Sir Roger Scruton/Dr. Jordan B. Peterson: Apprehending the T

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Sir Roger Scruton/Dr. Jordan B. Peterson: Apprehending the Transcendent v2

Wasn't a full moon so Jordan was okay.

not a full moon, but solstice festival - for all the strawmen erected, circumambulated and subsequently incinerated.

Sounds like your allergies are pounding you a bit. There was a lot of good content with respect to how western society could refocus going forward - though I get the concern, most people have to take things as either 100% agree or 100% disagree otherwise they're lost to the abyss.

true, this one was tough for me.
But by now, whenever I hear dominance hierarchy, I think of happy SS soldiers, whenever I hear meaning as a means to get through suffering, I think of the masses of people cheering on Hitler when he asks them if they want to give up everything for a total war.
It's not that Peterson's entirely wrong, but rather that he's not right without quite a few caveats, in the same way the "postmodern types" aren't all wrong .... it's this black and white thinking that makes him a millionaire, rather than part of the solution.

what amzes me by now is how none of the people discussing these things ever talk about technology and shifts in the external world, meaning: how few jobs actually come with responsibility AND a pacheck you can at least live on.
how taking reaponsibility towards society, local community and the environment is often a disadvantage in a free market.
ah, right. I forgot, Peterson doesn't believe in the environment.
It's funny, all those environmentalists, willing to make personal sacrifices, finding meaning in the higher good of keeping the planer habitable... or are those resentment driven postmodernist types, envious of the great dominance hierarchies that gave you housing bubbles and the 6th mass extinction?
one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter....

His take on hierarchies is that they need constant scrutiny to make sure that they're not becoming purely power structures, they should be competency hierarchies first and foremost and to the degree that they veer off course from that they need to be held to account. The thing Jordan says on repeat about meaning in the face of suffering is having first principles, values that you'd be likely to stick to in the face of intense pressure because they're ideas that you've tried, tested, and found to be correct rather than some social prescription that you'll as easily discard for the next replacement prescription as any you had before that.

The problem of Nazism and other totalitarian state-centered ideologies relates back to people's proclivity to conform to whatever power structure is in place and salute whatever flag they're given in exchange for being left alone - which is a thing tyrants will run full speed ahead with. The more people in a crowd who have personal integrity the less likely such things can take root.


Doesn't he repeatedly say that a robust and clear left is necessary to stand up for the common man? He's also expressed in interviews deep concerns with respect to what increased complexity in the work world and the minimum performative IQ requirements will do, ie. that 83 IQ and below is 1/6 of the population and if that shifts up to 90 or 95 IQ essentially being needed to function we'll be in a place where much closer to half the people out there won't be able to make ends meet. I don't think the topic of automation has come up but it's somewhat latent in that last comment on on this trajectory I don't see good reason to anticipate him denying that automation would destroy the available number of jobs.


Any basis for that?
I think the worst thing I could say, in favor of your interpretation, is that he's lauded some free-market solutions like a guy who has an automated skimmer that's harvesting the Pacific garbage patch for recyclable plastic and might be able to recapture it within a decade. He's not a climate change denier, at the worst he might prefer private sector solutions and innovation but that's not a debate over whether global warming or mass die-off is real, it's a what to do about it debate.


I really wonder what percentage of the Sierra Club is actually post-modernists, or what minority of them has even heard of postmodernism.

A lot of projection here, typically I don't interact with projection but given we've had as many long conversations on things I figure it's fair to at least try to untangle it.

Also I got the strange impression that after a recent thread sort of burning an effigy of Peterson and almost implying that he's now blown over and a has-been (everyone who haven't listened to five minutes of him in his own words can feel warm vindication fuzzies for their lack of effort now) that it might be taken that it's now inappropriate to post him, like he's a now-dead currency. I suppose that's part of why I'm more than happy to keep posting lectures and interviews, it's not the kind of consensus that should set the tempo around here.

you're righ of course-. I'm sorry for the polemics ... I might have been in a particularly bad mood.

regarding the dominance hierarchy thing: Peterson is using the plumber example - which is a somewhat unsuitable example to work with, because the difference between good plumbing and bad plumbing is easily determinable, and the money and power involved are relatively low. But that's also not really what anyone is attacking.
What people are attacking are hiring practices that end up leading to more men by the name of thomas than women (of all names) sitting on the boards of german companies.
the plumber-patriarchy is a strawman.

the hiearchies being attacked are the banking industry, where a trader can loose millions and get fired with a severance package bigger than what the average earner will earn in their entire life.

it's particularly funny they should be having this conversation in the UK, where almost all members of the government have attended Eaton and Oxbridge - very expensive institutions.
he's calling for scrutiny of the hierarchies, but it seems impossible for him to consider that some of the hierarchies currently in place actually might be so corrupt that there's good reason to reject them entirely.


regarding suffering etc.: yes, he's advocating for the tested - but they have been tested under very different conditions. The things he's referring to were written in circumstances of small tribal communities, where you need to get along with people you will be dealing with your entire life.
But we're living in a time where you don't get rewarded for the reputation you've built up all your life, because local communities have became fluid, the personell always shifting, new people coming in and old ones leaving.
Under these circumstances, going for short term rewards and "disruption" have become successful strategies - because they lead to financial reward, and when you move on, or your local community transforms, money has come to replace reputation.
That's what I mean with technological change: things are moving so fast, - one day you're an engineer in a german robotics company, thinking about ethics and how the robots you're creating can help workers, rather than just outright replacing them - the next day the company is sold off to chinese investors, and the day after, the company is disbanded and manufacturing and knowledge transferred to china and all your ethics and attempts to do this in a way that benefits people is just thwarted and gone .... (happened to a friend of mine)

ethics and reputation are long term things, but the total commodification and the logic of capital are short term things. This is what annoys me about Peterson's vague conception of god as some sort of higher good - the problem is not that people don't have a sense of what's right - it's that the world is increasingly modelled to be perfect for the homo oeconomicus. and the homo oeconomicus doesn't have ethics.
his solutions are basically to take one part of capitalism - dynamism, markets, globalization - and pretend that can be done without the other half - acceleration of social change, short term profit orientation etc.

his Jungian approach also is flawed - the heroe's journey is a model based on mythology from civlizations that had a different conception of time - a circular conception. the idea is that there actually are eternal cycles.
But this hasn't been the actual case ever since people figured out how to burn coal - that is, the consumption of non-renewable resources.
all this mthology and the interpretation of it is not really applicable in evolutionary time, where you mihht have to go back to school and learn a new trade at 40, because your vocation has just been replaced by something better and cheaper, or it turns out that what you were doing and taking pride in was actually creating horrible environmen4al damage.

regarding Peterson and the environment: in interviews he doubts the connection between co2 and global warming, and he's recently interviewed bjorn lomborg... and while they make some good points in the interview, there's still this overwhleming impression that we can actually go on emitting co2.
Peterson is a psychologist and Lomborg is an economist .... maybe they should be talking to biologists to understand what the 6th extinction actually means.

I think what soured public perception of Peterson is that he changed from public intellectual to thought leader ( I learned the distinction from a google talk...) - a public intellectual is a gate keeper who critizes the things thought leaders come up with. - Peterson vs. SJWs. But when the public intellectual turns into a thought leader, putting forward his own ideas - he becomes subject to scrutiny.
this is what's happened to Peterson.

Although I think they'd disagree on a lot, and some people would argue huge gaps in their achievement merits (ie. groundbreaking linguistic philosophy vs. groundbreaking depth psychology - some might argue the later is snake-oil thru and thru, which is a whole other topic), I really would liken Peterson's stature, position, and kind of conversation to where Chomky was at. Similarly I find I can often see a lecture posted by Noam Chomsky and even though know that there will be things he says that I'll question I do know that he'll say a lot of things that I do agree with, often enough take them in a quite different direction than I would, and even when I find myself disagree with conclusions I'll find myself quite respectful of how he arrived at them.

As far as what you said about homo oeconomicus yes, I do think it's that bad and yes - the Dunbar unit is probably smashed beyond repair as well as the incentives that go along with it. I've also speculated (on another forum - don't know that I've said it here yet) that I'm pretty sure that the evermore vapid, shallow, and limbic nature of our culture seems to be people deep down having the sense that procreation would be reduced to a skeleton crew of those with the most extreme talent, or those most extremely unique, or those most able to stand out, hence people will do anything - to hell with integrity - that will increase their odds of getting their germ into the next generation.

The problems with that are absolutely horrible needless to say. A culture with no integrity is absolutely ripe for the next 'big thing', really the next echo of the early 20th century. I've also increasingly become aware of my own animal that I pilot and it's inescapable to me now - I'm 39, I haven't had kids, I come from a family were the earlier generation had like 9-14 kids, and that animal feels like it's in one of those mafia movies where its tied up and a plastic bag is being put over its head and that it's being suffocated out permanently. That kind of constant stress, that constant sense that I, as an animal, am being destroyed first because of my disability and second because I didn't sell out (lucky for me selling out would have been abject abuse - not a winning strategy), but regardless this is what it's like to live for your ideals and find that you'll be dying childless for them as well.

I say that as a guy, who technically should have working spermatozoa into his 70's or even later. I try to think of what other guys go through with less self-control, I try to think of what women go through where the ceiling is much lower (early to mid 40's), and I gain a brand new appreciation for how messed up our world is. I also have one *very* deep concern, ie. what happens when these people get to that certain doom point that I feel I'm approaching internally, which is perhaps a bit like puberty in reverse, and they have absolutely don't have what they'd need to morally survive it or hold themselves together as human beings - ie. they spent everything they had in their attempt to launch. That's really going to go badly. Add a demagogue whose going to speak to their resentments? Lethal.

My approach to the problem I mentioned above - I have to, need to, remember that I'm a composite and that those ideals I hold to are mathematical, much longer lived than my body, and some things are important enough that the human experiment just isn't worth continuing if we lose track of them because what we become in that case is more debased than the apes we descended from. IMHO integrity is our only weapon. Peterson says life is tragic - no s***. Our culture has spent no time focusing on that, no time trying to orient people toward that reality, sees 'meaning' (as you suggested) and runs the other way and I heard Douglas Murray echoing your sentiments - ie. that a lot of people in Europe associate meaning as a precursor to pogroms thus a deep malefic. What's clear to me is that this system, on its present course, will wreck out badly. The only hope we do have is that each person, who can, works on galvanizing themselves against what nature would do to them (what it will do to most people) if they were fully given over to it.

"we don't need amazon, because we got 'tegrity" - in case you watch south park.

but here's a thing: individual 'tegrity does not necesarily get people anywhere -
Let's consider market solutions to fix climate issues:
Carbon cap and trade, for example.
I'd buy carbon emission certificates and keep them to myself/destroy them. I'd be burning money, but I'd have my intergrity. Except, I'm barred from buying carbon emission certificates. I have no access to that market.

I have zero ways of controlling supply chains, and while I could afford organic fairtrade eco sustainable food (food is ridiculously cheap in Germany, so cheap it's actually a problem), I have no way of checking any of these things.
So I have to trust the colourful stickers on the oranges...

There's actually a clothing manufacturer who's got his own supply chain completely under control - I buy there. But stuff is expensive, so I rarely buy new clothing. My father tells me I look like a bum for wearing old clothing. And I can see the looks I get from Professors I don't personally know at the university I work. They tend to think I'm a somewhat old student - not someone earning money.

Anyway. Personal integrity is not universal - my integrity and your integrity differ. Liberalism however is a mechanism that allows peaceful coexistence without universal ideas of integrity. But it also takes responsibility away from people - people can't be trusted with responsibility, just imagine! they might nationalize utilities!
English common law was invented to dodge taxes - the trust(fund) in particular.
And our democracy is designed to not allow many changes to the larger framework. ....
as in .... I can have integrity, but I feel that doesn't really matter. Because I'm not a CEO.
and a CEO can have integrity, but that doesn't matter, because the shareholders want ROI. Now.

This is really interesting, and I have to say I don't think you're grasping where I'm coming from.

Lets say hypothetically the global elite are going to starve us all to death. You can go out as a human being or as a shrieking zombie that's clawing the flesh off of other human beings to stay alive. The last way - everything you ever were, everything you ever went through, every hard time you survived, every person you helped, it's deleted, you ran full speed down the chain of evolution and became something more pathetic than most animals. It's a fate worse than death, it's having lived for absolutely nothing.

I'm talking about being able to survive being in your own skin or die with some shred of self-respect, irrespective of whether it 'gets you things'. Your ultimate judge is you, and that part is inescapable.

Ha. No, I really wasn't getting where you're coming from... In my scenario, the titanic hasn't hit the iceberg yet, but everyone with money would make a killing if it did.
In your scenario, it's a question of whether to keep playing the music while ship is sinking...

I'm guessing you don't tune in to Mark Blyth much. It would be an echo of what happened in Rome when the wealthy decided to move to the countryside and those charged with watching them slaughtered them and took what they have. His version of it is 'the Hamptons aren't a defensible position'. The other piece - when the public stops taking out loans for buying big ticket items or property and then starts taking out loans to cover basic staples, that'll set a cascade in motion that wipes out the financial sector.

Anyone who wants the world to burn and thinks they'll step out of the fire okay is in a very strange place and, outside sheer fluke of uncanny luck, things aren't likely to go as they'd expect.

Life might indeed be hell for a while but we've gotten so dutiful about supporting this system (not equal to integrity) and have our own senses of personal status so wrapped around it that it will more than likely take exquisite misery for us to get over it and agree that it was a sham.

To really boil this down in short - the system you're describing is antihuman. It can't last, it won't last, one could maybe try to safeguard themselves against the death throws of its suicide with certain kinds of investment or lifestyle decisions but sincerely adapting to it as 'the future' in my estimation is a huge mistake.

Also, I'm really starting to wonder if you understand the plain definition of what integrity actually is.

It's self-consistency. That's it.

It doesn't mean 'lay down and die because its the right thing to do' - that's only if you're absolutely f'd and, like in my example, making a choice in how you die. I made that example because your 'tegrity sounds like this has resonated with you all this time as just a bumper sticker word that people like because it's got a strong ring to it but none of them know what it means. It's not nebulous at all, it's really quite precise. That said I think definition 2) 'whole and undivided', is much more important than 1) 'the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles; moral uprightness', because 1) is generally a side-effect of 2).

Manly P Hall said it best perhaps when differentiating between an honest person and a person with integrity. An honest person when given 10 dollars for an 8 dollar product gives 2 dollars back because it's the right thing to do. A person with integrity gives 2 dollars back because 10 - 8 = 2.

no, I listen to Mark Blyth regularly.... but I've also seen the vice documentary on ultra-luxury bunkers in new zealand. In the words of Bruno Latour: they're going to Mars and New Zealand, at the same time.

And yes, this is a antihuman scenario - but, I'm here extrapolating from Yuval Harari: if humans really are a form of biological multi-purpose algorithm for complex problem-solving, it may be possible to create simulations of that, and have humanity-like AI. And then, what would real humans be good for? -
And with sufficiently high evolved autonomous kill-bots, there won't be an uprising of the guards, or any chance of even getting near the bunkers wit our burning pitchforks.
The Hamptons may not be a defensible position, but a drone-guarded bunker-colony on New Zealand is.

Now, please understand I don't want to offend you personally, when I'm phrasing this somewht provocatively, but:
do you think it's not possible to be a genuine, authentic, self-consistent a***hole?

I believe that that is possible, and personally tend towards a star trek tng like view - which is almost buddhist - a view in which one doesn't take oneself so seriously, precisely because one never is "whole", but always torn between one's amygdala and one's frontal cortex, and justice really is what the judge had for breakfast -meaning, the judge's bloodsugar has a *huge* influence on the harshness of sentencing.
Refusing to say things one doesn't believe in is great advice, and more people should do it - but it needs to come together with a preparedness to be proven wrong.

Actually the whole thing is quite likely to be tragic.

If they'd do what you're describing to us - one of their number, or some particular dictator and their army is going to see the 'all the power elite in one place' as the perfect time to kill them all and consolidate power for themselves.

Them all getting slaughtered probably won't erase the consequences or make those suffering on the mainland feel all that much better, heck that mass murder of the New Zealand bunkers would likely be the real 1984 leader. At the same time, as a sole megalomaniac, he might be great at mass-murder but he'll suck at governance and won't have the brains or sanity to keep things together beneath him no matter how much he thinks he knows how to use technology to dominate and submit the whole of world citizenry.


Yes, and it has genuine consequences. There's a thing called learning that we're forced to incur, especially with traumatic experiences, and if we use those experiences to just double down and get homicidal/genocidal then we pay the price for that. Ultimately it's a very paranoid life and the degree to which it pays out is dubious at best. It might be somewhat persuasive from the sidewalk that the most ruthless win but, they win for a season and often meet their ends at the hands of their toadies.

It's not practical, therefore it can't last.


That's only a problem if one equates complex with false.

You're always gathering new information, always have to reconcile it with your sum total of knowledge and experience, and it'll never be truly static even if one happens to be a master of self-deception and refusal to change in that they're still accruing a big tab of denials that they didn't have up to that point.