Jealousy

[Jonathan]

12 hours ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

In other words, collectivism gets spread so easily throughout the world not because many people "hate the good for being the good," although some might, but because collectivist intellectuals came up with a damn good story of bullies (the oppressors), the bullied (the victims), the hero savior (the state) and peppered it with lots of comeuppance for the bullies for reinforcing the emotional appeal.

That makes sense. People want something that others have produced. They want it for free, so therefore need to convince others, and possibly also themselves, that they deserve to take it with force (preferably with the government doing it for them) -- they need to promote the idea that they are morally justified. Therefore those from whom they want to take something have to be cast as villains. The hatred part of it is a facade, or a byproduct. It's not the core issue or cause.

J

[Paul Mawdsley]

17 hours ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

The more I dwell on core story (or something similar like core model or even core stories and models, etc.) the more I believe living within them in one's mind is a deeper motivation.

Hi Michael. Perhaps the bigger problem is living within a single core story or ideology. Perhaps this was the root of the dogmatism that has always been a part of the Objectivist movement and is the root of the general polemical dogmatism that seems to have become so prevalent everywhere today. Maybe baring witness to and weighing a multiplicity of perspectives in a combined internal and external dialectic is a more balanced and integrating stance. We’ve figured out that physical things can behave at once as particles and waves. What if people behave at once as particles and waves? What if people behave as separate AND connected beings, with individualism emerging from a focus on our separateness and collectivism emerging from a focus on our connectedness? Then no ideological perspective that has emerged from one or the other of these basic principles can ever be complete while being propounded at the exclusion of the other. The question then becomes how to integrate such paradoxical perspectives into a unified meta-perspective. This can’t be done at the level of political thinking. It can’t even be done at the level of philosophical thinking. It requires a deep existential dive into an exploration of the psyche. How can I exist as both a separate and a connected being in a way that is integrated and healthy? New answers here will fundamentally reshape the existence of the individual, of intimate relationships and of societal systems and interactions.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Paul!

Long time, no see, you causality freak, you!

 

9 hours ago, Paul Mawdsley said:

Perhaps the bigger problem is living within a single core story or ideology.

I'm not so sure this is a problem as a predisposition of the human mind. I have a lot to say on this, but later...

9 hours ago, Paul Mawdsley said:

We’ve figured out that physical things can behave at once as particles and waves. What if people behave at once as particles and waves? What if people behave as separate AND connected beings, with individualism emerging from a focus on our separateness and collectivism emerging from a focus on our connectedness? Then no ideological perspective that has emerged from one or the other of these basic principles can ever be complete while being propounded at the exclusion of the other. The question then becomes how to integrate such paradoxical perspectives into a unified meta-perspective.

I've alway maintained that human beings are not individual blobs stuck to a giant ball spinning through time and space. They are individual members of the human species. The individual got the reality of its very nature from the species, which is made up of individuals. So the issue for me is not either individual or group and put them into an antagonistic relationship or dominance hierarchy, although humans can (and do) do that. I can no more separate the human species from my nature as I can my individuality. It's not either-or. It's both at the same time.

To use a two-dimensional geometric analogy, this is not like a straight line where there is a beginning at one extreme and an end at the other. It is more like a circle where any point along the path is both the beginning and end point at the same time.

I'll have a lot more to say later, but for now, I have found certain metaphysical positions of Jordan Peterson extremely satisfying and fully compatible with how I understand Objectivism. Basically (and this is my paraphrase, not the way he says things), he speaks from an evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology perspective. Basically a species survives in the universe within a "safe space" of familiarity, which is safe enough for the species to at least survive, but there is the great chaos out there that individual members explore as their lives unfold (where there can be fatal threats and immeasurable boons). The members who survive such exploration and make new accomodation with the new stuff end up passing on their genes. Those who don't can't pass on their genes because they get dead, deceased and no longer among the living. He believes (and there is a lot of empirical evidence to back him up) that some innate knowledge of what is safe and good and what is threatening and dangerous is developed within the species this way. This metaphysical view and developed innate knowlkedge result in what he calls "maps of meaning," which he explains in his books and lectures.

This goes for all levels of life forms. The individual members rest and flourish within the familiar environments and explore into the chaos (meaning chaos from their perspective). 

There's more, but I like that part.

I also add that I don't believe the five senses cover all the reality that is out there. The five senses cover enough of reality to have let the human species survive and flourish. And within that "rest of reality" I can see a possibility of individuals communicating or impacting each other in ways inconceivable right now except through speculation and imaginative fiction. This is how I understand what you are referring to with separateness and collective nature. If that is basically your understanding, too, (using different words, of course, since a different path led to your understanding), then we are basically on the same page.

In fact, I believe storytelling is one possible way the species is developing a new sense organ, so to speak. It sure as hell gives all the different parts of the modular brain a workout at the same time that the brain doesn't often get through normal daily living. The way fMRI scans light up on story show exactly what I mean.

More later on this. As to the dogmatic stuff in our subcommunity, I no longer pay much attention to it. It used to mean something to me, but then I found some of the dogma did not reflect the reality I experienced and went my own way.

I look at Objectivism this way. When I was younger, it gave me an integrated philosophical framework (a familiar and effective mental frame and space so to speak that made sense to me) to peg the chaos to as I encountered it and learned about the nature of the new stuff I found. As my studies developed, several pillars of that framework got attached to new larger pillars I gleaned from the great out there of study and even introspection, meaning they got reassigned to a scope level instead of universal status. A few other pillars got replaced altogether. And lots of details got built on top of that frame. Hell, most everything I know fits on it.

I grew that way. My mind is shaped that way, or better, I shaped my mind that way. I can't undo this even if I wanted to. So, to me, Objectivism was an wonderful starting frame.

Instead of using Objectivism this way, that is as a model, as a solid workable and flexible frame to underpin living and growing, a frame that can be altered according to contact with reality (where we can even come up with instruction manuals for how to operate and even improve our brains  ), the dogma folks want to use Objectivism as a mold you squeeze your life and thoughts into so you can come out the other end in a particular shape with a certain top-down quality control built in. We can call this sausage or hot-dog Objectivism.  

I'm just not good sausage material. I eat sausages. I don't aspire to be one.

 

So I don't find much value in that approach. I don't even resent it anymore, nor the injustices from the group-think it causes. I just don't think about it unless someone brings it up. There's way too much to do that is fascinating and exciting instead.

Michael

[Paul Mawdsley]

Hey Michael. Ha, still a causality freak but learning other languages.

8 hours ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

I have found certain metaphysical positions of Jordan Peterson extremely satisfying and fully compatible with how I understand Objectivism.

Interesting and pertinent that you bring up Peterson so quickly. I've been studying his perspective for about a year now. I came across him while listening to Sam Harris' first podcast between the two of them, the one where they got stuck on the nature of truth. I found it fascinating precisely because each was stuck inside his own specific single story or paradigm or epistemic lens and unable to include the other's perspective. It so reminded me of the Einstein/Bohr debates about the nature of reality at the quantum level. As with Einstein and Bohr, Peterson and Harris embody two distinct epistemic lenses: Peterson seeing through the lens of metaphorical thinking, distilling, through a process of unconscious cultural selection over the ages, archetypal stories and meta-stories that are "true enough" to enable survival and Harris seeing through a lens of pragmatic empiricism, attempting to find the single story of truth by connecting the dots of accumulated scientific observation and measurement in a mechanistic causal framework.

I find it interesting that people have tended to take sides between the two. Peterson was just saying how his recent conversations with Harris, in Vancouver, Dublin and London, had audiences with a definitive divide into team Harris and team Peterson. My response to hearing the two archetypal epistemic perspectives was to attempt to take them both inside and see through each lens. (This is an act of, what I would call, masculine empathy.) My desire was to take them inside me and allow them to play out in a dialectical process so that I might find a truth that is deeper than and integrates both. One thing I have noticed is that the world can be very much divided into those who are metaphorically and spiritually intuitive in their thinking and those who are empirically and objectively intuitive in their thinking. I see them occupying two distinct spaces in a Venn diagram. But there is a third circle that is being missed. There is metaphorical thinking that gives us art and spirituality by exploring the inner nature of consciousness, there is empirical thinking that gives us science and engineering by exploring the outer nature of the objective world and there is causal thinking that gives us metaphysics and ethics by exploring the deepest, most fundamental nature of what is and why it behaves as it does on the level of principles. It also explores the point of connection between the metaphorical and the empirical.

Peterson is giving new credence to metaphorical thinking and people are so hungry for this that he is rocketing to stardom. The psychological tendency for people to cling to a single core story, defining themselves by the parts they own vs the parts they disown, makes them exclude not only other stories but other ways of thinking. The increasing dominance of empirical thinking, especially in the last 100 years, has caused an exclusion of metaphorical thinking in serious conversations. In Jungian terms, metaphorical thinking has been shifted into the shadow self within our culture and Peterson is reintroducing the shadow for integration. The answer is not now to adopt metaphorical thinking at the exclusion of empirical thinking. Pushing empirical thinking into the shadows is how we create the Dark Ages. The answer is to hold onto the seeming dichotomy and allow a dialectical process to evolve, as it currently is with the Intellectual Dark Web. I would suggest the power of synthesis resides within causal thinking. It also resides within the individual psyche and the principle of creating a single story through integration rather than through disintegration-- patterns of owning and disowning. Metaphorical thinking and empirical thinking have mutually exclusive operating systems and mutually exclusive languages. Causal thinking creates a language common to both. It is the only thinking that will build a bridge between mind and matter.

Paul