JBP Weekly 10/05/2020
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** October 5, 2020 | DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON
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** Potential and Responsibility
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** The following is from a draft of
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** Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life
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(Estimated Read: 3 Minutes)
The world, and those who inhabit it, are both characterized by possibility—by potential. In fact, it is perhaps most correct to postulate that the world that we all encounter daily is not so much the world that is as the world that could be. We certainly act as if this is the case. We conceptualize ourselves and our world in this manner. We perceive in front of us an array of things that could be, and work—when we are in fact working, instead of merely letting things degenerate—to make the things we choose from that array manifest themselves in reality. We confront the possibility inherent in Being with the possibility that inheres in our souls. We act out our formulation in the image of God, using our communicative, creative capability—our Logos, our divine souls—to extract from the chaotic possibilities of present and future the reality we choose to make manifest. If we do that ethically—with the desire to improve Being itself with our actions and to speak the truth—then we can grant
ourselves a certain respect and can extend that to others whom we seeing undertaking the same mission.
That’s the message of Genesis: our making in the image of God is the ability to transform chaos into reality and to do that in a manner that is good, if we orient ourselves in accordance with our conscience and act courageously, with genuine care for the world (despite its shortcomings and horrors), and in truth. And the message, say, of the Passion of Christ: there is no excuse to fail to undertake this responsibility. Not the sentence of death. Not the infliction of torture. Not the betrayal of friends. Not the enmity of the state. Not even, in the final agony, doubt about the relationship between God in the Highest and the suffering man. This is a responsibility that is too much to bear, in some real sense, and its existence is to me the most fundamental reason for the criticism of our religious heritage. Perhaps even randomness, nothingness, meaningless—perhaps even of sufficient intensity to produce a nihilistic hopelessness or a desperate turning to authoritarianism—is to be deemed
preferable in our understandably cowardly moments to the terrible burden that we are apparently required to adopt to live as truly ethical men and women. Are we so sure that it is only the discoveries of our rational science (something, by the way, deeply rooted in the Judeo-Christian idea of a comprehensible world capable of being understood by a willing spirit) that has led us down the garden path to our current state of confusion and faithlessness? All that intellect-fostered hopelessness is the courage of facing the truth, and none of the cowardice of avoiding our responsibility? I don’t think we’re good enough to make such a claim.
** How to Increase Motivation
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[link removed]
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Recommended Reading
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** The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales ([link removed])
Oliver Sacks
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[link removed]
Oliver Sacks’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat tells the stories of individuals afflicted with fantastic perceptual and intellectual aberrations: patients who have lost their memories and with them the greater part of their pasts; who are no longer able to recognize people and common objects; who are stricken with violent tics and grimaces or who shout involuntary obscenities; whose limbs have become alien, and more.
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Recent Media
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The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Maps of Meaning 11: The Flood and the Tower ([link removed])
In this lecture, Dr. Peterson continues his discussion of the archaic stories at the beginning of Genesis, including Cain and Abel, and the flood story of Noah (the return of chaos), and the story of the Tower of Babel (which he reads as a very old warning about the danger of erecting something akin to a totalitarian/utopian secular state -- that is pathological order).
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** thinkspot: New and Trending
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Be sure to post your questions before 8pm EDT Wednesday October 7th, so that the team can address them in the recorded discussion that evening.
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** Thinkspot is now free and open to the public. Browse the curated JBP collection ([link removed]) of exclusive lectures and writings, annotate your favourite content, and watch for new uploads coming soon. A login is required for commenting and annotating, but not for reading and viewing.
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