Theme: Religion

SUGGESTED CONVERSATION WITH DR. PETERSON

It would be interesting to discuss or debate this rather big question with Peterson:

Whether lying by supernaturalism (Abrahamism) or supernatural analogy (our ancient supernormal religions), or idealism (platonism/existential overloading, philosophy/reason overloading), or parables (hyperbolic reality), or description (selected stories from history) produces the least bad externalities, and the most good general rules of human behavior.

Because I have no way of knowing whether one who finds the authoritarian supernatural and Ideal attractive is simply familiar with this kind of content like someone who grows up with country music, or whether it’s an informational difference, or a difference in cognitive ability. There does appear to be some relation between that which is closer to dream state (free association) and that which is closer to acting state (description) in each culture. But this difference can almost universally be explained by the median ability of the population relying upon the mythos.

I understand that stories are good. But the method, the content, and the consequence of those stories are different things. And my job is to end the problem of *externalities* produced by many small errors made many times, culminating in vast influences – many of which are catastrophic.

We ended the era of human scale over 150 years ago, and we are today, in our works, unlike the past, not limited in ideas, or opportunities, but principally involved in the elimination of error, and saturated with methods of communicating meaning so that we can reduce our costs. And in each culture and even each class, we wish to communicate meaning using different ‘methods’ for purely habitual reasons. Yet the method we convey meaning with, functions itself, as a means of educating people in how meaning is conveyed and constructed.

We can communicate meaning by various devices, but then once we have achieved conveyance of meaning, we must reduce error that is a byproduct of the use of analogy to experience that we use to create meaning. Meaning followed by criticism leaving leaving what we intended to convey behind.

The problem is, we can leave artifacts of the method, behind. Leaving artifacts of history and science behind is one thing. Leaving artifacts of literature is another thing. Leaving the example of hyperbole that is so endemic to conservative thought is yet another thing. But leaving platonism and authoritarian supernaturalism is, as far as I can see, in all walks of life, disastrous for a people precisely because it it is, like alcohol, drugs, and gossip, so damaging to people and their societies.

Now some communication struggles to leave no artifacts behind: testimony, and science. Some seeks to leave good behind: parable. But western civilization was defeated in the ancient world and in the recent modern world, by the use of wishful thinking, suggestion, loading, framing, and overloading, the ordinary mind with information it cannot test. And in the past 150 years we have seen the use of media to use suggestion, loading, framing,and overloading to leave behind that which is not directly said. We have spent a century allowing ‘freedom of speech’ during the era of the industrialization and institutionalization of lying on a scope that neither Constantine nor Justinian could have dreamed of. They had to force the closure of the stoic schools. Other than the Italians and the Germans, Western governments put up very little resistance to the industrialization of lying.

I remember distinctly hearing church dogma on sunday mass, and saturday catechism, and reiterated by my mother – while at the same time and being saturated with anglo fairy tales, german fables, aesop’s fables, greek myths, arthurian legends, and my favorite story Pinocchio. (All before dr seuss brought jewish children’s stories into popular culture. And then as a young boy reading science fiction, and as I got older reading history.

I’m not against literature, I’m for it. I’m just against lying: platonism and abrahamism, because they are not obviously ‘stories’, and the stories that they tell you are stories for slaves.

I mean, why would you listen to supernatural lies, rather than hyperbolic parables? Or great events and heroes of history?

I mean… why would you do that? Why would you need lies when the truth is sitting there?

Why leave debilitating intellectual poisons behind – the literature of the enslaved, when we seek to create a free society?

Why not instead, prohibit such things in pedagogy, just as we prohibit all other forms of fraud in all aspects of life: commercial, judicial, and political?

Why do we need lies? Are we so incompetent that we cannot convey ideas through ordinary literature of extraordinary people? I don’t think so. Any number of tomes have been produced to do just that.

I am against carrying on the damaging myths of equality and the good of democracy, rather than the goods of truth, duty, and meritocracy. But that is a whole different topic.

The question remains, why pollute the informational commons and leave waste behind in the minds of our people, when every single sense of meaning can be conveyed by a literary device other than the platonic ideal and the authoritarian supernatural?

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev, Ukraine