Part 4: Pursue What is Meaningful

Petersons’ religion: refuse nihilism, maximize meaning

Why not choose pleasure through expediency? Our ancestors worked out a sophisticated answer, but incompletely articulated, primarily acted out in ritual, myth, and stories.

Meaning is better than bliss or happiness, because you don’t always know what you want.

Maximal meaning comes about when you place “make the world better” at the top of your value hierarchy. This aligns everything along a single axis, because you are acting properly such that you are psychologically integrated across time, while benefiting yourself, and the broader world around you. Sometimes this has a cost.

Sacrifice

When engaging in sacrifice, our forefathers were acting out this proposition: something better might be attained in the future by giving up something of value in the present. Perhaps God’s favour can be gained, and His wrath averted, through proper sacrifice (and, conversely, maybe those unwilling or unable to succeed in this manner will be motivated to murder).

Sacrifice is delayed gratification, and the discovery that gratification could be delayed was simultaneously the discovery of time and causality. The discovery of the causal relationship between our efforts today and the quality of tomorrow motivated the social contract.

→ The God of Western tradition demands not only sacrifice, but the sacrifice of precisely what is loved best. Sometimes, when things are not going well, the cause is not the world - it’s that which is currently most valued, subjectively and personally. It might be time to sacrifice so that you can become who you might become, instead of staying who you are.

The archetype of sacrifice

Small sacrifices are enough for singular problems. More comprehensive sacrifices might solve larger and more complex problems. What would be the largest, most effective - most pleasing - of all possible sacrifices? The ultimate sacrifice is a close race between child and self.

→ Christ is the archetypal story of the man who gives his all for the sake of the better - who offers up his life for the advancement of Being - who allows God’s will to become manifest fully within the confines of a single, mortal life. That is the model for the honorable man. In Christ’s case, as He sacrifices Himself, God - His Father - simultaneously sacrifices His son. It is for this reason that the Christian sacrificial drama of Son and Self is archetypal. It’s a story at the limit, where nothing more extreme - nothing greater - can be imagined.

Jesus as the archetype of good

→ In the desert, Jesus is tempted by Satan - the archetype of evil, who is pure hatred of Man, God and Being, deliberate evil, the refusal of sacrifice, arrogance, spite, deceit, and conscious malevolence. Jesus goes to the dark night of the soul, a deeply universal human experience, where friends and family are distant, hopelessness reigns, and black nihilism beckons.

→ This depravity of man is one Jesus chooses to confront. This is why Christ is forever He who determines to take personal responsibility for the full depth of human depravity. He is eternally He who is willing to confront evil - consciously, fully, and voluntarily - in the form that dwelt simultaneously within Him and in the world.

→ Lessons from the 3 temptations in the desert (Matthew 4:1-11):

  • Bread is of little use to the man who has betrayed his soul (even if he is starving)
  • It is wrong to dispense with responsibility for existence by ordering God to intervene in a way that works on a personal level but does not solve it for all people and all time
  • Jesus is offered the pinnacle of the dominance hierarchy, which means no more suffering nor subjugation to death, and also the capacity to take vengeance and crush all enemies. Christ’s rejection of this means that there is something even higher than that pinnacle.

In all of these, to obtain the greatest prize - the establishment of the Kingdom of God on Earth, the individual must reject immediate gratification.

Christianity as a revolution

The society produced by Christianity was far less barbaric than the ones it replaced.

→ It is nothing short of a miracle that the hierarchical slave-based societies of our ancestors reorganized themselves, such that the ownership and absolute domination of another person came to be viewed as wrong. Christianity put forth the previously incomprehensible idea that ownership of a slave degraded the slaver.

→ Christian society objected to infanticide, to prostitution, and to the principle that might means right. It insisted that women were as valuable as men (even though we are still working out how to manifest that insistence politically). It demanded that even a society’s enemies be regarded as human. Finally, it separated church from state, so that all-too-human emperors could no longer claim the veneration due to gods. All of this was asking the impossible: but it happened.

→ Side note: Nietzsche believed that Paul, and Luther’s Protestants, had removed moral responsibility from Christ’s followers, by watering down the idea of the imitation of Christ, i.e. that the believer should reject any real moral burden (except that of belief in salvation through Christ) because the Son of God had already done all the important work.

God is dead: the consequence of successful revolution

As Christianity solved some of the world’s hardest problems, those problems disappeared from view - as did the fact that those problems had ever existed. So the West came to focus on the remaining problems, and came to believe that those were the only problems that ever existed.

Just as a loving father restricts the freedom of a son when he disciplines him, so the dogma of the Church provided necessary disciplinary structure to allow for the development of a free mind. But now that the dogma is dead (to the West), what has emerged is nihilism, and dangerous susceptibility to new, totalizing, utopian ideas.

Nietzsche posited that humans would have to invent new values after Christianity, but this is a  weak ideal. We cannot impose what we believe on our souls. We have natures that we must discover, contend with, make peace with. So we must learn what we most truly are.

Rebuilding Morality

→ Perhaps not good things have a converse. If the worst sin is to torment others for the sake of the suffering, then the good is whatever is opposite, whatever stops such things from happening. A hero is more than a villain who despairs at his villainy, more than the absence of evil - a hero is something positive.

→ Core axiom: to the best of my ability, act in a manner that leads to the alleviation of unnecessary pain and suffering.

→ Foundation for everything else: aim up. Pay attention. Fix what you can fix. Don’t be arrogant in your knowledge. Strive for humility, because totalitarian pride manifests itself in intolerance, oppression, torture, and death. Become aware of your own insufficiency - your cowardice, malevolence, resentment, and hatred. Consider the murderousness of your own spirit before you dare accuse others, and before you attempt to repair the fabric of the world. Maybe it’s not the world that’s at fault - maybe it’s you. You’ve fallen short of the glory of God and sinned. And all of that is your contribution to the insufficiency and evil of the world.