The Jordan Peterson Thread

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@finley

You perhaps perceive that your iPhone still works, there are still cars on the roads, and food in the supermarket. These are not what civilisation is. They’re what happens when you have civilisation, which is nothing more than a set of ideas. You can destroy the ideas, and it’ll take some time for things to fall apart (not least because some people will oppose that destruction).

I neither confirm nor denying having an iphone, but this is interesting. On the one hand you characterize civilization as brain dead and about to (properly) collapse, while on the other hand your definition – civilization is just a set of ideas – implies that civilization exists as long as one person carries the ideas of civilization in its brain, even a hermit on a mountain, even after everyone else has died. I’m not saying that’s wrong, just that it doesn’t seem very useful as a definition, and that if it’s the definition you want to stick with, the total collapse of civilization is not just harder than you think but nearly impossible.

@finley

JP makes much of his “tell the truth” soundbite as it relates to civilisation, and I think he’s right. The common factor in all successful civilisations is that people can trust each other (most of the time). The common factor in all failed ones is that nobody can trust anybody, because everyone just lies so fluently. Western civilisation no longer values the truth as a social good and has embraced the re-writing of reality. Every big problem we currently have flows from lies being told and a sufficient number of people accepting and promoting those lies as personally profitable.

At one level I find this very logical, in the vein of the more a regime persecutes its own people, the less successful it tends to be, and the more people have faith in social customs like paying for something and then getting it or vice-versa, the more successful the society tends to be.

At another level, I think you’ve lost perspective. When in all of recorded history were people not living in a web of lies? They can be more cognizant or less cognizant of how much lying is going on, but it’s always going on. When a large number of people figures out something is a lie, there may be consequences, but you’re more likely to get some kind of reform than simply a collapse of civilization.

@finley

Civilisation is therefore finished. Once objective reality ceases to exist and is replaced by “narratives” and ad-hoc bullshit, ordinary human activity that deliver the trappings of civilisation become difficult or impossible.

Again, when was objective reality not replaced by narratives? The shape of the planet doesn’t change (not very fast anyway), but the narratives about it do. A narrative can be closer to or farther from objective reality, but it’s still a narrative. What really matters is how useful it is. If people avoid sailing somewhere because the prevailing maps say “here be dragons”, that probably restricts economic growth and so on. So once people figure that out, a new narrative prevails, and they sail places they didn’t use to.

If a huge number of people sail to somewhere on the map marked “Avalon” or whatever, and it turns out it’s actually a deadly place they shouldn’t go near, then okay, that’s sad, but it’s still not the end of civilization, and the narrative will change again.

@finley

There’s a certain subtlety here, I suppose, in that civilisation incorporates “narratives” that aren’t necessarily true, such as the idea of a corporation being a legal person. The difference is that people understand they are just convenient fictions that do at least have some rational basis. There aren’t any CEOs claiming that their company is a unicorn because they like unicorns.

I really don’t know why corporate personhood is such a favorite of yours. It’s attributed to the Romans. Speaking of which, did the Romans understand that X, Y, or Z narrative was just a convenient fiction? Take the emperor’s divinity for example. Rational basis? Sure, strengthening and maintenance of a power structure. Totally rational. Also totally fictional and very dangerous. Yet the empire persisted for centuries…

@finley

I wasn’t there at the time, so I can’t comment. Nevertheless, truth telling is a prerequisite for civilisation: if you do not have that, people simply cannot interact in the profitable ways that deliver the positive outcomes of civilisation. There are of course different types and degrees of civilisation, and I’m not making the argument that Western society represent(ed) the pinnacle. But we did, until recently, value the idea of objective, discoverable truths, and in general terms we attempted to interact with each other with honesty
That’s gone completely out the window.

Perhaps more obviously, societies that have singularly failed to achieve anything have a problem with lack of trust, often tightly coupled to a cultural habit of making up “the truth” according to whatever is convenient at the time.

We have a horrible situation now, but that’s what we’ve always had. It’s a bold new arrangement but still the same symphony underneath.