Stupid Bloody Fairytale Zip
Ma Layssard
We need a message that allows you to reframe your own life in that same heroic way. You think we need a heroic story of our own to combat it? Well, what do you have otherwise? You have a life of pleasure seeking, and you have no admiration for yourself if you live a life like that.
If you could be who you could be, how would you configure yourself, career, education, family? Who would you admire? You need a meaning (by adopting as much responsibility as you can) to offset the tragedy of life. So you need a noble goal. Something that ennobles you.
In the West, we have been withdrawing from our tradition-, religion- and even nation-centred cultures, partly to decrease the danger of group conflict. But we are increasingly falling prey to the desperation of meaninglessness, and that is no improvement at all.
In 1984, I started down the same road as Descartes. I did not know it was the same road at the time, and I am not claiming kinship with Descartes, who is rightly regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of all time. But I was truly plagued with doubt. I had outgrown the shallow Christianity of my youth by the time I could understand the fundamentals of Darwinian theory. After that, I could not distinguish the basic elements of Christian belief from wishful thinking. The socialism that soon afterward became so attractive to me as an alternative proved equally insubstantial; with time, I came to understand, through the great George Orwell, that much of such thinking found its motivation in hatred of the rich and successful, instead of true regard for the poor. Besides, the socialists were more intrinsically capitalist than the capitalists. They believed just as strongly in money. They just thought that if different people had the money, the problems plaguing humanity would vanish. This is simply untrue. There are many problems that money does not solve, and others that it makes worse. Rich people still divorce each other, and alienate themselves from their children, and suffer from existential angst, and develop cancer and dementia, and die alone and unloved. Recovering addicts cursed with money blow it all in a frenzy of snorting and drunkenness. And boredom weighs heavily on people who have nothing to do.
In a nod to his growing use of Christian ideas such as demonic possession to describe the world, Jordan Peterson devised the catch-all term ideological possession to describe the mental state of many of his multiplying antagonists. He saw ideological possession in the fierce and often illogical arguments that had begun to be lobbed at him both inside and outside his classrooms. In the emotional pleadings for their rights to a sustainable environment, organic food, the rights of animals, or aggrieved people, these advocates for the oppressed seemed somewhat impervious to logic and resistant to reason. All that apparently mattered were their emotions often stoked by prevalent disinformation, paid instigators, or flash mobs, both online and offline. Some sacrificed their individual ability to think critically and instead embraced the historical, collective ideology of Marxism. They indicated this often consuming collective identity by adopting the title of social justice warrior, or SJW.
This archetypal behavior was likely not intentional or even conscious to Jill Ker Conway. Like all Devouring Mothers she was doing everything for the children. That was the authentic impulse, certainly. But her conscious goal was to destroy the oppressive patriarchy and so, she must have known her efforts were all about power.
This was a complete and convincing fairy tale, often lived inside the ivy-covered walls of replicas of medieval castles. They, the children, were fed, attentively cared for, and adopted into an academic family that stretched back generations. They were clothed with the venerable family crests of the University of Toronto, Yale, Dartmouth, and Harvard. They were given champions, warriors in shining helmets, to cheer for on fields of contest. But, like all fairy tales, a dark secret lie in wait, hidden by an enchanting dream.
The promised power to control their lives was being drained day by day. They were being educated with a road map to a life that in no way matched the world outside the fortified walls. Some realized this and rebelled. They were punished. But for most who continued to believe, they were inescapably trapped inside the castle walls, eventually isolated on their cell phones, and the tragic results soon became obvious.
This is the message that everyone wants to hear. Risk your security. Face the unknown. Quit lying to yourself, and do what your heart truly tells you to do. You will be better for it, and so will the world. [pp.346-7 in Maps of Meaning]
Perhaps we could tolerate the horrors of the world if we left our own characters intact, and developed them to the fullest; if we took full advantage of every gift we have been granted. Perhaps the world would not look horrible then. [P.351 in Maps of Meaning]
Everyone requires a story to structure their perceptions and actions in what would otherwise be the overwhelming chaos of being. Every story requires a starting place that is not good enough and an ending place that is better. Nothing can be judged in the absence of that end place, that higher value. Without it, everything sinks into meaninglessness and boredom or degenerates and spirals into terror, anxiety, and pain. But, as time changes all things inexorably, every specific, value-predicated story may fail, in its particular incarnation and locale, and need replacement by something newer, more complete, but different. In consequence, the actor of a given story (and, therefore, someone deeply affiliated with the plot and the characterization) still must bow to the spirit of creative transformation that originally created and may need to destroy and re-create that story. It is for this reason that spirit eternally transcends dogma, truth transcends presupposition, Marduk transcends the elder gods, creativity updates society, and Christ transcends the law (as does Harry Potter, along with his courageous but continually rule-breaking friends). But it is important to remember, as we discussed in Rule I: Those who break the rules ethically are those who have mastered them first and disciplined themselves to understand the necessity of those rules, and break them in keeping with the spirit rather than the letter of the law.
Aim at something profound and noble and lofty. If you can find a better path along the way, once you have started moving forward, then switch course. Be careful, though; it is not easy to discriminate between changing paths and simply giving up. (One hint: if the new path you see forward, after learning what you needed to learn along your current way, appears more challenging, then you can be reasonably sure that you are not deluding or betraying yourself when you change your mind.) In this manner, you will zigzag forward. It is not the most efficient way to travel, but there is no real alternative, given that your goals will inevitably change while you pursue them, as you learn what you need to learn while you are disciplining yourself.
When you face a challenge, you grapple with the world and inform yourself. This makes you more than you are. It makes you increasingly into who you could be. Who could you be? You could be all that a man or woman might be. You could be the newest avatar, in your own unique manner, of the great ancestral heroes of the past. What is the upper limit to that? We do not know. Our religious structures hint at it. What would a human being who was completely turned on, so to speak, be like? How would someone who determined to take full responsibility for the tragedy and malevolence of the world manifest himself? The ultimate question of Man is not who we are, but who we could be.
What might serve as a more sophisticated alternative to happiness? Imagine it is living in accordance with the sense of responsibility, because that sets things right in the future. Imagine, as well, that you must act reliably, honestly, nobly, and in relationship to a higher good, in order to manifest the sense of responsibility properly. The higher good would be the simultaneous optimization of your function and the function of the people around you, across time, as we have discussed previously. That is the highest good. Imagine that you make that aim conscious, that you articulate that aim as an explicit goal.
Like God, however, ideology is dead. The bloody excesses of the twentieth century killed it. We should let it go, and begin to address and consider smaller, more precisely defined problems. We should conceptualize them at the scale at which we might begin to solve them, not by blaming others, but by trying to address them personally while simultaneously taking responsibility for the outcome.
Have some humility. Clean up your bedroom. Take care of your family. Follow your conscience. Straighten up your life. Find something productive and interesting to do and commit to it. When you can do all that, find a bigger problem and try to solve that if you dare. If that works, too, move on to even more ambitious projects. And, as the necessary beginning to that process . . . abandon ideology. [from Beyond Order, Rule VI]
People who do not choose a job or a career commonly become unmoored and drift. They may attempt to justify that drifting with a facade of romantic rebelliousness or prematurely world-weary cynicism. They may turn to casual identification with avant-garde artistic exploration or treat the attendant despair and aimlessness with the pursuit of hard-core alcohol and drug use and their instant gratifications. But none of that makes for a successful thirty-year-old (let alone someone a decade older). The same holds true for people who cannot choose and then commit to a single romantic partner, or are unable or unwilling to be loyal to their friends. They become lonely, isolated, and miserable, and all that merely adds the additional depth of bitterness to the cynicism that spurred the isolation in the first place. That is not the sort of vicious circle that you want to characterize your life.
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