Equilibrium in a society
I really liked Dr. Peterson's response in his latest Q&A to a viewer who asked why we haven't yet been able to find equilibrium in society. Somewhat paraphrased to remove the moments in which he's verbally thinking things over:
The reason we can't find equilibrium is because the environment that we live in isn't an equilibrium. We're traversing the back of a giant serpent and it weaves back and forth and you don't know at any moment which way it's going to curve and turn. Sometimes it turns to the right and sometimes it turns to the left, and what that means politically is that sometimes we have to turn to the right and sometimes we have to turn to the left. And we don't know exactly how to time that. And so what we all have to do is keep our eyes open and tell the truth and discuss things with each other, especially with people who have political beliefs that are different than us, so we can be sure that we haven't tilted too far one way or the other. And that's why I'm an advocate of free speech, or one of the many reasons I'm an advocate of free speech, is because it's the continual dialog between people of different temperamental types that keeps us oriented as close as we can to the center of the serpent's back. And so there is not permanent equilibrium, there's only the equilibrium that's produced by continual negotiation.
Posted Oct 6, 2017, 3:45 PM UTC
The two forces or tendencies are mutually interdependent, and the game [of life] is a working game just so long as the angel is winning, but does not win, and the devil is losing, but is never lost.
-- Alan Watts
Thank you for this. I get the impression a lot of people think JP comes up with most of his ideas himself, hence the cultish devotion, when he is synthesising ideas from lots of thinkers (Nietzsche, Jung, Watts, Maslow, Freud, Eliade etc. [I was pleased to see he even dropped a bit of Kierkegaard once])
I'm not accusing JP of plagiarism, I just think a lot of his most vocal fans can't see him in context if they have never been exposed broadly to the history of ideas, psychology, ethics, spirituality etc.
Dude who cares? Really. You consume knowledge and wisdom like you consume food, if you don't digest it completely into your own you are gonna have some serious troubles. So unless JBP copy the idea exactly without citing, there is no problem of him spouting dead wisdom to the younger generation.
People are obsessed with cult obsessions.
Have you never experienced, even a little, or witnessed, an intelligent person in the grip of ideological or cult-like obsession?
What's more worth fearing than that? (Apart from physical and mental illness.)
you are in a cult anyway whether you like it or not. A cult-free man will soon find himself on the edge of insanity, or one step away to god. Adopting a tyrannical ideology is to me very much essential for the majority of people, and then you can break out of that cult once you have grown some teeth, roughly speaking.
so yeah, i'm not really an advocate for absolute freedom.
edit: typing you the reply had me remember where that idea of mine came from, an old Asian scholar that I admire once wrote this: only gods don't need morality, for it is the shackle for the ones who are above humans. But for the people, they are not god, that is why morality is needed even if it is meant to weaken men.
I would hope most people who are seriously intrigued by JBP who haven't had exposure to any of these and more great thinkers would eventually find some of them through a life of researching these concepts. But I am assuming quite a few people who have discovered JBP, who understand him and his verbalization of these abstract concepts at first exposure, are aware of those who came before him.
I hope you're right about the "quite a few", but I think you may be projecting your own level of education onto others. Surface-level, many can talk the talk, but you test the foundations I think you'll find some are pretty shakey (I seriously hope I'm not projecting here!).
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