The Other Sage

 I usually characterize Dennis Prager as my revered sage, but Jordan Peterson is sagacious too in many ways. Peterson keeps comparing modern young people to their counterparts in past generations. He is trying to convey several points. More on that just below.

 There is not goodness, no meaning no love that the individual practices, shares or grows into without completely admitting to what one is inside. This radical, existentialist commitment to finding and including the truth in one's life so that one knows how to live is central to his message of assuming responsibility heroically (Here each individual finds meaning.), so that one's noble actions reduce the horror and reach of natural suffering and human malevolence in the world.

First, human nature is basically evil.

Second, the bad, instinctive, groupist side of human nature is unchangeable, universally applicable over time, binding all generations, and binds all the 100 billion or so souls that have lived and died.

Third, we are no better or worse than our ancestors, and most of us would prop up the Stalinist government or Hitler's government, as respectively did the Russians and Germans in their day.

We are fallen, wicked, cowardly, selfish and are herd-creatures that easily degenerate into a mob. So it has always been, and so it will always be unless genetically we program humans to be good and wise all the time like the High Elves in Tolkien's novels.

Jordan may not always speak the truth, but he wants to speak the truth all the time, but he is brilliant and gets it right much of the time. He is accusing the Russians and Germans that propped up Stalin and Hitler of being mostly to blame for the unimaginable suffering, murder and waste that ruined millions of lives.

The people failed to show moral courage and overthrow these totalitarian masters, so the people are to blame for the murderous excesses of Stalin and Hitler, far more than the wicked leaders themselves. What Jordan is implying her is that the sovereignty of the  individual is a spiritual/ethical/ontological necessity of existence. What this indicates is that we as individuals and as a people are to blame directly for societal evil that occurs in our society, under our watch. It is not a collective guilt but an individual guilt. We are to stand up to these tyrants each and every time, no matter if they ostracize, murder, imprison or torture us.

When we as individuals or as a people do good, our efforts are praiseworthy. When we allow evil to grow until the land is covered by it, our sin of omission and commission make us blameworthy.

Jordan disabuses us of the comforting, soothing, misleading but dangerous lie that evils in society are just the responsibility of  these monsters at the top of the totalitarian slag pile, because the people were just doing as they were told and they had to obey those demons running these governments.

Jordan insists that giving all the blame and responsibility to Stalin or Hitler is not only inaccurate, a lie and false--just making them gods or archetypal Lucifers--but that it will not solve the problem for how to make the world better.

The individual must make the world better--there is no other way.