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A Very Personal Review of Vox Day’s JORDANETICS

2018-11-25 / / 5 Comments

This is less of a review and more of a reaction.

When I opened Vox Day’s Jordanetics last week, I was expecting something similar to what Vox has posted in his blog and uploaded in his YouTube livestreams: a fairly straightforward takedown of Jordan B Peterson and his views. The takedown would go a little bit too far (it’s a bit much for me to fathom going that hard at someone with an admitted mental illness, but then again I’m a girl and I don’t go hard at anyone), would probably make a few wisecracks about the all-meat diet, and would pull apart JPB’s books in a way that people couldn’t ignore.

What I did not expect was the stake to the heart.

But more on that in a bit. First, a look at Jordanetics: A Journey into the Mind of Humanity’s Greatest Thinker.

I particularly liked how the book was structured at the beginning—a mix of social proof, evidence, and reasoning. First we have an introduction from Milo Yiannopoulos, who has been personally lied about by Jordan “don’t say things that aren’t true” Peterson. Milo’s writing style is always a little abrasive, but it’s good to get a third angle on things.

Then, we have an introduction to how Vox got involved, in typical Vox style. There are a few parts of this book that are going to stick with me for quite some time, and Vox’s analysis of JBP handles citations and evidence is going to be one of those things. It’s one thing to make small errors or fail to understand statistics well (quite common among university faculty). It’s quite another thing to cite the complete opposite conclusion from what the authors wrote in a study. That is bending evidence into a pre-formed conclusion. It’s straight-up fraud.

This analysis is followed by a very long list of quotes pulled from YouTube comments, an analysis of like/dislike ratios, and a transcript of the Voxiversity video on JBP (let’s be real: the transcript doesn’t do the video justice—the comedic timing of the editing is superb). This part is highly skippable and mostly receipts. It’s somewhat equivalent to a grumpy dad saying to a group of rowdy kids, “I wasn’t going to come downstairs and break this up, but y’all wouldn’t stop so now I’m here.”

Vox acknowledges that people like myself, Owen Benjamin, and others feel “bewildered” or “tricked” at how we could be taken in by this guy. Even after knowing about his involvement with the Trilateral Commission, his judgement of the Brett Kavanaugh situation, and reading this book, part of me still likes some of JBP’s messages. It’s tough to sort through the lies while still holding onto appreciation for the small truths, such as his admonishment to “do it badly.” I set very high standards for myself, so to see myself “failing” in the first steps of a new venture is disheartening. I like having a touchstone that things still worth doing badly when you’re first getting started, even though I know there are many other ways to get that touchstone.

With that in mind, Vox then dismantles many anticipated objections to his arguments, from “JBP is a respected academic” to “How do I know that you aren’t the one lying about him?” I particularly liked the response to latter objection, because it illuminates quite a few other cultural battles that are going on at the moment.

With the (lengthy) preamble dispensed of, Vox proceeds to take apart each of the 12 rules while weaving together an argument of how, following an ancient pattern, JBP is another in a long line of false teachers. It is a line of argument that I was not expecting, especially from Vox. It is an argument that punched me in the face, and for reasons that had nothing to do with Jordan Peterson.

You see, I am drawn to gnosticism like a moth to a flame. A gnostic view of the world is one in which there is hidden knowledge, and that to find salvation one must find and uncover those secrets.

It’s not surprising that I’m drawn to this way of thinking. I am a seeker. I am intelligent and highly intuitive, someone who has always loved fairy tales and myths. I’m the type of person who is always aware that there is something that I do not know. I’m fairly emotionally obtuse, so I’m always learning new things about myself (uncovering hidden knowledge, you may say.)

You might be this type of person, too.

In grad school, I remember learning about the sophists, and how they used rhetoric to essentially “manifest” the reality they wanted. That type of thinking hasn’t gone away, and in fact flourishes today more than ever. I rely on the Jung-influenced MBTI in my interactions with people, and it’s been on my list for so very long to dive into Jung’s writings on archetype and the psyche. I am fascinated by persuasion and conspiracy theories and little known facts.

As a Christian, I’ve been careful to avoid the occult—but setting that personal boundary has not erased its allure.

Over the past year or so, I’ve started to notice that many of my main influences are very gnostic-based. I’ve started noticing patterns of thought repeating around me. Every once in a while, I would stop and think to myself “I really need to examine the origins of this.”

It would be useful to identify the gnostic influence in my life and in my thinking, but it would also be hard. So I ignored it.

Which brings us back to this book, and this particular passage, which is included in the chapter on rule 11:

For, as long as Satan is not integrated, the world is not healed and man is not saved. But Satan represents evil, and how can evil be integrated? There is only one possibility: to assimilate it, that is to say, raise it to the level of consciousness. This is done by means of a very complicated symbolic process which is more or less identical with the psychological process of individuation. In alchemy this is called the conjunction of two principles.

—Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (as quoted in Jordanetics)

I had a physical reaction to reading this. I am not kidding when I describe it as a punch in the face or a stake to the heart. Remember what I said about not actually having read Carl Jung’s works? This is why that’s a problem.

You see, the way to salvation is not through “integrating” evil through a “very complicated symbolic process.” The way to salvation is through Jesus Christ, and Him only. The narrow path.

To follow Christ, one must reject evil—not integrate it.

This revelation changed the landscape in my heart. Now, it is not merely an intellectual exercise to trace the influence of gnosticism in my mind, up to and including Jordan B Peterson. It is now a matter of right thinking, of the utmost Truth, to sort out the wheat from the tares.

This is not something I can ignore any longer. I need to sit down and do the work of sorting through what I’ve learned in my life, where it came from, and how it contributes to my intuitive “filter” of the world. I do not expect this work to be fun.

It is not often that I have this type of reaction to a book, let alone share it on my blog. I have no doubt that I will write more about my de-gnostificating journey here, and I hope that it will help you, dear reader, if you are anything like me.

Overall, Jordanetics is a worthwhile read, especially if you have enjoyed JBP in the past. I am thankful that I stayed away from his Biblical lectures, because I didn’t trust him to present the Bible truthfully.

Now I know why.

 

 

As with all of the Very Personal Review series, I’m no expert in this category. I can’t always connect a book with broad context or deep history, but I still like to share my experience and thoughts.

The Batfort Reader

2018-07-21 / / 0 Comments

Here’s an idea: instead of calling this posts “linkshame,” I’ll rebrand and share what has caught my attention long enough to want to capture. Positive and helping-focused instead of negative and self-focused.

Articles

» Signaling concern over industry funding, Congress presses for transparency at groups supporting NIH, CDC

» Another article on why Peer Review is Not Scientific

» The founder of Cut the Knot.org recently passed away, so I checked it out. Good way to learn math, if you want.

» You can now download printable zines of Catlin Johnson articles. I love this idea.

» A Brief Introduction to Meme Therapy: If the meme strike notes are good, looking at fifty will save you from reading half a dozen books. They might not equip you to defend or attack a position beyond that, but that isn’t the point. The point is either carving out a space for certain ideas to be heard, or closing off a space and booting certain ingroups or positions outside of the sphere of acceptable public discourse.
[Scott Adams would call this “directional truth” rather than “exact truth.” -eds.]

» I’m intrigued by SocialMatter. Gotta love a neoreactionary website with a dot net address.

» The Puritan Intellectual Tradition in America, Part 1: Nineteenth-Century Optimism and Utopian Idealism

» It’s interesting to read this after having been to NYC: The Death of New York City

» The Only 3 Things I Need in a Partner

» Putting a Funny Face on Crohn’s Disease

» Global Stocks Lost Over $10 Trillion In H1, Just Wait For The Second Half

» I dream of living in a community like this one day: The History of the Cotton District

» How to Reinvest your Money

» Lack of group-to-individual generalizability is a threat to human subjects research. This is a big deal, and a truth that you’ve probably encountered if you are an n=1 experimenter.

 

Books and Other Things to Buy (or Not)

 

 

The unlikely influence of Earthsea

2018-01-23 / / 0 Comments

Ursula K LeGuin died recently. Her book A Wizard of Earthsea was one of my biggest influences growing up.

I’ve never read much else from her, although I should. The original Earthsea trilogy was good, but the 4th book veered into weird territory that didn’t make sense to me. I’m old-school and archetypal like that.

I’ve heard that she disliked her earlier writings (like my favorite) because they were too traditional and patriarchal, and felt like she “found her voice” when she started injecting feminism in her work. I read The Disposessed, which was interesting for a while but ended sour and preachy. I hate it when books do that.

I keep meaning to read The Left Hand of Darkness. Maybe now is a good time to do that.

When I lived in Portland, I met her once. She signed my copy of A Wizard of Earthsea and was very quiet and writerly. It turns out I lived in her neighborhood for a few years, but I never passed her on the sidewalks or in the park.

…

Here is my favorite passage from Earthsea. Our hero, Ged, has just escaped the embodiment of evil–the shadow–only to fall into temptation of unlimited power by Benderesk, Lord of the Terrenon, and the Lady Serret. “Only darkness can defeat the dark,” she says.

Ged’s eyes cleared, and his mind. He looked down at Serret. “It is light that defeats the dark,” he said stammering,–“light.”

As he spoke he saw, as plainly as if his own words were the light that showed him, how indeed he had been drawn here, lured here, how they had used his fear to lead him on, and how they would, once they had him, have kept him. They had saved him from the shadow, indeed, for they did not want him to be possessed by the shadow until he had become a slave of the Stone, then they would let the shadow into the walls, for a gebbeth was a better slave even than a man. If he had once touched the Stone, or spoken to it, he would have been utterly lost. Yet, even as the shadow had not quite been able to catch up with him and seize him, so the Stone had not been able to use him–not quite. He had almost yielded, but not quite. He had not consented. It is very hard for evil to take hold of an unconsenting soul.

I love A Wizard of Earthsea because it is a little book about fear–where it comes from, how it chases you, and how you and you alone must stare it in the face and defeat it.  You might think that Dune is a book about fear. Dune does indeed have the great Litany Against Fear, but it is one player on a stage of many things. The hero’s journey in Earthsea revolves around fear. It is an intimate, terrifying portrait.

This passage reminds me how easily we–especially those of us who understand some of the unseen undergirdings of the universe–can be tempted by power that is much bigger than us, that reveals all that we want to know and be. Power that would ultimately enslave us, because it is false.

This passage reminds me to keep up the good fight, and not give in to temptation. And yet, it also gives me hope–for even though I will stumble, I do not consent.

That idea–that evil cannot take you without your consent–is I think what marks the heroic men and women who stare evil in the face to investigate or prosecute or report or even just bear witness and who do not give into it.

We are not perfect. We will tremble. But evil cannot touch us if we do not allow it.

There’s a reason we are given a shield of faith and a sword of the spirit.

One of my failings in life is that I have not faced my fear, my shadow self, in a manner that would be worthy of Ged. I have stared fear in the face, certainly, and lived my life, but there are still places where fear has its claws burrowed in.

…

Now. Rewind to 2011, when I was first introduced to the band Gatsbys American Dream. I will have to write a whole post about them. Writing the paragraphs above made me tear up, but trying to put into words how I feel about Gatsbys makes me remember why I hate the world.

Their masterpiece is Volcano. Musically, it is pop-punk but asymmetrical and interesting. The songwriting is delicious. The album is cohesive, wrapping around to reference itself with music and lyrics. It is a beautiful package tied up with a little bow (my favorite).

And then. You barely hear it, a plaintive but insistent piano melody. It builds in intensity, and you finally catch ahold of some lyrics:

My pride ripped a hole in the world that set loose…a shadow….

I sail into jaws of the dragon: a beast before me, a shadow behind me….

“Is this…a song about Earthsea?” you think to yourself. “I thought I was the only person in the WORLD who cares about that little book.” You listen again. It still fits. You are excited, but realize that the likelihood of a lesser-known song of an indie band is highly unlikely to be based on your 12-year-old self’s favorite book. You decide that whatever you learn about the lyrics to that song, you’ll always pretend it’s about Earthsea even if it isn’t.

Lyrically, all of Volcano based on science fiction and fantasy. Books, video games, television. Ender’s Game makes an appearance, as does Interview with a Vampire.

Rest assured, friend, this really is a song about Sparrowhawk and his shadow.

Faculty dreams

2017-12-12 / / 0 Comments

I started reading The Four Cultures of the Academy for work, but I’m finishing it because the author is incredibly insightful. It’s the kind of book that rings so true that it’s funny.

I haven’t had this much fun reading a book since Antifragile. Like Nassim Taleb, author William H. Berquist puts words to many of the things that I’ve already observed, but arranges them in a useful way and explains them with more insight, experience, and technical knowledge than I have. It both affirms my confirmation bias while providing useful information–the best kind of book.

This is one of my favorite passages. See if you can guess what this story reveals about the rank the male faculty on the hierarchy.

Our protagonist–the ideal scientist or scholar–usually dwells on some lofty plane. Subsidized by family wealth or secure in a university appointment, he (rarely a woman) seems to be oblivious to the more mundane matters of finance. Personal relationships have a low priority, though the professor may be seduced at the end of the film or novel by an attractive laboratory assistant, reporter, alumna, or daughter of the university president. His requisite apparel is either a white lab coat or a herringbone jacket. He invariably smokes a pipe and partakes of an afternoon sherry. The scientist or scholar is often a former college athlete (the Rhodes Scholar model) but is not physically active only when an emergency occurs (about two-thirds of the way through the novel or movie). His physical prowess emerges only when the monster is invading, when fieldwork is required, or when our protagonist wants to show that he is still an all-American fellow by participating in a pick-up football game being played on the grass in front of the laboratory or library. Our modern-day equivalent to the scholar-athlete is Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones.

The scientist-scholar’s work is usually performed in solitude with one or two young proteges who provide appropriate respect and encouragement. Neither our protagonist nor his assistants are very interested in the ethical implications of their work until late in the movie or novel. They are concerned with the ultimate impact of their research on the welfare of mankind but are shortsighted about its immediate implications. The work in itself is a breakthrough–always on the frontiers of knowledge. In Thomas Kuhn’s terminology, this research is never in the realm of “normal science,” but is always in the realm of revolution and new-paradigm construction.

The research or scholarship is, of course, always successful. Very little attention is given to problems of dissemination; the new knowledge is immediately available to the entire world. only early on in the novel or movie is there resistance to the dissemination of our protagonist’s findings. By the end of the movie or novel, the scientist or scholar often shifts attention from his own work to broader social or religious concerns. The quest continues.

Let’s see…introspective? Check. Unusual? Yes; often cultivated deliberately. Unattractive? Generally on the left side of the bell curve. Bitter? Often.

$10 says the seductress is a redhead.

This is such prototypical version of Gamma: A Love Story (the title that I give all the different flavors of gamma fantasies in media) that it almost hurts. And yet, it really is the backbone of the dream of the research faculty. Everybody wants to be the secret king of research. Everybody wants to get the girl without having a clue. Everybody wants to never deal with money again in their lives.

And risk…don’t even get me started on the risk tolerance of faculty.

This book was written in 1992 so I’d like to say that things have changed since then…but I don’t think they have. The type of person that self-selects for a faculty role exhibits almost exactly the same characteristics of a gamma on the hierarchy.

Remember that the next time you ask why universities don’t just stand up to their students.

 

Coming soon

2017-12-02 / / 0 Comments

Glamour in the home

2017-10-31 / / 0 Comments

More on decorating. Forgive me (#SorryNotSorry), it was the best book on decor I’ve read to date.

This bit deals with glamour in our homes. While the author focuses on glamour as a style, rather than glamour as a concept, she highlights the concept that we all need a little bit of glamour in our homes. It helps us transcend the mundane.

Given how many mundane tasks a house must perform, a bit of frippery is actually a necessity. It can elevate a room into an experience. Glamour does require guts, though, because you need to express it with a bold stroke, not a tentative gesture. What creates glamour? Sparkle! Shine! Embellishment! Color! Pattern! Glamour is an essential excess, the icing on our cake.

Don’t think I am suggesting that we all have to go for an over-the-top, glitzy Hollywood “more is more” kind of look. In fact, that is rather hard to pull off. Miles Redd, a decorator who does not fear the glam, pulls out all the stops–crystal chandelier, gilded wood, chinoiserie wallpaper, leopard fabric, etc.–but keeps a tight rein on the color palette. You can also be selective and elegant, choosing perhaps one brilliantly ornate mirror, a lavish wallpaper, or a single glittering chandelier, in an otherwise modern or refined room. You don’t need to overdo it, but you can’t be wimpy: that chandelier or that mirror or wallpaper has to assert itself loudly and clearly. Glamour is not meek.

I’ve always liked the idea of having something sparkly or shiny in a room (or on an outfit), but I never put two and two together. Of course it would be an element of glamour to wake a room up and give it that extra bit of energy.

I also love the idea of not being wimpy in your own home. It’s so easy to fall into the trap of “good enough” or “nobody else will see this,” but sometimes it’s worth investing in a piece that makes you want to rise to the occasion on everything else. For me, in an outfit, that’s a great pair of shoes. Maybe in decor, it’s a mirror, for that sense of dancing light.

Because at the end of the day, isn’t it light that makes us happy? Dark, dreary homes are never welcoming.

It’s no great coincidence that the key to making people feel sparkly is to make the room itself sparkly. Candlelight, and low light in general, is essential for creating an elegant mood. The reason we still bother with candles, antiquated as they are, is that their light is hypnotic. And flattering. And it cannot be duplicated by any form of electric light. Candles mix best with dimly lit rooms. So keep all complementary lights low so that candlelight can cast its magic spell.

Natural light is best, but when that fails, there’s hygge and candlelight.

After that is Truth, I suppose. Because if you lose the truth, you’re truly sunk.

Even in home decor.

Even simple things like TASTE are subjective

2017-07-09 / / 0 Comments

Food Republic points out an interesting phenomenon in its review of a book called Gastrophysics: The New Science of Eating. Taste, it seems, is not just dependent on smell, but also on sight.

For example, a mouthwash manufacturer told me that their orange variant didn’t taste as astringent to people as their regular blue variety, despite the formulation of the active ingredients staying the same. It makes no sense until you learn something about the rules of multisensory integration governing how the brain combines the senses. Here, I am thinking of “sensory dominance” — where the brain uses one sense to infer what is going on in the others.

I’ve always found color theory to be fascinating, but I’ve never considered that “taste theory” might also be a field of study.

While everyone’s tastebuds are slightly different, and everyone has their own preferences in how certain things taste (some people like a lot of salt or spice, some don’t), I’ve always considered the majority of taste to be a mechanical thing.

It makes sense that smell is involved, since the nose is so directly connected to the mouth, and the smell of a food is usually related to the taste of that food. Except for Hot Pockets, the Biggest Lie.

Likewise, the sense of touch plays in to the taste of food because things like texture, mouthfeel, and temperature can also effect taste. You can taste a difference between cold brew and hot brew coffee, or a hot or cold chocolate chip cookie.

But it appears that sight plays a big part as well, and not just in the “we eat with our eyes first” sense. Sure, a meal can be beautiful, but not everything is. I don’t gaze in awe at my bottle of mouthwash.

What I find especially fascinating about this intersection between taste and our other senses is how the brain mediates between them. It makes the “truth” of a taste that much harder to get at–and knowing that our brain is running a bunch of interference with our other senses alongside can mean that it would be nearly impossible for us to get at the “truth of taste.”

That’s not a problem for people who just want to eat dinner, but I’m thinking about people who taste wine for a living or even food critics–maybe getting a better presentation DOES make the food taste better.

And that’s not even getting into nostalgia, memory, or expectation.

Gastrophysics is going on my to-read list.

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