I was listening to some Jordan Peterson Youtube interviews on my way home from the cabin yesterday. He clearly identifies the individual as sovereign in Western culture. I agree but worry about the lingering, residual elements of altruist and collectivist ethos still alive, powerful and conflicting with the individualist emphasis in Western culture. Tribalism as postmodernist socialism could still tank the West.
Roughly, Jordan is arguing that the individual is sovereign in the West, and that we are to lead meaningful, responsible lives, self-actualizing as ethical, spiritually good and mature adults to improve the lives of ourselves, our families and our community. I agree.
Peterson believes that in the individual free thinking, free speech and developing as a singular, private person is our life project, and is the best way to improve society. I agree.
He warns that tribalism and collectivism animates those on campus--professors, students and administrators--seek not to suppress free speech. He argues that their aim is deeper and more deadly: they deny that any individual has any rights at all, no right to think or speak freely at all. Each individual is but an avatar of his identity groups to which he belongs and was born into. There is no objective truth. There is only subjective, relative groups of rival tribes vying endlessly for power, so the socialists and postanarchist feel justified in disallowing any opposing individual to speak, think or act in ways contrary to the narratives advance by the collectivist tribe.
These nihilists will make Pol Pot look like a choir boy once they capture the government.
Jordan believes we are born depraved, that suffering tainted by malevolence is the human core existential state, and we do good and be good by facing it head on and amounting to something.
Peterson is a Mavellonialist or is converging towards it.
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