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Jordan Peterson (red flag, I know!) talks about how disgust is actually one of the oldest emotional centers in the brain and is an incredibly distinct emotion f

by zwkrt 5y ago

Jordan Peterson (red flag, I know!) talks about how disgust is actually one of the oldest emotional centers in the brain and is an incredibly distinct emotion from fear. He mentions that most people think that reactionary conservative thinking is driven by fear, but he thinks it is actually driven by people’s innate ability to feel disgusted and how that emotion pours over from physical disgust of feces, rot, maggots, etc. to more social and abstract forms. Some people innately feel this more strongly than others, but you can also train yourself to be less disgusted. It bears out if you have ever seen someone who is what I might call “physically bigoted”, i.e. their body seems to have an intense physical reaction to people of different races or classes. Think about how fundamentalists really hate gay sex (or even slightly kinky “adultery”)— their actions aren’t driven by a logical process, the thought of it is so disgusting that they are repulsed by it’s very existence. I find this interesting because of how disgust has been used in the past and present as a rhetorical device for various social movements. Hitlers speeches about keeping a strong aryan race centered around analogies of disease, filth, and purity. Covid and covid coverage certainly latches onto people’s deep desires to stay away from the diseases as well. There are logical reasons to want people to wear masks but I think the feeling goes deeper for some. A certain kind of lefty thinks right wing states are a plague ship full of untouchables. On the other hand, right wingers have latched on to the “Chinese virus” narrative, and attempt to humanize Asian people is seen as naively/maliciously allowing disease spreaders into the community by conservatives. I guess my point is that we might be better off to be intentionally and rationally disgusted wherever possible, and should be aware that this incredibly strong emotion can be used to manipulate us.

patcon 5y ago
Not sure why you were downvoted, but thanks. I'm no Jordan Peterson fan, but I appreciate your thoughtful comment :)
- proc0 5y ago
  People have that feeling of disgust towards JP.
  - throwaway3699 5y ago
    I don't understand how. JP is best known for being a (believe it or not, relatively left-wing) psychologist teaching young adults the virtue of responsibility. What is wrong with that?
    - zwkrt 5y ago
      Progressives don’t like responsibility because it is complicated to balance talk of personal responsibility with that of social justice. The hardest part of being a minority is that one can blame almost all of ones ills on the state of society, and be correct to do so, but in doing so one loses personal control over ones life in the day-to-day. We have to act as if we have responsibility even if we don’t, just to be sane. It’s the same line of thinking as believing in free will. If you don’t believe in it deep down you will almost certainly fall into a depression. But right-wing rhetoric flips the script and says of course we have to act with responsibility, because we /really are/ responsible at the lowest level of reality. If your life isn’t going well then that’s your responsibility to fix it and yours alone. Minorities and poor people hear this and either beat themselves up or reject it outright, since it is a half-truth at best. So now talking about responsibility is tied up with bigotry, which I think is really unfortunate.
      - watwut 5y ago
        Conservatives don't like responsibility for themselves tho. Only for those they perceive as others.
        redis_mlc 5y ago
        No, conservatives don't advocate for a nanny state like Marxists/leftists/Dems are literally demanding. However, conservatives do lean a little overboard on state censorship on occasion, though leftists have pulled far into the lead on that, am I right?
      - redis_mlc 5y ago
        > Progressives don’t like responsibility because it is complicated to balance talk of personal responsibility with that of social justice. It's more stark than that. If you're not personally responsible (ie. a victim), then the state assumes a larger role in controlling you. Thus Marxists (progressives) keep trying to expand the state - you can see that in Biden's policies, as he appeases his radical leftist base. A famous story is about Stalin visiting a farm: "See that duck? Right now he's free." Then he plucks the feathers and says, "Now he depends on me for the rest of his life." That's the purest example of Marxism that I can think of.
- zwkrt 5y ago
  Thanks. I try to take the medicine from the poison with regards to JP. Maps of Meaning really helped me fling myself out of a depression as an aspie-kind of a guy. I had such calm and reasoned thoughts of meaninglessness, a kind of zen-depression-nihilist-nothingness. I wasn’t crying or staying in bed all day, but I couldn’t be bothered to care about any aspect of my life. I already don’t like people, hobbies were pointless, work a sisyphantian task, etc. His book was great because it was an academic look into why meaning is important at the basest level of existence, and how it is basically ones responsibility to have a full life by /injecting/ meaning into the world—the more the better! Then I kind of saw through to the anti-progressive undertones and hung up the phone as it were, but I owe him a lot.
  - goldenchrome 5y ago
    What is it about the anti-progressive undertones, to use your language, that caused you to stop reading him?
    - zwkrt 5y ago
      Well if you’re still here to read my response, he believes really strongly that a strong sense of individual responsibility and personal freedom (as in liberty) is the only path to happiness. I live in a kind of a commune and I’ve never been happier, so I know that this is false first-hand, and it shows that he’s using his science to promote his political agenda. This is fine, but he really plays off his ideas as fundamental truths instead of opinions. It isn’t any single thing he says but kind of the underlying ideology of his writing and speech. He says bad things about the right wing but the. mostly says it’s due to personality differences. Right wing people are less open, more conscientious, etc. But when he says something bad about left wing thinking it isn’t due to personality but a giant moral failing and disaster of democracy. It’s kind of like attribution error but applied to political thinking. I can’t rally point to any one thing but if you listen to his lectures on personality you’ll get what I’m talking about. He really does have so much worthwhile to say about ontology and social interaction that I think he’s worth it, he just shouldn’t be anyone’s guru.
      - 5y ago
- watwut 5y ago
  The Hitlers speaches about aryan strength centered on aryan strenght and history and such. They had feel good and feel powerfuly strong element. They were motivating to target audience. He was in business of building powerful Reich, that required vision of strength and victory, not just threat. He did had also speeches about Jews being Marxists and pest and disease. That was favourite topic too. But the sentence itself is just something someone who is bluffing and hoping for best would say. I kind of suspect that part about disgust being oldest center of brain turns out similar "sounds good but not really" nonsense.
  - redis_mlc 5y ago
    > He did had also speeches about Jews being Marxists That's a historical fact. A lot of Jews who left early Soviet Russia because of discrimination carried Marxism to other countries. The original feminist author of "The Feminine Mystique", Betty Friedan, is a Jewish Marxist. She told women in 1963 that being a wife was slavery, yet has her own family, of course. And here we are. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feminine_Mystique https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feminine_Mystique If you're interested in learning more about Marxist influences in America, look for interviews with their family members - invariably they turn into denunciations of their "hypocritical Marxist" relatives. (Recently the writers for "Sex and the City" and "Cosmopolitan" admitted they misled women with feminist rhetoric that serves a narrative, but not individual women.)

by zwkrt 5y ago

patcon 5y ago

Not sure why you were downvoted, but thanks. I'm no Jordan Peterson fan, but I appreciate your thoughtful comment :)

proc0 5y ago
People have that feeling of disgust towards JP.
- throwaway3699 5y ago
  I don't understand how. JP is best known for being a (believe it or not, relatively left-wing) psychologist teaching young adults the virtue of responsibility. What is wrong with that?
  - zwkrt 5y ago
    Progressives don’t like responsibility because it is complicated to balance talk of personal responsibility with that of social justice. The hardest part of being a minority is that one can blame almost all of ones ills on the state of society, and be correct to do so, but in doing so one loses personal control over ones life in the day-to-day. We have to act as if we have responsibility even if we don’t, just to be sane. It’s the same line of thinking as believing in free will. If you don’t believe in it deep down you will almost certainly fall into a depression. But right-wing rhetoric flips the script and says of course we have to act with responsibility, because we /really are/ responsible at the lowest level of reality. If your life isn’t going well then that’s your responsibility to fix it and yours alone. Minorities and poor people hear this and either beat themselves up or reject it outright, since it is a half-truth at best. So now talking about responsibility is tied up with bigotry, which I think is really unfortunate.
    - watwut 5y ago
      Conservatives don't like responsibility for themselves tho. Only for those they perceive as others.
      - redis_mlc 5y ago
        No, conservatives don't advocate for a nanny state like Marxists/leftists/Dems are literally demanding. However, conservatives do lean a little overboard on state censorship on occasion, though leftists have pulled far into the lead on that, am I right?
    - redis_mlc 5y ago
      > Progressives don’t like responsibility because it is complicated to balance talk of personal responsibility with that of social justice. It's more stark than that. If you're not personally responsible (ie. a victim), then the state assumes a larger role in controlling you. Thus Marxists (progressives) keep trying to expand the state - you can see that in Biden's policies, as he appeases his radical leftist base. A famous story is about Stalin visiting a farm: "See that duck? Right now he's free." Then he plucks the feathers and says, "Now he depends on me for the rest of his life." That's the purest example of Marxism that I can think of.
zwkrt 5y ago
Thanks. I try to take the medicine from the poison with regards to JP. Maps of Meaning really helped me fling myself out of a depression as an aspie-kind of a guy. I had such calm and reasoned thoughts of meaninglessness, a kind of zen-depression-nihilist-nothingness. I wasn’t crying or staying in bed all day, but I couldn’t be bothered to care about any aspect of my life. I already don’t like people, hobbies were pointless, work a sisyphantian task, etc. His book was great because it was an academic look into why meaning is important at the basest level of existence, and how it is basically ones responsibility to have a full life by /injecting/ meaning into the world—the more the better! Then I kind of saw through to the anti-progressive undertones and hung up the phone as it were, but I owe him a lot.
- goldenchrome 5y ago
  What is it about the anti-progressive undertones, to use your language, that caused you to stop reading him?
  - zwkrt 5y ago
    Well if you’re still here to read my response, he believes really strongly that a strong sense of individual responsibility and personal freedom (as in liberty) is the only path to happiness. I live in a kind of a commune and I’ve never been happier, so I know that this is false first-hand, and it shows that he’s using his science to promote his political agenda. This is fine, but he really plays off his ideas as fundamental truths instead of opinions. It isn’t any single thing he says but kind of the underlying ideology of his writing and speech. He says bad things about the right wing but the. mostly says it’s due to personality differences. Right wing people are less open, more conscientious, etc. But when he says something bad about left wing thinking it isn’t due to personality but a giant moral failing and disaster of democracy. It’s kind of like attribution error but applied to political thinking. I can’t rally point to any one thing but if you listen to his lectures on personality you’ll get what I’m talking about. He really does have so much worthwhile to say about ontology and social interaction that I think he’s worth it, he just shouldn’t be anyone’s guru.
    - 5y ago
watwut 5y ago
The Hitlers speaches about aryan strength centered on aryan strenght and history and such. They had feel good and feel powerfuly strong element. They were motivating to target audience. He was in business of building powerful Reich, that required vision of strength and victory, not just threat. He did had also speeches about Jews being Marxists and pest and disease. That was favourite topic too. But the sentence itself is just something someone who is bluffing and hoping for best would say. I kind of suspect that part about disgust being oldest center of brain turns out similar "sounds good but not really" nonsense.
- redis_mlc 5y ago
  > He did had also speeches about Jews being Marxists That's a historical fact. A lot of Jews who left early Soviet Russia because of discrimination carried Marxism to other countries. The original feminist author of "The Feminine Mystique", Betty Friedan, is a Jewish Marxist. She told women in 1963 that being a wife was slavery, yet has her own family, of course. And here we are. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feminine_Mystique https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feminine_Mystique If you're interested in learning more about Marxist influences in America, look for interviews with their family members - invariably they turn into denunciations of their "hypocritical Marxist" relatives. (Recently the writers for "Sex and the City" and "Cosmopolitan" admitted they misled women with feminist rhetoric that serves a narrative, but not individual women.)