March 13th 2023 | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
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Hello,

In this week’s edition, I revisit A Conservative Manifesto, which I wrote to bring true conservatives and classic liberals together. I also introduce the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) and invite you to join in the mission. Finally, I pull a discussion of God's love from the archives. 

A Conservative Manifesto

I wrote A Conservative Manifesto several months ago, trying to give voice to the core sentiments of both traditional conservatism in its philosophical form and classic liberalism (an ethos that has always been predicated on the idea of an intrinsically ethical, even formally Christian, citizenry).

I read A Conservative Manifesto and commented on it in two separate podcasts, for those of you who would rather have an
audio version:

Part One
Part Two

It’s a rather dense text. It’s hard to read—not particularly accessible. In part, that’s purposeful: I wanted its comprehension to require some sacrifice on the part of the reader, because figuring such things out requires a degree of true commitment. It’s difficult to read also because it was necessary to pack a lot of information into a very short space, for reasons of communicative efficiency. Each sentence is a mustard seed of sorts, I suppose (Matthew 13:31-32). You can imagine it, as well, as an explicit unpacking of the ethos of the stories in the Biblical corpus (or a reduction of those stories to a semantic gist). I was and am hoping that A Conservative Manifesto would offer a statement of principle to draw together true conservatives and the remaining few classic liberals and provide a basis for the derivation of more explicit policy and political and personal perception and action. It was just published (translated) as a book in Germany, of all places. Perhaps the Germans need or want it more than anyone else, as they’ve gone so far down the environmental-apocalpyse-Gaia-idol-worshipping rabbit hole. Those Germans…

A Conservative Manifesto PDF

Alliance for Responsible Citizenship: background and further information

I would also like to let everyone reading this know that an analogous document, aimed more at the practical, social and political, is about to be released. It’s the invitational Statement of Vision for the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship that I recently alluded to (without naming it) on The Joe Rogan Podcast.

I wrote the statement in collaboration with the core members of the just-announced Alliance for Responsible Citizenship. It consists of six questions we are presenting to the public, as well as some context for deeper understanding of those questions. Today, I released what is essentially a reading of and reaction to the vision statement on my YouTube podcast.

That will constitute the first full public discussion of the trajectory of our new group. Baronness Philippa Stroud, one of ARC’s core founding members, just published this story in The Telegraph.

The ARC website is here.

There are posts there from Baronness Philippa Stroud, former Australian Deputy Prime Minister John Anderson, Orthodox podcaster, thinker and artist Jonathan Pageau, and journalist Colin Brazier. Many more to come.

Follow ARC on Twitter here: @arc_forum

The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship will hold its inaugural conference Oct 31, Nov 1 and Nov 2 in London, UK, with about 2000 people, accompanied by a large publicly ticketed event at the O2 (where I once debated with Sam Harris) with up to 15,000 attendees.

Everyone interested and inclined is invited aboard the ARC, so to speak. We are truly aiming at wide public participation (you know, the consent of the governed, and all that—so typically foregone at the level of top-down Tower-of-Babel international organization).

Keep your eyes peeled and your ears to the ground for further details.

JBP

P.S. Please contribute your thoughts to the six questions we are presenting to the public here.

A Tour Through the History of the World's Most Significant Book 

You might ask why I would be concerned with bringing the history of the Bible to a more popular audience. We inevitably and must see the world through the lens of a story. A story is a description of the implicit structure through which we view the world, prioritize our perceptions, and determine how to act. Now, because you can act in a very large variety of ways, that plethora of possibilities has to be limited and focused: it has to come to a point, it has to have a destination, it has to have a moral, it has to have an ethic. What a story is, is a description of an ethic of potential and action prioritization. Peace is dependent upon us being brought together under the rubric of a single centralizing narrative, much of which is reflected in the metanarrative that the Biblical library constitutes. So I hope you enjoy this tour through the history of the world’s most significant book.