The Frenetic Psychedelic Dia-logos Twist in the Meaning Crisis Rescue Effort
Jordan Peterson and John Vervaeke's Second Wave Conversation is Stranger than We Expected
I was very much anticipating this conversation between @vervaeke_john and @jordanbpeterson but what we got caught everyone by surprised.
The comments section of the video itself were full of queries about "why all the interruptions?” The title of the video nods to the frenetic nature of the conversation.
In my commentary I mention a variety of possible reasons for this. Was Jordan unwell? in pain? A bit giddy about the life that was taken from him by Blue Church discipline? Was Jordan trying to push John out of the patient academic disciplined pace into a new psycho technology?
We're deep enough into the second wave now to try to gain some perspective. the Jordan Peterson Phenomenon Wave 2 is very different from Wave 1 as it has proceeded more along the lines of Vervaekian "dia-logos".
Wave #1 was a large strong wave hitting the cultural rocks. That impact increased its reach and height. @jordanbpeterson went from local cult professor and Public TV gadfly to a global counter-revolutionary.
.@nytdavidbrooks called him the most important public intellectual in the Western World at that moment. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/25/opinion/jordan-peterson-moment.html A line repeated on the cover of his follow up to "12 Rules for Life" but attributed rather ironically to "The New York Times", one of Jordan’s chief prosecutors.
Wave #1 lost a lot of its energy in a quixotic half-year long "book tour" where Peterson toured something like 135 cities in 150 days offering fresh nightly stream-of-consciousness lectures tangentially connected with one of his 12 rules for life.
The wave receded then with his wife fighting terminal cancer and his own health collapse attempting to wean his body from benzodiazepine. What followed was a miraculous cure for his wife and a journey through the underworld for him.
He re-emerged in public life in 2021 with the sequel to "12 Rules for Life" this time commenting on the order side of the chaos/order duality close to the center of his view of existence.
.@jordanbpeterson emerged from the fiery furnace only to have he and his daughter @MikhailaAleksis betrayed by a hit job from a Times of London reporter letting the world know the Blue Church was not finished with him.
In the second wave @jordanbpeterson has stuck to mostly friendly Youtube channels and interviews with IDW friends and intellectuals who have ideas that interest him.
While this is a reasonable strategy for a man recovering from several near-fatal episodes in the last year his audience at some point has to ask "where exactly are we going this time around?"
Fairly early in the first wave I was prompted by someone who found me via my @jordanbpeterson videos @StruanCumming to take a look at another U of T professor @vervaeke_john .
Unlike his more famous colleague John steered clear of the culture war conflict and kept to the side of Peterson's work I was most interested in which @vervaeke_john had dubbed "The Meaning Crisis"
What began to form in "this corner of the Internet" as dubbed by @aqualityexiste1 was a group of religiously diverse conversation partners including @PageauJonathan working on changes in meaning making in the Western World.
What the Blue Church regularly missed in @jordanbpeterson work was the core of his mission to rescue young people from the nihilism that was stalking and destroying their lives. As I interviewed hundreds of his followers the pattern was quite clear.
His video lectures, particularly his Biblical Series, lifted thousands of nihilism riddled men and women out of depression and onto a path of productive meaning and purpose.
What he did even to the horror of his new-atheist critics like @RationalityRule was to smuggle Jesus to many of them not with an overt religious appeal but by making religion plausible once again to many. https://youtu.be/on0Lziov00Y
Overtly religious followers like @PageauJonathan and I created handrails for these bridge walkers to help them enter a new life in the church.
.@vervaeke_john on the other hand with his own cohort of non-theists has been working to create an ecology of practices to address the meaning crisis in collaboration with other non-theistic partners like @WisdomRebel
While the mass media obsesses over @jordanbpeterson 's harsh discipline at the hands of the Blue Church this corner of the Internet has been quietly pulling people out of the seas of chaos as modernity's ship continues to sink.
What I was hoping for from this meeting of two of the principle actors in this rescue effort was a debate over the place of narrative, telos and hero-mythology. What we got was something completely unexpected.
I shouldn't be surprised. This has been a strange and unexpected journey for many of us right from the start.
It may be that this strange "psychedelic" video is just what the meaning doctor ordered for this mysterious movement of God's Spirit in the world.
Thanks Paul for pointing me to your substack,... There is no such thing as "Jesus smuggling"... As people are beginning to discover through primarily Tom Holland's work, Jesus has been plagiarized and propagandized into obscurity by the inheritors of the enlightenment. Jesus smuggling is in effect simply ripping the mask off and exposing atheists to where their core values come from.... A hard pill to swallow understandably.
Thank you Paul. As a lifelong Christian, from an AOG, charismatic evangelical background, your insight is really important to me. I appreciate being able to negotiate what's happening from a church going, bible believing, practising pastor as I enjoy listening and learning from these people with excitement and expectation, as well as a small sense of anxiety - which I imagine probably explain why some of us are here.
I mentioned on twitter that this style of conversation was acceptable to Vervaeke and JP was perhaps leading the conversation with a strict aim, closing off any potential threads of digression and keeping a pace to get new ideas and answers.
As to the content, we'll I'm 5 videos into Vervaeke's crisis series haha
Grace and peace