Christian Altruist

 

I watched a snippet online today (12/9/2023) in which Jordan Peterson is talking about human hubris and secular humanist overreach in rebellion against and almost blasphemous towards God. I think Jordan now believes in God and is some sort of Christian, and that he is a conservative altruist.

 

A Marxist altruist is an ultra-fundamentalist collectivist that denies that individuals have any rights, that service to others and self-sacrifice to others and the state is the individual’s only reason for existing.

 

A more moderate Leftist style collectivist will still allow for some weak attention paid to self-care as compatible with and subsumed under the prevalent moral duty to serve others and the state. Group identity, group rights, group ethics and group-living trump individual identity, individual rights, individual ethics and individual-living all day long.

 

Jordan Peterson and Dennis Prager, and most Jews and Christians are what I label conservative altruists. They are ethical altruists, but, being Western, they are mildly for egoist ethics and capitalist, democratic individualism as a secondary, tolerable moral motive. Other-care is the individual’s primary moral ideal, and self-care and self-interest are somewhat acceptable if subordinated to primary values objectives: living to serve others, and one must sacrifice one’s interests, needs and desires if they at all conflict with the general good.

 

My Mavellonialist egoism suggests the promotion of enlightened self-interest, self-discipline, and self-self-sacrifice of the pettier, less developed self of today, in favor of becoming a better self tomorrow and into the future, to fulfill one’s telos, to self-develop into a great soul. Christian altruism make service to others the primary moral duty, and self-care is the secondary moral duty.

 

My version of rational egoism is to elevate self-interest as lived individuating to the status of primary moral duty, and to place self-sacrifice in service to others as the secondary moral duty, not much required or necessary, but to be fulfilled by every individual, when the requirement to help others is pressing: this is the personal requirement to contribute to welfare of all.

 

Here is my paraphrase of what Jordan Peterson said to the interviewer in the short video clip: “Instead of the just God itself being the seat of the remark whose self-identity revealed by God to Moses was: that I am what I am. That is great and proper.

 

Now along comes human individual, adapting and adopting God’s self-description for himself, brazenly, breezily pronouncing, I am what I am. I define myself as the source of all wisdom and revelation in my brain, my psyche, my subjectivity.

 

This individual has no humility, and it is a devastating cultural impropriety. It elevates subjective intellect to the status of God. It is a Luciferian crime.”

 

I am most an egoist and a bit an altruist. Peterson is an altruist that is a bit an egoist. This brilliant altruist is incorrect in the following ways.

 

First, Ayn Rand got it right: selfishness is good, and selfless is evil. Altruists, whether strong altruists like Marxist or weaker altruists like democratic Leftists insist that selfishness is evil, and selflessness is good. Christians like Peterson also accept that selfishness is evil, and altruism is good, though they make room for individualism and freedom of conscience, that the self can be held accountable, thus found praiseworthy or blameworthy by humans in this world, and God in this word and in the next world.

 

Peterson has said publicly elsewhere that there can be no collective guilt or praise for responsibility is always individual. This conclusion could lead to egoist ethics, but it did not in Peterson’s case.

 

Embedded in this would be the implication that group-living joiners lack free will, are mostly determined, so these slightly free robot would not much be blamed or blamed for their moral choices.

 

Second, Christians like Peterson assume that Jesus the Shepherd is head collectivist of the flock of sheep that he lovingly tends, and that is true. A singular Christian like I am concludes that good deities like Jesus, the Father, the Mother, the Holy Spirit and the Good Spirits are the Supreme Individualists and Individuators, those Greatest Souls that lead their flock by teaching the divine principles of self-care and some other-care to each individual human so each can meet his divine destiny to maverize as a mini-creator, strengthening and expanding the kingdom of God in this world and in the supernatural world.

 

Third, Peterson assumes that if a human asserts his worth, especially merited self-pride based upon self-sacrifice and loving positive service to God, the self, and others as a maverizer, that his humanism is an affront to God. That is incorrect.

 

It seems implicit here that God is objective, that God is the Only or Supreme Individualist because God is eternal, necessary, absolute, and omnipotent.

 

Now comes along puny, subjective, upstart humans, corrupt, foolish, emotional, not very bright, ignorant, and outrageously swelled up and self-important, laughably declaring they are the source of all wisdom and revelation in their brains, their psyches, and their subjectivity, all because human knowledge, technology and civilization have advanced somewhat.

 

These pathetic, naïve, contingent, imperfect, limited, mortal, temporal and weak creatures vainly announce without humility that they are what they are, the equals, the better than and replacers of God with themselves as gods incarnate.

 

Their humanistic rebellion and opposition to God is a devastating cultural impropriety, elevating the subjective intellects of abject sheep to Olympian heights where God is and resides as Supreme Being, Supreme Individualist, Supreme Ruler of all.

 

Humans sin against God goes way beyond secular narcissism, social pathology, and popular pathology: it is now a Luciferian crime of blasphemy against God, and God will rise up and wipe out wicked humanity with another Flood sent to humble self-exalting humanity.

 

Fourth, Peterson accuses secular humanists of a sinful, excessive pride (the pride of obsessive exalting of the self, so self-absorbed and conceited that the self worships the self and does not regard God as existing or if God does exist, God is not worth paying homage and obedience to.

 

A modest, Christian pride of the job well done as serving others and becoming competent, skilled, and responsible is acceptable.

 

LUCIFER the supremely confident individualist competed with God instead of being a contented, non-ambitious elite member of the collective sheep not vying with the Shepherd, and that is what blasphemy is: competing with and rivaling God—always doomed to fail anyway.

 

But, Satan is not an individualist or individuator but is a brilliant, handsome, charismatic leader of the pack, who settles for the dissatisfying power of powerlessness, as dictator or guru leading the herd. His selflessness and wickedness are cruel, pure self-hatred and other-hatred in action. God is a pure individualist, a loving self-realizer and creator but Satan is a pure joiner, collectivist, selfish, self-destroying Destroyer of all that is good, beautiful, and true.

 

The Divine Couple work in mysterious ways, and I think they have a wonderful sense of humor: it is militant atheist, secular humanist and flawed female guru of her Objectivist groupies (If I read correctly, she was not always clean, and her years-long affair with Nathaniel Branden while making her husband Frank and Nathaniel’s wife Barbara live with these open-marriage debacle, was sad, outrageous and degrading for all involved.), Ayn Rand, who shows us God’s nature, our nature, and the egoist-Objectivist value set that will save the world here, and open up the way to heaven for ailing humanity. I am sure she is in heaven for the good service she has unwittingly provided for God and humans. She was a very smart, wise, good lady, despite her personal sinning.

 

Fifth, Jordan Peterson and Dennis Prager have wisely, correctly identified the Objective as where was is good, right, and beautiful derive from, and in pursuit of these Forms. All the striving, the efforts, and the activities of humans, individually and collectively, should be directed towards the Objective or God.

 

These two ethicists define the subjective as bad, or less preferred, wrong, and ugly (ugly morally and spiritually). They define the subjective being as the isolated, insignificant individual. The Objective is God, universal, omniscience and wondrous. The human needs to leave the subjective (the self-interested, self-obsessed self) behind, downgrading the self while, through worship and reverence, exalting and showing self-humility at the same time people personally and collectively express pride in God, God’s perfection, excellence, and love. By abasing the self and eschewing self-interest, by serving the familial, communal, state, and global, and God in the other world, the latter acts of unselfish service to the latter is noble and good, avoiding self-regard in homage to the Objective the Good.

 

I agree that the subjective is bad or less preferable and that the objective is better and more worth living for, but I define God the Self-Realizer and each individual human, the self-realizer as objective. God takes care of the flock through De’s enlightened self-interest, and humans are to take care of themselves, others around them, and the creatures of nature through a primary mode of enlightened self-interest as the primary moral motive. If humans do their job as commanded by God, to self-realize, then they can feel proper pride and proper self-esteem, based upon performing, and they will be esteemed, approved of, and rewarded by God in this world and the next for doing as was commanded of them. They will worship God, work for and love God, but they will be extending God’s kingdom in a mode of sacred humanism, and that has everything to do with Jesus and nothing to do with the Supreme Collectivist Autocrat, Satan.

 

Sixth, Max Stirner, over 100 years ago, in his masterpiece, wrote that the prince, the church and God were considered the supreme, Objective Individualists or Egoists to be worshiped by collectivized, self-loathing, humbled self-depreciating, selfless altruists, or duped egoists that is human subjects.

 

Stirner was a psychological egoist, and wanted each person to be his own Egoist, and worship none of these nonexistent, Objective abstractions, ghosts that burdened deceived, subjugated humankind.

 

I would recommend conservative Western altruists like Peterson and Prager to adopt one idea from Stirner.

 

If each person, as an egoist (an objective Randian egoist not a Stirnerian subjective egoist) would refuse to worship any abstraction--as a prostate, groveling, egoless servant--as the only Individualist or Ego deserving homage: the state, the king or autocrat, the holy cause, the ideology, the fetishized abstraction, or God, that egoist would lead a full interesting life as the Individualist or Ego to be served.

 

I hasten to explain we do not want to ever, as an egoless collectivist groveler, or as a skilled, rational, proud, independent egoist and maverizer, serve any abstraction, the state or any dictator as our ideologicalized holy cause and religious substitute for worshiping a benevolent deity, but we can and should serve that good-deity, if we freely choose to do so, not as a dry abstraction, but as our boss, the head Individuator that we are proud of, obey and are friends with. The Divine Couple and Jesus expect no less.