The Interview

 

On June 12, 2023 Larry Arnn, President of Hillsdale College, for the Hillsdale College Podcast Network, interviewed Jordan Peterson on a mixed bag of issues: psychology, sexuality and the AI Revolution. I took notes on the interview and will comment on them.

 

Larry: Tell us about psychology and Karl Jung.

 

J: We live at multiple levels as people: on levels from subatomic, atomic, molecular, our body organs, up to our motivational system, our emotional system, our cognitive and perceptual systems. Psychology is the study of all these systems, integrated, up to the level of the individual. I studied the brain and neuroscience. I also studied the great clinicians like Freud and Jung.

 

My response: Peterson is a recognized and respected social scientist.

 

Larry: Are you a Jungian?

 

J: Yes, I started reading Freud before Jung. I like Freud.  Nietzsche said God was dead, which meant a loss of the meaning of conception that brought us together psychologically and socially. Nietzsche knew that that would lead to nihilism, hopelessness, and totalitarian certainty.

 

My response: I agree.

 

J: Nietzsche saw a way out. People would have to become gods and create their own values.

 

My response: that is actually what my religion of Mavellonialism is about: people are to become minor gods or living and eternal angels through spiritual and moral self-realization, as a living offering of the self to the service of the Father and the Mother. We still get the bulk of our values from the Light Couple, but we can create value and values on our own too, and the Parents encourage this independent, self-generated creativity. Not only can we create our own values, but it is a divine commandment that we produce value and values on our own.

 

J: Freud proved Nietzsche wrong, noting we are not the masters of our own house, and cannot produce our own values. Are we the unitary masters of our own destiny in how we integrate and arrange our cognition, perceptions, and emotions. Freud says no. We are more like a house full of autonomous spirits or Freudian complexes. Our motivational forces and emotional systems are autonomous wills working within us and often against and even overtaking our conscious will, so we are not masters of our own houses to make our own values.

 

My response: As groupists, nonindividuators and immature adults, often we are not of heightened consciousness, powerful intellect, rich imagination and of steel will, so it is, in that undeveloped or arrested state of development, that we cannot create our own values.

As active, accomplished maverizers with an impressive track record, that record is the value that we have created and shared with the world. If one does understand Jung, he is terrifying.

 

J: Freud’s weakness is that he made one motivational force paramount or superordinate—sex. Freud replaced Yahweh with sexuality. Jung disagreed with Freud: sex is not the paramount motivator for people. Jordan studied Nietzsche too.

 

Jordan read Jung and understood him. Jung’s writing is strange and seemingly impenetrable.  (Ed: I forgot what Jordan attributed to Freud as to what humans were haunted by, but Jung disagreed with Freud, insisting that we are haunted by gods and demons.).

 

My response:  I agree with Jung.

 

Larry: We will talk about sex today as it is almost a cultural obsession, and did Freud cause this?

 

J: Freud observed it, that every drive seeks to philosophize its spirit (sex). The world has declined into valuelessness so sex is all there is. Freud denied that there is a metaphysical reality, only a biological reality.

 

Freud did advance work and play as moral ideals, not just sex. He was anti-religious, so made the motivation of sexuality to stem the black tide of occultism. Freud’s weakness as an atheist-materialist was that he was not able to deal with religion in the world properly.

 

Jung instead offered a 4-dimensional self. You are here in the here and now. You extend across time from birth to death. All your dimensions are your totality as a self. Christ is a symbol of the self. Jung is a Christian but an unorthodox one.

 

The totality of you is to suffer and die, and humans suffer in life and experience death and hell to be reborn, a deep form of reformation at the highest level of conceptualization. Jung actually believed this: it was not just a statement of faith, but that it is true and wise.

 

My response: this interpretation of human suffering over a lifetime could be made consistent with the religion of self-actualization.

 

Larry: We are trying to transform ourselves into what it is that we want to be. We are whatever we say we are, but, you, Jordan, downplay that, why?

 

My response: I think Jordan is mistaken here. We are trying to grow into what it is we want to be, and though we are not what we say we are, we can still work tirelessly and creatively to reach these goals. This is not narcissism of radicals but humanism, religious and secular.

 

J: There is a cultural battle raging over self-definition. I am whatever I say I am, and that is what God told Moses.

 

My response: it is not enough for us to declare I am whatever I say I am, we have to have done the heavy lifting of self-realizing as God has done, in a much more perfect way, to make this bold assertion a reality.

 

J: Jung defined Prostestantism as each person will become his own church and this means you are your own god and get to define yourself and Jung meant what he said.

 

My response: I like Jung’s definition of Protestantism as long as the human so asserting is maverized and maverizing.

 

J: Do you ask yourself if you understand the self-enough to define the self or are you self-deceived and settle for worshiping some pagan goddess conflated with your shallow, hedonistic desires?

 

My response: this is a fair corrective, criticism to the dangers of self-deluding and low self-standards equated with worthy performance and living.

 

Larry: These definitions are not coherent.

 

J: Radical narcissistic types do not care if they are inconsistent if they get to define themselves. They settle for defining as worthy their whim of the moment, pleasure-seeking, turned into a narcissistic god. Living just for hedonism ends exploits all, with no mature relations, and all ends up being hell on earth. To settle for insisting that all I am is not attracted to a higher self is but a primitive morality.

 

My response: Again, this shallow narcissism is more connected to callow, selfish egoists and groupists than against serious, earnest, active maverizer.

 

Larry: In classical philosophy we note that we all have a nature, and our happiness and well-being are fulfilling our nature. Our nature is our purpose to be and grow. If you lose your nature, all you have is your will.

 

My response: Larry’s ethical view of human nature easily dovetails with self-realizing rational egoism.

 

J: You will not lose your base nature by being a shallow hedonist, but you will lose your higher order nature pursuing purpose. Pain, anxiety, remain negative. You cannot rationalize the self out of this negative state, if you allow your higher order nature to disintegrate. All you have then is pain, anxiety, and hopelessness. You end up in a metaphysical desert, losing your tyrannical presuppositions. You are anxious due to a loss of direction and atheistic nihilism will not comfort you. Pain and terror are real.

 

My response: I agree with what Larry and Jordan say above: we have a higher nature and a lower nature, and they are agreeing with each other, though they conceptualize their agreement with different words and different definitions for nature.

 

J: Are pain and suffering the ultimate reality? Jordan says no. What transcends them: the Eternal Verities and the higher nature of man is the antidote. Jung thought that Christ was a symbol of the self. For the self or Christ to escape hell or eternal suffering, one must shoulder the burden and spirit of voluntary self-sacrifice the same as the image of Christ and the crucifix. Self-sacrifice to transcend and defeat suffering.

 

My response I really have no issue with what Jordan and Jung offer here, suggesting we are like Christ or should be. I have long suggested that groupists are selfish and the self-interest and self-attention about the self by the self the primary focus of maverizers is not selfish but is self-disciplined and putting the self to work achieving the highest intellectual, moral, and spiritual excellence that one can perform, and that could be what Jung and Peterson refer to as self-sacrifice, and this egoism is sacrificing the self for the self, for the sake of the benevolent divinities, and indirectly for others too who should be self-realizing too.

 

J:  I sacrifice my whims of the moment to serve the image of myself across time. It is sort of a categorical imperative. If I make good decisions now and over time it will not cost me much over a lifetime. This life of self-sacrifice is a covenant with the self to sacrifice the whims of the moment. I treat you as I treat myself property in a mode, a high level of values. There is no difference for how I teat others or myself.

 

My response: I have written elsewhere that the rational egoism of an individuators is good for the self, for others and the nation. Altruism and egoism, if both benevolent, will aid each other. What is good for the group ordinarily will serve the individual and allowing individuals maximum liberty to purse their individuation and happiness generally suits the whole community’s needs.

 

J: We are all the same.

 

Larry: yes, we are equal: we have our natures, our obligations.

 

J: The narcissistic Left radicals create their own values, whatever they want, whenever they wants and if you don’t agree with them you go to prison.

 

When you are moral and mature you sacrifice your lower self to your higher self. You voluntarily accept the maximum level of suffering that you can bear like Christ took on maximal suffering on the cross.

 

My response: the spiritual and moral responsibility shouldered by a living angel, a great soul, a maverizer would be bolstering good and pushing back evil in the world and this entails much suffering incurred during the battle.

 

J: I visited a church in Rome. The center of the church was expressed architecturally rather than conceptually. The center of this first Christian church was the cross and all reality comes to this point.

 

In order for you to proceed in a healthy manner to would be for you to participate in a covenant that would make for a united society. This covenant with the self and with Christ and the community is to give up immediate presence in service of something broader and higher, serving your best interest is also serving the community’s best interest.

 

Larry: Churchill said your life must be a pattern of thought or action.

 

J: Abraham led a rich, privileged life, coasting along until the age of 83 until a spirit invites him to start off on an adventure, and in a great act of faith, Abraham agrees. One is to give up the life of ease and bliss, peace and tranquility to take on an romantic adventure. We need purpose or will invent a false adventure, wokeness, postmodernism or (I add: some destructive, totalitarian mass movement serving some demonic mass movement driven ideology.).

 

To make suffering meaningful, adopt maximum responsibility. You take on responsibility and are forced to grow and there may be no upper limit here.

 

Larry: Be good at being what you are.

 

J: More’s law computing power doubles every 18 months, and this is a revolution in all directions at the same time. This means the ancient archetypal battles are accelerated, equal to the end of time or some super intelligent tyranny—who knows?

 

My response: Jordan’s prophecy seems plausible.

 

J: Jung noted that salvation is an individual enterprise. So, I decided to be a psychologist and clinician not a politician (that offers collective solutions to make the world better, Ed adds). Hell is kept at bay one person at a time. People have divine destinies so keep hell at bay and your choices matter. You are to fight evil and your effort counts. It matters We all have a divine spark, and we share an infinite responsibility. Morality is real not a game. Your sake is indistinguishable from the sake of totality. We are unique and yet equal and all the same.

 

My response: I like his moral message for the individual here and to care for the self is to care for all others, and that is Gods expectation for us.

 

J: We fight evil by keeping the worthy and rejecting the bad. We are not to embrace narcissistic compassion which Eve did when her pure relativism led her to conclude that she need not reject the serpent but to tolerate all as equally acceptable. Objective morality is to distinguish evil from the good, to truthfully label them and then reject the evil.

 

Your thought is the space where you make thought expressed as a microscopic avatar of you, a description of the objective nature of the world. How you think reveals you as a good you or a bad you.  Think so you learn to be good and healthy, not die or live in hell or take your family with you. Modernists declare that what is real is what is actually out there, but postmodernists deny that there is a metanarrative, all is relative.

 

To be true is what keeps you out of hell. Hell is real—and for example the Japanese Unit 731 existed.

 

Larry: Jordan, you have been called brave.

 

J: No, I am not brave, I just know what to be afraid of.

 

J. As a counselor, he saw a core of goodness in many patients and that amazed and heartened him. You as a therapist must not advise them or impose your destiny on them, for they need the credit for what they get right and blame for what they get wrong.

 

Each person must save himself and the way to heaven is through the individual soul.

 

My response: recording this interview and commenting on it reveals that Peterson is an egoist though not as much of one as I am, but he is a good, brilliant, and great man who deserves all the credit and respect that he can receive. His critics are legion, and they hope to take him out and there has been some success at this but the good he has brought to the world and the conservative cause is already an accomplished fact. Thank God for allowing him to live and recover and share his love and wisdom with the world. May his new-found Christian faith give him comfort and salvation.