Dear Dr Jordan Peterson,
I want to first say that your views of individual empowerment have their merits. I see your ideas of structure can be needed by certain individuals at certain times in their life. Your views of the importance of family are noted and valued.
Having said that, your perspective is deeply flawed: 1. your inability to be flexible. 2. your divisive language, 3. your views on the collective.
The Inability to be Flexible
I’m sure with all your reading you have come across the analogy of the vinegar tasters along the way. While I think you conceptualize the sour and the bitter, I do not think you have any conception of the sweet. I think meditating on all three tasters together being correct is something you need time to contemplate. Because there is more than one correct answer, and we must house them together.
I also think your perspective, lacks the ability to include diversity, and the understanding that some are born at a disadvantage that sometimes can prevent empowerment by environment alone. But not just diversity, but diversity of morals that can’t compete with the mainstream morals you want to uphold. Can not fit into the mold and structure you seem to value so dearly, and in truth they would be imprisoned by them. While I understand the value of traditional roles and the evolution of thought and nature it took to achieve these traditions, and by no means would ever dismiss them, I do not discount the future evolution of these traditions. To deny the evolution of traditional roles, diminishes the power of the individual, and dismisses their individual path of ‘destiny’ as you call it.
If you genuinely believe certain morals are the north star, then a certain leap of faith is called for that others will eventually follow, but on their own terms and path. True knowledge and wisdom are found on the path of life, not following a rigid hierarchy structure of values and morals. Wisdom is the sweetness of life.
Divisive Language
Woke, left, and right? Just seems you are smarter than that, in understanding the immediate passions you awake by using those terms. It really puts emphasis on the fact that you are not trying to heal anything (Which should be the perspective of a doctor), in fact just the opposite.
Concept of the Collective
I find your thoughts on the collective confusing and misguided. While you talk about individuals guided by destiny shaping society, testing themselves against a hierarchy of society of individuals all striving for destiny, It sounds like a dog-eat-dog kind of world where only the strongest remain standing to enforce a collective government. A from the ground up created society and only a ground up society. You seem to be threatened by any top-down control by a collaborative government. And I want to point out the word collaborative, because I feel that your world view does not consider that in order to house many different world views in a collective, we do in fact need a collaboration of control from the top down. It may not be on point with what you view society to look like, but society is not just made for you. The word collaboration is a very yin word, to which your unbalanced yang seems to have little patience for.
On a personal Note,
I am sorry for all the health issues you and your family have had lately, I truly am. I would like to point out the following, for the sake of your health, your apparent mind/body divide, so that maybe in the future, you might close that divide and find peace. I assume you are familiar with the symbolism of the flesh being associated with the collective? I fear your structured mind is at odds with the collective body, and only by finding a way forward to reconcile the two of them will you find health. I say this from experience, as I have also had my own issues with the body/collective.
Best Regards,
Hazel Porter