God the Father
Order, the known, appears symbolically associated with masculinity …
This is perhaps because the primary hierarchical structure of human society is masculine, as it is among most animals …
It is because men are, and throughout history have been,Order is:
- the builders of towns and cities,
- the engineers, stonemasons, bricklayers, and lumberjacks,
- the operators of heavy machinery.
Chaos, the eternal feminine, is … the crushing force of sexual selection.
- God the Father, the eternal Judge, ledger-keeper and dispenser of rewards and punishments. …
- the peacetime army of policemen and soldiers. …
— Jordan Peterson (1962), 12 Rules for Life, 2018.
Fascists did not value masculinity per se – only that of some male members of the dominant race.
Socialists and communists (despite their own macho inclinations) were seen as the fomenters of ‘feminine’ indiscipline – while the fascist revolution was characterized by manly order.
The Nazis saw the Jews and Poles as ‘feminine’ races, achieving their goals through devious plots rather than masculine openness.
— Kevin Passmore (1962), Fascism: A Very Short Introduction, 2002.
[The] Western subjugation of the female is … a function of biblical thinking.
— Joseph Campbell (1904 – 87), Love and the Goddess, The Power of Myth, Episode 5, 1988.
[Even] the most thoughtful and fair-minded of [men] fall back on conservative assumptions about the inevitability of present:calling on precedent or sociobiology and psychobiology to demonstrate that male domination is natural and follows inevitably from evolutionary pressures.
- gender relations, and
- distributions of power,
— Peggy McIntosh (1934), White Privilege and Male Privilege, 1988.
Biology is Destiny
Maybe it is more important to strengthen our characters than to repair the world.
So much of that reparation … is selfishness and intellectual pride masquerading as love, creating a world polluted with good works that don’t work. …
This idea — granted me by the grace of God — allowed me to believe that I could find what I most wanted …
All cultures … have, within their mythological history, certain constant features … just as all languages share grammatical structure …
- The lines among which culture develops are determined biologically, and
- the rules which govern that development are the consequence of the psychological expression of neurophysiological structures. …
Mythological renditions of history, like those in the Bible, are just as "true" as the standard Western empirical renditions, just as literally true, but how they are true is different.
- Western historians describe (or think they describe) “what” happened.
- The traditions of mythology and religion describe the significance of what happened …
I think I have discovered something that no one else has any idea about …
— The Divinity Of Interest, Maps of Meaning, 1999.
Look for your inspiration to the victorious lobster, with its 350 million years of practical wisdom.
Stand up straight, with your shoulders back.
— Jordan Peterson (1962), 12 Rules for Life, 2018.
[The] fact that intuitive responses are widely held is not evidence that they are justified.
They are not rational insights into a realm of moral truth.
Some of them — roughly, those that we share with others of our species, irrespective of their cultural background — are responses that, for most of our evolutionary history, have been well suited to the survival and reproduction of beings like us.
Other intuitive responses — roughly, those that we do not share with humans from different cultures — we have because of our particular cultural history.
Neither the biological nor the cultural basis of our intuitive responses provides us with a sound reason for taking them as the basis of morality.
— Peter Singer (1946), One World, Text, 2002, p 180.
Knowledge is about truth and falsehood— discovery, evidence, and reason.
Meaning is about storytelling— creativity, imagination, and emotion.
Wisdom is about not confusing— knowledge with meaning,
— peaceandlonglife
Jordan Peterson (1962)
[The] axiomatic structures of the West were not merely arbitrary, nor were they rational, precisely, they were more than rational.
And that led me down, really, two distinct pathways:
- One, religious … associated with the world of narrative and fiction and mythology …
- And the other, evolutionary biology and neuroscience …
I'm trying to draw attention to our fundamental axiomatic principles.
And to say: these are so true we don't have a conception of truth that even characterizes them properly.
Because they are literally true and metaphorically true at the same time. …
You can derive them from first principles from evolutionary biology and they are the primary statements of Western theology, simultaneously. …
I'm unwilling [to] reduce theological presuppositions to evolutionary biology.
[Firstly, because] I don't think that we understand the mechanisms that drive evolution enough to make that reduction. …
[And secondly, because] as I've delved into religious stories, [I've found] they don't have a bottom.
The more you dig into them the more profound they become. …
I don't know what that ultimately means.
But none of us know what anything ultimately means.
(Twelve Rules for Life, RSA, 16 January 2018)
The Flaming Sword of Judgment
How could the nature of man ever reach its full potential without challenge and danger? …
Maybe God thought His new creation would be able to handle the serpent, and considered its presence the lesser of two evils. …
Why Eve, instead of Adam? …
It was fifty-fifty for Eve, statistically speaking …
Perhaps primordial Eve had more reason to attend to serpents than Adam.
Maybe they were more likely, for example, to prey on her tree-dwelling infants.
Perhaps it is for this reason that Eve’s daughters are more protective, self-conscious, fearful and nervous, to this day …
Being human, and wanting to know more, Eve decides to eat the fruit.
Poof!
She wakes up: she’s conscious, or perhaps self-conscious, for the first time.
Now, no clear-seeing, conscious woman is going to tolerate an unawakened man.
So, Eve immediately shares the fruit with Adam. …
Little has changed.
Women have been making men self-conscious since the beginning of time.
They do this primarily by rejecting them — but they also do it by shaming them, if men do not take responsibility. …
[This] capacity of women to shame men and render them self-conscious is still a primal force of nature. …
Since women bear the primary burden of reproduction, it's … very hard to see how it could be otherwise. …
… Adam and Eve became ashamed, immediately after their eyes were opened. …
Their faults stood out.
Their vulnerability was on display.
Unlike other mammals, whose delicate abdomens are protected by the armour-like expanse of their backs, they were upright creatures, with the most vulnerable parts of their body presented to the world. …
In their vulnerability, now fully realized, they felt unworthy to stand before God. …
God’s a judgmental father.
His standards are high.
He’s hard to please. …
[Every] person is deeply flawed.
Everyone falls short of the glory of God. …
If we wish to take care of ourselves properly, we would have to respect ourselves — but we don’t, because we are … fallen creatures.
If we lived in Truth; if we spoke the Truth — then we could walk [in the Garden] with God once again …
Heaven … will not arrive of its own accord. …
We will have to work to bring it about, and strengthen ourselves, so that we can withstand the deadly angels and flaming sword of judgment that God used to bar its entrance.
(RULE 2: Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote for Chaos, Penguin, 2018)
Burning Down The House
(Justin Pemberton, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, 2019)
I think I would have impulsively voted for Trump [in 2016.]
I really do find identity politics repugnant …
I think that we're making a very big mistake to retribalize … our social conceptual structure.
(Why I'd have voted for Trump, Reddot X, uploaded 14 July 2018)
There's a dark part of people …
[The] part that:
- voted for Trump, [and]
- would like to burn things to the ground …
Otherwise you'll participate in this polarization …
[Maintain] self-control, and don't aim to win.
Aim at peace, because winning [is] not peace. …
[There] are people who would be happy if there was blood running in the street.
They're the same sort of people that shoot up high schools or kill innocent … elementary school kids just to show what they're made of and what they believe and that's a big problem …
[You gotta remember] that these people that you're talking about, who are radical leftists, [are] 95% like you.
And if you pull them out of the mob they're just like your neighbor's 19 year old kid who's kind of clueless and rebellious and who you might even like. …
[They're] possessed by these ideas but only partially …
[Progressives] don't like the poor, they just hate the rich …
[The] affinity of Western intellectuals for Marxism maybe [arises] because they [aren't] paid as much as bankers. …
I've often thought that if you paid sociologists as much as investment bankers they'd be capitalists …
[You] underpay intellectuals at your peril. …
[It's] not a good idea to radicalize the people [who] are teaching your children …
[Our] education system has done a tremendously appalling job of educating young people about the absolute catastrophe of radical leftism.
Now, it's not much better with regards to … the actions of the Nazis, although I would say on average people are more aware of that …
[The] architect of the killing fields in Cambodia … wasn't Pol Pot.
It was one of his advisers [who] took his PhD at the Sorbonne [where] he developed the [Marxist thesis] that the cities were parasites on the land. …
[That's] exactly how complicit the Western leftist intellectuals were in facilitating the horrors of the 20th century.
And it's not like we've learned anything since then, quite the contrary, [they've] just gone underground …
[That's] what I see when I see post-modernism. …
Marxists [are] wrong, murderous, and genocidal … and there's lots of would-be revolutionaries who would be happy to have blood running in the street if they had their chance for revenge and the opportunity to move up the hierarchy of tyranny. …
[Postmodernists believe that] there's actually no real world, it's all interpretation. …
[They] are manipulating us with historical ignorance and philosophical sleight of hand to render us so goddamn guilty about what our ancestors may or may not have done so that we allow our shame and our guilt to be to be used as tools to manipulate us into accepting a future that we do not want …
… I've written to Mahzarin Banaji … one of the inventors of the [Implicit Association Test] several times [about how] people are misusing [her] damned tests. …
Silence.
Well, that's partly because her discipline, social psychology, is a corrupt …
(Identity politics and the Marxist lie of white privilege, Free Speech Club, University of British Columbia, 13 November 2017)
Contents
The Flaming Sword of Judgment
Biology is Destiny
On Humility
The Fairy of Porn
Against Divorce
Burning Down The House
Jordan Brent Peterson (1962)
Professor of Psychology, University of Toronto.
- Why is the alt-right eating so much meat?, ABC Quick Smart, 16 November 2023.
- Jordan Peterson, Custodian of the Patriarchy, The New York Times, 18 May 2018.
Nellie Bowles.Jordan Peterson (1962):
[Alek Minassian, the Toronto killer,] was angry at God because women were rejecting him …
The cure for that is enforced monogamy.
Jordan Peterson (1962):
Men get frustrated when they are not competitive in the sexual marketplace …
The dangerousness of frustrated young men (even if that frustration stems from their own incompetence) has to be regulated socially. …
The manifold social conventions tilting most societies toward monogamy constitute such regulation.
(On the New York Times and “Enforced Monogamy”, 20 May 2018) - Right-winger? Not me, says alt-right darling Jordan Peterson, The Sydney Morning Herald, 19-21 April 2018.
Greg Callaghan.Jordan Peterson (1962):
Most of the global warming posturing is a masquerade for anti-capitalists to have a go at the Western patriarchy.
[You] can’t trust the players [or] the data because there is too much ideology involved. - How dangerous is Jordan B Peterson, the rightwing professor who 'hit a hornets' nest'?, The Guardian, 7 February 2018.
Dorian Lynskey.
[Jordan Peterson said to Camille] Paglia last year … that it is harder to deal with “crazy women” because he cannot hit them. …Jordan Peterson (1962):
If you’re talking to a man who wouldn’t fight with you under any circumstances whatsoever, then you’re talking to someone for whom you [can] have absolutely no respect. - Psychologist Jordan Peterson says lobsters help to explain why human hierarchies exist – do they?, The Conversation, 24 January 2018.
Leonor Gonçalves: Research Associate in Neuroscience, Physiology and Pharmacology, University College London. - The Perilous State of the University, YouTube, 16 November 2017.
Jonathan Haidt & Jordan Peterson. - Jordan Peterson Exposes the Postmodernist Agenda, The Epoch Times, 21 June 2017.
Johua Philipp.Jordan Peterson (1962):
We’ve been publicly funding extremely radical, postmodern leftist thinkers who are hellbent on demolishing the fundamental substructure of Western civilization.
And that’s no paranoid delusion. …
The people who hold this … radical, postmodern, communitarian doctrine that makes … some kind of group identity paramount — they’ve got control over most low-to-mid level bureaucratic structures, and many governments as well …
I don’t think its dangers can be overstated.
And I also don’t think the degree to which it’s already infiltrated our culture can be overstated.
Michele Grossman [Professor, Research Chair in Diversity and Community Resilience, Alfred Deakin Institute]:
There are really three common elements that you find across all modes of politically or ideologically inspired extremism …- The first is a narrative around [imminent] peril or threat …
That if people do not rise up to counter it, you're simply going to be trampled to death. … - [Then] you've got grievance. …
The idea that people who saw themselves at the top of … the social order are now feeling that they've been displaced … - And the final element … is the adoption of being the victim.
- The first is a narrative around [imminent] peril or threat …
- What the Wilfrid Laurier professors got wrong about Bill C-16 and gender identity discrimination, National Post, 20 November 2017.
Brian Platt.Jordan Peterson (1962):
[Words like "zhe" and "zher"] are at the vanguard of a post-modern, radical leftist ideology that [is] frighteningly similar to the Marxist doctrines that killed at least 100 million people in the 20th century.
(Steven Pinker, The Long Peace, The Better Angels of Our Nature, Chapter 5, Penguin, 2011)
- Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief, Routledge, 1999.
Jordan Peterson (1962).The truth seems painfully simple — so simple that it is a miracle … that it can ever be forgotten.
Love God, with- all thy mind, and
- all thy acts, and
- all thy heart.
- serve truth above all else, and
- treat your fellow man as if he were yourself —
- not with the pity that undermines his self-respect, and
- not with the justice that elevates you above him,
On Humility
You should be aware of your own competence and your limits.
And that that's especially true if you're very young.
Because, what the hell to you know?
You haven't done anything.
I tell 18 year olds, 6 years ago you were 12.
It's like, what the hell to you know?
- You're under the care of your family or the state.
- You haven't established an independent existence.
- You haven't had children.
- You haven't started a business.
- You haven't taken responsibility for anything.
- You haven't got a degree.
- You haven't finished your courses.
- You don't know how to read.
- You can't think.
- You can't speak.
- You're ill-kempt.
- You don't know how to present yourself.
I'm concerned about [their] professors, because they've completely corrupted the humanities. …
And by corrupting the humanities, they're corrupting the fundamental structure of our civilization and they're spreading that out into the general culture. …
[You] risk inflating your own ego by [trying to deal] with the problems of the world. …
[You] should be very leary of assuming that when you try to do something else you won't just make it worse.
And you will.
Look, I've dealt with people who've dealt with complex systems for a very long period of time.
And I know the difference between someone who can make a complex system better, and someone who will make a complex system worse.
And most people will make a complex system worse.
That's for sure. …
You cannot fix a military helicopter unless you're a mechanic. …
You cannot fix a complex system unless you understand it. …
Part of the problem with climate change is irrreducible complexity. …
There's [the problem of] externalization of costs.
And we don't know how to manage that. …
[Should] we be concerned about that?
Like yeah, absolutely. …
Do we know how to be concerned about it?
Not really. …
[Most climate activism] is compassion masking uselessness …
I don't claim to be an expert of climate change. …
I don't think anybody is an expert on climate change.
I'm also very sceptical about the models that are used to predict climate change. …
(Twelve Rules for Life, RSA, 16 January 2018)
Since the dawn of the scientific revolution, a wedge has been driven through the heart of our society, such that, the moral systems that we used to unite us … religious systems fundamentally, have been subject to an intense critique from the scientists.
[Over Christianity's] 1,500 years of absolute domination, it produced a consensus of morality … that organized societies …
[But, since] the late 1800s … Western society has oscillated between … extremes on the right [and] extremes on the left …
[University students] come in clinging to the wreckage of their culture and floating with the pieces.
[Then] those pieces are taken away by professors who tell them that … nothing has any real meaning. …
[In] most cultures music plays a very central role in identity formation …
When you were being inculcated into the tribal culture [in the past,] that was inculcated with dance, and with masks, and music …
It's an invitation to a drama.
Now then, the question might be, well, is the drama real? …
I think that great dramas are more real than real, they're hyperreal.
They're hyperreal because they provide guidelines about how to act that are abstract and even perhaps generic, but applicable across an extraordinary broad range of situations.
(Context and Background, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief, Lecture 1, 16 January 2017)
The Fairy of Porn
Who the hell wants to grow up to be Captain Hook? …
[You're] chased by the Dragon of Chaos with a clock in its stomach. …
It's already got a piece of you.
Well that's what happens to you when you get older, time has already got a piece of you. …
And eventually it's going to eat you.
And so Hook is so traumatised by that he can't help but be a tyrant. …
[Peter Pan] sacrifices the possibility that he'll have a real relationship with a woman, because that's Wendy. …
[He] has to content himself with Tinkerbell.
She doesn't even exist.
She's like the fairy of porn. …
She's the substitute for the real thing. …
People don't have to get married to have sex [anymore. …]
[So] the only people who get married now are rich. …
So for poorer women, the dissolution of marriage has been an absolute catastrophe.
They are so screwed.
Because they have kids, so they're working, they've got their 90 hour work week man, that's for sure.
They're much less attractive to potential mates.
So they get low quality men, often parisitical and predatory.
So they have jobs in retail, which are just dreadful. …
Most of the women who are outspoken feminists are [economically successful.]
They don't even know any poor women.
So they have no idea what their lives are like. …
[Students have] told me [that] they're not learning a damn thing in Law.
It's all this social justice nonsense. …
It's like … there's a conspiracy to bring people into the education system to make them weaker. …
I guess that keeps the competition down. …
If your students are stupid they're not going to challenge you.
Against Divorce
People say … if the possibility of divorce is open it makes you free.
Yeah, that's what you want, you want to be free aye, really? really?
So you can't predict anything, that's what you're after?
[Marriage] is a vow.
It says: 'look, I know you're trouble, me too, so we won't leave, no matter what happens.' …
What's the alternative? …
Everything is mutable and changeable at any moment.
Well go ahead, you live your life like that, and see what you're like when you're 50.
Jesus, it's dismal.
Two or three divorces, your familys fragmented, you've got no continuity of narrative.
And it's not good for the kids …
[If] you can't run away you can solve your problems. …
'So I'm stuck with you, so how about we fix things?
Because the alternative is we're going to be in a boxing match for 40 years.' …
You think you're going to fix problems without something like that hanging over your head?
There isn't a chance, you'll just avoid them. …
[Before] the divorce laws were really liberalised you could sue to irreconcilable differences. …
It's like one person wants children and the other doesn't, [that's] a tough one to negotiate.
I'm certainly not saying that just because you lock yourself into a [marriage,] like two cats in a barrel, that that will make you solve your problem … sometimes you can't solve them.
I was just pointing out the cost of leaving the back door open is.
And it's a big cost. …
I'm definitely not making a utopian case for marriage. …
[But] there are some additional problems with divorce that people don't really grasp when they're young.
Like, the idea that you can be divorced once you've had children … that's kind of a stupid idea, because you can't. …
If you have kids and you try to get divorced, the probability that that's is going to demolish your life is very, very high.
First of all, it's incredibly expensive … so one or both of you is going to come out of that poor. …
Let's say you're the woman who takes the kids, your market value has declined radically.
You're going to be poorer.
The man is just as screwed, because he is now an indentured servant, and there's no escape from it.. …
[If] you're at each other's throats [after the divorce,] it's roughly like have non-fatal cancer …
[It will also] really disrupt your relationship with your kids.
[When] you bring kids into a step-parent family, they do not do as well.
Step-parents are not as good parents as biological parents, and the data on that is clear.
Obviously there are exceptions … but if you look in aggregate …
It's not that easy to care for children.
You need everything you can binding you to them.
And if they're someone else's children, mostly they get in the way of the person that you love. …
Let's say you have a child and I want to go out with you.
Every second you spend with that child is a second you don't spend with me …
I'm not going to be happy about that. …
And if I have a child … you might say: 'well, I love children.'
It's like, yeah, yeah, sure.
Sure you do.
I doubt it.
You might love your child, [but] it's pretty specific the way people love children.
And the rate of abuse is step families is way higher than it is in biological families.
There's not even any comparison. …
(Story and Metastory: Part 2, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief, Lecture 6, 20 February 2017)
