Jordan Peterson perfectly defines STO

Add it all up, and Peterson had made about $10 million in the past year. But he sure earned it, and then some.

At least he's not apparently resting on his laurels. Planning a follow-up book to 12 Rules and I assume more traveling to give talks on that book. He has also talked about using funds to create his own "online university", but the move away from Patreon may slow that down.
 
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At least he's not apparently resting on his laurels. Planning a follow-up book to 12 Rules and I assume more traveling to give talks on that book. He has also talked about using funds to create his own "online university", but the move away from Patreon may slow that down.

In his most recent Q & A he talks about the book. Apparently aiming for January 2020 for publishing. As with his other Q & A's it's pretty good! These are the new rules according to him:

  1. Do not carelessly denigrate social institutions or creative achievement
  2. Imagine who you could be and then aim single-mindedly at that
  3. Work as hard as you possibly can on at least one thing and see what happens
  4. Do not hide unwanted things in the fog
  5. Abandon ideology
  6. Notice that opportunity lurks where responsibility has been abdicated
  7. Do not do things that you hate
  8. Try to make one room in your house as beautiful as possible
  9. If old memories still make you cry write them down carefully and completely
  10. Plan and work diligently to maintain the romance in your relationship
  11. Be grateful in spite of your suffering
  12. Do not allow yourself to become resentful, deceitful or arrogant


Of the many questions, I really liked how he answered the one below, and found it very apt. One thing that I thought of is how useful posting on the forum and working on SoTT can be towards working to that end.

Q: You have talked about earning your knowledge. How do you define this and earn it? When is it ok to debate ideas like yours if they are not your own?

JPB: I would say it's okay to debate them right away if what you're trying to do is to test them and learn more about them. It’s not okay if you're trying to put them forward as if they're your own and to obtain something approximating unearned moral superiority by doing so. That means to have the ideas and to discuss them but not to identify with them as if they are defining features of your own personality.

How do you earn knowledge?

All your elementary school teachers, when you're writing an essay, said you got to put it in your own words. Think, well what does that mean? You can’t just copy a sentence - it has to be in your own words... and that was never very well explained to me but there was something to it.

For knowledge to be yours you have to integrate it with your own experience. You have to see how that applies to your own case and then have story to tell about how that's the case - that’s personal, right?

So it's the intermingling of the abstract with the personal that makes it real. It’s the intermingling of the epic with the particular, or the archetypal with the concrete that makes something real. So if an idea is still an abstraction, if you're just parroting it - it also means that you haven’t learned to use it as a tool, you haven’t started to apply it in your own life.

You could say, “well here’s an idea that I came across, and here‘s how I implemented it, and here's what I learned when I implemented it...” and then that’s definitely yours. You can kind of tell because you’re recounting your knowledge in a manner that no one else could do and that’s what gives it that ring of genuineness. That's what it means in some sense to speak from the heart.

It’s like, “well here's my experience with this idea,” and you can say too “well here‘s how I understand this idea,” and you reformulate that in your own terms. And that means that you associate it with the unique particularities of your own experience. Then I would also say it means that you've acted out the ideas and tested them in the world and that you have your own stories to tell about that. And that's how you make it your own.

It’s like you go to the tool store, the hardware store and you buy a hammer. Then you start to use the hammer to hammer in nails and you learn how to use the hammer. You learn how to use the saw and then at some point that saw sort of becomes yours. You know how to use it.

It’s the same with these ideas. You don't just say the words. You're not just a puppet mouthing the words. It becomes part and parcel of your own philosophy, the way that you perceive the world, the way that you construe things and the way that you act in the world. You've tested them and you have something to add to them that's yours personally.

If you're having a discussion with someone and they’re talking about things that don’t have those characteristics, that they haven't made personal, then the conversation is almost never interesting.

It’s because the person is just really are an empty shell through which ideology, clichés and slogans are pouring. There’s nothing about that that’s compelling because you don't see the grappling - you don't see that the other person has grappled with the ideas and come to their own unique conclusions. It really is in that mingling of the abstract and the particular that compelling wisdom is to be found.

Then concretely speaking, there’s ways of earning your knowledge and part of that is reformulating it in your own words. That’s thinking it through, right? Discussing it until you have it at hand you can talk about it and you can generalize from it because you truly understand it. A huge part of that is also putting it into practice then deriving your own conclusions as a consequence. And some of that can be done with debate.

It's like, “here's an idea I came across and here's the idea and here’s what I think it means. This is how I think it would change things if I put it into practice. This is how I understand this idea and what do you think of that?”

That's a good debate or discussion because then the other person can say, “well ,I don't really agree with the way you've formulated that,” or “I don't agree with your conclusions,” and hopefully it's a real discussion and not just one up-man-ship (because that's a pretty dull game). Then you get clearer about what it is that the idea is and how it is that you would use it as a tool in your own life. That's the right way to think about ideas too.

Partly they're tools for looking at the world with because you have to look at the world with tools because you can't look at the whole world. So you're looking at the world through a tool-like structure and then the ideas themselves are tool-like and they need to be used and worn a bit in your hands before they're yours.

The full Q & A can be seen here:

 
In his most recent Q & A he talks about the book. Apparently aiming for January 2020 for publishing. As with his other Q & A's it's pretty good! These are the new rules according to him:

  1. Do not carelessly denigrate social institutions or creative achievement
  2. Imagine who you could be and then aim single-mindedly at that
  3. Work as hard as you possibly can on at least one thing and see what happens
  4. Do not hide unwanted things in the fog
  5. Abandon ideology
  6. Notice that opportunity lurks where responsibility has been abdicated
  7. Do not do things that you hate
  8. Try to make one room in your house as beautiful as possible
  9. If old memories still make you cry write them down carefully and completely
  10. Plan and work diligently to maintain the romance in your relationship
  11. Be grateful in spite of your suffering
  12. Do not allow yourself to become resentful, deceitful or arrogant

Thank you Fabric to let us know that JP will continue with another 12 rules.

As I am reading "12 Rules" right now, I find JP again and again showing me new understanding of the the C´s lessons and the forums Work - at least from what I can grasp, eg. his way of refering to STO/STS aspects.

JP said:
Yours previously addicted [or neurotic, etc.] self is the tyrant of your emerging self. It is a false self, predicated on a false value system.

Isn´t that an STS aspect of how the predators mind abuses, exploits the self? As I am working now on integrating former selves, I find it helpful to be able to accept that this is who I have been or still am, to be able to turn past selves into lessons instead of being stuck with toxic shame blocks.

„For knowledge to be yours you have to integrate it with your own experience.
 
Isn´t that an STS aspect of how the predators mind abuses, exploits the self? As I am working now on integrating former selves, I find it helpful to be able to accept that this is who I have been or still am, to be able to turn past selves into lessons instead of being stuck with toxic shame blocks.

Breo,

I really like the way you expressed that thought of "being stuck with toxic shame blocks". It helps me see how we need to "let go" of "toxic" memories of past lessons and move on realizing we do not have to be "stuck" in some past (even though there is no time or maybe especially because "there is no time").
 
Gayacobol,
yes this toxic shame block is what kept me in a frozen prison for decades and also writing little on the forum. "It" made so much selfinduced harm to my being. Being able to forgive and integrate former selves really seems to help. I am happy that you resonate with my learning 🙂.
 
Just watched him in the the Q&A panel from Austrailia. The panel was great and of course, Jordan Peterson’s responses were direct and unwaveringly appropriate. Such as his answers to questions with just NO and the clear stand that he would never let anyone, sovern country or world group dictate what he could think or say. This is what this forum and Laura through the C’s have made cristal clear to me as our right of free will as human beings on earth have no matter what. This means to me, “with harm to no one”, accept maybe to my self because I have said and did things that I now realized effected my core soul😔. Lessons are the purpose of being here and I get it more and more every time I read SOTT or come here.
Thank You For letting me be heard and supported.
 
Just watched him in the the Q&A panel from Australia.

This talk (which may not be the same reference as he had spoken elsewhere down under) was with John Anderson who prior was Deputy Prime Minister of Australia.

The Q&A was not extensive at the end, while Peterson had Rubin beside him speaking often on questions from his perspective. Some good questions from John Anderson, too. Questions included examining the State - surveillance age etc. whereby Peterson brings this home to fixing things in oneself to be better able to define the State (it can outwardly manifest from the face of its citizens, who in this way have allowed it in themselves). This perhaps is akin to the human-cosmic connection at the State level. How it thinks and behaves is expressed from its people on other levels - like feedback.

Thought it a good talk overall:

Conversations with John Anderson: Jordan Peterson and Dave Rubin

Jordan and Dave joined John Anderson at this private forum event to further examine their diagnoses of and prescriptions for our contemporary challenges. A conversation recorded in Sydney, February 2019

Jordan B Peterson
Published on Mar 5, 2019

 
I recently watched this interview with Peterson and I really enjoyed it. There wasn’t anything particularly new – perhaps more refined would be a better way to describe it but good nonetheless. I’ve included a couple of favourite bits down below.



Yourself in relation to future selves - 28m02s

Some context: earlier he is talking about the problem that post modernists defined as being ‘how do we figure out what is the correct interpretation when there’s an infinite set of potential interpretations’ (paraphrasing). That starts here for those interested.

The Piagetian an idea is something like: there's an implicit morality that emerges to constrain the infinite set of interpretations and it has to do with the structure that will maintain reciprocity optimally in the largest number of people, across the largest amount of time.

The way that I've been portraying that for the people who've been listening to my lectures is that well, you need to take responsibility for yourself, as if you care for yourself.

Okay so first we figure out, what's yourself? Well, it's not just you now because you aren't just you now. You're the community of you’s that extra stretch across time. In order for you to take care of yourself properly now, you have to learn to play an iterative game with yourself that's sustainable and even potentially improvable across time.

There aren't many games that you can play like that so that starts to radically constrain the set of possibilities. Then it's more constrained than that because not only do you have to play a game with yourself that can repeat across time; to minimize suffering, to remove the possibility of death, to allow for the possibility of productive movement and a certain amount of happiness.

But you have to do that with other people around you and across time. So there's you, and the multiple you’s embedded in your family, and the multiplicity of your family members embedded inside a culture and the extension of that culture across time. So, for you to act properly then all of those things have to be harmoniously balanced at the same time.

That radically reduces the set of potential interpretations and that's the antidote to the chaos of the infinite array of potential perceptual worlds. Then there are questions that emerge out of that like, well what's the best way to play that game? But we certainly know that reciprocity - fair play, the spirit of fair play, is immensely important to that. That's what Piaget documented and what we all know and also that there's something about truth that's absolutely integral to that as well.


Meaning it to be found in Responsibility - 47m50s

No, you don't understand, you are the center of the world - a center of the world (it has many centers) and you do partake in this process of casting the potential of the future into the reality of the present and the past. That's what your consciousness does.

The quality of what you produce is dependent on the ethics of your choice. Your choice between good and evil in every moment is what determines the course of the world and that's on you. It's like well, that's deeply meaningful but it's unbelievably - it's ultimate responsibility, in the literal sense.

I think that in order for us to set things right we have to understand that we have to take on that burden of ultimate responsibility, not only as if it's ours, which it is, but as if there isn't anything better that we could do.

One of the things that I found so gratifying about the lecture tour that I've been doing, and why I keep doing it - the live events in particular, ‘cause we've done about a hundred of them now so far - is that when I explain to the audiences, and seems to be especially true of men, of young men but not so young even, to say, “Look you have an ethical obligation to lift the heaviest load you can possibly conceive of, and that's the primary call to adventure in life. And that call to adventure is so worthwhile that it justifies the particularity.”

It's like lights go on, “oh I see,” so you need a meaning to set against the suffering and to protect you against that temptation towards malevolence, you need that.

Where's the meaning to be found? Well it's not happiness, it's not short-term pleasure, it's not self-development, it's not self-esteem, it's none of those things that are so focused on the individual psyche even. It's literally the stumbling uphill towards the City of God with your burden.

People go, “Well, that's where the meaning is?” and they know that because they know responsible people, they know they admire responsible people. They already got that. Say, “Well that's what you should become” and they think... and not only that, that's what you could become because that's what you are in the deepest sense.
 
Every time I watch Jordan Peterson's clips, I see an example of a human being with his emotional center open.
When he gets emotional talking about people coming up to him about how many lives he has touched from his actions,
It gets me very emotional too. His genuineness has touched so many lives for the better to see more objectively and
diligently work for what you want to achieve in life.
 
Every time I watch Jordan Peterson's clips, I see an example of a human being with his emotional center open.
When he gets emotional talking about people coming up to him about how many lives he has touched from his actions,
It gets me very emotional too. His genuineness has touched so many lives for the better to see more objectively and
diligently work for what you want to achieve in life.

I've been watching his videos recently and I've seen him almost tear up when discussing very tragic things. He definitely has a heart, but he's also very wise when it comes to defending his psychic field. He doesn't let others' negativity bring him down to their level.
 
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