Jordan Peterson And The Principle of Unequal Distribution

 On Pages 8 & 9 of his book, 12 RULES FOR LIFE, AN ANTIDOTE TO CHAOS, Jordan Peterson introduces the principle of unequal distribution, and this explanation reveals much of his thinking; let me quote him: "Its winner-take-all in the lobster world just as it is in human societies, where the top 1 percent have as much loot as the bottom 50 percent--and where the richest eighty-five people have as much as the bottom three and a half billion.

That same brutal principle of unequal distribution applies outside of the financial domain--indeed, everywhere that creative production is required. . . . This principle is sometimes known as Price's law, after Derek J. de Solla Price, the researcher who discovered its application in science in 1963. It can be modelled using an approximately L-shaped graph, with number of people on the vertical axis, and productivity or resources on the horizontal. The basic principle had been discovered much earlier. Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923), an Italian polymath, noticed its applicability to wealth distribution in the early twentieth century, and it appears true for every society ever studied, regardless of governmental form. It also applies to the population of cities (a very small number have almost all the people), the mass of heavenly bodies (a very small number hoard all the matter), and the frequency of words in a language (90 percent of communication  occurs using just 500 words), among many things Sometimes it is known as the Matthew Principle (Mathew 25:29) derived from what might be the harshest statement ever attributed to Christ: 'to those that have everything, more will be given; from those that have nothing, everything will be taken.'"

My response: I believe that Jordan Peterson is claiming that hierarchies with their unequal distribution of wealth, rank and power are natural, not the immoral stratified class system engineered by greedy, unjust modern capitalists.

I believe Jordan the scientist has made his case convincingly. At the same time, I just wonder how relevant is his insistence that hierarchies are human destiny. I flatly or mostly refute his prediction: we are a smart race, and when living angels and awake, we will not settle for group, institutional or hierarchical living and working.

Where humans are untutored and natural, most people are lazy, passive, fatalistic and enjoy having little rank, power, independence, and wealth, and they enjoy (because they are sadists to those below them and masochistic towards those above them that abuse them) being pushed around and ruled, exploited, oppressed.

This is the human starting point for personal liberation; it is the jumping off place. Where and when most adults learn to love themselves, believe in themselves, follow God, maverize and individual-live, then hierarchies will be democratic, relatively flattened, limited in size, and influenced, and the classless society of Americans that will emerge will be quite affluent, upper middle class, with a few poor and a few super-rich at the fringes of mass society.