Archive for the ‘Jordan Peterson’ Category

Jordan Peterson: "Deadly boxers have become profound economic philosophers" – Jordan Peterson stunned by … – Sportskeeda

Renato Moicano was able to extend his winning streak to three with a second-round TKO victory over Jalin Turner on the early preliminary card of UFC 300. Following the bout, the No.13-ranked lightweight used his post-fight speech to state:

Bitcoin Rapid-Fire podcast host John Vallis shared the footage, leading psychologist and author Jordan Peterson to respond:

Peterson added:

Moicano caught wind of Peterson's comments and responded, stating:

He added:

Check out the tweets from Jordan Peterson and Renato Moicano below:

Moicano has seen his popularity increase since UFC 281, thanks in large part to his post-fight speeches. Following his victory over Brad Riddell, he expressed his desire for more money.

He followed that up by expressing his love for the United States and his desire to become a citizen after his UFC Fight Night 235 victory over Drew Dober in February.

Jalin Turner had one of the biggest gaffes fans will ever see as he walked away from Renato Moicano after dropping him in the first round, assuming he had knocked out his opponent rather than pursuing a finish. Things did not work out as Turner planned as he wound up suffering a second-round TKO loss.

The No.13-ranked lightweight weighed in on his opponent's blunder in his post-fight press conference, stating:

Check out Renato Moicano's comments on Jalin Turner walking away below (starting at the 0:22 mark):

While Turner has not commented on the loss, there have been suggestions that his decision could have been motivated by a pursuit of the $300,000 bonus that was on the line. Moicano later made the case that he was deserving of a bonus as he overcame adversity.

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Jordan Peterson: "Deadly boxers have become profound economic philosophers" - Jordan Peterson stunned by ... - Sportskeeda

Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson on Dogma – Word on Fire

Whatever dogma is, Sam Harris certainly doesnt like it. In his recent conversation with Jordan Peterson, Harris repeatedly condemns dogma, and Peterson repeatedly tries to moderate this condemnation. Harris notes correctly that dogma is a Catholic term. But what exactly is being condemned? The target is moving.

First, Harris defines dogma as a belief that is held in spite of the fact that theres no good evidence for it. According to this definition, belief in God is not a dogma. If Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Liebniz, Plantinga or William Lane Craig are right, there is good evidence to believe that God exists. Indeed, the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that, By natural reason man can know God with certainty.

But belief in God is not only a dogma, but is the fundamental dogma of the Catholic creed. So, Harris definition of dogma must differ radically from Catholic understandings of the term. In which case, his critique of dogma is a straw man of his own invention.

Harris offers a second understanding of dogma, If I say to you, listen, I believe X and theres nothing you can say to convince me otherwise, and no matter how good your evidence gets, no matter how good your arguments get, Im not gonna want to hear it. And if you press the case, Im gonna get angrier and angrier until the possibility of having a conversation about anything fully erodes. Dogma in this sense means close-mindedness.

Yet close-mindedness is a characteristic that can afflict a believer or a skeptic, an atheist or a theist. As woke mobs show us, you could reject all dogma in the religious sense of the term and yet be utterly certain of your beliefs and closed off from learning from others. Moreover, you could believe in a dogma (lets say, God exists) and also not get angry and indeed (as I do) even enjoy talking to people who see things differently. So, close-mindedness is a sloppy definition of dogma.

Everyone who reasons has basic beliefs, first principles, fundamental axioms, or dogmas from which they begin to reason to other conclusions.

In a third characterization, Harris seems to understand dogma as a belief that leads to harming others. Harris is right that dogma can lead to harming others. But anything, even the best of things, can be misused, distorted, degraded. Romantic love can be the beginning of a relationship that lasts a lifetime. But, as countless true crime episodes indicate, the abuse of romantic love can lead to murder. Harris and I share an admiration for the achievements of science. But can science be abused? The answer to this question is found in the scientific experiments conducted at Tuskegee as well as those of Dr. Josef Mengele.So, it hardly counts against dogma that it can lead to bad consequences.

Peterson recognizes this when he says we should try to distinguish between religious experience per se, or the religious experience thats valuable and a counterproductive totalitarian dogmatism. Indeed, if someone believes and lives in accordance with the dogma that every single human being deserves respect, this belief would in general help rather than harm people. The world would be a much better place if the dictum of Bernard Lonergan were universally adopted as dogma, Be attentive, be intelligent, be responsible, be loving, and, if necessary, change.

In a fourth way of using the term, Harris contrasts dogma and method,

Dogma is not a statement of how good the method was. Dogma is just, we didnt have a method, but this is so. It says so in the book, the book is perfect. How do we know its perfect? cause the book itself says so, right? Thats a, that bites its own tail. Thats not a method. That is dogmatism and in my view, totally illegitimate.

I totally agree with Harris that circular arguments are invalid. But as Karl Keating points out in his book, Catholicism and Fundamentalism, [Catholics] are not basing the inspiration of the Bible on the Churchs infallibility and the Churchs infallibility on the word of an inspired Bible. That indeed would be a circular argument. At least if his target is Catholic belief, Harris has again attacked a straw man.

Harris has confidence in method, and in this too I think he is right. But even the best method cannot be self-authenticating. If I have questions about whether I can trust the empirical method, it hardly helps to gather empirical evidence. If I am unsure whether logically valid deductive arguments show their conclusion, I cannot settle the matter by means of a logically valid deductive argument.

So, as Aristotle noted, first principles are necessary in order to begin the process of reasoning. Every method must presuppose some starting points. There is nothing illegitimate or dogmatic in a pejorative sense about having first principles in science, in philosophy, or in theology.

As the philosopher Alvin Plantinga pointed out, Every train of argument will have to start somewhere, and the ultimate premises from which it starts will not themselves be believed on the evidential basis of other propositions; they will have to be accepted in the basic way, that is, not on the evidential basis of other beliefs. Everyone who reasons has basic beliefs, first principles, fundamental axioms, or dogmas from which they begin to reason to other conclusions.

So, what is dogma actually? Rather than understand the meaning of the term as Catholics understand it, Harris gives his own idiosyncratic meanings to the term dogma and then criticizes figments of his imagination.This method is like ignoring what evolutionary biologists mean by the term evolution, and understanding evolution as, the belief that one day an ape gave birth to a human being.

An accurate definition of dogma comes from Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later elected Pope Benedict XVI). He wrote that dogma is by definition nothing other than an interpretation of Scripture. Catholic dogma constitutes the first principles or basic beliefs of Catholics expressed, for example, in the Nicene Creed.

There is nothing close-minded, harmful, or viciously circular about intellectual activities arising from first principles or basic beliefs. Mathematicians, philosophers, and scientists all begin to reason from fundamental axioms. But, despite Petersons efforts to pull Harris away from caricatures, this sympathetic understanding was not found in Harris diatribes against dogma.

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Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson on Dogma - Word on Fire

Dudes thinking big thoughts: Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson and the lure of the rabbit hole – America: The Jesuit Review

This essay is a Cover Story selection, a weekly feature highlighting the top picks from the editors of America Media.

When I started teaching college almost a decade ago, I began hearing the young men in my classes refer to a group of podcasters. The students who brought up these figures admiringly, even adoringly, were usually quiet and sat in the back of the room. Their feeds included Jordan Peterson, Lex Fridman and Joe Roganthe elder sage, the curious ascetic, the guy to talk trash with over a protein shake. They were then on the verge of becoming household names.

After fairly B-list careers in their primary professions, they have found their callings in the earbuds of the young. Each enacts a distinct but mutually reinforcing persona of white manhood, sponsored by a distinct set of advertisers. They appear on each others shows. Together, they inhabit a self-proclaimed intellectual dark web.

As I tried to understand what my students were drawn to, I noticed a few things. First, virtually all of the content was extremely long. Podcasts and videos went on for hour after hour, as if in grueling rebellion against the supposition that kids these days need everything bite-sized. Second, at a time when white masculinity is often a target of criticism, they gave a kind of permission for dudes to just practice being dudes together, to think big thoughts, to take nothing off the table.

Through their muscular anti-brevity, these guys carry out a further kind of performance: an insurgency against the political lines in polarized times. They present themselves as aloof from the political categories of the moment, as if in an alternate universe where giving offense is a virtue and nobody gets canceled.

Jordan Peterson is the only one of the three who bothers to publish books. His major writings are less about culture-warring than about Jungian psychology and the practical wisdom of decent living. Heencourages readers, for instance, to stand up straight and be kind to animals. But what first brought him most to prominence was his objection, as a professor at the University of Toronto, to a law that added discrimination by gender identity to Canadas human rights code. He complained that the law would inhibit free speech by compelling the use of a persons preferred pronouns. Peterson latercompared trans identity to a social contagion on Rogans podcast. In 2022, Twittersuspended him for referring to the actor Elliot Page by his dead name and pronoun.

Joe Rogan has defied cancellation for hiscasual use of a racial slur and his penchant for promoting medical misinformation. Like Peterson, he has promotedanti-trans activists as guests; he has alsowelcomed trans people on his show. There are interviews in his catalog with the commentator Ben Shapiro and with Senator Bernie Sanders, whose political differences did not hinder Rogan from signaling his support for them.

Lex Fridman exemplifies the persona of category transcendence, of innocent curiosity. He brings on leaders from various religionsBishop Robert Barron, for example, representing Catholicismto explain the basics of their beliefs to his listeners. He does the same for political pundits, tech entrepreneurs and scientists. The Israeli prime minister was a guest just before a Palestinian poet. His questions are more leading than he lets onhe seems to enjoyasking guests how they would praise Elon Musk, for instancebut we are told he is merely curious.

The common thread among Peterson, Rogan and Fridman is a studied resistance to commitmentpolitical, religious and otherwise. More than mainstream news broadcasters these days, the podcasters go out of their way to defy political labels. None of the three claims a specific religious affiliation. Over and over, when criticized, these figures insist that they are just interested in the conversation, the dialogue, the hard questions.

In polarized times like ours, there is something refreshing in refusing to choose a side. Its like being John Wayne on a horse, dealing justice in the way neither the gangsters nor the lawmen want. Accordingly, the podcasters are wildly interdisciplinary, juxtaposing politics and culture wars with deep dives into theoretical physics and ancient mythology.

Among those educating young people on streaming media these daysvia podcasts and videos, and even through the brevity of TikTokthe eminent modality is the rabbit hole. Like Alices descent into Wonderland, these rabbit holes are journeys of obsession, fascination, impropriety and conspiracy that unsettle the supposed rules of normal life. To get lost in one is to find some relief from the heat and false simplicity of the Boomer-led culture wars. Listen carefully, say the streaming philosophers, but do your own research. People who are coming of age crave complexity, and their favorite content creators know it.

The internet has done something important for philosophy: a return to orality, to the eminence of the spoken word. Many ancient philosophical texts, from India to Greece, took the form of dialogues or monologues, where any written record presented itself as a mere approximation of the original. We know about Socratess teachings, including his anxieties about literacy, only because Plato wrote them down. Orality presumes that philosophy is as much a genre of public performance as of abstract ideas, that a persuasive presence is as much a sign of wisdom as what one says. Streamer philosophy thus counteracts the trend of Western philosophy over the past few centuries: an ever-deeper wallowing in the production of increasingly bewildering written texts meant only to be read.

I first encountered Daniel Schmachtenberger when he was onstage at a cryptocurrency conference in 2022. His oeuvre cannot be found in any book, only in hours of monologues and interviews, live or online. Perhaps you caught him on Rogans podcast. He has this concept of the metacrisisbasically, all the ways the world is falling apart. Over many hours of videos and podcasts across various platforms, Schmachtenberger explains how we today find ourselves trapped between the options of unbridled climate-tech-bioweapon chaos and a dystopian, A.I.-authoritarian lockdown. The source of hope is in sensemaking our way toward finding a third attractor, a technology-enabled option where human decency and planetary ecology still have a chance.

Schmachtenberger represents the more mystical branch of the streaming philosophers, more likely to associate with the liminal web than the dark one. Until recently, relevant hangouts took place on YouTube channels with names like The Stoa (a reference to the architectural site of much ancient Greek philosophizing) and Rebel Wisdom. Schmachtenberger and his peers, again, claim no specific religious or political confession, but one does feel (and occasionally directly hears) the lingering presence of the New Age philosopher Ken Wilber, the now-elder purveyor of demanding books and workshops offering a transpersonal theory of everything that unites science, spirituality and experience. Schmachtenberger, for his part, attended Maharishi International University in Iowa, which is associated with the Transcendental Meditation movement.

The streamers induce nostalgia for me as much as anything else. Most of what I read in my coming-of-age years were textual versions of the same sort of thing: highly confident men in militarily dominant societies explaining the world at length. The more abstract the better.

The apogee of this genre was the 19th-century German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel. His writings are lengthy, impenetrably dense and supremely confident about the workings of the universe. Many of these texts are actually notes from his lectures transcribed by students. I know the appeal of this sort of thing; my first book, a zealous history of proofs for the existence of God, cribbed its core idea from some of those lectures. If Hegel were alive today, I bet his disciples would be encountering him not primarily in books, not on TikTok, but on the vast monologue-friendly expanses that YouTube and Spotify afford.

For Hegel, all philosophy is actually history. Ideas develop in evolving relationships to each other through sequences of dialectic: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. To philosophize, then, is not solely to apprehend certain ideas; it is to stand above and beyond all ideas and observe their swirling development. Polities that mattered to Hegel, like Prussia, were the agents of history. Non-European peoples, peripheral to his story, are people without history. China has no real history, he believed, and stateless people have no history. Their fates do not ultimately matter. They are expendable, philosophically speaking, despite whatever they might say about themselves.

Hegel saw Napoleon marching on Jena as the world-soul, the angel of history; Lex Fridman has been similarly obsessed with theproposed cage fight between Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. For the YouTube Hegelians, the agents of history worth caring about are tech-startup founders.

Like Hegel, his online successors seem to think that everything important is bigthe trends that are all-consuming and inescapable. In an age like ours that is so full of division and polarization, identity politics and information overload, these metanarratives offer a simplifying sort of complexity. The point is not which side of a culture war wins or loses, because both sides of the dialectic are necessary participants in the process of history discovering itself. As Ken Wilbers integral theory would suggest, they are just squares on a quadrant, points on a map of possible positions. No particular position matters, ultimately, but only the map, the view from nowhere that can see how they all interact and where they are leading.

The price for achieving the view from nowhere is time. Schmachtenbergersmonologue introducing the third attractorthe first of two partslasts almost three hours. He likes to insist that properly understanding one of his ideas will take multiple hours and several sessions. I am astonished that anyone can talk into a camera for that long and do so coherently, and that tens of thousands of others show up to watch. But they do. The amount of time spent with the philosopher is inseparable from the ideas he uses that time to convey.

Duration is no accident in the Hegelian tradition. The longer a philosopher can draw you into his universewith its extensive terminology and opaque phrasingsthe more you drift from identification with the world of mere particulars, mere location, mere identity. You become a philosopher-king in a universe of philosophical sovereigns. You see the universal and become a citizen of it. Length and difficulty are the table stakes, the hard-won ante that keeps disciples in the game and renders them trustworthy. These videos serve the same time-gobbling purpose as a heavy and difficult text.

Plus, more time means more ad views.

Hegels ideas proved useful for calamities. Writing certain places and peoples out of history surely eased the self-deceptions necessary for colonial regimes. Among the Young Hegelians who built their ideas on the foundations of the master was Karl Marx; his metanarrative of class struggle has justified regimes willing to let millions of their own people die for the cause. The centrality of what became the German nation in Hegelian thought prepared the way for Nazi mythology. Once you understand the dialectic of history in the Hegelian sense, nothing else really matters, and human life can seem expendable.

I do not mean to malign the YouTube Hegelians through such associations, but the associations are cause for caution. They love to talk about complexity theory, but they tend to ignore the complexities and differences among human cultures. They abhor the claims of identity politics and rarely talk about sexism or racism or ableism, except in ridicule. In their grand storylines, such trifles ultimately do not seem important. The dialectics at play will be absorbed into what is really real: tidal waves of exponential technologies and epochal shifts, such as life extension and space travel.

The philosophers can claim innocence from the fray of culture wars because they have their eyes on the meta-wars. And they are particularly influential in the world-colonizing subculture of tech startups.

When Mark Zuckerberg renamed his company from Facebook to Meta in 2021, he did so under duress. Especially after the 2016 election, he became the leading villain of a techlash. Politicians, journalists and even some Silicon Valley peers accused him of destroying democracy at home, enabling genocide abroad and committing a host of other wrongs. A former employee, Frances Haugen, released troubling internal documents and testified about them before Congress. The language of meta offered an escape, a way up and out. Zuckerberg made the rounds on Joe Rogan and Lex Fridmans podcasts.

Many teenage millennial nerds like Zuckerberg (and me) learned about meta-ness from Douglas Hofstadters glorious 1979 book Gdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. It is also a favorite of Schmachtenberger, who features the book at the top of hisrecommendation list, and,reportedly, Meta employees consulted with Hofstadter during the companys rebrand. Hofstadter argued that going meta is a kind of law of nature, as well as a formula that recurs in mathematics, art and music. To change the frame of reference, he added, is to change the set of possibilities. When you shift from the individual melody to the symphony, or from binary instructions to JavaScript, the rules of the system change.

Long before Hofstadter, the language of meta entered the Western canon through Aristotles book Metaphysics. Aristotle did not actually name the book that; a later editor simply attached to it what seemed the most obvious possible title. Meta means after in Greek, and this work was in the catalog after the book called Physics. But the prefix took on a life of its own. Metaphysics discourses on the nature of being, causation and Godthe conditions of possibility for everything else. Thus, to speak of the meta has become not a mere matter of sequence, but also one of transcendence. It is a claim to move from one level of reality to a more fundamental one.

To speak of the metacrisis, then, is to claim access to a crisis more real than reality appears to most of us. Going meta means shifting attention away from the problems of politics and culture, away from the world we read about in the news. Rather than fixating on election interference or genocides, Zuckerberg wants us to fixate on a future occurring in virtual worlds, as his companys metaverse products seek to enable.

Jordan Hall, a tech entrepreneur and streaming philosopher, is with Schmachtenberger one of the leading theorists of the metacrisis. He speaks of it in terms of two distinct sets of rules: Game A andGame B. The distinction, we are told, takes many hours of content consumption to comprehend. But as near as I can grok it, the idea is that Game A is the dominant way of the world (acquisitive, competitive, self-destructive) and Game B is an orientation that prioritizes collective flourishing (creative, coordinated, coherent). Maybe Game A was working well for a while, but it runs into trouble because of exponential technologiesthings like the internet and artificial intelligence, whose effects seem to accelerate and transform everything beyond anyones control.

The Game B philosophers have a technique for putting the culture wars in their place. Calls for undoing racism and sexism through social movements, for instance, are just Game A thinking. While Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis oppose feminists and antiracists with legislation and polemic, these philosophers do it with their transcendencesimply shifting attention elsewhere, away from the supposed present and toward what is just over the horizon. When one of the rare non-white streaming philosophers, Vinay Gupta, attempted to raise questions of race and colonialism in Game B discussions online, he experienced hostility and censorship from the community there. The leading voices seemed unwilling to challenge the prevailing behavior. Guptacharacterized Schmachtenberger, for instance, as a spineless sbag on race issues.

The metacrisis playbook has been particularly visible since the release of the artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT. Tech entrepreneurs and investors have rallied around a science-fictional framing of the problem: Large-language models, which learn by analyzing huge amounts of digital text, are an exponential technology that will change everything, and policymakers should start taking responsibility for addressing the catastrophic threats that the supposedly intelligent technologies pose. This is what Sam Altman, the chief executive officer of ChatGPT creator OpenAI, has preached on his roadshows on Capitol Hill. Technologists can thus present themselves as the angels of history, the sources from whom the forces of true importance will come, while passing off the responsibility for their products harms to the geriatric politicians.

Meanwhile, tech critics like the former Google ethicist Timnit Gibrusee the framing of future catastrophe as a distraction. We have enough problems with A.I. already, they say, and we know what they are: racial discrimination, evasions of accountability by decision-makers, corporations profiting from others creativity and an underground network of exploited human workers propping up the appearance of automation. When C.E.O.s point attention to the meta, the worry goes, they are turning regulators eye away from the actual injustices going on right in front of us.

In the light of the metacrisis, actual crises become harder to see. Weavers of abstraction obscure the agents of power politics, yet they come together around Joe Rogans mic.

In early 2022, Lex Fridmanannounced: I will travel to Russia and Ukraine. I will speak to citizens and leaders, including Putin. He went on: War is pain. My words are useless. I send my love, its all I have.

Fridman was born in Soviet Tajikistan and claims family members on both sides of the Russian-Ukrainian border. His reflections on the war there have been particularly heartfelt and tortured, even for himthe rare public figure who regularly speaks and invites others to speak about love and hate. He seemed to place great hope in the peacemaking potential of an interview with Vladimir Putin; repeatedly, he would ask guests for advice on what to ask. He seemed to imaginein a sweet sort of way, reallythat with the right kind of conversation, the fighting might end.

He traveled to Ukraine and described visiting the wars front. The interview with Putin, however, did not materialize. The war rages on. Echoing Platos failure to reform a Sicilian despot with philosophy, once again philosophy could not corral political power. As Plato and Hegel found in their own careers, philosophys easiest path to political relevance is to concoct elaborate justifications for the powerful. This appears to be the role that the streaming philosophers are performing, not on behalf of some political party but for the corporate tech elite.

What do these self-described heterodox thinkers really believe? Perhaps it is more difficult to pin down an oral tradition than a written one, though that is less the case in a universe where every thought becomes a video on the internet and A.I. can transcribe it all. The streaming philosophers discussed here harbor a general skepticism of liberal institutions, such as government regulators, public health authorities and salaried journalists. During the Covid-19 lockdowns, they generally erred on the side of vaccine skepticism and whatever else might upset the designs of Dr. Anthony Fauci. Today, Lex Fridman invites guests to ponder the harms of woke-ness. And Jordan Hall has flirted with the right-libertarian school of propertarianism, which privileges the right to property over all else.

I asked Hall about his relationship to the culture wars over dinner at a conference we both recently attended at Harvard University. As a conversationalist around a crowded table, he was alternately pensive and jovial. But he said he would have to think about my question. The next morning he took me aside and said that the political debates of the moment are not the hill I want to die on.

Through the media of interviews and monologues, the philosophers themselves seem anxious to maintain plausible deniability with respect to any given position. Their calling is the bottomless sensemaking. Fridman seemed to believe, with respect to Vladimir Putin, that if the right men get together and have the right conversations, the great problems of the world can be solved. And yet he and his fellow philosophers have a kind of parasitic relationship to the culture wars they claim to transcend, because it is by enraging the partisans that they attract attention to themselves and their advertisers.

In 2022, David Fuller, founder of Rebel Wisdom, went on a retreat in India and decided to close down his platform. This move seems in tune with the anti-institutionalism and ephemerality of streaming philosophy. Yet in a series of essays and interviews, he lamented what had become of the movement he had helped build. Fuller laments that Jordan Peterson, whom he once admired, is now little more than a boilerplate conservative commentator.

Fuller described a kind of capture that streaming philosophers often fall for as they chase the dollars and dopamine rushes of online virality. If youre outside the institutions, heexplained, youre dependent on your audience, and audience feedback becomes a warping factor. A willingness to challenge certain political pieties can turn a person into an uncritical devotee of the opposite pieties. Probing the uncertainties of a pandemic in public can lead to obsessive anti-vaxxery.

As Fuller considers next steps in his own career, hesays he is interested in projects focused on masculinity. This has been the central topic for most of these streaming philosophers all along, though they have rarely acknowledged it as such. I mentioned to Hall that I considered him a role model for young men in particular, and he said he had not thought of himself that way. Yet he agreed that nearly all his public conversation partners happen to be men, just as nearly all the guests on Lex Fridmans podcast are. Perhaps a more explicit examination of masculinity might help them recognize their interests as dependent upon the particular perceptions of a certain class of experience.

The world does need more conversation across dividing lines. I consider it a testament to my students and other young people who follow these figures that they crave this stuff: long conversations against the culture of brevity, and ideas that challenge the homogenizing pressures of a polarized time. But there are other lessons I hope my students learnlessons that tend not to come up when tech founders are presented as the angels of history. Try to see the world through the eyes of the poor, not just the powerful. As much as you stay open-minded, be willing to commit.

It should come as a relief that humankind still has an appetite for depth. But is the depth we need to be found in rabbit holes?

[Correction:A previous version of this text misspelled Ken Wilber's name as Wilbur. It has since been updated.]

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Dudes thinking big thoughts: Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson and the lure of the rabbit hole - America: The Jesuit Review

Wherever You Are Is Not As Good As It Could Be: Plot A Course Forward – The Daily Wire

The following is a transcribed excerpt from one of Dr. Jordan Petersons 2020 lectures. In this segment, he discusses moving forward, preparing for the future, identifying where you are, mapping the territory of your past, and bringing positivity into your life. You can listen to or watch more from Dr. Peterson on DailyWire+.

Start time: 00:00

There are deep reasons for how and why you perceive things as you do in the world. Perception is tightly related and associated to action, to movement forward, and to emotion and those things are very important to know. For example, you live in a map or a story, and because wherever you are is not as good as it could be, you go somewhere that is somewhat better. That can occur in different timeframes. Maybe you have a plan for the next minute: You are hungry, and you want to go somewhere to eat. Maybe it could be for the next hour or the next day or the next week or the next year. But, basically, what you are trying to do is take where you are (point A) and make it better (point B). So you are always somewhere that is not quite as good as it should be, and you are always going somewhere that is somewhat better at least, that is the hope.

This is somewhat unfortunate in some sense because it means you cannot be satisfied with where you are. But how can you be satisfied when you have problems coming your way? Even if everything is ok right now which it probably is not, but even if it was that does not mean everything is going to be ok tomorrow, next week, next year, or five years from now. You have the future, your future self, and your family to take care of. Maybe you have your community to take care of. Because the way things are is not good enough, you are going to fix them a bit, which you do across different levels of resolution.

First, you identify where you are. If you are mixed up, one of the problems you might have is that you do not know where you are. Often, people have to go to therapy or talk to someone for a long time to find out where they are because their experience might have scattered them everywhere, and they feel they have come apart at the seams that things have fallen apart, that they are in chaos, that they do not know where they are. If this happens to you, then you are in trouble because how are you going to plot a course forward into the future if you do not know where you are?

You have to bring yourself up-to-date, which you can know because it is fairly straightforward: If you are obsessed with memories of the past (more than 18 months old) and most of those are negative and anxiety-provoking, then there is a lot of you that is stuck in the past. What that means is that you did not map the territory well enough, and the parts of your brain that are alarm systems anxiety systems are telling you that there are holes in the way you are looking at the world. They are saying that you fell in those holes once, you do not know where they are, you do not know how to fill them, you do not know how to walk around them and you cannot forget them. If you have memories like that, you remember them, they make you feel anxious and negative, and you are stuck in the past. Your body is still reacting as if there is an emergency that could happen again that you have not fixed. It does not matter if it was your fault because the alarm system does not care. When your smoke detector goes off, it is not relevant whether the cause was your fault. The smoke detector just says, House is on fire and that is a bad thing.

Your anxiety systems are similar. If they are tagging old systems with anxiety, then you have to do something about it, or you will be tortured by those memories forever because that is how the alarm system works. So maybe you need to go back there and clean things up. You must figure out how it happened. Ask, what sort of role did I play? Even if it was a minor role, that does not matter because the point is that you do not want to be put in the same vulnerable position again so anything you can do to strengthen yourself is good. Often, if it is a really old memory, if you were a child, you probably have a variety of techniques at hand that you could use to deal with a situation like that because you are not a child now. But you have to update that part of your brain that still thinks you are four-years-old. Lots of people still have parts of them that are still stuck in a traumatic childhood experience. Thus, you need to know where you are.

When you decide to move from one point to another, going somewhere slightly better, that is good. Your positive emotion systems run on a neurochemical called dopamine the same neurochemical system that drugs like cocaine, methamphetamine, opiates, and alcohol, for some people, affect dramatically and make people feel far better than they should, which is part of their danger. It is a very fundamental system. The dopamine kicks in with a kick of positive emotion if you are going somewhere that is worth going. So how do you get a little bit of positivity in your life? This standalone neurochemical system that is rooted very deeply in the brains exploratory circuitry a very ancient system is happy when you have somewhere to go. Then it is happy when you are going there.

To continue, listen or watch more content with Dr. Jordan Peterson on DailyWire+.

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson is a clinical psychologist and professor emeritus at the University of Toronto. From 1993 to 1998 he served as assistant and then associate professor of psychology at Harvard. He is the international bestselling author of Maps of Meaning, 12 Rules For Life, and Beyond Order. You can now listen to or watch his popular lectures on DailyWire+.

Be sure to PRE-ORDER Dr.Petersons latest book: We Who Wrestle With God.

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Wherever You Are Is Not As Good As It Could Be: Plot A Course Forward - The Daily Wire

Is Andrew Huberman the new Jordan Peterson? – UnHerd

Is it really news if an unmarried, childless, 48-year-old science and self-improvement podcaster lied to some women he was dating? Evidently so: the latest New York magazine expos devotes 8,000 words to explaining how popular podcaster and Stanford professor Andrew Huberman maintained multiple long-term girlfriends, all of whom thought they were in a monogamous relationship.

The fact that it is news highlights two features of the contemporary culture that emanates especially from Americas West Coast. Firstly, the gulf between what California-inspired therapy culture promises and what it delivers; and secondly, the viciousness with which contemporary audiences now routinely go after high-profile role models especially men.

Huberman has reportedly been marinated in therapy culture since his parents divorced messily in his teens. According to the article, he seems expert in wielding its vocabulary to convey emotional attunement to his multiple girlfriends. I hear you saying you are angry and hurt, he texts in response to one discovering infidelity. I will hear you as much as long as needed for us [sic].

As a discursive register, therapy-speak was developed with the aim of enabling sincerity and authentic encounter; Hubermans proficiency with it suggests that with skilled bad-faith use its equally effective as a tool for manipulation. Still more striking, though, is how neatly this story fits another contemporary pattern: the speed and urgency with which male role models are first deified and then, just as swiftly, attacked.

Im not sure it really is newsworthy that a highly intelligent and highly sexed man with a painful family history and a world-class vocabulary for emotional manipulation should have had multiple concurrent girlfriends. It is news, though, for a high-profile male role model to have feet of clay in a culture that seems deeply conflicted about masculinity and authority. Before Huberman there was Jordan Peterson, another clearly wounded man who offered advice particularly to young men, and who subsequently and very publicly imploded.

The moment such a male role model achieves prominence, the hunt is on for the ways in which he is less than perfect. These are then wielded to deflate any pretensions he may have had to serving as a figure for admiration or emulation. Its a pattern that repeats, on a symbolic level, the repeated statue-toppling incidents since the BLM riots. Its hard to avoid the sense that as with the statues, whats being attacked is less the specific sins of a particular flawed hero and more the idea that any male figures should stand out and be emulated full stop.

Its common, when discussing the so-called crisis of masculinity, to blame it on loss of economic opportunity, the changing educational landscape, or other structural factors. A more uncomfortable possibility, though, is that at least part of this crisis is attributable less to structural shortcomings, or even the failings of individual men, than something more insidious. That is, a kind of baseline cultural hostility to the idea of prominent men entirely, particularly those who offer themselves as role models.

Heroes have always had feet of clay. Even Achilles had one weak spot. This isnt news. But today, for some reason, its become a sackable offence. Im perhaps less troubled than some by Hubermans very ordinary philandering, but the point is that if he wasnt in the stocks for infidelity, the Greek chorus of cultural levellers would have found something else to attack.

Its unclear what is driving this collective determination to be disappointed by every would-be avatar of masculine competence and agency. But I suspect that in the terms beloved of California therapy-speak we wont resolve the so-called crisis of masculinity until we work it through.

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Is Andrew Huberman the new Jordan Peterson? - UnHerd