2017-02-17: Maps of Meaning #4

Meetings
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topic

discussion notes

  • Jordan Peterson: Reality and the Sacred is the Reality and Sacred lecture from a different year, and is quite interesting and relevant to the 2017 Maps of Meaning lectures

  • Bread and circuses and the Motion Picture Production Code

  • Teared down, rebuilding pieces, not the same person can be made as before

    • Desire to go home, as as a child you were built up - but going home as an adult, tears you down further into a child - due to the progress you made from child to adult

    • Mother without friends - not raising child to be independent integrated unit - but instead meaning and friend to mother

  • Parental responsibility to create an integrated independent child

  • Appeal to authority, disappointment, parents, adulthood

    • Being an adult is recognising that your parents views that are based on authority alone no longer matter

    • A parent loses meaning when the child becomes an adult - when the adult child does not listen to the aging parent - the parent may feel lost

  • Anger, fear, fight or flight vs tend and befriend

    • Anger is an emotion of moral indignation expressed when you have control over a situation

    • Fear is a primal emotion

    • Resentment is anger unresolved

    • When angry, not possible for humility

  • How to address anger

    • De-escalate with reason

    • Escalate with emotion

    • Diffuse with non-reaction - best for attention seeking behaviour (which could be sought from the use of anger)

    • Postpone with flee

  • Oldness is the loss of play - playful old people are young at heart

    • In the talk Jose linked, Peterson also states that the story one experiences even, affects their thoughts on their age

    • One must embrace play, to enter chaos with humility, to learn

    • If one doesn’t play, chaos is met instead with fear and resentment, to die

    • 1:45:00 - old can mean the lack of play - play is needed to do new things that you haven’t done before - doing the same things will only last so long, before it becomes no longer fruitful

  • Cowards aren’t afraid of the dragons in you, but perhaps more the dragons in themselves

    • Example was insincere people - polite as a front - anger grows to resentment, as they are too afraid of confrontation (possibly discovering they are the monster in the mirror) they are not even willing to risk being the knight

    • Smugness of staying at home and judging the person who went on the pilgrimage and came back battered as not having it together - yet, the person who has fallen apart has so much growth that will be rebuilt into something greater than before - whereas the person who never ventured into chaos just slowly regresses - they never become something greater

      • 55:35 - the reason people tear things down is so they don’t have to see the virtue they lack embodied in something - the embodiment is a contrasting reminder of what they lack - so the destruction of it, destroys the reminder, so they can be carefree

      • 1:13:00 - sometimes to escape, you have jump into the unknown, which is scary - when you go from a bad place to a better place, you go to a worst place first - that is a great thing to know, as it tells you why you might be unwilling to take the next step

      • 1:15:30 - you can’t run back into who you are - as you are a new person with new experiences and knowledge

      • 1:24:00 - when you are rebuilding the broken pieces of your life, you are looking for the spirit needed to turn the unstable chaotic state in a new stable reality - this fantasy will make new things visible to you to help you on your journey

  • Macro vs micro problems

    • 1:49:00 - you need to see the macro problem and the micro problems, and tackle both - if you just see and tackle the micro problem, you are doing busywork and are blind to your journey - if you just see and tackle the macro problem, they you get nothing done and make no progress towards solving it - never lose sight of the macro problem, because ending up lost in a bad place is worse than stagnating?

      • Seems both are equally important, I cannot imagine a situation where losing sight of one is better or worse than the other

      • Moral degradation seems to happen when the micro problem is the only focus, as one loses sight of their virtues and integrity, leading to arrogance

        • I’ve had this where I decide to play a video game for an hour, and it turns into 8 hours - something that doesn’t help me at all in my macro goals

      • When one just focuses on the macro problem though, the problem can become so overwhelming and they build a habit of stagnation so even the smallest feets become too much, and leads to resentment

  • Perhaps the media consciously instills fear, anger, disgust - to impair our reasoning with the overflow of emotion - to make us zombies and sometimes even violent

  • 1:30:00 - the more articulate person always rises

    • Always true

  • Innovation

    • 1:52:00 - if you are unwilling to admit your insufficiency, then you will not be able to go on the pursuit to get help, ask the question, and seek the change - humility is the antidote to arrogance, as it means you still have something to learn and you are a student, an always honourable thing

      • This is super positive, as it shows humility as an opportunity for growth, rather than as a deficit

    • 1:54:00 - benevolence kills innovation, as benevolence is respect and admiration for the way things are - not what they could become > probably why frustration is such a good force for innovation!

      • Government’s job should be to ensure technology is developed and utilised to ensure everyone can live well even if they are all unemployed!

      • People who are not willing to retreat in 40-60 year olds in trades replaced by computers, shouldn’t vote for political parties that stifle innovation, but instead embrace play once again and retrain - although it may be too late to regain