Whatever does it mean to be anything?
This one is pretty humongous, and it's leading me strange places.
Moral orders are not arbitrary, which we've talked about before (#804036). Freedom isn't extreme libertine or the absence of obstacles, but rules pertinent to one's nature.
"The validity of a given worldview is therefore anything but arbitrary. Instead, it is dependent on or mirrors the accuracy with which it reflects the natural, social, and psychological world."
There's another notion here that has irked me for years: The idea that you can feel your way to truth, and that the result of immediately felt uneasiness is thereby unquestionably valid. That something bubbling up—fleetingly or repeatedly—is therefore tantamount to universal, unquestionable truth.
Have You Tried Feeling Differently?
There's something extremely concerning about every piece of suboptimal behavior having to be accepted, nay celebrated, merely become somebody proclaims to feel something, somewhere, for some portion of time.
The body operates as a feedback mechanism, and the mind stands ready to defend it in all manner of perverse and strange directions (see The Righteous Mind).
Page 113 from We Who Wrestle With God hits this home. The section it’s in (I believe 3.3) is absolutely stunning, hidden in between a pretty drowsy chapter on the virtue of sacrifice and the Cain and Abel story from the Bible.
= following one’s urges, and even upgrading them to “identity” or “core being” etc is a complete relinquishing of the mere existence of truth, virtue, or moral order.
It’s the highest version of “everything goes.”
As on cue, I also listened to this lecture on the JBP podcast episode, where Peterson gets to exactly this idea around the 20-35 minute mark. Identity.
Selfishness = a person "bound to the present in a way that makes them only the servants of their immediate desire—a form of radical immaturity."
FUCK.
I’ve been peddling with some version of that idea for a while: what’s an identity? What does it mean for someone to be carnivore? Be a Bitcoiner? Or, in these times of political identitarian madness, let's go one step further: what does it mean to for someone to be trans? be gay? (WTH is a lezzie? I sometimes amusingly ask).
Because those are not things.
I understand that we use these categories as linguistic shorthand for “someone who does certain things": a Bitcoiner is someone who holds and advocates for bitcoin; a gay person is someone who likes sleeping with/feel attraction to a person of the same sex; a trans person feels like they are the other sex (or at least desire living as if they were).
The observation here isn't on permissible behavior, since in an even remotely free society it's fine to live anywhich way that doesn't materially harm another; to each, their own.
The observation is on what it means, epistemologically, to be something. And by extension, what that does to a person's mental state. And when a whole society does that, up and down, for a decade plus.
But as an identity, a description of something real inside people who claim to feel something, some of these ideas don't even compute for me. The sex of the person one is attracted to and/or enjoys having sex with isn’t a thing—what, neatly situated next to a human's kidney?!—a vegetarian is a choice over preferred foods, not a state of the world or objective description. What's worse, some of these "identities" are as far from permanent features of reality as one can imagine—and an attitude of unquestionable truth forces the rest of us to turn into pretzels accommodating the invisible desires of others.
Where I'm stuck is the reality of this; a mountain is real, it exists whether or not humans are around to name it that. Social kinds exists only because humans classify them as such (language, marital status, ownership, etc.)
The problem here I run into here familiar among Bitcoiners, is of verification. What goes on inside someone’s being is completely unverifiable and completely intransparent. Nobody can tell what is, and we’re thus at the whim of whatever comes out of another’s mouth at any given moment. Whether someone really feels something, is or isn’t, is completely judged by that person’s meek words rather than anything concrete, objective, truthful, or appeal to valid moral orders.
Put in a Christian context, which Jordan Peterson does in the passage above, appeals to emotion or feeling—the elevation of fleeting demands to identity—is the complete outsourcing of a person’s governance to whichever demon happens to possess them at any given moment.
A person claiming to be of a certain invisible identity is the height of immature selfishness, asking everyone else to set aside what they perceive to benefit that person's felt unease. It's literally impossible; non-universalizable. Incredibly childish.
That bumper sticker I found so many years ago still applies:
What I most clearly remember from the 2016 Presidential Election was a bumper sticker with the enlightened message “Trump 2016: F*** Your Feelings!” Four years later, after a harrowing election and a moralizing society even more at war with itself, this is the message we desperately need. ("Feelings Over Facts is Dangerous to Human Liberty")
To elevate emotive suffering to the unverifiable and merely stated felt urge is anti-intellectual, anti-Enlightenment, and totally contrary to all that Western civilization is. It accounts for the autism, for the trans stuff, for the mental health disasters, for the body positivity nonsense and sheer abandonment of masculine energies. I read this #Nostr post today:
I think this explains a lot of the culture war nonsense slash softness that, for instance, Aleks Svetski gets to in his Bushido book and lectures: Everyone is, and most be regarded unquestionably, as whatever they feel like (or say they feel like) at any given moment: group identity, sex, sexual orientation, mental affliction, state of mind, learning disability, autism etc, etc. No other moral orders, virtues, or rules exists; Nietzsche foresaw this—god is stone-cold dead, and we slayed him to the tune of celebratory trumpets.
It’s the complete abandonment of sanity, of rationality, of truth, or shared co-existing with other people.
"Identity" is not a thing.
Yeah, this is the kind of lecture and chapter I must return to, again and again, to see what it says or what I may glean from it.
Whatcha thinking, Stackers?