The Architecture of Belief | Jordan Peterson and Stefan Molyneux

my notes

  • <20:00 - tyrannical woman power

  • 25:00 - socialists/communists believe money solves everything, it is just in the wrong hands - it doesn’t

  • 29:00 - marriage vs sexual predation vs STIs - sexuality puts the needs of the species higher than the needs of the individual - this is a very bad idea

  • 35:00 - personality and predatory types (Criminals) and parasite types (SJWs) - empathy protects those you are empathetic towards and violent towards those you are not

  • 40:00 - political factions

  • **44:00 - what the west has done is subordinate group identity to the nobility of the individual **- this is a brilliant idea, as it says the group is important, but it is subordinate to the individual, **it took us thousands of years to come up with that, to create stable societies **- Jung was the first to pose that human life depends on the nobility of the individual - this is the central religious statement of western culture

  • 46:00 - Stefan: when you build a multiplicity of meaning as an individual, then your own meaning as an individual is more than enough, and you no longer need group identity to thrive or find meaning

  • 46:00 - Peterson: if people shouldered enough responsibility, the question of meaning vanishes - if you want to set the world right, look for things in your own home, that bugs you that you can set right, then set it right - pick things that you can see what is wrong, and you can fix it yourself, as an individual - and as you go about fixing it, document what you think can happen, and what does happen -** if you just fix the tenable problems in your own vicinity and agency on your level, then your life will become so meaningful you won’t even be able to stand it, and almost immediately**

  • 48:00 - if your doubt is not serving your usefulness, you probably want to question your doubt

  • 49:00 - the nuremberg trial / Hannah Arendt / was the most important discovery of the 20th century

  • 50:00 - Stefan: everything is built and created by people who have rejected the concept of meaningless (Jordan: this is the everyday heroism that is everywhere if you are open to it) - if you sit and wallow about meaningless you are praying on everyone else’s opposite perspective as regards to meaning

  • 52:00 - one of the things that our culture doesn’t do very well, is teach people when they are doing the right things / doing things right - cake gives us intrinsic rewards through biological functions, intellectual pursuits are a lot harder and also require peer praise

  • 53:00 - people are not good at criticising their own doubts - just because it is negative, doesn’t mean it is true!

  • 54:00 - one of the other things I’ll do is make people realise the power their speech has over them - sometimes you will say things to yourself that make you feel amazing and other times you will say things that make you feel weak and falling apart - think and grow rich - detaching yourself from the voices in your head can be incredibly useful - Jung described the processes of antithesis and synthesis, that is I’m a house which many conflicting sub-personalities constantly live, and as such how do I make them live in peace with each other, how do I criticise them

  • 57:00 - when you utter things that make you feel like you are standing on firm ground, that might be the real you speaking - when I first started doing that, I was shocked at how much I was saying had nothing to do with me (it didn’t make me feel on firm ground)

  • 58:30 - Stefan: trading christianity for the state is a diminishing of free will, as in christianity you are allowed free will

  • 1:03:00 - we can no longer get by in the modern world without the ability to articulate what we mean, we can no longer just act it out

  • 1:05:00 - if you believe Dawkins and Harris, then everyone who isn’t scientific is stupid and barbaric - no, people have been smart and strong and tough and moral without science for a very long time, thanks to the role of religion - this seems very true, as the older the book I read, the wiser they are

  • 1:05:30 - humans are the species that conquests the unknown - that is us - that is who we are

  • 1:06:00 - I’m just going to tell you a bunch of stories that you already know - you just don’t know you know these stories - and now we need to know we know them

  • 1:08:00 - Stefan: when all you have is ideology, then you are unfulfilled as all you amount to is a an actor in someone else’s play - you lose you

    • << reminds me of poor Catherine in Fountainhead >>
  • 1:13:00 - the Nietzschean idea of resentment

    • << what? this is amazing, emotions didn’t exist cognitively until someone invented an understanding of them - perhaps the higher the abstraction the more difficult it is to recognise/invent/articulate/explain/publicise/adopt - probably why hippies harp on about love, even though it is a meaningless phrase, it is one they can identify with for lack of better higher cognitive words >>
  • 1:13:00 - part of your goal in life is to recognise tragedy and to minimise it - if you are resentful, then you are the main character of tragedy - we should do what we can to dispense with unnecessary suffering

  • 1:18:00 - the liberation of your suffering being your fault is that now you can do something about your suffering - victims lose that responsibility - the white male thing victimises, however white males can tune out and get on with their life - the world is infinitely complex and the white male hate mob is a resentful island in there, just tune out and go to a different island** - get rid of your pointless suffering!**

  • 1:19:00 - instead of focusing on day to day things, focus on the highest good you can possibly conceive of, and then speak and live in that truth - seems like every SJW does this though, and it seems like it goes against the get your house in order advice earlier - I’m sure there is a way to communicate the truth in that message better, but that was not it.

  • 1:21:00 - Stefan: it seems to me people in this modern age are wanting to outsource the conscious to an external entity/bureaucracy - Peterson: yep because half the archetype is missing!

    • << this seems to be a criticism of Sam Harris’s as well as the AI push for ethical machines - when our cars are making, and will need to make, the decisions about who to kill in an unavoidable accident, this outsourcing of conscious seems to reach a point where is there a place for human conscious left? - it seems not >>
  • 1:26:30 - the eye of Horus was worshipped, because it gave agency to the people in that they are divine and have the potential to improve things with their agency - and if people don’t act that way, if they don’t live up to their potential, then you get mad at them, because they are not acting as a responsible conscious individual - the radical types are always trying to get rid of individual consciousness - whereas consciousness is the mystery of how one actualises their potential to transform reality through the power of their decisions which alter the structure of reality - think and grow rich