with the whole question of the cult of the knight and the knight's love for his chosen loved-one whose scarf he carried on his knightly quest. Bologna and balderdash: that is what Huizinga says. The real knights of the Middle Ages were thugs, and life back then was nasty, brutish and short. There was no time for courtly love and damsels in distress, just the brutal game of political and military power. The medieval romances were fantasy, escape-from-reality. Nothing wrong with that: we all like our fantasy literature for breakfast.

But I am saying that the Activism Culture is a fantasy culture, and it probably does more harm than good, because the way to get on in the modern world is to become a responsible citizen that takes responsibility for looking after him and his, and does not expect some medieval lord or activist to do the heavy lifting.

As an example, today Christopher DeGroot this morning writes appreciatively about James Q. Wilson's 1990s proposal that "we" should put single black mothers in group homes if they get welfare, to get them out of the poisonous culture of the ghetto, in at attempt to deal with the poison of children growing up in a world where they "never see a married man working for a living at a legitimate job and supporting his family."

Yes, but. The problem begins with the fact that today we have abandoned the old rule that a woman needs a husband if she is going to be a mother and expect to raise her child to adulthood. The whole paraphernalia of chastity, of not having sex with a man unless he commits to raising his child, of marriage, of middle-class morality, of bourgeois respectability, of stigmatizing a woman having a child outside marriage as in Les Miserables, and so on is that if a woman does not ensure that her child has a father, and if society -- i.e., the neighborhood women -- turns a blind eye towards single parenthood, then you got trouble with a capital T. And group homes ain't gonna solve it.

But it sure feels good being an activist protesting against middle-class morality.

So what I came up with is the notion of the Sacrificial Hero. Yes, I know! Talk about reinventing the wheel, especially since the whole of Christianity amounts to a cult of Jesus Christ, the Sacrificial Hero!

But that is the point. The great truths are timeless, but they need to be reimagined in every age and for every culture, and for every level in the culture.

The question for our time is how the Sacrificial Hero can be experienced in our time and especially by the Gentry class of educated people that very often live and work in cloistered monasteries, like government bureaucracies, university faculties, and corporate headquarters.

This kind of person thinks themself a couple of cuts above an ordinary middle-class Commoner. You can tell this because of the genius of the political idiot Hillary Clinton who coined the notion of the "basket of deplorables" to signify ordinary middle-class Americans that aren't quite into the creative culture of the educated Übermenschen.

The point is that it in my lordly and reductive Three Peoples philosophy, it is perfectly understandable that ordinary middle-class people are not really into creative treatments of race, sex, and gender. People like that just follow the rules, without questioning them. And guess what: it is probably a good thing, because if everyone was determined to "question everything" well... Actually, our liberal friends are clear about that. They get to question everything, but not ordinary "deplorables." No siree.

So, if you follow my notion, you judge people that aspire to creativehood by whether they aspire to be an Ego Hero or submit to being a Sacrificial Hero.

Of course, the ancient form of the Sacrificial Hero that the gods sacrificed as a result of their power games on Mt. Olympus. That is how Sacrificial Hero works for the People of the Subordinate Self. But with Axial Age religions, God provides the Sacrificial Hero in the person of the Son of God, and all humans have to do is venerate God's example and try to live like Jesus.

But for the People of the Creative Self it is each one of them that must try out for the Sacrificial Hero. And so, for those that choose it, the Sacrificial Hero's Journey is incredibly hard and challenging. No wonder most of them choose the easy way out, as Ego Heroes.

I think that the two most obvious Sacrificial Heroes out there right now are Donald Trump and LTG Michael Flynn. The Deep State is throwing everything it can against these two men, and they are baring their chests and taking the incoming rounds. And for what?

Yeah, I know. To a great extent they had no choice. Not for them the convenient leak in the media, the helpful unmasking, the special prosecutor to cover their tracks. They must travel their own via dolorosa and try to keep faith that it will all come right in the end.

And if it doesn't come right in the end, at least they died honorably.

Yeah, it's pretty ridiculous: Donald Trump the blowhard publicity hound becoming a Sacrificial Hero. Who woulda thunk it? But the truth is that Donald Trump has accepted his destiny with unimaginable courage and seems to get up every day determined to do the best he can.

And if Donald Trump wins the November election he is still not out of the woods, because he will be dealing with the aftermath of the shutdown with its gigantic increase in federal debt, and then the inflation that will follow the monetization of a lot of the debt, and the recession that will come as a result of having to fight inflation.

I doubt if Donald Trump will leave office as a glorious hero. I expect that he will leave as the scapegoat for all our troubles, a sacrifice to our national dignity.

Or some sort of Sacrificial Hero.

The Creatives Attack Dignity. Of Course They Do

I often find something useful to react to at the Zman, and today is another such day. For he is writing about "The Loss of Dignity." He is singing my reductive Three Peoples song, only in another key.

How come we have lost the valuing of dignity in cultural and political life?

In the Demon In Democracy, Polish academic Ryszard Legutko observed that liberal democracy had abandoned the concept of dignity. This is the obligation to behave in a certain way, as determined by your position in society. Dignity was earned by acting in accordance with the high standards of the community. In turn, this behavior was rewarded with greater privilege and responsibility. Failure to live up to one’s duties would result in the loss of dignity, along with the status it conferred.

Well yes. That, in my Three Peoples terms, would mean that Responsible behavior would earn a person Dignity points, thereby confirming people in their decision to become and remain one of the People of the Responsible Self.

Instead, modern liberal democracy awards dignity by default. We are supposed to respect all choices and all behaviors as being equal. There are no standards against which to measure human behavior, other than the standard of absolute, unconditional acceptance. As a result, the most inventively degenerate and base activities spring from the culture, almost like a test of the community’s tolerance. Instead of looking up to the heavens for inspiration, liberal democracies look down in the gutter.

Well, yes. Do you see what is going on here? If you are a Creative, and your world view constitutes advancing your right to be creative, and cuddling your Little Darlings in the Subordinate classes, then it makes complete sense to devalue dignity, to award the dignity that the Responsibles strive for by default to all the Creatives messing about being "inventively degenerative" and the Subordinates that are just degenerate. Really, it's brilliant.

And yet, there is obviously something wrong with it. What is it? Why do we get to the point in "liberal democracy" where our masters go about "elevating the profane and vulgar, while pulling down the noble and honorable?" Zman notes that Legutko blames the Protestant reformation. But what is the problem, really?

Maybe we are just not built for anything but scarcity. Want gives us purpose and without it, we lose our reason to exist. Either way, without dignity, we cannot defend ourselves and the results are inevitable.

Well, I would say that this is not so hard. It falls naturally out of the structure of my Three Peoples theory, and the wrong turn that many Creatives have taken.

As a result of reading and deep thought and lucky inspiration that comes to me in the dead of night, I can say that the People of the Creative Self have two paths before them. Both paths are versions of the Hero's journey. Path One is the path of the Egoist Hero: it's all about me and my creative life. Path Two is the path of the Sacrificial Hero. He returns from his Hero's journey sadder and wiser. And he demonstrates his creativity and his heroism by exploring the border between Order and Chaos, trying to understand the borderlands of Chaos so that others may benefit from his trials and his hard-won knowledge.

I am afraid that the dominant part of our modern People of the Creative Self opt for the path of the Egoist Hero. And naturally whatever the Egoist Hero does must be right, because he is being creative. That's at the cultural level. At the political level he needs to maintain the political dominance, the hegemony of the People of the Creative Self, and ever since the brilliant Marx this has involved a political coalition between the People of the Creative Self and the People of the Subordinate Self against the People of the Responsible Self.

What would be the most obvious way to keep your Creative Dominance? Simple. You strip the People of the Responsible Self of their Dignity. You say that the Clients of the Gentry should be accorded just as much dignity as the deplorables in the middle class. Not to mention all the creative types in the yeasty woke neighborhoods of our major cities with their non-binary genders and the like.

You have to appreciate the genius of this. The very thing that Responsibles live by is the dignity of obeying the law, going to work, and following the rules. Our educated Gentry is telling us that this means nothing, nay, worse than nothing: deplorable.

Note that this pejorative attack on the Responsibles and calling them names is merely a power play -- what playground bullies have done since the dawn of playgrounds. It is just the natural thing to do if you want to dominate the culture and the politics and keep the Responsibles down so you and your Gentry pals can enjoy your appetite for "ambition, honor, and vanity."

In Maps of Meaning Jordan B. Peterson calls the Egoist Hero by his old name, the Devil,

the spirit who eternally states, "all I know is all that there is to be known"; the spirit who falls in love with his own beautiful productions and, in consequence, can no longer see beyond them. The devil is the desire to be right, above all, to be right once and for all and finally, rather than to constantly admit to insufficiency and ignorance, and to therefore partake in the process of creation itself.

The Egoist Hero rather than the Sacrificial Hero.

So, the way that Responsibles must act to regain their dignity is to have the courage to stand forth and take a stand against leftist conformity, to risk being canceled by the Cancel Culture. As Dave Rubin says, "if everyone started speaking up more—they can’t take us all out."

And I think what we would learn is that the cancel culture mob really is a paper tiger. It gets its power from our acquiescence. From our fear and silence. So I want more people to stand up... Because they use the mob, and they use cancel culture, and they use fear, so that good people won’t say what they think. 

When you think about it, all this is a good thing. Responsibles need to stand up and assert our dignity, and that means taking a risk. You don't earn dignity points just be existing; you earn them by action that deserves to be dignified. Our lefty friends have basically challenged up to stand up for what we believe in.

Why don't we take them up on the challenge? 

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.

Jordan B. Peterson -- Contents

Consequences of Jordan B. Peterson

1. Dr. Jordan Peterson is ready to go to jail for free speech

2. "Skeptical Neutrality" and "Courageous Trust"

3. The Real Reason Columbus is a Scandal

4. What Do #MeToo Want?

5. Real Critical Theory: How About a Critique of Leftism

6. Suppose It's the Democrats That are Behind the 8-Ball

7. The Great Reaction Also Includes Neo-sacrifice

8. Can Men and Women Recover Their Lives from Leftism?

9. Maps of Meaning: The Why and Who of Jordan B. Peterson

10. The Cure for Administrative-State-itis

11. Reds Under the Bed. Again.

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

13. The Grand Narrative of the Postmodernists

14. 350 Million Years of Hierarchy: Get Used to It

15. Humans Demand Good vs. Evil

16. Down in the Swamp with the Brennans and the McCabes

17. In Media Res: Peterson and Stark

18. Ancient Myth and My Three Peoples Theory

19. Omnibus Bills and Us

20. Myth and Religion in an Age of Science

21. Women, Kevin, Can Be As Mean As Pepper

22. Sure We Fight, But Then What?

23. The Three Forms of Social Control

24. Is This Peak Activism?

25. But First, Humans are Tribal

26. The Alt-right Takes Out After Jordan Peterson

27. Jordan B. Peterson's "Maps of Meaning:" It's a Start

28. Jonah's "Suicide:" The Bigger Problem

29. Peterson and Jung and Nietzsche, Oh My!

30. The Wages of Women in Leadership

31. Dealing with Activism's Affect of the Week

32. At Jordan Peterson's Road Show

33. Reality Hits the 19th Century White Ethnics

34. Women and Agency

35. The Two Paths: for Rich Kids After the Death of God

36. Values not Facts Make the World Go Round

37. The Three Peoples and Power

38. Yes, There is Objective Truth, But We Don't Know It

39. Why I Think Jordan Peterson is Important

40. The Poverty of Power

41. Let Us Imagine a New Culture

42. Now the Psychologists Come Out Against Traditional Masculinity

43. To What Do The Three Peoples Subordinate Themselves?

44. The Left's Religion of Political Power

45. Three Peoples: There is No One True Faith

46. We Must Bring the Past Back to Life

47. Leftism: First the Fear, Then the Hate

48. Where Do We Go From Here?

49. It's Too Soon for a "Dissident Right"

50. Liberals Legislating Liberal Morality

51. Yes, Secularists Do Too Have Religion

52. Lefties: Getting the Hero's Journey Upside Down

53. When the Other Shoe Drops

54. The New York Times' Problem

55. Our Ruling Class Does Too Have a Religion. And How.

56. Lenin's Philosophy of Force

57. Conservatism: What Comes Next

58. The Problem with the Notion that Power is Everything

59. Nietzsche on Knowledge and Reality

60. Canceling People for Racist Tweets

61. Three Peoples: What Happens When It All Goes Wrong?

62. When Will the Dems Cry Uncle? Not Yet.

63. The German Turn: How Germans Invented the Modern World

64. What Next in the Battle of the Sexes?

65. What is Best in Life for Children of the Privileged?

66. Looking at the Good Side of My Culture-of-Insult/Culture-of-Complaint Notion

67. Pelosi's Far-Left Bill: The Bigger Problem

68. What Path Should We Follow?

69. The Creatives Attack Dignity. Of Course They Do

70. The Sacrificial Hero Ancient and Modern

71. The German Turn

72. Three Religions for Three Peoples

73. Gorsuch Decision Means Back to the Drawing Board

74. What is the Good Life Better than the Left -- for Women?

75. What I Believe

76. Message to Lefties: The Age of Politics is Over

77. The Terminal Bossiness of the Educated Gentry

78. The Three Peoples and Revolution

79. Rebuilding "The Meaning of Life" with 26-year-olds

80. Now Penguins are Getting Triggered