William Butchman (et all),
Peterson’s claim is where he’s going wrong: trying to justify his priors.
- Yes, we can imagine and experience the world consisting of various combinations of objects, properties, relations, transformations, and values.
- Yes we can develop our own mental models out of those arrangements (philosophies). Yes we can seek or create an existence in which we comfortably role play with others. Yes we can seek to produce social environments that achieve these ends.
- Yes we can attempt to accomplish this “private construction of personal reality”, “interpersonal construction of interpersonal reality”, and “Social Construction of social reality”, and even political and institutional construction of political reality.
- Yes we can construct these sets of objects, properties, relations, transformations, and values out of dream state experiences, supernatural, mythical, literary, extra-rational (pseudorational, pseudoscientific), historical(existential analogical), and various minimalist (scientific) narratives by which we construct explanations of causal relations making use of our objects, properties, relations, transformations (actions), and values.
- Yes we can perform ideation (envision possibilities for additional desirable experiences) using each of these methods, and navigate through life by these different narratives.
- Yes, the ‘cost’ of more parsimonious (minimalist, and deflationary) is higher in rational (autistic) terms and provides lower experiential (solipsistic) returns.
- Yes, the most able can choose ANY of these methods by which to obtain satisfaction, and yes, the less able require increasingly experiential means, and yes the better able are more able to obtain by less experiential means. And yes, while the most expensive, the most demanding, and perhaps the most rewarding is a portfolio : a combination of solipsistic (rich) experiences, along with autistic (parsimonious) understanding of them.
- And Yes the negative consequences of those narratives consisting of the Dream state, occult, supernatural, mythic, literary, pseudorational, pseudoscientific, socially constructed, can be mitigated by sufficient historical (scientific), narratives (explanations).
BUT…
- 1) the material opportunities that arise from them empirically demonstrate that increasing precision, increasing correspondence, therefore increasingly deflationary and minimalist, and therefore more historical narratives, are far higher than all other methods combined.
- 2) that in matters of conflict people will grant priority to physical safety, opportunity, and comfort; kin safety, opportunity, and comfort; material safety, opportunity and comfort; psychological safety, opportunity, and comfort, normative safety, opportunity and comfort, and institutional safety, opportunity, and comfort in precisely that order. And therefore they demonstrate the superiority of the material in fact as far as they can, then demonstrate status and reputation and self worth, then demonstrate the psychological as far as they can. And all seeming exceptions, under scrutiny will eventually fall to this explanation: costs to them.
- 3) the function of the darwinian (historical, scientific, minimalist) model is to provide decidability ACROSS those narratives when we need them, and WITHIN those narratives if we choose to need them. In other words, darwinian (scientific) world-views, just like religion in the past, allow us to cooperate at larger scales across those narratives, making use of the range of people and range of experiences that those narratives can provide us with, while at the same time providing decidability across and between people making use of such narratives.
Group Strategy > Religion > Literature > Philosophy > Science > Law.
It is in the resolution of our disputes in law and war, and the preservation of non-retaliatory peace post-conflict that we define what is true. It is in the resolution of our disputes in all narrative structures that funnels down, over time, into every greater precision, leaving science (the most parsimonious, deflationary truth) that we ever-drive ourselves toward correspondence with reality no matter how undesirable. Because while we may seek cheap comforts of the mind, we will always fight expensively for material reality that allows us to preserve those fantasies.
- 4) since those narratives are profoundly easy to use to conduct frauds, deceits, manipulations, defeats, and conquests, we can use the parsimonious, minimalist, scientific, historical to analyze (criticize) propositions within and across these models.
And since the great challenges of our ancient world (monotheistic deceit), and the great challenges of the present world ( cosmopolitan pseudoscience, and pseudorationalism, and puritan pseudo moralism, and outright lying ) stem from our failure to develop both the methods of providing decidability (truth) across those new more advanced deceits (pseudorationalism, pseudoscience, and propaganda), and the institutional means of preventing such deceits (law), then we are in greater demand for deflationary, minmalist, historical (evidentiary, existential) means of decidability – that which Peterson calls “Darwinian”.
Ergo as the diversity of narrative, diversity of developmental range, role in group, class, trades, and specialization increases, the demand for decidability across them increases.
- 5) Darwinian judgement in particular tells us of the long term, unintended consequences of accumulated short term actions. It does not tell us our limitations. It explains why we engage in error, bias, wishful thinking, suggestion, obscurantism, pseudorationalism, pseudosicence, literary loading, framing, and overloading; propaganda, and outright deceit – for darwinian ends.
CLOSING
We generate opportunities with richly conflated narration, and we generate decidability with minimalist, deflationary truth.
That is the difference between the good (desirable) within any context and the true (decidable) across any and all contexts.
Curt Doolittle
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev, Ukraine
