Jordan Peterson has gone full collectivist, full altruist: he wants and insists that the moral person can only be moral and progress if he first kills his ego, and lives to serve others, to sacrifice his personal interests and happiness for their sake, to be an egoless adult, who necessarily is purely and solely a group, herding, herded creature, yet there is only tyranny, hate and malevolence there.
Below, I took notes on a 4-minute video by Jordan which aired in 2024, and its title is: Why Every Man Needs To Kill Their Ego. I lightly edited the video and will comment on it.
Here is the video which commences with a woman asking Peterson a question: “Would you please talk about what Jung refers to as the psychic death, also called an ego death?”
My response: Psychic death or ego death could be beneficial if not taught or implemented in some obscure, cumbersome manner. In a sense Jordan and Jungians calling for spiritual or psychic death of the corrupt, savage part of the self is beneficial, in the sense that one must be reborn and take on a new identity to heal, to love, to grow ethically and spiritually. I would argue that one should abandon or sensibly scale back group-living, group-identifying, group morality and nonindividuating, and that, that transformation will cause the self to be reborn and one’s natural egolessness-otherness ego will be killed off, so that the self can be born again or reborn as an egoist and individualist that individuates.
Jordan (J after this): “Now there are variants of that because you can have a voluntary or involuntary ego death. And a voluntary ego death is when you learn a bunch, and you’re willing to let go, that you be your own immolation.”
My response: It often seems as if the self is born in a state of illusion and self-delusion, without experience, innocent in a ways of the world, though a baby is born innocent in the good sweet sense, but is not born good, but will have to willingly be reborn to individuate as a person of good will and character.
This inexperienced, naïve self, from Jordan’s point of view, is a smug, complacent, egoistic/ egotistic (He would not likely distinguish between being egoistical and being egotistical, as I firmly maintain.), selfish brute concerned only with his hedonic pleasures and meeting his short-term desires.
The voluntary ego death occurs when the morally ambitious child chooses to grow morally and thereby gains a conscience, becomes mature, other-centered, other-interested and unselfish, because she has voluntarily to immolate the egoistic portion of her consciousness—I assume this is Jordan’s point of view.
J: “It’s like you are a phoenix, and you are lighting yourself on fire. That’s a much better idea even though it can still be very harsh.”
My response: Jordan’s crusade against individualism and egoist morality leads him to conclude and promote the campaign that a mature, honest child, by voluntarily killing off her ego, like a phoenix, burning itself to the ground, that allows her to be reborn as a healthy, moral, considerate adult with a future.
J: “The involuntary ego deaths: they are really hard on people. People will do almost anything to stop that from happening. That ego death is a journey into the underworld, or it’s a collapse into chaos.”
My response: We are born naïve and inexperienced, and life happens to us, and the world keeps changing. If we do not consciously, willingly grapple with what is coming at us, however falteringly we try, the mere act of facing the world and adjusting our consciousness to all that it throws at us, then our child ego will not die voluntarily; then reality and others will smash our callow, untested ego, and trample it into the ground for us, and we will be left with a crippled, limping consciousness.
As a failed, disintegrated adult ego, we may seek such poor solutions as to kill others, kill ourselves, rush into a mass movement or go insane to cope with our shattered, battered ego husks. We may turn vicious and live a life of no growth, and no moral or spiritual advancement. The journey into the underworld is most unpleasant and disconcerting, and one may so damaged as never to recover, never to lose being determined by the forces of chaos around and within one, which dominate one now.
J: “That’s not so bad if you do it purposefully. But in the Pinocchio story, for example, that’s exemplified by Pinocchio going down to the depths to rescue his Father from the whale.”
My response: Jordan here recounts how voluntary ego death is not so bad if it is purposefully undertaken and self-managed. The young person about to self-immolate her ego is going down into her subconscious to inspect, battle and defeat, if she can, the innate evil which controls her, and she will rescue her Father or superego, so that her conscience is her guide, so that her Father is plucked by her out of chaos, and, as her quiet inner voice, as a moral new adult, it and she will grow cosmos, order and love internally and out in the world.
J: “Now he does that voluntarily but it damn near kills him, right. I, me, first of all, he hardly gets out of the whale. Second, it’s a journey to the underworld. It’s the consequence of a collapse in previous personality and the disintegration of that personality into a chaotic state prior to rebirth.”
My response: Whether the ego death of the immature, naïve adult is voluntary or involuntary, Jordan suggests we need to kill that juvenile ego off before it kills us spiritually, leading a life of discontentment and quiet despair felt by most stunted adults, ripe for joining a mass movement, should the times expose them to such risky solutions.
Jordan’s grievous, great, and perhaps deliberate error is to teach the young that killing off one’s immature ego is the critical first step to make way for personal rebirth and being reborn as an experienced, mature, realistic adult ready to assume adult duties is a necessary transition to undertake and complete if one is ever to be happy and healthy.
But Jordan wants and characterizes the replacement adult ego as moral, sane, and noble, but that is not what occurs. By murdering the callow ego and replacing it with an adult egoless ego or consciousness, this selfless, humbled, low self-esteeming, disinterested egoless, groupist, altruistic, replacement self-lives for the collective over and against personal happiness and self-interest. This adult is a sick, immoral self, better than the immature version was sick, collectivist, immoral and not quite sane, but it sells short what humans can and should evolve into.
We are not to kill the immature unhealthy egoless self by replacing it with an adult egoless self only slightly less sick, so that the mature moral adults stagnate, but long-lived but immature, militantly sinning adults.
Jordan believes that individualism, egoism, and individuation are only for the few geniuses like himself smarter the dull, because these geniuses are and the only ones with talent. The dumb and talentless masses can only seek moral excellence, especially the self-sacrificing kind where they give everything, get nothing back, do not pursue their own interest, do not seek personal reward, enjoyment, or happiness. It is their lot in life, just grim martyrdom and endless giving to others, for the self is to be murdered and selflessness is the lot for the masses, to keep their heads down, properly humbled, and never to esteem themselves or be proud of themselves, practicing only very limited self-care, and even that modest self-care is barely acceptable ethically.
Even the elite, though allowed to be somewhat more individualistic than the selfless masses, able to pursue some happiness and self-realization for themselves commensurate to their exalt status, and to which they are entitled as an authentic elite of supermen and superwomen-even they’re also to be groupists, self-deprecating, and mostly sacrifice themselves for others.
The masses are so inferior that all they are allowed under collectivism and altruism is to seek moral excellence by maximum give till it hurts and give more, live for others and the group and group interest. Only a genetic elite of geniuses are allowed to seek intellectual or creative excellence for that is their genetic and natural destiny, only they are worthy to seek to be smarter, to think, to develop their innate gifts, it is their lot in life, it is their destiny.
J: “And so then what that would imply is that if you go to the point where you could look at the darkest things so that would be the abyss, right, that would be the deepest abyss. If you could look at the harshest things, the most brutal parts of the suffering of the world, and the malevolence of people and society, if you could look at that straight and directly, that would turn you on maximally, because imagine that you’re like the potential composite of all the ancestral wisdom that’s locked inside you biologically.”
My response: Jordan is correct on two points here, stated, or implied. First, he and I accept that people carry original sin in them, just be being born, that we are mostly evil from birth, and require extensive moral training, which, if we at some point choose to internalize it and work earnestly permanently to lead a virtuous life, then our natural depravity can be transmuted into something admirable and beneficial, or at least innocuous.
One cannot become a good person unless one fearlessly elects to encounter and embrace the harsh truth about human nature, discovering and accepting that all of us are teeming with demons swimming around and lurking in our subconscious, just waiting to break loose and wreak havoc in the world.
I, an egoist, and Jordan the altruist, both admit that each person is a born sinner, that we must look at ourselves and accept our flaws, faults, errors, and deficiencies. Only after loving truth for its own sake, and learning how nasty we naturally are, and then conclude that we disallow indulging our id while referring to its fulfillment as our self-interest set forth into action in the world out there, now we know what our problem is (We are the problem unless and until we clean up our personal room, and set our house in order.), then we can morally progress.
Where Jordan fails is assuming the basic self is selfish, arrogant, and smug (The basic self is selfless/selfish, arrogant to compensate for deep inner uncertainty and self-doubt, and smug because the self is too fragile to set aside rationales which protected that fragile self from brittlely blowing up into a million pieces because the self cannot deal with the truth.)
Jordan has concluded that attained self-truth will lead to rebirth as an adult that is other-interested, selfless and altruistic.
By contrast I know the basic self is evil or self-hating, so if the self is reborn as an individuator, then the love of self will make the self-whole, integrated personality filled with optimism love, joy and gratitude, and that self will serve his self-interest, and feel generally so generous, genial and content, that his good will towards others will result indirectly in others’ interest and needs being met , so the social needs will be cared for.
J: “But that’s not going to come out at all unless you stress yourself, unless you challenge yourself. And the bigger the challenge you take on the more that’s going to turn on, and so that as you take on a broader and broader range of challenges and you push yourself harder, then more and more of what you could be turns on, and that’s equivalented to transforming yourself into the ancestral Father.”
My response: My quick, superficial internet reading of what Carl Jung signifies with his ancestral Father archetype may have several interpretations, but, for Peterson here, it seems likely to me that the Father is the voice of reason, order, authority and responsibility, an ideal for a young man to emulate.
As the self develops morally—and I would say talent-wise and intellectually—the more the self-approaches self-perfection—obviously never quite attainable—coming closer to achieving personally the adopted ancestral Father role model.
J: “I think, I think you can think about it religiously too, so you can think about it this way so in, in the Christian story, for example, you have Christ does two things that are messianic.
One, he takes the suffering of the world onto himself because that is a weird idea, so what does that mean?”
My response: In part, Jesus, a divine god, takes on the role of Messiah to save the world, and to open the way to heaven for humans. None of us should aim so high, for we are puny humans and we cannot save the world: rather if we maverize, we can at a minimum remove ourselves from the list of troublemakers. Positively speaking, we might even make the world a little brighter and safer, lessening evil a bit—that is enough. Mostly people should handle their own suffering by individuating, and that will greatly and perhaps most effectively reduce needless suffering in the world.
J: “Let’s think about it psychologically. Well, maybe, that, well, that’s your job in the world full of suffering. And you should accept that as your responsibility past, present and future. You are supposed to do something about that, as much as you can about it.”
My response: We should clean up our own lives, and interfering in the lives of others in the name of noble giving usually cannot make their lives better but will make them worse. Only the individual can save herself—which is why enlightened egoistic morality is so appealing to me.
J: “And maybe you start with your own localized suffering: you know so you accept that as a responsibility so that’s part of taking on a load, that’s part of bearing a cross you could look at it that way.
The cross is sort of a symbol of the place of maximal suffering. So, you could accept that as a challenge., not as something you’re victimized by. Maybe you accept that as the price of being.”
My response: I do not intend to be censorious about Jordan’s view that life is suffering, and that we do not try to reduce our suffering, but that we should load ourselves up with it, and then serve others to make our suffering meaningful and directed.
He is a bit too gloomy for my taste: life is suffering, but it is not only suffering. I do agree that we start cleaning ourselves up by reducing or at least converting and sublimating our suffering into art or philosophy as we maverize.
The price of being is that we accept and deal with our suffering, and never play the victim, but the price of being is made even more lovely and exhilarating if we maximize our noble pleasure of self-realizing, and that is pleasing, enjoyable, thrilling and most fulfilling, and we can take quiet pride when we have made something of ourselves and our lives. We are all blessed with great talent and intelligence, so we should seek not maximal suffering, but maximal savoring of the miracle of living when we create cosmos and order with our intellectual, emotional, artistic, ethical, and spiritual creations, new ideas and wonders.
J: “Okay, so that’s one’s responsibility. You’re responsible for addressing the suffering in the world so that could give you some meaning, it seems to me.”
My response: Assuming moral responsibility for fighting evil in the world is one’s duty, and that would give one’s life meaning and direction. We should enjoy life too, and appreciate beauty and loveliness, for the sake of balance in our lives.
J: “Then the next thing is there’s a story of course that Christ met the Devil in the desert, so that is the encounter with malevolence.
So that would be the other thing because the major problems that people face obviously are suffering, tragedy and malevolence. So that’s the other thing you are responsible for is that you’re supposed to look the capacity for human evil as clearly as you possibly can.”
My response: Jordan wisely believes we are born wicked, and firmly adjures the individual to face clearly and openly the human capacity for and addiction to evil, that oneself is as guilty of this natural proclivity as any other human being. Then, one must work to be good, do good, and fight for God and goodness all of one’s life: that is one of our primary duties as children of God.
J: “It’s a very terrifying thing you know that causes post-traumatic stress disorder in people that aren’t accustomed to it. And, but the idea would be that if you can face that malevolence, and you can face the suffering then that maximally opens the door to your maximal potential.
And then the optimistic part of that is that though the suffering is great, and the malevolence is, is deep, your capacity to transcend it is stronger. So, what you get out of the most negative viewpoint is the most positive, possible consequence, because one of the things you would like to know, if you wanted to know something deep about yourself, you could face the worst that there was and prevail.”
My response: Jordan is right in encouraging young people to face the world’s malevolence inside themselves and out in the world, and the willingness and courage to encounter malevolence forthrightly might well maximally open the door to your maximal potential, but this is best and most lastingly achieved and undertaken as an individuating ego, not by killing the ego and depriving the individual of individualism, for that is a terrible idea doomed to failure.
J: “I believe that people are capable of that. I think that despite how tragic life is and how malevolent things are that fundamentally our spirit let’s say has the capacity to confront that and fix it, like psychologically to confront it courageously, to be able to bear up under that.
If you do it voluntarily, but also to address it, not only to deal with it psychologically but to deal with it practically and that we could make things much better.”
My response: Again, Jordan is too pessimistic, and this from me, who is gloomy enough. Yes, suffering and malevolence are a big part of the human and universal story, but they are not the full story.
We should and can face it psychologically and practically and fix it, but as individuating egoists, we are best equipped to withstand suffering and malevolence and thereby make the world and ourselves better.
Jordan is too bleak—all there is is duty and self-sacrifice and an egoless adult altruistically, disinterestedly dedicated to serve others.
There is little or no room for pleasure and enjoyment, and there are no tangible rewards, and the is a sever motivational obstacle, I think. Life is not as grim as Jordan assumes it is. Life is not easy, but there is hope.
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