Jordan Peterson: evaluation

Transcript context

…And good ideas from the bad ideas, and you lecture on truth that Nietzsche also struggled with, so how do you know that communism is a bad idea versus it’s a good idea implemented by bad actors? Right. That’s a more subtle variant of the religious problem. And that’s what the communists say all the time, the modern day communists like, “Real communism has never been tried,” and you could say, I suppose with some justification, you could say that real Christianity has never been tried because we always fall short of the ideal mark. My rejoinder to the communists is something like every single time it’s been implemented, wherever it’s been implemented regardless of the culture and the background of the people who’ve implemented it, it’s had exactly the same catastrophic consequences. It’s like, I don’t know how many examples you need of that, but I believe we’ve generated sufficient examples so that that case is basically resolved. Now, the general rejoinder to that is it’s really something like, “Well, if I was in charge of the communist enterprise, the utopia would’ve come about,” but that’s also a form of dangerous pretense. Part of the way… See, that problem is actually resolved to some degree in the notion of… in the developing notion of sacrifice that emerges in the western canon over thousands and thousands of years. So one of the suggestions, for example, and this is something exemplified in the passion story, is that you can tell the valid holder of an idea because that holder will take the responsibility for the consequences of his idea onto himself. And that’s why, for example, you see one way of conceptualizing Christ in the gospel story is as the ultimate sacrifice to God. So you might ask, well, what’s the ultimate sacrifice? And there are variants of the answer to that. One form of ultimate sacrifice is the sacrifice of a child, the offering of a child, and the other is the offering of the self. And the story of Christ brings both of those together because he’s the son of God that’s offered to God. And so it’s a marketable resolution of that tension between ultimate sacrifice, ultimate because once you’re a parent, most parents would rather sacrifice themselves than their children. So you have something that becomes of even more value than yourself. But the sacrifice of self is also a very high order level of sacrifice. Christ is an archetype of the pattern of being that’s predicated on the decision to take… to offer everything up to the highest value, that pattern of self-sacrifice. And I think part of the reason that’s valid is because the person who undertakes to do that pays the price themselves. It’s not externalized. They’re not trying to change anyone else except maybe by example. It’s your problem. Like Solzhenitsyn pointed that out too when he was struggling with the idea of good versus evil, and you see this in more sophisticated literature. one else except maybe by example. It’s your problem. Like Solzhenitsyn pointed that out too when he was struggling with the idea of good versus evil, and you see this in more sophisticated literature. In really unsophisticated literature or drama, there’s a good guy and the bad guy and the good guy’s all good, and the bad guy’s all bad. And in more sophisticated literature, the good and bad are abstracted. You can think of them as spirits. And then those spirits possess all the characters in the complex drama to a greater or lesser degree and that battle is fought out both socially and internally. In the high order religious conceptualizations in the West, if they culminate, let’s say in the Christian story, the notion is that battle between good and evil is fundamentally played out as an internal drama.…

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