Jordan Peterson's ARC is Looking for Crew Members to Confront the Cabal. A Question of 'How?' Q & A 3
Q3: Family and Social Fabric: What is the proper role for the family, the community, and the nation in creating the conditions for prosperity?
Q3 of Jordan Peterson’s ARC. An answer, edited and expanded for this publication.
Answer to Q2:
Introductory note
Many years ago, 1990s, I was exposed to woke before it had been given that name. It came to me in the form of a first or second year sociology course at my local top Canadian university. The assignment was to articulate the effect that industrialisation had had on the family. I was delighted to discover in my research that the prosperity that industrialisation had ‘given’ the family had improved five of the six elements or functions which were defined in my research as the attributes of ‘a family.’
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This was a delightful discovery because the inflection or signalling markers from the course presentation had been directing me to confirm that industrialisation was and is bad for the family. After doing my research I concluded that the only negative was that family/social wealth had transformed children from family assets to financial burdens and that that was having a subtle and very hurtful effect on the psychology of the children growing up. Pre-prosperity children, even in harsh circumstances, were aware that they were important contributors to the family’s wealth and success. After ‘prosperity’ children were glorified in often infantile ways as wonderful and as, perhaps, socially important virtue markers to the parents. That false or empty elevation came, or perhaps was even a compensation for, children now living inside a world that denigrated or relegated children as financial and other burdens as is often portrayed in comic strips, stand up comedy jokes, and serious financial discussions about the cost of education or the total financial burden of the child from birth to graduation. After reading one particular comic strip from a very popular daily, I realised that if the demographic had been anything but a child, the comic strip was getting close to being hate speech.
I think that this underlying devaluation of child as financially burdensome and as a priceless caricature is a contributing factor to the sad state of young people’s sense of place. And that unwholesome family aura is now seriously compounded by the prolific misandrist, misogynist and racist ideologies directed to them disguised as critical race theory and so-called gender dysphoria that is rampant in school curricula and all popular and mainstream media.
In a question worthy of a Johnny Carson Carnac skit, perhaps one of the most astounding critical comments scribbled in pencil on my typed paper came in the form of a question to ‘The technology and social wealth associated with industrialisation has given families the desire and ability to control the size of their families and the ability to choose when to have children.’ The marker’s (grad student TA’s) question: ‘Do you really think people do this?’
It will come as no surprise that I received a very poor grade for the paper. In response to my appeal of that grade I read that I had submitted ’a well researched, well written paper with supportable arguments.’ And my appeal increased my grade by a half letter. At the time I knew that it had been marked down because I argued that the prosperity that industrialisation had brought to the family was an overall strong benefit. If I had ideologically cited industrialisation as having created alienation and anomie I would have been well rewarded. (This was not my only encounter with woke in the humanities at that time.)
Prosperity brought with it expanded freedom to choose and it was and is a mistake to confuse newfound freedom with alienation and anomie even though newfound freedom without direction or some kind of manifestation or awareness of personal responsibility will create a mess while people learn what financial freedom means. And there has been some of that learning curve in the last two hundred years or so. It strikes me that a possible definition of “woke” may be simply acting compulsively from an unconscious fear of having the freedom to choose without possessing a sense of personal responsibility adequate to meet that freedom. What fills that responsibility vacuum are resentful platitudes, shallow understanding and hateful solutions.
End of introductory note.
Anyway, back to the question, which is “What is the proper role for the family, the community, and the nation in creating the conditions for prosperity?
For me it begins with the challenge of defining ‘prosperity’. From my youthful past I saw prosperity as the monetary freedom to choose. And that means more than just having the basic needs met, of course. Today I would more tightly define prosperity as having the financial freedom to choose and the awareness of having that freedom and the responsibility, ie maturity, to properly embody that freedom. Superficially money provides freedom, and yet is not actually absolutely necessary for freedom above mere subsistence levels. Nor will it provide freedom to immature individuals ‘enslaved’ by infantile compulsions projected onto some kind of enemy-de-jour, as is well manifested in the various woke causes and in self-destructive addictive behaviours of all kinds that are rampant within individuals, families and the community. (Tommy Rosen, of Recovery 2.0 has astutely delineated six areas of addiction which are thriving: drugs (including alcohol), work-money, food, sex, relationships, and technology.)
So, I would work the question stepwise backwards. The role of the family is to support the individual and the individual's freedom to choose by providing guidance and support when the choices are unexpectedly sub-optimal and ‘challenging’ throughout childhood. (Donald Winnicot called that ‘good enough parenting’.) That is how we learn, by stepping into and out of sub-optimal choices into independence and the maturity to ‘handle’ freedom. Once the individual has learned to take personal responsibility for choosing and accepting the consequences of choice as the means to becoming a more skilful and perhaps even wise human, then the family will be ‘naturally’ strong. A family is the smallest human social group, and the individual human is the foundation of the family. Strong human, strong family.
In similar fashion, the community is the extended family’s social structure that has the responsibility to give the family freedom to choose and to support them as the family learns to take responsibility for its collective choices and from that develop skilful and perhaps even wise behaviour. And thus the wise family becomes integral to the community that supports the family.
And the same with the nation. In each step, it is the power of the individual to be responsible for self, family, and community that will build prosperity because skilful and/or wise behaviours are those that move with compassion at the speed of trust in support of community.
With this definition of prosperity the totally incorrect and debilitating economic ideology of scarcity will fall away and the individual and community will solve the challenges of the basics by expansive thriving that is grounded by a tangible and experienced sense of responsibility and wisdom instead of the fear based demands for constriction, restriction and control.
So, the family is the individual and the community is the family and the nation is the community. It looks like somehow our challenge, if we choose to accept it, is to heal our individual selves out of blame, complain and other victimhood projections and thinking. Yup. Sounds simple, to simply grown up. That idea is well articulated in Peterson’s 12 Rules For Life: An Antidote to Chaos and the many other wise texts old and new from religion, psychology, philosophy and ‘recovery’. (In the many many books I’ve perused, a particular favourite is RECOVERY 2.0: Move Beyond Addiction and Upgrade Your Life by Tommy Rosen.)
Unfortunately this is a ‘chicken and egg’ problem, ie, the family is healed when the individual is healed, and yet the immature individual requires either a healed family or other ‘family’ community to be a worthy model to inspire and then provide healing. A lovely Catch-22 that can begin to be broken with a very simple step: make your own bed before you fix the world’s problems. Gautama’s practices are identical: begin with the messy bedroom within our own victim mind-states and from that comes the possibility of true prosperity: the embodied richness of compassion, that can also be understood as wisdom.
I particularly like how the Wilhelm/Baynes’ translation of the I Ching puts it, paraphrased:
“It is only when we have the courage to face things exactly as they are, without any sort of self deception or illusion, that the light will develop out of events by which the path to success may be recognised” (p25).
And also The Bible does a good job of describing this process.
“When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became an adult, I put away childish things” (1 Corinthians 13:11 edited).
So, likely this is not really a solution, beyond the well known truism that simply throwing money at poverty has rarely, if ever, created prosperity or healthy families despite years of so-called left wing (now woke) welfare-based poverty solutions.
What is compounding and expanding the lack of emotional and/or psychological prosperity (wisdom) in the individual and consequently the family has been the directed social management founded in a form of the religious economic ideology that has directed our schooling, entertainment, and all mass media to celebrate an infantilism of consumption as if greed and consumption is the foundation of a how to live a meaningful life. When Rockefeller took over the management of the grade school system in 1903, with the founding of the General Education Board, it was to create unthinking workers and consumers.
For the family to step up to its role as the foundation of the society, we the individuals that comprise the family are to step forward, step up and put our shoulders back and with courage face reality as it is, without any self-deception or illusion and with that maturity and wisdom embody compassion and so ease suffering.
It would seem that I am asking for a redefinition of prosperity beyond the standard socio-political ones: prosperity as the surplus of compassion because from that, all other material forms will be automatically manifest.
Very well said. There is much I could say in support, but I will sum it up thus: "No one should be denied attending the School of Hard Knocks." Sometimes, but not always, that is the only way to really learn and appreciate what one has. The Robber Barons (you mentioned one) decided to set every one on a different course of education.