RE: Peterson's 12 Rules For Life, have you heard of this?
September 2, 2018 at 11:58 pm
(This post was last modified: September 3, 2018 at 12:00 am by bennyboy.)
+1 for a good post, and one finally with some actual intellectual content worth mulling over.
But it's even worse than that. Tribes establish new tokens of membership-- flags to bear, fashions to emulate, and other tribes which must be held in enmity. That's while you get Hoodlums literally putting each other in the hospital over English soccer games, even though in other regards they might be 100% identical in their beliefs and political positions, and why in the Byzantine empire, gangs of blues and greens would murder each other over a color.
This is the cruelest trick of the human species, in almost all regards-- that no matter how smart we are, our instincts are very often able to enslave our minds. "Just the tip" is a great way for a million generations to coopt us into producing the million-and-first. "I'll run extra hard tomorrow" is a great way to get us to eat fatty foods, even when we didn't intend to. "Those other guys over there are inhuman, and must be conquered but never cooperated with" is a great way for us to select each other out of the gene pool, and maybe to end up with a stronger species-- but it's EXTREMELY unlikely ever to end up with a group of people establishing a happy life worth living for its own sake.
That's the biggest problem I have with PC. It simply won't work. Practices which replace one dogma with another, but don't improve productivity, for example, might mean a redistribution of wealth-- but it will never mean that everyone has enough. The PC left will completely ignore the facts, and therefore demand restitution for this or that group, bigger welfare payments, higher minimum wage, and so on. That's nice, today, but what happens when 300 million people go to the market and discover that there's nothing but an old loaf of bread?
We KNOW what happens. We saw it for the entire second half of the 20th century.
But it's even worse than that. Tribes establish new tokens of membership-- flags to bear, fashions to emulate, and other tribes which must be held in enmity. That's while you get Hoodlums literally putting each other in the hospital over English soccer games, even though in other regards they might be 100% identical in their beliefs and political positions, and why in the Byzantine empire, gangs of blues and greens would murder each other over a color.
This is the cruelest trick of the human species, in almost all regards-- that no matter how smart we are, our instincts are very often able to enslave our minds. "Just the tip" is a great way for a million generations to coopt us into producing the million-and-first. "I'll run extra hard tomorrow" is a great way to get us to eat fatty foods, even when we didn't intend to. "Those other guys over there are inhuman, and must be conquered but never cooperated with" is a great way for us to select each other out of the gene pool, and maybe to end up with a stronger species-- but it's EXTREMELY unlikely ever to end up with a group of people establishing a happy life worth living for its own sake.
That's the biggest problem I have with PC. It simply won't work. Practices which replace one dogma with another, but don't improve productivity, for example, might mean a redistribution of wealth-- but it will never mean that everyone has enough. The PC left will completely ignore the facts, and therefore demand restitution for this or that group, bigger welfare payments, higher minimum wage, and so on. That's nice, today, but what happens when 300 million people go to the market and discover that there's nothing but an old loaf of bread?
We KNOW what happens. We saw it for the entire second half of the 20th century.
