The Feminine and the Rehabilitation of the West

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shlaifu
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07 Oct 2018, 6:54 pm

Realizing I had a bit of a gap in my knowledge, I started reading Freud, Jung and Joseph Campbell.

And I was wondering, Techstep, which of these have you engaged with?
I'm asking, because these are the people that Jordan Peterson refers to a lot when he interprets mythology and talks about archetypes.

But here's the catch: Freud was extremely sloppy, generalizing, picking-and-choosing, to form a grand narrative of his own. And his interpretations of dreams, on which Jung's interpretation of myths, his archetypes and Campbell's hero's journey are based on, is .... I can't help but call it ridiculous.
My favourite example of dream symbols: a building in dreams *always* stands in for people. If they have balconies, they symbolize a woman.
*All* cylindrical objects symbolize penises. *all* landscapes, individual features of landscapes, countryside, symbolize individual female body parts.
(somewhere in the second half of the "general introduction to psychoanalysis, 1917)
After engaging with Freud, I can safely say that Freud is worth reading to understand how shaky and tainted by the views of the time they were written in the fundaments are.

Jung - and Campbell, and Peterson - are working in a similar fashion when interpreting myths, jumping from one example to the next, generalizing until details fit their pattern ....

I'd hold up the example of snakes in mythology: Peterson explains they stand for danger, sudden death etc.
Well .... they do in modern stories. And there are destructive snakes.
But there also are friendly snakes, and snakes often are ascribed healing powers - the staff of asclepius has a snake wrapped around it, because in ancient greece, they actually held snakes in hospitals, for their mythical healing powers.
Unlike Jung, Campbell and the Petrson, when he wrote his book on mythology, I have access to the internet, and therefore, a much, much larger sample size of mythology, extremely easily available.
(Freud was talking a lot about the customs of "primitive people" - particularly in totem and taboo, 1913, of course- , solely relying on secondary sources, and jumping from examples from Australia to Africa to South America in one paragraph, discarding the larger cultural frameworks. It's ethnologically, psychologically - scientifically - useless mythmaking)

Having read all three, I think archetypes are something they made up to establish order -any order - in the vast, chaotic weirdness of mythology (actual myths are sooo weird, and fit the patterns only insofar as they have some similarities with each other).

So, what I'm argueing is that psychoanalytic interpretation of dreams and mythology is a basically subset of astrology (you know ... sometimes horoscopes make good sense, and sometimes they need to be interpreted a bit looser...).
I would therefore like to stress that Freud, Jung and Campbell interpreted mythologies from their 19th/early 20th century viewpoint on societies, men, and women.
Therefore, a divine female archetype from these sources will be a divine female archetype from the 19th/early 20th century.

I'm not sure if this going to be of much use - event he Hero myth, made up by Campbell in 1948, is of limited use in the 21st century. We don't have to go out to dangerous lands to gather vital new knowledge. we have universities.


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techstepgenr8tion
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07 Oct 2018, 7:28 pm

shlaifu wrote:
Realizing I had a bit of a gap in my knowledge, I started reading Freud, Jung and Joseph Campbell.

And I was wondering, Techstep, which of these have you engaged with?

Unfortunately not nearly as much as I'd like of any of the three. I read maybe the first 1/3 of Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, I've been working 70 hours a week lately under a lot of stress (like this programming project failing = my head in a basket, with zero support) and that could be how things go for at least the next year.

My read of these issues actually came from a different direction. I read the bible several times through in 2013, I had a joke of a job and actually made it through the King James, reading 8+ hours a day, in about five weeks. I did a lot of rereading to solidify my understanding of a lot of the more obscure old testament entries just so I knew what was there and what kinds of novel things actually might shake out that very few people seemed to know about or grasp the importance of in terms of how it pivoted or even disproved most modern religious interpretations of the contents.

Instead of coming to a lot of this through Campbell I actually read quite a bit more Manly P Hall, eg. Secret Teachings of All Ages, Lectures on Ancient Philosophy, and listened to his lectures in a split between the practical psychological stuff and his read on the Greek philosophers, Mediterranean mysteries, etc.. Part of why I listened to him for as long as I did is that his interpretation of the bible was almost exactly square with what was jumping out of it for me - ie. the astrotheological interpretation of the symbols and contents and really that it's a mish/mash of various Ptolemaic concepts and other ideas from the regions dealing with seven classical planets, twelve constellations, etc.. I also got to see in my bible reading how much it's really the high pagan philosophies, like neoplatonism, that are what catches vibrance when people give sermons.

After spending that much time with Hall and people like him I felt like I had something I wanted to say to my friends about how symbols and the subconscious help us code new social information and help open new paths for both personal direction and even societal direction. These are objects that society spools itself around. I really didn't feel like I had any sort of go-to that I could send my friends out to read until Jordan Peterson came along, then it's like someone took the best of those ideas and toned down the mysticism to really deliver the credible import.


shlaifu wrote:
So, what I'm argueing is that psychoanalytic interpretation of dreams and mythology is a basically subset of astrology (you know ... sometimes horoscopes make good sense, and sometimes they need to be interpreted a bit looser...).

This is pretty close to what seems to be the Matt Dillahunty approach - ie. that symbols are weird, superfluous, unneeded, and anyone who wants to hype them needs to be looked at with a fair amount of suspicion. He at least does give some credit to Campbell for making interesting stories but I'm not even sure how much interest he can find in these things when he's said, both to Jordan Peterson and Douglas Murray, that he's tone-deaf to symbols and their importance.

Perhaps the best I can do to bridge on this one - these are big emergent phenomena, and in some cases many symbols and their impact on human behavior coalescing where it's tough to tell where the limits of one effect ends, one begins, and where they might be synergizing in ways that could take on qualities that none of them on their own have. It's one thing for someone to say that these dynamics do exist but deeply doubt that any one person has a deep enough handle on them to speak as such, and even then that doubt would need to pick up falsifiable claims to have more weight than personal opinion. OTOH there are also people out there who'll always be so uncomfortable with abstract things as such that they'll cry 'woo woo woo' at anything that looks remotely complex or abstract. You're clearly not in that later camp because you couldn't have read what you just said you did, let alone as many books on postmodernism as you've mentioned, without getting too seasick to go on within the first few pages.

I think the thing Peterson is doing that's of use, aside from the self-help and minimum intervention psychology, is telling us the different healthy ways in which we can inhabit our historical myths and how we can either grasp their intended import or at least move them into appropriate and helpful positions in our psyches. Our psyches are made of stories, made of myths, and so these are particularly powerful tools for putting our thoughts, ideas, and even emotions in order.

As for astrology it makes very specific physical world claims about the relationships about planets, houses, and nodal relationships. I don't think what Peterson is talking about is being presented as a physical word phenomena but rather as a subjective management tool at the individual and societal levels. That's part of where I think the analogy gets lost if no bold physical world claims are being made.


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07 Oct 2018, 7:50 pm

Also, just out of curiosity and perhaps in search of a better way to understand the questions you're asking, you seem to be on a bit if your own grail quest in all the reading you're putting in. Do you know what you're looking for yet?


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07 Oct 2018, 8:03 pm

techstepgenr8tion wrote:
shlaifu wrote:
Realizing I had a bit of a gap in my knowledge, I started reading Freud, Jung and Joseph Campbell.

And I was wondering, Techstep, which of these have you engaged with?

Unfortunately not nearly as much as I'd like of any of the three. I read maybe the first 1/3 of Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, I've been working 70 hours a week lately under a lot of stress (like this programming project failing = my head in a basket, with zero support) and that could be how things go for at least the next year.

My read of these issues actually came from a different direction. I read the bible several times through in 2013, I had a joke of a job and actually made it through the King James, reading 8+ hours a day, in about five weeks. I did a lot of rereading to solidify my understanding of a lot of the more obscure old testament entries just so I knew what was there and what kinds of novel things actually might shake out that very few people seemed to know about or grasp the importance of in terms of how it pivoted or even disproved most modern religious interpretations of the contents.

Instead of coming to a lot of this through Campbell I actually read quite a bit more Manly P Hall, eg. Secret Teachings of All Ages, Lectures on Ancient Philosophy, and listened to his lectures in a split between the practical psychological stuff and his read on the Greek philosophers, Mediterranean mysteries, etc.. Part of why I listened to him for as long as I did is that his interpretation of the bible was almost exactly square with what was jumping out of it for me - ie. the astrotheological interpretation of the symbols and contents and really that it's a mish/mash of various Ptolemaic concepts and other ideas from the regions dealing with seven classical planets, twelve constellations, etc.. I also got to see in my bible reading how much it's really the high pagan philosophies, like neoplatonism, that are what catches vibrance when people give sermons.

After spending that much time with Hall and people like him I felt like I had something I wanted to say to my friends about how symbols and the subconscious help us code new social information and help open new paths for both personal direction and even societal direction. These are objects that society spools itself around. I really didn't feel like I had any sort of go-to that I could send my friends out to read until Jordan Peterson came along, then it's like someone took the best of those ideas and toned down the mysticism to really deliver the credible import.


shlaifu wrote:
So, what I'm argueing is that psychoanalytic interpretation of dreams and mythology is a basically subset of astrology (you know ... sometimes horoscopes make good sense, and sometimes they need to be interpreted a bit looser...).

This is pretty close to what seems to be the Matt Dillahunty approach - ie. that symbols are weird, superfluous, unneeded, and anyone who wants to hype them needs to be looked at with a fair amount of suspicion. He at least does give some credit to Campbell for making interesting stories but I'm not even sure how much interest he can find in these things when he's said, both to Jordan Peterson and Douglas Murray, that he's tone-deaf to symbols and their importance.

Perhaps the best I can do to bridge on this one - these are big emergent phenomena, and in some cases many symbols and their impact on human behavior coalescing where it's tough to tell where the limits of one effect ends, one begins, and where they might be synergizing in ways that could take on qualities that none of them on their own have. It's one thing for someone to say that these dynamics do exist but deeply doubt that any one person has a deep enough handle on them to speak as such, and even then that doubt would need to pick up falsifiable claims to have more weight than personal opinion. OTOH there are also people out there who'll always be so uncomfortable with abstract things as such that they'll cry 'woo woo woo' at anything that looks remotely complex or abstract. You're clearly not in that later camp because you couldn't have read what you just said you did, let alone as many books on postmodernism as you've mentioned, without getting too seasick to go on within the first few pages.

I think the thing Peterson is doing that's of use, aside from the self-help and minimum intervention psychology, is telling us the different healthy ways in which we can inhabit our historical myths and how we can either grasp their intended import or at least move them into appropriate and helpful positions in our psyches. Our psyches are made of stories, made of myths, and so these are particularly powerful tools for putting our thoughts, ideas, and even emotions in order.

As for astrology it makes very specific physical world claims about the relationships about planets, houses, and nodal relationships. I don't think what Peterson is talking about is being presented as a physical word phenomena but rather as a subjective management tool at the individual and societal levels. That's part of where I think the analogy gets lost if no bold physical world claims are being made.


okay. I admit I was thinking of household horoscopes.
But here's one ting I learned from Freud: the power of suggestion. Basically, Freud would say: the house with the balcony is a symbol for a woman - and then leave it to the patient to think of any issues with women he might have - and of course, if someone told us to think of a woman, some woman would come to mind.
And it may be that mythology works in a similar way- not through symbols that are to be interpreted in one particular way, but through suggestion.
In that way, Peterson took up the suggestions made to him - to find the story he went out to find.
But I want to stress that Freud, Jung, Campbell did the same, and found the stories they went out to find. But the result is dependent on them, their situation, their time in history and the views of their times, more than it is on the myths - you could shuffle the symbols and its interpretations, tell it, and find that someone will make sense of it for the present day.

What worries me about it is what Freud had to say about women and their sexual development. Feminists have for three generations fought to overcome these ideas. Now Peterson is bringing them back, mixed in with his clinical experience and psychological education - and I can't help but thinking: his sample is biased. He only knows patients (really well, I mean. as well as a only a therapist knows a person, better than friends and family) - and so did Freud and Jung.


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techstepgenr8tion
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07 Oct 2018, 8:16 pm

shlaifu wrote:
What worries me about it is what Freud had to say about women and their sexual development. Feminists have for three generations fought to overcome these ideas. Now Peterson is bringing them back, mixed in with his clinical experience and psychological education - and I can't help but thinking: his sample is biased. He only knows patients (really well, I mean. as well as a only a therapist knows a person, better than friends and family) - and so did Freud and Jung.


I had heard an idea cogently stated twice in the last 24 hours of my Youtube listening that sort of gives the lie to the male suicide crisis in a way, first by Jordan Peterson in his interview with Dr. Oz and then Jonathan Haidt in his interview on Daily Wire. I can't remember who said it this directly but it's something along the line that women attempt suicide far more often than men just that men are more often successful because they'll use more lethal means.

Most of what I've heard Jordan bring up is the Scandanavian countries and the studies that show on average women have more of a preference for people and men more of preference for things. Is that the content you're talking about? If so I'd say check the literature or the sources he's mentioning to see what you can glean from them. Also I don't know, if one doesn't buy into tabula rasa or majority social construction ideas of gender, what the best path is to deal with that if it turned out to be accurate information? I'm still trying to sort out what's terrible about these things, ie. is the idea that different from men = inferior that entrenched? If so it doesn't seem like a coherent way of appraising the situation unless one's just observing that the world is behaving that way, but then perhaps the task is really to bring society to women rather than trying to jam a round peg into a square hole by forcing women to be more like men - it seems really just as antithetical to the liberty and happiness of women.


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07 Oct 2018, 8:18 pm

techstepgenr8tion wrote:
Also, just out of curiosity and perhaps in search of a better way to understand the questions you're asking, you seem to be on a bit if your own grail quest in all the reading you're putting in. Do you know what you're looking for yet?

I work in filmmaking, and for years have been teaching storytelling to students. I usually taught aristotle - putting it in a bit of context, contrasting with plato etc. - and left the hero's journey to youtube videos and summaries etc.
This year, I set myself the goal to learn about it. properly. and figured I need to know something about psychoanalysis, Jung etc.
So, in best Aspie-manner, I'm just reading everything. (or listening to audiobooks while working, - my work doesn't require me to think in words, so that part of my brain is largely unoccuppied)

But this is also where my scepticism comes from: I love films, and all those instructions, be it Aristotle, Campbell, or any random screenwriting advice - they all fail, fundamentally, in Japanese cinema. yet it works. Hence, my realization that the abstraction in form of the poetics, the hero's journey, etc, is culture-dependent, and creating a feedback loop between culture, artwork, and interpretation.

In western cinema, everything has to make sense - because Aristotle said so. Why did he say so? because that was his position in arguments with plato - who liked things being transcendental.

In indian cinema, things don't need to make sense, but they need to flow from one emotion to the next.- enjoy the spectacle of the universe...
Asian cinema tends to be very hard to pin down. A bit of everything, some environmental message, with giant robots.
More Buddhism and Daoism, Shintoism, less metaphysics.

Aristotle would turn in his grave, but: it works, just as well, but to a different effect.


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07 Oct 2018, 8:28 pm

Interesting stuff.

I think the place of stories in the real world is that we're born into a time and place, anywhere really, that has stories baked into everything - the culture's social contracts, the architecture, the art, the movies, and just about any games people play. It's the pervasiveness of these things and the need of the human mind for grabbing them up to orient itself that make them such important real estate. As you pointed out they're largely fungible albeit the core motifs tell us a lot about what we find important and useful in our daily lives. If a culture has a narrative collapse that struggle for meaning does fall back on the individual. In that sense the person then sort of has to be the artist, the poet, the magician, the alchemist, etc. to some degree in order to get through what's no longer in a steady supply anymore from other people.


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08 Oct 2018, 7:05 am

techstepgenr8tion wrote:
shlaifu wrote:
What worries me about it is what Freud had to say about women and their sexual development. Feminists have for three generations fought to overcome these ideas. Now Peterson is bringing them back, mixed in with his clinical experience and psychological education - and I can't help but thinking: his sample is biased. He only knows patients (really well, I mean. as well as a only a therapist knows a person, better than friends and family) - and so did Freud and Jung.


I had heard an idea cogently stated twice in the last 24 hours of my Youtube listening that sort of gives the lie to the male suicide crisis in a way, first by Jordan Peterson in his interview with Dr. Oz and then Jonathan Haidt in his interview on Daily Wire. I can't remember who said it this directly but it's something along the line that women attempt suicide far more often than men just that men are more often successful because they'll use more lethal means.

Most of what I've heard Jordan bring up is the Scandanavian countries and the studies that show on average women have more of a preference for people and men more of preference for things. Is that the content you're talking about? If so I'd say check the literature or the sources he's mentioning to see what you can glean from them. Also I don't know, if one doesn't buy into tabula rasa or majority social construction ideas of gender, what the best path is to deal with that if it turned out to be accurate information? I'm still trying to sort out what's terrible about these things, ie. is the idea that different from men = inferior that entrenched? If so it doesn't seem like a coherent way of appraising the situation unless one's just observing that the world is behaving that way, but then perhaps the task is really to bring society to women rather than trying to jam a round peg into a square hole by forcing women to be more like men - it seems really just as antithetical to the liberty and happiness of women.


well, Freud certainly thought that women were inferior. And the racist belief that other races are inferior is connected to that through the belief that it is having-a-different-body which is what makes one inferior. That's what the SJWs mean when they talk about phallogocentrism: sexist and racist beliefs state that if you don't have a white, male body, you're of inferior intelligence and can't have the same access to the "logos".
Peterson is insofar worrisome as in his story of the world, women need to become mothers and men need to do manly things, have a career etc. - but this perpetuates a situation in which women give up something for motherhood, and that men then don't ascribe them the same access to the logos -
the statistics on equal payment are interesting, btw.: the freakonmics guys did an episode on that, and found that in jobs where people are fungible - like pharmacists - there is no pay gap. And the pay gap widens, the more a job requires a specific person, as in: if you take time out for motherhood, you are also losing years of experience. And if you add up life-time worked, there apparently is no pay gap to speak of.
I'm thinking of access to the logos, the ability to think about big issues etc. is ascribed in a similar way, and that makes motherhood problematic in our society.

Germaine Greer said somewhere that there's no point to feminism, if the liberation of women would just allow them to live as unfree men - which is exactly what happened. Women's liberatikn happened at a time where things started to get more competitive, and these days, tere's no feminism, no trade-unions, and it's everyone against everyone else, but according to traditiknal rules - rules, in which taking time off for motherhood, in which not killing yourself completely for your job, create disadvantages.
I mean ... if you want to get ahead in life, become a banker and take ritalin while working, and by 35, you'll be filthy rich (and have a heart condition).


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shlaifu
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08 Oct 2018, 7:15 am

techstepgenr8tion wrote:
Interesting stuff.

I think the place of stories in the real world is that we're born into a time and place, anywhere really, that has stories baked into everything - the culture's social contracts, the architecture, the art, the movies, and just about any games people play. It's the pervasiveness of these things and the need of the human mind for grabbing them up to orient itself that make them such important real estate. As you pointed out they're largely fungible albeit the core motifs tell us a lot about what we find important and useful in our daily lives. If a culture has a narrative collapse that struggle for meaning does fall back on the individual. In that sense the person then sort of has to be the artist, the poet, the magician, the alchemist, etc. to some degree in order to get through what's no longer in a steady supply anymore from other people.


yes. exactly.
But there's a structural thing of stories that needs to be considered: where are we in the story?
are we at the climax, where everything is decided? do we need to act now?
in christianity for example, the end is near. hence, everything is permitted - you have to take it seriously, because if jesus comes home tomorrow and finds the world in such disarray, you're going to get grounded for eternity.

in hinduism, we're somewhere in the middle, and it'll start all over again anyway - no immediate need to act and cleanse the unbelievers - rather, think if your own karma, because you'll have to live a few more times..

modern materialist worldviews restrict the story to one's own, finite existence, which allows a person to act in a certain "scorched earth" way- there's not going to be a sequel for the individual, and your life will inevitably end in tragedy, so make it as entertaining for yourself as you can.... the end is nigh, you need to act now.

and regarding to social change, that leads to peter sloterdijk's dictum: "no one has time for a whole generation anymore" -


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08 Oct 2018, 7:44 pm

shlaifu wrote:
Peterson is insofar worrisome as in his story of the world, women need to become mothers and men need to do manly things, have a career etc. - but this perpetuates a situation in which women give up something for motherhood, and that men then don't ascribe them the same access to the logos -

My read of that might be sort of like saying that he does a great job of pointing out a problem, ie. women quite often being unhappy when they run in the opposite direction of their underlying program, but he doesn't propose the economic solution aside from encouraging people to get married. In one sense I hear a lot of center-left thinkers even argue that two-parent families end up with disparately positive outcomes for children to single parent families, and it's never a knock on single mothers or single fathers but more often an admission that it's such a big job that it takes everything two people have in them to cover it.

shlaifu wrote:
the statistics on equal payment are interesting, btw.: the freakonmics guys did an episode on that, and found that in jobs where people are fungible - like pharmacists - there is no pay gap. And the pay gap widens, the more a job requires a specific person, as in: if you take time out for motherhood, you are also losing years of experience. And if you add up life-time worked, there apparently is no pay gap to speak of.
I'm thinking of access to the logos, the ability to think about big issues etc. is ascribed in a similar way, and that makes motherhood problematic in our society.

The workplace fungibility part makes sense. I don't know if I'm quite understanding logos in the way you're saying it here, ie. it's not economic activity but refers more to a collective capacity for introspection and self-aware agency. If we were talking about variances in people's self-awareness or societal awareness I'm not sure that could ever directly map to economic activity.

The trouble here is that women clearly have gotten a raw deal in the modern world and it's probably going to have to be women who think of the solutions and push for them. This is part of why I really hope feminism can turn the corner from rip-down to build-up.

shlaifu wrote:
Germaine Greer said somewhere that there's no point to feminism, if the liberation of women would just allow them to live as unfree men - which is exactly what happened. Women's liberatikn happened at a time where things started to get more competitive, and these days, tere's no feminism, no trade-unions, and it's everyone against everyone else, but according to traditiknal rules - rules, in which taking time off for motherhood, in which not killing yourself completely for your job, create disadvantages.
I mean ... if you want to get ahead in life, become a banker and take ritalin while working, and by 35, you'll be filthy rich (and have a heart condition).

I'm sort of learning that about my current job - work double time for salary, fly by the seat of your pants, wring so much out that you endanger our health, and hopefully all the liability bullets your dodging keep missing your or at worst grazing you.

That really may be the question of our times - ie. if we believe ourselves to be worth no more than the meat we're made of and what it can do in a profession and what can be squeezed out of us what kind of future do we have when AI eliminates most of that? It's a paradox imminently on the horizon and I have to hope that enough clear thinkers speak often enough for long enough to staple a better alternative narrative than some sort of dutiful submission to mass eugenics or something of that sort.


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08 Oct 2018, 7:57 pm

shlaifu wrote:
But there's a structural thing of stories that needs to be considered: where are we in the story?
are we at the climax, where everything is decided? do we need to act now?
in christianity for example, the end is near. hence, everything is permitted - you have to take it seriously, because if jesus comes home tomorrow and finds the world in such disarray, you're going to get grounded for eternity.

in hinduism, we're somewhere in the middle, and it'll start all over again anyway - no immediate need to act and cleanse the unbelievers - rather, think if your own karma, because you'll have to live a few more times..

modern materialist worldviews restrict the story to one's own, finite existence, which allows a person to act in a certain "scorched earth" way- there's not going to be a sequel for the individual, and your life will inevitably end in tragedy, so make it as entertaining for yourself as you can.... the end is nigh, you need to act now.

and regarding to social change, that leads to peter sloterdijk's dictum: "no one has time for a whole generation anymore" -

I think Douglas Murray grabbed a quote well, I can't remember who it was from - a French social scientist who wrote in the 1990's if I remember correctly, that the west (or at least Europe in that context) felt like it had run out of narrative.

This is also why it's so dangerous for us to feel like we're at the 'end' of history. Technically, when you see how barbaric we are and how new all of this technology the opposite would seem to be very much the case, ie. that we're very young and very early to the party. Where I think I might have some disagreement with John Gray is that I do think social selection and pressures like that do augment humanity in such a way that there quite likely will be a childhood, adolescence, young adult hood, middle-age, silver years, and old age to our race and that there will be times where our more animal instincts will be much better neutralized by their consequences or, at least prior to that, we'll have much more prowess at neutralizing them and neutralizing the people who'd weaponize them against other people.

I just did a browse of Google and unfortunately can't find what I was looking for but there was some theory, can't remember who thought it up but I had to at least consider it a joke because of how transparent the problem with it was. The suggestion was that based on probabilities we're born at the median of human head-count and, since there are as many people alive today by some estimates as most of history it would mean that the end is imminent. Rainbows look like things one could chase as well until they keep retreating and one realizes that they're more of a pattern, and I can't think of the right technical term for this but they're patterns that scale to their container or their angle of view and the whole thing reminds me of the marathon runner who can never beat a tortoise in a race because he has to run half the distance to the tortoise, then half the remaining distance, then half of that, thus he can't pass it ever. I sometimes think our generation is in that sort of strange navel-gazing mode and I suppose there can be a use to us collectively getting it done and over with but we really need to snap out of it I think before things really hit the bricks.


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09 Oct 2018, 10:02 pm

In recent years girls have become too feminine.


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09 Oct 2018, 10:07 pm

You might have to unpack that. In what way?


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10 Oct 2018, 1:41 pm

techstepgenr8tion wrote:
shlaifu wrote:
But there's a structural thing of stories that needs to be considered: where are we in the story?
are we at the climax, where everything is decided? do we need to act now?
in christianity for example, the end is near. hence, everything is permitted - you have to take it seriously, because if jesus comes home tomorrow and finds the world in such disarray, you're going to get grounded for eternity.

in hinduism, we're somewhere in the middle, and it'll start all over again anyway - no immediate need to act and cleanse the unbelievers - rather, think if your own karma, because you'll have to live a few more times..

modern materialist worldviews restrict the story to one's own, finite existence, which allows a person to act in a certain "scorched earth" way- there's not going to be a sequel for the individual, and your life will inevitably end in tragedy, so make it as entertaining for yourself as you can.... the end is nigh, you need to act now.

and regarding to social change, that leads to peter sloterdijk's dictum: "no one has time for a whole generation anymore" -

I think Douglas Murray grabbed a quote well, I can't remember who it was from - a French social scientist who wrote in the 1990's if I remember correctly, that the west (or at least Europe in that context) felt like it had run out of narrative.

This is also why it's so dangerous for us to feel like we're at the 'end' of history. Technically, when you see how barbaric we are and how new all of this technology the opposite would seem to be very much the case, ie. that we're very young and very early to the party. Where I think I might have some disagreement with John Gray is that I do think social selection and pressures like that do augment humanity in such a way that there quite likely will be a childhood, adolescence, young adult hood, middle-age, silver years, and old age to our race and that there will be times where our more animal instincts will be much better neutralized by their consequences or, at least prior to that, we'll have much more prowess at neutralizing them and neutralizing the people who'd weaponize them against other people.

I just did a browse of Google and unfortunately can't find what I was looking for but there was some theory, can't remember who thought it up but I had to at least consider it a joke because of how transparent the problem with it was. The suggestion was that based on probabilities we're born at the median of human head-count and, since there are as many people alive today by some estimates as most of history it would mean that the end is imminent. Rainbows look like things one could chase as well until they keep retreating and one realizes that they're more of a pattern, and I can't think of the right technical term for this but they're patterns that scale to their container or their angle of view and the whole thing reminds me of the marathon runner who can never beat a tortoise in a race because he has to run half the distance to the tortoise, then half the remaining distance, then half of that, thus he can't pass it ever. I sometimes think our generation is in that sort of strange navel-gazing mode and I suppose there can be a use to us collectively getting it done and over with but we really need to snap out of it I think before things really hit the bricks.


the idea that the west ran out of a narrative is probably not some french sociologist, but likely Francis Fukuyama, an american economist, who wrote an essy in 1989 called "the end of history or the last man", basically argueing that after the end of the soviet union, the big fights are over, and it'll be liberal democracy from here on out.
It's basically Hegel's and Marx' ideas of progress through extremes to find an equilibrium - just that Marx thought that capitalism was one of the extremes, and communism the logic, balanced outcome.
To some extent, Hegel and Marx came up with that, and it spawned the idea of human progress, of a grand narrative of mankind. Fukuyama's essay is worth reading, and definitely the nineties look like it, in the west - if you look to the fincancial crashes in asia in the nineties, you realize that it was a myopic idea.

Today, not even Fukuyama is a Fukuyamaist - in the words of Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman: "we're off the edge of history", and he later came to define the period as an interregnum, a peoriod when the old king is dead, and the new one isn't crowned yet.

Zygmunt Bauman is definitely worth reading/listening to. I recommend that one.
But this is the history of which John Gray writes that it was an illusion - it' ll just go on and on, and there will be fighting over stuff, and we don't learn s**t.

this has gone a bit off-topic.
To return to the "divine feminine"- it's what feminists are accusing the partiarchy of: putting femininity on a pedestal.
The term divine female sums it up anyway.... I mean: in the Jung/Campbell/peterson world, ideal men are heroes, and ideal women are nurturing godesses. Women are the prize, the boon. - the trophy.
So .... basically Peterson is saying to women: be the trophy, because why would you want to be like an economically unfree man?

I think, we need a third option.


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10 Oct 2018, 8:17 pm

I went back and found the discussion I was thinking of.

He was talking about Chantal Delsol's 'Icarus Fallen'.

This is the panel discussion he brought it up on and he chats about it for about two minutes (17:15 - 19:15):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgEMPI-xI1k

shlaifu wrote:
To return to the "divine feminine"- it's what feminists are accusing the partiarchy of: putting femininity on a pedestal.
The term divine female sums it up anyway.... I mean: in the Jung/Campbell/peterson world, ideal men are heroes, and ideal women are nurturing godesses. Women are the prize, the boon. - the trophy.
So .... basically Peterson is saying to women: be the trophy, because why would you want to be like an economically unfree man?

I think, we need a third option.


What seems kind of obvious to me is that today's male hero isn't yesterday's gladiator or even soldier. There are a lot of different ways it can be achieved and so many of them are higher-order abstractions of the motif.

I think that third way would clearly be women abstracting the best of what femininity is and doing what they'd want to do with it, creating their own sort of hierarchy of value out of that and letting that hold as a structure that, as I was thinking in my OP, could counterpoise to masculine power structures in helpful ways. I would argue that between the two sexes they seem to be the, on average, more grounded and its the guys who've at least historically tended to buffalo stampede off of cliffs with bad ideas more readily.


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11 Oct 2018, 6:18 am

techstepgenr8tion wrote:
I went back and found the discussion I was thinking of.

He was talking about Chantal Delsol's 'Icarus Fallen'.

This is the panel discussion he brought it up on and he chats about it for about two minutes (17:15 - 19:15):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgEMPI-xI1k

shlaifu wrote:
To return to the "divine feminine"- it's what feminists are accusing the partiarchy of: putting femininity on a pedestal.
The term divine female sums it up anyway.... I mean: in the Jung/Campbell/peterson world, ideal men are heroes, and ideal women are nurturing godesses. Women are the prize, the boon. - the trophy.
So .... basically Peterson is saying to women: be the trophy, because why would you want to be like an economically unfree man?

I think, we need a third option.


What seems kind of obvious to me is that today's male hero isn't yesterday's gladiator or even soldier. There are a lot of different ways it can be achieved and so many of them are higher-order abstractions of the motif.

I think that third way would clearly be women abstracting the best of what femininity is and doing what they'd want to do with it, creating their own sort of hierarchy of value out of that and letting that hold as a structure that, as I was thinking in my OP, could counterpoise to masculine power structures in helpful ways. I would argue that between the two sexes they seem to be the, on average, more grounded and its the guys who've at least historically tended to buffalo stampede off of cliffs with bad ideas more readily.



regarding that discussion of Icarus fallen: they forget that globalized capitalism has also failed to fulfill its promises, not just fascism and communism.
Yaron Brook is a Randian, so of course, he's got a blind spot there. Plus his insistence on individualism and an "objective" view of reality.... the oh-so-dreaded postmodernists - the real ones, not the strawmen the rightwingers make up, argued convincingly that there is no objective view of the world, that the necessarily subjective view consists of the language that describes it (as in: stories, but also choice of words and the structure of grammar that suggests certain intuitiins but not others - this is where the PC madness comes from).
the strawman version is that any view is therefore as good as any other.
the actual Derrida argued that interpretation of texts- worldviews, actions, etc. is never finished, and that interpretations are always a product of the times and the lives of whoever did the interpretation.
Derrida did something worse, in a sense, than stating some mad everything's-equally-valid-idea: he introduced permanent doubt. - not that everyhting's right, but that there is no one, right way to read a text that will always stay right.

the two of them are having a rather muddled argument about things, really.
which is normal for people who neglect to talk about class and try to solve things solely by solving the contradictions in race, culture, gender.

regarding taking the best from the hero archetype: the 20th century encouraged venturing out into the unknown, and people who don't leave their safe home stayed behind. the result is a speed of development in which I can't ask anyone of an older generation (the father) for advice, because they older people have little that can be applied to my life, a generation later, in which everything is shifting and mutating all the time...


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