Beyond Order, Beyond Belief

This is a short compilation of three interview snippets about Jordan Peterson's new book, Beyond Order.

I wish to highlight one segment at around the 10-minute mark. Edited for clarity.

It took me a long time to understand that belief regulated emotion!

Right! But also the other way round! Emotions regulate beliefs.

So what happens is that if you act out your identity, if you act out your beliefs in the world, and what you want doesn't happen, what happens is that your body defaults into emergency preparation for action. The reason for that is you've wandered too far away from the campfire, and now you're in the forest and maybe you're naked and so what do you do then? And the answer is, well, you don't know what to do! So what do you do when you don't want know what to do? And the answer is you prepare to do everything, and the problem with that is that it's unbelievably draining psychophysiologically. Like it hurts you and there's an immense physiological literature detailing the cost of exactly that kind of response. And so people stay where what they do has the results they want. That's partly why you want to be around people who share your cultural presuppositions.
[...]
We can't tolerate that much uncertainty and you might ask well, "Why?" And the answer is because you can be hurt, be in pain, you can be damaged, you can become intolerably anxious and you can die. So it's no wonder you're sensitive, we're very sensitive, to negative emotion. And so your functional identity regulates your emotion.

This is something I've been saying for some time. The belief-function exists to make life easier. But, let us not forget, this is at the very serious expense of being guided by a false-belief.

So there are two ways in which one can carry around negative-consequences false-beliefs: one is the one Peterson mentions above, where your belief is different to the tribe you are embedded within, which causes social and hence personal problems; the other one is that you become swept along by such mass false-beliefs that you, and everybody else, becomes a danger to the tribe itself.

I still think there are three responses, and not just the classic two: fight or flight or freeze! What I see in the world currently are mainly the last two.

All of them consume a large amount of energy, both in purely calorific terms but also in psychological turmoil.

This is one of the reasons behind the title of Peterson's latest book. This is also what we are seeing around the world: the psychological problems of excessive order. Mass psychosis solves one problem, the "what to do when you don't know what to do?" and replaces it with another problem, which is what to do when everyone is marching to the same beat that will destroy society. There is a reason why armies do not march in step across bridges.

However, submerging one's self within a shared belief system that is not necessarily destructive has the same function - the adherence to a false-belief just to make life energetically and psychologically easier. That is no small thing for the brief existence of a human, but to be unaware that that is the fundamental deal means you don't know the way out when you feel the need to leave!

I am far more interested in personal existential crises than in mass delusions, coercions and hypocrisies of groups. However, one must be aware of the group to know precisely one's relationship to it - or them.

Peterson seems to have been unprepared for his rise to public fame and has dived back into a belief system; a very Jungian psychodrama, with a result that Jung himself would have appreciated. He remains one of the few articulate voices about the predicament of current-state humanity, but I disagree with his solution. For the "outsider" to return to the fold, he really should come bearing gifts - something revelatory, not placatory!

I think I shall do a list of belief-functions - I think it is a very short list. Lemme think about it.

So, belief-functions exist in the human mind to make life simpler. When one personal belief-function reaches a crisis-point, the easiest thing is to flip to another belief-function - which will then feel different but have the same utility. Life without beliefs will initially be hard! What happens if this becomes a mass phenomenon is something we are witnessing now: a mixture of mass lethargy and mass confusion, with the attempt to orchestrate it from above into a mass order. The new-belief-system is easy to spot - if you have the capacity - but in the absence of an explicit new-dogma, the us-and-them-war is very good as an ersatz motivator.

For the individual who can see this, and who is appalled and repelled by society, there is only one road left - personal empowerment. These are the human powers that are never spoken about in the mass media. The power of personal transcendence, the power of energetic perception and manipulation, the power to understand without beliefs. In short, the individual needs to know the methods by which to become more human.

Oh yes, there are many roads that look like the road to freedom, but look very closely at what you are being asked to do - and to believe. The vast majority of so-called religious or spiritual leaders have been shown to be totally inept at dealing with a higher power - the power of the will to control through violence. I hope some of them have been more honest in private.

If one wishes to call it the "last belief", then so be it, but having confidence and determination - and enjoyment - of discovering what it feels like to be optimally human (and not synthetically transubhuman) is really an altogether different plane of existence than being chained to a prescribed belief-system. This would be the ultimate science, and the merging of exoteric and esoteric knowledge.

This state of non-belief does not result in either fight or flight or freezing, as the universe is not seen as a threat. Instead... there is a dance! Between chaos and order there is dancing! There is the flow, or, more accurately, flows, in the plural.

This does not mean we all know the same thing, as we will have different experiences, although we might reach a more solid reality-consensus. But part of having knowledge is the acceptance that one's knowledge may be incomplete, or even wrong. A societal discussion about the limits of human knowledge and perceptions is a very different society to one that fights over false-belief-systems.

I do not need to believe - anything. The belief-trap is to convince you that believing itself, the injunction to "have a belief", is itself true - it isn't. This is where Peterson is wrong, and does not consider the alternative of true individual freedom. Backing away from that sucking noise of being pulled down into the drain of mass thoughts is very empowering - once you have pulled far enough away to survey the mess. This isn't easy, but it is far more interesting than the alternative.