Peterson, Are You Lost?

 

I have great affection, admiration and respect for both Jordan Peterson and Dennis Prager, and we share many of the same ethical and metaphysical views, but I worry that, despite their enormous love of the truth, and their genuine moral and spiritual efforts to make the world better (not save the world, but be voices of love and healing), they are going to get it wrong, fundamentally, on some critical components, which I adhere to, in ethics and theology.

 

Both thinkers believe and approve of the fact that the idea of the individual and individual rights are the sovereign axioms upon which Western civilization is founded, and that is a great start but insufficient to take us where we need to be ethically and theologically.

 

They both need Ayn Rand in their ethics and in their theology so that they can go to the next level of ethical and theological science (can I use that word, oh well, I am going to anyway) which is Mavellonialism.

 

a)     Self-esteem. They need to adopt a championing of self-esteem development as the only way the sovereign egoist can love himself, and through esteeming and loving himself, and self-sacrificing (delayed gratification) and self-disciplining himself to bring primordial and conditional joy and happiness to himself, others and for God’s cosmos. Love of self is how the world is healed, and there are few exceptions or qualifications to water this down, and noble altruistic ends are met and enriched by a population of self-esteeming egoists that take such good care of themselves that that blessed state produces benefits socially and spiritually, changing the very structure of reality around us for the good.

b)    Egoist ethics. Both Peterson and Prager likely promote a pluralist ethical code, predominantly altruistic with some rational egoism added in, but the problem is altruism evil inherently evil and demonic, so altruism can never be the dominant aspect of a pluralistic ethical code: the majority element must be rational and enlightened self-interest with altruism or service to other as a significant but minority element in the mixture.

c)     Reason: Rand the monistic physicalist is dogmatically optimistic that we can see reality out there as it is, and that our concepts and reason can linguistically capture the objective nature of that world out there as it essentially is, knowable, accessible, and foundational. She is more optimistic than I am, the epistemological and ethical moderate, but she is onto something: our high probable knowledge of objective reality out there and inside can be known approximately enough to build a life around. That meaningful construal of the nature of the role, our place in it, and our moral obligation to shoulder for our own sake, God’s sake, for others’ sake and for the world’s sake, is a construal epistemologically operational as we perceive and reason, and then as a minor element, we allow our feelings, whims, and hunches to well up to surface awakens our conscious appreciation by us. Peterson and Prager must not under-emphasize that reason is our means and standard for figuring out the world and our human condition. They need to adopt Rand’s epistemology, for the most part, despite her overrating the efficacy of reasoning.

d)    Individualism. The moral agent is an individual first, motivated by self-interest; the secondary element of his moral calculus is seeing how to act as serving others, sacrificing himself to others, making their needs and concern to trump his private concerns.

e)     Group-living. Because altruist ethics, collectivist themes, group-living, group rights and nonindividuating are tools used by the Evil Spirits to keep innately flawed humans living as sinners and agents of darkness, these two thinkers need to advocate the primacy of egoist ethics, individual issues, individual-living, individual rights and self-realizing as comprising the primary moral element of being a good person, whereas the group-living factors mentioned just above are kept in a minor element emphasis for the moral person to be good, and keeps his demonic temptations under control.

f)     Prager and Peterson can remain Christians as I am, but they need to believe and preach that all benevolent deities are Greatest Souls, Perfect or Near-Perfect Becoming, Improving Individualists and Individuators more than they are kind, omniscient Shepherds Self-Sacrificing Themselves to serve the world and all of humanity—they are and serve humanity too, but altruism is not their main means of growing and spreading love, goodness and happiness through out the world.