Feb 18, 2020, 12:38 PM
THOUGHTS ON PETERSON, WILBER, AND MORE
by Michael Churchill, with CurtD
Regarding Jordan Peterson and Ken Wilber:
Wilber’s life arc is quite interesting and perhaps can provide a roadmap for Peterson post-nervous breakdown.
Wilber was a bit of a mentor to Peterson and both men worked on the same problem: How to distinguish between internal truth and external truth:
- Internal truth is what I feel to be true (including the realm of feelings themselves).
- External truth is what survives falsification in real-world tests.
Both men came to realize that the the strategy of the rank-and-file left is to deliberately conflate internal feelings and externally verifiable fact. (Hence the growth of the mantra “Well that’s my truth.”)
When Wilber figured this out, he did the honorable thing and dropped out of the public eye for 5-10 years. Recall that Wilber was almost the Peterson of the ’90s: He started out a darling of the Oprah/Clinton set and was teed up to become a huge star. But two things happened: His wife got sick and his work started to lead him in disturbing, anti-left directions. So he dropped out of the spotlight.
When he got back to work, Wilber embraced the implications of his own model and moved rightward. He lost his fey mannerisms and embraced the bearing of the college football player he had once been.
My view is that Peterson’s nervous breakdown was caused by his failure to live up to his own extremely high standards. The man who won every debate was recently CRUSHED in a debate on his own website centering on a critical aspect of his worldview: That we are the drivers of our own destiny and group evolutionary strategy is not a relevant player in the game. (Or, more specifically, Peterson was arguing that there is no group who acts on an evolutionary strategy to deliberately undermine western civilization.)
Peterson collapsed because he couldn’t escape the implications of this problem: He either had to admit defeat on this point and risk losing his empire, or accept defeat and ALSO risk losing his empire.
Thus it seems the proper path for Peterson is to do what Wilber did. Drop out for five years. Recover. Re-work the model to fix its failures and keep what is good. Do not try to please the masters, nor necessarily challenge the masters in public if that doesn’t feel appealing.
That is my $0.02 on the matter.
by Eric Danelaw:
This is a great narrative. Really has me thinking….
I wonder if you could weave campbell in there – as you suggested, as someone who didn’t have those problems.
I’d throw in that the problem is jung-christianity where most of us use cognitive science and behavioral economics today. These fantasy literary worlds are disconnected from reality. He uses them because in his practice he can use suggestion rather than direct exposition to ‘seduce’ people to circumvent their natural resistance to correction by others. This is the entire value of suggestive experience (religion, theology, myth, parable, literature, history – suspension of disbelief opens us to suggestion by blame avoidance.)
As for causality I’ll take peterson’s meteoric rise, continuous exposure, workload, wife’s cancer, and susceptibility to medicine as the principle cause – but I’ll agree with your consequence.
Peterson wasn’t in a position where he could go thru a withdrawal that long in that condition without inflicting suffering on his family – already suffering from his wife’s cancer. And he couldn’t maintain public appearances, and he put his new found income stream at risk. And he had nowhere safe to go and recover.
So that’s an awful lot sitting on your shoulders for anyone.
But, what I got out of your post was … well, that it hadn’t occurred to me that i have no psychological dream world to run to so I have no psychological dream world to fail me.
And that as such the stoics (mindfulness) and epicureans (live well), were simply right all along.
And until you wrote this post I didn’t think that the opposite of these ideological and theological frames might be true: that they don’t provide comfort they provide sedation, so that the failure of the dream world is worse than the cost of learning mindfulness.
by Michael Churchill
Wow that is an awesome read. The moral of Peterson’s collapse is that building your house on a dreamworld — no matter how appealing and helpful in the short term — risks devastating consequences when it collapses.
This raises the question of whether Peterson FELT he was building a house of cards as he was going along. It doesn’t seem that way to me. I watched many hours of his lectures before I ever came to your critique of him and I thought his work was pretty solid. Like his analysis of Pinnochio. That was good stuff. And his one-man war against the speech codes in Canada was inspired.
Peterson’s only a few years older than me, so very likely he also grew up surrounded by the Joseph Campbell paradigm (follow your bliss etc). I think most people who came of age in the late 70s and early 80s walk around with a Nietzche/Pirsig/Camus/Campbell paradigm in their heads!
And he had a professional career fully invested in the literary model. (Plus he is quite clearly a touchy/feely literary type.)
by CurtD
I never thought of it before but the Nietzsche/Camus/Campbell thing was definitely influential.
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