Summary: Diagnosis often must precede a cure. Here is a deep and profound essay by writer Jasun Horsley. Each insight about our condition moves us closer to understanding – and solutions.
“In anthropology, liminality (from the Latin word līmen, meaning “a threshold”) is the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of a rite of passage, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the rite is complete.” {From Wikipedia.}
White Male Edgeman
Liminality, Group Identities, and Authoritarianism Left & Right.
By Jasun Horsley at James Howard Kunstler’s website.
Posted here with the author’s generous permission.
White Male Edgeman.
“Radical changes of identity, happening suddenly and in very brief intervals of time, have proved more deadly and destructive of human values than wars fought with hardware weapons.”
— From Laws of Media: The New Scienceby Marshall McLuhan.
by Marshall McLuhan.Probably most people reading this – especially if they spend a lot of time on the Internet – are aware of the growing phenomenon of “social justice warriors” with hair-trigger mouths and clicking mice, fiercely practicing intolerance in the name of tolerance.
Earlier this year, in the small (pop: 6000) Canadian town where I live, a group called Culture Guard were scheduled to speak at the local Royal Canadian Legion. The subject was a nationwide, multi-leveled educational program called SOGI (Sexual Orientation Gender Identification), ostensibly directed towards encouraging “tolerance.” Culture Guard is a conservative organization whose mission is to uphold citizen-driven democracy and community values and expose what they call the “tyranny of politically correct idiotology.”
The event was cancelled after the Legion received 900+ email complaints, including threats. Much to my surprise, the reaction on Facebook to this was mostly gushing gratitude that this diabolical hate group had been righteously silenced. Two fairly typical comments: “Hope we’ve run these poisonous haters out of town” and “No bible thumping flatlander would dare show their face because hate has a weak foundation.”
Apparently, nothing is more immoral to the new moralists than old-style moralism, and if you aren’t in a state of fear or loathing these days – possibly both – you probably aren’t participating in “the debate.” We have entered a liminal zone in which up can become down, right turn left, and virtue trades places with vice in the time it takes to say “What’s your pronoun?”
Legions of Unreason (The Outer Limits of Liminality).
The attributes of liminality are necessarily ambiguous. …Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention and ceremonial.”
— The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structureby Victor Turner (1995).
by Victor Turner (1995).When the town hall is overrun by legions of unreason, the desire to map the exits can be overwhelming. The problem is that, nine times out of ten, the proposed solutions only compound the problem. This has become ever more apparent to anyone paying attention to the evolution of progressivism and identity politics, with its endlessly replicating contortions and contradictions.
One concept I have found invaluable for navigating the increasingly incoherent – and explosive – social landscape is that of liminality. This is an anthropological term (coined in the early twentieth century by folklorist Arnold van Gennep) that refers to the quality of ambiguity or disorientation in the middle stage of religious rites. Later on, anthropologist Victor Turner used it to describe how ceremony masters usher ritual participants from one state to another, as in a coming of age ritual. The liminal stage is the intermediary one in which the initiate is on the threshold (l?men) between his or her old status and a new, as-yet unknown one. More recently, the philosopher Rene Girard (among others), applied the term to sociopolitical and cultural conditions. And not a moment too soon, since we have now entered a time in history when ambiguity and disorientation have assumed epic proportions.
A few examples from the anthropological database: People trapped in a liminal situation are increasingly unable to act rationally, because the structures upon which their rationality is based have disappeared. (Check.) Being in a liminal state spells crisis for most people. Emotions run wild, making clear thinking all but impossible. (Check.) This leads to “mimetic” (imitative) behavior by those trapped in the liminal space. (Check. 3 out of 3.)
In the politics of liminality, the future is unknown; since no one has gone through the process before, there is no one to lead people out of it. This allows for false ceremony masters – politicians, pundits, sophists, and general snake oil salesmen – to fill the void and offer bogus solutions or ways out of the liminal state, to alleviate the disorientation and helplessness of others, thereby perpetuating liminality indefinitely. (Check. Check. Check. Check.)
Conditions of permanent liminality can be maintained by schismogenesis – literally, the creation of a split, a polarity that, if unchecked, pushes the poles further and further apart. (Check!!)
The problem that isn’t being addressed by the snake oil salesmen is that the problems underlying liminality are not primarily social problems but psychological ones. This means they can’t be addressed with social reforms or new ideologies. In fact, those social reforms, policies, and “new” ideologies are, as Freud said of religion, symptoms of the problem itself. And multiplication of symptoms does not indicate that a cure is underway.
Rene Girard, Mimetic Violence & Scapegoating.
Everybody tends to merge his identity with other people at the speed of light. It’s called being mass man.
— Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviewsby Marshall McLuhan.
by Marshall McLuhan.In periods of sustained liminality, as now, the structures we rely on become by their nature unreliable. This makes most people extremely anxious, hence highly susceptible to influence and manipulation. A single Tweet can set us off; even a Tweet that fails to get retweeted becomes proof that the world is going to Hell – or that we are. In a liminal zone of “fluid” identities permeated by multiculturalism and pansexuality, the ideological snake oil business booms.
These kinds of interpersonal flame-wars seem like a distorted case of what Turner called “rites of status reversal,” when “the underling comes uppermost.” Turner writes: “at certain culturally defined points in the seasonal cycle, groups or categories of persons who habitually occupy low status positions in the social structure are positively enjoined to exercise ritual authority over their superiors; and they, in their turn, must accept with good will their ritual degradation” (Turner, 102, 167). This exact scenario played out recently at Evergreen College. Even the fact this article is written by a “privileged” white man and depends on the works of other white men as primary sources makes it ipso facto offensive to some people.
Which way is up and which way is down? What is acceptable behavior? What constitutes maleness or femaleness? What’s a paraphilia and what’s a sexual orientation? When does pride become narcissism? Everything is suddenly “up for grabs” (sometimes literally, cf. #MeToo movement). In “Violence in the media” (Canadian Forum, 1976), media prophet Marshall McLuhan wrote, “Violence, whether spiritual or physical, is a quest for identity and the meaningful. The less identity, the more violence.”
The primary consequence of liminality is increased mimesis or imitation (c.f. Girard) because, when old values no longer hold good, no one knows how to act without referring to others. This creates a free-for-all – a climate of social contagion – in which mimetic violence potentially escalates; this in turn creates the corresponding need for a scapegoat – an other – to unify the attention of the group and stabilize the community. Within larger communities such as a nation, an individual scapegoat is not enough, so entire groups are targeted.
This potential for mimetic violence in every community is why the idea of universal values (morality) is fundamental to social stabilization – to the extent that, in Adam Smith’s days, “social” and “moral” were often interchangeable (see Steven Hitlin 2013). In order to provide the guidance, support, and reassurance of stability, a societal system – the institutions it creates and the values it upholds – must give the impression of being unchanging, solid, and fundamental. They can’t be merely the products of human minds trying to work out the best way to organize a community; they must assume the status of holy writ, natural law, or scientific fact.
As above, so below: ideologically-oriented individuals depend on developing convictions and feeling-opinions that assume the solidity, inflexibility, and force of metaphysical beliefs. This is especially so when the beliefs run counter to previously accepted or established beliefs. Witness the secular metaphysics of gender identification, which proposes an empirical – and invisible – “reality” that transcends not just social conventions but biological truths – rendering them obsolete artifacts of an oppressive former regime.
“Let us be willing to remold society by redefining what it means to be a human being in the 20th century, moving into a new millennium.”
— Speech by Hillary Clinton on 6 April 1993. See this NYT article.
The Mass Man: Collective Negative Identity & the Abolition of Individuality.
“When the whole world is globalized, you’re going to be able to set fire to the whole thing with a single match.”
— Attributed to Rene Girard.
In times of artificially perpetuated liminality, as now, a particular kind of collective identity arises as a compensatory mechanism, a negative identity that affirms itself by negating what it is “not.” When the other is identified as not merely a single individual but a large, somewhat amorphous group of individuals, it becomes unclear where exactly the line between the community-identity being affirmed and the “other” being negated lies.
The surest way to avoid becoming the other – to avoid being negated by one’s community – is to participate in the negation of the designated other. To refuse to do so is to implicitly affirm the other, which is to negate one’s own identity – i.e., affiliation with one’s group. Witness the piece of ritual theater that played out at Evergreen State College, when participants at a 2016 Equity Council meeting were enjoined to get in an imaginary canoe – representing the Sate Equity Plan – as a way to signal their solidarity with the campus activists. While an Indian drumbeat and a recording of crashing surf played in the background, the audience was warned there was a “binary choice” between being allies of the State Equity Plan or “becoming enemies.”
So how exactly do we end up with a total intolerance of difference in the name of tolerating diversity? It is not easy to map a burning building while trapped inside it, but what seems to be occurring now is the growing substitution of (rightist) conservative morality with (leftist) ideological correctness. In a kind of funhouse mirror opposition to “the Right,” “the Left” has gradually assumed a position of anti-authoritarian authoritarianism. Girard described this as “mimetic rivalry” and it’s starkly observable in the form of “SJW” progressives looking more and more like “Alt-Right trolls.” The message – and the admonishment – of “The Left,” lest we forget, is all about inclusivity.
Inclusivity demands that all the marginals (what Turner called “the edgemen”) be ushered into the mainstream by creating a mono/multiculture with equality for all – not counting the deplorables, of course, who are ideologically unfit for inclusion. Ironically, and inescapably, this Borgian Prime Directive subtly or not so subtly endorses, and eventually enforces, homogeneity. Like the Starship Enterprise boldly going where no sane society ever went before, individualism is magnanimously imposed upon the collective.
We see this in how socially marginalized people – usually following a period of perceived or actual persecution – are encouraged to identify and take pride in their marginalized status (gay pride, black pride, transgender pride, etc.), and to assert their right to exist separately from the larger social community, as individuals. This leads to their being incorporated into the larger collective, integrated, or assimilated into the multi/monoculture. The right to be different is asserted, then, not as an end in itself, but as the means of becoming the same.
As this homogenization-in-the-name-of-individuality agenda advances, the potential for mimetic violence increases. In Turner’s “status reversal” rituals, taboo-breaking and totem-smashing was consciously enacted in a kind of Community Theater (which is what ritual is). Today, the performance appears to have gone beyond method, into unconscious voluntary possession – hence the legions of mutually-combusting contradictions that sizzle like matchheads beneath the kindling of every ideological identification.
All this is symptomatic of unconscious, divided, behavior, or schismogenesis. The progressives in my town guarding the culture from its former guardians didn’t realize that the SOGI agenda is self-devouring because sexual orientation is cancelled out, negated, by gender identification. They might be appalled to know, for example, that gender reassignment surgery is booming in the notoriously “homophobic” Iran – because changing “sex” is a practical, no-nonsense (and irreversible) way to eradicate homosexuality. Or by the fact that the supposedly radical trans-agenda is both ideologically and financially supported by most, if not all, the major corporations and government institutions in the world. The progressives have joined the patriarchy party and don’t even know it.
Right-wing libertarianism advocates the primacy of the individual; Left-wing socialism speaks for the primacy of the collective. Liminality is the collapse of categories, however, and as the category of “individualized sameness” expands to include more and more orientations and identifications, things like biological facts – and eventually any kind of fact, since facts, like numbers, tend to assert the reality of difference – become scapegoats sacrificed on the altar of oneness for all. The old values become the expendable “deplorables,” because the ideology of equality can only extend its assimilation agenda by erasing all differences between people. The final ritual sacrifice is the idea of individuality itself – or possibly the individual him- or herself, if Girard is right about human sacrifice being “the revelatory yet menacing dynamic that animates the whole of this civilization” (Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World
All this goes a way to explaining why every disagreement has started to feel like a battle – not just for our sanity, but for our very existence, and why the feeling of being in an unsafe space is contagious. As a white male “edgeman” mostly content to be condemned to the margins, I am starting to feel like an endangered minority, myself, caught inside an electronic effigy of McLuhan’s mass-man, waiting for that fatal spark.
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About the author
Jasun Horsley is a writer, filmmaker, artist, and musician. He is on the autism spectrum and sees creativity, spirituality, and the autistic experience (in its purest form) as synonymous: a going inward in order to make sense of what’s outside, and vice versa. See his website, AutiCulture, and his bio.
See his Twitter feed @JaKephas. See his YouTube channel. He…e are some of his books …
The Lucid View: Investigations into Occultism, Ufology, and Paranoid Awareness: 2013 Edition
Seen and Not Seen: Confessions of a Movie Autist
Prisoner of Infinity: UFOs, Social Engineering, and the Psychology of Fragmentation
The Vice of Kings: How Socialism, Occultism, and the Sexual Revolution Engineered a Culture of Abuse
For More Information
Ideas! For shopping ideas, see my recommended books and films at Amazon.
If you liked this post, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. For more about these matters, see Reforming America: steps to new politics and especially these …
- The bitter fruits of our alienation from America.
- Vignettes of men and women in America, alienated from their true selves.
- America’s rising tide of drug overdoses, a symptom of deeper problems.
- America’s men and women, alienated from our true selves.
- The Seattle Airplane Suicide is A Barometer of Our Culture.
- We’re losing the war on drugs. It’s a symptom of worse ills.
- Martin van Creveld gives the answer to America’s alienation.
- Kunstler points to a source of America’s problems.
- A new, dark picture of America’s future.
- Kunstler describes the ugly fruits of America’s social decay.
Persons on the Autistic spectrum are the big losers at the present time. We just can’t adjust to an emotions bases human reality.
Robert,
“We just can’t adjust to an emotions bases human reality.”
I don’t understand that. Please explain a bit more.
I don’t think emotions are the problem but the suppression of emotions that leads to an over-emotive form of communication; also, that neurotypicals have a socialized front or alter that serves to conceal the emotions they don’t want to experience or reveal, and autism often involves excess empathy, i.e., sensitivity to what a person ISN’T consciously communicating.
that creates cognitive dissonance & confusion over whether to respond to the conscious or the unconscious content in any given communication/social exchange.
Jasun,
“I don’t think emotions are the problem but the suppression of emotions that leads to an over-emotive form of communication;”
I’m 63. My impression is that adults suppressed – or managed – their emotions a lot more in the past (i.e., 1960s – 1970s America) than today. The range of expressions allowed (considered appropriate) was far smaller back in the day. In 1980, my wife and I created a sensation at the office Christmas party: she sat in my lap while Santa was giving out the gag gifts (most of the audience had drank a lot).
Making comparisons over longer time horizons – or between societies – is, of course, difficult to do.
“the suppression of emotions that leads to an over-emotive form of communication;”
This sounds right to me. I’ve been noticing a while now how volatile people, esp. the lefties but also others are… You are chatting and suddenly they burst our something in a very angry voice (but can be other emotions). “They got triggered” except that’s confused with PTSD and a traumatic reminder. Which this is not. This is more seemingly a lot of suppressed anger and resentment, etc. that suddenly bursts out. And being unconscious, it doesn’t work to talk further. You can’t resolve it without, idk, perhaps a lot of long psychotherapy. So usually the conservation just ends.
Interestingly, Jordan Peterson says belief systems regulate emotions. This article said “Violence, whether spiritual or physical, is a quest for identity and the meaningful. The less identity, the more violence.” These would seem to be saying the same thing. Unstable/weak belief systems create the environment for easy violence (“unregulated emotions”).
not sure where this reply will end up but it’s meant to be a response to Larry’s comment:
“My impression is that adults suppressed – or managed – their emotions a lot more in the past (i.e., 1960s – 1970s America) than today.”
Absolutely, and if we think of humans as not just individuals but also ancestral lineages, family systems, etc, then it follows from this that children of emotionally suppressed adults would be over-emotive (having been unable to express their emotions as children growing up in such a family environment). You reap what you sow, is the law of the Shadow (in Jungian sense).
“My impression is that adults suppressed – or managed – their emotions a lot more in the past (i.e., 1960s – 1970s America) than today. ”
What comes to mind is how feminism via “mental health professionals” has been encouraging men to talk about their feelings for 50 years now in various ways. I’ve seen it evolve, i.e. to “toxic masculinity” with some (distorted) element of truth to it all along. i.e. the new APA guidelines for men.
We are complex creatures and full of contradictions. If I had to generalize, expression is easy. Being civilized and tolerable to others requires a lot of supression of emotions and more. That’s what we seem to lack now.
kingfisher,
That’s a great example. Modern psychologists (and other leftists) are playing with the controls of people’s minds, like monkeys let loose in the control room of a nuclear power plant. Not likely to have good results.
kingfisher wrote: “feminism via “mental health professionals” has been encouraging men to talk about their feelings for 50 years now in various ways. I’ve seen it evolve, i.e. to “toxic masculinity”
that made me smile; beware of what you wish for….
Hi Larry,
Wow.
I had to read this twice and carefully the second time. What’s scary is the scale and ubiquity with which all of this is happening. Unless it’s a college town, I wouldn’t have imagined that a town of 6000 in Canada would generate 900+ email complaints (and threats!) for a presentation at a Royal Canadian Legion hall, but such is the way of the world these days. No engagement or conversation — only assertion or suppression.
“Othering” has become oppressive and similarly ubiquitous. One of the things I consciously try to do is not apply labels to people that they would not apply to themselves. You can’t read anything about anybody without them being described as left- or right-wing, fascist, white supremacist, truther, climate-denier (how does that even make sense?), any number of other “ist”s, etc. Oh, yes. Let’s not forget the panoply of “phobe”s. And Horsley is right — it’s easier to just participate in the negation than it is to be negated yourself and exiled like a James Damore or Bret Weinstein.
Of course, this has been a long time coming, and the pursuit of absolute equity will get us to a place that looks like Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron.
Regards,
Bill
Bill,
That was my reaction as well. This is a “meme”, a viral cultural infection. Like a real virus spread by jets, the internet and other global media spread it to the most obscure corners of the world.
But unlike viruses, societies have not yet evolved defenses. It might be an expensive process, in terms of damage and the result chaos.
“Radical changes of identity, happening suddenly and in very brief intervals of time, have proved more deadly and destructive of human values than wars fought with hardware weapons.”
Couldn’t the above-mentioned ‘human values’ be the very cause and perhaps the target of these changes?
The ‘forces of evolution’ come in mysterious ways. These forces often cause indiscriminate extinctions, but sometimes produce great leaps of progress in the emerging survivors. Are we fit enough to survive this ‘virus’ — not by developing immunity, but by allowing it to purify our species, to eradicate the rot we allowed to spread in our midst? Our elites abandoned the ‘duties and responsibilities’ of the Ubermensch, whether by loss of vision and/or competence; and the ‘commoner’ doesn’t see it or doesn’t care and may already be objectively (the N% is so deeply entrenched) or subjectively (losing faith in the existing system) beyond the point of redemption by ‘reigniting their spirit’…
Jako,
“Couldn’t the above-mentioned ‘human values’ be the very cause and perhaps the target of these changes?”
Now that’s an interesting idea, and worth some thought!
I’ve long wondered if our evolving values are destabilizing western civ. Radical feminism, multiculturalism, ever-more fluid concepts of gender (1960s ideas of unisex seem quaint today, as we’ve long passed them).
“Check. 4 out of 4.”
Wait, I count only 3…
This sounds like Jordan Petersons decent into chaos when one’s rational model of the world is untenable or destroyed.
kingfisher,
I don’t believe Jasun meant “check” literally, as in a checklist. More of a dramatic emphasis.
“This sounds like Jordan Peterson’s decent into chaos when one’s rational model of the world is untenable or destroyed.”
Please explain a bit more. I don’t understand.
He talks (in his university class lectures online) extensively about this starting from the context of our basic psychology/biology of being a goal driven organism. That requires a complex understanding of our situation which leads to something being “better”, a goal without which you can’t move. You’ll get “depressed”. Life being what it is, inevitably someday something surfaces which destroys your understanding of “where you are”. i.e. your wife is having an affair. “You descend into the chaos of the underworld”. You question everything and it can be a painful process to get back to a stable understanding.
On a much grander scale, that complex understanding is partly inherited culture which an individual has to translate, transform and transmit: Translate beliefs, traditions, customs, laws, etc. into the everyday “whys” to guide you. Transform the past understanding with new information and conditions… i.e. sex before marriage but still you get married. Transmit this updated culture into new forms, customs, laws and to the next generation.
This whole business is behind myths and stories like Pinocchio who’s father is swallowed by a whale, who Pinocchio rescues. Representing rescuing inherited values and culture from the previous generation. He ties all these cultural institutions back to our basic everyday stability (or increasingly, instability). So it’s why he’s talking to millions of people to reaffirm a basic cultural understanding that young people seem to be discarding to their destruction. Without seeming to understand in the slightest.
actually kingfisher is right, that was the result of an edit and then an oversight; there used to be four check-points; if you can correct, that’d be great.
Jasun,
Thanks for flagging that! I changed it to “3 out of 3.”
“We live in a time of heightened political, social, spiritual chaos; this widespread spiritual sickness of people dissociated internally where we say things we don’t believe, we think things we don’t act out, we act out things we don’t dream. It’s cure is an integrated system of belief and representation. –Jordan Peterson”
Kingfisher,
Thank you for that quote!
That’s my favorite thing he’s said (out of some 100+ hours I’ve listened to). Listen to the some 20 hours of his “Maps of Meaning” class on YT and you’ll get an idea of what’s all behind that distillation. It seems entirely consistent with this most interesting post.
Great catch, per Jasun’s comment!
It’s too easy to ignore such lapses, lost in an allegorical fog.
Ironic to have all the JBP {Jordan Peterson} quotes at this piece, as overall I find JBP to be an example of a “false ceremony master,” as described in the above article. At the risk of SPAMing the comments section, because I don’t want to make such a strong statement without backing it up, here are links {all from Autriculture}:
See also: The Liminalist # 150: Jordan Peterson & the Shadow of God (with Nick Goudie) and The Liminalist # 153: Jordan Peterson’s Elusive Metaphysic (with Norman Young).
Jasun,
“At the risk of SPAMing the comments section …”
As the author of this post, you have an extended Right of Reply! I inserted the links into the titles for easier reading.
Jasun,
Thanks very much for the SPAM! This is one of the most interesting posts on this site, Bravo!, and I’ll check you out more in time. I’d like to explore your criticism of JBP and obviously I like him, have listened to much of his content.
I’m rereading to try to understand what you mean about JBP. I’d agree his popularity is due to a void. His style is to think out loud about big issues without stating a clear answer. In his classes he references more science and fact but still in the same style. He addresses a lot of instability in philosophical, cultural understanding in his criticism of the “bloody neomarxists” and their various products. He addresses the psychological problems (as a clinical psychologist) which as you say, “are not primarily social problems but psychological ones”. All this fits to your uses of the term “liminal”.
I understand “false ceremony master” to mean he’s not in a more defined camp. Like an orthodox Catholic or something. He seems to be playing the psychotherapist role to crowds of 1000, hoping people find their own identity by asking them questions to guide them. It’s almost like group therapy on 1000’s at a time.
I don’t know if that will work on society at large but you seem to agree with him that the future is unknown and unstable. That’s his main thesis in fact, that “we’re in big trouble”.
On a different topic, I’m very interested in your remarks about the hidden nature of child abuse. I believe is the hidden factor in a culture’s success. “The Vice of Kings” seems to address that. Any other place to start on that topic?
@kingfisher
my problem with JBP isn’t that he doesn’t state clear answers but closer to the reverse. While I think he does an OK job of laying out many of the problems we are faced with socially, IMO the answer-solutions he comes up with are premature, insufficiently worked through, and “un-lived” – i.e., they don’t feel to me like they come from experience (the body) but from theory and concept, the head. This also makes them, for me, depressingly familiar, ie, not that new at all.
One (easy) example I have used is how JBP plays lot of lip service to Jung and shadow-integration, but has a personal history of anti-depressant use. This might come under “private business,” except that IMO it extends into his application of psychology over all, in that it is mostly cognitive-based, directed towards working on the outside (shoulders back, back straight, tidy room, cat petted), and not going deeper and deeper inward.
In a similar or even the same way, his appliance of religious ideas to social problems is inherently contradictory, IMO, because religion is, must be, oriented towards the eternal and what is not-of-this-world. What he ends up with, I think, is scientism, which is central to the same problems he is supposedly offering solutions for (i.e., the conflation or confusion of ideology with reality).
Another manifestation of this (IMO massive) bias in JBP’s presentation is that he is woefully ignorant of, or dishonest about, the depth of malevolence operating, I would say intentionally, beneath the social hierarchies he claims to want to rescue & redeem. One example is that or organized ritual abuse, which he has used as an example of mass hysteria i.e., having no basis in reality. Ditto with his mocking of the idea that sociopaths rise to the top in our current social arrangements. In my view, this indicates that his affiliation and allegiance is with the dominant social power structures, and this may or may not be confirmed by his rapid ascent and celebrity.
This doesn’t mean he doesn’t have good material (he does), or that he isn’t helping some people (he is); but at what price, i.e., what are the consequences in the long run?
The term “false ceremony master” isn’t about him not being in a defined camp, not at all; in fact that would be evidence of a true ceremony master, i.e., someone who is conformable in the liminal space between old, crumbling values and structures, and new, not-yet discovered ones. Comfortable, and hence able to lead others through the chaos, not because they have figured out what the new order is, but because they are able to refer to an internal GPS that doesn’t need external “rules to live by” (social structures) in order to know which way is up and which way is down. Rather, via the body and the soul, they have reference to what is eternal & unchanging (just as values like hot and cold never change for the body).
Regarding where to start with hidden child abuse, Lloyd de Mause is one author whose work will keep you busy for quite some time. Otherwise, I can post some more links to my own site if you think it’ll help.
“Ditto with his mocking of the idea that sociopaths rise to the top in our current social arrangements.” Correction, mocking is putting it too strongly, dismissing is more accurate.
Jasun,
For 3 decades I worked with senior members of corporate America. Most of uf who have done so soon notice that our systems tend to promote sociopaths to the top. That is, this is how the system operaties. It’s not that there are a few such at the top, bad apples.
Larry,
This is my riposte to JBP’s particular folly around this subject: What Jordan Peterson Doesn’t Know (or Isn’t Saying) about the Sociopathic Elite
Jasun,
You have a lot of great material in these videos. You might consider taking the Youtube transcript, cleaning it up, and posting it. Never use anything just once!