Jordan Peterson on the use of crises to curtail liberty, and as a religion substitute
I put this portion of the following Jordan Peterson interview (about 17 minutes) up on the post I just published, but I also want to highlight it by giving the excerpt its own post here. If you find listening to videos too slow, I suggest you go to “settings” on the video and change the speed to a faster one:
The famous advice by the odious Rahm Emanuel about never allowing a crisis to go to waste is a superb example of the means by which “progressives” nearly always manage to obtain more and more control, while the spineless and feckless Republican establishment flounders about with no ability to fight effectively against underhanded Alinskyite tactics. The Democrats have been provided during the past 18 months with three events perfectly suited to their ability to exploit any major crisis to their own ideological advantage, first the arrival on our shores of the Wuhan virus, then the self-inflicted death of the blessed martyr Floyd, followed by the probably FBI-instigated “mostly peaceful” protest of J6. It now seems likely that mail-in voting on a massive scale will soon result in permanent one-party rule, while violent crime (the “Floyd effect’) destroys our cities, and the political prisoners of J6 languish in prison, in Soviet fashion, in DC’s gulag.
I’m so glad that he’s back. He’s always great to listen to. Thanks.
“I’m so glad that he’s back.”
Indeed, he’s a treasure, no matter whether one agrees with everything he says or not.
Actually, he looks like he’s had a long walk through “the valley of the shadow of death”.
And he has, not just figuratively. And come out the other side.
A survivor. A fighter.
And he knows that he’s still in their sights. Now, in fact, more than ever.
Still, he soldiers on.
All power to him and godspeed….
Thank you for posting this, Neo.
Crises as a religion substitute…Arthur Koestler wrote of what he called the Tragic and the Trivial planes of life. As explained by his friend, the writer and fighter pilot Richard Hillary:
“K has a theory for this. He believes there are two planes of existence which he calls vie tragique and vie triviale. Usually we move on the trivial plane, but occasionally in moments of elation or danger, we find ourselves transferred to the plane of the vie tragique, with its non-commonsense, cosmic perspective. When we are on the trivial plane, the realities of the other appear as nonsense–as overstrung nerves and so on. When we live on the tragic plane, the realities of the other are shallow, frivolous, frivolous, trifling. But in exceptional circumstances, for instance if someone has to live through a long stretch of time in physical danger, one is placed, as it were, on the intersection line of the two planes; a curious situation which is a kind of tightrope-walking on one’s nerves…I think he is right.”
I think that a lot of people find Koestler’s Tragic Plane, the realm of ultimate things, missing in their lives, and some of them try to enter this plane of existence via political ideology and activism.
I watched this the other day. I hold the man in the highest of regard and not to in any way denigrate the value of Peterson’s points but anyone who hadn’t already realized those points, can’t have been paying attention.
It’s just that they’re not trying to hide it anymore.
Anyone who isn’t upset about it is either a sheep or when they agree with the majority, a de facto supporter of the tyranny of the majority.
A willingness to deny individual rights, rights upon which the majority may not intrude is a demonstration of their unfitness for American citizenship. That, even if native born. The brutal reality is that principle holds whether friend or relative. You either believe in inalienable rights or you don’t. Some lines may not be crossed. You can’t be half pregnant. You can’t murder someone and yet claim that you, unlike your victim, have a right to life.
Religion is a behavioral protocol: moral philosophy, its relativistic sibling ethics, and its politically congruent (“=”) cousin law. Faith (i.e. logical domain), ideology (i.e. realization), and conventions (e.g. traditions) are complementary. Each has a philosopher (e.g. God, gods, and mortal gods). Principles matter.
I like J.P., but the idea that the New Testament is what caused us to separate Church and State . . . . . I guess no one ever expects the Spanish Inquisition.
I suspect that Christ’s admonition to “render on to Caesar, what is Caesars’ ” did indeed provide an acceptable religious justification for the concept of the Separation of Church and State, by a public far more religious than is currently fashionable.
Personally, I find it to be a brilliant insight. One that had never occured to me.
The entire interview was good, which set me off to see more. I watched the interview of him by Helen Lewis. Intense, hilarious, exhausting! But well worth it. I had seen the one with Cathy Newman some time ago. I really must read some of his writing. Any recommendations?
@ Geoffrey Britain – when I read that statement (“Render unto Caesar …), my thought is, well, if Jesus did not have a price on his head before that, he surely got one then.
reference “render on to Caesar…”
I am still waiting for a reputable biblical scholar or qualified historian of 1st C Roman history to refute the proposal by Joseph Atwill, in his book Caesar’s Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus [2011]. Per Atwill, supposedly the Roman and (supportive) Jewish aristocracy hired knowledgeable Jewish scholars (including Josephus) to fabricate the Gospels, in part with the political purpose to get the rebellious Jews to tone down their resistance to Roman rule. Thus the “render” admonition. This supposedly occurred during the 70’s AD or so.
A lot of questions yet to be answered about this “hoax” proposal, and quite a bit of “just so” comparisons, so it is an intriguing idea but not fully credible as presented in his book. However, I don’t have the background knowledge to cleanly reject his thesis, even as I remain somewhat skeptical.
Jordan Peterson is back! He finally looks healthy. He even has a suntan. I’ve always believed that prayers only work when you’re praying for someone else. There must have been a lot of us.
R2L,
Did they invent St. Paul, too? And James? Although evidence for him does come from Josephus.
Anyway, if they did invent it all, it kinda backfired on them, didn’t it?
Jordan Peterson’s daughter, Mikhaila, interviews his wife, Tammy, on this podcast: https://mikhailapeterson.com/podcasts/5085/
I listened to it yesterday on a long drive. The first 2/3 is a fun conversation of a mother telling her daughter how she met and married her father. I found the last 20 minutes (start at 51 minutes in if you don’t want to hear the personal stuff) very inspiring.
Tammy Peterson had a horrific battle with kidney cancer, which I believe explains more about Jordan Peterson’s appearance than his own health struggle with benzodiazepine addiction. Her present outlook on life is incredible!
Molly+Brown,
That was my thought too. How does one explain the Acts of the Apostles or the historical evidence of people martyring themselves in Jesus’ name prior to 70AD?
Occam’s Razor makes mincemeat of that theory quicker than a Benihana chef can dice an onion.
I just finished listening to the clip in neo’s post.
Thanks for posting, neo!
Like many, I did a lot of research into Islam after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. In that research I grew to believe Jesus’ “Render unto Caesar” reply to the Pharisees is one of the most important elements leading to human freedom; especially things like the Magna Carta, Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution. Two other crucial elements are Jesus’ martyrdom rather soon after he began his formal ministry and the conversion of Saul of Tarsus. I agree with Dr. Peterson and will explain in my next comment…
Abraham, Moses and Mohammed were blessed with long lives (interestingly, according to Judaism and Islam, Moses and Mohammed are biologic descendants of Abraham). Aside from sharing God’s wishes with their followers they had to govern, and a lot of what they did and said was written down. Judaism and Islam are religions and political systems. Which makes perfect sense. If one believes in God and one believes a particular person (Abraham, Moses, Mohammed, a Rabbi, an Imam, a Prophet…) speaks for God, one would follow the advice of that person in all things. Nothing would be secular.
And we see this is how humans behave in all cultures in all recorded history. Even when a military ruler comes to power through force he (or one of his acolytes) eventually declares himself a religious figure, and his orders are not only political, but religious.
In other words, in any society that has religious faith humans default to melding societal rules with religious rules. They are the same. “God forbids his followers from…” “God commands his followers to…”
So we have this in Judaism; Abraham circumcised Isaac, Deuteronomy… And we have this in Islam; Sharia. Both religions had schisms where folks debated how to apply some of the laws in changing times, and some folks choose to be heterodox but, ultimately, if one is orthodox the rules are there, in black and white. Buddhism, Hinduism, the Maya, the Norse, the Celts… all have similar histories and divine laws that must be followed.
But when the Pharisees pushed Jesus on this point he said, “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and render unto God what is God’s.” This is brilliant on many levels, but for the point of this discussion we’ll simply focus on the freedom it gives His followers to detach the political from the spiritual. For Jesus, how you pay your taxes, what side of the ride you walk on, what foods you eat, or when you eat them… All subsidiary and inconsequential to the overarching mission of serving God. Then, not long after that statement, Jesus is martyred. We don’t have pages of records on him adjudicating disputes among his followers, as we do with Moses and Mohammed.
The Apostles struggled with this. They were devout Jews and Jesus was Jewish. After Jesus’ death they logically reasoned that being a devout Jew may be important to following Christ. If not, would He not have chosen a Gentile or two as disciples? Paul of Tarsus had a vision on the road to Damascus and became a skilled speaker on Christianity, converting many. Although he was Jewish, he was also a Roman citizen and an outsider to the Apostles. His talent and faith was very instrumental into convincing the Apostles strict adherence to Mosaic law was not necessary to be a devout Christian.
When Christianity became the majority religion in a region the same thing happened with it that had happened with all prior world religions. Those regions became Theocracies. Priests, Bishops, Cardinals and Popes held sway over Kings and Generals. However, when the Catholic church became oppressive and corrupt folks like Reverend Martin Luther were able to reason out a break from politics and military because of the unique nature of Jesus’ teachings and lack of political rule.
Now, I know Judaism and Islam (as well as other faiths) allowed (and still allow) secularism in their lands at times, but the non-faithful ultimately end up being second class citizens.
And, to Dr. Peterson’s point, trying to form a society with only politics and no faith seems disastrous; see Mao and Marx for recent examples.
R2L,
“Per Atwill, supposedly the Roman and (supportive) Jewish aristocracy hired knowledgeable Jewish scholars (including Josephus) to fabricate the Gospels, in part with the political purpose to get the rebellious Jews to tone down their resistance to Roman rule.”
Without further confirmatory supportive evidence, I dismiss that hypothesis simply because the Roman response to resistance in a conquered population was invariably the same; ruthless suppression. The Romans did not tolerate resistance. In fact, the diaspora occured as a response by Rome to rebellion.
Geoffrey Britain,
Good point, and, the Jewish lands were of little consequence to Rome and the Roman Empire. As you write, it’s hard to believe they would put much thought into any effort to quell or promote anything there. Because we know what happened we understand Judea had a critical impact on the Roman empire, but to a Senator living in Rome at the time Judea seemed as inconsequential as Afghanistan did to U.S. Senators in 2000AD.
Must have been in high school, sixty years ago. I saw a pic in a local paper of a cheerleader sobbing because her team had lost.
It occurred to me then, and I’ve only had it corroborated since, that perhaps our capacity to deal with disaster requires to be turned out for exercise from time to time. And if there isn’t any….
There’s always a looming catastrophe. Strontium 90. Nuclear fall out. Coming Ice Age. We’ll all starve–population bomb. Malaria might be made extinct!!!! Silent Spring. AGW. And there is Rapture, getting aboard a passing comet,
And even the most rationally likely–see AGW–are viewed by most in a religious sense.
And if there isn’t a catastrophe, one can be manufactured in the confidence that a politically useful proportion of the population will glom onto it from a religious standpoint, including resisting contradictory evidence, and a certain masochistic satisfaction in self-sacrifice, and a different kind of satisfaction in enforcing sacrifice on others.
See AGW.
The millenarian impulse. See LaBarre… “Ghost Dance”.
Rufus T. Firefly:
You write that “according to Judaism and Islam, Moses and Mohammed are biologic descendants of Abraham.” Judaism believes that about Moses but certainly not about Mohammed.
You also write “Judaism and Islam are religions and political systems.” That is no longer true of Judaism in most areas of the world, and hasn’t been for a long time. In Israel, the situation is very complicated; suffice to say that most Israeli Jews (including the huge number of secular Jews there) would like less involvement of religion in Israeli laws, although Jewish ethnicity (not the same as religion) is still of some importance to them in terms of the law of return. (I can give links to surveys, but they are long and involved, and I am summarizing here).
As for how important Judea was to Rome, if it was so unimportant, what is the Arch of Titus all about?
Rufus T. Firefly:
If you’re interested in learning more about Judaism and separation of church and state please see this.
If some moral narcissist gives you the lie “if it saves one life it’s worth it and if you don’t comply your killing people”, reply “OK, let’s lower the speed limit to 20 mph.”
Rome wasn’t indifferent to Judea; it cared enough to keep sending governors and the occasional army of retribution. But Judea was one of many potentially troublesome possessions, pretty far down the list of imperial importance, nothing like Egypt, say, or Gaul. You’d probably have had a hard time convincing a Roman ca. the birth of Christ that His tiny, persecuted, martyred sect would essentially capture the imperial throne. It can’t have been where a Roman expected convulsive change to originate, any more than the wealthy Byzantines expected a new sect to boil out of neglected Arabia and cut them off from their bread-basket possessions centuries later.
I think Sebastian Junger in “War” wrote about something very much like la vie tragique and la vie triviale. He thought it explained much of the PTSD problem in some sufferers, not the “flashback” or hypervigilance aspects so much, but the difficulty of re-adjusting to civilian life and maintaining emotional connections, after the intense bonding experience of catastrophe.
neo,
Do Jews dispute that Abraham had a child with his slave, Hagar, resulting in a son, Ismail?
I don’t mean that defensively. I simply do not know. I know that’s the claim in Islam. I thought it was also accepted across all three Abrahamic faiths.
neo,
Wendy’s comment on Rome’s view of Judea mirrors my opinion. It was a big empire. There were often uprisings or sparks of uprisings throughout Rome’s borders, especially in recently conquered territories. Judea and the goings on there during the Roman Empire are of great importance to Jews and Christians, but I doubt it was of much concern to the folks governing back home. Once Christians traveled to Rome and started practicing their faith there they became a nuisance that Emperors addressed first hand, but aside from that the Romans seemed to post low level functionaries there and augment troop numbers when the locals got restless.
I don’t recall the Jews threatening the Roman Empire outside of their own (the Jew’s) borders. As Wendy wrote, it was the other ethnic groups with aspirations of Empire, like the Romans (Persia, Greece, Carthage, Egypt, Gauls and other Barbarians), that kept Romans awake at night.
neo,
In the link you cite; “The Arch of Titus (Italian: Arco di Tito; Latin: Arcus Titi) is a 1st-century AD honorific arch,[1] located on the Via Sacra, Rome, just to the south-east of the Roman Forum.
It was constructed in c. 81 AD by the Emperor Domitian shortly after the death of his older brother Titus to commemorate Titus’s official deification or consecratio and the victory of Titus together with their father, Vespasian, over the Jewish rebellion in Judaea.” [my emphasis]
It seems to me that in one respect the Jews of Judea stood apart from every other troublesome Roman possession. Their faith declared Rome’s faith illegitimate. That they couldn’t coexist because the faith of the Israelites declared that they and they alone possessed the one true faith. That was a direct, cultural/religious challenge to Rome.
I don’t think that the Arch of Titus can be disconnected with its formal deification of Titus. In effect, the Romans were saying to the Jews and any other faith… our God(s) are greater than your god. And that Rome putting down the Jewish rebellion and destroying Jerusalem proved that to be the case. So the two are connected and the Arch of Titus symbolizes that connection.
We can’t know but if that was the case, then in that category, Judea’s Jewish faith was of great importance to Rome’s Emperors.
neo,
Regarding Judaism, your Oxford Academic link reinforces my point about the uniqueness of Christianity in this regard and states, “With the establishment of the state of Israel, and, especially, with the introduction of a new utopian Jewish religious national element into Israeli society in the 1970s, the question whether there are “authentic” warrants for separating religion and state crystallized.”
I think modern Israel has done a good job of governing secularly and agree it is not a theocracy.
Geoffrey Britain,
Which uprising or tribe of conquerors did the Roman’s defeat whose warriors were not fighting under the notion that their tribe’s leader was chosen by a god or gods to conquer the Romans? What nation did not meld political, religious and martial rule under one, cohesive umbrella with god or gods at the pinnacle, directing the whole thing? The Jews were unique (I think) at the time for being monotheists, but aside from that what was different?
Apropos of Titus’ father Vespasian, he evidently had a dry sense of humor about the whole deification thing. According to Suetonius, when Vespasian felt his end was near (after a lengthy bout of diarrhea), he called out to his physician, Vae, puto deus fio— “Alas, I think I’m becoming a god.”
However, this does call for a brief cultural interlude, courtesy of my favorite Daubing Dutchman:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flavian_dynasty#/media/File:The_Triumph_of_Titus_Alma_Tadema.jpg
What crap.
It is always nice to read a monograph that has no clear thesis or demonstration, but rather suggestions and assertions and a little proof texting to back them up. And which then informs us that the working assumptions and the explicitly delineated principles accepted by insiders and outsiders alike, by practitioners and authorities within and by antagonists and neutrals without alike, for some 28 and more centuries was all wrong. The people did not actually believe what they claimed to believe … because the author was able to discover an overlooked inconsistency (or a failure to knit-up every concept) between some authority here and that working rule there.
Good program. Yeah, and see we never really had a federal instead of a consolidated system of government either because John Jay said …
DNW:
Oh, so you call it “crap,” and that’s it?
I had no idea you were such an authority on halakha and how it has related over the millennia to the issue of the individual versus the state – which is the subject we were discussing here.
Until 1948 there had been no Jewish state or state religion for about 2 millennia. For two thousand years the Jews lived in Christian and Muslim communities that had official state religions for the most part (other than the US, which was somewhat of an exception in having no official state religion and in prohibiting one), and the Jews in those countries abided by the secular laws of those countries as well as having their own religious courts for other matters, and their own religious practices. And most Christian (European) countries not only did not have an establishment clause, but they had state religions despite Christ’s words about rendering under Caesar, etc., and in fact many European countries still have official state religions.