Hi all,
Let’s wrap up my ten part review of Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules For Life with a classic TOA riff off.
People seek to optimize rather than minimize risk.
Achieving competence often involves an element of danger or risk – by overcoming it, we develop the skills needed for truly being safe.
The Dutch build dikes to withstand the worst storm in the last ten thousand years.
The naturally tendency we have to avoid risk forgets the fundamental role of risk in the calculation of any return. Simply put, nothing is gained without some risk, and petty clashes among groups of people are often explainable by the way the groups differ in their desire to optimize rather than minimize risk. It’s why most people fall off a bike before learning to ride and why so many major cities are built in areas commonly afflicted by earthquakes, hurricanes, or flooding.
People tend to put up with things for too long. The willingness of individuals to stand up for themselves protects the majority from the petty authoritarians that foster corruption in society.
Our basic neurochemistry wires us to respond to losses as if our position in a dominance hierarchy were under threat.
The great tolerance people have of being pushed around is probably partly explained by the neurochemistry insight – by making some form of protest, they acknowledge a loss of some kind that activates the brain’s threat signal.
One of the great traits of children is how they assume that if they find something interesting then surely so might others.
Research suggests our central nervous system responds to novel environments by turning on new genes and proteins. In a way, without a baseline ability to explore, we remain incomplete.
This so-called ‘childhood trait’ is probably more like an example of a repressed instinct, one that we smother as we reach adulthood for the sake of new priorities.
Anyone can choose a frame of time in which nothing matters.
There is very little in a marriage – or any arrangement intended to last for decades – that is too trivial to fight over.
There are many benefits to tolerance but one of its downsides is how it has made it difficult for adults to pass along advice – ‘practical wisdom’ – to the young about how to live.
Traditionally, sins of action were considered worse than those allowed to happen through inaction, but perhaps we have this wrong.
The mystery of patience is how it prevents us from taking obvious action. One contributing factor is the rationalization made possible by time frames – most people will put off for later what they could deal with today. Another is the marginal effect – if the impact of almost any given moment is negligible, there is no urgency to take action. The patient must take great care to avoid putting off what might one day prove too late or too much to take care of with a last-ditch effort.
The problems of new institutions emerge in the aftermath of more pressing or significant problems being solved – often by these same institutions.
Today’s oppression of patriarchy was yesterday’s solution for many more significant problems – poverty, disease, and illiteracy.
Opiates exist because they work.
The desire to enslave and dominate does not require explanation yet we still seek it.
The mystery of why certain problems exist is often explainable by looking into history and recognizing how yesterday’s challenges were much different from our own. Good solutions to today’s problems weigh this history into the calculation and ensure that we move forward into a better future rather than step backward into the unstudied past.
Western intellectuals maintained a positive attitude toward communism despite significant evidence of its problems, failures, and atrocities.
Socialism fails when it focuses more on hatred of the rich than regard for the poor.
Socialism’s peculiar problem is that its adherents do not like the poor (as they claim) but simply hate the rich instead.
Every hierarchy means winners and losers. However, a shared pursuit towards common goals will always produce hierarchy due to differences in ability to contribute to the goal.
If democracy and capitalism were listed on the stock market, the recent price trend would likely point downward. The question ignored in the talk about large systems of organization is how to address the inevitable question of inequality that emerges whenever a group of people aims toward a common outcome. The solution to inequality isn’t to eliminate it entirely because this would necessitate the elimination of goals, targets, and ideals. A better first step might be to reach some agreement on our common goals so that we can all accept that some will justifiably reap a larger reward for their outsized contributions to those targets.
Placing all of human corruption at society’s feet is the worst kind of explanation – it explains nothing, solves no problems, and disempowers anyone who might have been interested in taking action.
The stories we tell lose their value if it becomes impossible to connect today’s problems to tomorrow’s solutions. A person disgusted by human corruption might have a case against society but the only way to motivate action is to reframe the story so that the next chapter can be written through individual actions within a personal sphere of influence.
The truth is not told with deceit, sarcasm, contempt, or self-congratulation. It is told with carefully chosen words that convey exactly your thoughts or feelings and why those have influenced your actions and decisions.
The truth is often associated with being right. I wonder if this relationship explains why people sometimes tell the truth in a way that alienates the target audience.
Single cause interpretations should be handled with great care.
I would probably rewrite this to say ‘single cause interpretations of multiple results’ but I agree with the broad premise. The simple answer to any complex question often does little more than change the question.
If you’ve got a spare half million, you could knock it down and start rebuilding.
There is a danger in thinking that change requires a big investment, one on an order of magnitude beyond the means of the average person. But change can come incrementally too, one based on daily adherence to a set of principles, and in 12 Rules For Life we see a version of such principles that can prove the catalyst for such a transformation.
Huh?
What?
Fine – that last thought’s from Courtney Barnett’s ‘Depreston’. But who better to end a riff off, right?
Thanks for reading.
