Scientific Truth VS Religious Truth - Dr Jordan Peterson on

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He seems to take perhaps more of a consequentialist lens when dealing with these mass movements but considers that individual integrity, forthrightness, and capacity to think from first principles will keep people out of the sorts of dystopias that passions, fueled by pain, can get people into when they feel like the chips are down and don't have a well-considered plan but take an archetypally pleasing one instead. I think he's right to the extent that psychologically healthy and philosophically matured people who can think independently are the bullwark of society against the passions of the masses.

What makes where we're at difficult is that we're economically headed toward a stack of crap sandwiches. There don't seem to be any good choices and it may be every bit as bad as the Great Depression. There will be all kinds of people who don't want to hear that, don't want to think about that, some of them will do something helpful which is try to find ways to dampen the blow that automation, globalization, and massive overvaluation bursts combined are going to deliver to our economic structures. Other people might not have that in them, could be aptitude or a whole list of other things, but they'd be more inclined to follow the tune of one particularly stylish and eloquent strong man or another. We could find ourselves in a position bad enough where someone will say "Suspend the rule of law - just for a short time - and I'll get this all worked out.". I'd really have to hope that we've seen this motif play out in history enough times that everyone would know better than to let that happen, no matter how bad things get, but this is also one of the failures of democracies in that the right number of people taking self delusion and voting with it could bring the country down for the count and end any semblance of traditional liberal human rights for decades.

I think this is maybe where people need to look at Jordan Peterson as someone whose calling people to look at their internal structures and consider the degree to which deep and subconscious drives and urges tend to fuel politics. I think back to something that's rather in agreement with this, something that Robert Sapolsky said about the conscious mind not being predominantly reasonable but being more like a press secretary for our desires, and I'd add to that one where primal desires in the subconscious mind are very good at hiding especially odious aims and goals from that press secretary which goes on to make up some innocuous fiction about what they're trying to do or why when the real goal beneath those desires to action is much closer to something that Brett Weinstein would call the pursuit of a transfer horizon.

I grew up in an upper middle class neighborhood and got bullied mercilessly through school so the lesson of mass hypocrisy being part of human makeup and being something much more deeply embedded in the structure of what we are than just some sort of moral confusion got etched quite deeply. To that degree I've had to come away with a view of humanity as apes following ape programming with a veneer of selective civility when it serves our evolutionary drives. So much of what Jordan Peterson, and Jung, and any of the depth psychologists have been trying to do is get people to make the press secretary to deeply question and even reform the president through their own integrity rather than being a simple shill and mouthpiece for an amoral dictator. That's what people like Rebel Wisdom talk about with respect to 'inner work' or shadow work. I don't even think there's much space to argue that such efforts aren't a real thing that produce real results, the trouble is resolving the question of how many people would do such a thing - ie. rewire their inner animal and even domesticate it to lower its rank hostility and antisocial leanings. If even a slightly larger percentage of people who weren't already doing that start doing it, like if 5-10% of people out there were either doing it under the name of 'spiritual work' or were even doing it without any such knowledge but knew it was what made sense, if that number jumps by another 5% it would absolutely have significant positive effects on where humanity could go. If it even jumped 5% that means you'd have likely 10% more people than before also toying with the idea, picking it up and putting it down, giving half-fast efforts, but that would be yet another 10% over and above what you had before. That's the sort of project that's on the table when people talk about working with their subconscious programming and attempting to update it for civility, for Enlightenment values, for putting truth first, etc.

I disagree, I think the mess we're in right now is primarily due to the failure to properly enforce simple possession. If you decriminalise usage of drugs, then every other legal measure to reduce drug usage is a waste of time. It doesn't matter how many suppliers you take out, there will be so much money to be made, that there will always be someone ready to take the last man's place.

If being caught with any amount was a guaranteed prison sentence and police offered cash rewards for reporting drug usage, many many people would stop taking drugs, a drop in demand would have a knock on effect on supply. JP said it himself, the police don't care, they don't want to enforce the law. That is the failure of drugs "war", not the existence of the laws themselves.



I thought my example was clear enough. How can large numbers of people breaking any law be a reasonable argument to get rid of the law? Surely what matters is the act and its effects on society, surely that is where the argument must be held. If so many people are breaking the law with impunity, then normally you look for failures in the system. You don't say ah well, we've reached a record number of speeding drivers this year, lets discuss decriminalisation. You say what the hell are the police doing?



That's the message we get, perhaps it does have that effect on most people or perhaps the message is faulty. Yet there are signs that it has the opposite effect in many.



You are right to wonder, but there is not much that will put your mind at ease, enough work just hasn't been done and the work itself is fraught with difficulty. More studies are done year on year, most of them not exactly positive for the pro-cannabis lobby. I think that's why there is such a desperate attempt to get cannabis legalised before we actually know the drug as well as we know alcohol for example (they know once it's legalised it will be almost impossible to undo). Problem is, the money just isn't there to fund this kind of unfashionable work. All the money is behind legalisation, which should raise eyebrows in skeptical people. This is the link I usually send people who say cannabis is drug that makes you lethargic. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog ... t-behavior
Again, its not definitive, the studies are small, the conclusions suggestive. But it's worrying.


.
There is a big problem studying cannabis and its effects on mental health. The whole profession is a bit wishy washy, the diagnosis for conditions often changes within the space of a few years. A good point made in the argument over the NHS and its treatment of mental health is that diagnoses are often missed, or misunderstood. They said that an increase of a mental health problem in any given area doesn't necessarily show up as increased diagnosis rates. It shows up as added homeless people, or added to petty crime data, or increased incidences of totally random violence. This as you can imagine makes studying it much more difficult than finding data that says if you smoke tobacco you are much more likely to get lung cancer.



It's a guess, something that needs proper investigation too.



It's not as well established as you think. Certainly not anywhere near tobacco or alcohol levels, those scourges whose effects we know all too well.



I wasn't sure what to think of it. Pretty sure drug usage alone does its fair share in destroying families and communities.



Debatable. Meth is certainly a horrendous drug. Heroin's dangers are somewhat overblown by the media, but still dangerous certainly. Even if you could prove that alcohol is somehow worse on some scale of evil and social disorder when compared to cannabis. That itself is not an argument for legalising cannabis, another potential or known scourge on a society, because "f**k it, who cares".

I think I understand what its like to be on the pro-gun control side of the debate in America. Some clever clogs on the other side saying things like "well assault rifles are lethal weapons, and they are legal, so why isn't my handheld napalm thrower legal?".


Yeah. There is a surprising amount of info out there showing unpleasant correlations. Its effect on otherwise promising young minds (as any teacher could have told you without a formal study) is particularly distressing.



Is it unreasonable of someone to see that every day and wonder if perhaps a mind altering drug like cannabis is a factor in those crimes? Naturally correlation is not causation... it seems to be the only thing taught in school these days. But what is often neglected is that correlation is how you FIND causation. Correlation can actually be a sign of causation. Yet dodgy corporations and billionaires, wanting to make trillions off tobacco 2.0 are desperate to get it legalised and in widespread usage before anyone can dig into the stats and determine whether or not cannabis might have all the effects of a biblical plague on our societies.

So in other words United States of Singapore or bust. No thank you.

I usually think of Japan when I think of a good, well enforced drugs policy. Drug usage is much lower, crime is lower in many other areas (connected perhaps?) and it's not exactly an uncivilised, totalitarian police state.

Edit: Perhaps I should add that Japan's policies mostly originated with the serious problems they had with widespread methamphetamine abuse in decades past. The hard ass policy directed at users seems to have worked.

Well, with the way things are going and the number of people you'll be able to find who've never tried an 'illicit drug' in their lives to have such insufficient point of reference to believe similar things you might just have to do some ideological tourism and repatriation.

This moves in the direction of banning things not on harm but on the sanctity of social conformity and creating group sacrifices for the sake of social bonding. I'd add, from what I've seen in a lot of angles of how human culture works - everything from refusing to forgive past prison convictions all the way down to holding arbitrary taboos has a certain silver lining in that if someone crosses a particular line (with or without harming anyone else) they join a group who is marked as okay to take everything from and divide the spoils. We're very dark, grimy, and shrewd animals like that.

Who knows, with some luck we could have the Chinese social credit system, a healthy dose of modernized Confucian philosophy, and anything from having tried an 'illicit' drug to having purchased a book on mysticism to not showing enough interest in Dancing with the Stars will be big deductions in credit score. If the universe would be a better place of a comet or asteroid hit the planet and wiped out all of humanity then I'd say I'm all for government doing anything to people it feels like and taking away as many human liberties as it pleases because we're a form of cancer and it just wouldn't matter anyway. Until there's objective proof of that as a permanent status of our species I'd prefer to be something closer to a social/civil libertarian because I believe the more people explore their inner and outer terrain they actually resolve internal problems and become less prone to violence or acts of criminal stupidity where as mass acts of government paternalism seem to cut the opposite way and creates herds of permanent children.

I understand where you are coming from. I believe in maximising certain freedoms in a society governed by law, I just don't see much value in unlimited freedom to self-stupefy (which it does in almost all users, despite lofty claims of "mind expansion" or similar) and to seek instant pleasures normally provided through long periods of intense effort and deferred gratification. I believe a society that battles it through law is going to be much healthier than one that doesn't. The mechanism is not hard to follow.

Malcolm Muggeridge infamously resigned from his post at the University of Edinburgh in 1968 when the university relaxed bylaws on the selling and purchasing of cannabis. His final speech was met with some jeers. I wouldn't have put it quite so poetically, or with quite so much religious refrain. But there is truth in his words.

“The students of this university are the beneficiaries of centuries of selfless scholarship. You are supposed to spearhead progress and to carry on the torch of humanity. Speaking for myself there is practically nothing that you could do in a mood of rebellion against our impoverished way of life for which I should not feel some degree of sympathy. But how infinitely sad, how macabre that the form of your rebellion should be a demand for drugs, for the most tenth rate sort of self indulgence ever known in history. All is prepared for a release of new life. We await great works of art, the spirit of adventure and courage, and what do we get from you? Self centered folly. You are on a crazy slope. For myself, I always come back to the King, to Jesus, to the Christian notion that all our efforts to make ourselves happy will fail, but that sacrifice for others will never fail. A man must become a new man, or he is no man. Or so at least I have concluded, having failed to find in past experience and present dilemmas any alternative proposition. As far as I am concerned, it is Christ or nothing. Goodbye and God bless you.”

Could you clarify your context plz...
Is it:
1. Police don't care about drug use...
2. Police don't care about the (soft) drug cannabis...




My point:
Just because a law has been passed doesn't make it ethical, moral...or practical...
Most people have little respect for nanny statism...

Presumably you will be thinking:
"But that wasn't my context", and you would be right...
I am simply addressing the wombat in the room that all laws are not always reasonable...
Most thinking people think and don't simply accept everything/everythink the establishment dictates...
(Unless you live in a country such as North Korea)

Also consider the hypocrisy of the legalisation of alcohol which does considerably more social damage...
Where is the credibility...

Regarding: "You don't say ah well, we've reached a record number of speeding drivers this year, lets discuss decriminalisation."
In germany there is no speed limit on some roads: "many rural sections have no general speed limit."...
With the proviso that the vehicle is road worthy and under control...
We have similar roads and road conditions in some parts of Australia, yet we don't have any sections that have an unlimited speed limit...

My Point:
Laws are often arbitrary...

Now, if we consider the context of speeding drivers behaving dangerously due to poor road condition, poor control or introducing a wild cards factor (road cowboys) defying reasonable expectation by other road users, this "changes the game" entirely...surely...

Now consider the following context:
The mary users that are at home and too stoned to get off the couch...
Chalk and cheese, surely...

Because of the size of this reply is so large already, I will split my response in two parts...

Last edited by Pepe on 04 Nov 2018, 6:46 pm, edited 1 time in total.

This is where I can't escape the conclusion that you're ideologically bent. Almost anyone I talk to who trips largely says the same thing I did. Almost anyone who had the outlook you put forward who does eventually get talked into exploring psychoactive substances has their views radically changed on what they are and what their value and purpose is. Most people I know who smoke weed daily, I can't imagine doing that and having the results they do but god bless them, they're highly functional people and plenty of which it actually acts medicinally in the sense that they were very high strung hair-trigger temper types and it helped them regrip and sublimate that. This is why I drew a picture earlier of someone still living on 5th grade DARE software - it sort of takes that to believe exactly what you're offering above, that or an explicit belief that the bible is the exact dead-literal word of God where all of these things would fall under pharmakeia, thus witchcraft, and any arguments for self-improvement through consciousness alteration are already smacking of Pelagianism when all you need is Jesus's death and resurrection - not self-improvement, not intellect, not anything else.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGK84Poeynk

One doesn't Always Find Truth In Religion And That's For Sure;
And it's even Rarer to Find Religion in Science except for when
Science
Becomes
A Symphony
With Emotions
And Not Just A
Science Abstract With No Soul.
It's Not really Hard to See Nature as
God in the Video included here with Carl
Sagan As A Rather Reserved Priest; and Neil
de Grasse Tyson as more of an Evangelist
Bringing the Good News that We are the
Cosmos Unto Itself as Carl Sagan puts
it in more of a Reserved Poetic Way
of Art. Carl Sagan, admitted that
His Usage of Hallucinogenic
Drugs Allowed him
the 'Mind Space'
in Greater
Open Minded
Ways to Question his
Previous Materialistic
Reductionist Views in Smaller
Of A Inner Multi-Uni-Verse of
Being Human; And Famous Atheist
Sam Harris Admits that Hallucinogenic
Drugs and Meditation Helps Bring him a Spiritual
Ascending Transcending Greater Mindful and Body Full
Awareness of Life, Increasing Human Potential too; as yes,
Science Shows this is Now True, Overall too. And Sam Also
Noted that for Some Folks stuck in a More Mechanical Systemizing
State of Thinking that it does take Some 'Substance Additives' to take
them out
of Neo
Cortex
Prison.
Some Of Us Folks, More Open
Minded And Bodied Require
No External Substances at all;
Just A Free Dance For me And A Free Write
is all i need; sure, i am one of the Lucky
ones where Heaven is just a Step away
of Dance Within and A Song to Spark
A Flame Then Torch and Overall
Bonfire of Loving all there is
to Love about Life in
other Words
God
also
known
felt
and
sensed as
All That Is for Those
Who Do come to be
Love iNCaRNaTE at/in
Essence of Human Form NoW.
Christianity; as far as the Actual Essence
of the Teachings per the Story of a Humble
Yogi-like Humble Dude Who Put himself as Humble
Servant And As Good Cop Jesus Version, Never King Above
Anyone Else; Who Also insisted that the Last are First This
Way as folks Still Vault His Story Book Version into A King
Instead of Servant that is Anti-Christ to the Essence of His Message
is Verily Disappointing Where i live as Politics is More Important than
Love overall as a Political Party that has acted against all the Beatitudes
of Jesus as Written Story is taunted as 'The God' to Vote for; Both at Catholic
Church i attend; and at an Extended Family Southern Baptist Group that Meets
on the Pastor's Farm We Attend once a Month For Dinner as they also Prayed for
the 'Anti-Christ' Political Party to Stay in Charge now. True; you don't take Health
Care away from the Poor and Give the Money to the Rich if you are anything like a
Christian Now and the
List goes on in
Lies over
Truth
too;
Per over 5000
Misleading Statements
and Falsehoods by the Head
'Anti-Christ' Dude in Charge Now
As That Phrase Applies to Against The
Beatitudes in the Story Book of Good Cop Jesus Still.
And to top that off, the Priest today while bringing some
Good News that Love Is the Only Two Commandments that
Count as far as Loving it ALL (GoD) As One Love Themselves; but that ain't
Gonna Work for a 'Narcissist' like Trump, who Loathes Himself to the Point
That he Needs Constant Approval from others to fill up the Empty inside; nope;
That IS the Definition
of the First
as the
Last
Still Now
so far away from
Anything that Hears or sees Love Now;
Anyway, the Priest Asserted that 'this Love
of Jesus' was no Emotion or Feeling but Just
a Neo-Cortical Rational Choice; as even though
he Graduated in the top 10 of His Class; he hasn't
Got the 'Memo' From Science Yet, Apparently that Emotions Move
Most of our Rational Decisions First; And When You Have no Love
Within to Move so-called Rational Decisions, you Get Trump and
Most of the Rest of the Republican Politicians now too; but of course
that is the reason most folks get into Politics for a Power and Status
High that never
Replaces
the
Empty
Place within
without the Real
Feeling and Sensing
of Heaven NoW oN EartH (LoVE)
Meh; The Deacon's Wife Agreed
with me at least; but it seems i have
A Way With Women More to Convince
Them About Stuff In Life And That's Good
Enough For me as you can't make people
Save their Souls from 'the other place'
away
from
Agape Love Now;
She even Agreed that
those who don't find Heaven
in Life Now as Love Will Never Find it in a Dirt Nap Next;
But of course; her Husband wasn't around when we talked about it.
Anyway; for Those Folks With A Soul in the Audience (Church and Farm)
The Cognitive Dissonance Must Be Squeezing Them a bit in HeART at least;
but it
did not
Appear
that the
Fire Of Agape Love
Lived Within; That's Sad;
Huuggeeely Sad And DArk
Away From: LiGHT Now So Long to: So Lost.

In my country, both. On the books there are rather draconian laws against possession. An unlimited fine and 5 years in prison for cannabis. In practice, it's very difficult to find someone who has even been to a court for simple possession of cannabis. Higher grade drugs are taken a bit more seriously, but not much. Police usually deal with cannabis by issuing a "cannabis warning" which is unrecorded. It's de facto decriminalised and has been for several decades. Drug usage has been going up and up ever since the police and courts stopped caring, but somehow people think de jure decriminalisation will make things better.



Don't disagree. You're avoiding my problems with the argument though. Mass breaking of a law is no argument for doing away with it. Argue the ethics, argue the morality. Don't argue that because many people are breaking the law that we should do away with the law. It's the argument of a moron, which my crass example applying it to rape was supposed to highlight. I should have stuck to the rape example, it works much better. According to some sources, rape is an epidemic in our countries. Rape culture. What was it? 1 in 3 women apparently raped in college. It's a very difficult crime to prosecute too. Let's do away with the law right? Right?



I've covered this, the problems with alcohol are an invitation to discuss further restrictions on or banning alcohol entirely. It's not an argument to introduce yet another drug.



Didn't I also cover this too? Doesn't seem to stop many users from driving like lunatics. There's a worrying number of users who go on to commit extreme violence while under the influence of cannabis. One chap was not too stoned to get off his couch and bite his dog's nose off.



Not entirely unexpected. I still stand by my point that the involvement of gangs will not cease unless the government refuses to tax it. Is having cannabis in the hands of cynical corporations really that much better for society? The same kind of people who sell tobacco, who spent billions lobbying, advertising, dismissing correlations about tobacco and cancer? I'm not so sure.

And you are not bent the other way? Bent towards maximising your ability for self-indulgence and "experimentation", its effects on the rest of society be damned? Is it so wrong to ask you to stop doing something to benefit your fellow citizens?



No other way to deal with tempers of course. Meditation? Self-control? Real medicines prescribed by doctors? No, it has to be "self-medication" with a toxic substance which not only destroys physical health, but potentially will see them in a mental asylum in a decade or two. And what's more this substance should be freely available to all, high and low, to use recreationally, sold and advertised by the people who run tobacco companies.

Being ideologically bent usually suggests having a strong opinion that's not commensurate with the facts. That's why I considered it - and still consider it - an appropriate comment.

You might back that up with some facts I have ignored or dismissed. I think I've been fairly clean when it comes to facts in this argument. I don't claim to have proof of much, only concerning correlations that should be investigated before we take a potentially irreversible leap, giggling as we go.

We could have done that a fair while back, I was trying to figure out if where you stood was as radical as it looked and it seems like you walked that forward nearly every step of the way.

Given that's the case this topic's almost too broad for us not to narrow it down to at least one aspect. I think the current growth in understanding about psychedelics and their capacity to make already psychologically healthy people even healthier as well as help people go through end of life experiences or overcome PTSD is an available enough body of knowledge that you can barely time anything in to Google that's related and not see articles along those lines. Marijuana is more of a mixed bag in that it has upsides, it has downsides, and most of the downsides don't seem to be directly related to the substance itself unless we're bringing up the consideration of people under 25 interrupting their frontal lobe development.

My personal outlook on these things is that I'm at least much more for their benefits being explored and if we were too childish a culture to have them fully legalized I'd least strongly consider, especially for psychedelics, a much broader model for their appropriate use (supervised if needed) than just doctors offices or laboratory settings - most of the later we've already done and a responsible policy for outward expansion of their availability and use (trying to strike a balance where proper use is maximized and abuse minimized) seems like it's the next logical step.

Come on, you already know that to be true. A society plagued with alcohol abuse (which is possible to take in moderation with no ill effects) is not going to magically be able handle other drugs in a responsible fashion. I'm not against medicinal use overseen by a doctor, but going beyond that, into widespread availability...



Any idea what that would look like? I am interested.