From Christian Prophet to Christian Profit Part I: Maps of Meaning

The Belgians are coming, the Belgians are coming!

In a hopeless effort to put myself to sleep I used to watch early morning television.

In Australia a decade or so ago, the early morning broadcast consisted entirely of American content.

Presumably it is now entirely Chinese (or more likely, Belgian).

If you want to know the soul-sickness of any country, early morning television is the best place to start, as anyone with an atypical circadian rhythm is in dire need of normalising propaganda. So what was the sickness gnawing at the soul of Australia? America, apparently! While the Chinese are now busy funding universities and the building industry, America back then was busy spreading the message of an evangelical Christianity which interpreted Jesus’s message to be one of rampant imperialism and vulgar self-enrichment. I’ll admit that Jesus did come with a sword; but unfortunately no matter how many wars against heathens the televangelists cheerlead, their extravagant wealth is going to make getting into heaven very difficult for them.

This apocalyptical vision of a world always on the verge of ending due to natural disasters whose only cause is God’s theatrics and the ever-present threat of America’s imperial subjects rebelling made the secular self-help gurus like Anthony Robbins and the asinine American breakfast shows seem almost saccharine by comparison. Yet all three shared some important similarities, and all were ultimately apocalyptical. Each was stalked by a vague sense of paranoia; whether Rome was burning due to gay marriage or the lack thereof, terrorists or natural disasters caused by God or global warming, Rome was always burning for two of the three pillars of the holy trinity of America; and for self-help gurus the only thing worse than not getting rich yourself was someone else getting rich at your expense. Any budding entrepreneur was thus condemned to apocalyptical purgatory by the fact that there will always be someone richer than them.

Indeed, all pillars of this unholy trinity worshipped unquestioningly the almighty dollar: for televangelists the road to salvation was paved in gold, for breakfast shows all cultural traditions were reduced to opportunities for advertisers to build a brand identity with which they would fill the cultural vacuum they themselves created, and for self-help gurus the only way to improve oneself was, ultimately, by making money.

Although I love the bible, can’t help but find Al “token” Roker endearing, appreciate the sideshow showmanship of televangelists and even admire how Jaws turned his life around and went from being a henchman for hire to a Bond villain rich enough to hire his own henchmen, it’s hard for me not to be sceptical about a book like 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos by Jordan (B.) Peterson, as it has the potential to combine all three of the diseases currently gnawing away at the soul of Australia, America.

But before we begin, I must point out that the way I interpret self-help advice is as a career strategy for self-help gurus themselves: Tell people what they want to hear, and no matter how inarticulate the expression, how hollow the advice, people hungry for a boost to their self-esteem will lap it up. Be assertive, project confidence! The two most important skills of the salesman, and the only two pieces of concrete advice from the entirety of the self-help oeuvre. Well, who wouldn’t want all their problems to be due to them lacking in confidence and being too nice? It’s a lot easier (in theory) to demand more and be an arsehole than it is to be nice or, you know, learn a trade…

Of course, in reality, being confident and assertive in a confrontational situation isn’t so easy after all—nor is it necessarily the best course of action. Just as often you’ll get more out of a situation by being submissive at the right time than you will by being assertive.

And even if you were taking on this seemingly good advice purely for your upcoming career as a conman, for every successful self-help guru, there are a thousand failures. Besides, who doesn’t have fantasies about pretending to be something they’re not and succeeding at it? Even if hackwork seems easy, maybe hackwork is actually hard when you have to do it for a living? Maybe Brokeback Mountain was actually harder to write than Twilight? Maybe pretending to be successful when you’re not will make you no less miserable than pretending to be the something-else-you’re-not that you’re already masquerading as. Maybe the fantasies of self-improvement and self-realisation are most expedient if they remain fantasies? Hell, maybe being yourself will be even worse? People might not like the real you!

Or, god forbid, maybe Anthony Robbins, televangelists and the casts of morning talk shows are all in earnest; what could be more horrifying than this?

Well, let’s assume they are in earnest! That’d be just the sort of terrifying world in which an antidote to chaos would come in handy (this sort of self-fulfilling prophecy is the way fear and lust is used in advertising: arouse your adrenal glands or genitals—or preferably both—then offer you a means of relief). But before we get to those 12 rules (or at least several of them), we need to take a detour to the more academic Maps of Meaning.

If you only read one book by Jordan (B.) Peterson, make sure it is Maps of Meaning. If that’s too much, then at least go to Archive.org and borrow it for an hour. Skip ahead to page 163 and read about a dream he had in which his grandmother tried to molest him! Her pubic hair was like a paint brush, he sublimated his incestuous sexual attraction by killing a bear, and all of this shows how the feminine is symbolic of chaos and the unknown: Female genitals are internal—apparently he is unaware of the labia and the clitoris, or that half his dick is located inside his pubis: both male and female genitals are a combination of internal and external parts.

Personally I believe the anus is a better symbol for the chaotic unknown given that digestion is more universal than sexual reproduction, and diarrhoea is a much more chaotic experience than sexual intercourse; not to mention the fact that it’s by an order of magnitude more dangerous than sex, and contributes significantly more to the destruction, sustenance and creation of life than sexual reproduction does and in more unpredictable ways, too; and that’s not even taking into account its importance in agriculture—one of, if not the most, important foundations of modern life!

Now, having read about his hilarious dream, skip ahead to the letter at the end to learn everything you need to know about him: he’s saving the world while his dad does his tax returns.

Yup, just like his hero Aleksander Solzehnytzen, Peterson has figured out how to bring about world peace. Essentially, you just need to follow the teachings of the New Testament. Give away all your wealth, wash the feet of prostitutes, tear down the temple, turn the other cheek, and perhaps most important of all, spite fig trees. (From incest porn and foot fetishes to beheadings and genocide, the bible is basically an ancient version of the internet; theologians are Wikipedia, priests are search engines and churches social media.)

All that good stuff, right?

On the contrary.

As far as I can tell—which may not be very far, as Jordan (B.) Peterson is as inarticulate as he is verbose, and as verbose as he is opaque; so much so that somehow the numerous quotations from the Gulag Archipelago when presented in Maps of Meaning glow like blinding cataracts of pure light, when if one reads them in the source itself, one is confronted by the dullest of gaslights. Indeed, on finishing The Gulag Archipelago I was left with the impression that at least Stalin got one thing right: it was under his leadership that mediocre literary hacks who in the capitalist world win Nobel prizes for literature suffered enhanced interrogation in detention centres instead. Bravo, J.V. Stalin Jr.! Seriously, though, unfortunately even hack writers can’t be rehabilitated by punitive punishment: Solzhenitsyn’s writing shows no signs of having improved as a result of his imprisonment and torture!

But I digress…and probably not even far enough to a win a Nobel prize.

So how does Peterson interpret the New Testament, and how can we bring about world peace?

Protecting the temple is paramount, no matter how much the Pharisees are fleecing the flock (remember the Pareto principle and forget about fractals), the feet of prostitutes should be hidden behind the veil of forced monogamy (abolish no-fault divorce and maybe birth control, as women who don’t ovulate are attracted to men with lacklustre jaw lines, and thus produce degenerate offspring), and cheeks should not be turned but both sides slapped so the sphincter grows ever tighter that, as you age, you will not suffer from rectal prolapses…or civilisational decline. Or, as W.B. Yeats would put it even less eloquently, so that when things fall apart the centre can hold (admittedly, it sounds better in the poem). The only non-political prescription is essentially that gratification should be delayed.

So there you have it, Jordan (B.) Peterson is not so much about nofap as he is about edging to save Western Civilisation! Sorry, Proud Boys; Peterson isn’t a white knight of the alt-right, after all.

Also, scientists in the past were alchemists, even Newton! I bet you didn’t know that! (His enthusiasm on having discovered this is, honestly, quite endearing.) But why does this matter? Because it was an attempt to change physical reality through morality, and practically-applied morality was the precursor to modern science. (Simultaneously he believes that the lack of female ovulation is the cause of the civil rights movement, rather than the civil rights movement leading to women choosing to stop ovulating; so he doesn’t really believe in morality being of practical significance.)

Unfortunately for the Newtonian alchemy argument, scientists are no more immune to dedicating large amounts of their time to folly than anyone else. But even if we assume that scientists aren’t as unwise as us mere mortals, at the height of the alchemical craze there were people well aware that alchemy was stupid as fuck, and not the same thing as less silly ways of trying to understand and change the world. The OG English unis didn’t even teach it as one of the higher sciences. Plus, everything about Newton’s life other than his maths would suggest the dude was actually a dunce; or, if not a dunce, then a despicable human being whose moral philosophy was in support of the enslavement of heathens and the execution of any members of the criminal class who did not allow themselves to starve to death for the benefit of his stock portfolio.

And in this context, unlike his mathematical work, we cannot appreciate Newton’s genius without considering his atrocious moral character, as Peterson brings him up in support of his claim that alchemy and a moral conception of the universe grew into the empirical, scientific world in which we now live, and that this pragmatic use of morality in the context of predicting the future and manipulating the world is the foundation of liberalism as well as science.

He’s only half wrong!

Liberalism was indeed founded on the moral principles of slavery and the execution of the poor who weren’t docile enough to starve as the sacrificial scapegoat of capital—there are more palatable foundational principles too, of course, but if anyone claims to be a “classical” liberal, one wonders if it’s these less palatable principles which have of late gone out of fashion from which they draw their classical identity; as they’re usually reluctant to elaborate!

In any case, the argument that alchemy was a combination of morality and the foetus of a soon to be born scientific method is pretty stupid considering that it was not on his alchemical experimentation that Newton justified class warfare against the poor and the enslavement of his investments, but the principles of liberal and rational philosophy. Nor did he even base his theology on his alchemical experimentation, but on his scientific work in mathematics. In fact, his alchemical experimentation was not so much about morality as it was a materialist rejection of morality: the spiritual morality of Christ could offer him neither riches nor immortality, but perhaps the materialist quackery of alchemy might! But, then, his morality in its justification of slavery and the starvation of the people whose property his class was in the process of redistributing to themselves was purely materialistic as well, so maybe Peterson, counter-intuitively, actually has a point here, after all; as horrifying as that point may be…

Besides, since the Sermon on the Mount, there have always been prominent voices arguing for the existence of God not on a mystical or moral basis, but on empirical, logical and rational basses. Even the bible advises Christians to be suspicious of anyone who claims to have had direct interaction with God (you’d have to be crazy or lying to be doing something kooky like talking to something so unbelievable as God!). Let’s also not forget that during the birth of Protestantism, Erasmus and Calvin both attacked their contemporaries for focusing too much on pseudoscientific argument and not enough on poetical analogy—and, comically, the best example that the former could come up with of a mystical church father was Saint Augustine, a theologian who had centred most of his arguments for the existence of God on the principle of establishing empirical causation and presented the findings he thus made in the form of rational arguments, much to the confusion of modern day atheists the world over.

(But maybe his point is actually that of the new atheists: that Christianity is merely a failed scientific conception of the world? Let me be the first person to criticise Peterson who admits  that he may not actually understand quite what the fuck he’s on about; but at least I’m having a crack at making sense of it, unlike his supporters!)

Which leaves us with the other half of the argument, that of adaptive usefulness. The way that the theory of natural selection was popularised means that evolution is often used as little more than a secular theology to justify the world as we presently perceive it to be. (Anything that has survived must be the fittest!) But we can’t complain too much, as if it wasn’t popularised as a liberal teleology, it might never have been popularised at all. Still, as a result we’ve forgotten about random mutation moments after we discovered it and ignore the inherently arbitrary nature of selection—and it’s just as hard to establish an objective basis for any element of sexual selection, too, beyond the usefulness of genetic diversity. (Diversity is, indeed, strength!)

So, while it’s possible that the cultural morality Peterson imagines has existed for so long has grown so old because it serves an adaptive purpose, it is also just as likely that it’s still around not because it serves any purpose at all, but merely because there are no selective pressures likely to result in its extinction. More importantly, it’s a hard argument to suggest that it even exists in the first place. While Christianity has existed for a couple of thousand years, Christianity as a core set of beliefs has been and is a million and one things, from the clockwork universe of Newton to the less materialistic and more moral atheistic Satanist movement trolling Westboro Baptists in America today. (Maybe, however, diversity is strength when it comes to ideas, as well, and this is a sign of its adaptive usefulness.)

But even though Maps of Meaning’s two core arguments are tremendously uninteresting considering that they come from a man who believes he is a prophet delivering a truth that will bring about a new era of world peace (for other recent works of pseudoscientific prophecy I highly recommend Edgar Allan Poe’s Eureka and W.B. Yeats gyre theory; interestingly while Yeats wasn’t an alchemist, he was influenced by the Occult, which was the cultural predecessor to many recent scientific fields, from psychology to deep learning AI, to quantum physics, in the same way that the scientific method evolved out of alchemy!), the book is nevertheless as entertaining and deserving of respect as the writing of any other prophet, and I mean that sincerely—surely we all dream of saving the world; surely we all at least have ideas on how the world can be improved, but few of us are willing to state these to our closest friends and family, let alone publically in a book!