"There is a powerful argument that societies need religion for resilient social cohesion."
As an atheist I very much agree with this. There is need for the sacred, that which cannot be traded or negotiated in order for society to persist through time.
This is a true Enlightenment conundrum, and even Rousseau perceived it, and took a vain stab at a solution. You can't reason your way into divine justification, for the Enlightenment path to truth is not revelatory. We view religion functionally, but that isn't what makes religion work.
So, going back to the Roman Republic - was religion necessary for social cohesion then? You often work forward from the Roman/Christian merger. What about working back?
That would make me think it wasn't that strong - which leaves Nietzsche in a rather curious place. The master morality subverted by a slave morality. Although he did admire the cleverness of priestly hate, it would seem it is almost fated to win.
Further, you point out the law was human as opposed to divine. Is that a fundamental social weak point? The later, merged sensibility, sublimated civil law until the Renaissance, and it was a long, slow re-emergence.
No, the Church always thought law was human (see Aquinas, for example). It just that religious law was the human attempt to follow God’s rules as embedded in the universe (natural law) and via revelation. The retreat of canon law was about relative power and authority.
I generally agree, but does the sacred belief need to be non-logical or even rather irrational (i.e., evidence free) to ensure the necessary degree of fealty to the group's cohesion?
And just how long do we expect a given set of beliefs to provide for continued cohesion?
Certainly there are also climatic, demographic, and other "random" factors that can reduce that society's persistence, regardless of what sacred belief is being maintained or how long it has been viable in the past.
The U.S. clearly elevated an ideal above sectarian cohesion. The problem is in keeping the civil, civil and the spiritual, spiritual. If humans aren't inclined that way naturally, then it will always be an uphill battle.
To be more specific, there are times when social cohesion requires people to act as devoted rather than instrumentally rational agents. That is, to view some things as sacred, as not subject to ordinary trade-offs.
We are currently experiencing this lack via the pervasive problem of cowardice in institutions.
Another good essay; thanks. But I baulk at the idea of granting the modern tyrants and social bullies their own lying title for themselves: "progressive". After all, this is a group that has taken Lenin's bureaucratic despotism, Stalin's cultural controls, Hitler's ideas that race is the driver of history and that there exists in the world a race of world poisoners, and Mao's thought and speech controls, and amalgamated them in into a single poisoners ideology! Progressive they emphatically are not.
"And yet, and yet: yes, it does represent a clear evolution of Left thought. But still, something seems wrong calling this self-serving elitism—which so obviously despises the working class, and is so deeply inegalitarian in its performative commitment to equality—Left."
Only if you elect to believe that the Bolsheviks (and every other Marxist cadre ever to seek or seize power) were actually about revolution for the benefit of the masses, and not simply so they could consolidate power into their own hands. I honestly don't know how you could grant them that. The great "advance" of DEI is that it is conducting a mostly bloodless revolution. Sure, some lives get ruined but they are hardly amassing a body-count like their predecessors.
I think the issue here is that every political side has both the “Baptists and Bootleggers”. Some on the left care about the worker and some pretend to as a means to power. Likewise on the right some care about individual Liberty and freedom, while others mouth the words only.
I am personally disposed to not trust the left in so far as I don’t think “workers” as such is a meaningful group and usually leftists seem to want to help some and harm others, but I think as a general point the idea holds. However, I think most political ideologies that do not explicitly seek to limit government (ie politicians’) power are in fact in support of political power for those who profess the ideology.
Like many, I'm passingly familiar with Tocqueville but have never read his full work. Thus I was a bit surprised by the embedded quote in Nisbet's Twilight of Authority.
“The foremost or indeed the sole condition required in order to succeed in centralizing the supreme power in a democratic community is to love equality or to get men to believe you love it. Thus, the science of despotism, which was once so complex, has been simplified and reduced, as it were, to a single principle.”
This predates Marx, and is informed both by American culture and politics as well as the excesses of the French Revolution.
That’s an excellent quote, I will have to grab that book, thanks!
It lines up well with what I am reading about the Taipei rebellion in mid 19th century China as well. The theme and behaviors were strikingly similar to the Communist revolution to take place half a century or so later, all about shared ownership and equality while the higher ups lived like kings and broke rules that were brutally enforced on the near slave lower classes. It got me thinking that maybe civilizations had revolutions typical of their cultures, like the same things would roughly happen over and over because of their structure, but that Nisbet quote makes me think maybe it is more fundamental than that even, and all human civilizations can face revolution from that same source. It is a fundamental bug in the human psyche, as it were.
Yes, Fraser mentioned that Mao saw the Taipings as a sort of proto-communist revolution. It strikes me that it is hard to see that pattern exactly in western revolutions, but then they rarely get so big or last so long. I doubt Britain's Levelers would have gotten so bad, and although the Glorious Revolution had it's problems it didn't seem to get near to killing 5-10% of the total population. The French Revolutions, though... there's a certain flavor there that is reminiscent.
Now I wonder if there might have been some mid-east regional revolutions that got that bad. If so, maybe it is a fundamental cultural pattern between eastern and western civilizations. Russia had some bloody times before the Communists took over, and the Indian Mutiny was definitely a super bloody mess... I don't recall either having the egalitarian, proto-communist flavors though. Maybe eastern cultures tended to have less concern for human life as such into modern times, so any revolutions/rebellions get super bloody, and only some feature the socialist/equalitarian/communism angle, were as in the west concern for life started earlier and so rebellions didn't get so far out of hand, even the egalitarian ones, so we don't get to see just how they might have acted?
Hmmm... If I had another thesis to write, and all the relevant features of my life were different, that would be an interesting one :D
States with a strong tradition of Parliamentarianism tended to be less bloody than those without. The Nazis are only a partial exception, as they slaughtered in the realm of destroyed states, not in Germany proper.
<<Sure, some lives get ruined but they are hardly amassing a body-count like their predecessors.>>
The problem is that some aspects of DIE are implicitly exterminatory. For example, CRT could only work if there were no white people. Therefore, as the wokusts will fail to produce "equality of outcome", they must resort to extermination as their last resort. This is the same route that the Bolsheviks went down - a relatively bloodless coup, followed by gross economic and social breakdown, followed by civil war accompanied by mass-murder and which culminated in state-sponsored famine.
The Bolsheviks didn't just slip into insane violence - they had studied the Jacobins carefully. They were committed to violence from the start and that is documented in their own words.
You're right in saying that the Bolsheviks were committed to violence. However, it's the sheer scale of Bolshevik violence that is extraordinary and unexpected. For example, by the time Lenin died at the beginning of 1924, the Bolsheviks had slaughtered 11 million people - 5 million in the civil war, 6 million in the famine. That scale of mass-murder was made necessary by the absolute failure of the Russian Marxists to create the utopia they thought they could magic into existence. The contemporary wokusts will go down the same path for the same reasons.
The logic is there, I agree. The will to do so I believe is lacking, and the pushback will not strengthen their resolve, it will collapse it. That is the difference between the woke and the true revolutionary. The woke will whine rather than fight, believing that their priestly authority is supposed to bend the will of all, and they lack the warrior mentality that cares less about moral authority.
I think you are right if the wokists are a bottom up movement. If it is too down, ie a way for politicians to amass more power, then I might expect the pushback to be fierce as it will come from those with the capacity to inflict violence through others.
In that vein, I wouldn’t be surprised to find that if Wokism really alienated enough of the American left such that support was weakening, the Woke would get pressured into shutting up and purged if they didn’t. Sort of the modern version of the Night of Long Knives, if not so dramatic. Probably just a half dozen suicides, car accidents and drug overdoses over a month or so, till people got the message.
I think in our softer gentler age, where (thankfully) people shed tears instead of blood to gain power, the Wokusts (!) won't need to dirty their manicured hands exterminating the White kulak. Now they can use deplatforming, shadow-banning, strict quotas to weed out enemies and speech codes to monitor their words, and coming soon: de-banking and CBDCs, which can bankrupt and impoverish you at the speed of light.
What's in store is more like ancient banishment than 20th-century death camps.
I'm very much looking forward to how you think accountability can be raised up. It seems to me that our prosperity has allowed us to paper over the vast decline in accountability (across our entire economy and government) and the only hope for bringing it back is via a precipitous loss of general wealth (i.e. when the people who make bad decisions will actually have to suffer for doing so). I pray there is a better, and better targeted, approach.
"While folk often talk about freedom of speech and thought in the language of rights, it’s much more useful to see it in terms of authority: specifically one’s authority as a citizen.
A citizen has the authority to express themselves, to make their own decisions and judgements."
This is an interesting change in language. In the US the core ideas are that we have natural rights (from God or Nature) merely because we are human with a unique set of evolved capabilities, and that We The People are sovereign over our own government/governance.
But our "authority" for this sovereignty is really expressed in our Constitution as our version of foundational law [even if the Declaration of Independence also expresses some of our "Rights"] . So our "rights" are sort of given, while our authority is based on the limitations and foibles of human creators [rather than a divine one]. Constitutions are changed (and do need to be changed) occasionally. The nature or basis of this authority also evolves, but at a cultural pace.
I suppose in principle, a despot may be able to constrain your expression of your "rights", but you still retain them, while this despot can deny your authority as a citizen by abrogating your constitution.
IIRC, Helen said in Australia the law is more dependent upon written legislation and has no truck with fairy ideas about rights outside of written law. ???
Another good piece, with which I have no substantive gripes. But one item deserves a quick comment:
"Rudyard Lynch, Mr Whatifalthist, likes to point out that Communism—i.e. the Dialectical Faith in power—was a geopolitical boon to the US."
That's true only if you come at it from a zero-sum mindset where for us to win, someone else must lose. Had Russia and China not destroyed millions of lives (and untold wealth) to communism but instead joined the West in democratic capitalism, had we been able to direct our resources toward trade with partners instead of defense from adversaries, _all_ of us -- not just Russians and Chinese -- would likely be better off than we are today.
China and Russia choosing to cripple themselves is a "boon" to the U.S. in the same way that the neighbors burning down their houses is great news because it will reduce your property taxes.
So, the woke “religion” confers status, not on accomplishment, but to membership in a “marginalized” group - either natural (that is, through the accident of birth) or manufactured - and to the ability to verbalize approved grand intentions.
Relative success - either material or prestige - gleaned through accomplishment is proof of sin and is therefore discouraged. Relative failure is proof of marginalization and is rewarded, creating incentives for self-marginalization.
How long can any society based on such perverse incentives survive? Probably only as long as the generations not steeped in this religion are still alive and capable of keeping the lights on.
"A particularly blatant example of this retreat from a general, practical egalitarian ethic to a much more hierarchical conception is the re-elevation of racial identity that Critical Social Justice engages in via Critical Race Theory. It’s made clear that a black identity is most emphatically superior to a white one. Such insistence on grading people by identity category overturns a post-civil-rights embrace of more egalitarian social attitudes. LGBTIQ+ has become ever-more-of-the-alphabet people so everyone can play intersectional bingo, so anyone can push themselves up the intersectional hierarchy."
--- Then why do hierarchical loving lobsters like Jordan Peterson NOT appreciate identity politics that place Black people and LGBTQIA+ at the top of the hierarchies they so cherish?
The latter are due to features that are inherent. The former due to what you can demonstrate you can do due to skills, application, etc. It is not a hard distinction. Hence Jordan Peterson discusses Pareto principle and power laws.
One of the key reasons that the Dialectical Faith, in all its derivatives, is such toxic nonsense is that it subordinates the basic problems of making things work to moral posturings and framings.
The difference between the Constrained Vision (there are no complete solutions, only various trade-offs) and the Unconstrained Vision (yes, we can make the world conform to human subjectivity, so all constraint is oppression).
Peterson and his hierarchal loving ilk are not referring to infrastructure and the laborers that build it when they perform puja to the concept of hierarchy.
Do you honestly believe that an institution or nation with a hierarchy based on demonstrated performance would be no more successful than one with a hierarchy based on degrees of presumed group oppression as determined by intersectionality charts? If so, why?
In bureaucracies and much of academe, yes demonstrated performance can be highly subjective. That is a large reason why they tend towards the dysfunctional. In much of life, demonstrated performance is very real.
In business, performance is objectively determined by profit and loss. In sports, it’s determined by the scoreboard. In battle, it’s determined by victory or defeat. How does Peterson talk about it?
A stimulating read. I lost it a bit in the middle but generally thought-provoking and hopefully discussion-provoking!
I may have piled too many thoughts together too quickly.
"There is a powerful argument that societies need religion for resilient social cohesion."
As an atheist I very much agree with this. There is need for the sacred, that which cannot be traded or negotiated in order for society to persist through time.
Nicely put.
This is a true Enlightenment conundrum, and even Rousseau perceived it, and took a vain stab at a solution. You can't reason your way into divine justification, for the Enlightenment path to truth is not revelatory. We view religion functionally, but that isn't what makes religion work.
Correct.
So, going back to the Roman Republic - was religion necessary for social cohesion then? You often work forward from the Roman/Christian merger. What about working back?
The ritual structure of the Roman republic was definitely part of its functioning. The Christians clearly thought they had to displace it.
That would make me think it wasn't that strong - which leaves Nietzsche in a rather curious place. The master morality subverted by a slave morality. Although he did admire the cleverness of priestly hate, it would seem it is almost fated to win.
Further, you point out the law was human as opposed to divine. Is that a fundamental social weak point? The later, merged sensibility, sublimated civil law until the Renaissance, and it was a long, slow re-emergence.
"That would make me think it wasn't that strong..."
Well, the first kings of Rome reigned around 500BC and Paganism was not officially dethroned till about 400AD.
The Gods of Rome lived for probably close to a millenium...not a bad run!
No, the Church always thought law was human (see Aquinas, for example). It just that religious law was the human attempt to follow God’s rules as embedded in the universe (natural law) and via revelation. The retreat of canon law was about relative power and authority.
I think Ken Wilber's "integral theory" with its AQAL (All Quandrants/All Levels" could be a possible "solution".
I generally agree, but does the sacred belief need to be non-logical or even rather irrational (i.e., evidence free) to ensure the necessary degree of fealty to the group's cohesion?
And just how long do we expect a given set of beliefs to provide for continued cohesion?
Certainly there are also climatic, demographic, and other "random" factors that can reduce that society's persistence, regardless of what sacred belief is being maintained or how long it has been viable in the past.
Yes, a lot of things have to keep functioning for a complex society to continue.
The U.S. clearly elevated an ideal above sectarian cohesion. The problem is in keeping the civil, civil and the spiritual, spiritual. If humans aren't inclined that way naturally, then it will always be an uphill battle.
To be more specific, there are times when social cohesion requires people to act as devoted rather than instrumentally rational agents. That is, to view some things as sacred, as not subject to ordinary trade-offs.
We are currently experiencing this lack via the pervasive problem of cowardice in institutions.
Another good essay; thanks. But I baulk at the idea of granting the modern tyrants and social bullies their own lying title for themselves: "progressive". After all, this is a group that has taken Lenin's bureaucratic despotism, Stalin's cultural controls, Hitler's ideas that race is the driver of history and that there exists in the world a race of world poisoners, and Mao's thought and speech controls, and amalgamated them in into a single poisoners ideology! Progressive they emphatically are not.
All those people regarded themselves as progressives.
"And yet, and yet: yes, it does represent a clear evolution of Left thought. But still, something seems wrong calling this self-serving elitism—which so obviously despises the working class, and is so deeply inegalitarian in its performative commitment to equality—Left."
Only if you elect to believe that the Bolsheviks (and every other Marxist cadre ever to seek or seize power) were actually about revolution for the benefit of the masses, and not simply so they could consolidate power into their own hands. I honestly don't know how you could grant them that. The great "advance" of DEI is that it is conducting a mostly bloodless revolution. Sure, some lives get ruined but they are hardly amassing a body-count like their predecessors.
I think the issue here is that every political side has both the “Baptists and Bootleggers”. Some on the left care about the worker and some pretend to as a means to power. Likewise on the right some care about individual Liberty and freedom, while others mouth the words only.
I am personally disposed to not trust the left in so far as I don’t think “workers” as such is a meaningful group and usually leftists seem to want to help some and harm others, but I think as a general point the idea holds. However, I think most political ideologies that do not explicitly seek to limit government (ie politicians’) power are in fact in support of political power for those who profess the ideology.
Like many, I'm passingly familiar with Tocqueville but have never read his full work. Thus I was a bit surprised by the embedded quote in Nisbet's Twilight of Authority.
“The foremost or indeed the sole condition required in order to succeed in centralizing the supreme power in a democratic community is to love equality or to get men to believe you love it. Thus, the science of despotism, which was once so complex, has been simplified and reduced, as it were, to a single principle.”
This predates Marx, and is informed both by American culture and politics as well as the excesses of the French Revolution.
That’s an excellent quote, I will have to grab that book, thanks!
It lines up well with what I am reading about the Taipei rebellion in mid 19th century China as well. The theme and behaviors were strikingly similar to the Communist revolution to take place half a century or so later, all about shared ownership and equality while the higher ups lived like kings and broke rules that were brutally enforced on the near slave lower classes. It got me thinking that maybe civilizations had revolutions typical of their cultures, like the same things would roughly happen over and over because of their structure, but that Nisbet quote makes me think maybe it is more fundamental than that even, and all human civilizations can face revolution from that same source. It is a fundamental bug in the human psyche, as it were.
Mao apparently admired the leader of the Taiping Rebellion. China certainly has a recurring pattern. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huang_Chao
Yes, Fraser mentioned that Mao saw the Taipings as a sort of proto-communist revolution. It strikes me that it is hard to see that pattern exactly in western revolutions, but then they rarely get so big or last so long. I doubt Britain's Levelers would have gotten so bad, and although the Glorious Revolution had it's problems it didn't seem to get near to killing 5-10% of the total population. The French Revolutions, though... there's a certain flavor there that is reminiscent.
Now I wonder if there might have been some mid-east regional revolutions that got that bad. If so, maybe it is a fundamental cultural pattern between eastern and western civilizations. Russia had some bloody times before the Communists took over, and the Indian Mutiny was definitely a super bloody mess... I don't recall either having the egalitarian, proto-communist flavors though. Maybe eastern cultures tended to have less concern for human life as such into modern times, so any revolutions/rebellions get super bloody, and only some feature the socialist/equalitarian/communism angle, were as in the west concern for life started earlier and so rebellions didn't get so far out of hand, even the egalitarian ones, so we don't get to see just how they might have acted?
Hmmm... If I had another thesis to write, and all the relevant features of my life were different, that would be an interesting one :D
States with a strong tradition of Parliamentarianism tended to be less bloody than those without. The Nazis are only a partial exception, as they slaughtered in the realm of destroyed states, not in Germany proper.
<<Sure, some lives get ruined but they are hardly amassing a body-count like their predecessors.>>
The problem is that some aspects of DIE are implicitly exterminatory. For example, CRT could only work if there were no white people. Therefore, as the wokusts will fail to produce "equality of outcome", they must resort to extermination as their last resort. This is the same route that the Bolsheviks went down - a relatively bloodless coup, followed by gross economic and social breakdown, followed by civil war accompanied by mass-murder and which culminated in state-sponsored famine.
The Bolsheviks didn't just slip into insane violence - they had studied the Jacobins carefully. They were committed to violence from the start and that is documented in their own words.
You're right in saying that the Bolsheviks were committed to violence. However, it's the sheer scale of Bolshevik violence that is extraordinary and unexpected. For example, by the time Lenin died at the beginning of 1924, the Bolsheviks had slaughtered 11 million people - 5 million in the civil war, 6 million in the famine. That scale of mass-murder was made necessary by the absolute failure of the Russian Marxists to create the utopia they thought they could magic into existence. The contemporary wokusts will go down the same path for the same reasons.
The logic is there, I agree. The will to do so I believe is lacking, and the pushback will not strengthen their resolve, it will collapse it. That is the difference between the woke and the true revolutionary. The woke will whine rather than fight, believing that their priestly authority is supposed to bend the will of all, and they lack the warrior mentality that cares less about moral authority.
I think you are right if the wokists are a bottom up movement. If it is too down, ie a way for politicians to amass more power, then I might expect the pushback to be fierce as it will come from those with the capacity to inflict violence through others.
In that vein, I wouldn’t be surprised to find that if Wokism really alienated enough of the American left such that support was weakening, the Woke would get pressured into shutting up and purged if they didn’t. Sort of the modern version of the Night of Long Knives, if not so dramatic. Probably just a half dozen suicides, car accidents and drug overdoses over a month or so, till people got the message.
I think in our softer gentler age, where (thankfully) people shed tears instead of blood to gain power, the Wokusts (!) won't need to dirty their manicured hands exterminating the White kulak. Now they can use deplatforming, shadow-banning, strict quotas to weed out enemies and speech codes to monitor their words, and coming soon: de-banking and CBDCs, which can bankrupt and impoverish you at the speed of light.
What's in store is more like ancient banishment than 20th-century death camps.
I'm very much looking forward to how you think accountability can be raised up. It seems to me that our prosperity has allowed us to paper over the vast decline in accountability (across our entire economy and government) and the only hope for bringing it back is via a precipitous loss of general wealth (i.e. when the people who make bad decisions will actually have to suffer for doing so). I pray there is a better, and better targeted, approach.
"While folk often talk about freedom of speech and thought in the language of rights, it’s much more useful to see it in terms of authority: specifically one’s authority as a citizen.
A citizen has the authority to express themselves, to make their own decisions and judgements."
This is an interesting change in language. In the US the core ideas are that we have natural rights (from God or Nature) merely because we are human with a unique set of evolved capabilities, and that We The People are sovereign over our own government/governance.
But our "authority" for this sovereignty is really expressed in our Constitution as our version of foundational law [even if the Declaration of Independence also expresses some of our "Rights"] . So our "rights" are sort of given, while our authority is based on the limitations and foibles of human creators [rather than a divine one]. Constitutions are changed (and do need to be changed) occasionally. The nature or basis of this authority also evolves, but at a cultural pace.
I suppose in principle, a despot may be able to constrain your expression of your "rights", but you still retain them, while this despot can deny your authority as a citizen by abrogating your constitution.
IIRC, Helen said in Australia the law is more dependent upon written legislation and has no truck with fairy ideas about rights outside of written law. ???
Australian law and political culture is very utilitarian and strongly legal positivist.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/legal-positivism/
Also, employment protections (or their lack) turn out to matter in the age of cancel culture.
Another good piece, with which I have no substantive gripes. But one item deserves a quick comment:
"Rudyard Lynch, Mr Whatifalthist, likes to point out that Communism—i.e. the Dialectical Faith in power—was a geopolitical boon to the US."
That's true only if you come at it from a zero-sum mindset where for us to win, someone else must lose. Had Russia and China not destroyed millions of lives (and untold wealth) to communism but instead joined the West in democratic capitalism, had we been able to direct our resources toward trade with partners instead of defense from adversaries, _all_ of us -- not just Russians and Chinese -- would likely be better off than we are today.
China and Russia choosing to cripple themselves is a "boon" to the U.S. in the same way that the neighbors burning down their houses is great news because it will reduce your property taxes.
Yes. He is talking strictly in terms of relative power.
So, the woke “religion” confers status, not on accomplishment, but to membership in a “marginalized” group - either natural (that is, through the accident of birth) or manufactured - and to the ability to verbalize approved grand intentions.
Relative success - either material or prestige - gleaned through accomplishment is proof of sin and is therefore discouraged. Relative failure is proof of marginalization and is rewarded, creating incentives for self-marginalization.
How long can any society based on such perverse incentives survive? Probably only as long as the generations not steeped in this religion are still alive and capable of keeping the lights on.
Unless there is a revolt among sufficient younger folk …
"A particularly blatant example of this retreat from a general, practical egalitarian ethic to a much more hierarchical conception is the re-elevation of racial identity that Critical Social Justice engages in via Critical Race Theory. It’s made clear that a black identity is most emphatically superior to a white one. Such insistence on grading people by identity category overturns a post-civil-rights embrace of more egalitarian social attitudes. LGBTIQ+ has become ever-more-of-the-alphabet people so everyone can play intersectional bingo, so anyone can push themselves up the intersectional hierarchy."
--- Then why do hierarchical loving lobsters like Jordan Peterson NOT appreciate identity politics that place Black people and LGBTQIA+ at the top of the hierarchies they so cherish?
Hierarchies of talent are very different from the moral caste system of identity politics.
How so, exactly?
The latter are due to features that are inherent. The former due to what you can demonstrate you can do due to skills, application, etc. It is not a hard distinction. Hence Jordan Peterson discusses Pareto principle and power laws.
One of the key reasons that the Dialectical Faith, in all its derivatives, is such toxic nonsense is that it subordinates the basic problems of making things work to moral posturings and framings.
The difference between the Constrained Vision (there are no complete solutions, only various trade-offs) and the Unconstrained Vision (yes, we can make the world conform to human subjectivity, so all constraint is oppression).
Both are subjective.
False. Bridges stay up or they don’t. Physical things work or they don’t. Something is profitable or it is not. There is a reason the more one works with physical reality, the more inclined to the politics of the Constrained Vision one is likely to be. https://www.businessinsider.com/charts-show-the-political-bias-of-each-profession-2014-11
Peterson and his hierarchal loving ilk are not referring to infrastructure and the laborers that build it when they perform puja to the concept of hierarchy.
Do you honestly believe that an institution or nation with a hierarchy based on demonstrated performance would be no more successful than one with a hierarchy based on degrees of presumed group oppression as determined by intersectionality charts? If so, why?
"Demonstrated performance" is subjective in the sense that Peterson talks about it, and represents.
In bureaucracies and much of academe, yes demonstrated performance can be highly subjective. That is a large reason why they tend towards the dysfunctional. In much of life, demonstrated performance is very real.
Peterson failed utterly as a professor yet envisions himself at the top of that hierarchy.
In business, performance is objectively determined by profit and loss. In sports, it’s determined by the scoreboard. In battle, it’s determined by victory or defeat. How does Peterson talk about it?
It's a vague pseudo-intellectual hierarchy in which he envisions himself hovering somewhere around the top.
Totally impressed by both the scope and depth.
Taken individually, or several at a time, I could take on board what you are saying. But to reiterate the whole thing? No way.