The Sovereign Individual

 

On 12/26/2023 I came across a YouTube video clip, 5-minutes, and 31 seconds long. It was some guy unnamed from Returning Lobster interviewing Jordan Peterson, it was captioned: Jordan Peterson explains his Big Difference with Ayn Rand.

 

Interviewer: “How does collectivism annihilate all human particularity economically or familialy. It seems to me that what is going on in collectivist thinking is the enemy of human particularity and freedom itself.”

 

My response: This interviewer got me thinking new thoughts, inspiring me to realize the organic, spiritual, moral, metaphysical, social, and mutual connection between collectivism, malice, slavery and tyranny on the one hand, and individualism, love, goodness, liberty, freedom, democracy, free market economics and republicanism on the other hand.

 

Collectivism is the enemy of freedom itself and of human particularity, the individual. Collectivism is all about the human identity being the group, the larger and the more centralized the better, and tyranny flows from collectivism as freedom is integral to the individual.

 

Jordan Peterson (J after this): “Collectivism is the enemy of the sovereign individual, the central idea of the West. That is manifested in the underlying religious structure. You think about Christianity for example, psychologically: If you strip it of its metaphysics, you can see the emergence of the divine individual as part of divinity itself. That is part of the Trinitarian idea.”

 

My response: I elsewhere already concluded that the divine individual emerges from the good deities, that are Individuals and Individuators, whose ethics are more egoistic than altruistic, but are both, but Peterson has not gone to these conclusions as I have.

 

Still, he does credit Judeo-Christian theologies and morality as being altruistic but also sympathetic to the individual as divinely inspired and appreciated each for his own intrinsic worth as an independent soul, a spark of human particularity.

 

The three persons in One God (The Father, The Son, and the Holy Spirit) seems to Jordan to remind him of the divine individual concept or reality affiliated with God in Christianity.

 

J: “This is part of divinity itself. That divinity to me is the capacity of individual consciousness to generate order from potential.”

 

My response: If the divine in the human individual is the capacity for that individual consciousness or soul to generate order or cosmos from potential (chaos), why does not Jordan advocate for the self-realized and becoming individual, the living angel developing his talents to the utmost while alive?

 

Jordan seems to see the individual as sovereign, but she can only self-realize as a moral giant, taking on almost Christ-like responsibility for the sins of the world, sacrificing herself for the good of the collective humanity, and perhaps for reality’s benefit itself.

 

Why does he not see the divine potential in each person, not only as spiritual and ethical perfecting or becoming as an individual that is a s selfless sufferer serving the common good, but as each person developing her personal gifts, her brains, her artistic inclinations to their maximum potential, for her own sake?

 

I speculate or answer my own question with two possible answers. First, he is a fringe Christian of some kind (I too am a fringe Christian, but Jordan is an altruist, but I am an egoist.). He is an altruist like traditional Jews and Christians that define the individual as evil, poisoned by original sin which is sick, excessive, narcissistic, malevolent self-love or selfishness.

 

 The only way the fallen individual can redeem himself, Jordan maintains, is to, as an individualist more than as a collectivist or group-liver, though still communally oriented, take on maximal moral responsibility to serve the common good, and that is how is individualism is purely divine or instantiated in the flesh on earth while still existing.

 

Second, Jordan is a professor and a genius, wise, brilliant, original, and subtle. He may not realize it, but I have never forgotten Eric Hoffer leeriness of professors and brilliant people, part of intelligentsia and the ruling class over every regime for the last few thousand years.

 

Intellectuals self-identify as aristocrats, destined to rule the inferior, naughty, child-like masses who need controlling not much liberty or say at all about running their lives. I do not know that Peterson thinks this way, but he is on record in many videos asserting that the talented few rises to the top of every hierarchy, and that is a biological and social fact, and he is largely right about that.

 

Could it be that he sincerely believes that divinely triggered self-realization intellectually, artistically or mathematically or technically is only available to few super talented people like himself, while the masses, inferior in talent, intelligence and ability, can only become divinely inspired individualists as moral giants, while the few geniuses like Peterson himself will express the divine in themselves as moral and intellectual/artistic individuals, self-realizing their personhood in both arenas?

 

These two explanations of mind might explain why Jordan rejects Ayn Rand’s egoist morality as something that could be applied to the individual of any intelligence and talent level, gender, class or race.

Under Mavellonialism I assume that each soul is required by the good deities to self-realize her talents morally, spiritually, intellectually, socially, artistically, and technically. Some like Peterson may be smarter or more talented, but those less smart and less talented, are still capable of miraculous, wondrous, original contributions to growing God’s kingdom on earth.

 

Tolkien the genius knew that Saruman was naturally smarter and more powerful than Gandalf, but Gandalf knew the truth and goodness better than did Saruman, and withstood evil better than did the more skilled Saruman, but Gandalf the wiser and nobler eventually surpassed Saruman that sold out to Sauron.

 

Tolkien is reminding us that God works in mysterious ways, and who could predict that little Frodo and Bilbo could withstand the Ring far more than strutting, Prom-King, muscle-bound Boromir?

 

J: “People see my philosophy—it is not mine—as a variant of Ayn Rand’s philosophy—the centrality of the individual above all.

 

That is not the issue.”

 

My response: She is a pure egoist, fully turning the individual lose to do his thing and develop his talents in a way that he enjoys. Peterson limits the social, religious, legal, and institutional freedom allotted each child, the sovereign individual, born evil and selfish, that is to grow morally, personally as a person whose goodness is socially beneficial and expressible only as a mini-Christ-like martyr, giving up his life, his own interests, sacrificing himself for the benefit of the collective, humanity itself, or God.

 

J: “It is a conceptual issue. What category is to be primary? For me the individual is to be primary. There are a variety of reasons for that. First, the individual is the locus for suffering and the individual is the locus for responsibility.

 

Those are the two reasons that the individual has to be made primary. The divinity element of the individual is deeply encoded in our stories, in Genesis. What humans confront in their lives is akin to what God confronted at the beginning of time. It is easy for us to believe we are deterministic creatures and that the past drives us forward in a determinist manner into the future.

 

I don’t believe that is the case. There is no evidence that that is the case. Humans are really complex creatures. You can’t predict them except in very constrained circumstances. Determinism is a hypothesis but not a very good one, though it has utility.”

 

My response: I am a compatibilist and likely Jordan is too, but we do have free will and we are too complex to predict.

 

J: “What seems to me to be the case is how people conceptualize themselves and act towards themselves, towards others. How the social and political structures are constituted is that humans are constantly confronting a landscape of possibilities. It is potential itself.

 

We believe in the idea of potential. We believe that things could be. It is a very strange conception of reality because things that could be are not measurable in any sense.

 

We actually act as if they exist, and we all treat each other as if one of our fundamental ethical responsibilities is to confront that potentiality properly. We are to live up to our responsibilities.

 

You have these gifts and talents and possibilities that have been granted to you, and if you fail to make use of them, of your talent say, that is a sin of sorts, and that is a religious way of thinking about it.”

 

My response: God calls us to be living angels on earth while alive self-realizing as we go along.

 

J: “It doesn’t matter as that is how people treat each other (We assume implicitly that all of us have free will and moral duties to fulfill—Ed Note.).

 

If a child, your spouse, your brother could be doing more with themselves, you are deeply disappointed (Ed Note: By their mediocre performing.) because there is a call to us, an existential call to face that potential that is everywhere, in every direction, and to transform it into the most functional, habitable order possible.

 

To do it properly with truth and all of those ideas that are integral to the substrata of all the Judeo-Christian Western ideas and fundamentals.

 

If you put the group before the individual, that individual disappears.

 

When you are debating with the radical Left Postmodernist types, about free speech, the argument is not about free speech. They don’t believe in free speech—it is not part of their conceptual universe.

 

For speech to be free and valuable, the people conducting the conversation must be sovereign individuals capable of generating independent thought, independent of their canonical group identity, reach a consensus through dialogue.

 

None of that exists among the Postmodernists. They dismiss all such preconceptions as attributable to something like the Eurocentric colonialists, something like that.