Peterson started this class partially hoping to explain why people defend their belief systems and why they are found valuable. Belief systems regulate people’s emotions by helping them orient themselves in the world so that what they do matches what they want in the social environment where they are successful. People defend their beliefs systems because they are used to make sense of the world and then to act out making sense of the world with everyone around them.
What happens when two groups of people have different beliefs systems? You can give yours up for theirs, you can fight, or you can assimilate. Could you deconstruct your beliefs to find essential principles or guidelines to find similarities despite their differences? Can we find viable principles in them?
Communism and capitalism are ideologies pitted against each other. Are their differences meaningful to debate or as postmodernists say, they are both just power games and debate is meaningless?
Universities are now making it mandatory to take classes in equity, which is equality of outcome, teaching that wherever there isn’t equality the system is corrupt and must be destroyed. But we can endlessly multiply categories of people in society and their inequalities so the notion is futile. The only way to have total equality is if everyone has nothing. Why are these ideas returning with such force when history shows the bloody carnage that resulted in trying to implement these ideas?
Are there principles that Western civilization is based on that are more than mere opinion? Nietzsche said if you take the core principles out of society the whole system shakes and crumbles. When we kill God or transcendent values, what’s left? Dostoyevski was working on this at the same time in Crime and Punishment. A character in that book wants to solve multiple problems by killing someone, believing the only thing holding him back is arbitrary moral convention. He commits the crime and hell breaks loose. Dostoyevsky is investigating the idea that with no God or transcendent or higher values anything goes.
Peterson is frustrated with Sam Harris and radical atheists who believe that we can abandon the transcendent and be purely rational. Naked self-interest is completely rational. Harming others to get what I want is completely rational. Where is the pathway from the rational to an egalitarian virtue? Why the hell not every man for himself? It’s a fairly coherent philosophy that can be implemented in the world with a great level of success. The ethics Harris and Dawkins take for granted as rational come from a long history of mythology. You don’t get to wipe that out and assume that the ethics it delivers are just rationally axiomatic.
You don’t have to argue for the existence of God. You can say God is our ethics personified. The point is, western civilization bases its ethics on God. What’s at the bottom of the idea of a transcendent value? How can we address this without appealing to metaphysics? We can say God can be anything. What—if anything—is our culture predicated on?
Out of Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky came Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn who wrote The Gulag Archipelago and documented the horrors and atrocities that resulted from trying to implement state-based equality. Why don’t students learn about this in college when taught left wing politics? The system didn’t work because it was predicated on the wrong values. Whatever we’re doing in the West works despite its flaws.
Solzhenitsyn advised that
Nietzsche said we had to create out own values, becoming supermen, to replace God, which was a bad idea. If you are the giver of values, you inflate yourself into a demigod and announce the values you thrust forth. What’s to keep you humble? Hitler didn’t create himself or Nazi Germany, it was co-created with the Germans. He became the mouthpiece of their darkest desires and they fueled each other.
Jung studied Nietzsche in great detail and saw the flaws in the idea that we must create our own values. Jung and Freud paid attention to dreams and their language and that there is great significance to them. They were informative. Freud wrote The Interpretation of Dreams and saw them as wish fulfillments and that the primary motivation of human beings are sexual. Jung wrote Symbols of Transformation about the fantasies of an American schizophrenic woman and relating them to mythology.
Myths are birthed from dreams, which a mode of information presentation. They both share a narrative structure and are narrative-like. They are movies that play in your head, like daydreams, involuntarily. Dreams, like thoughts, think and dream in you. What are they, what are they thinking, and why?
Freud thought dreams were sneaky and cryptic because they want to tell you what your conscious mind doesn’t want to hear, tied up in the idea of repression. Jung disagreed, believing dreams are being is clear as possible, it’s just the best they can do. They are the birthplace of thought the same way artists are the birthplace of culture. Your mind is groping outward to try to comprehend what it has not yet comprehend by trying to mapping it to image. It’s incoherent because it’s not a full-fledged thought. It’s potential that could be clarified and brought into reality.
From where to thoughts come to pop into our head, the void? The gold Buddha sitting in the image of the lotus is an image of the lotus bursting up from the bottom into fruition. Maybe these ideas have roots. There seems to be a necessary pattern in morality that is intrinsic and manifested in culture and isn’t just arbitrary or learned. The dialogue between culture and nature that tries to make the proper articulation of that spring forward in each individual. Your nature strives so you can manifest yourself properly in the world and culture is meant to aid you in that.
Piaget had some interesting ideas, hoping to reconcile science and religion. He was interested in the spontaneous morality the developed in children as they played together. What is central to all of them? What’s the ideal?
The dominance hierarchy is in your biology. You become healthier and experience wellbeing at every level physically, emotionally, and psychologically when doing the right thing, and we put the right thing at the top. It’s anything but arbitrary opinion.
When you look at the night sky, you project gods into the cosmos and populate the unknown with deities from your imagination. When you remove them from the cosmos, do they go away? No, they back to your imagination. The corpses of your gods live in your imagination, so where do you go to revivify them? Your imagination. What’s down there? Just mess and catastrophe, or is it patterned? Order in the form of archetypes exist down there—structure looking for things to fill it with.
We are predisposed to language. We babble all possible phonics as babies and can potentially speak any language until we absorb a language from our culture and fill those babblings with words. Similarly, we are predisposed to thinking in archetypes and fill this with data.
A fundamental question of existence is why keep struggling? If you cut off one head on a hydra and more keep coming in endless struggle and suffering, why go on? Is life really worth living? Why not just kill yourself and end the game? People who have become truly malevolent answer that life is worth destroying. It’s not irrational to work for the destruction of being. It might be the most rational thing you can come up with depending on your presuppositions.
Jung sees the birthplace of archetypal ideas in the imagination. They are representations of patterns of adaptive behavior that have evolved collectively. We determine morals and ethics together by figuring them out over history.
There is nothing more noble than encountering the unknown and articulating what you find. This will make you practically successful. You’ll be admired by men, selected by women, and practically successful in life. Your ideals are trying to manifest themselves and make themselves known to you, which is what religious education is for. We’ve lost that.
The hero goes out into chaos and makes order, then when order becomes too rigid and oppressive you bring it to chaos and restructure it to improve it.
Joseph Campbell is a mediator between Jung and general culture, but all of his ideas come from Jung.
The story of the Buddha is almost a perfect parallel structurally to the story of Adam and Eve. Are we imposing structure on the story or are there archetypes that underlie them that we simply notice?
The Bible was authored by multiple people over long periods of time and organized later into a collective story out of which the sense arises. It evolved from bottom up. We acted first and made sense of it later. Information is encoded in action and we don’t know why that’s the case. The best you can do is dream yourself up and bring it into articulated existence. Most of the time you don’t even know what you’re up to and have little control, so good luck trying to control someone else.
The reason the Bible has so many contradictions is because dreams have so many contradictions. Too much coherence loses the unarticulated richness in the premature attempt at coherence. Waking thought sacrifices completeness for coherence and dream thought sacrifices coherence for completeness. Precise thought excludes too much (left hemisphere, linguistically mediated, sequential, logical) and imprecise thought is not sufficiently coherent (right hemisphere, imagistic, emotion based) so we do both. The right hemisphere wants a picture of everything so it’s not precise, so the left articulates for precision and clear action but loses richness. The Bible is half dream and half articulated thought which has the advantages and disadvantages of both. We have to face everything thougt we don’t understand anything completely. We need the interplay of dream and articulation.
A healthy family functions in which all the individuals thrive and the family is strong. The individual benefits along with the group and keeps bringing one another up. That’s the goal of a healthy society. You try to maintain what is stable because it falls apart easily. An orchestra is comprised of individuals doing their part to create a harmonious symphony and everything comes into coherence. All levels of being are stacked coherently. Everyone is having a good time. It’s a glimpse of paradise.
The first stories of Genesis are unidentifiably ancient. God only knows how old they are. Oral traditions can last centuries. They are repeated and acted out. There is a place in history past which we cannot look. Everything pops up about 5,000 years go and everything before that is lost.
Where is the meaning in a literary work? It’s the words in relation to the sentences in relation to the paragraphs in relation to the chapters in relation to the book in relation to culture in which the book is produced.
The Bible endlessly cross-references itself and tries to connect everything to everything to create coherence. You can pull out meanings at one level of analysis that you can’t at another. You can focus on a particular story or see how it’s used in coherence with the bigger story which changes the meaning.
To believe the Biblical stories and ask if they are true is to ask whether or not you agree with the moral of the story or the archetype as a valid representation of reality, not whether or not God actually exists or whether or not the Bible makes sense scientifically or whether or not the events and people in it are actually historical.
In Genesis, to be naked and not ashamed is to lack self awareness that you have made yourself vulnerable and unprotected. Things were pretty good when we weren’t self-conscious and didn’t know we were naked. Clothing is a barrier of protection between you and the world. Knowing good and evil is to be aware of threat and to learn to be malevolent.
In Genesis, Adam and Eve are unconscious beings in a safe
space and a serpent comes in to open their eyes and reveal suffering and death.
If these stories are archaic superstitions written by ignorant people in the past, why do they make so much sense?
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