I have taken notes and done slight editing on these notes from a Jordan Peterson video clip, dated 2023, about 10:45 minutes long, and entitled Destroy Your Ego.
I will comment on this video periodically. Here is the video.
Jordan (J after this): “Pride is the opposite of humility, and humility is the precondition for learning, and you might say that’s partly why humility is something that was practiced, say, by genuine religious people as a virtue, because the idea would be to open yourself up like a child.”
My response: I buy little of this: yes, pride, the negative pride of a groupist, blocks learning and growing, and this vice is the opposite of positive humility, an individualistic worldview.
Positive pride allows the individual to be humble and self-humbling enough to know and admit that he is ignorant and unskilled, that he has to face and deal with his existing shortcomings if he would seek to improve himself.
Those—the majority who are groupist--that actually are humble (negatively humble)—lacking self-esteem—they feel so insecure that they must strut and act proud; it would shatter them to consciously accept and admit ignorance or fault, so they cannot learn and grow.
As a rational religionist, I counter-argue that a person can be genuinely religious as a virtue most easily when he is an individuating adult. Children are sweet and loveable, but they are not developed enough to learn and grow very much, especially ethically on the level of a maverizer. A moral and holy religious believer is more adult-like than child-like. Adults are good, rational, and more individualistic, while children are less noble, emotional and more groupist. An adult is open to self-improvement if she wills to be.
J: “You know how open a child is to learning. Well, the child doesn’t assume he or she knows everything already. They are just looking around all the time, which is one of the things so remarkable about children. They’re looking around all the time at everything.”
My response: Children are naturally open to learning as part of growing up, but, on balance, they grow out of their intellectual, curious state of consciousness too early, too easily if adults do not reward them for individuating.
if an adult can extend this childhood love of learning as an adult, learned plan to individuate one’s talents and personality over a lifetime, then adult learning can amaze, and be splendid, productive, and prolific.
J: “They don’t know and with it with us like an infant that’s just they’re just like this, all the time wondering what the world’s going on and trying to learn. So, pride stops learning. Alfred North Whitehead said the reason we think is so that we let our thoughts die instead of us.”
My response: I think it is the other way around, that humility stops learning and that proper pride inaugurates the learning process.
It just occurred to me that Jordan is anti-intellectual, that he equates the individual of free agency and thinking for himself in a conscious, realist state of awareness as sinful, defying God, faith, the community, his group, his traditions.
Some pride and intellectual pride of one’s own ideas and thought processes is limitedly acceptable for geniuses and the talented, but the masses turn stupid, cruel, and sinful, when they are individualistic, egoistic, rational, and proud of their own thoughts and accomplishments.
The masses must be humble, group-oriented and submissive to elites and traditions—this is where Jordan is headed, and that is anti-Western, anti-humanistic, and not what the Mother and Father, the great egoistic Individuators, the Divine Couple, want and expect from humans.
Healthy, merited pride or self-esteeming is humble, and the self-pride of the humble groupist, by contrast is capable of tremendous arrogance, unable to grow, adjust or exhibit intellectual curiosity.
J: “So, imagine you have a stupid idea.”
My response: Let us identify that many, perhaps most stupid ideas originate from the prejudiced opinion held in common by group-thinked, childlike adults, egoless joiners whose group pride and memes prevent them from seeing individualists or rival groups as they are, or not to treat them with contempt.
J: “Which is highly probable. Right, it, it doesn’t matter. You might have 50 of them a day so then you think, well, let’s go act out that stupid idea which is what you do when you are impulsive. And so, you act out the stupid idea and you just get walloped by the world and maybe you die. Well, so well, why don’t you throw your stupid idea out on the table?”
My response: It is true that we all have stupid ideas, and that we need to look before we leap, and impulsive executing a bad idea is almost always disastrous. I will grant Jordan this criticism. Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.
But the most damaging and dumbest ideas can be deliberately held and fearlessly executed by systems, governments, large groups of people ideologically motivated. Their lethal, malevolent, dysfunctional, stupid ideas become entrenched social traditions.
Thus, the tyrannical and bloody plans of socialists and true believers inflict their ideas upon the unfortunate, suffering world.
Jordan: “To a bunch of other people and say, I have this idea. I’m kind of thinking about acting it out. It is stupid and maybe you are prideful about your idea because you know you’re attracted by it, and you thought of it up, whatever that means, and so now you’re glued to it—plus it tiles something for you, so you’re invested in it, and you don’t want it to be a stupid idea.
But, then like yeah, fine. Do you want to die? And so, a lot of what we do in dialogue is kill stupid ideas.”
My response: Because, even on his own, the individuator is ordinarily, sufficiently realistic and rational enough--and largely fantasy averse enough—that he is able to live in the objective realm, dialoguing with himself in his prideful, reasoned confidence and practical grasp of consequences: therefore, he is also adept at killing off most of his stupid ideas.
Still, Jordan is correct is urging that receiving input from others is another useful way of gaining information and perspective so that one is operating in the realm of objectivity, where stupid ideas are often more easily detected, isolated, and killed off.
J: “And we do that, so we don’t have to act them out because then we die. And this even works biologically so the part of your brain that generates thought grew out of your brain that you use to voluntarily control your actions.
So, you could say a thought is a potential action. People think a thought is a representation of the world. It’s like yeah, not fundamentally. Fundamentally a thought is a potential action, so then in your imagination, you make avatars of yourself. So that’s you and your image. What if I did this? It’s a little avatar of yourself. You think what if I did this? Here’s the world I walk: I act like these good things happen. That’s my vision.”
My response: A thought is a potential action, so bad ideas can have terrible consequences in the world, and good ideas can yield worldly benefits for the self and others, so the trick is to know which is which, and always move forward cautiously and carefully.
J: “Then you throw your vision on the table and say I have this vision. And you say, well, that’s a stupid vision because you didn’t take this into account, and how are you going to do that? And you think, oh, that sucks because I had this vision. Well, thank you because I didn’t see these snakes right, and then it’s tricky because maybe your mad because I had a vision and you didn’t have one, so you’re pissed about that, so you’re just attacking my vision because you don’t have anything better to do.”
And the other voice interrupted, talking to Peterson: ‘I’ve had this conversation with someone before where a kid told me he wanted like a million followers on social media.”
J: “Yeah.”
My response: Others in dialogue can curb our executing our ideas, but we can do it for ourselves as individuators, or by listening in prayer to the wise Good Spirits.
Other voice: “And I was like, yeah, but that’s going to happen though like not for you because.”
J: “Right.”
Other voice: “I knew because I had the experience you know and then I had that moment where they basically freaked out.”
J: “Right, well, yeah, you shatter a dream, aye.”
Other voice: “Absolutely.”
J: “Well, so a dream is a tile of the future so you say what’s the future? Well, you don’t know. Well, here’s a vision, so that’s now a tile and then it covers the future. And it also covers it in a pleasing way. Then you come along and say you knows it’s a little low resolution, well you could say to someone who wants that, are you sure you want a million followers?
Because people say I would be happy if I had 400 million dollars. It’s like you think you could handle that responsibility, do you? Like you are so sure of that, that all of a sudden, you, you would like all this money dumped on you. You can’t even control your household budget. You live from paycheck to paycheck. “
My response: Jordan repeatedly sets straw men, which he then easily defeats: he takes foolish young joiners and parades them around as avatars of proud egoism and Luficerian pride. This erroneous attribution of individualism to groupist young adults, is his general mischaracterization—this is his description not mine, and what he is describing is naïve, complacent young groupists both selfish, arrogant and self-deluding, ready, eager and willing to implement fearlessly their stupid ideas.
They are arrogant, selfish, and mistaken not because they are egoistic and proud, but because they are negatively humble, altruistic collectivists, not sturdy egoistic individualists. They know not who they are, how the world works, and what are the consequences of their acting on their stupid ideas.
It is easy to make them look foolish because they are. Jordan keeps providing foolish young groupists as stupid individualists: he provides these misguided youths as an exemplars of individualism and pride, and he sets up the these naïve, presumptuous, arrogant young, inexperienced, and hype-confident boobs, doomed to fail, and they will because their actions grow out of stupid ideas.
But these are joiners, not individualists, so this argument though true in criticizing the foolish youngster, has no standing as a legitimate criticism of egoism. Such foolish overconfidence and easy optimisms are group imaginings of the selfless and humble.
J: “Now someone is going to dump a treasure on your steps and that’s going to fix your life. It’s like okay how much are you going to give your relatives? Like none, that’ll work out really well. Too much so then so you’re going to take away their responsibility from them, are you? And you’re going to get that balance exactly right?
And what are you going to do with that money because as soon as you got the money the parasites are going to come in and take your money?
There’s an element of corruption around everyone who, who isn’t what you would say walking hand in hand with God in the Garden of Eden, yeah right.
Look, there’s an old mythological trope useful in understanding this. Presume that most people watching and listening have watched the Lion King. The Lion King has a very solid narrative structure. It’s a very smart movie, like many of the Disney movies. And people criticize me because I am so interested in Disney movies, but I’m interested in anything that many, many, many people watch for a long time, because, well, what’s going on there, and why is that so attractive?
And often a movie is attractive because it gets the story right and the characters right—whatever that means. Well, the Lion King was a very, very successful animated movie.
‘Everything the light touches is all king.’ Right there, I can tell you exactly what that means. That’s, that’s a brilliant line. That’s also and notice I use the word brilliant. And Brilliant is associated with the idea of the light. Okay, so now when the light touches something and you see it, then you establish a relationship with a thing that you see because now you start to understand it. And the more lit up something is the more you’re, the more you can understand it, and explore it, and so when you shine a light into the dark crevices, then let’s say then you start to see what’s in the dark crevices.
And if you go around your apartment building, let’s say, and you pay attention to every nook and cranny, you start to, it starts to become yours (Ed says in agreement, it becomes your kingdom of light and cosmos.) in a very fundamental way.
And so you could say light is the equivalent to consciousness (Ed says: or the equivalent of good consciousness, individual consciousness, not the equivalent to evil consciousness, group consciousness, Ed says.).
That’s a good way to think about it. Now, why? Well, we’re very visual creatures, human beings. Our brains are organized on vision. Most animals are organized on smell by the way. But not us. A huge part of our cortical activity is devoted to sight, so we think of sight as Enlightenment, light. We think of it as illumination, right. When we bring something into the light, we improve it. And we associate the day with consciousness and illumination and Enlightenment.
And so, if you attend to something by shining a light on it, then it becomes yours and so your kingdom is actually everything that the light of your consciousness is shone on. And all that is encapsulated in that statement and that’s why it’s stuck in your imagination.”
My response: Whatever share of the earth which comes under the light of your benevolent consciousness is your share of the kingdom of God on earth, and your developing it and caring for it is your lived gift back to God as a maverizer.
J: “Yeah, you remember he is up with his son on a mountain right, on a cliff, so now think about that. That means he can see a long way and then he sees the circle of this world, and the light is shining on it. And he says everything the light shines on is our kingdom, and that also implies and he says that next. That outside the light, there’s another kingdom of darkness, and that hasn’t been explored.”
My response: Jordan said earlier in the video that one cannot learn until one is humbled and humbled by one’s own agency, by others, or by circumstances. Being humble is the acceptable adjective applying to the learner if it is identical to an individuators fielding his veridical self-esteem and clear awareness of his strengths and of his errors, sins and deficiencies, which he works assiduously to improve, and the egoist is the most successful human kind at self-improving. He is strong enough to see himself as his is, warts and strengths.
It is the collective-living joiner and selfless nonindividuator of low self-esteem who is inclined to exaggerate his virtues and ignore his deficiencies.
If he practices individuation and egoist morality, eventually he will confront his faults and deal with them, and afterwards he can regard himself with some level of self-pride which is meritorious, earned, and applicable. He remains eager and open to receive new information, and to receive God’s instruction.
J: “And if you remember in the movie that’s where the fascists and the hyenas are predatory. And so, when Simba goes out past the domain of light, he enters the unknown, and he enters the underworld, the demonic underworld, and that’s Scar.
Back to Scar. Okay, so Simba has Mustafa as his father. And Mustafa is the positive aspect of the patriarchy, and he’s wise and he’s tough. He’s got a tough face. He’s no pushover, but he has an evil brother. That is Scar. And Scar has been scarred and that’s why he is resentful, right. He’s a victim because his brother gets all the attention like Cain in relationship to Abel. And he’s a victim for some reason we do not quite understand.”
Other voice: “He is smaller.”
J: “He is smaller but he’s intellectual too, right, so he’s got the pride—he got the Luciferian pride in intellect and Jeremy Irons, who is that character play, played that extremely well with that kind of unctuous voice that”
Other voice: “’kind of a snaky sound”
J: “Yeah, well and contemptuous and presumptuous and narcissistic. He did a lovely job of that.
And so, you might say why does the king have an evil uncle or brother? Well, the answer is, this is the mythological answer, is that, well, the king will always have an evil brother, always, and the reason for that is if the king is the emblem of the state, which, or even of the stable state of being, because you can think about it psychologically or sociologically.
He always has a counterpart, and the counterpart is the proclivity of that state to be overtaken by willful blindness, so failure to shine a light on things, right. To turn your head away when you know you shouldn’t.
And also, by this corrupt will to resentful power and that is chronic. Now the Marxists would say and do in some real sense there’s nothing but Scar. There’s nothing but the evil uncle.
It’s like that’s a hell of a worldview. I can tell you in some real sense its kin on the Christian front to making the statement that the true ruler of reality is the satanic spirit.”
My response: I agree with Jordan that Marxists and evildoers regard the world as nothing but evil uncles, but there is also hope, love and happiness available in this Vale of Tears.
J: “It’s the same idea and that’s a hell of a claim, man, to, to make, literally speaking. And so, but it’s the case that almost every institution and almost every person has a touch of the evil uncle as part of their structure One of the things I often recommend to my clinical clients if they’re having trouble with a family member is number one, shut up.”
My response: Jordan is a contradiction: his altruistic ethics and collectivist predilection are socially, psychologically, and ethically catastrophic but conventional as ARI philosopher Onkar Ghate points out.
Yet, when Jordan sticks to psychology, he is brilliant and wise. Wisely, he recommends to his patients that, when afflicted by gaslighting and narcissistic-sadistic family members, he advises that the patients shut up, sharing neither good news nor bad news about themselves with the enemy within, who weaponizes that information against the victim. Self-care is disallowing anyone, anywhere, at any time to disrespect and gratuitously hurt one. Part of self-care is in turn abusing and enslaving no other, and thus liberating both parties in a social transaction, and this is altruistic practice, mutualism, at its finest.
J: “Don’t tell them anything about yourself. Just, and I don’t mean in a rude way, it’s just like no more personal information.
Number two, watch them like a hawk. And listen and if you do that long enough, they will tell you exactly what they are up to. And they will also tell you who they think you are. And then you will be shocked because they think you’re something that’s not what you are.
And when they tell you, it’s like a revelation to both of you but attention is an unbelievably powerful force.
And you see this in psychology too because a lot of what you do. And in any reparative relationship is really paying attention to that other person. Pay attention and listen, and you would not believe what people tell you, or reveal to you if you watch them as if you want to know, instead of watching them so will have your prejudices reinforced.”
My response: AGAIN, JORDAN THE CONTRADICTORY: when he is on, he is on, and in his moral conclusions, he goes into the ditch.
Being alert, paying attention, seeing, and hearing oneself and others as one is, and they are—this conscious and intuitive sense of withitness is vital for gaining an understanding of the human condition, about interacting with others, and to discover what the self is up to. Well said Jordan.
J: “That’s usually how people interact. It’s like I want to keep thinking about you and so I’m going to filter out anything that disproves my theory.”
My response: I have long complained that people mostly live in a world of lies, and their subjective prejudices are impossible to penetrate because they cling to them so desperately, so deliberately, so willfully.
Jordan of course attributes this unenlightened way of characterizing others and the self as prideful, individual arrogance, while, in near stark disagreement, I attribute subjective prejudices and a dishonest way of viewing people as misbehaviors and mental errors growing out of group-thinking and group-living. Herd-living produces social life and relationships as the world of the lie.
J: “That’s not what I’m talking about at all. It’s I’m going to watch you and figure out what you are up to, not in a rude way. None of that. Just want to see what is there.”
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