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/lit/ - Literature


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23342202 No.23342202 [Reply] [Original]

>Reductive physicalism meets random evopsych conjecture meets banal WebMD recommendations with a tiny bit of interesting ideas from complexity studies sprinkled on top.

No wonder young men have si many issues. Is this really the best response that could be mustered? They should just be told to read Augustine or à Kempis.

>> No.23342264
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23342264

lmao

>> No.23342266

>>23342202
Peterson is not a reductionist or physicalist, since he believes the most real things are not matter but values, narratives and archetypes.

>> No.23342309

>>23342202
Young men were educated to be liberal atheists who worship science.
Not many would read explicitly religious authors like Augustine or Kempis.

>> No.23342347

>>23342202
A mouthpiece for state power, no more, no less.

>> No.23342362

>>23342266
The opening chapter seems pretty reductionist. It draws an analogy between the human good and lobsters, and then points to the fact that "the same chemicals are involved in each," to try to substantiate this claim. But one can just as easily find even more ancient examples of symbiosis.

In any event, he goes in to rank people on a numeric scale of dominance, where the top is clearly superior and the bottom is clearly worse, with the framing in physicalism, biological terms. But Plato, in the Protagoras and The Statesman, has already shown the cascade of mistakes that can follow from trying to reduce normative measure to some point along a number line (more or less is always better, or variance from some point is always better/worse). This simply doesn't work for many measures, e.g. the proper length of a speech, and the human good is filtered through such measures.

More importantly, the big difference Aristotle, Plato, St. Augustine, etc. start with in ethics is the difference between what the appetites and passions desire and what is actually good for us and leads to a good life. But here, being a "10" on dominance is presented as unambiguously good. "Oh wow, all the women will want to have sex with you." Funny then how so many tyrants and celebrities as miserable, become drug addicts, or kill themselves. It's almost like the human telos might be related to what makes man human, and not a beast. But where is Logos in this narrative? Nowhere to be seen in this section.

>> No.23342403

>>23342362
I have never read Peterson, but somehow I have read plenty of people criticizing him.
This might be the first time I have ever read a good criticism of him.

>> No.23342410

>>23342362
In this book he draws a parallel between animal dominance hierarchies, which are based mostly on bioindicators of fertility combined with violence, and human male dominance hierarchies, but in other places, he claims that dominance hierarchies in human males are based on "competence, not violence, unless they turn dark."
The proper thing to conclude is that the guy is insane, stupid or a bullshitter, or some combination of these.
Also, I'm highly suspect of clearly effeminate men who speak in the language of dominance.

>> No.23342444

>>23342362
Fair points, but if you're looking to critique Peterson's philosophically you may be better off reading Maps of Meaning, since it's an academic book. It may be more your thing as this is just a self-help book for a popular audience.
I think also you're sort of over-criticising details and focusing less on the bigger picture. Peterson probably wouldn't disagree with anything you're saying, he's very much aware of the danger of dominance hierarchies when they become tyrannical, and he also doesn't believe that life is constituted of a single dominance hierarchy, but he does believe one conceptualisation of the transcendent ideal of what is good could be framed as what allows you to succeed across many dominance hierarchies simultaneously -- which also necessitates, for example, graciously losing some games. Likewise he would also agree with the Aristotelian ethical notion that virtue is to be found in moderation between opposites, not in more or less of any quality -- he's a Jungian so he very much believes in the Via Media between chaos and order.

>> No.23342453

>>23342410
Do you believe in the existence of human hierarchies? What are they based on?

>> No.23342463
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23342463

>>23342202
Counterpoint: Saint Augustine and all the other saints/older philosophers, were literally broke, unemployed, at times homeless, incels. They didn't own a house. They didn't have a horse or cart. They didn't have a GF.

Socrates is broke and gets executed as a common criminal. Boethius moralfags too hard and gets tortured and killed (low T kvetching vs barbarian will). St. Francis is literally a homeless man, as is St. Anthony.

They didn't have good work ethic. We might respect them for sitting down to write to some degree, but mostly it was doing the bare minimum to live off lentils and then spend all their free time coomtemplating. When you're a bearded incel who literally lives in a tiny, unadorned "cell," living off cabbages, all so that you have more time to coomptemplate and OD on Neoplatonism you might consider that you have a problem. Being a nice guy doesn't mean giving all your shit away or telling everyone who wants they can live at your house (literally Benedictines do this). It's a negative T, negative dominance lifestyle and it shows when you look.

>> No.23342479

>>23342463
Saint Augustine was a wealthy Roman citizen and famously had a concubine before his conversion.

>> No.23342481

>>23342453
Do I "believe" in them? What do you mean by that?
Do I believe in their innateness? No. Do I believe some people can brutalize others with impunity and others cant? I've no choice, its reality.

>> No.23342483

>>23342463
>ascetics didn't have good work ethic
Just fucking rangeban all Americans already

>> No.23342503

>>23342403
Not our fault you're retarded

>> No.23342715

>>23342479
And he gave all his money away and got rid of his GF.

>> No.23342729
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23342729

>>23342444
Right, but this is probably the thing young men least need to hear about, especially today where empty "tough-guyism" is an extremely widespread cope for a sense of emasculation in modernity. E.g., pic related.

The setting up of "dominance = better," is prone to all sorts of error. Plato's illustration of the way in which the tyrannical man, the oligarchic man, and even the honor seeking timocratic man are all unfree and beset by internal conflict and ignorance is a logical place to start here.

There is a reason Plato and Aristotle, and the whole tradition following them (Boethius, Aquinas, etc.) START by underscoring why wealth, power, honors, etc. are not equivalent with the human good and why the rule of the rational part of the soul is essential to escaping these illusions.

>> No.23342747

>>23342266
Yes he is. He takes talks about these archetypes and religious notions as mere expressions of some evolutionary hierarchy. He is thoroughly Darwinist materialist. Evolution is his God

>> No.23342778

>>23342362
I think he was being reactionary to the anti hierarchy people. Serotonin aside, similar social structures emerge independently across animals which points to something "real". That said, he is someone who starts with an idea and takes it further than it can typically go. There are obvious tradeoffs to this.
>>23342444
Maps has the same problem. I'll spoil the conclusion which is that the solution to inevitable fascist and communist poles of social organization is to embrace the heroic, specifically the kind of sacrificial heroism seen in Christ.

>> No.23342812

>>23342778
Okay but I'm not an animal

>> No.23342913
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23342913

>>23342778
Ok. It's also "real"/biologically grounded that animals given ready access to excess calories become obese. Does this make gluttony "natural," and thus key to living a "good life," and being a "good person."

Man is certainly the political animal, but he is also the rational animal. Human biology can be informative as to the telos of the human being, but only to a limited extent and only if properly approached.

The desire for truth and for what is "truly good," is essential to the human person. Yet you won't ever get there by trying to compare man to beasts or taking the defective positivist view that inevitably reduces all of practical reason to mere appetitive desire. I really wish someone would distill something like pic related into an easily accessible format without as much of the scholastic back and forth, because it would be far more valuable.

I don't think "crisis of modernity," is overstating the problem our current schizophrenic ethics and the bourgeois metaphysics that motivate it. Christian schools, and really increasingly largely only some Catholic schools, are the only places left offering a classical education that looks to "how do I become good," over "how do I get what I want." It's a sad state of affairs.

>> No.23342975
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23342975

>>23342747
I find it strange how it's people coming from psych and neuroscience backgrounds that tend to be most reductionists. Physicists don't tend to buy into reductionism the same way. If anything, I would guess that reductionism is probably a minority opinion in the physical sciences, even as the laity still think that "everything is little balls of stuff bouncing," is what "science says the world is like."

I think it has to do with the difference in explanations in the sciences. There is no good theory for how conciousness works. The only thing that is understood well is how small parts of the system work, or how abstract models like neural networks work. So the person steeped in this sort of very incomplete science will tend to look to what is understood better, and so becomes a reductionist.

In physics, high level, global tendencies are often the way to explain things. E.g., why do balloons have roughly spherical shapes? You don't explain this in terms of particles. You explain it in terms of constraints and the properties of the end state (equalized pressure) that make it more likely. Essentially, it's a form of telology such that the end state's properties determine its occurance (obviously without retrocausality).

Reductions is science are very rare. Unifications are much more common. Physics has had a lot of very successful unifications in the last century. Unifications point towards more general, global principles explaining things as opposed to smaller parts being necessary to explaining things. Bigism vs smallism. If what is smallest most fundemental, or are parts only definable in terms of wholes? Well, for physics and QFT, it's the whole, the field, that is fundemental. Cognitive science tends to be very much stuck in the old 19th century view of parts being fundemental because it has no global theory of how conciousness emerges.

But this is an insane view to embrace if you want to write self-help or philosophy because if reductionism is true then epiphenomenalism is true, and what we think can NEVER have any effect on how we behave or if we live a good life. Plato gets at this essential problem in his attack on the idea that the psyche is like a chord played on a lyre in the Phaedo. If the mind just IS the vibrations of the strings (physical motion), it can't determine anything. For Plato, rightly Id say, this is a reductio. It's absurd to say that our thoughts never control our actions. People are only forced into eliminitivism and denying this by bad metaphysics, shit that isn't even supported by physics anymore. So the entire frame is broken.

Anyhow, evolution itself seems to fit very nicely with the Hegelian conception of being as inheritly rational, being coming to know its self as self. I think Hegel's Spinozism makes this too abstract, it leaves our the drama and personalism (e.g. von Balthasar) essential to a good human life. But it gets something right.

>> No.23343001 [DELETED] 

>>23342975
>Physicists don't tend to buy into reductionism the same way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson

>> No.23343014

>>23342975
>Physicists don't tend to buy into reductionism the same way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson
The field idea is still marred by the standard model of particle physics, which leads scientists to postulate non-existent particles as matters of empirical fact, so in a roundabout way this "field" rhetoric is just another side of reductionism. When the standard model of rejected and there are no fields consisting OF ever smaller and smaller parts, only then there is no reductionism. Up until then, the anti-reductionism is just pseudo-holism hiddenly built on reductionism.

>> No.23343024

>>23342481
>communist who doesn't believe in hierarchy hates peterstein
Well I didn't see that coming

>>23342812
Yes you are.

>>23342913
If you're going to wish away human nature why not become a libertarian instead of communist?

>> No.23343039

>>23342463
>Counterpoint: Saint Augustine and all the other saints/older philosophers, were literally broke, unemployed, at times homeless, incels.
Dumbest thing I've read on /lit/ so far this week.

>> No.23343084

>>23343024
You are, maybe

>> No.23343107

>>23342778
>is to embrace the heroic, specifically the kind of sacrificial heroism seen in Christ.
This doesn't sound physicalist or reductionist to me.

>> No.23343401
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23343401

>>23343039
It's factually true, no? This is what tradcucks don't want you to know.

>> No.23343466

>>23343107
It is it archetypes are just tendencies in human thoughts brought about by natural selection and Christianity is hollowed out so that it becomes just a set of ideas that are "useful" for allowing people to get on in life and be happy. Here, the Good gets reduced to a sort of "tendency to produce pleasantness." Christianity has no higher metaphysical truth to lead us to, but is simply pleasant.

But then this is has the same problem as all emotivism relying on sentinentalism. All it actually shows is that we should act "good" when doing so leads to what is pleasant. Everything remains good in virtue of something else, rather than being good in itself. Such a view can never answer Glaucon's question to Socrates at the main inflection point of the Republic: "why should we ever prefer to be the just man who is seen as unjust and punished instead of the unjust man who is celebrated and rewarded?"

And this means it can never look at St. Augustine's elucidation of this point, re the idea that the man who seeks after the immutable good can never lose that good, where as fortune can take from us wealth, lovers, health, reputation, etc. And so it can not explain how it is that St. Paul or Boethius, awaiting grizzly deaths, can be more sublime and happier than the tyrant who has all his appetites and passions can desire—how they are better and more real as themselves because more self-determining, rather than simply being the effects of causes external to them or internal causes they cannot control. What is missing is any way to explain the transcendence of reason in allowing us to go beyond current belief and desire, reaching out for what is truly good. At the very best, you end up with a Kantian dualism where the phenomenal world of nature needs to be forever cut off and distinct from the world where rational agents make choices based on the idealized "good will." But in this case, the person will always have the suspicion that the world of nature is more real because the techne developed by science, its utility, is proof that it gets "something right," about reality. Only when we are pointed to self transcendence, the bliss of the saint versus the unhappiness of the hedonist, as Plato points to the historical Socrates in the Republic, do we see the practical "techne" of living the "good life," in union with the pursuit of, and eros for, the Good itself and union with the Divine (theosis)

>> No.23343609

>>23342975
Freud was a reductionist. Jung even makes fun of him for this. But the Freudian side ultimately won out, so you get people thinking psychology is about cause and effect rather than purposeful agency.

>> No.23343622

>>23343466
Good post. Much better than I >>23343609 could have put it.

>> No.23343674

>>23343401
>It's factually true, no?
No, not at all. It confuses disconnecting from the material world with the idea of a pre-existing poverty guiding their beliefs. The point of saints and philosophers is that they're not like the average person but can serve as an example of inspiration for regular people living normal lives. It was a really dumb argument that then went on to characterize people like Augustine as lazy when the guy literally worked his ass off managing various church and state affairs all while writing almost none stop. Either you, or that poster, is a complete retard or you're writing bait (which is basically the same as being a retard anyway).

>> No.23343714
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23343714

>>23343466
To be fair this is all well and good but Dostoyevsky, St. Paul, Boethius et al are still archetypes and you are silly to disregard archetypes or 'tendencies in human thoughts brought about by natural selection' just because they don't always cross over into metaphysics (which I think they do), just as you'd be silly to disregard basic physics because it doesn't hold up under general relativity. You certainly don't arrive at any metaphysical propositions at without first passing by the world of signs and symbols. Theosis is only a word after all. Nothing would get done if we judged people on their metaphysics and then worked backwards from that.

>> No.23345450

>>23342463
Back to your mouse wheel, wage cuck.

>> No.23345573

>>23342266
He is a status quo advocate and a milqtoast conservative and a Jungian.

>> No.23345599
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23345599

>>23342202
>noooooo stop pointing out the physical benefits and overlaps to spiritual truths!!!
You people are bizarre.

>> No.23345702
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23345702

>>23342202
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maXXTXIgpu8

Jordan Peterson is evil and stupid. He has a daughter and says, “We are here to suffer so learn to suffer like a man.” A potential paradise could be like a never ending DMT trip with the constant pleasure level of heroin. If you get bored then it’s not paradise. There don’t even have to be human bodies. His is just a severe lack of imagination. And there is no sense in which suffering or mediocrity create meaning. All the meaning you need would be packaged into the paradise experience. But I am not experiencing such meaning and perhaps never will. That’s why despite the abundant grace and mercy I think I am not subject to a fully benevolent God. Perhaps God is like Jordan Peterson and I therefore consider him my enemy.

>> No.23345744
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23345744

>>23345599
You're a retard

>> No.23346327

>>23342202
"If there's any critique about Jordan Peterson that hasn't but should be addressed, it's with the presuppositions contained within “clean your room”. The logic of this mantra is that you start to work on small issues in your life so that you can eventually work up to harder ones. First shower and brush your teeth, then go for a job interview, then get hired, then ask for a promotion, etc etc etc. You get it, right? It's perfectly logical. Except there's one false assumption Peterson makes, in that he believes that “cleaning your room” is Step 1 to getting your life on track. He's wrong. Cleaning your room is merely Step 2. What is Step 1, then? Entering Peterson's room.
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What Peterson doesn't understand, and it's easy to see why as he's been a clinical psychologist for 3 decades, is that the reason people sort themselves out when they meet him at his practice isn't because they listened to him and subsequently cleaned their rooms. It's because they placed themselves in a position to have someone to listen to in the first place. By that I mean that making the choice of one's own free will to see a therapist and seek out help, saying to yourself that you need to change and you need to get better, is the true Step 1. Any instructions or advice that follow after that are all secondary as consequent. But the catch is that choosing to seek professional help isn't something that can be taught, because being taught this impulse to seek professional help would already necessitate the presence of a professional to teach or imbue said impulse – a Catch-22.

Cont

>> No.23346330

>>23346327
Do not be fooled by the reductive and materialistic scientism of 21st century pop psychology (insofar as 20th century pop psychology was “everything I don't like about society is pathological self-aggrandizement” and 21st century pop psychology is “everything I don't like about society is pathological self-deprecation, including societies of the 20th century) – for those who are truly and sincerely “mentally ill” (why else would one pay big money to see a clinical psychologist?), cleaning your room will sort your life together, yes, but ONLY MATERIALISTICALLY. You will have better spaces, but not a better head space. You will be financially stable, but not psychologically stable.
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This is ultimately the hard truth we as a species need to accept, and it ties in perfectly with why some people do not believe in the mere existence of mental illness itself, because if all you had to do to “cure” your “anxiety” or “depression” was clean out your garage, exercise more and have a better diet, then you were never mentally ill in the first place – you were just a fucking wreck of a human being. Can being mentally ill cause a spiral of this sort? Sometimes sure, but the vice versa? Highly highly unlikely. Being depressed isn't wanting to commit suicide because your body is low on vitamins/sleep/relationships and high on stress or fear, that's just a perfectly rational response to bad circumstances (self-imposed or otherwise). Mental illness is IRrational by definition, it is wanting to commit suicide even when seemingly everything is, for lack of a better word, objectively going well for you, whether that be close friends, a good job, love in your life, etc.

Cont

>> No.23346332

>>23346330
Feeling bad because you're lonely isn't depression, we already have a word for that, that's just feeling lonely. Feeling in a funk because you live in a messy room isn't depression, that's just being a slob. Feeling shameful because you think you may have too much sex isn't depression, that's just being an addict. I know it's tempting to say “I'm depressed” after you get dumped or after your dog dies, and in a layman's context I have no issues with it, but in the long run you mustn't buy into the equivocation, no matter how tempting it may be. I am more than aware that a mental illness can potentially lead to these things, but here's my point: if getting rid of the loneliness/messy room/addictions cures the mental illness symptoms, you were never mentally ill. If the symptoms are still there....then consider seeking real help this time
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If this is you, then the good news is that you have a solvable problem. The bad news is that you NOW have a solvable problem, because you may have to consider the possibility that you never wanted a solution in the first place. You wanted to believe that you had some incurable disease so that you would have an excuse to ruminate and rhapsodize in perpetuity. Because that would be easier than getting up and getting to work on “cleaning your room” so to speak.

Cont

>> No.23346335

>>23346332
This is why our growing obsession with therapy and “LeT'S tALk aBoUT mENtAl HeaLth” is so tempting and enticing these days, it presents a less obvious problem to the reason why your room is so messy. “The reason you have no work ethic and no diligence isn't because you're an ungrateful bum, it's because you were born with pussy genes that just magically make you want to kill yourself 5-8 times a month.” I'm not saying this never happens, the point is that there are people all over the world who actually WANT this to be the case, not just for others or for clients bur for themselves as clients, because it immediately relinquishes the burden of responsibility, it is ad hoc hypothesizing and self-justification. People would more readily conceive of themselves as literally self-destructive agents than despondent or demotivated and if that isn't evidence of a global death drive or of the titanic ignorance people have of how powerful despair truly can be, then I don't know what is
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This is essentially why people think of Jordan Peterson less as a clinician and more of a self-help guru: people who are dangerously mentally ill, irrespective of any special life circumstances, are the ones that need a clinical psychologist, but people who are just living in squalor or lacking motivation to do work that wasn't set in motion by some inexplicable existential angst don't need a psychologist, they need a life coach. This is why Peterson turned into a life coach, because most of his clientele and fans were just people who needed a push in the right direction, not people who have completely forgotten the very concept of “direction” itself. It would be like leading a horse to water that has a physical defect rendering him incapable of drinking. He wasn't helping people with existential despair, I mean he probably was sometimes, but he was mostly helping people with glorified chores and basic formulas for success in life.

Cont

>> No.23346340

>>23346335
(Notice how I said SUCCESS in life, not HAPPINESS. Look at Peterson himself – he is definitely only one of these things, and is also an important reminder that meaningfulness and happiness are not two sides of the same coin)
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Because this entire planet is slowly being conditioned to read less and less character limits per thought, I'm presumably one of the only 100 people on this planet that has actually read both of his books, and the great divide between the two is that 12 Rules was trying to teach you how to find meaning in YOUR life, whereas Maps of Meaning was trying to teach you how meaning is found in Life ITSELF. Neither of these books were, predominantly, works of psychology, and judging by the majority of the citations it is no surprise why I've heard Peterson consider himself a “scientist” more than once. He is clearly better at researching the abstract than the earthly, which should be obvious when one remembers that he is a psychologist, not a psychiatrist
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So what am I saying then? That cleaning your room is useless and pretentious? Of course not. Everyone should be cleaning their rooms. An ideal world would be one where everyone would see the importance of cleaning their room, literally or otherwise, as self-evident. But a clean room, even if it eventually leads to the psychological momentum that acquires you a career or a marriage, may save your “life” in a manner of speaking, but it isn't going to save your sanity or your soul, and that is by far the greatest snakeoil that Peterson ever sold the world. He's not giving you a cure, he's giving you a temporary balm that will neither amend nor negate the angst he claims to be fighting. He wants you to bear your cross like Jesus himself but he also wants you to rescue your father from the belly of the whale, but last time I checked Jesus only had to do the former and not the latter. You can't have both

Cont

>> No.23346342

>>23342309
It’s worse. They were raised to be scientistic-new age hybrids. The official state religion if the West is a syncretic combination of atheistic scientism and the Joe Rogan led ancient Egyptian alien earthing druggie cult.

>> No.23346345

>>23346340
This kind of overload and overexerting burden is a fundamentally Icarus-esque issue, it is guaranteed to lead to burnout and self-destruction for nearly any kind of human being. This is fine if you want to live the sort of "live fast, die young" attitude without its usual hedonistic connotations, but if that were really the case, why would anyone with this mindset ever see a therapist? To, somehow, get better at not getting better? Nonsense.
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He's also completely wrong about lobsters, it's been debunked a thousand times and is also just a symptom of the kind of biological essentialism that has plagued this planet both scientifically and politically, and plagued the way we conceptualize of our own emotions and consciousnesses. Thinking about people in terms of organs/nerves/biochemicals is totally fine when appropriate, but ONLY thinking in those terms is poisonous not only to your“self” but also ironically so to said organs/nerves/biochemicals, but that's neither here nor there
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The skeptic who is undoubtedly thinking about how “mind and body” or “agent and arena” are interlinked needs to keep in mind that these, especially the latter, are largely metaphors: how we talk about ourselves should not also be how we * think * about ourselves because you cannot infer accuracy from convenience, and any modern day cognitive scientist worth their salt knows full well that our metaphors for the mind and consciousness are fundamentally inaccurate. This incapability to be more precise is why we default onto metaphorical language in the first place, as metaphors are necessarily imprecise, they * must * be imprecise. The idea that a messy room is indicative of a messy mind is the exact same kind of pop psychology I criticized earlier, and it is frankly a disgrace to the human spirit to think that something like the mind can be so easily represented through such a crude visual trick when even the greatest works of art have consistently failed at this task

Cont

>> No.23346350

>>23346345
Cleaning your room is merely following basic instructions, but like I already said this is merely Step 2. Step 1 is something far more magical, far more enigmatic, and is vaguely analogous to what one might call a leap of faith. I don't necessarily mean this in a religious sense, but I don't necessarily mean it in a non-religious sense either; the presence or lack-thereof of divinity is entirely irrelevant. I also suspect this is part of what Peterson was trying to get at when he said that you can't quit smoking without believing in God – he's obviously wrong, ludicrously so, and he reveals just how out of date he is on certain subjects here (including theological ones) but I can admit he is touching on something very important with that claim
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This Step 1, this leap of faith, this inner temptation that motivates you towards change, towards discontinuity with your former “self”, this is not something that you can “reason” or “logic” your way into. This leap that will send you onto a potentially transformative experience is a fundamentally arational move. Again, pay attention to my language: it is neither rational nor irrational, it is still a form of thinking, per say, but it transcends rational thought itself, and therefore relegating this leap of faith to the domain of logic or rationality is categorically invalid. Don't believe me? Too bad, because I can prove it very easily – using logic itself.


Cont

>> No.23346353

>>23346350
Do you see it now? Making Step 1 is like one of these transformative leaps. Don't be fooled by how highfalutin this thread has been, because this leap has nothing to do with logic, it has nothing to do with intellect. Just as there is nothing within propositional logic that will give you modal logic, there is nothing within your current worldview, or Peterson's, that will get you to the “clean your room” modality either. He was never selling you anything new, he was only ever selling you your“self”, a drive you always-already had but just didn't know how to articulate. This is why therapy is a bit of a scam for lack of a better word, because it's great at helping the people it's not targeting and terrible at helping the people it is targeting.
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A good therapist is just a Superego larping as an Ego in order to give you the external criticism you need rather than corroborating validation, but delivered in a palatable and preferably actionable manner. Peterson's problem is that he got it in reverse, he relied too much on preaching to the choir without checking to see whether or not they were already converts. He was only ever dealing with preconscious problems as if they were truly unconscious ones.

Cont

>> No.23346357

>>23346353
If you think becoming religious, joining a cult or self-inducing a """mystical experience""" will increase your ability to make these leaps of faith, you have not been paying attention. The bad news is that there really is no formula or methodology for cultivating this skillset. It can be improved with practice, but the trick is you have to practice getting comfortable with being uncomfortable, you have to exit that zone on a more consistent basis. This is more or less what Peterson was trying to get at when he metaphorically spoke of “entering the lair of the dragon and slaying it” or whatever, but what he doesn't understand is that the dust bunnies under your bed aren't the dragon – therapists like Peterson are the dragon

/end

>> No.23346358

>>23342362
And this is why the modernist project is always doomed. It’s just about subjective power dynamics in the end. Maybe not so devastating for a dating coach or a politician but for a therapist? Yeah, I’d say so. It’s actually funny the guys loves Nietzsche so much because Nietzsche was the same. I guess when you more skeptical of everything they only thing you can’t be skeptical of is power, that power dynamics seem to exist.

>> No.23346375

>>23342913
I honestly don’t see that happening at any Catholic schools at all.

>> No.23348163

>>23342483
Wash your dick

>> No.23348171

>>23342202
Augustine and a Kempis are utterly alien and incomprehensible to modern man.

>> No.23348212

>>23342202
>>23342362
>physicalism
>reductionist
If it seems like he's taking that angle, it's because he has to, not because there's no other way to discuss it. Everything he did with his first few years of fame was about taking complex shit and making it digestible to common people (which he was so good at that most of you retards thought it was trite). Common people today, even the religious ones, have internalized the materialist kool-aid, so if you want to introduce them to an idea that sounds even the slightest bit uplifting or hopeful, you should prime them with something that doesn't conflict with materialism until they're ready to explore in a less reductive way. Put a big fucking Science™ approved sticker on it.
You can just ignore anything he's produced after getting involved with the Daily Wire.