I'd like to know more about how a lack of value structure leads to nihilism. He kinda glossed over it without jordansplaining exactly how it works (around 14:00).
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skeptoid (Old Spike)
It's not lack of - it's abandonment of. When you abandon an existing value structure it presents the awful spectre of nihilism, and most people can't live nihilistically - they can't act that out day to day. So they tend to grasp desperately for something to hold on to - totalitarian certainty: "I can go to work now, pay my bills, take care of the kids because I'm part of a shared community that has goals and a direction."
Very few actually "act out" a truly atheist AND nihilist belief system in their every day. During a recent talk Matt Dillahunty actually said that the reason he doesn't throw people who annoy him like Sam Harris off the stage with physical violence is because he wouldn't want Sam to do the same to him (claiming even the fear of societal punishment is not the main prohibitor). If Matt actually lived his life that way, it would mean that the instant he found himself in a situation where committing an act of selfish violence would only benefit him (the dark alley example) he wouldn't hesitate to do so. And yet watching Matt and listening to him speak, and having gone through a lot of his material and listened to his autobiography, it's obvious that Matt does not *really* believe he doesn't throw Sam off the stage because of a "rational sense of self-preseveration" but because he knows it's wrong. Matt wants morality to and rationality to overlap 1 to 1 and it just doesn't work that way - reductionism always runs into this issue.
There are atheists that have lived truly nihilistic lives - the Marque de Sade was one: He made such an impact that we named an entire branch of evil after him.
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danmanjones (Old Spike)
Hmm. I'm just reading about moral nihilism (I thought he mean existential nihilism)... It seems more like to be morally nihilistic, you'd have to either be sociopathic or be incapable of logic to not realise "what goes around comes around". It's a pretty fundatmenal lesson that people learn in life & doesn't need to be taught.
I don't pay attention to that huckster Sam Harris or any atheism advocates, simply because they have a horse in the race.
You're saying that nihilism leads to sadism but your evidence is circumstancial.
Deriving pleasure from inhumane acts seems like more than just moral ambiguity.
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skeptoid (Old Spike)
I'm not saying nihilism automatically leads to sadism - Jordan Peterson is making the claim that from a neuropsychological perspective genuine nihilism greases the path to what we tend to catagorize as "negative" emotion - for example sadism. Is taking pleasure from inflicting pain on others a "positive" emotion? - we've evolved a set of archetypal ideas based out of religion that say "No, every individual is divinely sacred. Even when they've done wrong, an eye for an eye only...."
As a society, over the past few decades, we've been in the process of discarding that notion because it comes from religion. If you truly have no sense of meaning, purpose or goal, besides suicide what's left other than to perpetually seek to satisfy whatever urges come to mind while taking care to minimize your own exposure? That's essentially what a sociopath does - there's a reason the term "non-violent" sociopath has taken root of late: It's because the phenomenon has become impossible to ignore any longer. And that's not specifically sadism - although sadism could be one aspect of what turns a person's crank. There was a guy who did something really horrible to my family that wasn't technically illegal - he was the quintessential sociopath - and I have had thoughts of making that person suffer. I don't act on them, not because I don't want to be punished or I don't want him to hurt me back but because I recognize the sadistic urge to make him pay is the part of me that I hate in him. I didn't learn that from any other place than religion.
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danmanjones (Old Spike)
It was the last sentence in your first comment that I thought you were saying that nihilism leads to sadism. You did kinda imply that in the case of Marque de Sade that his sadistic behaviour was related to his nihilistic lifestyle. But whatever, it was just a side point.
I'm not sure why you mention religion. Maybe you think of religion in a broader sense than I do. Some believe that these days the religion is the Western world is being replaced by Holocaustianity where Hitler is the ultimate evil architype and the allies are the ultimate good. I think that has some truth to it & to me that's worse than Christianity in a lot of ways. It has racist connotations & justifies violence against millions of people. And it's just as crazy as the bible with tales of Jesus doing magic tricks & whatnot. You could argue that the allies were less immoral than the axis forces but it's just as easy to argue the opposite. To argue against the efforts of the Allies in WWII is considered worse than arguing against Christianity. And all those holocaust museums in the US.... for what? Sorry I digress....
Religion to me is just another expression of humanity. It's part of our DNA, we're not going to get rid of it any time soon, even if we got rid of the Abrahamic religions, we'd just find other crap to lie to each other about. I really don't see how it relates to a discussion about moral nihilism. Value systems come from your community, regardless of whether religion plays a role or not IMO.
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skeptoid (Old Spike)
Peterson makes his arguments about religion from the ground up, rather than from the unknown down. When he arrives at the point of the unknown he stops and goes "So, nothing here invalidates the existence of God, and nothing here confirms the nature of God" which leads to the usual speculatory "what ifs". There are plenty of "what if" scenarios one can play with. Peterson argues that religion is an expression of humanity - a part of our DNA. Where he diverges from Dawkins is where he objects to the presentation of this fact as somehow proof that religion archetypes, which are an aggregate of a plurality of memes, are "viruses". That's a very unscientific characterization - it's full of contemptuous emotion. Peterson says that the fact that the evolution of religious concepts that tell us how to see ourselves and the world around us exists deep within our DNA, the precursors of which we can actually observe in apes for example, actually pushes us in the direction of a purposeful universe and the possibility of a Creator.
There are plenty of agnostic and even atheist scientists who feel the same way, so much so that they have begun creating their own little stories to help orient themselves as truly as they can with respect to the reality they are facing. For example, Neil Tyson thinks it "very likely" we live inside something that could be extrapolated down (and the "down" part is a real problem) to the analogy of a simulation. Neil also reveals, and this is consistent, that he believes there is likely a creator but Neil judges the creator to be incapable of being both all good and all powerful and thus rejects the Creator (the "simulators" if you will). You can see here the child-like yearning and woldview that typifies most - he creates an analogy to explain what he's seeing about the material univers: That somone probably created it, like we create our simulations. And then he makes the fatal mistake of analogizing off his analogy, characterizing the "creators of the simulation" as we might characterize a petulant child who observes and manipulates but does not care a lick for his ant farm.
Anyway these are some of the notions I'm playing around with for future installments of these series. I want to map out the full landscape of belief (impossible) so people can get a real sense of what's out there so that people stop equating non-belief in God with intelligence and the reductionist materialist worldview as that which is most rational. I'm not saying belief in God is MORE rational, and there are plenty of examples of its irrational applications (we've seen the same for the secular religions Peterson speaks out against) - but to be as Dawkins and claim belief in a purposeful universe makes one delusional looks very dishonest to me, and I'm wary of calls from that camp to marginalize anyone who believes the universe was created - keep them out of certain professions, certain positions. You start talking that way and we have a big problem.
I've posted many clips to my channel, but it wasn't until I posted a clip where Peterson mentioned Dawkins and I put that name in the title that I saw the full force of the Dawkins army. The Harris fans are smug, and make the fatal error of equating atheism with intelligence, but that "Plus" in "Atheism +" must make a difference because the Harris people remain more-or-less civil. The Dawkinites are just disgusting, truly disgusting - I laughed watching their comments come in: Seeing people who genuinely believe that they and everyone else around them are worthless sacks of meat driven mindlessly to live only so their genes will pass on; people who believe their lives are purposeless pursuits of instinctual urges with no higher transcendent journey or mystery to solve. Their vulgarity, viciousness, violent rhetoric - have never seen anything like that before on my channel. It makes me laugh even now because in those fools you can see Peterson's point about the Nietzchean dilemma come through so very clearly. For them, the non-existence of God and the absense of purpose gives them full license to be terrible. I suspect that some are also the survivors of abuse at the hands of religious people, but it's impossible to tell what percentage.
The point about the Marque is that he was very honest about his nihilist atheism in so far as he actually acted it out in his every day. His bag was sadism - that's what he loved: he loved enjoying having the power of life and torture over others less powerful than him. This is a common human trait. Look at the Stanford experiment, and the Milgrim experiment. Based on what we know, when put in a position where they can be sadistic without fear of repercussion an alarmingly high percentage of people can be coaxed to do the kinds of things we only associate with "the nazis" or "stalinists". Naw that's people - you create the right environment and most apparently can't resist the apparent gleeful joy of sadism. And you see here now I have to deal with my own sadism, because when I think of people who slide so easily into a space where they would do that to some innocent person they don't know I have the urge to get sadistic with them. So what's that? Am I justified? If it's not self-defense, not really. Religion can help us escape these paradoxes, or it can make them worse - both are subjects of future installments.
Comments
(Old Spike)
Nice work!
I'd like to know more about how a lack of value structure leads to nihilism. He kinda glossed over it without jordansplaining exactly how it works (around 14:00).
(Old Spike)
It's not lack of - it's abandonment of. When you abandon an existing value structure it presents the awful spectre of nihilism, and most people can't live nihilistically - they can't act that out day to day. So they tend to grasp desperately for something to hold on to - totalitarian certainty: "I can go to work now, pay my bills, take care of the kids because I'm part of a shared community that has goals and a direction."
Very few actually "act out" a truly atheist AND nihilist belief system in their every day. During a recent talk Matt Dillahunty actually said that the reason he doesn't throw people who annoy him like Sam Harris off the stage with physical violence is because he wouldn't want Sam to do the same to him (claiming even the fear of societal punishment is not the main prohibitor). If Matt actually lived his life that way, it would mean that the instant he found himself in a situation where committing an act of selfish violence would only benefit him (the dark alley example) he wouldn't hesitate to do so. And yet watching Matt and listening to him speak, and having gone through a lot of his material and listened to his autobiography, it's obvious that Matt does not *really* believe he doesn't throw Sam off the stage because of a "rational sense of self-preseveration" but because he knows it's wrong. Matt wants morality to and rationality to overlap 1 to 1 and it just doesn't work that way - reductionism always runs into this issue.
There are atheists that have lived truly nihilistic lives - the Marque de Sade was one: He made such an impact that we named an entire branch of evil after him.
(Old Spike)
Hmm. I'm just reading about moral nihilism (I thought he mean existential nihilism)... It seems more like to be morally nihilistic, you'd have to either be sociopathic or be incapable of logic to not realise "what goes around comes around". It's a pretty fundatmenal lesson that people learn in life & doesn't need to be taught.
I don't pay attention to that huckster Sam Harris or any atheism advocates, simply because they have a horse in the race.
You're saying that nihilism leads to sadism but your evidence is circumstancial.
Deriving pleasure from inhumane acts seems like more than just moral ambiguity.
(Old Spike)
I'm not saying nihilism automatically leads to sadism - Jordan Peterson is making the claim that from a neuropsychological perspective genuine nihilism greases the path to what we tend to catagorize as "negative" emotion - for example sadism. Is taking pleasure from inflicting pain on others a "positive" emotion? - we've evolved a set of archetypal ideas based out of religion that say "No, every individual is divinely sacred. Even when they've done wrong, an eye for an eye only...."
As a society, over the past few decades, we've been in the process of discarding that notion because it comes from religion. If you truly have no sense of meaning, purpose or goal, besides suicide what's left other than to perpetually seek to satisfy whatever urges come to mind while taking care to minimize your own exposure? That's essentially what a sociopath does - there's a reason the term "non-violent" sociopath has taken root of late: It's because the phenomenon has become impossible to ignore any longer. And that's not specifically sadism - although sadism could be one aspect of what turns a person's crank. There was a guy who did something really horrible to my family that wasn't technically illegal - he was the quintessential sociopath - and I have had thoughts of making that person suffer. I don't act on them, not because I don't want to be punished or I don't want him to hurt me back but because I recognize the sadistic urge to make him pay is the part of me that I hate in him. I didn't learn that from any other place than religion.
(Old Spike)
It was the last sentence in your first comment that I thought you were saying that nihilism leads to sadism. You did kinda imply that in the case of Marque de Sade that his sadistic behaviour was related to his nihilistic lifestyle. But whatever, it was just a side point.
I'm not sure why you mention religion. Maybe you think of religion in a broader sense than I do. Some believe that these days the religion is the Western world is being replaced by Holocaustianity where Hitler is the ultimate evil architype and the allies are the ultimate good. I think that has some truth to it & to me that's worse than Christianity in a lot of ways. It has racist connotations & justifies violence against millions of people. And it's just as crazy as the bible with tales of Jesus doing magic tricks & whatnot. You could argue that the allies were less immoral than the axis forces but it's just as easy to argue the opposite. To argue against the efforts of the Allies in WWII is considered worse than arguing against Christianity. And all those holocaust museums in the US.... for what? Sorry I digress....
Religion to me is just another expression of humanity. It's part of our DNA, we're not going to get rid of it any time soon, even if we got rid of the Abrahamic religions, we'd just find other crap to lie to each other about. I really don't see how it relates to a discussion about moral nihilism. Value systems come from your community, regardless of whether religion plays a role or not IMO.
(Old Spike)
Peterson makes his arguments about religion from the ground up, rather than from the unknown down. When he arrives at the point of the unknown he stops and goes "So, nothing here invalidates the existence of God, and nothing here confirms the nature of God" which leads to the usual speculatory "what ifs". There are plenty of "what if" scenarios one can play with. Peterson argues that religion is an expression of humanity - a part of our DNA. Where he diverges from Dawkins is where he objects to the presentation of this fact as somehow proof that religion archetypes, which are an aggregate of a plurality of memes, are "viruses". That's a very unscientific characterization - it's full of contemptuous emotion. Peterson says that the fact that the evolution of religious concepts that tell us how to see ourselves and the world around us exists deep within our DNA, the precursors of which we can actually observe in apes for example, actually pushes us in the direction of a purposeful universe and the possibility of a Creator.
There are plenty of agnostic and even atheist scientists who feel the same way, so much so that they have begun creating their own little stories to help orient themselves as truly as they can with respect to the reality they are facing. For example, Neil Tyson thinks it "very likely" we live inside something that could be extrapolated down (and the "down" part is a real problem) to the analogy of a simulation. Neil also reveals, and this is consistent, that he believes there is likely a creator but Neil judges the creator to be incapable of being both all good and all powerful and thus rejects the Creator (the "simulators" if you will). You can see here the child-like yearning and woldview that typifies most - he creates an analogy to explain what he's seeing about the material univers: That somone probably created it, like we create our simulations. And then he makes the fatal mistake of analogizing off his analogy, characterizing the "creators of the simulation" as we might characterize a petulant child who observes and manipulates but does not care a lick for his ant farm.
Anyway these are some of the notions I'm playing around with for future installments of these series. I want to map out the full landscape of belief (impossible) so people can get a real sense of what's out there so that people stop equating non-belief in God with intelligence and the reductionist materialist worldview as that which is most rational. I'm not saying belief in God is MORE rational, and there are plenty of examples of its irrational applications (we've seen the same for the secular religions Peterson speaks out against) - but to be as Dawkins and claim belief in a purposeful universe makes one delusional looks very dishonest to me, and I'm wary of calls from that camp to marginalize anyone who believes the universe was created - keep them out of certain professions, certain positions. You start talking that way and we have a big problem.
I've posted many clips to my channel, but it wasn't until I posted a clip where Peterson mentioned Dawkins and I put that name in the title that I saw the full force of the Dawkins army. The Harris fans are smug, and make the fatal error of equating atheism with intelligence, but that "Plus" in "Atheism +" must make a difference because the Harris people remain more-or-less civil. The Dawkinites are just disgusting, truly disgusting - I laughed watching their comments come in: Seeing people who genuinely believe that they and everyone else around them are worthless sacks of meat driven mindlessly to live only so their genes will pass on; people who believe their lives are purposeless pursuits of instinctual urges with no higher transcendent journey or mystery to solve. Their vulgarity, viciousness, violent rhetoric - have never seen anything like that before on my channel. It makes me laugh even now because in those fools you can see Peterson's point about the Nietzchean dilemma come through so very clearly. For them, the non-existence of God and the absense of purpose gives them full license to be terrible. I suspect that some are also the survivors of abuse at the hands of religious people, but it's impossible to tell what percentage.
The point about the Marque is that he was very honest about his nihilist atheism in so far as he actually acted it out in his every day. His bag was sadism - that's what he loved: he loved enjoying having the power of life and torture over others less powerful than him. This is a common human trait. Look at the Stanford experiment, and the Milgrim experiment. Based on what we know, when put in a position where they can be sadistic without fear of repercussion an alarmingly high percentage of people can be coaxed to do the kinds of things we only associate with "the nazis" or "stalinists". Naw that's people - you create the right environment and most apparently can't resist the apparent gleeful joy of sadism. And you see here now I have to deal with my own sadism, because when I think of people who slide so easily into a space where they would do that to some innocent person they don't know I have the urge to get sadistic with them. So what's that? Am I justified? If it's not self-defense, not really. Religion can help us escape these paradoxes, or it can make them worse - both are subjects of future installments.