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0:08
Thinkest thou that Hell is but a fable? Ay, think so still, till experience change thy mind! Why, this is Hell, nor are we out of it. Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscrib'd In one self place; for where I am is Hell, And where Hell is, there must I ever be… <Amazing synth devil music by Nina Richards> I, Lucifer, Lord of Hell and Regent of the Damned, am a huge fan of Jordan Peterson. In fact, I'd go so far as to say I am the only true Jordan Peterson fan in the entire world.
1:19
For the damnably uninitiated, Jordan Peterson is a Canadian psychologist; author of "12 Rules For Life," a very popular self-help philosophy book, and "Maps of Meaning," which is also a book. He does a lot of TV and live appearances and has a devoted following both on the Internet and in Hell, which are increasingly the same thing. Fortunately for me, there are a lot of philosophers down here - (Turns out to get into Heaven you have to be both Muslim and trans, so there’s a lot
1:51
of people there but it’s still pretty exclusive) and I’ve learned a great deal. Peterson presents as a warrior battling the forces of Hell and darkness, by which I mean Nihilism. A lack of values and goals in life, and the accompanying sadness that can sometimes go with it, which he and several other thinkers believe is endemic to the modern world. He’s a big fan of Nietzsche, who did a lot of work on ‘the death of God’ - which sadly
2:17
wasn't literally about God being killed but about how can you humans live meaningful lives in a secular age? How canyou go on without falling into despair in the face of the sheer pointlessness of it all? That’s where the self-help aspect of his work comes in: if everybody sank into nihilism then human society would collapse, so you've gotta aim at something! Sort yourself out! Stand up straight! Clean your room! and all that that entails.
2:42
Peterson doesn’t just think that nihilism is depressing to live with though - he also thinks it’s dangerous. In his book he talks about how mass killers can spend too long in nihilism and come to believe that life isn’t worth anything for anyone. There are other causes of mass killings - if it was just nihilism, which everybody sinks into occasionally - then Hell would be full of mass shooters from every demographic when in fact
3:02
they’re not a very diverse bunch. He also thinks that postmodernism and Marxism are dangerous in that nihilist way, which… ehhmmmm... It is a little confusing approaching Peterson’s work from the point of view of philosophy because words like postmodernism and Marxism, relativism and nihilism, have technical meanings that he tends to... wind around, and one popular tactic for arguing against him is to explain those technical meanings and showhow he’s using them incorrectly. But more
3:36
talented demons than me have tried that before and it doesn’t seem to phase him, so what I'd like to do is show why his attack on nihilism isn’t all it’s cracked up to be and then present an alternative! Peterson seems to use the word Nihilism as interchangeable with Relativism - which it isn’t really, and we’ll get to that, but if you follow his work you’d be forgiven for thinking that relativism is a bad thing. The good doctor has condemned moral relativism
4:04
multiple times in his lectures; he went on the Joe Rogan show to say that it was “just wrong”; and 12 Rules For Life contains a foreword by psychologist Norman Doidge presenting Peterson’s whole career as a counter to relativism. The supposed link is that if we were all diehard relativists and every goal was as good as every other we would never truly value anything! Hence Nihilism and societal collapse. And Peterson’s not the only one worried about this. The philosopher Stephen Hicks
4:32
and neuroscientist Sam Harris see relativism as a rejection of science and Enlightenment values - we’ll come back to both of them. Former Breitbart editor Ben Shapiro has linked it with cultural decay; and in his video The Ugly Truth About Relativism, with over 90,000 views, ex-software salesman Stefan Molyneux says that relativism is part of a plot driven by a “demonic thirst for power.” There’s also this video from weird male YouTube which honestly has one of the best openings since Genesis:
5:01
“So this video's gonna be on ‘Does moral relativism lead to pussy worship?'”
5:11
The common theme running through a lot of these thinkers is that objectivity, which is associated with things like reason, the Enlightenment, modernism, the West, and Judeo-Christian values, is good. As has been pointed out by an inspiring angel in another video also featuring wings and nudity, many of those terms are more complicated than they appear. Whereas relativism, which is associated with feelings, social justice warriors, the not-West,
5:36
postmodernism, and dangerous leftist thinking, is bad. A lack of strongly grounded values can leave individuals (and maybe societies) open to corruption by demonic influences. Peterson actually has quite an unusual stance compared to some of those others and I’m not lumping him in with them carelessly - down here everyone's punishment is bespoke - but it’s worth noting that some of those who claim to have the answer to nihilism do share some political themes.
6:07
The question for now is is - how can you confront the meaninglessness of your life without falling into nihilism and despair? You have a few options. One is to believe in God - Yuck! Another is to invent some new goals and meaning through pop psychology and recycling a lot of religion; like Jordan Peterson does, taking God’s dead corpse and turning it into fertiliser. Or, if magic isn’t doing it for you anymore, why not try science?
6:43
In 2010, neuroscientist Sam Harris responded to this alleged problem of nihilism and relativism. In his book The Moral Landscape he claims that there are objective answers to moral questions and that science can help humans discover them. He isn’t saying that there will someday be single, scientific answers to all moral questions, but he is trying to find objective values without religion: “The demagogues are right about one thing: we need a universal conception of human values.”
7:10
He thinks you are too tolerant and that this is a symptom of a dangerous cultural relativism, a theme he shares with Peterson, Doidge, Molyneux, Shapiro and others. Harris thinks you should all be brave free speech warriors and face the truth: if there are facts about morality then doesn’t it stand to reason that some people, or cultures, might know more about those facts than others? “Whenever we are talking about facts, certain opinions must be excluded. That is what it
7:42
is to have a domain of expertise…. How have we convinced ourselves that every culture has a point of view on these subjects worth considering?” He’s particularly concerned that you are too tolerant of behaviours that he associates with religion and conservative Islam especially, like requiring women to wear veils and honour killings. Though in fact, both of those behaviours have parallels in societies that aren’t
8:05
quite so influenced by conservative Islam, and arguably say more about controlling women than they do about religion. What this illustrates though is that for Harris, the quest to find objective value in life is not just for the fun of it: in his book The End of Faith he explicitly discusses these issues in the context of American military intervention, racial profiling, and torture. Apropos, at the end of this talk, a man comes onstage - <music stops> Who is this guy? is this Ted?
8:34
Is this Ted Talks? Theodore T. Talks? Anyway - a man comes onstage and points out something Harris neglected to mention, that many Muslim women wear veils voluntarily: “Can you engage in a conversation with that kind of woman without seeming like a cultural imperialist?” Harris replies that “voluntary” doesn’t really mean all that much in certain contexts. They might be brainwashed by their delusional belief systems. “I don’t think we should be so eager to always take their word for it.”
9:05
So Harris has allowed himself the possibility of saying, “I know what’s good for you and I don’t necessarily need to ask” and it seems like he’s at least open to the idea that those in possession of the moral facts can be justified in acting violently against the morally ignorant. That’s the power of having objectivity on your side. Elsewhere Harris mentions brain scans as a way of objectively knowing who’s happy and
9:32
who’s not, but how can you tell the difference between a brain scan of someone who is “really” happy according to Harris and somebody who is deluded? You can’t, so even though he highly values the facts, it seems like some are more valuable than others, and it's not clear on what basis he's weighing them up. Interestingly, this criticism is similar to one put forward by another thinker… Jordan Peterson. He and Harris agree on an awful lot, but one thing Peterson has pointed out
10:01
is that there are so many facts in the realm of objective science that you need some story to help you pick and choose which facts will be relevant. Philosophers would call that story an ‘ideology’ but that’s not a word Peterson likes and he has his own ideas, which we’ll get to. Even more interestingly, Harris’ idea is an accidental ripoff of a theory developed by philosopher Richard Boyd in 1982, called: ‘The Homeostatic Cluster Property Theory of Metaethical Naturalism’ Sexy title.
10:30
Boyd thought that words like ‘good’ and ‘evil’ refer to real properties out there in the material world, and that therefore statements like ‘Murder is bad’ are capable of being objectively true, or at least true in the same way as scientific statements are. Which prompts the question, “To what exactly do these words refer?” Boyd’s answer is that they are cluster properties - groups of things that tend to go together.
11:00
The example he uses is actually the same one Harris does - health. There are all kinds of things we would want to include in a definition of the word “healthy,” like your heart should be beating and you should be able to breathe, but do you have to be a certain size in order to be healthy? Do you have to not be in pain? Can you have a beating heart and be unhealthy? There’s a cluster of properties here somewhere that makes up the definition of the word health
11:26
but we’re never going to pin down a definite list because that’s just not how the concept works. Despite that vagueness it’s still very obviously useful and meaningful. Similarly Boyd thinks that a word like ‘good’ refers to a cluster of things that are non-morally good for humans, like sharing friendship, sharing love, having fun, watching quality YouTube videos, but just like with health, you’re never going to be able to pin down a full list because the concept just isn’t like that.
11:54
And here’s the big takeaway - if we say ‘John is healthy’ we could be talking about any number of things in the cluster of health - whether he a has disease, whether he works out, whether he has a good relationship with his mother - all of which are objective - but whether the sentence ‘John is healthy’ is true will still depend on what aspect of his health we’re talking about. It will be relative to the context in which we’re saying it.
12:23
So this relative/objective binary that people like Peterson and Harris are working with is an oversimplification. The theory Boyd defends is called moral naturalism; it's about as objective as ethical theories get, but statements about morality will still be true or false relative to the context in which we use them. Objectivity and relativity can go together!
12:53
We’ve seen that attempts to find objective meaning in life through science can get pretty complicated pretty fast, which might be a problem if that meaning is something you’re expected to kill for. Turns out getting rid of subjectivity isn't so easy after all. Peterson has an interesting relationship with subjectivity. He thinks there are two worlds, the world of the objective and the world of experience, and that it's the world of experience
13:19
with things like pain, and hunger, and stories that people really care about: “It is such things, experienced personally, that are the most fundamental elements of human life, from the archaic, dramatic perspective, and they are not easily reducible to detached and objective...You’re not objective. You’re alive. You’re subjective.” Just as the objective world has atoms and fundamental particles, Peterson thinks that the
13:44
experiential world too has its fundamental elements - the dichotomy for which he is famous - Order and Chaos. “Chaos is the domain of ignorance itself… It’s the foreigner, the stranger, the member of another gang, the rustle in the bushes at night-time...Chaos is also the formless potential from which the God of Genesis I called forth order using language at the beginning of time... And Chaos is freedom... Order, by contrast, is explored territory… Order
14:11
is tribe, religion, hearth, home, and country. It’s the warm, secure living-room where the fireplace glows and the children play… But order is sometimes tyranny.” So here we see that Peterson thinks Order and Chaos can manifest in different ways at different times - no great problem there. But - In that talk I showed you Peterson gives two examples of Order - “The Walls of the City” and “the Uniform of the Police.” But there are those for whom walls and borders
14:41
are more representative of Chaos - if you’ve ever travelled internationally you'll know that crossing the border is a moment where the unknown and uncertainty and anxiety can confront you. And of course there are many people for whom the uniform of the police is a symbol of terror. So can the same thing be both Order and Chaos at the same time? If the answer is no, and they really are objective properties then it seems like Peterson needs to answer questions like what are they and what are they
15:07
made of? From his books and his conversations with Harris it seems like he’d rather say these are features of subjective experience, so yes two people could experience the same thing, one as Order one as Chaos, just as two people could experience the same work of art differently. But if that’s the case then Order and Chaos are relative; not just statements about them either, but the properties themselves. Although he’s trying to escape it relativity
15:34
is actually built right into the heart of Peterson’s entire worldview. There’s a big tension here between somebody who rails against relativism on the one hand but places subjectivity and contextual understanding at the heart of most of what he does on the other. One of those fake Jordan Peterson fans might say, “He’s not really a relativist, he’s a pragmatist - he's not trying to defend a philosophical theory, he's trying to help people! There’s that
16:00
whole bit in Chapter 9 about how it’s good to order your life based on some principles whether it’s Freud, Jung, religion, or whatever. The point is to avoid Nihilism.” But I think it’s a stretch to say that Peterson would consider any ordered life to be as good as any other. It definitely seems like he thinks some interpretations of Order and Chaos are more on the money than others, which again is in deep tension with their relativistic nature.
16:25
Peterson I’m sure would say that Order and Chaos are evolved into the structure of your human brains. According to him your ancestors learned that some behaviors were advantageous and they unconsciously developed rules from those behaviours, which we can come to be consciously aware of through the telling of stories. That’s why he thinks stories and tradition are so important. So it’s not 100% relative, it’s grounded in people's experiences
16:51
but it's still objectively biological. This is quite similar to an idea developed by Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, one of Peterson’s major inspirations, who proposed the existence of a collective unconscious *to explain similarities* that he observed between his patients. Peterson came up with his version *to explain similarities* that he observed in the different fields he studied for "Maps of Meaning." But - anything is similar to anything if you look hard enough; lions are similar to lingerie
17:24
in that they’re both made of atoms. Judging two things to be similar in a way that matters though, is subjective and relative to the context. As a zookeeper once said to me, “Lions are similar to lingerie in that they are both made of atoms, but this is the Lion Enclosure of the Central Park Zoo so will you and your girlfriend please leave.” Take these two images: one is a 19th Century painting by Italian artist Roberto Ferruzzi
17:47
showing the virgin Mary and Jesus; and the other is a vase from the 5th Century BC showing the goddess Demeter, her daughter Persephone, and the man Triptolemus being given some wheat. I might say, ‘I think there are similarities between these: they’re both images of women, mothers, symbols of new life.” But they’re also different in many ways: they come from very different cultures and times and are made of different materials. To say, “I
18:10
think there are similarities here that are relevant relative to certain contexts” is a statement that forefronts a subjective judgement - I think there are similarities that I am telling you about for some reason I have. But if I say, “Mary and Demeter are both instances of the archetype of the Great Mother which exists in the collective unconscious” then it sounds like I’m being objective. 12 Rules For Life is full of this, what philosophers call ‘reification’ - making something
18:41
into a thing. From hierarchies to archetypes, Peterson uses objective-sounding language when really what he’s doing is subjectively drawing comparisons for his own reasons. And as the only true Jordan Peterson fan in the world I don’t have a problem with that but it does mean that all his psychology still can’t get him out of relativism. By the standard he sets himself his attempt to find meaning in life fails.
19:06
None of this, by the way, is me claiming that science is all subjective or denying that reality doesn't exist. Maybe there really is a collective unconscious, maybe you have similar brains and therefore tend to think in similar ways. But the point is that the subjective and the objective are not so easily crowbarred apart. Which is why questions like, “Who gets to write the stories? Who gets to decide what
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represents Order and what represents Chaos?” are important. And don’t look now, but it looks like we’re heading into -
19:43
Bertolt Brecht... was a 20th Century playwright and theatre practitioner - one of those horribly pretentious people who tried to combine philosophy with theatre for which he was damned to Hell for all eternity. and Brecht would often employ theatrical techniques that drew his audience’s attention to the fact that they were watching a play. He called it Epic Theatre, in contrast to Dramatic Theatre which tries to present an illusion of reality. Rather than maintain a fourth wall, Brecht
20:10
would try to deliberately remind his audience that what they are watching is just a show!
20:29
So far I’ve done my best to engage with Peterson’s ideas on their own terms and take them seriously albeit with a bit of an irreverent tone but now I want to take a step back. I said that there’s this tension there between being very against relativism on one hand but actually relying on it on the other and I’m curious about why that tension is there. Peterson does not like postmodernism at all. He associates it very much with the relativism
20:53
and nihilism that he’s trying to combat, and he says that the goal of postmodernism is to reduce everything to power relations. There are no real categories like race and gender, no real morality, only power, and “if only power exists, then the use of power becomes fully justifiable… It is almost impossible to overestimate the nihilistic and destructive nature of this philosophy. It puts the act of categorisation
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itself into doubt. It negates the idea that distinctions might be drawn between things for any reasons other than that of raw power.” Why so down on postmodernism? Well, Peterson does not like Marxism at all. He's reviewed the history of the 20th Century and he thinks that Marxism leads inevitably to tyranny and genocide and chaos. And that’s another a topic for another video: we don't have time to get into it today... That's just his political position. He then says that Marxist intellectuals
21:42
like Sartre and Derrida needed some way of making Marxism cool again after everybody in Europe supposedly realised that it was evil, so they “substituted the idea of power for the idea of money... Society was no longer repression of the poor by the rich. It was the oppression of everyone by the powerful.” And this allowed them to crack right on with being evil Marxists but just change up the lingo. Unfortunately this misunderstands both Marxism and postmodernism. As other
22:10
YouTubers more talented than me have pointed out before those two sets of ideas are actually contradictory and at the time that a lot of early postmodernists were writing the Marxist Left did not need help; it was still going strong. So this idea that postmodernism was a PR move cover up or a by Marxists is, I'm afraid, just theoretically and historically false. And I know where he got this idea too: Peterson’s major source for a lot of these claims is a book by the right-wing
22:30
philosopher Steven Hicks called Understanding Postmodernism, and unfortunately for our boy JP the book is, to put it technically, really f****n bad. If you want the blow by blow of all the sloppy mistakes then Cuck Philosophy has a great video on it, but Hicks' central error that that gets transmitted over to Peterson is this idea that postmodernism is essentially destructive. That when Foucault, for instance, was talking how knowledge
22:54
always presupposes some power relations, the goal real was to say, <bad French accent> "Oh well you know uhh, knowledge and logic is just what the oppressors say it is! Truth is just whatever, so let’s tear down ze capitalist patriarchal structures of ze West and roll on nihilism and ze end of the world.” And that’s just not what postmodernism is about at all. So I mentioned Brecht a few minutes ago - an example of a Brechtian technique might be using title cards
23:23
to tell the audience what’s about to happen; doing a serious piece in a silly costume; showing them how a particular effect was achieved; or showing them how the show is made! To draw your attention to the fact that what you're watching is a constructed representation, not reality. Because once you see how the story is made to go the way it goes, you also see how it could have gone differently. Brecht himself was a Marxist, and he wanted his audiences to criticise his characters
23:52
and their stories as a intro to criticising their own, but it needn't be just a Marxist thing: the British comedian... See the Sun's just come out from behind a cloud and it's completely changed the colour temperature in here. This is why I hate filming with natural light. This is why coloured lights are just objectively better. I mean, of the two principles - Apollonian and Dionysian - this is a clear demonstraton of why the Dionysian is better.
24:14
Brecht himself was a Marxist and he wanted his audiences to criticise his characters and their world as an intro to criticising their own. But it needn't be just a Marxist thing: the British standup comedian Stewart Lee uses a lot of Brechtian theatre techniques to get his audience to criticise the comedy industry, which is probably why so many young standup comedians struggling in that same industry try and rip him off:
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"Comedians will often take something that's got a grain of truth and build on it and elaborate it in order to make you forget that what you're watching is just an act. It's just pretend. And that's a technique that I personally learned from the comedian Stewart Lee, when I met him on board a flying Viking burial ship orbiting Gannymede, one of the largest moons of Jupiter. One of the best modern examples of Brechtian Theatre techniques I can think of is this TV show:
24:59
it's really thoughtful, really cerebral, very intellectual, bit of a slow burner - it's called Ru Paul’s Drag Race. The show cuts between footage of the queens performing and confessional footage which is shot out of drag, reminding the audience that (at least on this show) these are performances done by and large by men. And when they perform as the queens they're outrageous and campy and over the top: it's kindof hyperfemininity, which prompts the audience to ask, “Well
25:24
what are gender expectations anyway, really?” And do you care more about meeting those expectations or about looking good? But getting somebody to question why something is the way it is isn’t the same as getting them to throw it out. Peterson says that postmodernism and critiques about how power shapes our ideas remove the possibility of choice. “Choice has no place in the ideological picture: if men and women act, voluntarily, to produce
25:50
gender-unequal outcomes, those very choices must have been determined by cultural bias. In consequence, everyone is a brainwashed victim, whatever gender differences exist, and the rigorous critical theoretician is morally obligated to set them straight.” The surrounding context makes it clear that he’s talking about “setting people straight” through force, so again there’s this idea that’s it’s essentially violent and destructive.
26:10
Generously ignoring the fact that Peterson frequently does the same thing he's criticising there - assumes without talking to people that he knows what's going on inside their heads and what’s really good for them <cough cough trans rights> - he’s correct to note that power sometimes shapes us even on the level of our desires. But realising that doesn’t take away choice: if anything it gives us more choices because now we can think
26:30
about why we value the things we do. Like Brecht: the goal of postmodernism and critical theory isn’t to minimise the role choice or the individual or justify violence against those who make the “wrong” choices; it's to get you to realise that many of the things you see around and the ways in which you look at them can change if you want them to. And that’s exactly what Peterson’s doing. Drawing people’s attention to their
26:55
psychological bad habits so they can reflect on where they come from and whether or not they want to indulge them. Postmodernism's doing a similar thing just on the level of societies and ideas! In 12 Rules For Life Peterson talks about the importance of articulating clearly what you want, of standing up for yourself, of thinking about what you value and why you value it of taking risks and being daring even if it potentially risks your safety or other people's, and that's all good advice.
27:19
But he only wants you to do it as an individual. If you start getting together with other people, standing up for yourselves, articulating clearly what you want, thinking about what you value and why you value it politically speaking, maybe advocating for some potentially risky and transformative social ideas, all of a sudden that’s a bad thing. Cause it doesn't fit with his politics or his understanding of human psychology which, as we’ve seen, is pretty subjective.
27:45
The Peterson project is deeply relativist, deeply subjective, and deeply ideological. And again, as the only true fan of Jordan Peterson in the entire world I don’t have a problem with that. But I'm not the one who built my whole career telling people that these ideas pave the road to Hell.
28:08
Well bugger me blue, it looks like life really is meaningless after all. Whether we try to find objective value through brain scans or Petersonism or whatever Stefan Molyneux is peddling it looks we can't escape the quicksand of relativism and subjectivism. We could give religion another go, but... that just seems like a lot of work. (Also it has its own philosophical problems which are pretty well trodden.) I just wanna have fun! Is there any philosophy that’s about having fun?
28:37
Well there is one idea. Although it is a little bit controversial. Maybe you've heard of it? It’s called - try and f*****n enjoy yourself. Hedonism is like snakes. It has a nasty reputation but it’s actually quite sweet. It’s associated with vice, and frivolous enjoyment, social media and se...eking pleasure outside the light of Christ but when philosophers talk about pleasure they don’t just mean the cheap and easy thrills - ‘pleasure’ can mean any mental state that is desired.
29:09
That means that we can still talk about somebody experiencing pleasure even if they are physically in pain. And yes, there are some pleasures that, if overindulged in, might lessen your pleasure in the long run - heroin and infidelity, to name just two components of my typical Friday night. I once spent an entire Sunday in a bathtub coming down from getting absurdly high on MDMA and it was one of the bleakest periods of my life cause my brain wouldn’t make any more of the happy juice!
29:40
And now I don’t do MDMA anymore - cause it’s a whole lot of pleasure in one go but it limits the pleasure of my whole life, and a general attempt to maximise pleasure over your lifetime could lead to a pretty meaningful existence. And if you don’t want to think of it as hedonism, think of it as maximising your own rational self-interest with respect to happiness. You can be a hedonist and still reflect on why you want what you want, still “pay attention
30:06
to your own thoughts” as Peterson might put it. It’s not about being a slave to your passions all the time. By choosing to get off the Mandy I’m sacrificing small pleasures now for greater pleasure overall, which is something that Peterson also places a lot of emphasis on. Believe me, hedonism is entirely consistent with delayed gratification. A philosophy of life that tells people to ignore pleasure just isn’t gonna go anywhere!
30:29
That's why I’m not so hot on most major religions. Even Peterson, with all of his ‘life is suffering’ rhetoric, knows this: the final rule in 12 Rules For Life is ‘Pet A Cat When You Encounter One on the Street’ - and what is that if not an invitation to take pleasure in the little things when you find them? I know that in my darkest moments I find a little thing that brings me pleasure. Harris: “It’s important to do something other than masturbate." Peterson: "YES."
30:51
Nietzsche’s approach was to say, “Look, a work of art can be stylish, yes? And to say it’s stylish implies some standard. But stylishness is less about the work conforming to an external objective standard and more about a particular harmony between all the notes. So sing the song of your life like a work of art - with balance, and grace, coloratura espressivo; some forte and some pianissimo; some solos and some ensemble pieces; a little
31:22
bit of dolente and probably some wrong notes, especially if it's me singing. The clashes acknowledged and faced up to but presented in such a way as to make them sublime so that the effect of the whole is a kind of harmony.” And this too is consistent with hedonism: in order to get what you desire you have to know yourself and understand all of your varied wants, even the dark ones. See this is why Jordan Peterson’s favourite Russian author is Dostoyevsky, but mine is
31:50
Vladimir Nabokov, because the characters in Nabokov’s books understand that sometimes the best response to the meaninglessness of life is to just f**k your own sister. The French philosopher Albert Camus had his own strategy for confronting Nihilism. He thought there was a fundamental contradiction between humans’ desire to seek meaning in your lives and life itself, which is meaningless, and he gave this contradiction a name - the
32:14
Absurd. Camus wasn’t a hedonist, but he wouldn’t have been a fan of Peterson either. He thought you shouldn’t run from the Absurd, try to pick goals and meaning like cleaning your room to escape it. Instead he wanted people to live their lives in full knowledge of its meaninglessness; to confront the Absurd and go on living anyway. One of the figures Camus discusses is Don Juan, a legendary character of theatre and
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literature who appears as a serial seducer of women. He travels from country to country, often in disguise, seducing women of all ages and backgrounds, not out of a secret desire for true love or any of that nonsense, but for the sheer sport of seduction. Oh my god! he was right all along! Many versions of the story give moral commentary on his actions; some even end with him being sent here to Hell. And one of the objections to hedonism is that you could lead a very
33:05
pleasurable life but a very immoral one. Camus may also have had a personal investment to the character of Duan Juan: in 1959 he wrote a letter containing the sentence - 'This frightful separation will at least bring home to us more than ever the constant need we have for each other; I await you full of strength and passion.'
33:35
That letter was not addressed to his wife, but to one of his four mistresses. But Camus says that Don Juan isn’t immoral, per se, he's just amoral - morality doesn’t factor into what he considers a worthwhile existence - how could it, once he had confronted the Absurd and realised that life is meaningless? This is distinct from hedonism because it’s not just about pleasure: it’s about taking the right attitude towards the pleasure.
34:02
An argument that, sadly, Mrs. Camus was not persuaded by. His second wife, Francine Faure, had depression and jumped off a balcony in part because of her husband’s infidelity. She survived, and they reconciled, but to me this illustrates a far stronger objection to hedonism: sometimes it straight up doesn’t work; some days are so bleak that even the thought of pleasure and happiness just makes me sick, "Think'st thou that I, who saw the face of God,
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And tasted the eternal joys of heaven, Am not tormented with ten thousand hells, In being depriv'd of everlasting bliss?" And then the water goes cold but you sit there anyway because sometimes Hell is a bathtub in Debden. But as we’ve seen, other attempts to find meaning in life are hardly 100% effective or morally bulletproof either. What I do on those days is try and talk to my friends, and then they don’t answer my messages because I’m a reclusive Internet weirdo, so I listen
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to music, or look at art, or if it’s really not working I just wait for the drugs to wear off so I can sing the next verse of my life. And every single time I would rather have the snake than the snake oil salesmen. <A version of "Goodbye Mister A" plays that is legally a cover and transformative, whatever Sony Music says> There's a hole in your logic You who know all the answers Whoa-oh-ah-oh! You claim science ain't magic And expect me to buy it
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Goodbye Dr. P! You promised you would love us, but you knew too much! Goodbye Dr. P You had all the answers, but no human touch! If life is subtraction, your number is up! Your love is a fraction, it's not adding up! Oh-oh-oh-oh! Oh-oh-oh-oh! Oh-oh-oh-oh! Oh-oh-oh! Whoa-oh-oh-oh! So busy showing me where I'm wrong, You forgot to switch your feelings on! Whoa-oh-oh-oh! So so superior, are you not? You love a little bit you forgot!
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Goodbye Dr. P! You promised you would love us but you know too much! Goodbye Dr. P! You had all the answers but no human touch! If life is subtraction your number is up! Your love is a fraction, it's not adding up! Oh-oh-oh-whoa! Oh-oh-oh-oh! Oh-oh-oh-oh! Oh-oh-oh-whoa-whoa-whoa-whoa!
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Goodbye Dr. P! Goodbye Dr. P! Goodbye Dr. P! The world was full of wonder 'til you opened my eyes! Goodbye Dr. P! Wish you hadn't blown my mind and killed the surprise! Goodbye Dr. P! You promised you would love us, but you knew too much! Goodbye Dr. P!!!!!!! You had all the answers but no human touch, oh! If life is subtraction your number is up! Your love is a fraction: it's not adding up!! Oh-oh-oh-oh! Oh-oh-oh-oh! Oh-oh-oh-whoa-whoa-whoa-whoa!
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Oh-oh-oh-oh! Oh-oh-oh-oh! Oh-oh-oh-whoa-whoa-whoa-whoa! <More sick music by Nina> <This song was huge when I was like 17. I saw them play live once at my uni years later and they still got it!> <The band is called 'The Hoosiers' btw> <How about that high note, eh? Took some practice, that one> <Seriously though, Sony Music have claimed the copyright here so if you could go to my Patreon that'd be sweet> <There's an end credits gag> "Does moral realtivism lead to pussy worship?" "YEAS."
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