On 7/16/23, journalist Steven Edington from The Telegraph in the UK, interviewed Jordan Peterson for over an hour, and I took notes on what interested me, and will comment on the exchange. The title of the interview is: The radical left is guilt-tripping the West into oblivion. Conservatives are losing the war but I know how to win.
Jordan (J): It is commonly believed that the totalitarian state is ruled by the dictator, running things from the top-down. No, it is ruled by the Lie.
My response: This point is critical. I have long thought that tyranny and slavery exist because the common people suffer it of their own free will; that the existence of totalitarian or authoritarian systems survive and were and are the political norm for most people throughout history, more due to the masochism, cowardice and love of dependency chosen by the oppressed majority, than by the unjust, cruel, power-sot machinations of elites and oppressors.
Jordan thinks similarly. When he states that the totalitarian state is ruled by the Lie, it is the obligation of the people from the bottom up to no longer tolerate lying, no longer lie or be tolerant, and no longer accept being oppressed or oppressing anyone else, and that is the Truth that each individual citizen must embrace. It is his choice if he is free, and it is his choice is he is enslaved.
Steven (S): Has the Right lost the culture war?
J: We will see. The Right lacks vision. They play a rearguard game. They lack a compelling story to tell young people.
My response: Mavellonialism is a compelling story for young people to rally around and blend with their other political, ethical, and cultural values.
J: Conservatives are conscientious; it is so easy to make them feel guilty, and psychopathic narcissists on the Left are unbelievably good at that. So, conservatives are set back on their heels, not able to articulate their principles, They just go about their business. They are not conceptually articulate but just do what works. They are not able to repel messianism of the Left, so they are dragged Left a bit at a time. Conservatives are also terrible strategists. 50% of state budgets go for education. 90% of teacher political donations go to the Democratic Party. Mediocre professors and third-rate students become teachers and run or graduate from Departments of Education that hammer on teachers. Departments of Education have a monopoly on teacher certification; these activists in Academia have been working to destroy us for 60 years.
Republicans are too daft and have handed over culture to these Leftists. The Right is ineffective, and the Left is winning. They thrive in chaos and are willing to upset the apple cart.
S: How to fight back against Leftist authoritarianism?
My response: Jordan accurately depicts what has happened, but thinkers like Jordan, Christopher Rufo and Marl Levin are urging a counterrevolution to win the culture war and save our Western democracies and republics, and I support that counter-offensive—peaceful of course—wholeheartedly.
S; Debanking in Canada and the UK are used against conservatives.
J: I asked Democrats when does the Left go too far, and they would not or could not give me an answer. This censoring and canceling are classic female archetypal forms of aggression; men usually are aggressive physically, but women cancel, shame, gossip, and are antisocial by denigrating the person and their reputation and communal standing.
S: What should we do if we experience totalitarian victory and there is no hope?
J: All is a matter of faith. Atheists accuse believers of believing in what is not there. No, faith is staking your faith on some set of propositions: you must act in spite of your ultimate ignorance. We move forward in ignorance, grounded in a stable set of principles or by wavering. Say what you need to say to save your skin or to gain an advantage. Then you have faith in the lie, the power of deception, and we know who rules the kingdom of deception.
My response: I agree with Jordan, and if Satan rules the kingdom of lies here and in hell, then the Divine Couple rule the kingdom of truth here, when good rules here and it does not right now, and in heaven.
Faith in truth means you act and speak truth as if that is the best thing that can possibly happen. If you lie some time and tell the truth some time, you end up confused, and Christ coming back allots the worst form of hell to those that were fence straddlers.
My response: A fence straddler is not a moderate which is good and is consistent with Christianity and all benevolent deities and faiths. To be moderate is to believe and live your faith with your whole heart, soul and mind in what you think, feel and do, but it is not a fanatical allegiance or orientation for that sickens and distorts the relationship between the believer and the good deity worshiped. God does not want nor does De reward enthusiasts.
The fence straddler is a closet fanatic and false moderate that lies and tells the truth, playing both sides against the middle.
J: Speak the truth as a dissident and reap worldly consequences. Doug Murray is courageous, and courage is rare. (Ed says: Courage is rare because self-actualizing individualists are rare.) If you speak the truth that is your truth is your way as an individual thinker, and if you lie, the lie is not your way, but is some external way that you are linking yourself to. (Ed says: the lie is Satan’s way).
I tell the truth as best I can. I am a dissident and I side against Trudeau and the Lie.
S: Why does no one study
the great Soviet dissident like Solzhenitsyn anymore?
J: Since World War II educated young people were taught that authoritarianism was a right-wing phenomenon. Leftists were allowed to argue that Stalin’s Communism was not real socialism, or that its principles were misapplied. Leftism offered Soviet Jews the possibility of universal brotherhood, and those Jews liked that, not offered by the Fascists.
And capitalism concentrates wealth and power in the hands of fewer and fewer people, which it does, but so does every other economic model. Teachers do not know this or do not admit to this.
S: Dissidents are rare. Why do the masses put up with totalitarian abuse?
J: It is a myth that totalitarians rule is top-down by strongmen but instead the people are ruled by the Lie as the principle of governance. Everyone that lies is complicit in maintenance of the state. The masses are not oppressed by wanting to be free, but the vicious dictator disallows it; no all are lying about everything 100% of the time, and silence is lying too.
My response: true reform comes from the bottom up, so if all are lying and preferring to live in tyranny, then that is the bottom-up program that the majority has agreed to and supports.
J: I want to bring up the book of Jonah. Jonah is the voice of conscience for Yahweh to the Hebrew people. The Lord tells Jonah to go preach to the people of Nineveh, so sinful that unless they repent, God will destroy them. Jonah disobeyed God and fled on a boat, but the boat was seized by a violent storm so they sailors asked which passenger was to blame for this divine attack. Jonah admitted to offending and disobeying God, so they threw him overboard and a whale swallowed him up.
For the Hebrews the bottom of the ocean was hell, so a creature came up from the abyss, grabs Johan and takes him down to hell. He repented after 3 days and agreed to do his duty. Jonah talks to the people of Ninevah, who repent and are saved. God showed them mercy.
My response: no one knows for sure what our conscience is, and we all seem to have one. A working one seems to be a voice from God speaking to us. Notice too that the Lord shows mercy to the people of Ninevah, pagans and the enemies of Israel. This foreshadows that Jesus is speaking to all humans, not just to the Jews.
J: The sin of omission is if you do not speak the truth, you do not stick your neck out, but if you were a truth-teller, you are hurt either way.
God shows mercy even if only a few are good.
Steve: Let us return to Solzhenitsyn.
J: He took responsibility for his condition, not willing to be a victim, and could have blamed Hitler and Stalin, and this seems reasonable. Solzhenitsyn observed that religious believers blamed no one for their suffering acting nobly under impossible conditions. He also observed that prisoners were running the camp, so he could take responsibility as had the prisoners, so change comes from the bottom up.
Dostoevsky warned that we are responsible for what happens to the self and everyone else. If you were near perfect, you could still improve yourself and everyone else by your heroic efforts to be a moral paragon, and if all is dark, all are to blame for each of you has a divine spark in him.
My response: Yes, we are responsible for what happens to the self, and for everyone else If we take care of, love ourselves, discipline ourselves, and develop as living angels. Then we and all and God’s kingdom here on earth all benefit and that kingdom grows a bit. Altruism or the common good is achieved through enlightened and proper self-interest pursued en masse first.
St: Let us talk about Hans and Sophie Scholl, twins in Nazi Germany, the white rose movement to speak out against Hitler and the Nazis when most Germans refused to speak out, and the twins were quickly executed.
My response: We are born flawed; and this means we are selfish and cowardly, so it is easy to go along with the status quo, be it wicked or good, just or unjust. We have free will but we do not often choose to be courageous, but some do, or are courageous by some deterministic combination of nature and nurture. Our naturally weak moral nature must be made strong and vigorous by us to accept courage and truth and to thwart totalitarianism.
J: It is a mystery as to whom will be courageous or how to get it. This is a mystery that I do not understand. Determinism enters into the picture here, for a deterministic creature can’t configure the transforming horizon of the future which is unpredictable. I think we must choose to be courageous. Freud was mechanistic about the Oedipal complex working in a child, that it was imposed by his mother, so it was her responsibility and blame. Jung disagreed. The child had to agree to accept the Oedipal complex. The child has free will so blame is bottom up as well as top down. It is a mutual dance between oppressor and the oppressed to accept being hurt as one’s identity and becoming dysfunctional. We make moral choices or have free will and we do so very early in childhood. It is easier not to pay for our sins, not to shoulder responsibility.
My response: I agree with Jordan.
S: Who is more inclined to be dissident: the people in China, Russian, Germany?
J: I do not know, even in a free society we are free only to the degree that all are dissidents. Free people are truth-speaking dissidents. In a free society when we start lying or being silent things turn towards tyranny and chaos. The Judeo-Christian corpus is the bedrock of (Ed says: virtuous citizenry) values since truth is its highest principle and core to our natures and our divine obligation. Nietzsche equated the death of God and truth with nihilism and totalitarianism, or we create our own values, and psychoanalysts proved that we cannot do that.
My response: As maverizers, our original creativity and art is to create our own values, and that is God-sanctioned and guided by the Good Spirits, the wellspring of such personal creativity and personal creator power. This is our divine duty to assume and provide for extending God’s kingdom in the world.
S: What lessons can we learn from 20th century dissidents?
J: Solzhenitsyn notes that one man speaking the truth can bring down a tyranny, and if you speak the truth to yourself, you can bring down the tyranny over yourself.
My response: I concur.
J: You can’t orient life by mere attention to the facts, for the right answer is not known a priori. We must guess how to act, live and then find out what is the truth. We must have faith (that we are on the right track, Ed says) so put your faith in truth. If you lie, you falsify the relationship with yourself.
S: Ironically, woke tyranny radicals view themselves as liberators (and virtuous saviors, Ed says). Woke people see themselves as victims.
My response: We need to clean up ourselves, whether victim or victimizer, doing neither anymore. Once we clean ourselves up, we then can make the world a little better. We are not just to grab worldly power out there to solve problems; there are some things wrong in the West, but it is not warranting or resolvable through Marxist revolution.
J: With the David and Goliath myth, the hero confronts chaos and creates order. Social hierarchies ossify and tilt towards power. It is all power and conflict at the base, Leftists insist. No, power is not the fundamental motivating principle. Power corrupts the social enterprise and the psyche, but it is not the fundamental motivating principle. Play is the antithesis to power and can be adopted. Play is the fundamental motivating principle and free play is antithetical to power.
My response: power accumulation is not the fundamental motivating principle in the world. Play can b called love or power-sharing or insisting upon one’s share of power-wielding to maverize and serve God, no more and no less power gathering to the self. Love is the motivating principle of the universe or at least in heaven, Hate or lying and out of balance power-sharing patterns is the motivating fundamental principle in hell or when the universe is reduced to bad anarchy and chaos.
J: Leftists assume that mere public protest against the ‘man”, such virtue-signaling activism is sufficient moral effort. It is not. Everyone improves nothing when they are parading their nobility whining morally, publicly. Propagandists subvert the mythological to the ideological.
My response: Logos or the divine principle of love, reason and goodness is best exemplified in the ethical individual as a personal self-controlling performance or act to introduce God to the world in a faithful way. One’s abstractions so communicated and performed are a religious sacrifice of the self to God and God’s cause.
To subvert the Logos and one’s abstractions is to pervert and distort those abstractions into a false idol, an ideological cause that one seeks to force upon the world, a collective lie hammered down onto an unwilling, captivated public.
J: Judeo-Christian ethos: the tyrant you face most morally is the one in your heart—to do good is to reform the heart of yourself, morality is individual effort to control and discipline your, natural flawed self. This is how malevolence is removed from the external world as the idea of God progresses. God becomes less a voice of nature ad awe and more within us as a voice of conscience. This is the psychologicalization of the concept of the divine.
The most evil spirit is the one that lurks within you; that is the most sophisticated definition of evil. You help the external world by conquering evil inside first.
If you go the power route you can rule the world or hell—or put your house in order and inherit God’s kingdom here and in the next world.
If you are kind and honest, that is heaven’s treasure. You then treat others well because they are you.
My response: I agree, not how egoism well-done by the individual then heals others and is the common good.
S: I have this great man theory.
J: The great man gives voice to the present dynamic relationship between him and the social surround. Individual effort is what moves things forward. We all have the divine spark, and each can give the world something unique that no one else can give and without it the world is profoundly lessened. We each have the divine spark, so we also have divine value and divine responsibility. And shouldering that responsibility is where meaning is found. You will suffer and need meaning, or the storms will take your out or you will be dead.
S: Great men were common in history, but today we have no great men, only mediocre politicians. Why?
J: Well, communication technology is to blame: tv only allowed shallow, glib answers.
My response: Great citizens, individuators-anarchist supercitizens will provide a countless pool of great men and women that could lead the nation, or at least will order a mediocre leader to become a statesman or resign, or obey her boss, the united voice of the people from the bottom up.
S: After 2016, how are you changed?
J: I have suffered by I refused to be a helpless victim. I did not accept for myself a role of helpless victimhood, becoming bitter and resentful and then murderous and genocidal.
S; Are there advantages to suffering?
J: Suffering can make us wise but it can degrade us too.
S: Are you more cynical and pessimistic now?
J: No, but the level of discovered level of malevolence and stupidity at work in the world did amaze me, but I have met many good people too. I was right to predict that C16 woud lead to restricted free speech.
If not speak the truth then that will cause hell to grow here on earth. Mental health requires some participation with the community, others balancing you and keeping you on track.
My response: I agree, but until great souls like I am can be socially popular whether or not we conform, speak the truth, and come and go, then it is impossible to for a great loner to be social without them poisoning the relationship by hunting and persecuting the great soul, seeking to defeat and break him.
J : Liberals can be too open and that can lead to chaos. Canada is now a banana republic.
S: Why is Britain special?
J: The British do the best job of translating the corpus of Judeo-Christian values into public policy in their Parliamentary structure and in its common law tradition, a miracle. It is bottom-up law, or individualism. Anti-oppression Leftists in America decry British colonialism, but the British navy legally and militarily enforced the end of slavery. English evangelical Christians called their Parliamentarians to their conscience to end slavery, and there was a plan to give India its sovereignty.
S: US Founding Fathers followed the British model.
J: Their revolution was to end British rule, but use the English system, in effect, to be treated by British citizens. It was a bottom-up model not a top-down elite model that the French advocated and instantiated. The Elite there can rule and use reason (Reason is a very bad master but a good tool.). The French enshrined worship of self-serving intellectuals, and no respect for the common man.
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