Peterson's 12 Rules for Life v2.0-- actual book discussion

[bennyboy]

Every organized group of humans (and lobsters, OMG the OP it LIVES!!!) will form a power hierarchy

They will, but this is no excuse for the institution of structural racism as expressed by white privilege, for example.  It's just flat out stating that people are prone to do shit like this.  Yeah, no shit, that's why white privilege exists.  The group at the top of the power hierarchy has amassed a set of tangible benefits conferred by identification with their group. Not by merit, not by earning it, not by having enough money.  Identification with their group.

That's right, and it's a problem. Many hording money and resources now don't have the same attributes of success that their grandfathers (for example) had. So the money grows stagnant, leading to a huge loss of potential productivity.

It seems to me that fitter individuals might arrive at the conclusion that those less fit rich people (thinking the rich trust-fund babies who buy a Porsche for every color of shoes they like wearing or whatever) should be challenged for those resources.

And while I say that if you removed the power hierarchy, a new one would turn up, I'd say two things: 1) the new hierarchy would be more closely mapped to real power-- maybe intelligence, maybe strength of character, maybe just a willingness to kill. For sure, it wouldn't be a bunch of rich fops taking selfies next to golden fucking cars all day.

Saying "it happens, it's natural" is not a defense or a justification or an explanation.  Yes, we know it happens.  Christ.  It doesn't have to, it doesn't fit our values, and the fact that power hierarchies arise doesn't say anything about how we should seek to arrange them when they do.  I think that you and I can both agree that when a power hierarchy is explicitly and structural racist, shit has gone awry and needs to be fixed.  What's not helpful, are wheedling excuses by way of lobsters and pretending they don't exist but are simultaneously natural.

First of all, power doesn't need any defense or justification. It only needs to be able to fight off challengers, or to sufficiently threaten challengers that they don't bother.

I wasn't being flippant when I said black people should use the killings of innocent kids as a pretext for taking over police stations or staging an insurrection. And I wasn't joking when I said I had hoped Occupy Wall Street would end up with a few bankers swinging from lamp posts. I say let those in power have their character tested-- see if they have the strength of personality, or the actual ability, to stand as King-of-the-Castle when it seems like to cost them their lives.

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It's called "white privilege" because, for whatever reasons that led to all this, white people (just for being perceived as white) enjoy privileges that others don't. South Africa is an even better example of this than a country like the USA.

You can insert the dominant demographic in any situation, and put the word "privilege" after it. The Mongolian empire had Mongolian privilege, the Roman empire had Roman privilege, and the big-clawed-lobster has big-clawed-lobster privilege.

But on what basis should those in power be expected not to act on it? If there really IS white privilege, why shouldn't every white person say, "Wow man. Thank God I was born white, my life is fantastic!"

That's the part in all this discussion that nobody has ever brought up-- if it IS white oppression, and if black people can't or won't challenge that oppression, then what of it? Is there something intrinsically wrong with taking advantage of favorable circumstances, or in preventing others from turning the tables?

Every organized group of humans (and lobsters, OMG the OP it LIVES!!!) will form a power hierarchy, because individuals compete and some end up on top, and because groups compete and some end up on top, and nations compete and some end up on top.

But it doesn't mean that these power hierarchies must be exactly the way they are now. Evolution doesn't fix things in stone. Just because we've evolved in a certain way doesn't mean that we are forever doomed to be such way. And just because other species evolved a certain way doesn't mean we must necessarily evolve in that way as well.

What a stupid thing to compare human beings with a highly complex nervous system to fucking lobsters.

Have you read the book? I'm gonna go out on a limb and say you haven't. The comparison made is that competition for resources is so fundamental to the process of evolution that it is found among lobsters-- a particularly ancient species. The interesting thing is how conflicts are mediated by behaviors to avoid harm to the participants-- biochemical changes in the brains of both species that affect behaviors greatly.

If you doubt that humans are animals, and particular vicious and self-serving ones who will fight to the death for power, then I'd argue that you haven't met enough humans. This "complex nervous system," in the end, is mainly used as a tool for communicating new ways in which to establish and maintain genetic fitness-- justifying oppression, triggering challenges, getting women pregnant, and so on.