Warring Isms--Jordan Peterson

 Jordan Peterson seems to teach that the great mythic stories and legends are ancient, prehistoric efforts by early humans to make sense of existence, and these stories easily convert to religious. impulses, even pagan religions. This hypothesis seems attractive to me.

Then Peterson goes farther, arguing where each tribe perverts its abstraction, its cosmology, its meaning system or its religion into a cult or ideology, the worship becomes intolerant, fanatical, involuntary and imperialistic. If neighboring tribes or groups of people attack each other, each claiming to own the one, true faith, then endless warfare ensues, and ironically nihilism, or anti-meaning and anti-value system is what comes out of it, or the more powerful tribe and its ideology prevail everywhere.

Let me quote Peterson on Pages xxxi and xxxii where he discusses the above concern: "So, no value, no meaning. Between value systems, however, there is the possibility of conflicts. We are thus eternally caught between the most diamantine rock and the hardest of places: loss of group-centered belief renders life chaotic, miserable, intolerable; presence of group-centered belief makes conflict with other groups inevitable."

My response: Jordan accepts my first principle that the middle is the way, and here clearly demonstrates what happens: we cannot live without value systems, but, because they are group-centered, members of rival tribes are converted into true believers that conflict with each other, our value systems might well lead to the annihilation of the human race. Value systems save us and value systems will kill us. We must find a way to enjoy our essential value systems without transforming them into credal abstractions that we worship and will die for. There may be holy wars, but many are unholy or, once viciously conducted, become unholy.

My recommendation is for each tribe to enjoy their value systems, while moving towards member individuation, values of nonviolence towards rival isms, individual-living and moderate not totalistic support, and confidence in one's own ism. With these changes in place, perhaps inter-tribal war over competing isms can be prevented in the future.

As I have long noted, groupists are passionate, extremist and worship their ism, and wish to spread it across the planet, and their opposite numbers are the same. Note how individualists are far less inclined to be passionate, intemperate, and insisting on advancing their value system by force and the sword.

Let me continue quoting Peterson: "In the West, we have been withdrawing from our tradition-, religion- and even nation-centered cultures, partly to decrease the danger of group conflict. But we are increasingly falling prey to the desperation of meaninglessness, and that is no improvement at all."

My response: Another way of expressing my axiom that the middle is the way is to state that it is our hope and duty to have our cake and eat it too. For example, we need value systems to live and survive, but we must refuse to reduce and twist them into cults or isms that we worship and are willing to fight and die for. We refuse to join tribal mass movements as true believers that go to war against equally fervent and sincere, corrupt true believers embedded in and joyously fighting to the death in the neighboring tribe's mass movement and army.

We must enjoy our value systems without them sickening us with power lust to force everyone in the world to think and worship just like we do.