Three Wisemen By: Felt Habit

Three Wisemen by: Felt Habit

Dedicated to: Eion “Bobby” Bryson (1936 - 2019)

Contents

A Message For the Reader .……………….………………………..………………... 3

Wiseman1: Thorstein Veblen (1857 – 1929) ……………………………….…...….. 4

Wiseman 2: Alan Watts (1915 – 1973) …………………………………….…..……. 14

Wiseman 3: Jordan Peterson (1962) …………………….……………………..……. 24

Three Wisemen …………………….………………………….………………….……. 37

Acknowledgements …………………….……………………………...………….……. 42

Notes …………………………………….……………………………...………….……. 43

Sources ……………………………….……………………………...……...…….……. 51

About the author …………………….………………………………....………….……. 52

Three Wisemen

A Message For The Reader From Felt Habit ____

Early in the morning on the 8th of May 2020 I woke up, made a coffee, sat down at my piano and began to play. Before I knew it, I had recorded one long session of piano layered over an ambient background. There was no clear intention behind it. I just let the music flow, moving from one note to another feeling what to do, rather than thinking about it. The recording consisted of three distinct parts each in a different key. Each was it’s own song but part of a recognizable whole. I decided to name these the Three Wise Men after the three geniuses who have influenced my way of thinking: Thorstein Veblen (1857 – 1929), Alan Watts (1915 – 1973) and Jordan Peterson (1962 -).

This book summarizes the wisdom I’ve gathered from reading and listening to them over the years. I wrote it in the hope of sharing their ideas with my friends and family. There are three chapters. Each one dedicated to one of the Wise Men and written in chronological order; but also in the order I first heard about them. Veblen and Watts have passed on; and that is why their chapters start with a short biography before I outline what they had to say. Peterson’s chapter, on the other hand, begins with the events that launched him onto the global media stage back in 2016. I then go over his ideas which have earned him a massive following worldwide, but have also attracted a loud audience that find his point of view utterly detestable.

I’ve tried my best to write all this down in the simplest way I could so that it might be easier to follow as well as keep you captivated along the way. I’ve left notes at the end of the book with relevant links to YouTube videos and the sources from the organizations that are continuing the Wisemen’s legacies. This whole project is designed to align my passion for music and philosophy. And so each chapter is meant to be read accompanied by the music. That’s why I’ve also created a 1 hour’s long binaural ambience track for each chapter; to be listened to while you read. Binaural music uses alternating frequencies to make your brain focus better (*headphones required). It might sound weird and disturbing at first, but it will induce a trancelike state that will help you really immerse yourself in the words.

I hope you enjoy the music and the book. But more importantly, I hope you find it useful.

Wiseman: 1

Thorstein Veblen (1857 – 1929) ____

Field of study: Sociology and Economics Nationality: American Archetype: Ruthless Critic Best known work: The Theory of The Leisure Class (1899) Binaural Music: Listen now

Wise words:

“The situation of today shapes the institutions of tomorrow through a selective, coercive process, by acting upon men’s habitual view of things, and so altering or fortifying a point of view or a mental attitude handed down from the past.”

Thorstein Veblen (The Theory of The Leisure Class, 1899)

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Thorstein Veblen: His Life

Midway into the nineteenth century Thorstein Veblen, a boy from an immigrant family of Norwegian descent, grew up on a farm in Wisconsin. He was brought up in what seemed an estranged world with a foreign language; it’s culture forever perturbed him. His family possessed little, but still placed immense value in education in the hopes that Thorstein and his siblings might live a better life. Besides being gifted with a piercing intellect, his continual contention against adversity and the prejudices of the times led him to believe that he was, indeed, an outsider. As a philosophy graduate from Yale in 1884 (at the age of 27) his failed attempts to gain a meaningful appointment meant that he essentially spent the next seven years unemployed and confined to the family farm passing the time by reading books and fighting off disease until he was eventually accepted at Cornell and later the University of Chicago. He would go on to achieve great renown for his

academic career in Economics, but his story tells that these achievements came with unsuitable conditions attached to them and they never appeared at the times when he really needed them. In 1899 Veblen made his first breakthrough with the book that is remembered today as his masterpiece: The Theory of the Leisure Class. This scathing critique of high society in modern life examines how the rich, famous and powerful can afford to indulge in a life of leisure and consume plentifully without the necessity of earning a livelihood through manual labor. Their ability to live such a life is shown ostensibly¹ through the kinds of things they can buy and use; as well as the manner in which they spend their time². As a consequence, their decadent habits and the fancy items they have in their possession (like horse-riding and wearing expensive clothes) become themselves signals of status and serve to distinguish them apart from those who cannot live such a life. Veblen called this “conspicuous consumption”, which in today’s words might mean something like ‘showing off’. But even that doesn’t explain what he is trying to say. That’s because Veblen’s theory does more than just describe (with ruthless detail) the frivolous indulgences of the wealthy and well-to-do. Rather, Veblen’s concern was for how this ‘institution’³ came about from an historical and evolutionary standpoint. Only by looking at it this way can you make sense of it all⁴.

The follow-up to Veblen’s first book came in 1904 with the publication of The Theory of Business Enterprise. If his initial argument stressed the hindrance that the leisure class plays on society as a conservative factor (preventing the progressive demands of present circumstances to direct the course of the future); his second book extended his critique to the realm of commerce and industry. In it he turns our attention to the threats which the interests of businessmen have on industry and society as a whole⁴. In other words, the damage that can be caused by business owners who pursue the growth of profit at the cost of all else. The need to cut expenses in an effort to keep profits up, by laying off workers for example, places limits on productive capacity and obstructs the operations of the industrial system (causing strikes and boycotts). These decisions by business leaders and the owners of capital are taken without consulting the technical specialists of industry; the engineers who understand the productive functions of these companies. In the end, Veblen argued that what industry makes and society consumes is at the mercy of men chasing power and profit and not the concern of industry nor society’s well-being⁵.

Despite the thought-provoking and original contribution these books made to the discourse (prophetic, in retrospect, of where Western society would end up today), they did not bring Veblen immediate success when they were published. They didn’t even earn him a raise at the university where he worked. In the eyes of the academic institution he was not held in high regard. As a

lecturer there was a prevailing impression felt by his students that his teaching style was dreadful and boring. Amongst his peers he was considered a womanizer and ridiculed for his infidelity to the point that he was forced to resign from his post in 1909. Compounded with the prejudice committed against him for his openly agnostic views and lack of pedigree in the teachings of Christianity, this tarnished notoriety only made the prospect of future employment elsewhere more doubtful. In 1911, following the divorce with his first wife, some good fortune did present itself in the form of an appointment at the University of Missouri. However it came with less pay and at a lower rank than his previous position⁶.

By the time the Great War had broken out Veblen published another two books. The first one furthered his views on the social evolution of industry and the other was the very timely and topical: “Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution” (1915). In this book he contrasted the authoritarian politics of Germany with the democratic tradition of Britain (which fostered a progressive political culture) and portrayed warfare in true Veblenesque fashion as a threat to industrial productivity (classing it amongst those interests, which stem from financial, national or private motives, as wasteful and unproductive). This contribution earned Veblen a space on a group of economic advisors commissioned by President Woodrow Wilson to analyze possible peace settlements that would see through to end to the war and thereafter. Up until his death which occurred on the cusp of the Wall Street Market Crash of 1929 (at the age of 72), Veblen would go on to publish more books and articles as well as serve as editor to a magazine in New York called The Dial. He was also fundamental to the formation of an intellectual movement called The New School which sought an “unbiased understanding of the existing order, its genesis, growth, and present working”. It was also known for advocating the rise of a soviet of engineers⁷ to mobilize against capitalism as it stood during the time.

In the end, there’s no better story that sums up the life and character of the man than his refusal to accept the prestigious position as president of the American Economic Association (in 1925, at the age of 68), choosing instead to retire to a rustic cabin in California up until his final days, some four years later. He declined the honour owing to the condition that he first agree to become a member of the organization (though, to be honest, it’s not really clear as to why that would be such an egregious demand). In turning down the accolade, which many would regard as the pinnacle of achievement for an academic who had devoted his entire life to the field of economics, Veblen added a callous remark that the offer should’ve been awarded to him sooner when he was deserving of it and not at the twilight of his career and life.

Veblen, continuing in the spirit of the Socrates, was another Gadfly plaguing the sensibilities of people in modern times, urging us to look behind the surface of what we hold to be the accepted scheme of life. From a small boy raised on a farm in the Midwest to the frugal²² old man living out the remainder of his days in a cabin on the East Coast, Thorstein Veblen lived a life tainted with unfavourable renown; too smart for his own good. According to biographer Gilles Dostaler, Veblen was “a merciless detractor of his own society”. But what did that get him, though? Yes, for all his anti-conformism and dissidence we have been given a gift of wisdom, but at what cost to himself? We don’t have to become iconoclasts in order to see the world more clearer around us. There is a point where criticism transgresses it’s motive of illumination and becomes self-deprecating. Veblen’s defeat was not that he was denied what was owing to him given his genius, but that he didn’t live out what he knew to his advantage. Does that make him a proud but sore loser? Perhaps, but he was indeed a wiseman; and I’ll soon tell you why.

The Wisdom of Social Evolution

To think sociologically is to ask the question: why is society the way it is? Being a sociologist, or even just reading a book by one, means you’ll be asked to look at ordinary things in an unordinary way. Think of it like a meal in the microwave, by looking at it you would assume that it heats up because of the light inside and the fact that it rotates. But the real explanation lies in the rays of radiation that you don’t see. In that way, Veblen’s ideas are like solar flares (not easy to look at but a thing of beauty to behold, if you know how). Back when I was a student it was by mistake that I stumbled upon his work. Because he wasn’t in the curriculum where I studied⁸ I had to seek out his writings in my own capacity outside of the prescribed coursework. These courses were more preoccupied with conflict theory instigated by Marx and his acolytes. Or else with the more co-operative views of Durkheim⁹. Weber’s influence was overwhelming as well and very few would put Veblen's contributions to the discipline on the same level as these other thinkers (I would even concede to that fact). And yet it was Veblen who stood out for me¹⁰. Why though? What was it about what he had to say that I found more compelling? The answer lies in: craft beer.

The year was 2013, the folk music of Mumford & Sons filled the air of the niche craft markets popping up in the gentrified¹¹ (previously abandoned) industrial lots around the Mother City. Cape Town was named the global capital of design and was building a reputation for itself as an

international hotspot for the fashionable post-industrial¹² literati. Conscious capitalism¹³ was manufacturing the growing desire for organic foods; and anything labeled ‘hand-crafted’ or eco-friendly almost instinctively demanded our attention as something worth buying and talking to people about¹⁴. Surrounded by this new wave of consumer culture I found myself asking the question: what is going on here? And so with a little help from my friend Veblen, I decided to find out the answer by explaining craft beer, one of the more peculiar products of this whole trend.

For a year I dedicated myself to craft beer. I took any chance I could to seek it out (and yes drink it). I went to the weekend markets where they were sold; even worked at the craft beer stand. I visited the microbreweries where they were being brewed and I sat down and spoke with the independent owners and brewers of craft beer. All of whom shared with me a similar story. What I found out from doing all this research is that the craft beer industry was started by entrepreneurs who had travelled to places like Germany, the UK and America where there was a tradition of small independent breweries making all kinds of beers, different in flavour and appearance when compared to mainstream beers that are available everywhere else¹⁵. Inspired by what they saw, these entrepreneurs returned to South Africa and started their own microbreweries or commissioned other breweries to make the beer for their own brand¹⁶.

Given the barriers to entry (how to get the beer made and into the hands of willing customers), these craft brewers had to use their marketing wits to get the idea across to consumers that craft beer is a cool and trendy thing to buy. Their target market was the mid-to-high LSM group with disposable income to spend on beers that were comparatively more expensive than the mainstream beers like Castle and Black Label¹⁷. Using their limitations to their advantage the craft brewers approach was to over-emphasize the value of being local and boutique. One such strategy was selling (in person) at craft markets. These hipster hotspots are where they found their ideal customers; those who sought out niche places where independent merchants sold locally-made goods. There was a sense that such places satisfy the desire to buy and experience unique things whilst supporting the local economy. Also they were cool places to be seen at and be around like-minded people¹⁸.

This strategy came to full fruition with a marketing campaign arranged by some of the brewers called ‘We Love Real Beer’. A movement that so blatantly pinned craft beer against mainstream beer, ridiculing and embellishing the latter with notions of cheapness, commonness and lacking integrity. This rebellious sentiment rallied around craft beer as being ‘real’ as opposed to fake.

Claiming that it was made with care, by the hands of small independent brewers, instead of just the output of a vast, calculated and heartless brewing system of a large facility. ‘We’ was used to denote a sense of community or coming together; and ‘Love’ as a call to appreciate what craft beer and the brewers stand for. I saw this craft beer movement unfold in front of my very eyes. I went to these markets and participated in the scene. Besides drinking a lot of the beers myself (naturally) I was actually a bartender for a time at a pub that only sold craft beer. So it’s fair to say that I was pretty well immersed in what was going on - from both sides of the bar.

And here’s the truth. The question of craft beer being more ‘real’ is troublesome. As far as quality is concerned it is dubious to suggest that the large brewing companies are lacking in some comparison with the smaller companies. Taking into account ingredients and technicalities of the brewing as well as distribution process (i.e. from factory to keg and keg to glass) the large brewing companies have it all nailed down to a tee. Their expertise, purchasing power and distribution network built up over decades ensures that you’ll get served a fresh beer, without falter¹⁹. And that’s what the question of quality really comes down to at the end of the day: does the beer satisfy you (as subjective as that may sound). In my experience selling beers and just being around beer drinkers, the question: what is the best kind of beer, comes down to a very simple answer: whichever is colder. To put it bluntly, whether that beer was brewed by this or that company, regardless of what kind of hops was used to brew it, or whether it was made locally or imported from a country on the other side of the globe, nobody in their right mind would choose a warm beer over a cold one. It’s more reliable to judge people’s actions towards something they don’t want (or what they are not willing to put up with) than it is to try to estimate what it is they do want or desire.

But I wasn’t interested in solving the question of whether craft beer was better than beer that wasn’t ‘crafted’. The question I wanted to answer was what this craft beer movement could tell us about the world we live in today. This is where Veblen comes into play. His wisdom can be understood simply as an evolutionary perspective on how our habits and points of view change or stay the same. We know Darwin described how natural selection affects the evolution of a species over vast periods of time; how it is by a species ability to respond favourably to the environment as it changes that determines its ability to survive and propagate further into the future. Veblen held a similar view but towards the social and economic environment, where instead of the evolution of species he looked at the change or persistence of different habits of thought and ways of acting. Veblen used this evolutionary approach to study the attitudes and inclinations of the wealthy leisure

class of his time; plotting where they came from historically and describing the ways their ideas and attitudes are perpetuated in the present. For Veblen these habits and aptitudes of the wealthy originate for a time which he called the ‘early stages of barbarism’; which in today’s language means the time when society was less differentiated, comprising small bands of hunter-gatherers who formed fortified tribes. Back then the way of life for the community moved away from being fairly peaceable and became more predacious (‘tribal’ in the sense of warfare). The increase of conflict between tribes meant a proclivity developed among the ‘able-bodied men of the community’ to engage in warlike activity. Warriors raiding another tribe and seizing their women and possessions became seen as an honorific thing to do. A successful raid meant glory for the victorious men and the things which they seized from others became trophies of their successful exploits. The ownership of these things (female captives, gold and what not) symbolized their honour; and the more possessions one had the more successful and worthy they appeared to the other members of the group.

Besides the samanistic or priestly persons in the group who committed themselves to religious practices, everyone else who did not engage in tribal combat (in other words the women, children, the ‘non abled-bodied men’ and slaves) did whatever else there was to do. This meant they were engaged in the cultivation and preparation of food or whatever else went to further the maintenance of the group. With the drudgery that went with harvesting, cooking, making things, etc. such activities were classed as ignoble (not honourable) and were therefore unworthy for warrior men to partake in. Warfare, government and sports were the right and proper activities for them. Gradually the idea set in that a distinction exists between the different kinds of employment; where esteem and praise is attached to having things seized from or made by another, and debasement or unworthiness is attached to having to do work of the laborious kind.

As technology developed and society evolved it became less necessary to raid others and have slaves. In other words, when the recourse to predation became less beneficial than more productive means like industry or diplomacy. But the desire for wealth and the aggressive mindset to impose mastery over another still finds its way into the minds and actions of people in the present day (think of how the spectacle of international sport replaces the notion of going to war). In modern society, Veblen argued, these predacious ideas survive and live on in the excesses of the leisure class who possess many riches and spend their time doing everything else but manual work. Not having to do otherwise out of necessity is a sign of their status and marks their distinction from others. What Veblen is actually trying to say here is that the sense of reward that

comes with buying and having an expensive watch for example is the same that played itself out with the barbarian warrior enjoying the spoils of war, brandishing the booty he had taken from the less successful combatant. Regardless of whether this watch was stolen or indeed paid for fairly with money which the customer earned, it makes no significant difference in light of the prevailing sense that society places high regard on the person who wears the watch.

Despite the diverse preferences in tastes people have in the present day, whether or not they idiosyncratically place personal regard in owning an expensive watch over some other cheaper one, it still holds true in the mind of society at large that the expensive watch is of higher value (if not in terms of preference then at least in terms of economic value). Access to high-valued things is not an option for everyone; only those with the means to. And so, when we see someone that has these things or is able to have these things we instinctively ascribe to them status and worth. With craft beer, Veblen would say that being able to buy and drink craft beer is a status symbol because it is more expensive and more wasteful than mainstream beer. Yes you read correctly; wasteful, because for Veblen the idea that something extra which goes into making something, beyond the necessity of it needing to be in it, is waste. This doesn’t mean it goes to waste, but rather that more has to be spent in fashioning it.²⁰

Waste can also mean doing something that is inefficient; like going out of your way to get it. Craft beer is not as ubiquitous as mainstream beers; meaning that mainstream beers are conveniently available at every liquor store, restaurant or pub. Craft beer on the other hand is inconveniently unavailable; which makes them wasteful because you have to deliberately seek out and go to the kinds of places where they are sold. Actually those niche markets where craft beers are sold are also inefficient when compared to supermarkets, convenience stores and online shopping. Think about it; they’re only open on the weekends, you have to drive to another part of the city to get to it, finding parking is a hassle, the security of your vehicle parked in these streets is a risk, you have to stand in line of a busy market to get the beer, and after all they’re overpriced. All this is inefficient when compared to the convenience of going to the liquor store just around the corner from your house and buying as many beers as you need at retail price. So what is it about it being wasteful and inefficient that makes craft beer ‘cool’ and worthwhile?

In Veblen’s eyes, the answer lies in being conspicuously wasteful; meaning that others can see that it is wasteful and you can spend more on it than you need to. Driving to another part of the city means you can afford to own a car and can go to any place of your choosing. The hassle of finding

parking, the risk of parking your car there, standing in the line of a busy market is evidence of a kind of equation where all these efforts are weighed out and justified because the end is worth it. That end, the justification for going through all of that effort is: to be there, to be present and to be seen in that very space holding, drinking that craft beer in your hand.

It is in that very moment which signals to the world, out there in the open for all those to see, that you’re partaking in this conspicuously wasteful act. By doing so you’re acting in line with what Veblen called the ‘pecuniary canon of taste’ (or canon of reputability), a kind of system of judging the worth of people with regard to whether they meet the appropriate levels of respectability in what they are doing. Veblen is telling us that there is a kind of guiding system regulating our thoughts and behaviours telling us and others that we are or are not worthy. If that doesn’t sit well with you then think of it as an unwritten code we live by that shapes our points of view and directs our course of action regarding what is valuable and what is not (I mean, what is advertising if not the mouthpiece of this unwritten code telling us what to value?). We might think our own preferences are unique and formed outside the view of society (in other words, you like what you like because you like it, not because other people told you what you like). But this value framework is at once outside and inside of ourselves, it lives through us when we act it out (even if we don’t believe it does). It is characteristic of living in society. Far from being arbitrary, they have roots that stretch back deep into our historical past.

The Take-Away

What good is knowing this? Well, first ask yourself how you’re responding to it. I’d take a guess that if you aren’t immediately on board with it then you’ll react in one of two ways. The first is defensive (“No, that’s not what I do or why I do it”) and the other is naive (“Yeah? so what, who cares?”). The defensive response explains away intention; the intention that you’re doing something because of what other people will think. Some people don’t care if anyone else sees them drinking craft beer or not, they just enjoy the taste (they’re quite happy to drink it at home where no one sees). But here’s the thing, the signal attached to the act is not dependent on the intention (it is still culpable because the meaning is still being carried out). Like that old philosophical question of the tree falling in the middle of the forest, if someone drinks a craft beer in the middle of the forest and no one is there to witness it, is it still conspicuous consumption? The answer, if we listen to Veblen, is yes (especially if that person posts about it on their Instagram story).

To be naive just denies and delays coming to terms with the fact that we do things that are not entirely within our control or beyond our intention to do so²¹. We refute it, why? So we can feel better about ourselves? Here’s all Veblen’s saying: our value system has at its roots in the predacious inclination to possess wealth through violence and we desire to put that worth in evidence for others to see when we are successful. We kind of secretly knew that already didn’t we! Haven’t we always known that? The point is not to avoid feeling bad for ourselves nor to rush to change who and what we are. That’s why it’s futile to mobilize a revolution against the oppressive capitalist structure like the Marxists demanded. Instead if we’re going to do something about it properly, let’s first not take ourselves for granted.

The take-away from Veblen’s wisdom is that what we value is not entirely up to ourselves; it’s tied to the society we live in. And that society, the institutions we live by, have come to us from the past. We mustn’t forget that our points of view and the habits we are accustomed to are part of the evolutionary passage of time. It tells us that the past lives on in the present through the ways we think and act (and it doesn’t take much for some scandal shown in the media to bring out our aggressive animalistic urges on a wide-scale, e.g. riots and looting). What we can try to do is to look at the present and see if our ideas about the world and how we choose to act in the world now is appropriate for the times we live in. Do they lead to a more prosperous future? What do we want to keep hold of? But then again, is it really our choice to do so or not.

We can learn from Veblen’s wisdom as well as his faults. Noting the irony, perhaps we should be weary of how wasteful and unproductive over-criticism can be to ourselves. He was so bent on criticising the society he lived in that he made it hard for him to live in it. Where do we draw the line? In my estimation, he is still an under-acknowledged genius whose intellectual contributions are overlooked. Perhaps in a maturer time (and less predacious society) Veblen’s views could have (and will have) a more real impact. In the end, Veblen has undoubtedly earned the title of Wiseman. Not just because of his genius but because as a man plagued by his own folly like the rest of us, he persevered, stood by his philosophy, and through his stubbornness we’re now able to point the mirror at ourselves and see things more clearly.

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Wiseman: 2

Alan Watts (1915 – 1973) ____

Field of study: Zen Philosophy Nationality: American Archetype: Voice of serenity Best known work: The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951). Binaural Music: Listen now

Wise words:

“Life exists only at this very moment, and in this moment it is infinite and eternal, for the present moment is infinitely small; before we can measure it, it has gone, and yet it exists forever.”

Alan Watts (Become What You Are, 1938)

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Alan Watts: His Life

Born and raised in London's countryside during the First World War, Alan Watts, who would become known as the Godfather of Zen in the West, grew up with a precocious fascination for the mystical and Oriental. He came from a family of modest means. His father was a businessman with the Michelin tyre company and his mother, whose own father was a missionary, cared for the house. Intrigued by storybooks and artworks from the Far East at a young age, Watts spent holidays in France where a family friend introduced him to Buddhism. As a teenager his father would take him to the Buddhist Lodge in London where Watts became more learned in the ways of the East; practising meditation and immersing himself in its library. He began writing for the Lodge’s journal¹, eventually became it’s editor, and by the age of sixteen he was the organization’s secretary.

In 1932 he wrote his first booklet called ‘An Outline of Zen Buddhism’ which was essentially a summary of the works of D.T. Suzuki². During World War II, Watts moved to America with his wife Eleanor and enrolled in formal Zen training in New York. But Watts, discouraged by the method of the teaching there, left without becoming an ordained Zen monk. He was not by any means a scholar just reserved to his books and writings. His talkative nature urged him to find an outlet by giving lectures in bookstores and cafes. These talks formed the basis for his book ‘The Meaning of Happiness’ published in 1940. He moved to Chicago to enrol at Seabury-Western Theological Seminary where he studied Christian scriptures and history. It was there that he was awarded a masters degree in Theology and later became an Episcoal priest at the age of thirty in 1944.

In the Spring of 1950, Watts resigned from the ministry, partly because of an extramarital affair which resulted in his wife filing for an annulment of their marriage. But this was also primarily due to the fact that he could no longer reconcile his Buddhist beliefs with the formal doctrines of the Christian Church. This was owing to his disdain for any religious philosophy that appeared to him to espouse a guilt-ridden or militarily proselytizing³ outlook. Committing himself instead to Buddhism, Watts moved to California in 1951 and joined the American Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco where he taught alongside Saburō Hasegawa and other experts on the East. The fascination that Watts had for Far Eastern art since the days of his youth found its fullest expression during his time at the academy. It was here that he indulged in practicing Chinese brush calligraphy and delved into readings from a wide range of influences including the Vedantas⁴, cybernetics, natural history and sexuality⁵.

Watt’s real claim to fame came from the talks he gave on a weekly radio program on KPFA at Berkeley; as well as his television series called "Eastern Wisdom and Modern Life" on a public television station, KQED. The insights he conveyed in these talks, which at the time seemed somewhat unconventional to commonsense thinking, soon found an avid audience; so much so that his radio broadcasts carried on until 1962 (that’s a running time of nine years). His talks became so popular that even up into the present day some radio stations still replay these on a regular basis. The rise in popularity of his teachings coincided with an emerging wave of nonconformist sentiment that was spanning out from the Bay Area. This is now known as the ‘counterculture’ of the 1960’s which was an amalgam of dissident views (mainly from students and ‘hippies’) on issues ranging from gender equality, civil rights and anti-war protest.

But among these cultural renegades Watt’s influence had its closest alignment with the Beat culture; a literary movement formed around the rejection of standard narrative views in favour of alternative outlooks (like those conceived of in the East). This generation of philosophers and cultural critics was also known for its loose sexual morals, dropout culture and experimentation in psychedelic drugs⁶ like LSD and psilocybin. Watts is said to have experimented with psychedelics as part of a research team who were studying its effects on the human body and consciousness. But Watts later said about the trappings of overuse that: “if you get the message, hang up the phone. For psychedelic drugs are simply instruments, like microscopes, telescopes, and telephones. The biologist does not sit with eyes permanently glued to the microscope, he goes away and works on what he has seen." Taking a step back to look at it all, Watts was a poster boy for the Beat generation and the counterculture movement more broadly. Many would attribute this to his affiliation with other counterculture personalities like Allen Ginsberg⁷.

By the end of the 1960’s Watts resided on a ferry boat harboured in a waterfront community of bohemians in Sausalito, California. But given his celebrity status amongst the conduits of the counterculture the boat became a site of such public attraction and adornment that he escaped to a cabin on the nearby slopes of Mount Tamalpais to be away from the attention. It was there that he became part of the Druid Heights artist community. This community practiced a lifestyle of aesthetic self-sufficiency that inspired Watts. Here they combined architecture, gardening, and carpentry with the philosophical disposition of liberation; being free-spirited. They created for themselves a way of living that they deemed beautiful and more fitting to their far-out constitution.

Watts’ life was fairly short-lived, coming to an end in 1973, dieing at the age of 58. After returning from a prolific tour of talks and seminars in Europe, he passed away during his sleep in the cabin on the mountain⁸. Consideration regarding his death is informed by his friends’ concern over his alcoholism during the days leading up to his passing. He was also said to have been under treatment for a heart condition. There is a small coincidence in the story that he passed away during sleep. He once gave a lecture where to dispense with the fear of nothingness following death he compared it with falling asleep; or at least compared it to the feeling of not having been awake at all. What it will feel like, he said in the lecture, is the same as what it felt like before you were alive; like nothing.

His legacy now endures through his printed works, but especially it continues today due to the internet. There are innumerable videos of his teachings on YouTube. The most common of which

you’ll find are excerpts from seminars of his radio and television broadcasts that are played with calming inspirational music and shown with visuals of nature, outer space or people living out their lives. With the threat of sounding too cheesy, his ethereal voice conveys the very sound of wisdom, or in the very least it is made to sound wise. The rough and scratchy sounded recording tells the listener that these words were spoken long ago (especially to the mind of a millennial); and the reverb effect that is usually added to his voice gives the feeling of depth and importance as if he is speaking directly to us from some distant but eternal realm.

It is no wonder that in the times we live in today, where everyone has access to these videos on their mobiles and where podcasts, audiobooks and the like are so convenient and entertaining for aspirant people on the go; it’s no surprise that the cool, calm and fairly humorous teachings of a laidback Zen teacher like Alan Watts is still listened to and admired by millions. Given the pressures of contemporary life that induce uncertainties about whether life has any meaning at all, it’s not hard to see why Watt’s frank words of clarity are offered as a remedy to those needing spiritual guidance in a period of disillusionment with formal religious institutions. It also offers a point of resolve and contentment for those susceptible to self-destructive inclinations of suicide and narcissism. Alan Watts, the proclaimed Godfather of Zen in America, far from being an intellectual figure of the past, is a source of living wisdom that is carried on in the present (thanks to YouTube). But what did / or does he say that gives such phenomenal acclaim? And why is he, in my view, a Wiseman?

The Wisdom of Zen

Everybody secretly loves a guru. Whether or not we latch ourselves onto their teachings, there’s something about the confidence they exude through their very presence and demeanor that we find comforting. In a tumultuous world they stand steadfast in their convictions like a lighthouse against the rising tide and crashing waves amidst the raging of a storm (even in the storms brought about by their own teachings⁹). However comforting it may be to rely on someone else to have all the answers to the questions you have about life, and know what to do about it, there is a danger in placing too much respect and admiration for these holy men and their enlightened teachings. Almost always they tend to produce zealots¹⁰; and zealots turn out to be mere puppets of ideology, similar to what in virtual gaming are called NPC’s or non-playable characters; those computer-generated characters that roam the world of these virtual environments and react only according to what they have been programmed to respond to.

Perhaps our proclivity to become devoted to gurus has something to do with the paternalistic dependence we had towards our parents that has been ingrained in us since we were infants (Freud would certainly agree with that). The yearning for gurus’ teachings can be likened to an infant suckling on a mother’s breast; where the infant instinctually cries out for sustenance and receives the teat for its milk unquestioningly. Also, the mother in this analogy knows it can satisfy the infant’s craving; and thereby we see the cases of some ego-inflated spiritual charlatans who take advantage and see this dependence as an opportunity¹¹. Or to see it differently, is this devotion to a guru simply an energy-saving strategy to free up space in our cognitive capacities by outsourcing the matters of spiritual concern to those who have dedicated their lives to paving the way to enlightenment or have already gained salvation (Human beings are incredibly resourceful creatures, as we know!). In any case, the message is pretty clear: we shouldn’t take for granted the words of our gurus (spiritual guides or whatever name we choose to give them) no matter how drawn we are to them for whatever reasons¹².

If we ascribed Alan Watts with guru status it would be a mistake. He himself would have warned against it. Even calling him a Zen philosopher would be incorrect. He instead saw himself as a ‘philosophical entertainer’, as someone who plays around with philosophical speculations to bring complicated ideas down to a level that is accessible for the layperson. His aim in this endeavour is not to use argumentative reasoning power to change people’s ideas, but rather to stir the pot, as it were, and encourage people to make up their own minds when confronted with an alternative way of looking at things. So, if he is not a guru and more an entertainer than an academic what was he? I guess to answer that we first need to have some basic grasp on what exactly is Zen. Is it a religion or a philosophy? What does Zen do to help us change the way we look at the world? Let’s start by putting it in historical context.

Zen is a form of Buddhism that originated in China during the sixth-century CE. A mixture of Indian Mahayana Buddhism and Taoism, it was brought to China by the Indian monk Bodhidharma where it spread to Korea, matured in Japan and later made its way to the West in the 19th and 20th centuries. Watts tells us that the word translates into ‘contemplation’ or ‘meditation’. But these direct translations do not help us understand its difference from the Buddhist self-reflection. According to Watts, a more appropriate definition sees Zen as a ‘revolutionary interpretation’ that corrects a mistake in the Buddhist teaching. In Buddhism the attainment of Enlightenment, to reach a state of being called Nirvana, is achieved by letting go of the selfish attitude that is attached to life. Nirvana is a state void of any craving of desire which is at the root of all suffering; and so to be

rid of these cravings is therefore to be infinitely removed from all earthly concerns. Zen is a revolutionary interpretation of this by pointing out that the state of letting go of desire can be misunderstood as an utter denial of life in the world. Zen on the other hand tries to get you out of your own mind but brings you back to the ground; to be aware and pay attention to the here and now; and not focusing too much on the other-worldly.

To understand this better, let’s go through Watts’ guide to Zen meditation. First it starts with just listening. When you hear the sounds going on around you, don’t try to identify them (Oh, that’s a car driving past and that’s a bird in the tree outside - don’t picture it like that in your head). Let go of your mind's attempt to make out what you are hearing. Instead of listening to that voice in your head listen at it. Pay attention to the fact that there is this voice trying to make sense of the noise. Consider these thoughts in your head as if they are also noise, like the noise going on outside around you. You’ll find that the noise outside you and the noise inside you come together to form a happening. They are something happening to you and also coming from you. Whilst you’re doing this you also become aware of your own breathing as both something you can control and something that goes on without you thinking about it. It is voluntary and involuntary. You realize in that moment that breathing is something you’re doing as well as a doing to you (to put it in a more Zen-like way). This, according to Watts, is the art of Zen meditation; when you come to the point of seeing life as a goings-on right now in the present and you are there to bear witness to this happening.

This ‘goings-on’ right now in the present is what in Zen is called the Tao. It’s the Chinese concept of Nature, or rather the way of Nature, and means ‘self-so’; or it happens by itself. An acorn does not become a tree because it tries to or because it thinks about it. It just does. It is in accordance with the Tao. Just to clarify, Zen is not an activity where we try to get in accordance with the Tao or with nature. Because according to Zen, we can never not be in accordance with the Tao. Zen is only a reminder that we are always in the way of nature (and can get in the way of nature). Meditation, in other words, isn’t an exercise where we get closer to who and what we really are. Rather it is just a way of disposing the wrongly conceived idea that we have in some way become lost and are not acting truthfully to our nature. That’s actually all Zen is. Getting out of our own way. The idea that we need to find ourselves is actually what gets in the way of us ‘finding ourselves’. This getting out of our own way is what in Zen is called ‘Wu Wei’ (pronounced woo way).

Wu Wei means ‘not forcing’, or in Japanese: mui, meaning ‘doing nothing’. Imagine you’re caught in a riptide just off the shore. What is the best course of action to take? You could try to swim to the shore as hard as you can. But what ends up happening is that the more you fight the current the worse the situation becomes for you and you’ll end up drowning. The right thing to do is to actually not fight it but rather let the current take you out further into sea until you are in safer waters to swim around the tide. That’s a perfect example of Wu Wei and mui, of not forcing just doing nothing, which brings about what you actually want. This does not mean to simply be passive, lazy or unresponsive in life; but rather to use effort at the right moment¹³. Watts said of Wu Wei that it was the “art of sailing, rather than rowing”; for there are different ways of moving through the water, one through brute effort and the other that catches the flow of the wind and moves with it.

If Wui Wei and mui is about getting out of your way through non-action, Zen has another concept about getting out of the way of your own thoughts. It’s called ‘Mushin’ which means ‘no-mind’. Now in the West (who were Watts’ primary audience) the idea of mushin can be misrepresented as mindlessness; but this takes on negative connotations for being senseless or doing things without thinking about the consequences. It doesn’t mean that at all. To be of no-mind is rather to go about doing without expectation. By not fixating your energy on expecting something to happen you can prepare yourself to receive the unexpected. Like in a sword fight, if you face squarely towards the opponent in front of you, you will be susceptible to an attack from another behind you or from the side. Mushin in the art of the sword fight means to free up or loosen your position in order to be able to encounter a threat from either direction. In the same way if you free up your preconceived notions you will be able to take on a new perspective. That’s what it means to open up in therapy, to be willing to change faults in your own personality.

Watts’ ideas go on in this way, picking up old knowledge from the East and announcing them to a Western audience. He had plenty more to say about the nature of God and life after death, the metaphysics of time and causality, the theology of Christianity, how we are deceived by the idea of the self and that Enlightenment or salvation is something we need to strive towards. It would not be feasible to go on and cover all these insights given the limitations of this essay. And besides, even to elaborate on and on about Zen’s principles is not very Zen. Wanting to go further into the explanation of Zen and desiring to know more about it is to fall into the trap of the infant suckling on the mother’s teat, yearning to attain the precious milk of Enlightenment; (which Wu Wei proves to be futile in any case). Zen is a precious sudden thing. It is coming to the attention of the present¹⁴; which really just means to attend to the present rather than intend upon it.

The Take-Away

In historical context Alan Watts was part of a wider re-education (or better yet, an uneducation) of the Western psyche during the twentieth century¹⁵. This Western psyche is based on a monotheistic view of the Nature of the universe which can be understood and manipulated through reason and sense perception. It is the point of view that originated from the Judeo-Christian world in the Middle East and spread to the Medittereanean in the centuries leading up to what is now, according to the Gregorian calendar, marked by the birth and death of Jesus Christ (BC and AD). It matured philosophically in Ancient Greece with Plato and was later re-invigorated by the rediscovery of Aristotle in the Arabic world¹⁶ in the 12th century. Stepping out of the Dark Ages and spurred on by a renaissance of art, architecture as well as a new found confidence in the spirit of scientific exploration in Europe since the 14th century, it now reaches across the world thanks to modern technology and the expansion of European and American cultural influence since the colonial era which shaped, what is now, modern globalized life. If we understand the West in this way then we can see that Alan Watts was trying to get through to the people who live under its influence by introducing them to an alternative view of the world and suggestions of how to live in it.

The whole thrust of the counterculture of the 1960’s, which Watts was indeed a significant figurehead, was to turn a mirror to the West's way of thinking so as to awaken it from its own slumber as being the only viewpoint. Introducing Zen to the West was Watts' method of bringing this awakening about. How did he do this? And what did this awakening look like? From the Western point of view at the root of your experience in life is a thinking feeling self or the Ego (that’s you, the ‘I’ when you say I am hungry). That center is located somewhere in your head and part of a body¹⁷ which finds itself in a material universe filled with other objects created and conducted by an all-mighty, omniscient Being. The relationship that you have to this Being (or God) is one between a servile subject and a merciful all-powerful Lord or Master¹⁸. Such a relation, Watts tells us, leaves you with an immense sense of anxiety. You are indebted to your Creator for his having made you. And so you live on in constant dread of displeasing Him and falling out of favour in his Graces.

Watts urges us to unshackle ourselves from the anxiety of this view of yourselves, the nature of the universe and our relationship to it. Zen meditation does this by swiftly disposing of the fallacy of the self at the root of the Western outlook. By extending the conception of ourselves out from our own bodies and into the wider universe, not stopping at the ‘arbitrary’ point of the surface of the skin we inhabit, we discover a newer perspective of who and what we are. Taken to its ultimate conclusion

Watts tells us that we are the universe experiencing itself. We are the aware nodes of the universe endowed with consciousness to experience it, respond to it and shape it. The modern materialist outlook of the West saw this consciousness as a good enough reason to define an obvious separation and distinction from the non-conscious beings of the world, like animals and rocks. We are, in this view, thus cut off from the rest of Creation and we ourselves have done the cutting off. This seems ironic, because it is. The normal response from Zen to this ironic realization is: laughter; since laughter is just a releasing of tension. And it is from this release of tension that we can eventually start to make real progress in seeing things and ourselves more clearly.

Zen is referred to as uneducation because it isn’t adding onto our existing body of knowledge like some add-on course to the degree you're studying. Rather it is lifting up the layers of knowledge that lie on top of our understanding that have built up like sediment in our minds. This is why Zen reminds us to look at how we were as children; where the world was filled with wonder before the responsibilities of maturity pressure us to adopt a more serious and senile point of view. I mean, the formal education system in modern life does exactly that: it takes the unlimited potential of children and molds them into adults who can fit in appropriately with the rest of society. That’s why the counterculture opted for dropping out of school and be free. It was a refusal to be molded by society; and also why the rock ‘n roll music they listened to was inspired by the image of ‘sticking-it to the man’, in other words to face up to authority.

Alan Watts is the de facto Wiseman, to the point of being a pop-culture icon. But let us not denigrate the real force of his contribution by merely turning his quotes into catchphrases while we continue to live a life in our own illusions. The take-away from Alan Watts’ words of wisdom, which are listened to today by millions of viewers on the internet, is to be open to alternative ways of looking at ourselves and the world. It doesn’t mean discarding the Western outlook. We don’t need to all become agnostic or atheistic because the image of God we have may just be an idea modelled from the rulers in ancient times. Rather than reject or limit our conception of God, Watts’ welcomes us to develop a further understanding and relationship with God by opening up our experience of the divine in more ways.

If the self is a deception and the world around us an illusion (what the Buddhists called maya), that doesn’t mean we can just do whatever. And although Zen does not exactly have a code of mandated behaviour for us to follow; it does get us to a point where the codes we do follow can be seen for what they really are. Zen confounds our sense of means and ends. It is not a religion or a

theology that prescribes a way of living (as a means) and an afterlife that is to be attained (as an end). Instead, Zen is encouragement against seeing things as mere means being driven to some end. And that’s because Zen reminds us that we are making and using the very definitions that we live by. Without expectating some eternal end we can turn our attention to what’s going on around us. There is a beauty to the flow of the universe and we are welcomed by Zen to witness it and be here in it, right now in the present; not dilute this beauty with the imaginings we place over our experiences in order to make sense of it. Alan Watts says it is all a dance, the dance of universal vibrations. Practicing the piano in order to play well, he said, is when “going over it again, and again, is a dance”. The game of life is played well when you dance with it. Only by letting go do we get to see it. And the wisdom of Alan Watts helps us to let go without becoming lost.

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Wiseman: 3

Jordan Peterson (1962 -) ____

Field of study: Psychology Nationality: Canadian Archetype: Careful motivator Best known work: 12 Rules For Life: An Antidote to Chaos (2018) Binaural Music: Listen Now

Wise words:

“The purpose of life, as far as I can tell… is to find a mode of being that’s so meaningful that the fact that life is suffering is no longer relevant.”

Jordan B. Peterson (12 Rules For Life, 2018)

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Jordan Peterson: The Harbinger

11 October 2016. A crowd is gathered on the courtyard steps outside the Sidney Smith Hall at the University of Toronto in Canada. A rally is underway to defend Freedom of Speech in the face of a looming legislative amendment to the Human Rights Code that will make discrimination against gender identity and gender expression grounds for criminal prosecution. The amendment, Bill C-16, was on its way to becoming passed into law and by doing so it would make the misuse of gender-neutral pronouns¹ a criminal offense (and maybe even a Hate Crime). The central figure at this rally is clinical psychologist and psychology professor at the university, Dr Jordan B Peterson. This event would catapult him onto the global media arena as a harbinger of the times we live in.

“Something is up!”, Peterson lamented in a YouTube clip back in 2016. Looking at it now, it foreshadowed a lively global debate that was to unfold in the coming years. His story reveals to us that something is indeed up. It is the story of how an obscure Canadian psychology professor became one of the most sought after thinkers in the world in a very short space of time. This

journey of Jordan Peterson brought into the spotlight an ongoing rivalry between different interest groups in the media; and along the way he sheds light on some of the most pressing issues all Western culture faces. This journey, these discussion, if you take them seriously enough, reach into the very foundations of the Western ethic and mode of being. It is a call to adventure down and through the depths of oneself and those around you. Not doing so puts the very culture on the line. The stakes are just too high for us to ignore this message of responsibility; and naivete is no longer an excuse.

Weeks leading up to the rally of October 2016, Dr Peterson took to YouTube and posted a series of three videos titled: “Professor Against Political Correctness”². In it he explains that after consulting with colleagues who feared that their job and standing in the academic institution would be in jeopardy if they were to speak out against political correctness he decided to post these videos to outline the dangers of political correctness. In the videos he exclaims that the overreaching powers of political correctness poses a serious threat to Free Speech because the underlying ideology³ behind political correctness is derived from radical left-wing egalitarianism. This ideology does not regard the individual as having anything meaningful to say or contribute besides expressing power against people of some marginalized group. Freedom of opportunity is very welcome and beneficial to all says Peterson, but Freedom of outcome is a nefarious pathological slippery slope. These videos caused a real stir within the university and caught the attention of people who sympathized with the statements Peterson was making. But his outcry also attracted the attention of those who interpreted it as a flagrant attack against trans-gender anti-discrimination.

The rally on the 11th of October was set up as a forum for open dialogue on the campus; where Peterson could make his stance in a public setting and attendees could voice their own response and concerns. But tensions revealed themselves. Protesters against the rally attempted to disrupt the forum by using white noise on a loudspeaker⁴ to drown out Peterson’s speech. Eventually police and public safety personnel were called to step in when physical confrontations occurred⁵. This was not the only public appearance Peterson made that was disrupted by protesters. At Queen’s University in March 2018⁶ chants of “Fuck Jordan Peterson” were made outside the lecture hall where he spoke. Three protestors made it onto the stage for a short period of time, disrupting proceedings, before they ran off; all the while protestors outside were yelling and later banged on the windows, shattering some of them (a display of pure narcissism, Peterson called it)⁷. In the protestors view, Peterson’s right to Free Speech should not be allowed to deny their right to be free from discrimination. By opposing the new Bill C-16 legislation he was blatantly standing in

the way of laws being passed that would prevent trans-people from being excluded from housing, employment and other types of harm because of the way they identify and choose to express themselves along non-binary gender lines. Peterson’s stance however was not to encourage discrimination against trans-gender. It was a warning against the compulsion of speech by the law to call trans-gender people by whatever pronoun they preferred.

This confrontation between two tenets of modern Western freedom, the freedom of speech and the freedom from discrimination, had been lingering in the culture long before the events in October 2016. And its skirmishes would continue to play themselves out afterwards with censorship scandals, further protests and ideological clashes in the media. Essentially this was a battlefield of ideas. It’s a conflict that has brought out into the open underlying contradictions within Western culture that many have taken for granted. This battleground of debate was the stage upon which Peterson would make his debut and rise to prominence as a public intellectual tour de force. Due to his outburst he’s been featured in dozens if not hundreds of media broadcasts, sold millions of copies of his books, reached an audience of millions of viewers on YouTube as well as engaged with thousands of people in person in 160 cities in 40 countries during his global tour of talks and seminars. Today Jordan Peterson has reached intellectual rockstar status having built an immense following but also having attracted a loud and relentless sea of voices which try to discredit him.

The figure of Jordan Peterson takes on two roles in the public eye. He is the lecturer we see and listen to (mainly on YouTube) and the other is the public intellectual we encounter in the media. Both of these personalities however are linked together by a cohesive and consistent stance that Peterson has abided to, and spoken from, throughout his rise to prominence. Whether through this educative role in the university classroom and lecture hall or as a social commentator on the news and on talk shows, Peterson’s singular stance has been to challenge certain views that undermine the ability for people to essentially live out a meaningful life. A meaningful life, according to Peterson, means to take up responsibility for your own suffering voluntarily and despite acknowledging your vulnerabilities and insufficiencies still try to make something meaningful out of your life; and in the world⁸.

Peterson’s underlying motive, to promote meaning as an antidote to the chaos of experience, has been widely misrepresented in the media⁹ and easily misinterpreted by Peterson’s critics. Caricatured as a bigot who is using academics to justify intolerance and espouse sentiments aligned with the ignorant views of the alt-right¹⁰, Peterson’s message has been inundated,

submerged by a tsunami of allegations which (with closer inspection) says more about the preconceptions of his critics than they do of his actual rhetorical position. Some such allegations claim that he is simply being a provocator, exploiting issues of the day just to grow his own fame; or the more arrogant claims that his arguments are not based on real science¹¹. He has also been accused of being a covert propagandist for right-wing ideology even though his arguments are informed by decades of studying the history of dangerous ideologies (both on the left and right extremes of the political spectrum) all in an attempt to discredit and warn us against them. Ironically articles by right-wing idealogues and Neo-Nazi sympathizers, the same group he is accused of being in bed with, have lambasted Peterson for being a Jewish stooge. So it seems the attack against Peterson’s views¹² have come from many different directions and from proponents who are themselves at opposed ends to one another.

The accusation that he is a racist bigot is fraudulent considering he has been inducted to an indigenous Coastal Pacific tribe. The claim that his reasons are not backed by science is a farse given that his work on these matters have be citied and published thousands of times in the relevant literature. His stance against the gender-pay gap is taken as sexism, even though all he is saying is that the difference in pay between men and women is not only attributable to sex (there are other factors that need to be taken into account). If you take the time to sift through the mess of everything that has involved Peterson in recent years, after you’ve explored every kind of critique that has been launched against him, you will come to the plain realization that his stated motive, to encourage personal development through meaningful endeavors, is a message directed at the individual to take stock of their own life and do something with it. All these political debates that he has been embroiled in prove to be mere accidental sticking points which he only made use of to get his message out there. He confessed explicitly that it is coincidental that gender identity and gender expression became the issue at hand which he chose to propel his stance into the public eye.

That’s why an analysis of Peterson from the perspective of any one particular social issue is guaranteed to be a hollow one. The meat of what he really has to say goes beyond the surface of the issue. Knowing this, Peterson’s particular take on any one of these issues stops becoming interesting after a time¹³. And also that’s why going after him over any one of these issues repeatedly also becomes uninteresting the more the issue gets raised. All this goes to say that there is more to learn from Peterson than just looking at his debates on social issues. What we should pay more attention to is the deeper resource, the intellectual archive he is able to access at any

given point (The Jordan Peterson Toolkit, as it were). So what is this toolkit? What wisdom does Peterson have to share with us?

The Wisdom of Individual Sovereignty

“God is dead”, Nietzsche said; the provocative statement by the nineteenth century philosopher still echoes down the valleys of Western thought. Many have wrongfully interpreted it as a sigh of rejoice, but Nietzsche implied something far more dreadful. Dreadful not because it had occurred but because of its ramifications for us. Nietzsche was not professing a theological truth, instead he was professing a profoundly psychological one with profound social consequences. Up until this utterance held sway the basis of Western thought was forever and always grounded by the Christian image of God as the omnipresent, omniscient, benevolent Father; with all things coming from him. All moral conduct, all prescriptive customs shared in the West, all unwavering doubt, all of this was derived from God. When Nietzsche wrote “God is dead” he did not mean that God had died. He meant this grounding was not there anymore. This implies, for example, that the very answer to the question what does it all mean, which was supplied by Christian doctrine, did not have a grounding any longer. The ultimate ramification of this according to Nietzsche (much to his despair) was that we had to now come up with our own basis from which we could orientate ourselves. Our own moral conduct, all new customs and answers.

Peterson is a great admirer of Nietzsche. But Nietzsche is far from being the only or even the most influential figure of Peterson’s admiration. Peterson states explicitly who the intellectual figures are that have influenced his thinking the most (literally he has a reading list of all of them on his website). Besides Nietzsche and Darwin, his list includes: the nineteenth and twentieth century Russian novelists Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Solzhenitsyn, the English novelists Orwell and Huxley, and twentieth century scientists Jean Piaget, Frans de Waal, Erich Neumann, and Jaak Panksepp (the list goes on). Besides these great thinkers there is one other that arguably holds the strongest appeal and influence on Petersons thinking: the psychoanalyst Carl Jung. It’s not a surprise then that Jung had something to say in response to Nietszche’s proclamation of the death of God. A response that tried to redeem the view of religion in the West.

Jung was a student of Freud but his work diverges from Freud regarding his view of the unconscious¹⁴ and also how he perceived religion. Without going into too much detail, Freud

argued that all religious belief was just an elaborate coping mechanism to deal with life. The belief in God (in Christianity) was built up from the attributes of a real judgemental father; it is the mind's impression of parents and authority in general projected out into the world on a universal, divine scale. Heaven, for that matter, Freud saw as having been conceived to combat the fear of death. In other words, it is an idea that lessens the blow of dying and makes living life by following society’s rules worth it. Marx called religion the opium of the masses, meaning that people feed on it like a craving and therefore it holds a controlling force over the whole society. Freud, Marx and Nietszche (unlikely bedfellows, but) taken together are very much responsible for the deportation of religion in Western philosophy.

What do we discard when we do away with religious belief in Western thought? For Peterson we stand to lose the most important idea ever conceived. This is the idea of the sovereignty of the individual. It’s an idea so powerful it brought down the Roman Empire. It’s also the idea that ushered in the abolition of slavery in the West. It’s even the idea behind our modern day democratic constitution. The sovereignty of the individual is the belief in the inherent integrity of each human being; that there is something inalienable to every person which self-evidently gives them undeniable value and worth. What this value is, is outlined by the opening paragraphs of Genesis in the Bible. When the universe was created all was void and without meaning until God spoke the Word and brought being into existence. Man as part of this creation was created in God’s image, meaning that we have the ability to speak this Truth into being as well. The sovereignty of the individual is derived from this idea, that every person has the undeniable capacity to turn the potential of the world into something meaningful through truth. Consciousness is another way of looking at this. Human beings are endowed with consciousness, a spirit as it were, which enables us to sort out and make sense of the chaos of experience.

This ‘making sense’ is called the Logos, a Greek word for ‘reason’, and in Christian thought the Logos is instantiated by the figure of Jesus Christ. Jesus was the Son of God, able to communicate with the divine Father and use his Word in the world to perform miracles. This mediation between matter (or things of the world) and the higher Heavenly source (with the Creator) in order to create meaning, is the Logos. In Egyptian mythology the figure of Jesus is preceded by Horus who was the God of the Sky, symbolizing the light from the sun, and associated with the head of a Falcon; because Falcons soar above the Earth and have better eyesight than humans (they can see up to eight times as far!). All this symbolism translates into the process of paying attention. It is by paying attention and speaking truthfully in the world that we are able to bring meaning into the world, to

work miracles in life. It takes sacrifice to do this and that’s why the ultimate sacrifice is embodied in Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection. It’s also why Horus’ battle with Set symbolizes the rising and setting of the sun each day. The light of the day (life itself) is followed by a period of darkness (death) only to be wrestled out from the underworld of night to bring into being a new dawn, a new coming of the light.

By paying attention to the world around you and sacrificing yourself in the pursuit of Truth you will die a sort of death (a part of you dies). But you will be born again as the narrative goes. And this new part of you can be a different perspective, or a new invention that you have made. It could be giving birth to a new baby or it could be a new piece of music you have written. What this all takes is voluntary sacrifice and perseverance or faith, because there will come a time when your sacrifice will come under scrutiny; you will even doubt it yourself. Even Jesus on the cross felt for a moment before his death that God had abandoned him: “My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” We ourselves, the individual, have to go through this sacrificial transformation in the name of Truth if we want to make the world right (for ourselves, our family and the people around us). Groups can’t do this per se, but individuals can be united in a shared vision of personal sacrifice towards a higher collective goal or state of being. Without this unifying vision, what Peterson calls a unified narrative, like the one embodied in Christianity with the story of Jesus Christ or in Egyptian mythology with the symbolism of Horus, without a shared unified underlying narrative the point of personal sacrifice becomes meaningless.

So then, what is at stake with the exorcism of religion from the West at the hands of Freud, Marx and Nietzsche? The grounds of individual sovereignty begin to fall away, if not defended. Jung, rather than disregard it or turn a blind eye to their critiques, took it very, very seriously. In order to contend with it and find a solution around the loss of the divine, Jung turns back the clock to before these ‘Godless’ times and leads by hand the whole skeptical modern perspective on a journey into the depths of the human psyche; in order to reclaim what these philosophies have dispelled. Jung, according to Peterson, understood that we embody a lot of information in our actions and that these actions are developed from our imitation of other people. If we extend that logic out historically what we find is that the people we imitate are imitating what people did in times before them; and those people of the past in turn were doing the same with the people that came before them; and so on until all time. What this collective imitation means is that we act out patterns of behaviour from this descended lineage of imitated behaviours without us really thinking about it, they're just there inside our minds; and we use them to deal with the world.

Jung called this the pool of imitated behaviours and ideas: the collective unconscious. The way he saw it, these patterns of action and thought get distilled into groups that can manifest themselves as figures in the imagination. We can recognize these figures because they are given characteristics derived from ordinary experience. Like for example the lightbulb on top of your head. This symbolizes coming up with a new useful idea or breakthrough because light is associated in the mind with seeing clearly as opposed to darkness where you can’t see anything. Not being able to see leaves you feeling unsure of what to do; you seem lost as it were. But with the light over your head you can now see through the uncertainty. Also the lightbulb is above you, on top of your head because that’s where your brain is, the place where you do your thinking. Because it’s above you, means that this idea is something outside of yourself, something which is higher than you, something you have to reach for to get. In appearance, the lightbulb also adds to your physical height, making you look taller, and so you seem to be more than what you are. All this meaning is implied in the symbol of a lighbulb over someones head. We don’t actually see this happen in real life yet we all get what it means when we see it drawn. The meaning of this particular symbol is tied to what Jung called the Hero archetype; because the hero is someone who becomes more than what they are by reaching for something greater and facing some fear or overcoming some challenge to bring back a reward to share with everyone else (like a new idea!¹⁵).

An Archetype, according to Jung, represents the distillations of patterns of behaviour gathered in the collective unconscious. And they are reinforced over time because they manifest themselves in the stories we tell, in the art we create and in the things we build¹⁶. They’re not just ‘figments of our imagination’ which is normally said in a ridiculing way. Nor are these figures unique to you in your own mind. Rather, the same patterns and underlying symbols are expressed in the minds of others as well. That’s why, Peterson explains, we’re able to follow the story of an animated film. It’s not just absurd, it’s amazing how we can tolerate sitting and watching these characters move on a screen in front of us for two hours, or whatever the duration of the film. What’s even more incredible is how immensely captivated we are by it. That’s because we all get the ideas expressed in the story. It’s the narrative of these stories which the animated characters are playing out which is the real repository of meaning, the vehicle driving the plot forward. Our ability to react this way and share the same ideas is what makes us human.

So the treasure in Jungian psychology is the realization that these figures of the imagination can reveal to us the very structure of reality and outline our shared sense of experience developed over the course of all conceivable history. That’s why the narrative structures underlying religious belief

are not simply arbitrary. We can’t just push them aside as being imaginary projections of a primitive, immature mind. Jung says to Freud that there’s more to our unconscious than repressed sexual desires. He tells Marx that religion does not just oppress¹⁷ us, it also gives us a shared sense of meaning to work towards. And he let’s Nietzsche know that far from God being dead and that we can just make our own new rules, it’s actually not so easy to make and follow rules unless there’s some underlying archetypal structure with collective backing to give it purpose. Without meaning in it’s ultimate sense, which is what God represents, there is no diaphragm on the stethoscope we use to measure the pulse of life; no magnetic field to direct our compass. Values, without the conception of the highest possible value, cannot supply us with a good enough purpose to align ourselves with them. There can be no purpose without meaning, and without meaning there is only chaos¹⁸.

Meaning for Peterson is being in the right place doing the right thing at the right time. And you know it's right because there is sufficient purpose in the thing you are doing, in other words you know why you’re doing it without thinking why you’re doing it. Purpose is evident when you work towards something and the work you do gets you closer to what you are working towards. A sign that this is happening is when you become so engrossed in doing something that the concern over whether the thing you are doing is right or meaningful becomes a non-issue; it just is. In other words, the question: “Is this meaningful?”, becomes frivolous, unnecessary. The answer does not not even need the question. Look at it this way: you’re working on a puzzle. The meaning is found in the point of completing it. To do this you first have to have an idea of what needs to be done, which is to find the right pieces to fit in where they belong. You also need to be able to complete it, otherwise you’ll lose interest. If you know the puzzle can’t be completed the purpose of completing it loses its meaning. That’s because it’s no longer relevant to you.

If something happens halfway through building the puzzle and the part which you have already put together falls apart (meaning you have to start again) you might feel discouraged to carry on. What if you get to the end and there’s one missing piece left, so can’t finish the whole puzzle. The unfinished puzzle, no matter how far it’s come and how close it is to being completed, starts to seem pointless. All the time you spent building it seems wasted. Essentially, what has occurred in these scenarios is that you had a good thing going, you were proceeding meaningfully building the puzzle because there was an order to what you were doing and that order was getting you closer to completing the puzzle. But then chaos¹⁹ emerged, something happened to disrupt that order, and it made you question the point of building the puzzle. You began to lose faith in carrying on with it

and you might even regret starting it in the first place. For Peterson it takes courage to carry on and build the puzzle after this accident. Resentment, on the other hand, is feeling cheated by the accident and urges you to give up and blame the circumstances instead.

Meaning is also found in the rules of games and maintained by the integrity of the players. So much so that if you’re involved in a game with someone else and that person violates the rules you know it and so do they. Postmodern analysis, which is skeptical of any grand narratives, would say that the other is just using power; the rules of the game are arbitrary anyway. But this view doesn’t explain why this violation is shared and felt by both; why both know and feel it is a violation. Peterson would suggest that maybe there is a real narrative they’re playing out, a participation hierarchy with rules to keep the game going. The breaking down of that hierarchy brings into question the very point why anyone should follow the rules. It is not trivial that there is a moral obligation to follow the rules. Rules like the Ten Commandments or the penal code aren’t just arbitrary and restrictive rules saying what can and can’t be done. They’re guides to ensure the game carries on (given what we know about what has happened from what we’ve done in the past). Not all rules we write down are acted out. But some acts are guided without written rules.

Critical thinking is productive when the rules themselves aren’t serving the purpose they're meant to. It’s the role of discourse between people to sort it out. This is what Peterson means by the mythological trope rescuing your dead father from the underworld. Society’s fall about on their own accord and it’s up to individuals to confront the entropy of our institutions and keep them updated and functioning properly. The West figured out that this can be done through civil dialogue amongst people. National parliaments are an example of this; these are groups of elected representatives who discuss and vote on the issues that affect the country. But postmodernists dispense with the idea that we can have any meaningful dialogue. Add a Neo-Marxist stance onto this and you get the stubborn view that dialogue is just the expression of one group's interest seeking to control another. The notion of being able to reach a fair consensus that serves all interests is not possible because some group’s interest will be privileged while the others are suppressed. Peterson saw this outlook as pathological and not in the least bit pragmatic.

In life’s puzzle, if you voluntarily choose to involve yourself in the pursuit of purposeful activity you can make something out of nothing; you can bring something meaningful into the world. By pursuing meaning you balance out the forces of order and chaos and produce an enduring and sustainable purpose which gives direction to your life. Just like the solution to solving a puzzle,

which is to organize the pile of pieces and try to get them to fit, piece by piece, Peterson’s antidote to the chaos in life is to figure out some kind of order that can work sufficiently with the chaos so that you can make it right. You need to align both chaos and order together and make use of both aspects of experience to set things straight. In psychological terms, Peterson borrows Jung’s idea that we have to integrate both the known and unknown parts into your personality. Men need to incorporate the feminine aspect of the psyche and women the masculine by not allowing the extremes of either to dominate. You can’t just rely on the persona, on the part of your personality you know or like about yourself. It takes a heroic effort to wrestle with the deep and darkest aspects of your personality (what Jung calls: the Shadow) and integrate them into who you are and what you do.

That’s what it really means to be a fully-rounded human being according to Jungian psychology. Peterson sums this idea up with Jung’s profound statement: “What you most need will be found where you least want to look”. It’s up to the sovereign individual to go through this daunting but rewarding process; not the group. It is up to each individual to undergo this transformation within themselves; to transform out from a fractured and underdeveloped self into a differentiated but put together personality able to pay attention in the world and use truth and purposeful activity to create and sustain meaning.

The Take-Away

Find a penny, pick it up, all day long you’ll have good luck. Seems neat, but far too hopeful for Peterson’s liking. Find something useful that you can do and do it, good things are more likely to come from it. Yes, that seems more like Peterson. I’ve watched countless Jordan Peterson videos on YouTube but I can’t say for sure whether or not he actually references the penny phrase above. But the second phrase is his without a doubt. If we lay it out comprehensively, Peterson’s wisdom is contained in the following statement:

Bear your own suffering in existence and get your act together (you do this by paying attention and being truthful). Then find something meaningful to do that will be useful to you as well as to those around you, now and in the future. To do so means you have to undergo the voluntary sacrifice that is required to make it happen.

What makes this all worth it in the face of a nihilist worldview that has proliferated Western thought? Or the victimization narrative, driven by political correctness, impacting our institutions and censoring our use of free speech to challenge the prevailing ideologies at play? What makes it worth it, says Peterson, is knowing the downside of what happens if we don’t. Low self-esteem and resentment for others, increased polarization and a hyper-rationalization over society’s discontents. All of these lead us to resort to primal patterns of behaviour like predation and violence. Follow that path down long enough and you get the kid shooting up a school or the man gunning down a church. Taken to its extreme you get the atrocities of war and genocide with Nazi Germany, or the famines of Communist China and forced labour camps of Soviet Russia that killed millions through out the twentieth century. All done in the name of what? A corrupt and insufficient ideology put in place to make up for the Death of God.

No, the evidence of the devastating consequences of not pursuing Truth are just too visceral to bypass the responsibility each and every individual has to pursue meaning. Peterson claims that we might not know precisely what is good or what is the right meaning to follow, but we can almost certainly agree on what is evil (more pain than is necessary to bear). If we are dedicated to this end we can orientate ourselves to prevent evil like that from happening. He’s not saying that doing something meaningful is bound to make you happy. But he is saying that you will find happiness in pursuing meaning; in the same way that going to the dentist isn’t pleasant but getting rid of that pain in your tooth makes it worth it. Or how studying for an exam overnight might not bring you the joy a party might but the rewards of graduating outweighs the temporary caprese from one night of revelry.

Peterson is being pragmatic but it is a pragmatism informed by a deep understanding of evolutionary biology, the behavioural and neurosciences and gatherings from his clinical psychiatry. In other words, his message is not a hollow set of wishful thoughts on how to make the world a better place. The pragmatic call to set yourself and the world straight is grounded in accepted and proven scientific, psychological principles. It’s also not a particularly bright depiction of the state of things as they stand. Neither painting with the brush of hopeful optimism nor kicking over the paint-can with nihilistic pessimism, Peterson’s philosophy is about measuring the outcomes between an optimism to move forward and a pessimism to stop and be careful about what we are doing. His enemies are those who aren’t attentive enough to this measurement, willfully blinded by the over-optimism of progress or otherwise stunted by an arrogant and ill-conceived sense of pride in not seeing the point.

Peterson’s sociological diagnosis is that the West is threatened by an overwhelming and overbearing excess of chaos without a suitable framework of order to keep it in check. This is partly due to rapid technological advances²⁰ in the modern world which have disrupted traditional modes of being. But apart from the chaos brought on by technology is the corrosive effect of identity politics on the culture, as well as the crisis in masculinity (nihilism in the culture more generally). He is also concerned about the polarization of political opinion into camps that speak past one another (with populism or radical right-leaning fringe groups on the one side and the left-wing liberal agenda²¹ on the other). The role of broadcast media²² is also in a chaotic state where targeted audience-group sensationalism is valued over unbiased informative programming in the pursuit of ratings. Taken all together, the institutions that we rely on to sustain us with meaning and keep our societies functioning in the West are at jeopardy because the mechanism by which we keep these institutions in place (free speech and individual sovereignty) is not being allowed to do what it needs to do. We need responsible individuals to bring this mechanism back to life.

The take-away from Peterson is that what society needs is for individuals to take up responsibility. Responsibility for themselves and responsibility for others and the world. Ultimately this comes down to caring enough to do something about it but transcending the pathological ideologies that offer insufficient solutions. It comes to being brave enough to go through a real transformation of yourself to mediate between order and chaos forthrightly and bring about something meaningful, something that at least adds less suffering to the world (no matter how small or seemingly insignificant). It is our responsibility to find meaning through purposeful activity by following what interests us and paying attention to how that interest manifests in the world. When more people do this, whether or not they believe it, they start to form something approximating a shared unified underlying narrative that works for the betterment of them and others, not only now but into the unforeseeable future.

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Three Wisemen

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It’s not a coincidence that the title Three Wise Men borrows its name from the Three Kings in the Biblical story; the Kings who traveled from the East, following a star, to give offerings to the baby Jesus Christ. Veblen, Watts and Peterson are men that come bearing gifts of wisdom. That’s the way I see them. The Three Kings from the Biblical story are said to have been priests who studied astrology (the forerunner to modern day astronomy) and so they were visionaries who paid attention to the heavenly bodies above. To concern yourself with things that are beyond this world can be valuable, but also it can lead you to lose sight of what is right here in front of you. Alan Watts tells us that Zen re-interprets the parts of Buddhism which draw attention away from the experience of the here and now; and invites us to become its witness. Yet, just as much as we need to be in the world, Peterson informs us that, more than being a witness, we have to pick up responsibility and do something in the world. Veblen does not give much advice for what we ought to do or how we ought to be. His wisdom is more a description of how things are than a prescription for what ought to be done. Even though their ideas are quite disparate from one another, together they share with us a tremendously deep understanding, that is both illuminating and pragmatic. And while each of the Three Kings in the Bible are remembered for being wise, they did each bring a different gift.

I am a graduate from the Humanities and the Social Sciences; which means I studied History, Philosophy and Sociology. My time at university was a profoundly transformative experience. I never considered myself an intellectual, my grades at school certainly pay testament to that fact. But something happened during my time studying these subjects that changed me. I am reminded of a scene from the fictional book Siddhartha by Herman Hesse. Siddartha is a young man born to a Brahmin family, the learned caste in India in the 5th century BC. He voluntarily left his house as a youth to become a wandering ascetic. After many years foregoing Earthly pleasures by fasting and meditating he visits a wealthy merchant looking to get a job so he can buy fancy clothes to impress a beautiful woman named Kamala. In his interview with the merchant he’s asked what his skills are. Siddartha replies: “I can think. I can wait. I can fast.” To which the merchant responses: “What’s the use of that?” Ask any BA student and they will all tell you that they have been asked that question about their choice in degree. In South Africa where I’m from, B.A. is mockingly called a “Bugger All” degree, meaning that it does nothing and will get you nowhere.

I asked myself that question, was what I was studying worth it? Was it going to be useful? And to be honest, the answer was not always comforting. But I’ve come to really appreciate my studies, especially after reading Siddartha and how he responds to the merchant. Being able to think, wait and fast is the smartest thing you can do, Siddartha says, because a man who can wait calmly “knows no impatience, he knows no emergency, for a long time he can allow hunger to besiege him and can laugh about it”. What might seem pointless to people like the merchant, who are so concerned about money or material possessions, can actually be of immense value. If I think to myself what good is History, Philosophy and Sociology. Well, from History we are told that if we don’t learn from the mistakes of the past we’re bound to repeat it. From Philosophy: there is more than one way to solve a problem, and some problems may not be problems at all. And finally from Sociology: there’s more to us than we think. Put these together and you become a formidable critic.

Criticizing an idea or even the whole culture of a people is easier when you’re not part of that culture or don’t see the value of the idea. Rites and stories from other religions seem bizarre to those who don’t worship that religion. Just like making fun of another person's dress because you don’t subscribe to their taste in fashion comes quite naturally to some. But it’s different to be a part of a culture and turn your criticism against the ideas and customs it prescribes; in other words, to criticize your very own way of life and the society you live in. Well, that is if you still want to feel fully at home inside your own culture afterwards (Don’t shit where you sleep!; as the saying goes). Studying the Humanities, and especially the Social Sciences, means you are made to criticize your own culture. In fact, there is a profound sense that if you don’t somehow look at your own society differently after your degree, you haven’t really learnt anything. Let’s just say sleeping in the bed of your culture, as a Humanities student, sometimes stinks.

I had to wrestle with this existential matter. The matter between trying to understand what is right but also understanding in what ways it is wrong. Just do one single semester of Philosophy. The first week you’ll learn about this ancient thinker; and he seems to have all the answers. Then the following week you learn about another philosopher and you admit that he has the better answers than the guy before. The weeks keep coming and the philosophers keeping rolling and by and soon you find yourself on the intellectual highway, this super network of twisting lanes and traversing on-ramps; filled with potholes, noisy cars but thankfully some free lanes open, for now. How do you enjoy a rave when you know that this is just a modern day reenactment of a tribal dance ceremony where symbolic representation of the sacred is severed in a society alienated from religion? How do you feel a sense of pride in your country when you’ve learned about the atrocities that have taken

place in the past and you encounter the legacy of it’s brutality on a daily basis. This is the stuff of the humanities students living angst and dread.

There are two destructive ways of coping with this. The one is to forget it. Not in a Zen-like way, but in a way that distracts you from having to confront reality. You don’t need to worry about the contradictions of capitalism when you’re earning enough money to buy cool things but still give a bit away to charity here and there. Quick and easy forms of entertainment like watching series and scrolling through memes do well to put your mind in a kind of hamster wheel (just one more, okay no, just one more). Alcohol, drugs, party’s and who can ignore the thrill of a little personal drama? All the stuff of the hormonal playground, the great distraction from pain and responsibility. Let’s call this the revelry in the trivial. The other destructive coping mechanism we can call the pathological fixation of ideology. Basically you choose a point of view and stick with it. In the universities the lure of ideology is a serious temptation. Besides the peer pressure to be part of a group, more a consequence of fashion than anything, really, there’s something comforting in knowing where you stand in the debate. Being the mouthpiece for an ideology is pathological because you react in predictable ways, which just means you aren’t capable of conceiving your own original thought. Both of these choices are destructive because they tend to be addictive and self-satisfying. In the end, they keep you further from confronting the truth.

I’ve found my own alternative coping mechanism, one that abides to an idea without becoming an acolyte and that knows when to revel in the trivial yet still see the trivial as anything but. It’s this: The Three Wisemen. They’re my archetypes. Veblen is the ruthless critic, Watts the voice of serenity, and Peterson the careful motivator. You can’t take society or yourself for granted. It’s not this one thing of many things which are obvious and unchanging. The pleasures of civility may give us the illusion of peaceability, but underlying civil order is a predacious element. “One’s neighbours often are socially not one’s neighbours” says Veblen. How and what we value is crafted by society more than we care to admit it. And we are living in a social environment surely governed by processes of selection and adaptation just as the natural environment is subject to natural selection. And on that matter, the conceptual lines defining when society starts and ends and where nature begins is voided by the stark reality that society is not something separate from nature. The impact of climate change does enough to make us wonder: When a tsunami takes out a beach town, is the town just in the way of the rising tide or is it the other way around? Thanks to the ruthless criticism of Veblen we can start by not taking things for granted. And when you begin to do that you can actually appreciate things for what they really are; and stop lying to yourself.

In Sociology you learn about conflict scripts, the different ways in which people deal with and resolve conflict. I’ve learnt that in my conflict script a bad attitude or being negative is a problem you put on top of your problems that are already there. The best way to handle situations where negativity isn’t warranted is to just let it go. Not to give in, but to take a step back and watch how things happen by themselves. That's the gift of Zen. Alan Watts, as the voice of serenity, reminds us to be cool, calm and collected; we are the universe looking back at itself. David Hume, a philosopher some 200 years before Watts, wrote “Be a philosopher; but amidst all your philosophy, be still a man”. For all your yearning to have everything figured out, there is a world happening out there to a part of. While you sit and think about it, it’s here, happening. Don’t just be resigned to finding the solution to the problem, go partake in the dance of the universe and find out what it has to reveal to you.

With sincerity, Watts lays bare the traditional view in the West that we are only our individual self; that we just find ourselves in the world but think we’re somehow separate from it. Zen’s uneducation unlimits us. It does not break down the image of one God only to replace it with another. It is the halfwit who confuses having divine substance with being a deity. We have this craving to know who we need to become; more than we actually care about being that. Who is this person I need to be? Watt says: becomes what you are. Start now, because there is only the present right here. There is no past and no future, only the constant rolling on of the present. So this future self you’re putting off becoming because you think it’ll happen in the future is futile. Here and now till infinity.

The sad truth though is that for all we know, you don’t have infinity. You only have a limited time to live this universal dance. So how do you move forward in a meaningful direction? Jordan Peterson, the careful motivator, tells us to pick up some responsibility. Responsibility for what we do and the people around us. It doesn’t mean we need to care for everyone else, just that we are careful in what we are doing. To do this you have to pay attention and be truthful. We can’t rely on someone else to give us meaning. I mean, of course we can and it’s easy to do, but it is not always right. What is right? We don’t have a clue to be honest. But at least we know what is wrong, what is evil; and we can try our best to get away from that. So meaning is found in doing what is right; and doing something right means we move a little further away from living in hell. This meaningful thing we do, no matter how seemingly insignificant, it must be of benefit to you and everyone else. And not just now, but continue to benefit us into the future. That’s why the idea of faith is not arbitrary and our efforts to put things straight is not the byproduct of some oppression hierarchy just trying

to wield power over others. We can find purpose in this and if we all start doing this way, it doesn't matter if we do it badly in the beginning. You don’t even need to really believe that it’s coming from some large divine purpose. Just by doing it, if we all just start pursuing meaning for ourselves, then an overarching but also underlying ethical narrative will take route in our society.

Like Goldilocks and the Three Bears, The wisdom of the Three Wisemen is to be critical and see the world for more than it appears; but not so critical that we think everything is meaningless. Be laidback and let the play of the universe do its thing; but not so lax that we don’t do anything useful about it. And pursue what gives you meaning, but also pay attention to what that does to you and how it affects those around you.

End.

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Acknowledgements ____

This project would not have been possible without the support of the following people: Tristan Bryson, Karen Bryson, John & Viv Cannan, Jean Wootton, Matt Gruter, Luke & Hayley Bryson and lovely Lara Sue Nevin.

I’d also like to thank the following organizations that provided the source of facts and information referenced throughout the book: Alan Watts Organization (https://www.alanwatts.org/), Jordan Peterson (https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/) and the Veblen Institute (https://www.veblen-institute.org/).

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Notes ____

Thorstein Veblen

1) Ostensible: put out there for all to see.

2) And you can imagine what they’re also able to get away with, given their bargaining power and network.

3) Institutions are social conventions; habits of thought and accustomed ways of doing things (e.g. the institution of marriage or the strictures of the law).

4) Considering his pragmatic outlook and bias in favour of what he determined as productive economic activity, he questioned what effect our habits and thoughts have on the present state of the economy and in what ways they might shape our future.

5) Including the lasting consequences these decisions and choices have on society at large.

6) On top of the injury to his pride Veblen also apparently loathed the town of Columbia where the university was situated; dreading the time he spent there.

7) The degree to which the tenants of this movement has had any significant effect on the world is shown quite plainly in the rise and success stories of tech startups in Silicon Valley and other such entrepreneurial hubs across the globe. Apple, Facebook, Google, Space-X (the list goes on) all of these afford substantial evidence of how the world is now shaped by software engineers-turned CEOs. Ask yourself this: in a foot-race between the proletarian revolution and the engineers with their revolutionary products, who would you rather want to come out on top?

8) I studied at Stellenbosch University and the University of Cape Town.

9) In Durkheim’s theory, society is organized like the structure of an organism; each and every part serves a function for the whole. Law, education, commerce all these have a part to play in keeping society working properly. If one function began to break down then its dependent functions would start to fall out of order as a consequence (e.g. if the law breaks down then devious behaviours go on unchecked. In the same way, if the heart stopped beating the other organs of the body would start to shut down).

10) Don’t get me wrong, the tour de force of Marx and the others held immense sway over my intellectual leanings, and with good reason (they still do to this very day). As an avid student with a large mouth for asking questions and a hungry belly for answers, their ideas did more than enough to satisfy the appetite and suspend further cravings.

11) The best illustration of the absurdities of gentrification is shown in South Park’s nineteenth season which follows the plot of the townsfolk who (needing to persuade Whole Foods to build a store in their town) turn the derelict part of the town (actually the backyard of the poorest family: Kenny’s house) into a hip-and-happening food, art and nightlife district called SoDaSoPa (Watch on YouTube here).

12) Post-industrialism just means that part of the contemporary economy that is preoccupied with providing services and ‘experiences’ rather than goods. If industrial means the harvesting of coffee beans on farms then the post-industrial is the cafe where the coffee is served. What makes this distinction so peculiar today is that businesses are trying to dissolve this separation between production and consumption or at least have the spatial distance between the stages become narrower (for example the farm-to-table movement). Supermarkets do this by making the butchery more open and visible to shoppers (despite its visceral display of dead hanging animals). If this were taken to its extreme the slaughter itself would be put on display. But I guess the sensibilities of urbane consumers does indeed have its limits.

13) The spirit in business nowadays to offer goods and services which leave a positive impact on human life and the world rather than contribute to its demise. Read John Mackey’s “Conscious Capitalism: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business: (2013).

14) I call this the aesthetic of discernment; which is basically when people form their taste around how the things they use are made. Is the chicken free range? Are the materials manufactured sustainably? Is it diamond or faux? The aesthetic of discernment is also formed around the process of what happens after something has been used. Bamboo straws instead of plastic because bamboo is eco-friendly and plastic is harmful to the environment. Another way of looking at it is that people feel good about themselves when they buy these kinds of products. The aesthetic is therefore a sign of not just feeling good, but being good. It is obvious today why this aesthetic has become fashionable and how businesses intentionally feed into this aesthetic in order to attract customers and sell products.

15) Sometimes called craft beer other times specialty beers or microbrews because they’re brewed in small batches and sold in particular pubs and restaurants. Mainstream beers, sometimes called commercial beers (de facto) or colloquially as ‘monobeers’ because they tend to be the same kind (lagers) similar in appearance and are ubiquitously sold in all liquor stores and offered as the default options wherever beer is sold. As far as the economics are concerned, craft beer is a small part of the global beer market (25% as of 2019 - Statistica.com). And in terms of consumption it comes nowhere near the scale and reach of the multinational conglomerates like Anheuser-Busch and SABMiller.

16) It’s useful to point out that these entrepreneurs were not all simply opportunists seeking to profit from a new consumer trend. Many in fact exhibited a genuine passion for making beer they deemed to be of greater quality than mainstream beers. Keeping in mind the economics and risks of starting these businesses, one first-hand account told me that hundreds of thousands of his own money was wasted, spent experimenting on perfecting the right flavour and quality. Another expressed quite plainly that there were far easier ways to make money than going through the effort and risk of becoming a craft brewer. In other words, there was enough evidence to

suggest that a genuine consideration for the craft of brewing extended beyond the motive of money simply. This was evident even to the degree that politics existed between brewers regarding the perceived integrity of another’s product (in some cases this came down to a critique in the use of some single ingredient or brewing procedure of another brewer).

17) Make no mistake, these craft beers are more expensive. At the time of the research a six pack of craft beer compared to an ordinary six pack of beer would normally come in at a 50% price disparity increase. And as far as the economics of volume are concerned, a single 330ml craft beer in a liquor store can be bought for the same price (if not more expensive) than a 750ml quart. And in a restaurant a single draught of some craft beers can cost the same amount for an entire six pack of mainstream beer at a liquor store.

18) The most prominent market of this sort is the Old Biscuit Mill in Woodstock. Just by attending and being present at this market all of what is being said here will become blatantly obvious.

19) Many if not most of the draught dispensing stations (known as ‘towers’) at pubs and restaurants are in fact owned by reps of the brewing companies. It is they who inspect and maintain the standards of these draught towers to ensure that the customer gets a well-served beer each and every time. These are state of the art with cooling controls and are built to handle plenty of volumes being poured continuously. At the markets and the pub where I poured and sold craft beer the equipment we used was pretty make-shift and regularly gave us problems. Due to the nature of these microbreweries’ brewing process, the output between the different brews can vary quite substantially. Also the different breweries have different methods of carbonation for example which can affect how they pour on certain dispensing systems. And so in the hustle and bustle of serving a rowdy pub with frequent keg changes needing to be made and where pouring beer quickly for eagerly awaiting customers is of paramount importance, you can imagine the frustration on both sides when there are either pouring complications or the customer doesn’t like the taste of this beer because it’s not what they had before. At the end of the day, at least when you’re ordering a Castle or a Heineken you know what you’re getting and you get what you expect.

20) Veblen uses the example of bookmakers. Consider what is needed to make a book, what is the minimum amount needed before it can sufficiently serve its purpose of being able to be read. For Veblen anything that goes into the making of a book beyond the point of serving this function is wasteful. Artistic bookmakers who use gold-lining along the pages, old-style illustrations and type which take more time and expense to make than cost-effective paper and print type are in fact wasteful. The fact that is wasteful makes it more valuable and expensive. The price difference between the artistically-made book and the factory printed one is justified in economic terms, but also in social terms, because the worth of the artistic one is ranked higher because more value was spent in making it.

21) Freud followed shortly after Veblen, and his work on the unconscious illuminated even more disturbing characteristics about ourselves.

22) Veblen had lost his investments at the close of his life and lived off meager royalties and donations from a former student.

Alan Watts

1) The Buddhist Lodge’s journal was called: ‘The Middle Way’

2) D. Suzuki was a Japanese author who wrote about Buddhism and Far Eastern Philosophy.

3) Proselytism is the method of gaining followers through conversion, in other words persuading people to change their opinion or point of view. Militant proselytism is to convert through the imposition of a strict order or discipline that needs to be adhered to. Best guess is that Watts disliked its socially oppressive character; the way that people are pressured by others to become adherents to an unwavering set of tenets not based on consent or the use of one’s own reasoning, but rather through coercion.

4) Vedantas are a Hindu Philosophy, literally meaning "end of the Vedas"; it explores ideas of liberation and knowledge that emerged from the speculations contained in the Upanishads (The ‘holy book’ of Hinduism).

5) In 1958, Watts toured parts of Europe where he met with psychiatrist Carl Jung (student of Freud) and the German psychotherapist Karlfried Graf Dürckheim.

6) His experiences induced by these drugs influenced his books that came out during the 1960’s.

7) In 1967 Alan Watts hosted the Houseboat Summit, where he recorded a podcast with poets Allen Cohen and Allen Ginsberg, psychedelics specialist Timothy Leary and Zen monk Gary Snyder.

8) Alan Watts' ashes were scattered half near the library of Druid Heights and the other half at the Green Gulch Monastery.

9) If you haven’t heard of the scandal of Rajneeshpuram, a new age settlement established in Oregon in 1983 by followers of the guru Rajneesh, then go do yourselves a favour and watch the Netflix documentary Wild Wild Country.

10) A zealot is a person who is fanatical and uncompromising in pursuit of their religious, political, or other ideals. 11) See the documentary which covers the allegations of abuse committed by Yoga guru: Bikram Choudhury.

12) The scandal of sexual abuse of children (particulary young boys) by Catholic priests is well reported (See the film and Academy Award Winner for Best Picture: Spotlight (2015)). These cases reveal the atrocious proof that, for whatever psychological reasons, priests elicited sexual acts with some young members of their congregation. This happened on a wide scale, repeatedly and continued to happen because, first, the child victims’ have an unquestioning diligence to an ordained man of their church (‘Father’) and secondly because the parents who were aware of such acts chose to rather let it carry on unchallenged in fear of bringing on social chastisement upon themselves or else dared not disrespect or tarnish the holy Church of their faith.

13) The martial art of Judo means the way of gentleness; where the whole point is to get into the right position where at the right moment you use the weight of your opponent to dislodge them from their position with the least amount of force required to do so.

14) In Zen the sudden moment of realization of awareness is called satori.

15) In this his efforts can be ranked alongside the psychoanalysts (Freud, Jung and Adler) and the phenomenologists and existentialist philosophers (Husserl, Nietzsche and Satre).

16) The numbers we use in the West (1,2,3,4...) is actually a numbering system conceived from the Arabic world called the Hindu-Arabic numeral system.

17) Watt’s called the Western idea of your body as just a ‘bag of skin’.

18) Watts explains that this image of God as the Ruling Father is derived from the idea of Pharaohs in Ancient Persia who kept order and ruled the society ‘from above’ the common folk.

Jordan Peterson

1) Gender-neutral pronouns express pronouns for sexually non-binary persons. Some trans-gender people do not identify as male or female and so they do not accept the designation he or she but instead ‘they’ or any of the more novel ones like ‘ze’ or ‘zir’.

2) Watch: Jordan Peterson - 2016/09/27: Part 1: Fear and the Law

3) He is skeptical of political correctness because in his estimation the same ideological substrate that guides their utterances, the sentiment in favour of equality of outcome or censorship, is the same from which the radical egalitarianism and left-wing authoritarianism of the Bolsheviks in Soviet Russia or Communist China under Mao. This destructive ideology, which led to the deaths of millions of people over the course of the twentieth century, was discredited in the social sciences until it made a resurgence from the 1970’s onwards under the influence of postmodern French intellectuals Foucault and Derrida in the 1970s. Their philosophy was bent on

deconstructing Western culture from a perspective of power. Power in the West according to them was expressed in relations of domination and exclusion where groups who had power possessed it solely due their exclusion and marginalization of others.

4) Watch: Dr. Jordan Peterson speaks at UofT Rally for Free Speech

5) Watch: Rebel Media - Toronto Radicals Fight Free Speech

6) Watch: Protest outside Jordan Peterson's visit to Queen's campus

7) Watch: Jordan Peterson Calls Out Disruptive Protesters at Queen's University

8) If life is a puzzle we want to solve, then we better be prepared to face the challenge by starting with ourselves. Before we can confront the problems of the world we first need to set ourselves straight. If we don’t start from this presupposition, that we might be riddled with insufficiencies that need fixing, we will proceed dangerously.

9) Joe Rogan, one of if not the most watched private podcasters in the world, exclaimed that Jordan Peterson is the most misrepresented figure in the world today, see here.

10) The alt-right is a white nationalist fringe movement primarily active online but also organizes rallies, like the infamous Charlottesville “Unite the Right” (‘tiki-torch’) protest in August 2017.

11) Peterson has been published in over a hundred peer-reviewed articles that have been cited over 8000 times.

12) The persecution of Peterson extends further to supposed censorship from the university where we worked. After receiving more than one formal letter of complaint by the university stating that he discontinue pushing his stance against Bill C-16, Peterson incidentally was given the proof he needed to justify his stance even more.

13) Whether someone is for or against a given topic of debate is not a point of intellectual interest from the perspective of the issue. It may be of interest if we wanted to sketch out the personality and preference of the person doing the debating, but beyond that it is not interesting. What is interesting is the subject material and the sport between the participants; i.e. what is actually being said in the debate and the witnessing the jousting contest between the debaters.

14) Freud’s description of the human psyche is made up of three parts. There’s the Ego, the Superego and the ‘id’ (pronounced not as I.D. like identity document, but more like Ed). Now the id are instinctual drives or desires; these are impulsives that have a life of their own, and when acted out they almost have no other basis apart from themselves. So like the drive to eat when you have a ravenous appetite, or if a child fears thunder the urge to hide under their covers, that’s the id (think of it as our animal instincts). The Superego is the regulating

mechanism that filters in or blocks out implusives from the id. If you think of a nightclub the Superego is the bouncer and the id is the line of people outside wanting to get in. The Superego decides what should or should not be acted on (yet there are sometimes people who get inside without the bouncer knowing). The Ego in this imagery are the people that get into the club. If the Superego is informed by what is considered appropriate by society’s standards, then the Ego is our persona, the character of attitudes and actions that we present to the world. The problem or disorders someone has in their personality will show themselves in the Ego. In order to treat them, which was Freud’s goal as a psychiatrist, you have to delve into that person’s individual psyche beyond the Ego and look at the Superego and the id so you can find out where these problems arise.

15) There are even creative depictions of the lightbulb symbol stylized in the shape of an exclamation mark (!). Otherwise known as the Eureka moment, Eureka is itself an exclamation, the exclaimed response to figuring something out.

16) Watch: Jordan Peterson - Jungian Psychoanalysis In A Nutshell

17) Order in symbolic representation has two archetypal forms: the corrupt tyrant and the benevolent, wise king. Structures fall apart on their own accord, but order has a tyrannical side that can speed up that entropy. This happens when order does not do what it must to in order to maintain the hierarchy it instantiates. Peterson argues that order based on buy-in and a mutually shared vision by the constituent elements that order is imposed on will last longer and do more good than order imposed illegitimately in the eyes of its constituents. Peterson calls the former the first kind of power: competence, and the latter: corruption. Competence is found in the archetype of the benevolent wise king. Order is oppressive and judgemental but like a benevolent ruler it can lay out a structure that is just and well-informed. The king is wise if there is reliable feedback of communication between himself and his subjects. His ability to respond successfully to this communication adds to his competence in ruling a lasting and productive dominion.

18) For Peterson our experience is made up of chaos and order. Order is what we put in place to understand experience. Order is sheet music to understand a concerto; or legislation to discriminate wrongdoing. It’s the domain of what we know and when things are going according to plan. Symbolically, order is represented by the masculine because it imposes itself upon existence, composing a dominance hierarchy, although it cannot generate anything new on it’s own accord. Chaos on the other hand is symbolically represented with the feminine because it is the source from which new things emerge; that’s why nature is symbolized as Mother Nature.

19) Besides this creative aspect from which new forms are generated, chaos also has a destructive aspect as shown in the breaking down of life in order for new life to arise. Basically chaos is what we don’t have a grip on. Chaos is getting fired from your job or finding out your partner is cheating on you. Chaos is a power cut or loadshedding and your enter neighbourhood no longer has electricity. When there is an excess of chaos there is an imbalance between you being able to do things and things being done to you without your control. So you in

effect lose your ability to cope because uncontrollable and unpredictable forces are denying you from doing so. Peterson’s antidote to the excess of chaos is: meaning.

20) The workplace has become more feminized as more women enter the workspace and have longer career paths owing to the impact of the birth control pill which has allowed womens to postpone pregnancy and pursue their careers instead. Or how there is a generation of young people who are more susceptible to depression than any other preceding them; and this is due in part to the effects of social media which can induce feelings of inadequacy by comparing their lives to the lavish ideals portrayed in others’ posts.

21) In Peterson’s view this postmodern critique snuck into the discourse (“through the backdoor”) a Neo-Marxist agenda; meaning that the Marxist dichotomy of power relations between the bourgeoisie and the working class or proletariat has been substituted with other dichotomies that have their basis in relations of cultural oppression: men vs. women (patriarchy), heterosexual vs. homosexual (homophobia), black vs white (racism), etc. This postmodern, Neo-Marxist doctrine when formulated clearly states that modern society is characterized by the victimization of marginalized groups by an oppressive patriarchal hierarchy dominated by rich and powerful white men. With this philosophy having spread deeply across the humanities, and given its Marxist bent which sees philosophy’s only purpose is to drive social change, these ideas have spilled out into the world outside of academia.

22) Established media channels are also challenged by alternative sources on the internet like independent podcasters and YouTubers which is of course the platform from which Jordan Peterson gained popularity.

Sources ____

https://www.alanwatts.org/

https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/

https://www.veblen-institute.org/

About the Author ____

Felt Habit is the music project of Chad Lee Bryson. Born and raised in Cape Town, South Africa; he graduated from Stellenbosch University in 2012 and went on to get his Masters in Sociology from the University of Cape Town. He moved to Vietnam in 2020 where he began writing and recording music under the alias Felt Habit.

Discover more at: www.felthabit.com Follow on: @felthabit

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