The Quote

 Let me quote from Jordan Peterson in his book, BEYOND ORDER 12 MORE RULES FOR LIFE. This is what he wrote on Pages 163 and 164: "Nietzsche appears to have unquestioningly adopted the idea that the world was both objective and valueless in the manner posited by the emergent physical sciences. This left him with a single remaining escape from nihilism and totalitarianism: the emergence of the individual strong enough to create his own values, project them onto valueless reality, and then abide by them. He posited that a new kind of man--the Ubermensch (the higher person or superman)--would be necessary in the aftermath of the death of God, so that society would not drift towards the opposing rocky shoals of despair and oversystematized political theorizing. Individuals who take this route, this alternative to nihilism and totalitarianism, must therefore produce their own cosmology of values.

However, the psychoanalysts Freud and Jung put paid to that notion, demonstrating that we are not sufficiently in possession of ourselves to create values by conscious choice . . . But it is not at all obvious that the individual will ever be capable of bringing new values that Nietzsche so fervently longed for into being."

My response: the world is objective and subjective at the same time; it is also value-rich and valueless simultaneously. It depends if one recognizes what one is experiencing and looking at, and has the richness of knowledge, words, and creative insight to creatively capture what one is encountering internally and out in the world.

Mavellonialism is the suggestion that each human, immensely rich in talent, potential and imagination, can and must create his own values, building upon what nature, his culture of origin and the teachings of the deity that he worships--adding onto the values that he inherited.

I disagree with Jordan, Freud, and Jung: everyone can and must bring new values into the world.

Jordan continues on Pages 164 and 165: "There are other problems with Nietzsche's argument, as well. If each of us lives by our own created and projected values, what remains to unite us? This is a philosophical problem of central importance. How could a society of Ubermenschen possibly avoid being at constant odds with one another, unless there was something comparable about their created values?"

My response: as Jordan has spoken of in many interviews, it is not individuals that war against others and compete in destructive, violent ways. It usually is jungle dog-eat-dog misbehavior within tribes, or inter-tribal warring over land, territory, values and conflicting ideologies and ethnic rivalry.

A society of Ubermensch individuators would, as the calm, principled, rational egoists that they will be, find ways to invent their own values, while working, dialoguing and negotiating with talented peers with quite different values, to find common ground, and weave their values systems together on an ongoing basis. There need not be conflict between individuators.