I was struck by this as being a statement that assumes that we are all our own makers, as though we did not thoroughly profit from the struggles of previous generations throughout millennia. If Philosophers are so rare, why not value the work of those who have gone before, and not assume that the simple issues have to be sorted by each and every one of us, and are therefore not absurd or “below us”? There seems to be an arrogance about these days that is hard to understand, except in assuming that those people who are arrogant are ignorant of basic truths. They are steeped in many theories but either shy away from the lessons that reality teaches us or they cling to the most fashionable “ism” around at the time.
Perhaps it is because I have a very complex psychology that I think that the task of socialisation is such a struggle, and finding the right path so confusing. It took me decades to understand myself fully and only then are we really in the position to understand history and the development of philosophy throughout the thousands of years we have been developing. If I take this personal experience and assume that I am not so very different from other people, then the ups and downs of history are understandable, but also the horrific suffering that people have gone through before we came to be. The human rights that we have become accustomed to having been cut out of a bloody history, and acclaimed although they still remain utopian for many people.
There has been a variety of criticism of Jordan Peterson, most of which I fail to agree with because it misses the mark. I am by no means someone who would defend Peterson at every occasion because there are things he says that I disagree with. However, coming from a parallel development, discovering Jung late in life, having a Christian background but being disappointed with the church, and discovering suffering very close up through my vocation as a geriatric nurse, I must agree with Peterson on his starting point: Life is suffering. From there, we can develop different ideas about how to cope with that, indeed to combat suffering, as many in the past have already done, but we tend to find similarities despite cultural differences, which is what Jung and now Peterson have picked up on.
My criticism of Peterson isn’t that he is wrong, but that he fails to find an integral approach to history. The developments of the past, in history, but also our own developments, have aspects towards which we may now find animosity, but they are a part of our development and not all wrong. Some things we do because it is the lesser of two evils; sometimes we have been struggling to survive, and therefore unable to find the higher ground that we assume ourselves to be on today. I know that I have had many occasion to be frustrated at the path I took, but benevolent onlookers have appeased me by telling me that they didn’t see anything bad about what I did, it is just that today I would do something different.
I find that Peterson has laid down a worthy psychological description of what value mythology has in our lives, and has had throughout time. His 12 Rules are in a way just an excerpt from the bigger work Maps of Meaning, which is worth a read, even though it is pretty large. His Youtube videos can give further insight. I just can’t accept that people who have not yet achieved anything similar should ridicule 15 years of intense study and thirty years of clinical experience.