That’s very good, Ed, and it sounds like…feels like…a kind of conceptual blending that may be happening in the aging social brains of the Cafe. Everyone’s brain on the planet is aging and that may be why the capacity for transversality is needed. This is what Lisa mentions in a previous cafe, examining how same, similar, difference register as a higher structure, as if these terms are riding seamlessly on a mobius strip.
It’s like same sex-marriage took about twenty years of constant repetition before enough social brains shifted so that we could allow a difference to happen without threatening the status quo. The sky did not fall and the people have gotten on with their business without having to slaughter other people for being different. Enough good people stopped reproducing a knee jerk reptilian reaction, driven by the war metaphor, cut it out, kill it, nuke it first. The landmark Supreme Court decisions to strike down sodomy laws and allow gay marriage was a direct result of intensive language games conducted by many post-modern thinkers that Peterson, with his language of contempt, despises. Peterson throws out the baby and the bath water. I dont think he is stupid but his behavior is. He is a toxic bully.
And I dont want to discuss Peterson’s well publicized antics, I would like to delve into identity politics however and wonder why people who have not had their identities attacked have no imagination when other people who are attacked at the level of identity constantly are upset. Any black kid in the ghetto or gay man who walks on the wrong side of town knows this threat of persecution. I have been called faggot since I was ten years old. I have been hit, spit upon an d beat up by gangs of bullies. They attacked who I am. I fought back. I am not a victim but I am aware that in a court of law, such as runs our State, you have to become a victim in order to win the case. This paradox is very well established and Gays and other minorities have used it brilliantly in order to survive.
Has there been excessive use of Identity politics? I would say when Hilary Clinton claims special status as a victim that she used identity politics in a devious way to mask her Neo-liberal ambitions. And maybe these patterns and meta-patterns can be recognized and dealt with more effectively. If people would stop persecuting people and deriving satisfaction from maintaining master/slave dynamics there would be no need for laws or lawyers to manipulate the public the way they currently must to stop vicious politicians from using the exclusionary tactics to win approval.
And I appreciate that there is a positive intention behind your SO WHAT?, Ed. That you intend it to be a prompt rather than a dismissal is useful to know. I realize that a safe space is necessary so that enough transversality can be risked. We can have porous boundaries where we negotiate rather than encounter border crossings where people get shot! This is to work the social engagement system that has been disentangled from thousands of years of persecution and ongoing trauma.
The dreamer’s voice, which is often associated with the visionary, often has a quiet voice, it is often a young voice, an age regressed voice, a neuro atypical voice. We should talk to the visionary as we would to a pet or a small child, with a slow rhythm. These kinds of voices are under the collective mind and are more closely aligned with the animal world. Debate is antithetical to that still, quiet voice. It is kind of shy…hides behind Mama’s skirt…but feels everything and feels much more deeply that Peterson does about justice and fair play.
I have made it a habit, as the elder brother, who had to protect his mother and younger siblings from a vicious tyrant (he thinks just like Peterson) and I stood up to tyrant and whooped his ass. So please do not confuse me with someone who is unable to speak their mind.
I can regress in service of transcendence and this will be, if we become a collaborative species, a prerequisite for entering the kingdom. We will need many voices often together heard.
Another theory I find useful is highlighted in this brief tutorial. Can we get out of the drama triangle? I am open to that possibility.
