Catching Jordan Peterson

 

Jordan Peterson is harder to catch than a greased pig but that doesn’t stop people having a go.  Professor Hans-Georg Moeller (youtube ‘carefree wandering)  has a go.  He declares that Peterson is the mirror image of the woke, an anti-woke as it were and is therefore as much of an ideologue as his opposite number is.  However, that is, I believe, to misunderstand what ideology is.  It is a world view supported by a very narrow band of the explanatory spectrum.  For instance - it’s all class war or you’re a victim in a rigged racist game or its up to you to decide whether you’re a man or a woman.  Peterson in contrast to this promotes the idea of a Logos, a natural law that is a broad spectrum response that draws on traditional wisdom, a meditation on archetypal forms, the Hero, the Pilgrim, the Seeker and the Delphic Know Thyself.  These are supple, skilful, adaptive strategies that admit the concept of Freedom as a project (Sartre) and not as a given.  As a practising psychotherapist he would know that everybody has elements of the shadow (Jung) within them that deflects from the goal of freedom.  Lewis Waller(youtube ‘then and now’) in a simplistic parsing of ‘responsibility’ as response - ability claims that Peterson does not take into account the blocks to perfect freedom.  Lewis, he meets them everyday, like the carpenter meets a hammer.   Which is why he starts out with the basics of creating your own world i.e. pick up your room.  I go into the workshop feeling slack.  O.K. sweep the floor, sharpen your chisels, adjust a plane and then you’re there.  Dirk Bogarde the actor said - ‘you do your best work when you don’t feel like it’.  My understanding of this is, when you absolutely feel like it then you are drawing down your rote capacity but breaking through a block brings creative freedom.

There is a greater force than any psychopomp.  When we were leaving the ashram of Jillelamudi Ama ( Rajah Rajeshwari ) we asked through an interpreter ‘Does Mother have any instruction for us’  She replied ‘the Mother does not give instruction’.