Wake Up Jordan

 

I am about to criticize Jordan Peterson, that good and wise and very articulate conservative intellectual doing so much good in the world.

 

Peterson has often adduced that the sovereign idea of Western Civilization is the primacy of the individual, his needs, his concerns, his quest for happiness and fulfillment.

 

Peterson is a Buddhist and Cantonese metaphysical moderate that approximately states that the middle is the way, and that is my metaphysical take on things too.

 

Peterson, the genius thinker and scientist, ironically is an existentialist in his version of Christianity, his metaphysics, his ethos. This outlook—and this is what worries me about Peterson—is that existentialists promote existence over essence, and irrationality and feeling over rationality and thinking.

 

I note the deep, profound affinity between feeling and altruist-collectivist ethics versus the superior and better Randian egoistic-individualist ethics and reasoning.

 

To know truth and goodness and God, it is imperative than we are individual more than groupist and group-living, and thinking more than we feel in our ethical choices made.

 

Peterson seems to be for altruism—collectivist more than he is for egoism-individualism, and that is the traditional ethical code of the Jews and the Christians, and that is not what will work well going forward.

 

My choice of moderate ethical system to help the self and others, and to be compatible with what God wants from us—that system requires that we think more than we feel, and that we live and make choices as egoist-individualists more than as altruist-collectivists.

 

Peterson wants people to make a leap of faith into the unknown to come to lead a fulfilling, enriching, authentic, meaningful, virtuous life, and he has a point. My fear is that that radically irrationalist, Kierkegaard is influencing Peterson so much that the agent is left with a trend away from individualism, away from rationality, suppressing the cultivation of personal self-esteem—and the unintended (or intended, I do not know that the astute Peterson knows or has made clear that he wants individualism subordinated under collectivism control.) consequence is a move away from individualism and individuating, and that is a move away from mental and spiritual health, and a  move away from  the Good Spirits, all great souls in the noumenal realm.

 

If Peterson is rejecting, in effect, that the individual good is the sovereign focus in Western thinking, and by allowing individuals to maverize, that is how the collective good is met, then Peterson is moving  back towards the ancient moral view that individual good is self-sacrifice in service to others and for the common good, and that is the only way forward for any individual, then I disagree with his thinking here.