This summarizes a section written by Nordam Doidge, which constitutes the foreword. I included it after the essays because I consider it Peterson-adjacent but not core material.
Defining ideology
Ideologies are simple ideas, disguised as science or philosophy, that try to explain the complexity of the world and offer remedies to perfect it. Ideologues are people who pretend they know how to “make the world a better place” before taking care of their own chaos within. They are dangerous in positions of power, because existence is more complex than their simple model.
Suffering is universal
It is sad, but not special. We don’t suffer because “politicians are dimwitted” or “the system is corrupt” or because we, like most, can legitimately describe ourselves as victims in some way. It is because we are born human that we are guaranteed a good dose of suffering.
Modern lies - modern moral relativism and physical reality
We are taught that morality is relative, at best a personal “value judgment.” According to this argument (now a creed), religions and tribes have always tended to disagree about fundamental matters. Postmodernism claims that one group’s morality is nothing but an attempt to exercise power over another group. Relativism devalues millennia of human knowledge about how to acquire virtue, dismissing it as passé or even “oppressive.” But cultivating judgment about the difference between virtue and vice is the beginning of timeless wisdom.
Relativism’s closest approximation to “virtue” is “tolerance.” Only tolerance will provide social cohesion between different groups, and save us from harming each other. But most people are not uncertain relativists, but ideologues, hyper-judgmental and censorious, with clear opinions about what’s wrong about others, and what to do about it.
Ancient response to cultural differences
Some people think that we are the first to realize that different societies have different rules and morals. Obviously, this is not the case. But while we have responded with relativism, nihilism, and ideology, the ancient world chose a very different path. Socrates, as an example, devoted his life to the search for wisdom that could reason about these differences (helping invent philosophy). He asked perplexing, foundational questions, such as “what is virtue?” and “how can one live the good life?” and “what is justice?”
For the ancients, the discovery that different people have different ideas about how, practically, to live, did not paralyze them; it deepened their understanding of humanity and led to some of the most satisfying conversations human beings have ever had, about how life might be lived.