Sorry, Socialism Had Its Try, Ms. Bruenig

In theWashington Post on March 6, WaPo opinion writer Elizabeth Bruenig wrote "It's time to give socialism a try." She is concerned that capitalism does not always turn out right, that it is not true that "if we only have the right attitude, everything will set itself aright."

So I am writing her a personal letter, via snail mail, in the hope that this unusual method of communication will actually get through to her.

Dear Ms. Bruenig:

I was disturbed by your recent article that "it's time to give socialism a try," and so I am writing to try to convince you to change your mind.

In the first place, I think that in 2018 it is up to the advocates of socialism to show, with irrefutable science and logic, that it is a good idea to get off the capitalist train and trying something else.

I recommend to you Deirdre McCloskey, a transgender economist, whose "Bourgeois Era" books are a celebration of the culture that gave us the market economy. Her main argument is this. The last 200 years represents a Great Enrichment in which any country that allowed capitalism has increased real per-capita income from about $1-3 per day in 1800 to over $100 per day in 2018. That is a 3,000 percent increase in 200 years, or 30 times. As McCloskey writes, there has never been anything like it, ever.

Inspired by McCloskey, I have put up "Great Enrichment" pages on my government spending websites, and I enclose copies of the charts of real per-capita income over time. Your challenge is to produce the science that can prove that democratic socialism can do any better.

I wonder why you propose the "decommodification of labor." Marx proposed this notion in the period just before the apparent contradiction of "use value" and "exchange value" had been exploded by the marginal revolution of 1870. Really, wage labor (or salary labor for you and me) is rather liberating. It lets you know how much other humans value your contribution to society, and it detaches you somewhat from the risks faced by the businessman that has hired you.

Sincerely, etc.

Well that's all I wrote to Elizabeth Bruenig. But here are the charts:

First US Great Enrichment.

The interesting thing to me is that it doesn't really show much response from the changes in government policy. It seems like a S-curve with a slow acceleration in the 19th century and a slow deceleration since 2000.

Hey. only one big glitch, in the Great Depression. Even the Great Recession wasn't so bad.

Now look at China. I only have a couple of data points before 1960.

Yes. Oy. China started the same as the US in 1800, at $4 per person per day. It was down below $3 per day by 1900. The reason the chart plunges below the x-axis is that per-capita income in China was below $1 per day for perhaps 40 years. It was $0.53 when the St. Louis Fed data starts in 1960, and went down to $0.36 by 1962. That was what the Chinese got from half a century of revolution, civil war, socialism, Great Leap Forward, and Cultural Revolution. God save us from the experience of China. $0.36.

I only wanted to write a one-page letter to Elizabeth Bruenig, but of course there is a whole world of reasons why democratic socialism is a bad idea.

First, there are the "classical liberal" writers have assembled a devastating critique of socialism in all its forms.

• Economic calculation argument. In 1918 Ludwig von Mises argued that socialism could not work because it could not compute prices.
• Bureaucrat vs. producer/consumer argument. After World War II, F.A. Hayek argued that it was impossible for a few thousand bureaucrats in the administrative state to outperform the millions of producers and consumers in the market economy.
• Regulatory capture argument. George Stigler argued that whenever government regulates an industry, the regulators end up being "captured" by the industry.

My own contribution is what I call the "government can't cut" argument. It is that governments find it almost impossible to cut spending programs, even when they are looking right into the face of disaster. Think Germany after World War I. Think Greece during its Euro crisis. Think Venezuela right now. The reason that governments, even authoritarian governments, can't cut is that they are afraid to. They know that the beneficiaries of any program they might try to cut will want to have their guts for garters, and may very well succeed. Indeed, any legislative reform, like Obamacare, can't get passed unless it bribes the opponents to silence their opposition. So once a government starts a program it finds it almost impossible to reform it or cut it. And as for actually ending it, well, good like with that. It is perfectly understood by my catchphrase that government is an armed minority occupying territory and taxing the inhabitants to reward its supporters. Yeah. Those supporters. They are mean and nasty.

Really, Ben Rhodes is the go-to guy on this. He was the Obama media guy that said that:

The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.

Only someone that "literally knows nothing" would write a piece suggesting that we give socialism a try. 

The Grand Narrative of the Postmodernists

The grand narrative of the post-modernists is that they don't believe in grand narratives. I was reminded of this as I watched a Jordan B. Peterson speech on YouTube titled "Identity Politics and the Lie of White Privilege."

Peterson correctly told his audience that the post-modernists sail under the flag of "no grand narratives." He provided a slide with a definition of post-modernism (at 32:01):

Postmodernism: an attitude of skepticism: irony toward/rejection of grand narratives, ideologies and universalism, including objective notions of reason, human nature, social progress, absolute truth, and objective reality.

Then he lays out the findings of the post-modernists (at 44:30):

• The Enlightenment's objective of an objective and reasoned basis for knowledge, merit, truth, justice, and the like is an impossibility...
• The Enlightenment itself merely replaced one socially constructed view of reality with another, mistaking power for knowledge
• There is naught but power

Hey post-modernist kids! I call that a grand narrative! To say that that the Enlightenment's grand narrative is wrong is the first step to a new grand narrative. And then to say there is naught but power is to construct a new grand narratives on the ruins of the old grand narrative. Then the post-modernists unveil their program, which is to fight power, such as patriarchy and white privilege, with power. Hey kids! That's a grand narrative to beat all grand narratives!

So here is my grand narrative.

• The post-modernists' notion of a world without grand narratives is an impossibility. Of course, there is no such thing as objective knowledge, but there is knowledge, usually understood by humankind in the form of grand narratives, that is really useful for wiving and thriving in the world.
• The post-modernists have merely replaced one socially constructed view of reality with another, completely missing the point that traditional concept of "power" in our modern age is in radical decline.
• Not power but competence.

OK, I got the "competence" bit from Peterson.

Peterson makes a very powerful point. He says that hierarchy in this world is about 350 million years old, and the point of hierarchy is to reduce the need for power. In other words, any social animals in a group need to arrange themselves in a hierarchy so they are not constantly fighting among themselves. When the post-modernists rail against hierarchy and power they are missing the point.

Hey kids. Do you realize that anyone who wants to fight hierarchy is actually saying that they want a world with more conflicts over power?

But the post-modernists miss an even bigger point, and that is that the modern world since the industrial revolution has needed much less power. That's because in the old days the only thing that mattered was to defend your food-growing territory from others. For that you needed power. But today territory is nothing; the whole world is a market and you can buy anything, anywhere, for a price.

Today, real power is the power of knowledge, what the World Bank calls "intangible capital," the knowledge inside men's minds that manifests itself encoded in everything from smart-phones to LED lights. It is the power, the Great Enrichment, that has raised per-capita real income from $1-3 per day in 1800 to over $100 per day right now.

What does political power, what does ideological power, what does territorial power mean when you can buy a smart-phone for $100 and access all the knowledge in the world?

Now, our post-modernist friends have got one thing right. It is perfectly true that there is no such thing as objective knowledge. The warrant for knowledge is not that it comes from God or that it is self-evident, or that it is objective. The modern revolution in knowledge that starts, if you like, with Descartes, and certainly with Kant, is that we don't know what the really real is. Instead, we have knowledge that works. Special relativity must be valid knowledge because we use it in GPS technology. Quantum mechanics must be valid knowledge because we assume it is true when we make LED lights.

One fine day, I dare say, relativity and quantum mechanics will be superseded by new and deeper knowledge about the structure of the universe. But meanwhile both theories are highly serviceable. Notice that relativity and quantum mechanics reveal themselves to the world through the competencies of physicists and engineers and the folks that make stuff. Without that competence they would be merely airy-fairy theories about how many quanta fit on the head of a pin that people would argue about in coffee houses.

There is another form of knowledge that has transformed the world. It is the market and its prices. At its basic level it solves the problem of getting access to physical resources. Time was that the only way you could get access to resources was by invading another guy's territory and taking it. But with the price system you can say: wow, our tribe really needs more grain. How about we buy some from you? And the answer is: oh yeah? How much are you willing to pay, pal?

But hey, getting access to physical resources is just the beginning.

The point is that the modern world, by dethroning the "power" of hierarchy as the be-all and end-all of everything, has unleashed the unimaginable power of competence, of knowing how to make things and do things and distributing those things all across the world.

The interesting question now is: what is their problem? How can these post-modernists not see what is right in front of their eyes, that "power" in our modern era has been utterly transformed, and that the guys with a real raging "grand narrative" fever are the folks that imagine they have conquered "grand narratives."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

However, there is a problem. We rich westerners,

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

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

Our NYPost BPD sufferer explains the things she struggles with.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reds Under the Bed. Again.

The current liberal campaign on Russian Collusion would be all fun and frolic, if it weren't for this.

Back in the day, liberals were absolutely enraged by Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) and his accusations about Communists in the State Department. Thus "McCarthyism" is to this day almost as important a liberal pejorative as "racism."

Only, of course, there really were Communists in the State Department. Hello Harry Dexter White and Alger Hiss.

Now we have liberals from coast to coast fainting in the aisles over the issue of Russian Collusion in the late presidential election.

Earth to liberals: of course there was Russian Collusion in the election. That's what Russians do, starting back back in the good old days of the early Bolshevik Revolution. Mainly, of course, the Russians want to sow conflict and distrust in the fields of American politics, so that the US will be less of a global hegemon. I guess they know what they are doing.

Also, any presidential campaign worth its salt is going to have contacts with foreign powers. Moreover, any businessman like Trump with international interests is going to have foreign contacts, and some of them are likely to be unsavory, because the borderland between government and business is not for the neophyte. After all, government is an agent that gets its money by intimidation and force, kinda like the Mob. You need to be really careful dealing with outfits like that; you need to have intermediaries and deniability.

Anyway, there is nothing that has come up thus far that indicates Russian Collusion in the Trump campaign.

But, of course, there is ample evidence of Russian Collusion in the Clinton campaign. The whole point of the Steele Dossier is that Christopher Steele got his information from Russian contacts, and that the whole Steele Dossier was a operation funded by the Democratic Party and/or the Democratic National Committee.

Wow. Think of that. Dirt on Trump obtained from nameless Russian officials. Imagine! No Collusion there, no sir, not no how.

What is stunning to me in this whole Russian Collusion storm and its corollary, the suborning of the Department of Justice and the FBI to spy on the Trump campaign, is that Democratic partisans -- including the Democratic partisans in the media -- cannot see what is in plain sight.

Hello liberals! The Obama administration was spying on the Trump campaign, using the FBI's counterintelligence apparatus to do it.

Hello liberals! When the government spies on the campaign of the opposing party, it is really bad news.

Hello liberals! Remember Watergate? That issued from a burglary of the Democratic National Committee by a bunch of campaign operatives. But at least they were campaign operatives and not actual government employees. When the Nixon people tried to suborn the FBI and the CIA to cover up their misdeeds the FBI and the CIA refused.

Hello liberals! Do you not see the problem? In 1972 the intelligence community refused to assist the Nixon administration in spying on the opposition. Everyone agreed it was the worst thing since sliced bread. In 2016 the FBI was perfectly willing to assist the party in power with spying on the party out of power. Yet today there seems not to be a liberal in the land that is willing to agree that this is really a problem.

I am reading Jordan B. Peterson's Maps of Meaning right now and he is in the middle of explaining the basic human response, that of reacting when you bump into something unexpected. His line is that we run along in our accustomed paths, not paying much attention, just living our lives, until something unexpected happens. But when something unexpected happens then we have to stop our life and reassess the situation. Is the situation nothing in particular, such as bumping into a chair in the hallway, or it is serious, such as: the elevator is out of commission and the door to the stairway is locked and there is no way out of the building?

Right now it seems that my liberal friends have not even realized that something unexpected has happened, let alone that we are facing perhaps the biggest government scandal of our lifetimes.

The point that Jordan B. Peterson is making is that the whole of life really hangs on making a good decision, a good adaption, when something in your life goes wrong, whether it is the trivial business of bumping into a chair in the hallway or the deadly serious experience of losing your job because you have completely misread your role and your relationship with your fellow workers.

The lesson of Trump, and Brexit, and now the Italian election is that something has changed. But the ruling class all over the world is still doing its thing of identity politics and the administrative state as though nothing had changed.

It would be really, really nice if you ruling class chaps and you dutiful liberals raised your eyes from the vital task of hunting down hate speech and look up to see that something is seriously going wrong with your glorious administrative state dynasty.

Because if you don't then I am afraid that things are going to get really mean and nasty.

Dear China: Are You Sure You Want an Emperor?

I don't pay too much attention to China, but, you might say, I find that sometimes China is paying attention to me. First, we had China announcing its "One Belt One Road" initiative. This initiative aims to upgrade infrastructure linking China to its neighbors, particularly to the west.

Then there is President Xi Jinping deciding to make himself president-for-life.

This seems to mean that China is returning to its pre-Mao traditions. Used to be that China had an Emperor, or Son of Heaven, that ruled until he died. And his heir ruled until the dynasty was removed at the start of a Time of Troubles. And it used to be that China operated as a kind of spider in the middle of a tributary web, maintaining its integrity with tributary neighboring states that acknowledged Chinese supremacy in return for a quiet life.

I suppose that, after the turmoil of the last two centuries, it is natural for China to return to its roots, but I wonder if it is really such a good idea.

Here's what I think.

I think that a government-centered infrastructure push like the One Belt One Road initiative is likely to be an incredibly wasteful and corrupt operation rather like the West's policy of foreign aid to Africa. It won't help the target countries, but it will solidify the power of the local tin-horn dictators as US cold war policy managed to do.

And I don't think that China needs a president-for-life. I don't think anyone needs a president-for-life. Imagine if Barack Obama had become president-for-life. That would have meant that all of his foolish and unjust notions of "fundamental transformation" would have stayed in place. It would have meant that the campus rape panic would have been intensified, the snowflake campus culture would have ended in an Ice Age, the Obamacare nationalization of healthcare would have intensified, net-neutrality would have intensified, and the slow economic growth consequent on the politicizing of everything would have continued. And above all, the natural intensification of injustice resulting from any clique remaining in political power would have continued.

Look, I'm not a particular fan of democracy. I think the voters are idiots, and I believe the politicians are worse. But with regular elections you get periodic change elections where the voters throw out the current rascals and replace them with new rascals. Also, you get the chance for the people to tell its ruling class that it is really screwing up, as with Trump and Brexit and the populist surge in Europe.

The regular changing of the guard weakens the corruption and injustice of the incumbent party and provides an interregnum where the new government undoes some of the previous injustices before proceeding inevitably to create new injustices. China has had the same gang in power for the last 70 years, and it has got to be hurting.

Now I don't know if alternation in power using the model of western-style democracy would work in China. I respect the Chinese people and their ability to figure out what would work. I just believe in the concept that you need to alternate political power between contending parties. If you don't there is no way for the people to register their grievances and petition for redress short of open rebellion and revolution, and who needs that?

Now there is one interesting aspect of the One Belt One Road initiative that you may not have thought of. It comes from Jesus in Beijing, a report on Christianity in China by David Aikman. One of his key themes in the belief of Chinese Christians in the Return to Jerusalem.

In the Chinese Christian narrative, Christianity has migrated westward across the world, from the Levant to Europe and then to the Americas, and thence to East Asia. Chinese Christians believe it is their destiny to complete the westward march of Christianity with a return to Jerusalem. Hmm. Now what would that mean to all the Islamic -stans that presently exist between China and Jerusalem? Is the real meaning of the One Belt One Road the Christianizing of the Muslim belt by the westward venturing Chinese?

You may very well think that. I couldn't possibly comment.

The Cure for Administrative-State-itis

While our more emotional friends are wailing about "assault rifles" and "bump stocks" it is pretty clear that the problem with America is the ruling class and its bureaucracy.

What is it about school shooters? Well, they are almost all fatherless, thanks to the sexual revolution and the welfare state that enables fatherlessness.

Why wasn't the Parkland school shooter restrained? Well, one main reason is the Broward County policy of not arresting school children that commit crimes, because racism.

Why didn't the Broward County deputies enter the Parkland school? Well, because in this post-Ferguson world the way for a policeman to stay out of trouble is not to engage the perp.

Let us make the problem bigger.

What in the world were the bureaucrats at the DOJ and the FBI doing in getting the FISA court to enable spying on the Trump campaign? Well, most likely the ambitious folks in those bureaucracies saw advancement in helping the Next President of the United States, Hillary Clinton, and turning a blind eye to her monstrous Clinton Corruption.

OK, here's an even bigger question.

Why in the world are we still doing this bureaucratic administrative state thing when the science clearly shows that bureaucracy is a mess?

Science #1: Socialism cannot work because it cannot compute prices.
Science #2: A thousand bureaucrats in Washington DC cannot outperform millions of consumers and producers.
Science #3: Any regulatory scheme fails because of regulatory capture.

So why do we continue with the administrative state? Is it just that the sons and daughters of the educated professional class get lots of jobs in it? Is it that we the people are really quite content to be ordered around by politicians and bureaucrats, because it makes our lives less stressful? Is it just that the ruling class has fooled us, cunningly undermining our authentic social institutions, from churches to fraternal organizations to rights organizations while we weren't looking, and replacing them with a bureaucratic, administrative hierarchy that is responsible only to the ruling class? Or is it just the stupidity of the ruling class that, having invested itself in the administrative state model a century ago, has now found itself unable to admit its error and help us transition to a more effective and more just model?

Of course, my preferred understanding is that the ruling class are idiots, they don't really know what they are doing, they have opted for the administrative state model because they don't know any better, and because the administrative state model gives them the illusion of control. And, of course, once you have set up a bureaucratic system it becomes almost impossible to reform or update it because the folks in the system will raise holy hell against anyone that tries to change it. And thus the ruling class, like any ageing dynasty, is just lurching from crisis to crisis and ruling in total reactive mode.

Or let us listen to my interpretation of Jordan B. Peterson to understand the position of our ruling class and its instrument, the administrative state.

Our current "story" is the domain of the known and the predictable. But what happens if something unexpected happens, or what happens if things aren't turning out the way we expected? Well, the normal thing to do is to cling to what we understand anyway. But that might lead to disaster. However, if we try to interpret the unexpected and make a radical change that might lead to disaster too.

The two disaster scenarios are the only thing that politics understands. The one is to keep with the current narrative and pretend that nothing is wrong, as the ancien régime did in France in the 18th century. The other is reckless revolution, as per lefty activists. Thus politics.

In the real world, that we see in the market economy, actors are endlessly making adjustments to their understanding of the world and to their actions. Some actors do nothing; other actors try to completely change. But in the middle there are actors that, by luck or by cunning, understand the tenor of the times, develop a understanding of the situation that turns out to be confirmed by events, act upon their understanding, and get it right. And so the ship of state manages to continue on its way.

We humans desperately want to avoid a sudden irruption of the unknown and its chaos. So we "will go to almost any length to ensure that [our] protective cultural 'stories' remain intact." The nature of politics and the actions of ruling classes is to act to prevent almost all adjustments to our cultural "stories" until it is too late. This is what we are seeing in Venezuela, where the socialist government cannot admit that its Bolivarian narrative is horribly, disastrously wrong. That is what we see in the United States where the ruling class and its supporters cannot bear to admit that their whole plan is tearing the country apart, and cannot afford to inconvenience their supporters with genuine reform. Reform the sexual revolution? Roll back single-parenthood? Get the cops out on the beat harassing gang-bangers? Actually tell the Clintons to clean up their act? You must be kidding!

But there is another way.

But when you limit the power of government and the administrative state, then you allow the knowledge of actors outside the charmed circle of ruling class notables and their bribed apologists to evaluate the situation and then propose and start to implement a whole range of solutions -- for which each will pay if they are wrong and for which they and society as a whole will benefit if they are right.

Imagine that.

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

I finally got my copy of Jordan B. Peterson's Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief and I've finished the Preface. So now I am completely qualified to start writing about it!

Actually, the Preface is disarmingly frank and appealing. Simply, Peterson tells us why he has written the book.

First, after being brought up by a church-going mom, he broke with Christianity during his confirmation process. Then he became a lefty and an activist and became a student representative on the board of his local community college.

Then he has a crisis of faith, because while he disagreed with all the local notables on the board, he "could not but help admire them, even though [he] did not share their political stance." However, he could not say the same of the low-level lefty activists he interacted with in leftist politics.

They seemed to live to complain. They had no career, frequently, no family, no completed education -- nothing but ideology. They were peevish, irritable, and little, in every sense of the word.

How to deal with the contradiction: disagreeing with the worthy notables on the college board while agreeing with the moral midgets in lefty politics?

Then something curious happened. He discovered a critical voice in his head that would say "you don't believe that" when he was spouting off on something. This was confusing and embarrassing and would cause him to stop in the middle of a sentence. He realized that he could not go on repeating other peoples' ideas from books, not unless he could actually believe them to be true.

Peterson found that Jung's idea of the persona explained this, that we each put on a mask to present to society as a compromise between the real "me" and what society expects.

Then Peterson started having terrible dreams, two or three times a week. He read Freud's Interpretation of Dreams and then remembered that Jung had done a lot of work at the intersection of dreams and myth, and he read this from Jung:

It must be admitted that the archetypal contents of the collective unconscious can often assume grotesque and horrible forms in dreams and fantasies, so that even the most hard-boiled rationalist is not immune from shattering nightmares and haunting fears.

It is telling that Jung himself went through a long period of terrible dreams after his break with Freud.

Peterson's study of "comparative mythological material" made his terrible dreams disappear. But it also transformed what he believed about the world. He used to believe in the modern disenchanted world, but now believed that "beliefs make the world," that "beliefs are the world."

So let us set forth his manifesto at the end of the Preface, which, I think, brilliantly captures our current human dilemma -- and opportunity.

The world can be validly construed as a forum for action, as well as a place of things. We describe the world as a place of things, using the formal methods of science. The techniques of narrative, however -- myth, literature and drama -- portray the world as a forum for action. The two forms of representation have been unnecessarily set at odds, because we have not yet formed  a picture of their respective domains. The domain of the former [i.e., science] is the objective world -- what is, from the perspective of intersubjective perception. The domain of the latter [i.e., myth] is the world of value -- what is and what should be, from the perspective of emotion and action.

Now the point is that, until the rise of science in the last millennium we humans had only the perspective of the world as a "forum for action" and the myths and narratives and dramas that try to make sense of it all. Many modern people now think that the world as a place of things, of reason and science, completely negates the old world of myth and meaning. But the flagrant failure of communism and fascism in the last century, not  to mention the unsatisfactory experience of the market system as a mechanical process, put the lie to this.

We cannot do without narrative and meaning. Science and the knowledge of objects may be very useful, but they do not tell us what life means and what we ought to do about it. The meaning of life, the universe and everything is what we should do about ourselves and the rest of the world, and what it all means, not what we know about things.

Peterson argues that we need to balance our old knowledge of narrative and meaning with our new knowledge of places and things, and that is the way to understand and to live in the world. He dramatizes this balance with the notion of a baby girl reaching up to touch "a fragile and expensive glass sculpture... Suddenly her mother interferes... tells to not to ever touch that object."

But why? What is so special about that object to mother? What does it mean? That is exactly the point, according to Peterson. "Everything is something, and means something --  and the distinction between essence and significance is not necessarily drawn."

Indeed even today the distinction between thingness and meaning is very often not drawn; it is just stated and woe betide the fool that dares to challenge the generally accepted narrative about meaning. And this is not necessarily a fault. Life must go on, using what knowledge we have, and we cannot often afford the luxury of working out all angles of a particular issue before acting, any more than a mother can spend half an hour explaining what makes a sculpture is so special and meaningful that little Suzy may not touch it, ever.

One point. I don't think I agree that communism and fascism are merely applications of thingness to the human condition. I think they are attempts, after the demolition of meaning, to rebuild the cathedral of meaning in too much of a hurry. The world that Peterson proposes, working out the boundaries of thingness and meaning, is a gigantic project, a reformulation of everything we humans have been and hope to be.

Figuring it all out ain't gonna be easy. It is going to take a while to figure out. But, what a wonderful moment to be alive!