Thinking Changed

 

Yesterday, I watched a 53-minute video on Dave Ramsey Podcast where he interviewed Jordan Peterson. I will comment on my notes on the overall video later but there is an 8-minute chunk from the middle that I wish to remark on.

 

It seems that this interview occurred last month in America some where , but I will comment on my notes on this 8 minute excerpt of interest to me; the excerpt was called, “This Caused Jordan Peterson to change His Political Thinking.” The excerpt was posted by Dave Ramsey of the The EntreLeadership Podcast.

 

Here are my notes:

 

J (Jordan Peterson): I worked with the Socialist Party of Alberta from the age of 13 to 16. I knew the leader. There was him, one socialist, and 36 conservatives in the provincial Parliament. People voted for him because he was a good man. He was an ex-labor leader and stood for the working class.

 

Eventually I got disenchanted in part because I went to their convention and met the radical types that were the same then as they are now. J thought, what is up with you people? You are just bitter and resentful. You claim to care for the poor.  You lie and wave signs in public saying, I am against poverty. Well, who isn’t? I felt cognitive dissonance: they claimed to be idealists and morally superior and filled with compassion, but they were bitter and resentful How could they claim to have moral upper hand?

 

My response: Leftists are Marxists, and these people are filled with rage, hate, nihilism and bitterness. They seek to destroy everyone and everything. Without God, love, Christian morality, reason, and egoism, gratitude, or love.  (Self-love allows one to love others and God.). Marxists are true believers and true believers are not happy, pleasant, or wholesome to be around. They preach compassion and justice, and have anointed themselves as morally enlightened, but they crave raw power and that is their only aim, and that is the truth that they cover up and never admit to. It is no wonder that exceptionally prescient 16-year-old J got their number and parted ways with them. Fanatics of any ilk have dead or demonic souls, and the radicals are pure poison for an impressionable young person to associate with.

 

Then, as a college student, J served on the board of governors of Grand Prairie Regional College. All the other governors on the board were immigrants and entrepreneurs. He did not like their conservative politics, but he liked them as persons.

 

They were happier and more pleasant (I assume.) that the Leftist ideologue, sour, grim, rude, and unpleasant.

 

I interpret this two ways. First, business-people and blue collar workers are more individualistic than are well-educated ideologues: being an individualistic makes one have self-esteem and love oneself, so of course one is more pleasant and optimistic. The intellectual, educated socialists live in bureaucracies, corporate and governmental: they do not do physical or profitable work in the real world, so, their lack of a sense of worth and concrete interaction with the world makes them lack self-esteem, and that fills them with rage and loathing, and they seek ideological power as a substitute that will never fill their inner emptiness, but addicted to the cause, they seek to spread it all over the world binging all to it. Their sickness they seek to spread to the world like vampires seeking to bite all necks.

 

Being educated makes educated people feel aristocratic naturally destined, they feel to rule the uneducated, emotional, childlike, inarticulate masses. Being part of the elite or being part of the non-middle classes masses, say in feudal times, sickened all in that society, for a class system always promotes hierarchies, where no self-esteem can be fostered.  Socialism and centralized power, collectivism and anti-individualism are poisons at work there too. Such people seem unpleasant because they do not feel good or act good: they have lied to themselves and tell each other that how they live is superior and to be envied and emulated. They are the educated experts, destined, they presume to lecture, teach, and straighten out ignorant, wayward others, and it is very hard to reach them.

 

Middle class entrepreneurs and blue-collar workers are more individualistic, more content being middle class and slightly upper class, and they are proud, self-reliant, self-supporting and independent; and they seek neither to rule others or be ruled. Eric Hoffer long ago pointed out that the only classless society that the world had ever seen was the American middle class, and, overall and compared to the disgruntled, angry socialists they are happy pleasant people to associate with, and that is what sentient young J picked up on.

 

Dennis Prager points out that you cannot be moral unless you are grateful and pleasant, and the so-called selfish business interests are rather moral and the true-believing socialists were rather crummy nasty, toxic people.

 

It is to J’s credit that he decided that the way of life for the free-market conservatives must be superior to the way touted by the radicals since it made them relatively happy and pleasant, while the culture and economics and totalitarian politics of the socialists rendered them resentful and not fun to be around, so J rejected the politics and culture that created them.

 

That is a most significant insight that all Americans must learn if we are to be able to maverize while working with our hands and making money as businesspeople, so we are self-educated, intellectual and articulate, and are thus able to repel the lies and pressure from the radicals and their institutional revolution underway in America, to bring about the effective counterrevolution that Chris Rufo is championing. Dave Ramsey and his Christian friends should ally themselves with the Objectivists that could provide them with intellectual skills and their organizations genius for building Randian chapters pushing capitalism, rational thinking, individualism, and capitalism all over the world. These conservative forces need to work together to defeat the radicals in America and all across the world.

 

Ramsey’s Protestant followers and Randian chapters, though they tout their individualism—and they are relatives to worshipers of any abstraction in the world, but they need to individual-live more than group-live be moderate and maverized so they learn to still enjoy groups and organize and unite without becoming to cliquish and undermining their saving America ethos. They need for example not to worry that Ramsey is Christian and Stephen Hicks is an atheist—both are for objective morality and reason (ironic for conservatives like Ramsey that are not intellectuals and moderate, perhaps not so formally educated. Educated people are far more emotional, groupist, groupthinking, intolerant, conformists, anti-intellectual, ideological, and immoderate and this makes them stupid and unable to let others speak what all need to hear but don not want to hear.

 

J: He liked the board members at the college because they were solid (Real, red-blooded, individual persons that had made something and done something with their lives, not empty ghosts spouting social justice, empty fakes that never ran a company, created wealth, or built anything like a manufactured widget that could be sold to the consumers.

 

J: He discovered people that built productively that had the moral upper hand. (Ed: that is very important to realize and repeat.). J criticized the conservatives as people that could not well articulate their ethos intellectually and explicitly. But in terms of their character, they had established a victory.

 

There are conservatives of solid character everywhere, but they are not as good as the Left as explaining the foundation of their ethos. S when Radically Left comes along, and takes them apart ethically, they do not know how to respond or what to do. Being conscientious they feel guilty when they should not. (Ed says: the selfish, intolerant, cruel, power-hungry socialists are not at all conscientious and should feel guilty, but they are not all self-critical. Indeed, they feel righteous when they are actually pushing the devil’s cause.)

 

J: Conservatives throw up their hands. If someone came up to you and yelled, “Justify marriage.”  You would think that we settled that like 25,000 years ago. You do not know what to say. Lot of the ethical things we regular people do in our lives--we do not know how to justify them.

 

Why do you put up a Christmas tree, but you do not know how to say the star at the top of the tree that light symbolizes Christ on the apex of reality and represents service to all. Conservatives (traditionalist I call them.) values are acted out by regular folk and everyone has already agreed on them.  But the more articulate, intellectually daunting Left picks apart and silences the non-intellectual masses.

 

When the intellectual challenges you to justify marriage is not opposite sex marriage good too? Marriage has long been heterosexual, long term, stable and child-centered. Is it not exclusionary criticizes the Left. Is it not wrong to be exclusive? Now, you feel guilty and do not want to exclude anyone. You are confused, cannot answer and mumble. I say I do not know so then feel guilty and retreat. You cannot explain it but you are not wrong. The same is true on the profit front.

 

Profits: most businesspeople careful modest and marshal their resources not Hollywood hedonists with yachts, models and cocaine.

 

You conservative free marketers are not wrong and are not guilty.

 

Dave: I know I am right, and the accuser so just move on and go about my business, and not hold that conversation.

 

My response: Dave could not be more mistaken. It is critical that we win the cultural war and we need all capitalists and all conservatives, if they would maverize to be as articulate as Eric Hoffer and Jordan Peterson (Hoffer, the blue-collar intellectual if self-taught) and Peterson (a PhD professor, writer and psychologist but also a successful businessman); both of these conservative capitalist or capitalist loving thinkers moderate (Mix blue collar or entrepreneur with being an intellectual, formally or self-educated so able to justify articulately one ethos.)

 

J: You really should explain your ethos even if voluntarily exchange, (honorable and liberating and enriching—Ed says) even if the Left viciously attacks it

 

My response: J is telling Dave Ramsey that blue collar and businesspeople must be able to explain their views to save the American way of life, its culture and constitutional republic, humanity’s last best hope.

 

 

 

J: If you conservatives do not learn to articulate and defend your ethos it will be taken from you by the Left. Get politically involved at least at the level locally at the school board. I know you are busy and but get involved or radicals take over schools (They have already destroyed universities and they are not coming back,) Conservatives have abdicated responsibility.

 

Administrators in college took over and the DEI types took over the Administration and it can happen to you too. You in your business must not hire HR Progressives that bring in a DEI consultant. There is no appeasing these radicals. They will take it all, a big mistake.