169) The despair you are feeling right now: Dead children, bombed hospitals, the lies of tyranny in a dying world, and the crushing hopelessness of “What the hell can I DO about any of this?”
What can we do, in the midst of a genocide? What can we do, in the midst of tyranny that’s been happening, and strengthening, since before we were born? We can we do, in a world that burns its own living flesh, due to the greed of the most-privileged minority who clamour for ever-more wealth and power?
None of us want this.
64) Jordan Peterson, Part 5: The Perfect House Problem; Subsection 7 -- The Rebel Alliance
The Rebel Alliance depended on a dead dude, a quixotic Elf who talked like Grover, a wannabe hero with an inferiority complex, an arrogant smuggler, an incomprehensible BigFoot, an annoying and basically useless robot, a super-cool robot who looked like a futuristic garbage can, and a bitchy, bad-ass princess.
61) Jordan Peterson, Part 5: The Perfect House Problem; Subsection 4 - Atheist Indigenous Immigrant Women Should Rule the World
Let’s let the peace-lovers and wisdom-seekers, the poor and disenfranchised, ‘rule the world’ for, say, one generation of humanity, and see if we’re better off, or worse. I have every bit of faith that they’ll do no worse, at worst, than the men, most of whom are very wealthy men to boot, who’ve had the reins for MOST of the past….uh….forever?
57) The bleeding hearts and the artists: 'Requiem' for a species
Rational discussion is important. But woefully insufficient. And people’s impatience at others’ ideological closedness, when they themselves have stared into the abyss and wept over the bottomless pit of human atrocity, is perfectly, perfectly understandable.
44) Jordan Peterson, Part 2: More problems...; Subsection 2: Bear Food reasoning in Darwinian/Functionalist clothing
In short, just because something WAS functional, or is functional in some ways, does not mean it’s good. Similarly, just because something is ‘natural’ certainly doesn’t mean it’s good. And just because something is “the winner” in some contest, doesn’t necessarily mean that’s the best outcome, or even a desirable one. You can’t reason backwards from what exists now, to infer that it is better than what ceased to exist. Cain was not a better man than Abel; he was just a better murderer.
42) Afterbirth in a field: The answer to the question of life, the universe, and everything...
Soften into your true animal body and feel your rawness, your wildness, your strength and your vulnerability, your life. And your death.
If you have not done this, then you should. I would call it as close to a moral imperative as anything Kant ever came up with. Even more important than masturbating, if you can believe that.
41) Jordan Peterson, Part 1, Subsection 4: Moral Foolishness
It is very easy for a “sort yourself out” message to get co-opted by the standard individualistic identity project that most of us are already struggling with, as we try to ‘self-improve’ and get motivated and “awaken the giant within” and all that. To the extent that the psychology of motivation gets applied in ways that are unwise, that are not conducive to both individual and collective human flourishing but instead could simply be in the service of a person’s ego, the “sort yourself out” approach, can easily become a force of destruction, like a once-cozy campfire that has gotten out of control….
40) Jordan Peterson, Part 1; Subsection 3: Theoretical Foolishness
But scaffolding is far more subtle than that. It happens not only at the emotional-to-behavioural level, but right down at the millisecond level of human consciousness, the level at which our emotions are guiding our perceptions which in turn are constructing a reality in accordance with our emotions — the level of our implicit story-telling hardware (and software).
The essential, long-term reason why compassion is so important for babies, is because it helps their own neurobiology learn to regulate itself. This is the basic insight of attachment research; receiving attentive care (i.e., compassionate, loving, responsive attunement with others) allows one’s own infant, raging, chaotic neurobiology to be, in effect, soothed by the more stable, grounded, controlled, resilient, more ‘ordered’ neurobiology of the attachment-figures.
38) Jordan Peterson: Part 1: Problems with fundamental assumptions
In the most succinct way I can put it, I think a good part of Jordan’s recent public narrative has a deep and fundamental problem — it is Foolish.
22) Gratitude Day 3: Bugs
I’m grateful for bugs. They’re the choir singing the Song…..of my home.