The imagery speaks to me. Wolves in sheep’s clothing following a single Lamb. All the wolves who go to the lamb never return to the pack.

The context for me has two components,

1) recently on instagram there’s a creator, bdguan, who started a challenge for himself. He decided to live according to the principles of the Bible for 30 days “pretending as if God is real”; S⁠o, like Jordan, he acted out belief. Watch bdguan’s series it’s wonderful.

2) I have a lot of conversations online with self professed atheists who like to claim the moral high ground. They start the conversation with “ If you need the threat of divine punishment to be good then you’re not good.”

Correct. There is only One Lamb and we are as oily rags. We’re wolves in sheep’s clothing, voluntarily defying our own nature to follow the lamb.

Atheists don’t seem to appreciate that there is no meaningful “up” in a purely subjective space. So claiming the moral “high” ground doesn’t have any meaning.

It’s impossible to be good when good doesn’t have any semantic content.

If I formulate my own meaning for “basketball” and declare myself as “the best basketball player ever” it doesn’t mean anything. Likewise with definitions of good and ideas about morality derived from those definitions.

Anyway, I’d had this clip and these thoughts stuck in my head for about a day now.

August was Dostoevsky month. Short list, but a consistent one.

I run Podshelf, a free site that tracks book mentions across hundreds of podcasts by reading the episode transcripts. This is the Peterson slice for August, books only.

The two Dostoevsky titles came in the same argument, in Why Being Nice Is Destroying Your Family:

• Notes from Underground. "Dostoevsky was an absolute prophet. Like Nietzsche, he could see way down into the structure of things."
• The Devils, also published as The Possessed or Demons, credited with predicting the Communist revolution sixty years early.

His own We Who Wrestle with God came up three times across the month, including the origin of the title, that Israel means those who wrestle with God, which he says he only worked out during the 2017 lecture series.

The rest:

• Dante's Inferno, as one of the two directions a life can go
• Don Quixote, via the Cervantes line "the road is always better than the inn," which he was asked whether he agreed with
• Freud's Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, on why slips and jokes reveal structure
• The God Delusion (Richard Dawkins), which he was reading in preparation for a conversation with Dawkins in the next six months
• Lord of the Rings, in a run of dragon-myth examples

Full list with quotes and episodes: https://podshelf.io/podcasts/the-jordan-b-peterson-podcast

What do you think about such massive large scale criminal organisations using various religions to run a trafficking ring? Religion seems to have a lot of potency when it comes to scamming millions of people at once

I made a lot of mistakes in my 20s many of which were easily avoidable and dug a deep deep hole

Many of the them simply came down to not doing the right thing at the right time or even trying or putting in an effort

How do I handle forever wasting 5 years of my life

I’ve done a lot of introspection and realized I am the reason and cause of my problems

How do I fix myself and remain hopeful for the future and accept the consequences of my past

Professor Leonard is a legendary mathematics educator on YouTube. After taking a break for a few years for family reasons, he's now back and has produced a new series of lectures on statistics, for the Peterson Academy.

Here is his announcement

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gW8--Mzs3wM

In less than a day it's got over 1000 comments from his fans. Of course, here on Reddit the hatemongers are doing their thing.

In a podcast, maybe one or two years ago, JP commented on Eckart Tolle who is a spiritual teacher and wrote a best-selling book called "The power of now" which essentially is his own twist on buddhist philosophy. Peterson in the podcast said that Tolle is part of the 1960's humanist movement and that the humanists were fundamentally wrong. Is it possible that Peterson was mistaking Tolle for somebody else here ? I've never heard Tolle being related to this movement.

But anyway, if you guys are familiar with Tolle and Peterson's take on life, what is your opinion on Tolle ? Tolle believes that most problems aren't real problems but egoic constructs of the mind and all you need to do is to be present. Nothing else. You can be poor, sit on a bench for the rest of your life and according to him that's not a wasted life. Peterson believes that strategic self-improvement, meaning, adopting responsibility and competence are the keys to a good life.

I appreciate buddhism and what it can teach us but I believe that Peterson is right when it comes to living in the west. I don't know a single person who lives like Tolle who by the way who also has a net worth of 70 million dollars but tells people that most problems in life aren't real problems. I also don't think that tere is anything wrong with having an ego either and being motivated by it and wanting a good job, a strong body, a family and everything else what the material world has to offer us.

Really curious to hear your opinion

It may be possible to learn a lot about a country by looking at the roads. Not only how developed they are, but also the traffic on them and the behaviours of the drivers.

In my thinking, roads represent a path to opportunity. The level of thought going into how well developed these paths are, how many paths there are, how these paths are treated by the users and how these paths are maintained by those responsible for developing them are all important to look at when understanding the culture of the place you are at.

I thought about this sitting in a traffic jam, thinking about what was going on. My country is seriously lax on traffic rules, so you'd often see an illegal lane develop by the side of the road when traffic jams occur. These jams tend to concentrate around 'unregulated' junctions (without traffic lights), where, due to heightened road traffic at peak hours, indecisive drivers tend to stall, causing a pile up. You can understand that the more bold drivers are the ones who end up using the illegal lane that forms, and also that they tend to pass through the unregulated junctions more easily as they are less likely to stall.

I couldn't help but realise the odd relief found in the jam slightly clearing up as drivers move toward the illegal lane. I also wondered what it was keeping me in the legal lane, as in, was it my moral code or was that something I'd tell myself in order to not take risks while subtly enjoying the small benefits of the 'bolder criminals'? Then I realised that the relief I was enjoying was only short term, as even though there's a slight clearing up as drivers shift lanes, the additional lane at the junction makes it even harder for the indecisive drivers at the front of my lane to get through the junction, and so the benefit is surface level in exchange for a more fundamental problem.

So I started thinking about who is truly to blame. Are the roads not wide enough? Are there too many cars on the road? Is it the incompetence of the driver ahead of me? If I were in their position maybe this problem wouldn't exist. Should I blame the bold criminals, too impatient to wait for their chance and making it harder for the innocent to follow the law? They're even encouraging more to break the law, because if the illegal lane is apparently the only one moving, more shift over to it.

I then realised that this is occuring because we're all headed in the same direction. Piecing all this together with the idea that a road is simply a path towards opportunity, it started to seem like maybe the issue is actually that there aren't that many opportunities in my country. This is to say that the economy heavily concentrates around a few cities, leading to most vehicles heading in the same direction, causing traffic jams and incentives to break the law, which only worsen the state of the roads for the law abiding, convincing the road users that in order to peacefully use the roads in my country you have to be bold enough to break the law.

This is when I began to see roads as a microchosm of the country, because all these conflicting thoughts seem to be prevalent in my country's culture beyond just the roads.

Not too many industries in my country are developed, so the job market is highly competitive. To beat the competition, illegal routes develop, given that the government isn't too keen on fighting corruption. The opinion on who's truly responsible for this strife truly fluctuates between two extremes: 'those in power are too incompetent to identify the problems preventing us from reaching opportunities' and 'those corrupting the system are making it disorganised for their own benefit, but this disorganisation hurts us who choose to abide by the law'. From time to time we even find ourselves sublty enjoying how lax the system can be at times, or believing that if we had the positions of power it would be a lot easier to grasp at opportunity.

Both extreme perspectives may be true, but the more fundamental issue is, similarly to how there aren't too many developed cities in my country, there aren't too many developed industries either, so opportunities are scarce, and that scarcity creates a downward spiral as it does with the traffic jam.

I've seen 7 lane roads in other countries with traffic jams as well, because even though the country is developed enough to make and maintain such roads, the development is concentrated to a few small regions, which could indicate that they have few but highly developed industries.

The diversity in industry allows for separate regions to develop around similar markets (e.g Tech, Agribusiness, Fashion/design, Mining, etc), meaning the job market becomes less competitive as people aren't seeking the same set of skills to make it in the country, and traffic jams reduce as not everyone is headed in the same direction.

Such an understanding may be necessary to help people think beyond the career path they envision themselves following with the context they're in, to think about the potential sectors they can pioneer developing, relieving themselves of the stress of a traffic jam.

• Humanitarian/Low-Skilled Mass Immigration
• Expansive Welfare
• Prostituting the Justice System for Third Worldism

Western liberalism rests on high social trust, fiscal restraint, and one law for all. Progressive policies combined large-scale low-skill immigration, an ever-expanding welfare state, and identity-based leniency in courts and policing.

The result in several European countries and some US cities: lower trust, more concentrated crime, fiscal strain, and a visible two-tier justice system.

The concept of Western Liberalism has now been destroyed. Both the Far-Left and the Far-Right can point to the entire system being a failure, due to it being corrupted by progressivism, while they endorse new anti-liberal systems to replace it.