my best friend loves jordan peterson.
if there’s 10,000 jordan peterson fans, my friend is one of them.
if there’s 10 jordan peterson fans, my friend is one of them.
if there are no jordan peterson fans, my friend is dead.
i’m not a huge jordan peterson guy. i used to be, maybe 3 or 4 years ago, but i’ve fazed out of my philo-tweed-jacket-and-elbow-pads phase of life. I’m not as wowed by big fancy words said by a raspy, oddly high pitched voice.
that’s not to say i HATE or DESPITE jordan peterson.
but i’m not a fan.
my beliefs have changed from 17 to 21, but i actually think this process of me “un-loving” jordan peterson is part of a bigger lesson/observation i’ve noticed.
when you learn something is as important as what you learn.
a few years ago, i learned how silly anger was. how harboring resent and ill-will towards someone just made me feel awful.
learning that at 18 vs at 58 yields a completely different life.
it’s not just the content of the learning, but the context in which you learn it. the order in which you learn “things” changes the “stickiness” or “depth” of those ideas.
a few fundamental beliefs.
as cliche as it sounds, there are two distinct “periods” or “phases” of my life.
pre-first-relationship-breakup vs post-breakup.
and during that post-breakup period of 3-4(ish) months, i got deep into Stoicism, Buddhism, and all that self-development jazz.
as a result, my “self”, the collection of my thoughts, actions, habits, morals, etc, surrounded those fundamental beliefs of those philosophies.
Stoicism’s “you cannot control what happens to you, only how you react” and “there are things in your control and things that aren’t. focus on what is. on what you can change” became core parts of my being. their roots are strong and ingrained in the garden of my mind. and it would have to take one hell of a hurricane to rip those roots out.
the same deal is with Viktor Frankl’s “the meaning of life is to help other people find theirs” or his logotherapy philosophy.
the beliefs are so core to my being, i cannot imagine “me” without them. it’s like a tree that had a bullet shot into it 50 years ago, and now has hardened, metastasized, and grown layers upon layers of bark around this one stray bullet. metal forever lodged in organic matter. beliefs forever lodged deep in the labyrinth of “me”, “myself”, and “I”.
this is not to say i’ll always believe these things. suffering is the vehicle of change. it forces us to reflect and act. so if i go through enough suffering at the behest of these beliefs and need to change, i’ll worry about it then. but who i am right now, some 21 year old buffoon, these beliefs are ingrained.
back to my bestfriend
my best friend’s version of my relationship to Stoicism, Buddhism, etc is Jordan Peterson.
JP is his rock.
after his first breakup and existential wanderings, JP was the lifeboat that got him to shore. so i understand why my friend is such a diehard fan, no matter the seemingly reductionist filth Jordan Peterson may spit out of his mouth.
(sorry if that’s a bit too dramatic or heated, i just really like writing like that. nothing against JP, i’m the problem)
however, my interpretation that JP is my friend’s “emotional/existential root” of his “self” is quite an egotistical perspective. i guess i’m kinda treating my friend like an object, in the Strawson “objective stance” sort of way, but this mental model has helped me realize that the order in which you learn is just as important as what you learn.
certain mindsets and perspectives take root, and it’s damn hard to unearth them.
no matter how much “based” facts and knowledge get thrown at you, if your first entry into the intellectual world was Marxism, that perspective will always color your thought and shape your initial intuitions, unless you actively reverse it, of course.
the same goes with any other topics.
piaget and psychology
all ideas build off our current model of the world.
as the developmental psychologist Piaget laid out in his many many MANY observations, we humans have schemas or “templates” for thought. all new thought is first matched and fit into our schemas before these schemas adapt to incorporate this new knowledge.
but your first intuition with a new thought, idea, perspective, etc first rubs up against your current mental model of the world. this is why opposing information can be so infuriating when you encounter it.
it goes against everything you believe. and rather than consider it right/consider yourself wrong, humans choose confirmation bias. we choose deception over truth.
anyways, back to Piaget. because all knowledge builds off previous knowledge, it really matters the order in which you learn about the world.
learning about gender studies before evolutionary psychology is a completely different perspective than evolutionary psychology before gender studies.
a + b =/= b + a
ok so how do we apply this bro?
i don’t know. this was just a thought or model of the mind. i don’t know if it’s fucking correct. if i can turn back time and change the order in which i learned things, maybe we could run an experiment.
but unfortunately, we can’t.
but quite often i think about “when we learn is as important as what we learn” when im interacting with other people.
if i’m talking to an evangelical christian or a gang member, my ability to empathize with their different perspective increases when i can understand the context in which they learned what they learned.
if someone becomes a super devout christian after they nearly die of a drug overdose, that’s a very different experience than being a super devout christian from your birth because your family raised you like so.
both people may have similar beliefs, but the emotional valence and context of those beliefs are different, and ultimately, i think that’s more important than just the “what”.
so yeah, i’ll wrap it up now.
thanks for reading. i know my writing can feel warbly and overly dramatic and run-on sometimes. but i like it that way. i hope you do, too. if you don’t, feel free to file a complaint at armaanajoomal@gmail.com.
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