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Bitcoin 2021. Miami.

This is an article which formed the basis of my talk at Bitcoin 2021 in Miami (see video above) and was inspired by the longer-form article I wrote a couple of months back entitled Fiat, Fascism And Communism:

Fiat, Fascism And Communism

My intent during the talk, and in this article here, is to remind you, the reader, of what you may already know or what perhaps you are starting to slowly realize about Bitcoin.

Yes. Bitcoin is the most important economic decision youll make in your entire life. Nothing else comes close. In fact, its probably the most asymmetric economic opportunity any group of people will ever have had, in the history of humanity. And youre lucky enough to be alive during this period.

Bitcoin is the final Cantillon opportunity in the sense that by reading this, youre early enough and close enough to the greatest wealth transfer in documented history. That is a big deal.

But no, thats not what Im here to talk to you about. NgU technology is important, and of course its the centerpiece of the Bitcoin flywheel, but I dont need to remind you of that.

What I want to remind you of is the moral duty of moving into Bitcoin. Its at the core of why were all here, whether you realize it or not.

The world is being overrun by collectivist statists and central planners of every kind. You see it all around us. Whether theyre democratic, or conservative, fascist or communist, socialist, globalist, MMTist, utopian or another misshapen form or blend of authoritarian dictator it doesnt matter.

They are tearing apart what humans have built for millennia, theyre sucking the energy, will and passion out of people, turning them into empty automatons and their short-sighted stupidity is going to drive us back into the Dark Ages.

The soulless gaze of an individual who owns nothing and has no privacy. Source: Twitter.

Bitcoin and Bitcoiners are here to change that, not by replacing one group of arbitrary rulers with another, but by removing rulers altogether and replacing them with a set of verifiable, incorruptible rules that nobody can take advantage of at the expense of someone else.

Source: Reddit

When the means via which human action is measured, stored and transacted is OUTSIDE of the hands of any group, organization, foundation, institution or state, we have TRUE equality of opportunity.

Until then, we have stagnation. We have corruption. We have theft. We have waste. We have poverty. We have wealth redistribution by bureaucrats (the dumbest of the dumb in society). We have environmental destruction. We have state indoctrination instead of schooling. We have the oppression Olympics, where everyone is a victim. We have sludge instead of food. We have scientism instead of science.

Bitcoin rug-pulls the statists and changes not only the returns to violence as discussed in The Sovereign Individual, but it transforms each individuals relationship to time, their future and natural resources.

When the individual changes their behavior for the better, the world changes for the better.

That is why Bitcoin fixes this. You start with the individual and spread outward.

So, lets look at Bitcoins impact on the world in a few key areas.

Fiat standard on the left, Bitcoin standard on the right.

Classes will always exist in human society. Its normal and perfectly natural. People are different and dynamic. We excel at different things, we apply different levels of effort, we have varying degrees of talent, were born to parents of a different level of competence and have teachers and friends throughout life who all impact us in different ways.

The result is an unequal distribution of wealth and resources. Which is, once again, perfectly fine. That is natural in a society that is layered, diverse and multifaceted.

The problem is more nuanced. We dont have natural 80/20 inequality anymore (pareto-type distributions), but we have completely unnatural inequality (99.9/0.1 distributions).

This is something very few seem to understand, even people who I highly admire, like the Jordan Petersons of the world. They seem to think that, somehow, concentration of wealth (for example) can continue unabated without some form of rigging the game.

I like to differentiate inequality as follows:

Static Inequality

This is the bad kind. Its the world we live in today and its the kind that continues to make the poor poorer and the rich richer because whoever controls the rules of the game (the money) can play heads I win, tails you lose. Its central feature is moral hazard and the goal as the ruler is to remove skin from the game (i.e., someone else pays the consequence for your bad decisions).

Dynamic Inequality

This is the good kind, in which everyone is playing by the same rules, everyone has skin in the game, you can move up the social hierarchy and, just as importantly, if you make stupid decisions you can move down the social hierarchy. A key characteristic of this type of natural, complex system is a beautiful, dynamic equilibrium that forms over time because social mobility is tied to competence, effort, value and energy.

How does Bitcoin fix this?

The central banking, statist and government model today is the bastion of moral hazard. You have the public officials with zero skin in the game making decisions on behalf of us and our future generations, with no regard to the cost or the consequences of such decisions.

In a similar vein, central banks, banks, Wall Street, tech oligopolies and anyone else who is close to the monetary spigot can privatize any gains they make, and then socialize any losses theyve incurred.

Boeing is a great example from 2020. You and I paid for it to stay in business. It stayed at the top of the hierarchy and us idiots in the middle funded it. Todays tech giants are similar. They are major beneficiaries of the ridiculous amount of money being created, borrowed and subsequently handed to Wall Street, who then ploughs it into their stock. They become unnaturally strong and any upstart with a better product or service has no chance of competing.

You wonder why censorship is such a problem? Its not a lack of some decentralized alternative that nobody is ever going to use. Its a lack of viable competition.

Break the corrupt game of fraudulently concentrating wealth through direct and indirect confiscation (taxation, inflation, regulation) and you re-introduce competition into the system. With competition, you begin to get quality.

When a business requires customers in order to survive, they treat them well. When a business can get bailed out or be the recipient of all the free money being created by the bureaucrats, then it doesnt give a shit about its customers. It can censor them, force them to breathe through face diapers and much more.

Anyway, I digress.

The world we live in today is split into feudal-like castes or classes that are extraordinarily difficult for individuals to move between.

If youre at the bottom, you cannot climb because the product of your labor (the money you earn) is being debased faster than you can earn it. You barely have enough to feed yourself and youre completely disincentivized to save.

Savings are the cornerstone of civilization. One cannot climb without having a foundation upon which to build. Its like building a house made of sand, on ground made of quicksand.

The result? Youre stuck at the bottom, and relatively speaking, you get poorer as time passes.

It gets worse. If youre at the top, and parasitic enough to stay there, you not only have access to more, but what really decays the system is that you can privatize any gains you make and socialize your fuck ups. You can stay at the top fraudulently and this is just as bad for the system as being stuck at the bottom. This is how the system rots (to quote Nassim Taleb, the IYI).

And who foots the bill for this entire thing? Me, you, your friends and your family. The productive engine of society. The middle class (whether lower, mid- or upper) who produce most of everything, we pay for it all.

We support the poor, and we simultaneously pay the jailers to keep us enslaved. Its pretty messed up.

This concept right here, the transformation from static inequality to dynamic inequality, is what I believe Bitcoins greatest impact on the world will be.

The right-hand side of the diagram above is what Bitcoin enables. A playing field in which classes of people will still exist, but that are separated by a permeable membrane.

Yes, if youre broke, poor and young, youre going to have to work to climb, but the product of your labor cannot be debased, and your time, effort and energy can be better valued. You have a solid foundation upon which to build your wealth.

If youre at the top, and you got there through competence and merit, you must either keep producing to stay there, or invest in other up and coming entrepreneurs/producers who are climbing and building value for everyone in the stack. At the same time, if youre at the top through luck, or you were early and youre either a parasite, a moron, you make bad decisions or you just want to blow your wealth on hookers and coke, you will fall down the social hierarchy. You can no longer stay there at someone elses expense.

This means each individual is not only free to do what they want, but each individual bears the cost of their decisions and the fruits of their labor.

This has profound implications on society, moral behavior, meaning, time preference, the environment, generational wealth, art and so much more which will require a book. Ill save that for later 🙂

Next up, we have the environment.

There are other writers, namely Hass McCook and Nic Carter, whove both written at length about this topic, so I wont rehash their work.

You can check it out for yourself and discover that Bitcoin is far more efficient than the infrastructure required to support the existing monetary and financial system.

I will also point out that there is a lot of talk about using renewables to support Bitcoins hash rate and network security. I dont entirely buy that because I believe that unreliable, dilute energy capture mechanisms are far worse for not only the environment (you have all the energy input upfront, which rarely gets paid back) but for human prosperity (how much better were able to allocate our time when we have energy abundance), and as the backbone for the most reliable money to ever exist.

But again thats another topic, and for now, Bitcoin is not only more efficient, but its actually making those unreliable forms of renewable energy more useful than they would otherwise be.

My argument for Bitcoins impact on the environment goes deeper.

My contention is that the greatest harm we can do to the planet is to pollute without consequence and waste scarce natural resources on moronic mandates and ridiculous pipe dreams conjured up by statists, bureaucrats, academics and governments who dont pay the bill for the damages (you, me and the natural environment do).

Its possible that more than 10 billion masks are disposed of monthly, according to the author of this article. Image source: Twitter.

Money literally measures time, energy and scarce resources (matter).

When money is fake, valueless, meaningless and has no basis in thermodynamic reality, the things that it represents are squandered and wasted.

The existing monetary system is literally burning up the worlds resources and our collective lifeblood because they can produce money out of thin air, and waste it!

In this way, by supporting the fiat monetary system you are directly destroying the environment!!!

Furthermore, because human time and energy, when directed toward productive ends, means the creation of better, more energy efficient products and services, by cutting the bureaucratic waste out of the system we further help the broader natural environment by using the capital stock more intelligently (were confronted with the reality of its cost).

The natural incentive of the productive individual is to do more with less.

This is actually the very essence of capitalism. Its the process of taking scarce time, energy and natural resources and transforming them into something of higher value and utility.

Capitalism is the transformation of chaos into higher order.

The implications of Bitcoins impact on the environment and the more sustainable and efficient use of energy and resources is staggering.

I imagine we could likely feed 100 billion people, transform the toughest of terrains, green the desserts, clean up the oceans, master energy production and learn to build gardens and monuments, instead of barren concrete wastelands.

Source: Twitter

I wrote about this in more length in Fiat, Fascism And Communism, and will dedicate an article to just this topic, but suffice it to say the following:

Once again, the state not only produces the absolute worst product imaginable, but they do it with your money, that you worked for, that they took from you at the point of a gun or the threat of imprisonment.

Dont believe me? Try not paying your taxes for a few years, and see what happens. Even if you dont use any of their shitty services.

Its like walking into a shop to buy a new sofa. As you walk in, the agent punches you in the face, takes a dump on the sofa and charges you triple for taking it.

On a Bitcoin standard this wont happen. Their entire eDucAtIoN system will collapse, and hallelujah for that.

Parents are far better educators for their kids*, the internet has made better education cheaper and practically free to just about anyone, anywhere and there are millions of brilliant teachers, educators, philosophers, writers and mentors who will have the opportunity to build their own centers of excellence, whether large or small.

*Yeah, I know, there are a few asshole exceptions, but you dont handicap the vast majority of good parents for the few dipshits.

I wont go into much here except to state that as the sound money foundation broadens and solidifies, the system will naturally re-introduce accurate price signals and true information will flow orders of magnitude more efficiently.

Money is the fabric that binds us all. It measures human action and is used by humans to measure subjective value. One of its most important functions is to transmit information and it does so with prices.

If you fuck with the money, you fuck with the transmission of information and those on the receiving end make the wrong decisions, which then creates a positive feedback loop (with a negative consequence) that further spirals the system out of control. And while there are rational players in the system which counteract some of the madness, when the transmission medium is broken, theres only one destination: destruction, waste, misallocation.

Our mOdeRn eCOnoMy looks like this guy here:

With Bitcoin, we fix this too.

Bitcoin is an information and energy superconductor.

- Svetski, Bitcoin, Chaos And Order

When price signals are accurate, when the right information is flowing, we can discover not only opportunity, but truth. The result will be the creation of solutions for the biggest problems, because that is where the greatest opportunities lie.

Need is what drives demand, which in turn is what drives supply, which is what incentivizes the producer.

Need Demand Supply Production Entrepreneur/Producer.

Today, we have a completely deformed economy where money filters through to moron VCs and bankers who believe that what people need is another dick pic app, or convoluted gambling platform disguised as fintech.

They pump money into these dumb ideas, they then market the shit out of them on the mainstream and social media networks that they also fund and control, and we all wonder how we become users of the next dumb app that nobody needs or wanted in the first place.

Meanwhile, over in Africa, Latin America, Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia, people are dying of starvation, living in the dirt, in the darkness, with no clean water or clothes.

Its fucking disgusting. And its a direct result of the legacy monetary system.

Not only does it enslave these poor nations with dirty loans from institutions like the IMF and World Bank, but smart, intelligent people who would otherwise go solve problems over there are instead incentivized to work on Wall Street or program for the morons at Facebook, or some other ridiculous Silicon Valley startup that got major funding because they knew a guy.

The fiat-toilet-paper price of bitcoin will go up, down and around in circles in the short term, and if you focus on that, youll lose your mind.

I want you to remember why youre really here.

You, as Bitcoiners, are here as the white blood cells of the network. You are the cyber hornets. Each and every one of us is here with a moral duty.

We are here to slay the frauds. The collectivists. The eco terrorists and fascists. Were here to slay the cry babies, the fiat slaves and think bois.

Source: The author

And as we grow this, our very existence will slay the evil cartoon villains who believe that they know how to run your life better than you do, and will stop at nothing to make you pay for their lavish lifestyle.

The shitcoiners and charlatans are irrelevant. Theyll continue to be pathetic, desperate slobs with dreams of being the next Epstein or Fragile Taleb.

Source: Twitter

You and I are here to be warriors. To fight. To build a free world. To help each individual become sovereign, starting first and foremost, with ourselves.

See the original post here:
Fix The Money, Fix The World - Bitcoin Magazine

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

Leftist hatred for the Canadian psychology professor Jordan Peterson is really something to behold. He stands as an example of what happens to someone who strays from the crazy line of thinking by modern campus bigots.

Mr. Peterson is the canary in the toxic coal mine of political correctness and petty thought police.

Lets start with the professors crime.

Simply put, Mr. Peterson does not share the monolithic, prevailing liberal orthodoxy on university campuses dictating that Western White males are the worlds evil oppressors and anyone who does not belong to that evil race is a victim trapped in circumstances beyond his or her control.

Consider for a moment the leftist premise to which the radical Mr. Peterson objects.

On its face, it is blatantly racist. Divvying up, defining and punishing groups of people based on their race (or gender) was racist 200 years ago during slavery times. It was racist 75 years ago. It is still racist today.

Yet, astonishingly, this reborn racism is widely embraced by the racists who dominate college campuses today.

The second obvious flaw in this racist orthodoxy is the message it sends to non-White, non-males.

Any challenges, failures or misery you face in life are not your fault. And, even worse, there is nothing you can do to change your circumstances. So, just stew in your bitterness and hatred for White males along with the rest of us, goes the leftist campus orthodoxy of the day.

Is there any more destructive and devious lie that could be sold to young people? Is there anything more dystopian or hopeless?

Mr. Peterson has become something of a rock star among beleaguered youth suffocating in the coal mine of modern academia with speeches, lectures, podcasts and a book titled, The Twelve Rules of Life: An Antidote to Chaos. His message has been particularly devoured among young men many of them White who have been vilified and emasculated by crazy university teachings.

Find meaning in life. Take responsibility for yourself. Surround yourself with good people who want the best for you.

Pretty nasty stuff, huh?

The chapter titles of his book include radical instructions such as: Stand up straight with your shoulders back, Tell the truth or, at least, dont lie, and Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street.

These lessons have earned Mr. Peterson a level of blinding hatred that is normally reserved for former President Donald Trump.

So it has been with considerable glee that the leftist media the Revolutionary Guard of modern academia hunted down Mr. Peterson as he suffered from a pestilence of personal maladies that no decent human would wish on his worst enemy.

Over the past year, Mr. Peterson has suffered physical illness and serious mental disease including suicidal thoughts. His wife was diagnosed with cancer. As his life spiraled out of control, Mr. Peterson developed a near-fatal drug addiction.

Actual humans read those lines and are struck with pangs of angst and sorrow for Mr. Peterson and his family. They mutter a prayer for them.

But not the campus bigots and the jackals in the media. Every bleak detail is catnip to them. Their desperate war to destroy all who disagree never sleeps.

When the story of Mr. Petersons troubles emerged about a year ago, a creature named Amir Attaran, a professor of both law and medicine, began his public hot take on Mr. Petersons travails: #KARMA.

Jordan Peterson, oracle to gullible young men, preacher of macho toughness, and hectoring bully to snowflakes, is addicted to strong drugs and his brain is riddled with neurological damage. He deserves as much sympathy as he showed others.

Says the law professor.

A new interview with the Sunday Times of London about his tribulations sparked yet another avalanche of glee and gloating over the unimaginable pain Mr. Peterson has been through.

Introducing her interview, reporter Decca Aitkenhead opines openly referring to herself no fewer than three times in the lead paragraph that she is unable to diagnose the root of Mr. Petersons problems.

I dont know if this is a story about drug dependency, or doctors, or Peterson family dynamics or a parable about toxic masculinity, she sneers.

If these are the purveyors of social justice, we are truly doomed.

Charles Hurt is opinion editor of The Washington Times. He can be reached at churt@washingtontimes.com.

The rest is here:
The war on Jordan Peterson - Washington Times

Do you ever feel good when someone wont tell you how much something costs something you have to pay for?

No? Me neither.

But, when it comes to the Canadian governments climate change agenda, and in particular the Net Zero by 2050 strategy, that is where we are.

I will continue to dig to find out more. But in the meantime, let me share what an expert on the climate file says about what doing nothing would cost.

Yes, doing nothing.

But dont take my word for it.

President Obama was (and remains) quite outspoken as an alarmist on the issue of climate change, talking often about the impending crisis.

But the former Democratic Presidents senior Department of Energy official, Stephen Koonin, has just come out with a most sensible and distinctly non-alarmist perspective. His recently published book, Unsettled, suggests the alarmist climate change narrative is unfounded.

Stephen Koonin served as Undersecretary of Energy in former U.S. President Barack Obamas administration. A PhD Physicist, he is a smart guy.

Referencing materials from the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) an organization that is widely viewed by governments and media as the single most important source for information on climate change Koonin demonstrates that the science of climate change is anything but settled, and that we are not in, nor should we anticipate, a crisis.

In fact, despite decades of apocalyptic warnings there is in fact remarkably little knowledge of what might happen. Over the last 5 decades of apocalyptic warning, life on earth has dramatically improved as our management of countless environmental challenges has improved.

What the evidence really shows is that as the global economy improves, our ability to deal with whatever mother nature throws at us improves. On that point, Koonin draws attention to what the IPCC experts say about the possible economic impacts of possible climate change-induced temperature changes.

Koonin notes that, according to the IPCC, a temperature increase of 3 degrees centigrade by 2100 which some scientists say might happen might create some negative environmental effects, which in turn would cause an estimated 3% hit to the economy in 2100.

But even as it makes these claims, the IPCC further predicts that the economy, in 2100, will be several times the size of the economy today (unless, of course, we interfere with it as the Net Zero by 2050 crowd wants us to do). In other words, a strategy of doing nothing may or may not mean a temperature increase, the effects of which if bad, are expected to represent a small economic hit to the economy, but that economy will be much, much larger.

In Koonins words, thistranslates to a decrease in the annual growth rate by an average of 3 percent divided by 80, or about 0.04 percent per year. The IPCC scenariosassume an average global annual growth rate of about 2 percent through 2100; the climate impact would then be a 0.04 percent decrease in that 2 percent growth rate, for a resulting growth rate of 1.96 percent. In other words, the U.N. report says that the economic impact of human-induced climate change is negligible, at most a bump in the road.

So this doesnt sound like a crisis to me. It sounds like a very modest reduction in extraordinary economic growth. So from extraordinary economic growth to slightly less extraordinary economic growth.

Why do I draw attention to this?

Because Canada is pursuing a Net Zero by 2050 target with a whole bunch of policies that will kill economic growth.

The IPCC predicts significant global economic growth without all the things Trudeau and other Net Zero by 2050 advocates are pursuing massive carbon taxes, additional carbon taxes called clean fuel standards (CFS), building code changes that will make a new home unaffordable, huge subsidies for pet projects, etc. In other words, the IPCC predicts growth without crazy and wasteful spending of taxpayer dollars that will hurt citizens.

So why are we allowing Trudeau and co to pursue these things?

We dont know the full costs of Net Zero by 2050, but every signal we have is that it is absurdly expensive. AND (thank you Stephen Koonin for making this explicitly clear) the International Panel on Climate Change says ignoring the Net Zero by 2050 target and doing nothing will mean a much bigger economy.

Prime Minister Trudeau and the activists wont tell you that.

Nor will they acknowledge what the IPCC actually says.

Lets all applaud Stephen Koonin for trying to do so.

Green activists are driving a radical agenda screaming at us that the science is settled. As courageous scientists like Stephen Koonin note, science is never settled and to say it is settled is irresponsible. The activists say we have to radically change our economy, but dont tell us how much that will cost but the IPCC tells us doing absolutely nothing would result in only slightly less economic growth than we would otherwise have.

Governments are spending massive sums of your money on Net Zero by 2050.

Corporate interests commit to this radical agenda and hide behind rhetoric of doing the right thing, while they also seek out government subsidies (which taxpayers will pay for) to meet their absurd Net Zero by 2050 commitments.

All of us, as consumers, will foot the bill.

And none of it needs to happen.

Click here for more articles from Dan McTeague of Canadians for Affordable energy

An 18 year veteran of the House of Commons, Dan is widely known in both official languages for his tireless work on energy pricing and saving Canadians money through accurate price forecasts. His Parliamentary initiatives, aimed at helping Canadians cope with affordable energy costs, led to providing Canadians heating fuel rebates on at least two occasions.

Widely sought for his extensive work and knowledge in energy pricing, Dan continues to provide valuable insights to North American media and policy makers. He brings three decades of experience and proven efforts on behalf of consumers in both the private and public spheres. Dan is committed to improving energy affordability for Canadians and promoting the benefits we all share in having a strong and robust energy sector.

Continued here:
Jordan Peterson and Rex Murphy on Woke Culture Wars - Todayville.com

Photo by Nick Krug. Enlarge photo.

Kansas football coach Lance Leipold talks with media members on May 18, 2021, at the Anderson Family Football Complex.

A Tonganoxie High graduate is returning home for a position at his other alma mater.

Scott Aligo, who graduated from THS in 2000 and the University of Kansas in 2005, will be the director of scouting for Kansas football, KU head coach Lance Leipold announced Friday.

Tonganoxie High alum Scott Aligo is the new director of scouting for Kansas football. KU head coach Lance Leipold announced Aligo's addition to his staff Friday. Aligo comes to KU from Michigan State.

Aligo is one of three new members of the Jayhawks support staff. Leipold also announced a new role for another staffer.

Aligo and director of recruiting Greg Svarczkopf will play key roles in KUs behind-the-scenes recruiting efforts.

Leipold also hired Stephen Matos as a senior offensive analyst and announced that Tory Teykl, who formerly held the title of director of football operations, will remain on staff as the director of player development.

Were very happy to have Scott, Greg, Tory and Stephen on our staff, Leipold stated in a KU release.

Aligo joined the Jayhawks after working last year as Michigan States director of player personnel, a position he also held at Akron in 2019.

Earlier in his career, Aligo worked in the NFL for seven-plus years, most recently as a player personnel associate with Cleveland from 2014-15. Previously, Aligo worked for Kansas City as a personnel assistant from 2005-09.

Football has been a part of Aligo family for many years. Scotts father, Gerard, worked as an assistant at Baker University in Baldwin City from 1988-91 and then served as head football coach at McLouth for 15 years before returning the BU sidelines in 2002. Gerard, who lives in Tonganoxie, retired from teaching at McLouth High a few years ago but continues to serve on the coaching staff at Baker.

Svarczkopf was Armys director of recruiting before joining Leipolds staff at KU. Svarczkopf first worked as Armys director of on-campus recruiting before being promoted.

Prior to his time with Army football, Svarczkopf spent three years at New Mexico, working his way up from graduate assistant to director of recruiting.

This is a critical time in recruiting, and Scott and Greg both have accomplished backgrounds in that area and bring great experience and evaluation skills, Leipold said.

Matos, like so many of KUs new assistants and staff members, followed Leipold to Lawrence from Buffalo. Matos spent the previous two years as a UB graduate assistant, focusing on the defensive line in 2019 and the offensive line in 2020.

Leipold expects Matos will be a great addition here with his strong work ethic and deep knowledge of our system and culture.

Matos joins Kevin Wewers as a senior analyst for the KU offense. The defensive senior analysts are Jordan Peterson, Chris Woods and Brock Caraboa. KU also has two senior special teams analysts Luke Roth and Taiwo Onatolu and two quality control staffers Travis Partridge for the offense and Thomas Wells for the defense in place.

Teykl first came to KU in 2020, when she was hired as an assistant athletic director for football operations, after holding that same job at Texas for the previous three years.

Im extremely excited to retain Tory on staff and transition her to this role, Leipold said. She will be a tremendous asset teaming up with (director of football relations) Darrell Stuckey to provide our (players) with outstanding support.

Mirror editor Shawn F. Linenberger contributed to this story.

See original here:
Rock chalk return: Tonganoxie grad and KU alum returning to Lawrence to join KU football staff as director of scouting | TonganoxieMirror.com - The...

The University of Toronto psychology professor, clinical psychologist, best-selling author and YouTube sensation Jordan B. Peterson published his third book and second international best-seller, Beyond Order, in March. The book expands in an intentional and direct way on its prequel, 12 Rules for Life (2018). Like 12 Rules for Life, Beyond Order offers 12 rules meant to help readers craft lives that include less pointless suffering (though not necessarily less suffering) and more meaning (though not necessarily more happiness).

As in 12 Rules for Life, the presentation of these rules ranges from the literal and mundane (Try to make one room in your house as beautiful as possible) to the metaphoric and abstract (Do not hide unwanted things in the fog). Overall, Beyond Order is well argued and provocative, though more prone to discursiveness than its predecessor.

Petersons tendency toward tangents in Beyond Order belies the books even sharper focus on one overarching argument: The meaning in life is found in taking responsibility.

This contention is made explicit only in Rule 4: Notice that opportunity lurks where responsibility has been abdicated. But in fact, the moral and psychological argument for shouldering heavier personal and professional burdens rather than lighter ones animates every chapter of Beyond Order.

After five years of international fame, Petersons reputation as a divisive public intellectual is often viewed as inextricable from his work itself. This is mostly because his controversial views on Bill C-16 (a Canadian law pertaining to the use of pronouns as related to trans people) got a great deal of media attention in 2017 and helped to grow his burgeoning international reputation.

Yet Peterson and his central message about responsibility are difficult to shoehorn into either of our increasingly polarized political camps.

Rhetoric on the left tends to be invested in acknowledging peoples suffering and the ways that trauma, oppression and the like can ravage the mind and the soul. Meanwhile, rhetoric on the right tends to be invested in telling people to strive regardless of their circumstances. Peterson does both; he is honest about how hard life is and how unfair it can be, and he offers practical guidance about how to order ones mind, body and environment to withstand inevitable suffering and pursue goals with purpose.

A deep dive into Petersons books and lectures raised three questions for me: 1) Why is this very old message about meeting profound suffering with heroic responsibility resonating in a new way in the 21st century? 2) Why is it resonating disproportionately with younger white men? 3) How does Petersons argument, and the cultural context around it, challenge us specifically as Catholics?

In many ways, life today is far easier than it was 100 (or even 25) years ago. People generally live longer and healthier lives, and there are ever more technologies that free us from drudgery and inconvenience. And yet this very technology has spawned new and unique mental, psychological and spiritual demands. One has to be quite organized to keep track of the average Americans 100 passwords. It is disconcerting and stressful to make choices when the options seem endless. And it is particularly difficult to manage the incessant demands of modern life absent the familial, communal and religious contexts that those before us mostly took for granted.

When my paternal grandparents got married in 1944, there was no question that they would live in Philadelphias Italian section. It was an equally foregone conclusion that the vast majority of their income would go toward paying their bills. They did not have a lot of choices, and they would not have known what to make of them if they did. Their parents had been born in Italy; neither of them had graduated from high school; and they were both Catholic.

Their load of responsibilities was not lightthey raised children without a lot of means, and had the same concerns and struggles as everyone both before and after thembut there were many sets of shoulders to help bear those burdens. They lived among scores of family members and friends and went to the same stores, church and social events as nearly everyone they knew. With their community thus institutionalized by both geography and custom, their familial dramas included a cast of characters large enough to absorb any particularly operatic incidents with less collateral damage than would have been possible otherwise. Thus, their lapses as individuals, as spouses and as parents were less consequential to themselves and to their children than they would have been without the collectivized, communal responsibility that lightened their individual loads.

When my husband and I got married in 2012, by contrast, we were both pursuing graduate degrees. Our decision to remain in the Philadelphia region, where I had grown up and we had met as undergraduates, was born of an explicit desire to achieve rootedness among family and friendsan outcome that we understood could no longer be taken for granted. And our decision to stay in Philadelphia was fraught rather than obvious. It meant not living in Cleveland, where my husband had grown up.

Moreover, even as we have sought to centralize, routinize and institutionalize many of our familial relationships and friendships, we recognize that our interactions with others are nearly always conscious choices rather than ever-present unconscious realities. For this reason, our responsibilitiesprofessional, marital and parentalare ours alone in a way that was not true for either my Italian-American grandparents or his Liberian ones. Hence no amount of self-awareness or hard work can render us truly fit for the sheer amount of personal responsibility required of anyone trying to be a decent citizen, worker or parent in todays newly individuated world.

Enter Jordan Peterson with his now 24 rules, making what was communal, implicit and abstract for my grandparents individual, explicit and specific for me.

Thus, it is Peterson himself who has noticed that opportunity lurks where responsibility has been abdicated. His resonance with younger people reflects the extreme demands of modern life and the new isolation in which we are expected to meet those demands. It also reflects the failure of our parents and grandparents to prepare many of us for the logistical, psychological and emotional reality that they unwittingly created.

Much has been made of the fact that Petersons audiences tend to be dominated by younger white men. Progressive critics have tended to assume that if a lot of white men are buying Petersons message about responsibility, there must be something sexist and/or racist in the message itself. If there werent, this line of reasoning goes, more women and people of color would be enthusiastic about Peterson, too.

Putting aside the fact that there is more gender and racial diversity among Petersons fans than the popular perception might lead us to believe, I speculate that there is a reason why comparatively fewer women and people of color find Petersons exaltation of responsibility life-changing. Its not that his message doesnt apply to us. Its that it isnt news to us.

In order for a person to receive Petersons injunction toward responsibility as transformative, he or she would have to have previously believed that avoiding adult responsibility while escaping dire consequences was not only desirable but possible. That is, he or she would have to have believed that failure to grow up could look more like the Neverland of Peter Pan than like the Pleasure Island of Pinocchio (both of which are among Petersons many Disney-adapted preoccupations).

Neverland, where Peter Pan resides indefinitely, is a seeming manifestation of childhoods wonder. Bright and carefree, filled with fairy dust and games, and stretching out over endless tomorrows without the worries of aging or mortality, residence in Neverland doesnt appear to extract any price from its inhabitants.

By contrast, Pleasure Island, where Pinocchio alights briefly after missteps in his quest to prove himself brave, truthful, and unselfish, is eerie even at first glance. Boys come to the ominously peripatetic carnival of their own volition; but they do not get to choose when or whether to leave. After a few hours of self-indulgent fun, they are transformed into braying donkeys, boxed and loaded onto ships. In short, their avoidance of responsibility robs them of their humanity.

No one needs Jordan Peterson to talk him or her out of a stay on Pleasure Island. Therefore, for those of us whose biological reality of gender, political reality of race, or material reality of socioeconomic status renders failure to take responsibility more likely to result in the kind of permanent and potentially dire consequences that Pinocchio so narrowly avoids, Peterson may be relevant but redundant. He echoes and explicates, rather than countering or complicating, what we understand already about our own Pleasure-Island-like proximity to danger.

But for some young white men with sufficient academic ability to comprehend Petersons writing and lectures, it is actually news that the worry-free irresponsibility offered in the seeming safety of Neverland has psychological, emotional and spiritual consequences. Many of these young white men were raised by baby boomers who accepted as individuals all the benefits of choices my grandparents never enjoyedbut not the attendant responsibilities of a revolutionized social regime that facilitated those choices by eradicating the communal safety net my grandparents took for granted. Now, as young adults, they actually need a psychologist to convince them of what the rest of us already know: Neverland has always been a lie.

Ultimately, the consequence of an extended sojourn in Neverland is just as bad as one in Pleasure Island. Perpetual childhood is just as much a form of dehumanization as transformation into an ass, since it is the ability to live a life of self-aware responsibility that renders humans different from asses in the first place.

Like most women, Wendy senses that Neverland has no real place for her (there are no other lost girls for a reason), so she leaves of her own volition. Peter knows that Neverland is made in his image, so he relinquishes the possibility of an adult relationship with Wendy and stays there.

One more young white man who desperately needs Jordan Petersons rules.

Peterson has said that to be Catholic is, in his view, to be as sane as a person can be. This makes sense, because Christ on the cross (and the Catholic determination to leave him there in our depictions, unlike our Protestant brothers and sisters) is the iconic representation of suffering. It is also the ultimate exhortation toward self-sacrifice (that is, the responsibility to love others) in the face of suffering.

So if we Catholics have both the crucifix and an intellectual tradition stretching back millennia that explains its significance, why does anyone need some psychologists rules to understand what 1.2 billion people worldwide (not to mention one billion Protestants, many of whom profess much of the same) ostensibly already know?

Why does Petersons ability to evince simultaneously both compassion for human suffering and insistence on moral responsibility despite suffering seem new, when it is the Catholic Churchthe oldest continually operating institution in the worldthat can most credibly lay claim to that concept?

The reason is that, per Peterson, opportunity lurks where responsibility has been abdicated. And in the United Statesdespite the incredible work of many within the church (like Bishop Robert Barron, who recently had an illuminating conversation with Peterson)we Catholics have abdicated our responsibility and forfeited our credibility in the face of political polarization and increasing secularism.

Too many of us too often live in what Simcha Fisher calls a pre-furnished house of ideas. We allow political exigencies of the moment or sociopolitical stereotypes to dictate our uncontextualized expression of either the lefts too often thoughtless compassion or the rights too often heartless morality.

If more of us spoke at a uniform volume about the totality of what we allegedly professrather than loudly about the ongoing genocide of abortion but quietly about the evils of unfettered capitalisms sinful inequalities, or vice versawe would not only be sane, but sound credible.

Clearly, there is an audience for the kind of rigorous pluralism that Peterson is offeringthe kind that Catholic belief, rightly understood, demands. Moreover, an accurate understanding of our faith should render us fundamentally opposed to the craven creeds of each of todays increasingly monistic political camps.

So, just imagine if we American Catholics laid claim to a higher and more appealing truth than the political left, the political right or even a nonpartisan iconoclast like Peterson can provide. Judging by the sizes of the crowds at Petersons lectures, we might be able to stop closing our churches and start opening them again.

And then maybe, just maybe, we could help to create an American politics that did not incentivize and almost require the abandonment of each fundamental truth on the altar of another.

But that is a task for another day. After all, we should, per Rule 6 of the original 12 Rules for Life, Set [our] own house in perfect order before [we] criticize the world.

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Jordan Peterson is telling young white men what many of us already know: Neverland is a lie. - America Magazine