Sunday, November 29, 2020

Jordan Peterson And Hierarchies

 Jordan Peterson announces, and seem correct, in insisting that living in hierarchies is inevitable in any occupation or field of human endeavor. He cites the biological evidence from 350 million years ago until modern human life. It seems that hierarchical societies or communities occur through out the animal kingdom, and that they are how humans necessarily arrange themselves, naturally, in terms of ability, and talent.

A few geniuses, and hyper-smart people--the "Best"--rise to the top of every hierarchy and that the vast majority of lesser types, less talented and less bright, will be at base of the hierarchy, because, no matter how conscientious and industrious they are, they can only be somewhat successful no mater how hard they try to rise above their limiting, genetically determined station in life. Historically, this occurs all the time, as a few end up top, and the rest of the people end up in the middle class or sprinkled out among the lower classes.

It would seem that a caste system is how human life is distributed and determined to end up, each assigned to class system corresponding to his natural ability or the limits thereof apportioned.

I agree that this is how it is naturally: due to genetics and environmental pushes, a few geniuses and very smart people end up running everything, and most are average or poor, grounded in their more limited intelligence and curbed abilities. I propose an alternative, unnatural hierarchical set up that is workable and consistent with existing human nature, and yet meets the demands for social justice.

Jordan allows that society, especially a Western industrial democracy, functions pretty well as long as the hierarchies are based on competence, not corrupted so that thugs run them. If more than 30% of a society is constituted by corrupted hierarchies, the society collapses. 

I will grant him this. I believe that I can allow that good hierarchies can exist at the same time that we address and redress the Marxist, legitimate criticism, that a stratified social arrangement brings unearned and unwarranted suffering and poverty down upon the heads of the majority on the bottom rungs, while the few at the top get the majority of the money, power and other advantages. How does this cruel, unjust system end, and what do we replace it with? Not with dreaded, dreadful Communism. History in the 20th century proves that Marxists in power bring nothing but enormous suffering, poverty, starvation, murder genocide of millions of citizens, and constant totalitarian brutality hammering the victims into the ground. Their cure is much worse than the capitalist disease.

I believe that under Mavellonialism, I introduce a society that allows that fixed, wicked human nature is taken into account, and that hierarchies are an ontological necessity, and yet humans are perfectible and can devise a society, a constitutional republic with free markets, and self-realizing, individualist, individuating anarchist supercitizens, a society that will bring about a social arrangement of upper middle class majority (the revolution that gives us a happy, workable classless society), with a few poor and a few rich people rounding off the system at the margins. The hierarchy exists, but competence and  individual and collective cooperation allow for stable, humane and permanent leveling of the hierarchy. Thus, the terrible injustices of poverty and hunger disappear. It is voluntarily agreed to by the governed consenters, and no tyranny, elites, totalitarian state, or collective economies are in the mix at all. More on this below.

Let me revisit Marxism. The Marxist are mistaken in at least many ways. First, they believe that people are good and they are not. Second, they think that people are created equal, deserving equality of outcome, monitored and police by big government agencies. People deserve equality of opportunity, and then let them end up where they end up. Third, they do not accept that there is a fixed human nature. Human nature is fixed. Fourth, they deny that hierarichal formation of institutions and other class orders is a biological necessity that humans always revert too as soon as social engineering and governmental schemes disappear. Marxist insist that if a classless society is forcibly instituted and compelled by a dictatorship of the proletariat, then that classless society will be a permanent change. That is not what happened in the collapsed Soviet Union. Class society in Russia is resuming naturally as fascism, a few rich and many poor, and a weird mercantilist capitalism is growing their under Putin. Fifth, Marxist claim to be scientific but Stephen Hicks proves the in practice Marxism has failed every time. Sixth, Marxists are collectivist in their group-living and in their solutions, not just in their economics. and without individualism and individual-living, no reform and no revolution can work. Seventh, Maxist use lies, murder, totalitarian terror and brutality to force people to accept or surrender to their ism. 

One universal truism is that evil means makes rotten and tainted every noble aim undertaken, and the status quo is thus made more cruel, more painful and more unjust after Marxist violent, involuntary revolution was unleashed.

My orientation comes out of Eric Hoffer, and our basic assumption is that a society does not function unless the people are free to amass property in a free market economy, enjoy personal and political liberty, develop themselves, and run their own lives without tutelage and supervision from bureaucrats, elites or overlords of any kind or description. True reform comes from the bottom up, and only the common peope, not intellectual elites, should ever run society.

Hoffer is no conscious Mavellonialist, but he knew in his heart that the masses were loaded with and blessed with vast, undeveloped talent that would spring forth as it did in 19th century America if the common people and the little people were left alone to run the country.

I go a step further in assuming that the self-actualized average citizen, using 98% of her natural talent, can do remarkable, almost miraculous things. When she is working close to the maximum of her talents, her IQ is raised on average to 150 points. Think what the society of 325 million Americans would become if 285 million people were self-realizers with a working IQ of 150 points, each a spiritually, intellectually, emotionally enlightened living angel. These citizens, the vast majority, will be the base of the American hierarchy, a very proud, strong, tough, creative, original thinking upper middle class, the broad, flat bottom rung of the societal hierarchy. 

A few poor people, the poor, the shirkers, the nonindividuators, the militant group-livers, the mentally disabled, etc., will be poorer, and a few million people will be millionaires, and a few more will be billionaires and a couple will be trillionaires. 

Above them, at various ranks along the Great Chain of Being, will be situated and residing the Good Spirits, and above them the Divine Couple, but these great souled giants will not be jealous of, curtail or slap down American individuators, but indeed will bless them. This is how we let Jordan insist that hierarchies are our reality, and yet we come up with an unnatural, invented, good hierarchy to replace the old, naturally-occuring bad hierarchies so reviled by the Marxists whose solution was to bring totalitarian hell to earth. And still the old bad hierarchies would naturally emerge out of that mess after a couple of generations.

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