Why Jordan Peterson's Work Matters.

The reason Jordan Peterson is amazing to me and why I think it is that he is going viral is because he is healing the divide between the nihilistic atheists and the dogmatic moralists.

The scientific revolution was an amazing thing. It gave humans the power to command nature as you'd think a magician would. It was a light so bright, nothing seemed out of it's reach. Not even god.

The accuracy of the scientific method pulled the carpet from underneath the physics beliefs of the religious. Their moral sensibilities were suddenly transformed from the 'word of god', to something like bias based delusions.

This is about the time Nietzsche famously proclaimed that 'God is dead'. But that was not the end of the quote.

He effectively said that god is dead and we have killed him. And that there won't be enough water to wash away the blood.

A few generations later. We saw the rise of communism. And with it, the most bloody, and horrendous mass murders the world has ever seen. Like gigantic meat grinders with scientific precision, millions and millions of people were killed, at the altar of the communist state. All by atheists.

Lenin was an atheist, Mao was an atheist, Stalin was an atheist.

Their deeds make the Hitler look like an amateur.

Coincidence? I don't think so. Morality up to that point rested on the shoulders of the biblical gods. On the assumptions of the bible's literal interpretations.

The stories in these old books served as lessons that survived millennia, captured in stories and distilled by memory.

Bare in mind, many of the stories in these old books are far older than their written form and were at one point passed down through oral tradition.

And so, morality went away and the scientific machine was unleashed without a moral compass.

At least the authoritarian theocracies didn't have the technology to kill millions.

On the flip side. The more morally inclined were left neutered. Without solid ground on which to build the ethics they saw as self-evident. Weakened by the embarrassment that their literal interpretations of the old books had been utterly debunked.

What Jordan Peterson is doing, is trying to rebuild the foundation of ethics. Not from literal interpretations of the Bible, nor from utopian, detached idealization.

But from rationality and evolutionary psychology.

And turns out, that if you start to look at these old stories as powerful dreams, as art that rose to prominence through free market-ish story telling, as pre-scientific anthropomorphised thought, as a kind of fiction that spoke of our own nature and the nature of the world, well, a lot of things start to make a lot more sense.

People are hungry for meaning. Hungry for responsibility. Hungry for a light with which to walk through this dark forest we call the life.

And Peterson is doing amazing work by extracting ideas from these old and popular tales, the archetypes of which are seen all over the world across cultures and time.

I expect his psycho evolutionary analysis of the Bible will start a new generation of thought and will make history.

To not take this work seriously. Or at the least this, to not take this great challenge seriously, is to not care about the epic conflict that engulfs our world.

Now, perhaps you are busy, or perhaps you are fighting the good fight within your own realm and niche. That's fine. Do your thing. We need people to do their thing. We need people to do what they are best at.

But please. Don't get in the way.

Here's a good place to start if you are interested in these ideas. And let’s talk. :)