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Reflecting Pools
By Psyche | March 3, 2008
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I heard Jordan Peterson speak at the Royal Ontario Museum a few months ago; he was awkward, but very knowledgeable. I can’t recall the topic, but when it was mentioned he wrote a book on the psychology of myths in religion, I took note. That book was Maps of Meaning, which I’ve recently begun reading. It’s fascinating, and deeply insightful: expect further commentary.
In the preface Peterson outlines his background. He was raised Christian, attended church, and left while young (”twelve or so”) due to a minister’s inability to reconcile modern truths with archaic beliefs. (”Religion was for the ignorant, weak and superstitious. I stopped attending church and joined the modern world.”) Typical story.
As a young adult he joined a socialist party, convinced “[e]conomic injustice was the root of all evil”.1 Secular dreams replaced religious, political utopia exchanged for spiritual paradise. Familiar territory.
He left the town he grew up in, attended an out of town college, and got involved with university politics, retaining his left wing stance. He writes:
“The board was composed of politically and ideological conservative people: lawyers, doctors, and businessmen. They were all well (or at least practically) educated, pragmatic, confident, outspoken; they had all accomplished something worthwhile and difficult. I could not help but admire them even though I did not share their political stance. I found the fact of my admiration unsettling.”
In contrast, the socialist leaders he wanted to look up to did not inspire respect. He found them to be ineffective complainers. He explains that “[t]hey had no career, frequently, and no family, no completed education – nothing but ideology. They were peevish, irritable, and little, in every sense of the word.”2) He found he did not admire those who believed in the same things he did. Reading Orwell effectively ended his “faith in ideological stances themselves”.
Peterson dropped out, and later changed majors and moved to Alberta to attend university. A series of events lead him to question who he was, what he identified as himself. Deeply conflicted, he realized:
“All the things I “believed” were things I thought sounded good, admirable, respectable, courageous. They weren’t my things, however – I had stolen them. Most of them I had taken from books. Having “understood” them, abstractly, I presumed I had a right to them – presumed I could adopt them, as if they were mine: presumed that they were me. My head was stuffed full of the ideas of others; stuffed full of arguments I could not logically refute. I did not know then that an irrefutable argument is not necessarily true, nor that the right to identify with certain ideas had to be earned.”3
This new self-questioning gave rise to a crisis of identity which ultimately proved fruitful, but was profoundly troubling at the time. It takes strength to reach this conclusion, and more, to be able to move to a place to discover what lies at the core.
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March 4th, 2008 at 5:41 pm
Thanks for the add. I’m enjoying reading your blog; it’s nice to see some Canadian content. :)
[Reply]
Psyche reply on March 4th, 2008:
Thanks :)
Are you Canadian as well? (Your about page doesn’t give much info on the person behind the blog.)
[Reply]
Semjaza reply on March 29th, 2008:
Yeppers… From the wilds of Nova Scotia, lol. I suppose I should add a bit to that page…
[Reply]
Psyche reply on March 30th, 2008:
The About page is one of the first pages I always check when reading a new blog :)
(And I also liked Oryx and Crake. I saw Atwood speak at the IFOA here in Toronto a couple years ago - she’s great. Cutting, if you’re the interviewer, but wonderful to watch. From afar. Hehe.)
April 2nd, 2008 at 1:39 pm
i hope you’d had a chance to look through his lecture videos online, i’m in his class ‘maps of meaning’ and its easily the most important university class i’ve taken.
[Reply]