https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=ADGrd3SsWzw
Alright, so I’m back from traveling and I’ve been giving a lot of thought to my other video, What Did Jordan Peterson Do? And so this is what Elsie did, effectively. What I’m going to talk about today is a different aspect of what Jordan Peterson engendered in people and how he broke through the strictly materialist frame that people are using when they’re understanding the world as objects and objective things and with properties, things like that, that way of seeing the world and how he broke through all of that to open people up to a different set of potentials, a different set of frames for looking at the world. One of the things that Peterson does in the lecture series, Maps of Meaning in particular, but also when he’s talking in general, is he highlights certain aspects. For example, you can’t look at an object and tell what it is for. The desire for something determines whether or not you care about the object first, that’s attention, right, and then what that object is. So if you’re walking through the forest and your feet are tired and you want to sit down, you don’t see a tree stump because effectively there’s no such thing as a tree stump, right, you see a sitting place. And of course all the other tree stumps you pass that aren’t suitable for sitting, you just don’t notice. I mean they may stand out to you for other reasons, but you’re basically only going to notice the things you want to notice. This sort of goes into John Vervicki’s Relevance Realization, roughly speaking, right. So Peterson tells you that you’re looking for affordances, you’re looking for participation, ways to interact with the world, and that determines how you view the things around you. That determines the object, if you will. So the object isn’t something quote objective that’s out there in the world. The object is the object of your desire. That’s really what it is. And Peterson makes this clear with his examples. And what this also does is highlight the relationship first approach to the world. Now I talked before, right, in my earlier video, right, I talked about this idea that he’s not that charismatic, that he’s not using his own authority. And of all the scientists to have authority, given his published papers even before he got famous and the numbers there, he’s up there. He’s in the top like 1% of scientists. He never talks about that, right. He’s using your own phenomenological experience as his authority to explain something to you. He’s not telling you something. He’s not commanding you. He’s not doing any of that. He’s explaining your phenomenological experience that you’ve already felt to you. That’s why he says repeatedly, I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. Well that’s weird. If he’s telling me something that’s propositional and I already know it, but when he says it, I’ve never heard it before. So you can see the way in which he’s appealing to a type of knowledge that doesn’t have anything to do with language or hearing or speech. The knowledge he’s appealing to is the knowledge within you of your experience. It’s your participation in the world that he’s appealing to. Now in the model that I outlined earlier that I worked on with a bunch of people on the Discord server, which I’ll link to here, in that model we talk about this as a difference between intuitive knowledge, things you know intuitively as a result of participating poetically in the world. So you’ve got poetic information. You’ve got participatory information. Those types of information lend towards the intuitive knowledge. That’s the type of knowledge that Peterson’s explaining to you using propositions and procedures. The procedure is not I look at the world and see the world as it is. That’s not the procedure. He’s breaking down that procedure. He’s speaking to you. Those are the propositions. It’s not a tree stump. There’s no such thing as a tree stump until you have something you need to explain via tree stump. But if you need to sit down, you see a seat. Or if you need to be somewhere to eat, you’ll see a table. That tree stump can be all kinds of things. If you need to look further than you can and stand up high, it might be a watchtower. So he uses these tactics to explain to you in proposition what you’ve experienced in the world. And that’s why you already know it. And he tells you that this is appealing to your own authority, to your own experience, to your own participation in the world. And then he opens you up to the fact that matter doesn’t have properties. And that even in cases where you can think of it that way, because it’s a valid way to think of the world for a lot of things, scientific thinking relies on this to some extent. It’s not the way you think of the world. And there’s another way to think of the world. And that way is relationship first. What is it that I want? What are the things in front of me going to afford me towards what I want? And that’s part of directing your attention. And that’s something I need to get into in a different video for sure. But with respect to Peterson, he’s using these tactics to show you this different world. He’s talking about Carl Jung. He’s talking about myth. He’s showing you the way in which these things are relevant to your experience, to your personal experience. And then again, he says, I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know, which is weird. But you do already know it. You know it because you’ve experienced it. But it’s never been properly propositionally explained to you. Peterson gives you that propositional explanation. He ties together the feeling inside you from the experience, that embodied knowledge. He ties it together with your propositional understanding of the world. Those two things can be different. And they’re different in his students. And that’s why I believe he is one of the top life-changing professors wherever he teaches. Because he’s tying these two ways of relating to the world. There’s two types of knowledge, intuitive knowledge embodied and particular knowledge, which is your propositional sort of knowledge, together and reunifying you and making you feel comfortable in that. Because really, he’s doing the work of making you a whole person in that case. And you don’t have as many internal inconsistencies when you can clearly articulate, and Peterson goes into articulation and the importance of it, clearly articulate what you’re feeling inside. Peterson gives you a whole way to think about it. He gives you a framework to think about that such that you can relate your experience back to the words you’re using. Which is a problem that we have today, right? People are not relating their experience. They’re relating the world inside their head and projecting it out onto the real world. Unfortunately, that doesn’t work. It only works when it’s close to an emanation. So Peterson reverses that process and says you can’t just take what’s in your head and throw it out on the world. You have to link the world to your experience. And what you want to express, the thing that gives you the most power, he’s perfectly happy to play the postmodern power narrative game, is to link your experience to your words. And I would argue that’s authenticity. And so you can see the way, hopefully, that all these things wrap together. And they culminate in this better way of relating to the world with more tools and a deeper quality understanding of how the world is laid out, or how best to understand how the world is laid out. So that, I think, is another thing. And there are other things. So we’ll try to do more of them in videos. That’s another thing I think he does. It’s about affordances, breaking that matter property, object property dichotomy model, and opening you up to being able to express your own experience in the world. And I don’t know if it’s easy to understand how important that is. Because people that already have that, kind of take it for granted. They’re very well balanced. And they don’t necessarily understand how other people can be unbalanced in that, because they’re fine. And I think that’s really important to understand. And I think it’s significant that that’s where Peterson focuses. And again, I think he does this very deliberately. I think he learned how to do this over years. He knew what the problem was, and he knew how to solve it, because he solved it for himself. And that is important to understand. Again, he’s not doing a charismatic appeal. He’s found a way around that. He’s appealing to you and your own phenomenological experience in the moment. And he’s telling you the trick. There’s such a thing as embodied knowledge. He says it. It comes first. Language comes later. And so I hope that that goes some way towards explaining some of the sort of methods that Jordan Peterson is using to appeal to people, and some of the methods that need to be used. These appeals to authority are not going to work, and increasingly so. We’re moving away from that model. And I’m always grateful that I’m able to see some of these patterns and communicate them out in a way that people really are able to understand. It’s clear from the views on my first What Did Peterson Do video. And so that’s why I’ve opted to do another. Also, I had requests. So it seems to be working. So I’m always very grateful, too, that people watch any of my videos at all. And most of all, I’m grateful for the thing that Peterson seems to be able to get from people very readily, which is your time. And attention.