Ooo

I'd been procrastinating reading this article by Jordan B. Peterson, but it turns out it's really cool.

“Human beings ‘naturally’ divide the world up into chaos and order, darkness and light, nature and culture, fear and security, stranger and kinsman. The metacategory of fear/stranger/darkness/chaos leaps perhaps as naturally to mind. It is reasonable, furthermore, to fear the unknown: it is after all the place where death and destruction truly lurk. Does this mean that there is an irrevocable human tendency to demonize the foreigner and to strive for the shedding of his blood? We might look to mythology – and to neuropsychology – one final time for a more optimistic conclusion. ( Cut so I can skip ahead to the punch line, bolded emphasis mine: )

identity with the process that generates social order (presuming mastery of that order) is preferable to identity with social order itself. Thus, participation in the process that bestows acceptable emotional valence on heretofore unknown phenomena is to be regarded as more appropriate than adherence to traditional modes of apprehension, no matter how valuable these proved to be in the past...”

I downloaded six more of his articles, not that I have time to read them.