Before controversy and fame, Jordan Peterson was a psychologist theorizing myth and meaning.

Jake Orthwein points out striking similarities in Peterson’s work and David’s. Along with them, fundamental disagreements: partly due to Peterson bringing a Christian perspective, and Chapman a Vajrayana Buddhist one.

Nihilistic catastrophes ※ Chaos and order ※ Reconciling myth and rationality ※ Interactionist cognitive science ※ The purpose of life

Jake intercut our conversation with brief relevant clips from Jordan Peterson’s classroom lectures and media interviews. It’s fun seeing the commonalities and contrasts!

In this post:

* The Making Of: demons and the idiot

* Sections and topics in the video, with timestamps so you can find them

* Further reading: books &c. we refer to, with links

* “AI”-generated “transcript” (not safe for human consumption)

Demons and the idiot

This podcast has been years in the making. Our attempts were incessantly obstructed by malicious demons, who don’t want you to see or hear it. Eventually this became comical, although also frustrating.

To be fair to the demons, progress was also frequently obstructed by an idiot. Namely: me, David. I fumbled the technology repeatedly.

After finally getting to record the conversation, I applied “AI” to remove pauses and “ums” and such. This improved the audio track, but makes the video extremely jerky. Also, I used “AI” to make it appear as though we are looking at the camera when we weren’t. An uncanny, demonic appearance results. And, because I am an idiot, I did this irreversibly. Sorry about that!

Next time, I will perform extensive exorcisms and protective rituals. And also learn how to use software before inflicting it on Jake’s invaluable contribution. Or leave the editing to him; he’s a professional!

Sections and topics

00:00:00 Introduction

00:01:05 David summarizes Meaningness (his book): it’s about the inseparability of nebulosity and pattern.

00:05:01 The intellectual lineage of Meaningness is mainly the same as that of Jordan Peterson’s Maps of Meaning. However, David draws on Vajrayana Buddhism where Peterson draws on the Western tradition, particularly Christianity.

00:07:48 Nihilism, as explained by Nietzsche and as in Buddhism, is a key topic for both of us. Psychological lineages: German Romanticism, Carl Jung, Jean Piaget, Robert Kegan, Robert Bly.

00:10:54 Jake summarizes Peterson’s project and intellectual lineage. The catastrophes of the twentieth century. Recovering the mythic mode as compatible with rationality. Envisioning positive futures and preventing nihilistic ones.

00:20:59 The history of the gradual collapse of meaning. Tradition, modernity, postmodernity: communal/choiceless, systematic/rational, and postrational/nihilistic modes.

00:32:20 A future that combines the advantages of different historical modes of culture, social organization, and psychology, avoiding their disadvantages. Subdividing the past century: totalitarianism, countercultures, subcultures, atomization. Those abandoned, in order, nobility, universality, rationality, and coherence. We can restore all of those, but not as absolutes.

00:43:32 Jake explains Peterson’s somewhat different take on the same historical periods. Rationalism and modernity as the result of encountering alien cultures.

00:53:02 Jake explains Peterson’s “universal grammar” of myth in the Western tradition: Chaos is the Great Mother, Order is the Great Father, the Divine Son mediates between them. Peterson maps this onto twentieth century history.

00:56:43 David explains how Vajrayana Buddhism’s understanding of emptiness and form is fascinatingly similar to Peterson’s account of chaos and order, and also quite different. This may account for our fundamentally different attitudes, despite sharing much of our intellectual backgrounds. Personifications of chaos in Babylonian and Buddhist mythology: Tiamat and Prajñaparamita are the same goddess, viewed in radically different ways.

01:05:06 Positive and negative aspects of the characters in Peterson’s mythology. The self-sacrifice of Jesus, the Divine Son (a theme we return to later).

01:09:55 Our shared lineage in “4E,” interactionist cognitive science, and our rejection of rationalism. Heidegger, situated activity, Gibson, affordances, rigpa in Dzogchen. The frame problem in AI research, and how David (and others) resolved it in the late 1980s. “You see meaning and then infer object rather than see object and infer meaning.”

01:23:09 How the Ancient Greeks rejected the mythic mode and invented rationalism, as an eternalistic response to a nihilistic crisis. How Nietzsche finally diagnosed the failure of rationalism, and realized that would lead to another nihilistic crisis. His rejection of the delusion of a supposed True World, more real than the apparent one, in Twilight of the Idols.

01:34:07 Peterson’s account of Christian soteriology, and its justification for social action. Buddhism’s lack of a social vision. Social vision is a form of purpose. Rationalism has no account of purpose. You have to go to myth for that!

01:39:19 The influence of AI planning research on Peterson’s thinking. My debunking of that (with Phil Agre, influenced by Lucy Suchman and Hubert Dreyfus) in the 1980s. Francisco Varela’s reformulation of subplans as micro-identities in micro-worlds.

01:47:28 Self-sacrifice as essential in identifying purpose: in the Western tradition, and in Buddhism.

01:50:56 Demons subjugated at last! Credits roll.

Further reading: books &c. we refer to

In the order we refer to them in the podcast, explicitly or implicitly:

* Jordan B. Peterson, Maps of Meaning

* David Chapman, Meaningness

* Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

* Jordan B. Peterson, “A Psycho-ontological Analysis of Genesis 2-6”

* Robert Kegan, The Evolving Self

* Robert Bly, A Little Book on the Human Shadow

* Jordan B. Peterson and Joseph L. Flanders, “Complexity Management Theory: Motivation for Ideological Rigidity and Social Conflict”

* The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship

* David Chapman, “Fundamentalism is counter-cultural modernism”

* David Chapman, Meaningness and Time; includng “How meaning fell apart”

* David Chapman, “The mythic mode: from childhood, throughout life”

* Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge

* David Chapman, “Desiderata for any future mode of meaningness”

* Bryan Burrough, Days of Rage

* Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man

* David Chapman and Philip E. Agre, “Abstract Reasoning as Emergent from Concrete Activity”

* Hubert L. Dreyfus, What Computers Still Can’t Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason

* James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception

* Friedrich Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols

* David Chapman, “This is it!”

* David Chapman, “Charnel ground”

* Jordan B. Peterson, “Three Forms of Meaning and the Management of Complexity”

* George A. Miller, Eugene Galanter, and Karl H. Pribram, Plans and the Structure of Behavior

* Philip E. Agre, “Toward a Critical Technical Practice: Lessons Learned