It seemed a few years ago that Jordan Peterson was a powerful, outspoken advocate of the individual as the sovereign substrate of Western Civilization. He is not so much so now. His morality seems to be altruistic/egoist while mine is egoist/altruistic. Ayn Rand’s morality is egoist/egoist, and Karl Marx’s morality is altruist/altruist in major and minor emphasis of percentage of entire moral content, scope and aim.
Peterson’s morality is quite like that of traditional Christianity in which pride is considered to be a mortal sin, excessive self-regard and appreciation of one’s ability in competition and lack of deference shown to God.
As I wrote of Peterson and Christians before, they are more altruist than egoist in their morality, and this fault of theirs (likely quite consistent with Biblical morality) has made the West more evil, less progressive, and successful than it otherwise would be. Their ancient, regressive, unenlightened morality is holding humanity in chains, holding it down and back. When Peterson and Christians teach Western youth not to have merited, earn pride and self-esteem, they are reinforcing the natural selflessness, self-loathing, selfishness and lack of self-pride that makes these youth bitter, resentful, filled with rage: this fills them with an impulse or ambition to act decisively if negatively taking revenge upon God, the community, themselves and others for having been born and born in pain.
Then these frustrated and self-alienated groupists, running in packs, find substitutes for individual, positive earned pride in unearned, meaningless, empty sources of pride like group affiliations or a cause to true-believe.
I am an egoist in ethics, and at least one assumption underpinning this morality, which I hold, is the sovereignty of the individual who is divinely commanded to his reason and intellect to make sense of the world and to build his path of self-development in service to the Good Spirits. Since self-interest is good, and other-interest is evil—more than less, and more or less—the individual should esteem himself if he is to love himself, and that means he must have pride in his accomplishments, his creativity, his moral decency—if he had actually worked hard and merits feeling proud of his accomplishments.
I also assume that positive self-pride is tightly linked to the individual wielding a strong, active conscience to govern his own behavioral choices. He is healthy ethically and the self is sensitively in touch with acting in a way pleasing to his conscience, that he has been acting consistently with his own high moral standards. That is the only way how he gains and keeps self-esteem. If he is not virtuous, he will not esteem himself. He will feel guilty, lousy inside, and he will disdain himself. If he does not esteem himself, he lacks the positive motivation to make things better. Once he learns to esteem himself, and his conscience is his accurate, sensitive, alert self-monitoring faculty, he will proportionately valuing himself based on his actions not his pronounced values. His self-esteem thus is directly grounded in his good character, wise choices, and good acting; only then will his virtuous living allow him to be at peace with his powerful conscience. He does not lie to himself or suppress feedback from his uncensored, unrepressed conscience. He is in touch with reality and his self-esteem is sanctioned by his conscience, only when his conduct mirrors this merited self-approval. He likes esteeming himself, and he is loath to act in immoral ways, because it feels terrible to no longer be proud of whom he is and what he has become by misbehaving.
Since the self loves the self and thinks highly of the self, if the self does not act honorably, nobly and truthfully, then such sinful, unworthy and blameworthy actions and practices have diminished the self in the eyes of the self and the world, and the individual’s good name, honor and reputation are besmirched because the self is not acting up to the moral standard require of being worthy to feel individual pride in one’s moral, material and creative accomplishments. Such pride has nothing to do with disrespecting God or putting down others as inferior to oneself. The virtuous person is proud but that is in line with God’s being justly proud of De’s own moral excellence.
In effect, I am offering that individual pride of the individuators is good, individual pride and a virtue but the hubris-centered, intellectual, and passionate pride of a follower of Lucifer is vice, a mortal sin and it is group pride.
Sinful pride is ordinarily individual group pride, and virtuous pride or self-regard is typically individual pride based upon how well one has acted and conducted oneself.
Here are several YouTube video excerpts in which Peterson is showing talking about pride. I edited them lightly.
YouTube Video Excerpt 1—Jordan: “Break the universal law and things go bad for all; you are breaking the law that governs the structure of Being.
My response: This reminds me of natural law, that one cannot be sinned against without painful consequences following the miscreant self.
Jordan: “People being hubristic: pride goes before the Fall. The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. No one ever gets away with anything.’
My response: Perhaps sinful perpetrators are able to bend the structure of reality and get away with it in the short run but not in the long run--cause and effect.
They cannot twist the fabric of reality without repercussions. They can’t get away with anything. That is the beginning of wisdom, that one is not to sew chaos or even hyper, tyrannical order.
YouTube Video Excerpt 2--Jordan: “Pride is a cardinal sin. I don’t think you should be proud of yourself. That is somewhere that culture has fallen off the rails. You should be convinced in your heart that you are doing the best you can with what you have been given.”
My response: I think those that are arrogant and haughty do not like themselves. If you need to make others feel bad by elevating yourself above them, nothing about inner peace would drive such misbehavior. Excess humility is the cardinal sin, and it is those that play social power games of sadomasochism based on social rank and striving that are generally the arrogant kind, and these practitioners of group-pride are altruistic, not egoistic.
If we learn to self-realize as Americans, then our people will grow to be very, very intelligent, creative, and wise: most of these same people would likely not brag because they felt no need to misbehave. If we learn over the next 20 years, by self-realizing, by taking brain-enhancing smart pills, millions of us learning how to unlock hidden inner psychic potential to be smart and creative, then we can grow people with powerful, imaginative intelligence and artistic abilities. Jordan assumes that the very bright are the very creative and they are rare, but that is not true: all or creative and bright beyond belief, if they would but believe in themselves, esteem themselves as worthy of maverizing, and then go ahead and self-realize.
Jordan: “Hopefully that will make you less anxious and more hopeful. You should have the same regard for yourself as you have fore someone you love. That’s not pride. It would be lovely if you could orient your thoughts to yourself so that you could allow yourself to be pleased if you tried.”
YouTube Excerpt 3—Jordan : “Pride is related to hedonistic self-gratification.
This is a Luciferian crime. Instead of the God that revealed to Moses saying I am what I am, it is the individual person proclaiming I am what I am. I get to define myself. I am the source of all wisdom and revelation. My brain, my psyche, my subjectivity with no humility in that regard. I think that is a devastating cultural impropriety. Because it elevates the subjective intellect to the status of God and that is a Luciferian crime.”
My response: I am for self-esteem, self-love, and merited pride in what one has achieved, but I like people that are modest because it makes social relations more agreeable for all. Snotty, arrogant people putting others down is disagreeable and such ill-advised performing makes all unhappy. These hostile games promote fighting and unnecessary suffering in society, and that is unethical.
I assume if one is cruel to others or oneself, then one hates the self and has no self-esteem.
On the other hand, if one is kind to others and oneself, then over all one loves the self and esteems the self.
If one is arrogant even if its source is merited individual pride, or, more commonly is generated by unmerited, empty group pride (the source of most arrogant strutting), that is unethical, but is a symptom of low self-esteem. One of high self-esteem does not need to brag, show off or loudly make others feel inferior (be it true or just an opinion). And I like modest quiet, quietly confident people and a little humility is fine, but if too humble and self-deprecating, that is a sign of low self-esteem. Be tranquil, stoic and at peace. If one is an accomplished individuator and moral person, then one can be proud of self as an individual, if expressing that self-assessment privately or publicly in a calm demeanor, and one’s self-rating corresponds to one past behaving.
It seems now that Jordan Peterson is a believer in God and is sympathetic to Christianity, he seems not so high on the sovereign individual as the core belief of the West.
YouTube Excerpt 4--Jordan “Remember when pride was a sin. Although that is merely a factual statement because under the old rules even applicable even a decade ago, pride was a sin and recognized as a cardinal sin. For thousands of years previously. It still might not be acceptable to the woke authoritarian morality who now insist that we celebrate Pride Month . . .”
My response: Once again group pride is the cardinal sin, and this bragging and strutting is grounded in low self-esteem being compensated for. Individual pride is self-esteem or self-love and that leads to virtue and holiness when the agent is maverizing for the sake of the Good Spirits
YouTube Excerpt 5--Jordan discusses the sin of pride: “You feel any experience that puts you on the edge of development as engaging. That is the line between yin and yang. Or that is chaos and order. Chaos is where you do not understand anything at all. And order is where you do not understand as much as you think you do. Structure and the lack of structure. Or actuality and the lack of structure. Or actuality and possibility.
So how do you mediate between these two? The answer is that you have an instinct for that.”
My response: The moderate tendency to mediate moderately between polar opposites is an instinct, but it is also a rational appreciation of how we should live, and this cognitive process is rationally triggered as we interface daily with reality and work out how to live and where to aim.
Jordan: “And the instinct is meaning. This conversation is so contentious that we are upset. And it is not so mundane that we are bored. It’s right on the border so the reason we can have this conversation and it is working is that you know there are some things you don’t know and there are some things you do know. You’re trying to redeem yourself from your ignorance and blindness but also trying to redeem yourself from your excessive pride and your pride would be I know what I am saying and doing. Pride is a sin because it leads to you being a tyrant and stops you from learning.”
My response: I do not deny that corrupt personal pride is a sin when it leads your being a tyrant, and prevents you from learning, but normally this is group-pride, not individual pride.
I fear God’s power and might enough not to get too swelled up for group-pride goeth before the fall, and that personal arrogance springs from and is reflective of a need for the self to over-react to excess self-humility. Peterson seems to have concluded that the virtuous person is humble and self-deprecating. That smacks too much of traditional Christian ethics, and there is much altruistic evil in that. Of course, one does not want ever to be arrogant and defy God, competing with God, rebelling against God, seeking to overthrow God or replace God with society as God, like is being done by people who are atheistic secular humanists claiming there is no God, or even if there is, they no longer need God”
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