CHAPTER 1
Our Friend Chaos
You know what I’ve noticed? Nobody panics when things go “according to plan.” Even if the plan is horrifying! If, tomorrow, I tell the press that, like, a gang banger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics, because it’s all “part of the plan.” – The Joker, The Dark Knight (2008)
Jordan Peterson’s book begins with an examination of order and chaos, so it seems proper that mine should do the same. Though Peterson is primarily obsessed with Christian symbolism, he begins his book with a meditation on a piece of Eastern symbolism: the Yin Yang symbol. He likens the dark and feminine Yin to chaos, and the bright and masculine Yang to order. This is Peterson’s personal read of this symbol, not the traditional Taoist take on Yin and Yang, which holds to the notion that both of these essential forces of existence emerged from the creative fires of chaos, and each represent their own form of order, especially when placed in conjunction with one another.
As we examine the Yin Yang symbol, we notice that in Yin, there is a speck of Yang. In Yang, a speck of Yin. Peterson interprets this aspect of the symbol as saying that within chaos there is the potential for order to emerge, and vice-versa. But in fact, the intent behind the symbol was to show that darkness and light are inexorably connected, in the same way that front and back are opposites, yet they are connected because everything that has a front has a back. Up and down are opposites, yet they are connected, because everything that has a bottom has a top. Darkness and light are similarly connected in Taoist philosophy. I don’t personally subscribe to this notion, because darkness can certainly exist without light. In fact, being “without light” is the very definition of darkness—but the point is still taken.
It’s as my friend, author Howard Bloom, is fond of saying: “Opposites are joined at the hip.” In philosophy, this is called dialectical monism, or dualistic monism: the notion that reality exists a unified whole, but human perception (or perhaps some other force), splits existence into a series of dichotomies. The reason than Yin and Yang are in such balance, and the reason they each contains a seed of their opposite, is to show us that the separation between them is nothing but an illusion. Darkness and light, in Taoism, are not opposite forces, but two pieces of one force working in a beautiful tandem with one another.
But as George Carlin pointed out in his 14th album and eighth HBO special, ‘Jammin in New York,’ we should “leave symbols to the symbol-minded.” The Taoist interpretation of the Yin Yang symbol is no more relevant than Peterson’s interpretation or my own. It’s just a symbol. It doesn’t necessarily contain any greater truth about reality. The best it can claim to do is promulgate reflection on certain aspects of existence; introspections that will perhaps come to a worth-while conclusion (or set of conclusions), but could just as likely lead only to folly. In Peterson’s case, his interpretation strikes me as absolutist and almost childish. I have said before that Peterson is deceptively subtle, but there is nothing subtle about his take on Yin and Yang, or his take on order and chaos. He truly is among the ranks of the symbol-minded folks that George Carlin warned us about.
Though Peterson does occasionally in his book pay lip service to the power of chaos—and even eludes to the ways in which chaos and order work in tandem—for the most part he is obsessed with drawing a line in the sand between the two concepts and taking a moral stance on each of them. The title of his book tells you as much, as it purports to be an “Antidote to Chaos.” Listen to the way he describes order in the introduction (or, overture, as he calls it) to his book.
Order is where people around you act according to well-understood social norms, and remain predictable and cooperative. It’s the world of social structure, explored territority, and familiarity.
And here is how he describes chaos.
Chaos, by contrast, is where—or when—something unexpected happens. . . . Chaos is what emerges . . . when you suddenly find yourself without employment, or are betrayed by a lover.
These sentiments are hammered home again and again in his book. Order equals goodness and stability, chaos equals badness and uncertainty. He makes occasional exceptions to this otherwise rigid dichotomy, but the prevailing narrative is one of simplistic caveman logic: Order good. Chaos bad.
Let me present to you a very different notion of what order and chaos are (one that is more in line with what the Taoists intended with their Yin Yang symbol, not that it really matters).
Before we begin, it should be noted that concepts as broad as these often boil down to subjective interpretation. One man’s order is another man’s chaos. That’s why I chose to precede this chapter with a line from Heath Ledger’s joker, written by Jonathan and Christopher Nolan in their Saturn-award winning screenplay for The Dark Knight.
I think you will find that subjectivity is among the major themes of this book, and order and chaos are subjective in many of the ways they impact human life. This doesn’t mean there are no objective notions of order and chaos, however. It simply means that order and chaos are terms that can be defined subjectively or objectively depending on the context.
Objective chaos is most easily defined as randomness, that which has no pattern, no rules, no method. A Jackson Pollack painting is chaos. The paint is spattered about at random, non-representational, depicting nothing in particular, and created without any obvious regard for composition or form. (Nitpickers might point out that this was only the case during Pollack’s “drip” period, and that some eras of his work did place more emphasis on composition, to which I can only exasperatedly sigh: “fine.” Here, we are talking about the iconic drip and spatter style of painting that he made famous and that made him famous.)
Objective order is the opposite—it is predictable, deliberate, or has a definable pattern, a method, a discernible structure. A Leonardo da Vinci painting is order. The paint is carefully arranged on the canvas to create a composition that represents the subject of the painting in a recognizable way. No one looks at the Mona Lisa and says, “What the hell is this supposed to be?” It’s a woman wearing an enigmatic smile. And human beings with eyes and a few brain cells can cobble that information together.
But we’re not really here to talk about objective order and chaos, we’re here to talk about the subjective ways these concepts enter into our lives, and how one man’s order is another man’s chaos. I think you’ll find that this proposition is a great deal more difficult and complicated than just laying the blame for everything bad that happens in your life at the feet of chaos and crediting everything good to order, as Peterson too often does.
One of Peterson’s examples of chaos is finding yourself suddenly unemployed—but perhaps to the employer who fired you, this represents order. Perhaps your former boss is saying, “I’m glad we fired that lazy son of a bitch. Now we can get the company back on track.” To you, this decision is chaos, representing financial and other personal uncertainties. To your employer, this decision is order, representing the potential for a more prosperous and better-staffed business.
Peterson also likens chaos to being betrayed by a lover. But perhaps from that lover’s perspective, this is a stride towards order. Perhaps he or she is saying, “I’ve finally taken my life back from that controlling narcissist, and now I can be happy again.” To you, the break-up might represent the sorrow of the ending, but to your lover it may represent the thrill of a new beginning, the chance to establish a better order in their lives.
Perhaps in both of these examples, the contrast is not so much, your chaos vs. their order, but your harmful chaos vs. their beneficial chaos. But we will get into that more in a moment.
From an even broader perspective, being fired by a company or being dumped in a relationship are both part of larger structures of order. A company that didn’t have the option to fire people who wouldn’t or couldn’t perform their duties would be in perpetual chaos. A company must be free to fire those who cannot perform their job duties adequately, because otherwise they are at the mercy of bad employees. The ability to fire people is built into the structure, the order, of every company on earth, because it’s an absolutely vital ability to have if you want a stable and prosperous company. A worker who cannot perform his or her duties is a detriment. The ability to fire people is not a byproduct of chaos, but a pillar of order.
Of course, to the person being fired, it feels like chaos. They had a job, and a steady paycheck to rely on, and now they don’t have those things any longer. They might begin to wonder, with some alarm, where their next meal will come from and how their bills will be paid and how they will indulge in the luxuries to which they are accustomed. But meals and bills and luxuries requiring money is also part of an established order: capitalism.
The point, if you’re still not getting it, is that your personal chaos is often the byproduct of strictly regimented systems of order. Which raises the question: does this work in the opposite direction as well? Personal chaos can be a symptom of a larger order, so can personal order also be a symptom of larger chaos?
Well, let’s ask those situated in the heart of the military industrial complex who make vast personal fortunes from exploiting the chaos of war. Let’s ask those rare souls who have won their fortunes in games of random chance like the lottery. Let’s ask those authors who see the chaos of the modern world and write books claiming to be the antidote to chaos and who subsequently make a fortune off the disheartened and disenfranchised who seek a remedy to the personal chaos that has engulfed their lives. Clever exploiters and lucky dupes alike have been the benefactors of chaos since the dawn of man, and probably before that as well. But that’s only the most superficial way in which human beings have benefitted from chaos.
Life itself has climbed a ladder of chaos to reach new heights of order. Even Peterson is forced to concede this in his first chapter, where he probes the depths of evolutionary psychology expertly in what I consider to be the best and least infantile part of his book.
One of the principle engines of evolution is random genetic mutation. Genes are not “supposed” to mutate. They are supposed to perfectly replicate themselves in a predictable manner. And 29,999,999 times out of 30 million, they do. But one in every 30 million times during the passing of genes from one generation to the next, a base pair mutates. This means that there are about 100 to 200 new mutations from one generation of humans to the next. The vast majority of these mutations are neutral mutations that have neither negative nor positive effects on the organism they occurred within. Other mutations are harmful, and cause genetic disorders like cystic fibrosis or hereditary cancers. Other mutations are beneficial, and actually lead to an organism being better adapted to its environment.
Without beneficial mutations, the process of evolution would be impossible. In other words, without the chaos of certain genes failing to replicate themselves accurately, the higher orders of life that exist in abundance today would not be possible. If genes never yielded to chaos, and always replicated themselves perfectly, then life never would have evolved beyond its most primitive state—a prokaryotic cell more primitive than any that exists today; little more than a bit of RNA floating around in a lipid membrane. Basically, a self-replicating soap bubble filled with genetic material.
The title of this book, The Order of Chaos, sounds like a contradiction, but it isn’t. Order owes a great debt to chaos. Because chaos can do something that order cannot do. It can pull off the great material miracle of creation. The Taoists were correct when they said the Yin and Yang and all of the dichotomies they represent were born out of the creative fires of chaos. Earlier, I likened a Jackson Pollock painting to chaos and a Da Vinci painting to order, and in the context of the analogy, it was accurate. But from a broader perspective, they are both the children of chaos. Paintings are now part of the established order of existence. We understand them and we understand their purpose. But there was a time, just a blink of an eye ago on the cosmic time scale, when paintings were not part of the natural order.
The first paintings were made on the walls of caves, and were made with dirt or charcoal, mixed with spit or with animal fat. Dirt, charcoal, spit, and animal fat, cave walls—all of these things existed long before human beings were even dreamed of by mother nature. They each had their own place in the natural order of the world. And if a sentient observer had existed to study them, he or she would have safely predicted what each of them would do and what each of them would be within the order of nature. It wasn’t until mankind arrived on the scene and began to use their big brains (which, once again, evolved by climbing the ladder of chaos) to repurpose these natural elements into something unpredictable. Cave walls became canvasses. Dirt, charcoal, spit, and fat became paint. And humankind began to express itself through representational art. This was chaos. It was not the predictable. It was not the way things had always been. It was not hitherto part of the established order.
When Jordan Peterson defined order, in part, as being the predictable, he was making a bold admission about what chaos really is: something new. Something that upsets that order. And just as genetic mutations can be neutral, beneficial, or harmful, so too can all of the creations of chaos. I personally think that painting is a wonderful example of beneficial chaos. It was something that rewrote the rules of the reality in an unforeseeable way that bucked the established pattern of the world, and thanks to it we have Van Gogh’s Starry Night and Klimt’s The Kiss and Picasso’s Guernica and so on.
All that which is new to this world, and which could not have been predicted by precedent, is a form of chaos. And just as life has benefitted from the continued meddling of chaos, so too has art. We aren’t still painting on cave walls. We’ve moved past even the need for physical canvasses and paints thanks to softwares like Abode Photoshop, Corel Painter, and a slew of others. And who knows what new leaps in visual art will stun us in the future? Technology is always improving. Human beings are still up to their old tricks of taking that which exists in one form and repurposing it into something new, something that defies the extant order, something inherently and magically chaotic. Sometimes the new creations are not useful, and they fade away benignly. Other times, they are beneficial, and become incorporated into a new order, at least until they are replaced by some new radical departure from the norm, brought to you by our good friend chaos.
But if chaos is our friend, then why does it have such a shabby reputation? All of us have said, during a tumultuous time, that, “my life is in chaos right now.” If a room is messy and not functional, we say sheepishly to a friend who sees it, “Sorry, my room is in chaos right now.” If people are rioting in the streets, and violence is breaking out, and fires are being set, and cars are being flipped, and utter bedlam has broken out in every conceivable way, we are apt to describe this situation with the word “chaos.” And in none of these examples are we misusing the world. All of these situations are, in fact, chaos. And it’s this chaos that Jordan Peterson likely sees his book as being the antidote to.
Peterson has developed a catchphrase of sorts, that has resonated and caught on with many of the disenfranchised people who have come to him. “Clean your room, Bucko.” It’s such a simple phrase. The same kids who likely ignored it when it came from their parents are now championing it as great philosophical wisdom now that it comes to them from Peterson. And here is what it means, according to Peterson, in an interview with ABC Comedy’s Tonightly with Tom Ballard:
It sounds so reasonable, doesn’t it? Too bad it’s completely wrong. The people throughout history who have made an impact, who have changed the world, for better or do worse, have never done so by cleaning their room, but by messing it up. Remember that angry mob I mentioned in my example of harmful chaos—the throngs of people turning over cars, breaking windows, setting fires, and throwing a massive tantrum? Let me ask you this: what are they saying? Are they saying, “We are through with order and we now want nothing but chaos?” No. They are saying, “We are tired of the order that exists now, and we demand a new order. We demand an order more in line with what we want the world to be.”
Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X had very different approaches to the problems faced by black people in America, but one thing they shared in common was that they did not care about disrupting the established order. Why would they? It was an order that disadvantaged them for the color of their skin. It was an order that, to them, was evil. It deserved to be disrupted. It deserved to be challenged. The result of their disruption was chaos. Unquestionably. Yet, few would look now at their actions and say, “Well, they both lost their lives in the chaos they created, and many people were hurt, many were attacked by dogs, or with fire hoses, many were jailed, many in the establishment were offended, many in the public were upset and confused, therefore what they did was bad.” Most wouldn’t now say that because we see in retrospect that what they did produced results.
Malcolm X, though a radical, though an extremist, though naïve to the point of not knowing what socialism was when asked about it, though a deeply flawed human being, gave black people in America a deeper sense of pride, and many of those who suffered under racist tyranny believed that he addressed their grievances more accurately than did the Civil Rights activists of the time, who Malcolm found too limited in their approach. Malcolm X, at once point, described Martin Luther King as a “chump” and saw the civil rights movement as stooges for the white establishment.
As for MLK, it was only days after his assassination that the Civil Rights Act of 1968 was passed, and this was during heavy rioting in reaction to his murder. The discrimination of blacks in America was part of an established order. Martin Luther King disrupted it with chaos. He was eventually assassinated, and this too was chaos. His death produced riots and outrage—more chaos. And then the system reacted with concession—The Civil Rights Act of 1968—and this was a new order. We see chaos giving birth to order, then chaos disrupting that order, then chaos forcing a new order to emerge.
I could write an entire chapter about the lives and accomplishments of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. and their contrasting approaches, but for the purposes of this book, only these facts are important:
- Both men were malcontents who opposed the established order of their times.
- Both men disrupted the established order with their speeches and protests, causing great confusion and pandemonium. They used the power of chaos.
- They changed the world into something more akin to how they thought it ought to be.
And they didn’t change the world by making sure their rooms were clean and by being respectful to order. They changed the world by causing havoc, disruption, chaos. Their rooms were dirty.
“But TJ,” you are now perhaps saying, “You’ve missed the point of Peterson’s statement. He wasn’t necessarily saying that a person who is opposed to the order of the day cannot work to change it, he was essentially saying that a person must have their own life in order before they attempt to start changing the world.”
Well, Martin Luther King Jr. may have been a great champion for civil rights, but he was also a plagiarist who was not at all faithful to his wife. The extent of his plagiarism and his infidelities is unknown, but few argue that they didn’t happen. Imagine if Martin Luther King Jr. had said, “Well, I’m a flawed person. I’ve done some bad things. My life is not in perfect order, so how can I presume to lecture the world? How can I presume to change the world when I can’t even change the bad things about myself?” Imagine if he’d taken that tact. Maybe black people would still be drinking from separate water fountains in places like my home state of Louisiana. Maybe they would still be openly discriminated against in housing. We cannot speculate as to the alternative routes history might have taken, since too many variables are present, but it’s somewhat safe to say that in the absence of a world-changing man, the world would not have changed.
Malcolm X may have imparted dignity and a strong belief in the right to self-defense to the Black community, but he was also a convicted criminal who spent part of his adolescence in a mental hospital. When he was a member of the Nation of Islam, he was overtly racist, thinking of white people as devils and promoting black supremacy. Later in his life, he softened these stances and disavowed racism and the Nation of Islam—which is probably why three of its members riddled him with bullets. The point is, he was far from a perfect human being. His room wasn’t clean. And his knowledge of the systems he sought to change was far from perfect. It didn’t stop him from speaking out. And much of what he said, I don’t agree with. He believed in racism, in segregation, in the extinction of the white race. And in the midst of those times, to a white man like me, he would have been a frightening force. But through the cold lens of retrospect, I see these positions he took as largely a reaction of the disenfranchised to living in a world that was demonstrably stacked against them. I also view the hardline stance of Malcolm X as making the comparatively softer stances of Martin Luther King Jr. more palatable to white America. Even X himself seemed to realize this, when he spoke to a crowd of 300 Islamic students on December 10, 1964: “I'll say nothing against [Martin Luther King Jr.]. At one time the whites in the United States called him a racialist, and extremist, and a Communist. Then the Black Muslims came along and the whites thanked the Lord for Martin Luther King.”
Later in his life, Malcolm would come to believe that all races could live together in harmony. He believed, wrongly in my opinion, that Islam would be the ideology that could accomplish this, but whether I agree with Malcolm X or not isn’t the point. The point is that he didn’t wait for his room to be clean before he spoke out against the injustices of the world. And as his views changed, so did what he preached to his people. And so those who followed his journey changed with him. He didn’t wait until his ducks were all in a row, he got them in a row as he went, as best he could. And more than half a century after his death, his name and his legacy remain. For better or for worse—and that, once again, is relative—he changed the world. He didn’t need perfect order in his life to change the order of the world. He didn’t need perfect knowledge of the systems he was affecting in order to change those systems.
Many of those who changed the course of history not only used chaos as their tool, but also had skeletons in their dirty rooms. Winston Churchill was a white supremacist prick who few people really liked, but he still led England through the darkest days of its history in World War 2. John Lennon was an absentee father and wife beater, but he still wrote great songs and generated an enormous groundswell of support for peace activism. Thomas Jefferson was not only a slave-owner, but was also fucking at least one of his slaves, Sally Hemmings, and had numerous children by her, but he was still instrumental in laying down the foundational thoughts that defined what the United States of America would be as a country. Henry Ford was an anti-semite who bought the Dearborn Independent newspaper just to propagate his hatred of the jews, but he still revolutionized industrial manufacturing with his ingenious vision of the assembly line. Aristotle was brutally misogynistic, and thought women were little more than “deformed men,” but he was still among the most brilliant philosophers of all time. Einstein was a philanderer, Benjamin Franklin was a womanizer, Christopher Columbus was a clueless dolt—this could go on ad nauseum. When you study the lives of influential people who changed the course of history in some way, big or small, good or bad, finding someone with their shit together is a lot harder than you’d think.
Jordan Peterson’s directive to see to it that you have mastery over yourself before you attempt to change the world is not an antidote for chaos as all, but a paralytic agent that places you at the mercy of chaos. Because while you are trying to master your self and clean your room, the world does not sit idly by and wait for you to have your bearings. It churns and morphs and fights and yields to the forces that act upon it. You haven’t the time to wait until you are the master of yourself before you fight to change the world. If you take that tact, you will die still in pursuit of your own perfection, and the world will not blink at your passage, because you left no mark. You cannot always play defense. You cannot focus all of your energy on fortification of your self, and none of your energy on attacking that which you find unjust or incompetent. The truth as I see it is this: no one’s room is actually clean. No one truly has an antidote for chaos, and hopefully by now you’ve realized that’s a good thing.
Chaos is not your enemy. It’s your friend. Even when it hurts you, it is often reshaping your world in ways that history will ultimately deem were for the better. To wish for an antidote to chaos is to wish for a static world, an inert world, a world that cannot change. To think that you must be a perfect being with perfect knowledge before you can seek the change the world is not an idea supported by even the most cursory glance throughout history.
Chaos can give birth to order, and chaos can change one system of order into a new system of order. We have seen that time and time again, but can order itself give birth to chaos? The American Civil War—what was it if not chaos? A country divided in two, brothers killing brothers to the tune of 620,000 deaths. More Americans died in the Civil War than died in Korea, Vietnam, World War I, and World War 2 combined. And yet, the chaos was born out of two conflicting ideas of order. It was the zenith of a conflict that existed since the formation of our country, tying back to the competing visions of Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton for what this nation should be, with Hamilton pushing for centralized power under the rule of a strong Federal government and Jefferson pushing for a looser affiliation of states, with greater autonomy and more of a right towards self-determination.
It wasn’t until nearly a century had passed that these competing ideas had it out with each other over the issue of slavery. The chaos of the Civil War was a battle to determine whose vision of order should exist, and Hamilton’s vision won a hard fought victory, though the battle is still not truly ended. There are still those among us who hold more to Jefferson’s ideal, and despise the central power of the federal government.
The point is that, yes, order can give birth to chaos, usually when there are two conflicting notions of what order should exist. But a system of order that is challenged neither by chaos nor order will not change itself. And even when two forms of order compete, they must each use the tool of chaos to achieve their ends, as Lincoln and his Union Army did, as Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X did, and all world-changing figures and their legions have done throughout time.
Order itself is never perfect. The founding documents of our own nation include a much-contested provision in the Bill of Rights called The Second Amendment. This provision states, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
Was the intent of the amendment to ensure that all American have the right to own guns, or only that a well-regulated militia does? Was the intent of the amendment that guns cannot be regulated? Does the amendment make sense in a modern context? After all, it was written in the time of muskets, not the age of AR-15s. These are questions that can be, and have been, examined elsewhere.
The questions I am interested in are these: Why do these questions exist? Why does this debate exist? What has prompted this amendment to the bill of rights to come under such intense scrutiny? Few Americans would struggle to answer this question. The reason that gun control vs. gun rights is one of the most hotly contested issues of our age is because of bad actors with guns—armed robbers, mass shooters (including school shooters), gang violence, and a high rate of gun suicides, gun homicides, and gun accidents. If not for these pockets of chaos, these events that are a threat to the orderly existence that people desire for themselves, this amendment would be as uncontroversial as most of the others.
Once again, we see two competing visions of order. Shall we live in a society where the right to own guns remains unencumbered by law, or one in which gun ownership is regulated to some greater degree or banned outright? Both positions represent order. The former order has been shown to contain within it elements of chaos, and the latter will surely contain chaos of its own.
Though we strive towards order, chaos is always with us. And oftentimes, as discussed earlier in this chapter, our chaos arrives in the form of another man’s order. And no system of order can fully contain chaos. Allow gun, and you see more gun violence. Ban guns, and you perhaps leave citizens without an ability to defend themselves against criminals and tyrants. We have lots of clichés ready to throw at such a predicament: Catch 22. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Pick your poison.
The relationship between chaos and order is a complicated thing that touches on every facet of human existence, and perhaps existence itself. The subjectivity of these concepts makes the relationship only more complex by orders of magnitude. But amidst the complexity, and amidst the subjectivity, and amidst the dizzying cycles of chaos creating order, and competing orders creating chaos, and order using chaos to transform itself, and people caught in the maelstrom trying to sort through the debris and find patterns of order when only chaos seems to reign supreme—amidst all of these things, there is one truth that can be clung to. One truth that is beyond dispute and beyond serious argument: chaos cannot and should not be cured. An antidote to chaos is an antidote to the new, an antidote to change, an antidote to progress. In other words, it is no antidote at all, but a poison that paralyzes humanity.
Luckily for all of us, Peterson’s book cannot cure chaos. It can only offer yet one another idea of order, a vision of order that must compete against many others in a chaotic marketplace of ideas. Whether it can survive that marketplace will have very little to do with the true-false merits of the ideas, but will be instead contingent on how successfully it stirs the human soul. People long for order, and so if you offer it to them, many will buy it. Chaos is a harder sell, because with chaos comes challenges. With chaos comes confusion, uncertainty, fear, and tribulation. But we can’t hide from the powers of chaos, and I would argue that we shouldn’t. It has done more for us than I’ve seen many people frankly admit, and nothing has ever been gained from denying its power.
I will close this chapter with two summarizing aphorisms.
- Order provides the stabilities which we crave, but chaos creates the opportunities for change that we need.
- Those who are waiting for internal order, will be the subjects of external chaos. Those who yield to internal chaos will be the architects of a new order.
I admire your writing. Wish I was so patient and... passionate 👍🏼
Cool. I was waiting for this.
I like just about any book that references George Carlin.
Dang tj, I didn't know you had all that in you...lol I started reading it at what ever time and just finished now...lol. And that's just chapter 1! So what I got from this chapter is that we can't have too much Yin, and we can't have too much Yang or else the whole worlds gonna go to crap! That nothing is really black or white, nothing is absolute. We need bad things as much as good things to happen to even recognize that they are in fact good things. What is this secret world you speak of??? Anyway good post I really enjoyed it and found it very interesting.
I like TJ the Philosopher.
Very interesting. You know TJ you are smarter than most people give you credit for.
I dare say Chaos are Fuels.
When the going gets tough the tough gets going and the tough gets it.
We tend to get things done at the peak of it's urgency.
I enjoyed every bit of this...Thank you!
Finally!
Took you long enough, TJ.
I kid, good job.
Now, lemme check it out.
JBP is hucksteriffico!
Damn, TJ, that was beautiful. I dare to believe your content is reaching into new heights of quality.
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"And in none of these examples are we misusing the WORLD" should be "And in none of these examples are we misusing the WORD"
Why does the internet atheists have a boner for Jordan Peterson. I grew up in Japan so I don't understand why these people have a complex against Christianity. I think Jordan Peterson's work is based much more on Carl Jung's idea and trying to combine that with statistical based psychology. To me, it seems his personal faith is rarely discussed and really doesn't have anything to do with most points he makes.
$4.49? What kind of retarded algorithm is Steemit?
Anyway, counterfeit printing presses aside, Peterson is one of a legion who are laying the groundwork for the implementation of The Noahide Laws. The fact of the matter is TPTB didn't spend 5000 years creating their religions to allow upstart atheists to mess with their agenda(S). Now, it might also be noted that atheism has made one critical error in assessment and that was going from rightfully rejecting the endless B.S. of religion to saying that God doesn't exist and specifically denying the obvious: by all reasonable assessments, this earth is run by an evil God! Please see the arguments made by the youtuber underlings in this regard. Also, consider that this earth is a cosmic meat grinder with 2-people dying per second; that life has to eat life to survive here; that everything you love will be taken away from you at death, all arguably evidence of the existence of an evil God. In fact, this is the message of the earliest Christians. Given this circumstance and evidence, it may be time to consider marriage and children:) as this will ensure the survival of one's head!
I look forward to the rest of this most excellent work...Upvoted and a rare resteem.
NOTE: even if this earth and universe are not evil in the way Christian Gnostics asserted that still wouldn't change the fact of the coming religious cabal that aims to rule the world.
Very well written.
I know this is only chapter one so I will guess some ideas that I feel didn't get enough examination will probably be covered in latter chapters.
It's really here!
I am glad to see that you are writing again and engaging in philosophical discourse, as I have always felt that this is one of the areas in which you excel.
Starting off with the Joker is always a good idea.
https://steemit.com/philosophy/@sonofsparta/a-rebuttal-of-a-rebuttal-tj-kirk-vs-jordan-peterson
https://steemit.com/philosophy/@sonofsparta/tj-kirk-vs-jordan-peterson-round-2
When this book drops I'm gonna be one of the first to buy it.