Jordan Peterson On Guilt Trips

Posted on by johnbarleycorn12

Identity Politics and Class Guilt

One of the most awful elements, I think, is the idea that individuals should be defined in terms of their group identity at all. This is one of these weird inversions that’s so characteristic of this chaotic state that we’re in.

When people originally started fighting against unfair discrimination… the initial idea was to eliminate the proclivity for people to be categorized according to their group identity, because that was interfering with everyone’s ability to view them as competent individuals. But that got flipped, probably in the 70s after the Soviet state so self-evidently was revealed as a catastrophe. That got flipped so that the world was turned into one group against another—a power struggle from one group against another. And then the social justice warrior types and the lefties, even the Democratic Party, started categorizing everyone according to their ethnic or sexual or racial identity, and made that the canonical element of their being.

That’s an absolutely terrible thing to do. In the Soviet Union when that happened, they introduced that idea along with the notion of “class guilt.” So, for example, when the Soviets collectivized the farms, they pretty much wiped out or raped and froze to death all of their competent farmers. They called them “kulaks,” and they attributed class guilt to them because they were successful peasants, and they defined their success as oppression and theft. They killed all of them, pretty much—shipped them off to Siberia and froze them to death. And they were the productive agriculturalists in the Soviet Union. And then in the 1930s in the Ukraine, because of that, about 6 million Ukrainians starved to death. The Soviets were big on collective guilt.

And all of these things you hear about now, like “white privilege” for example, are variants of collective guilt. I pick your bloody identity, whatever it happens to be, and then I make you a guilty member of that category, and then you and the rest of the guilty members of that category are judged as a unit. It’s murderous, pushed to its extreme. And we’ve seen that many, many times.

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The Cave

Posted on by johnbarleycorn12

The Cave
In book seven of Plato’s The Republic, he tells us about some people chained in a cave, forced to watch shadows across a stone wall.

The group of prisoners has been living there in chains since their birth. They have never seen the outside world, only shadows of it. They have no knowledge of anything beyond their miserable lives in the cave.

The prisoners are chained facing a wall and can’t turn their heads. There’s a fire behind them which produces some light. Occasionally people pass by that fire with animals and objects or figures that are cast in the wall, and the prisoners can see their shadows.

All that the prisoners know are those shadows. They name them and believe they are real entities. They talk about the shadows with enthusiasm and are fascinated by them, thinking that if you pay attention, you can succeed in life.

One day, a prisoner manages to free himself from the chains and step outside the cave to see the outer world. At first, the sun burns his eyes, but then they adjust, and he finds everything so colorful, exciting, full of life. He sees the real forms of the things he knew as shadows, like rabbits, birds, flowers, people, objects, he even sees the sky and stars.

“Previously, he had been looking only at phantoms; now, he is nearer to the true nature of being.” – Plato

People explain to him that everything he sees is real, and the shadows are just mere reflections. Although he cannot understand this at first, he then adjusts and sees how the sun is responsible for light and producing the shadows.

The prisoner gets back to the cave and tells everyone what he had just witnessed, but no one believes him. His eyes had adjusted to the sun, and now he can’t see the shadows clearly as he did before. They tell him he’s crazy, and violently resist while he tries to free them.

The cave signifies ignorance.