67) Purpose: A Four-part series -- Part 1 -- "Tearing Down the Wall"
The antidote to suffering and alienation, is love. It’s trusting. Reaching out for connection. It’s admitting weakness, accepting yourself, and accepting the Other. It’s embracing the unknown, together. It’s courage, in the Brene Brown sense of speaking your truth, with your whole heart.
53) Dissociation, Part 2
These experiences pile up. They create anxiety. Depression. Embarrassment. Guilt. Despair. For me most of all, shame. You feel like a fucking failure. Not “someone who failed”, but A FAILURE, like it is actually who you are. Failure is your Essence.
52) Motherfuckin' Dissociation
I believe that inside every one us is a bad-ass motherfucker, just waiting to bust out and live our passion, and let our freak flag fly, and be awesome, and the world is your oyster, and all that awesome shit. But, so many people today — literally millions and millions and millions — are preventing themselves from doing so.
50) Dirty Feet (TW: suicide, sexual assault)
Thinking about suicide has been my main hobby for 14 years, 7 months and 16 days.
You were right about sexual assault, especially for kids.
“It makes you see yourself as a demon. So you check-out, dissociate, a lot of the time, because who wants to be a demon?”
I realize why I kept this fantasy alive for so long.
I believed the only worthy thing to do with my life was make sure my last act will be one of love.
47) Jordan Peterson, Part 3: The Bucko Mistake; Sub-section 2: Metaphorically Terrible Advice
This is an insidious problem with telling Bucko to sort himself out. This advice is most relevant to people who are struggling, but it is precisely those people who are likely the least equipped to apply the advice skillfully and effectively.
46) Jordan Peterson: Part 3: The Bucko Mistake; Sub-section 1: Literally Terrible Advice
“Stand up straight with your shoulders back.” This is Jordan’s first Rule of Life. It is intended both metaphorically and literally. And in both cases, it is terrible advice.
45) Jordan Peterson, Part 2: More problems...; Sub-section 3: Issues of Scale
We need to ask whether humans predominantly survived the billions of years by functioning at an individual level or at a group level. I believe we are predominantly a group-selected species, and that therefore, our “fundamental human nature” has far more to do with processes that connect us to one another and allow us to function harmoniously together, than with processes of individual power and competitive dominance-striving.
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.
43) Jordan Peterson, Part 2: More Problems with Fundamental Assumptions; Sub-section 1: The Naturalistic Fallacy
The weird thing about getting eaten by bears is that it IS totally natural, as natural as falling off a log or getting a sunburn. No plastic, metals, electricity or advanced computing required. Not a single human invention is necessary, not a single alteration from Nature in the raw.
Lots of other things we have come to see as undesirable are natural. Ebola. Rape. Eating your own babies sometimes.
Reasoning that follows the basic logic of “it’s natural, so it’s good” is understood as the Naturalistic Fallacy, an elemental error in reasoning.
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.
39) Jordan Peterson: Part 1, Subsection 2: Philosophical Foolishness
If you examine [Jordan Peterson’s] rhetoric and restate it in the simplest terms, it would be something like, “If you disagree with me (about this), you are Ignorant, Evil, or both.”
I should not need to point out how incredibly dangerous an ideology this is. In fact, in the Great Pissing Contest of Most Murderous Ideologies of All Time, I nominate as my champion, this specific belief system: “I and mine are right and good; you and yours are ignorant and evil.”
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.
36) Jordan Peterson: Prologue - A personal note
I feel it’s important to try here, and share a few thoughts about the whole phenomenon of Jordan Peterson. It’s….complicated to get into, personally, for a bunch of reasons….which is why I’m starting this series of essays with this ‘personal prologue’, because I think it is important to contextualize my views.
34) Less than half, and none of the important ones: Part 4
I believe that healing starts with feeling.
Feeling the truth of your pain. Feeling the ache of loneliness that seems to open into infinite blackness in your heart. Feeling the guilt that eats away at you for the ways you know, deep down inside, that you have failed people, or yourself. Feeling your awfulness. Your grief. Your desperation. Your failures. If you don’t first stop and FEEL the soft, suffering animal that you are, then you will spend your life trying to hammer yourself into shape. This won’t make you stronger; it will just make you bruised and broken and exhausted. The “road to self-improvement” will become more like a hamster wheel, a treadmill that takes you nowhere.
33) Less than half, and none of the important ones: Part 3
“She said she had made a list of all the qualities she wanted in a partner. At the end, she concluded, “he has less than half. And none of the important ones.”
This was the end of my sanity, for a long time. I don’t know why. I just stopped being a person. I was a blank page. And anything written on me turned into invisible ink.
…..Less than half, and none of the important ones. I hate that phrase. It still haunts me, practically every day.”
32) Less than half, and none of the important ones: Part 2
Independence is a delusion. And it’s a dangerous one. Anyone who has been abused knows the deep truth of interdependence, right in their very bodies. The assaulted. The betrayed. The terrorized. The gas-lighted. But also the lonely. The invisible. The unwanted. The ridiculed and rejected.
People live out, in their consciousnesses, their bodies’ attempts to ‘process’ what has happened to them in life; we construct our entire ‘selves’ around this problem of body-world adaptation. It’s good to remember that.
31) Less than half, and none of the important ones: Part 1
Have you ever been on the receiving end of someone’s harshness? Criticism? Gas-lighting? Name-calling? Bullying? Shaming? Humiliating? Lying?
Well, “sticks and stones may break your bones but words….”
Just stop. Right there. Because “words can never hurt you” is absolute, dangerous, bullshit. Words can break your heart, poison your mind, even destroy your life.
25) Gratitude Day 5: Aging
Thich Nhat Hanh once likened life to rapids that tumble down the mountainside in a frothy, ecstatic rush, slowing somewhat to a burbling, meandering stream further down, then broadening into a slow, flat, peaceful river near the bottom. And then eventually emptying, into the ocean.
22) Gratitude Day 3: Bugs
I’m grateful for bugs. They’re the choir singing the Song…..of my home.