Jordan Peterson With Ben Shapiro

I watched and took notes on a video of The Ben Shapiro Show with Jordan B. Peterson, showed on Sunday, Special Ep 1 on 5/6/2018. Jordan starts off with his sensible, typical advice to young adults to try to lead a meaningful life rather than just a happy life, in order to survive. I like Jordan's tragic sense of life, and love his explanation about human depravity, but Stephen Hick's objection to Jordan's excessive pessimism is a need corrective. Hicks the happy Randian atheist warrior is an optimist that sees good in the world, and positivity breaking out everywhere. Ben noted the stereotype about Jordan as being so prominent with enraged, young white males. Jordan sighed and agreed that Leftists smear him as an Alt-Right fascist, so no real dialogue is undertaken. He is right most of the time, and they demonize rather that debate and dialogue--these are their only weapons. Jordan denies that he is pushing hyper-masculinity as accused of by his enemies; rather, he is advocating for powerful, heroes, competent but routine masculinity, and he is accurate in his self-description here. I would take it farther: Jordan wants powerful, competent males, but he also is for competent, able women. I would go farther and suggest that women maverize too--that they can and should be all that they can be. Jordan promotes masculinity based on competency not power-accumulation. Jordan back hierarchies based on individuals seeking competence rather than power as they compete and cooperate for rank and status in whatever hierarchy they are seeking to climb up, but there the rank is based on merit, not group-affiliation or tyrannical self-promotion. Jordan is mostly correct here, but hierarchies should be flattened and devolved as much as possible in a world of Mavellonialists. I have no interest in groupism, tribal rivalry, their endless, violent power struggles, and class system. Hierarchies can be about power-grabbing based on one's group becoming dominant and oppressive, while vanquished competitors are enslaved, tyrannized and oppressed as victim classes. Jordan wants people to realize the value of hierarchies being used to fulfill their function, not just reduced cynically to an apparatus for acquiring power. Peterson argues that healthy hierarchies are based upon leaders of merit driven by the desire to work and serve and are sympathetic, not ruthless, conniving, selfish power accumulators. Ben praises Jordan as helping a lot of people, by making a difference in their lives. They are taught by Peterson to learn self-discipline and take control of their lives. Jordan is a good man, teaching people how to lead good, fulfilling lives. Jordan rejects this praise, and says, no, all he did was give people courage. They begin discussing gender differences as biologically-driven, much less so as a socio-cultural conditioning. The research indicates that genetic differences increased in egalitarian societies, and no one realized that. Jordan worries about countries that push gender sameness wholly by conditioning the children, but Peterson doubts that you want to cede to the state to socialize your children. Leftists/atheists/secular humanists claim to be rational and pro-science, but their Marxist/postmodernists axioms are paramount for them, and their assumptions fly in the face of biological, scientific research. Leftists assert that all hierarchies are based on power and all power plays are based on group identity. History has been a power play between different, warring identity groups. Peterson explains that is science if the bottom axiom, incorrect intellectuals, life the Leftists, when faced with the overwhelming evidence., may ignore that science in favor of their primordial deep biases, then science is altered to match their cherished narrative. Jordan denounces group warfare and arbitrary power-wielding and clashed break out between the rivals. Jordan believes that the core proposition guiding the West is that the individual should be sovereign. He has concluded that the Liberal culture answers these questions: What is the proper framework to view human identity? What is the relationship of the individual and the group in relationship to the individual? The individual in the West is sovereign and thinking or Logos or spiritual consciousness are best expressed by the maverizing individualist leading his independent life of liberation from group and hierarchy. The Leftists answer that the connection should be vying group identities and naked, raw, brutal power rivalry. This leads to totalitarian hell, I recommend. Conservatives answer with pushing the ascendancy of individualism and their willingness to compete, cooperate and show empathy to each other. I agree, as did Eric Hoffer. Ben responds that the cultural war in the West is collectivists versus individualists, or some individualists versus other individualists. Ben notes that he and Peterson are considered part of the Intellectual Dark Web pushing for revitalizing the Enlightenment. Leftists reject the Enlightenment, seeking to go back to tribalism. Jordan offers (here I am interpreting his explanation and I may have missed something.) that Enlightenment values are based on older, deeper ethos, the source of the self and the modern ethos. Its description includes pieces of expressed, less articulate, nonverbal pattern recognitions and include borrowing from art, music, dance and ritual. My response: If Divine Reason is free, individual and rational and spiritual, it could well be the source for the Enlightenment values. Inputs come from our brain's left hemisphere that conveys what we know, and the right hemisphere operates on what we do not know. Both sides of the brain play a role as deep motivations and emotions are satisfied over time. The question is how to validate our axiomatic system of ethics--to play it out on the world and the self until it satisfies participants. We get the ethical, axiomatic system justified by making people happy p play that game. As adults we make rules of the game; we now have a structure and then get monotheism. Heroes are admirable because they embody a principle. as the erect and manage hierarchical systems. We adapt and map out our adaptations. We map out customs as rules, then get law codes. Rules were customs until identified and written down. We evolve structures of success: adaptation is captured in art, drama, etc., and semantics codes then build up to the Enlightenment. Jordan warns that if you obsess with evil long enough, it takes you over. And if you get good enough, that takes you over too. Ontological patterns characterize good and evil. God used logos (I found online an Oxford Dictionary definition of Logos as: "the Word of God, or principle of divine reason and creative order, identified in the Gospel of John with the second person of the Trinity incarnate in Jesus Christ." So, Logos is divine reason, creative order and the world of God. God the Creator is Pure Reason as the universe is ordered and natural law operates the cosmos.) at the beginning of time to extract order out of chaos. The spirit of good acts in the world on the potential of the world to generate the actuality of the world. Judeo-Christian values confront the potential of the world with good in mind with truthful communication--the order that you extract is good. God used the word to make the cosmos out of potential. This was an encounter with the good and it was good. Jordan's proposition: If one encounters potential with good and truth, the cosmos that you create is good. Ben Shapiro: We separate values from the universal and make human values. Then humans build their own ideology. Jordan: we feel vulnerable, mortal, naked, awake with knowledge of good and evil after the Fall. Ben: We make our system and then get grandiose, then challenge God, and then all turns totalitarian. Rules are necessary precondition for discipline. Our need for ethics underlies the rules. Christ's idea was to orient the self towards the good. An alliance with God and tell the truth. Jordan: What is acting through people as the good is the Holy Spirit or the Logos. Logos and consciousness are real, hard to define. Consciousness has a role in choosing reality. Sexual selection is consciousness, not chance, not just natural selection. Darwin believed in both, but materialists ignored sexual selection. Jordan: females choose competent males, heroes at the top of the hierarchy, but men vote on who is the competent here, and then women abide by this selection of the popular hero. Consciousness steers the direction of evolution. Consciousness, through its active expression, transforms the potential of the world into actuality. To live well and make good choices, we cannot dissipate but we behave and make good decisions. We have to treat each other as divine centers of consciousness. Be responsible, set up order and telos. Jordan suggests that consciousness selects the direction of evolution that becomes biological reality. From Dawkins to Jung it becomes obvious that consciousness extracts the proper world of being through truth and that is good that manifests itself at, for humans, the individual level of consciousness. This is logos within the individual, and it is the metaphysical foundation of the idea of natural rights and responsibility, expressed as the hero of heroes, the driving force behind evolution. Logos drives evolution and order out of chaos. Logos is consciousness or God, and it gives us order and drives our efforts: we trust each other as logos. Jordan has noted that we do not understand what consciousness is. My response: Could it be the soul, I wonder. It could well be that evolution is natural and biological, but its ruler and controller is Divine Logos.