If Mort Divine ruled the world

[rms]

i saw that shit today. hilarious

 

[Einherjar86]

Well I would agree that this is a misperception. I don't see what the use of "broad false consciousness" is here though. People are generally uncritical, and fail to investigate overarching cultural structures, and this is rather necessary. Every cultural hegemonic "ecology" in history has benefited from this, and in most cases the people themselves benefit from it - which is another reason why it isn't investigated. There are always benefits to worshiping the right gods, and when those gods are overthrown rarely do conditions improve, even if they weren't the best of gods.

Well, if our premise now is that it's pointless to tell people they're in a cave mistaking shadows on the wall for the things casting the shadows, then why are we even bothering to argue about these ideas?

You sympathize with ignorance and that's fine, but it doesn't disqualify critique for the sake of critique.

 

[Dak]

Well, if our premise now is that it's pointless to tell people they're in a cave mistaking shadows on the wall for the things casting the shadows, then why are we even bothering to argue about these ideas?

You sympathize with ignorance and that's fine, but it doesn't disqualify critique for the sake of critique.

I'm not sympathizing with ignorance at all. God may be dead, but as long as humans remain human gods will never die. If we want to use the cave allegory, Nietzsche basically said there is no outside of the cave. It's tunnel all the way [down].

 

[Einherjar86]

Notice I didn't insinuate that there's an outside of the cave.

The extent of your argument is, as far as I can tell, that demystification is pointless if the myth serves a purpose. That's not reason, it's just complacence.

 

[Dak]

Notice I didn't insinuate that there's an outside of the cave.

The extent of your argument is, as far as I can tell, that demystification is pointless if the myth serves a purpose. That's not reason, it's just complacence.

We can go at it the other way: What's the point of demystification? Noncomplacence?

 

[Einherjar86]

True, we can go at it the other way. I value demystification, so I believe it's good in and of itself. You value pragmatism (or some version thereof), and so if mythic beliefs serve a practical social purpose, then you believe they're good in and of themselves.

All I'm pointing out is that your argument has fallen back on appeals to particular values, and hence no longer resembles a logical rebuttal of my point, which simply had to do with the originality and applicability of Marx's ideas.

For what it's worth, I think both of our positions deserve the appropriate values awarded to them. Mythic beliefs are valuable for the way they organize and streamline everyday life. The critique of those beliefs is valuable for its ability to prepare a society for when it must confront their collapse.

 

[Dak]

True, we can go at it the other way. I value demystification, so I believe it's good in and of itself. You value pragmatism (or some version thereof), and so if mythic beliefs serve a practical social purpose, then you believe they're good in and of themselves.

All I'm pointing out is that your argument has fallen back on appeals to particular values, and hence no longer resembles a logical rebuttal of my point, which simply had to do with the originality and applicability of Marx's ideas.

Well we don't have a consensus on what false consciousness means, so it's not really possible to rebut it, so then it kind of went meta.

For what it's worth, I think both of our positions deserve the appropriate values awarded to them. Mythic beliefs are valuable for the way they organize and streamline everyday life. The critique of those beliefs is valuable for its ability to prepare a society for when it must confront their collapse.

Well I can agree with this. But that doesn't mean all critiques a. help to prepare for collapse (provide or lead to useful alternatives) b. have a motivation beyond pushing for collapse. These are both general problems for Marx and anything even tangentially related, whether or not it's a problem with specific thinkers or specific theories.

With capitalism specifically, it's not capitalistic theory properly that creates, for instance, perceptions of "objective" values of goods. That's a human psychology quirk. Capitalism contains plenty of it's own critiques without needing to resort to neohegelian mysticism, or however one wants to shorthandedly refer to ideas like false consciousness.

 

[Dak]

http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/03/26/book-review-twelve-rules-for-life/

Scott Alexander reviews 12 rules for life. He spends some time poking at the holes and hanging bits of his philosophy and then gets to the real point (imo):

Much of what I think I got from this book was psychotherapy advice; I would have killed to have Peterson as a teacher during residency.

Jordan Peterson’s superpower is saying cliches and having them sound meaningful. There are times – like when I have a desperate and grieving patient in front of me – that I would give almost anything for this talent. “You know that she wouldn’t have wanted you to be unhappy.” “Oh my God, you’re right! I’m wasting my life grieving when I could be helping others and making her proud of me, let me go out and do this right now!” If only.

So how does Jordan Peterson, the only person in the world who can say our social truisms and get a genuine reaction with them, do psychotherapy?

He mostly just listens.
..............
you always think – if I were just a deeper, more eloquent person, I could say something that would solve this right now. Part of the therapeutic skillset is realizing that this isn’t true, and that you’ll do more harm than good if you try. But you still feel inadequate. And so learning that Jordan Peterson, who in his off-hours injects pharmaceutical-grade meaning into thousands of disillusioned young people – learning that even he doesn’t have much he can do except listen and try to help people organize their narrative – is really calming and helpful.

And it makes me even more convinced that he’s good. Not just a good psychotherapist, but a good person. To be able to create narratives like Peterson does – but also to lay that talent aside because someone else needs to create their own without your interference – is a heck of a sacrifice.

 

[rms]

What he sees as a super power, making something common sound profound, is exactly what annoys me. Attempts to sound intelligent over dumb people. What a spin!

 

[Dak]

Attempts to sound intelligent over dumb people. What a spin!

If a person with a PhD and years of experience within a subfield wanted to "sound intelligent", they would speak in jargon, not utter cliches.

 

[rms]

Peterson doesn't speak in jargon to you? The dude says post modernist or marxist almost every other word !

and the listening thing, not really sure where he gets that from. Peterson is quite a chatterbox

 

[Einherjar86]

Ultimately, if what he wants to do with 12 Rules is help people, then great. Critics need to start addressing the book's reception and not its author (we all know the author's credentials and his prejudices, repeating them won't help).

His first book was utter jargon and misdirection, from what I can tell. This new one feels like a genuine attempt to move away from jargon and offer a more therapeutic, "self help"-style work. The problem is that self-help can only work insofar as individual readers respond to what it's selling. Peterson is appealing to a particular demographic who share a certain set of disgruntled/depressed qualities, and his new book is speaking to them. I have an issue with the way it's speaking to people and how they're interpreting its usefulness. Appealing to the perceived inadequacies of disgruntled men is slapping a bandage on the wound, it's not treating the larger infection. Peterson may be a good psychotherapist, but that doesn't make his work good social critique or philosophy; yet it's being treated as such.

I'm also not sure I buy the shtick about listening. If Peterson was interested in listening, then why's he talking so damn much?

 

[Dak]

So two issues: How is Peterson listening when he's talking, and he is "appealing to inadequecies".

First listening vs talking: This reminds me of criticism I've gotten here on at least a couple of occasions: Based on my comments on this board I must be a shitty therapist. Therapy doesn't look like posting on a message board, and no one here is my client. Therapy also doesn't look like public speaking. I can tell you right now that the overwhelming majority of paid therapy time is the client talking. A good therapist is good at listening and eliciting more talking in the right direction with minimal comments. What you get in Peterson's public speaking/book is the distillation of thousands of hours of listening with cognitive and behavioral therapy responses. Tolstoy might have been right about unhappy families, but unhappy people are often unhappy in similar ways. That's part of the reason general therapy techniques work and how Peterson can have the connection with a mass audience as if he's been listening to them for hours. However, the catch to it is plenty of therapists can be decent in a normal clinical setting and not have the mass effect Peterson has. I think SA might be right as to why that is.

- Side note about jargon- notice he swerves into jargon were he isn't an expert.

Second issue: Appealing to indequecies in young men. I see this critique a lot and it's patently untrue. Appealing to the inadequecy would be telling people "it's not your fault", "your inadequecy is actually a strength", etc. That's the exact opposite of Peterson's message: Make your bed, clean your room; you're not as good as you could be and you know it.

 

[Einherjar86]

A good therapist is good at listening and eliciting more talking in the right direction with minimal comments. What you get in Peterson's public speaking/book is the distillation of thousands of hours of listening with cognitive and behavioral therapy responses.

This is fair and probably true, as Freud did the same thing (just not on YouTube).

Second issue: Appealing to indequecies in young men. I see this critique a lot and it's patently untrue. Appealing to the inadequecy would be telling people "it's not your fault", "your inadequecy is actually a strength", etc. That's the exact opposite of Peterson's message: Make your bed, clean your room; you're not as good as you could be and you know it.

This is also fair given that my comment was brusque and unexplained. For what it's worth, I don't think he appeals to the perceived inadequacies of young men. I think some of his comments and some of his writings do, and I'm even willing to believe he doesn't intend it that way. The problem is that they still do, mainly because he exhibits very little consideration for what he actually says, even if takes great care in figuring out what he means.

 

[Dak]

This is also fair given that my comment was brusque and unexplained. For what it's worth, I don't think he appeals to the perceived inadequacies of young men. I think some of his comments and some of his writings do, and I'm even willing to believe he doesn't intend it that way. The problem is that they still do, mainly because he exhibits very little consideration for what he actually says, even if takes great care in figuring out what he means.

If there's a place where Peterson is "appealing to inadequecies", it's related to the disdain for "neomarxist postmodernists", and it's the dismissal of "white privilege". How this ties into his main audience is that you have young men (probably mostly white) not doing well in any number of ways for any number of reasons (some self-inflicted, some not), and stacked on top of that is their "privilege" being thrown in their faces in equal measure with derision ("YOU'RE A WHITE MALE!"). So you have this "prophet" or "fatherly" figure telling them A. that they aren't doing well for x reasons, some of which includes being a point of liberal derision, the disqualifying of male traits, etc (this counts as the "listening") B. That they have permission to succeed....but that it's up to them to do it. It's the "A" portion that is that "appealing to them" portion. Now, I would not be surprised if a substantial number stop at that, or at least don't go much farther. But you can't really get to B if A is still a problem, so Peterson can't just ignore it.

 

[Dak]

http://www.isegoria.net/2018/03/any-study-of-gun-violence-should-include-how-guns-save-lives/

The numbers of defensive gun uses (DGUs) each year is controversial. But one studyordered by the CDC and conducted by The National Academies’ Institute of Medicine and National Research Council reported that, “Defensive use of guns by crime victims is a common occurrence”:

Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million, in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008.
.........................
one recent Washington Post story reported that, “For every criminal killed in self-defense, 34 innocent people die”:

In 2012, there were 8,855 criminal gun homicides in the FBI’s homicide database, but only 258 gun killings by private citizens that were deemed justifiable, which the FBI defines as “the killing of a felon, during the commission of a felony, by a private citizen.” That works out to one justifiable gun death for every 34 unjustifiable gun deaths.

However, this comparison can be misleading. An armed civilian does not have to kill the criminal in order to save an innocent life. As the National Research Council notes, “[E]ffective defensive gun use need not ever lead the perpetrator to be wounded or killed. Rather, to assess the benefits of self-defense, one needs to measure crime and injury averted. The particular outcome of an offender is of little relevance.”

 

[Dak]

Not to beat the Peterson topic into the ground, but just found a new blogger/writer and he had this take, as well as a link to a condensed, journal publication of Peterson's perspective:

http://scholars-stage.blogspot.com

Robinson's attack on Peterson is much more damaging, precisely because it attacks Peterson's ideas directly instead of diverting itself with Peterson's character or the excesses of his devotees. His critique takes advantage of another one of Peterson's weaknesses: a tendency to write in convoluted and baroque academic prose. This weakness is hardly unique to Peterson, but it makes it easy for Robinson to pick out page-long paragraphs full of the sort of fluff that other writers would dispatch in half a sentence or so. To claim that this sort of academic fluff is all there is to Peterson's work is not fair. There is substance behind Peterson's writing; Peterson simply has no experience laying it out concisely. When concision is compelled out of Peterson, the strength of his underlying ideas is far more apparent. The best presentation I have seen of these ideas is a 13 page precis Peterson wrote for The Encyclopedia of Violence, Peace, and Conflict. The encyclopedia's editor deserves great praise: he was able to squeeze unusual lucidity from Peterson in a very small number of pages. I do not think an honest observer can read them and then conclude he is pedaling mere fluff.

 

[rms]

i'm glad you've come full circle to peterson lacking brevity within just a few posts

maybe ill read that 13 page thing when sometime soon

 

[Dak]

i'm glad you've come full circle to peterson lacking brevity within just a few posts

maybe ill read that 13 page thing when sometime soon

I've never said he had brevity as a skill. I said he doesn't use a ton of jargon. If you wanted jargon you could read his pulished personality research.

 

[Dak]

The gaslighting of gunowners:

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/politics-ideas/gaslighting-no-one-is-saying-that-gun-control/