Why Sam Harris his Secular-Mystical-Nihilism is Bottoming Out

Why Jordan Peterson Continues to Eat Sam Harris' Fanbase

In today's video continuing my @SamHarrisOrg mental meanderings now including @SeekersofU and Netflix Midnight Mass

Two weeks ago I was still in the "Sam makes me want to pull my hair out if I had any" stage because of the conflict between his whole-show ontology app-based-mystic-guru popularity but @GrailCountry pushed me beyond that.

Let's begin with the biggest problem Sam Harris has, but as with most of the issues with the "system" he's propounding he either won't admit or can't see, that his form of naturalism is completely at odds with evolution.

The best that I can tell listening to @SamHarrisOrg explain his beliefs to @BretWeinstein Harris really is the sort of naturalist that CS Lewis identifies in his book Miracles as one who believes we are locked into "the whole show"

.@BretWeinstein pushes on Sam for hours but gets nowhere. You don't have to listen to the whole thing to understand this. This clip will do.

Everything we are or think is a product of "the whole show" whose source is locked in from the big bang. We do not have agency to know or choose to know the truth. Our experience of selfhood and agency is completely illusory.

.@BretWeinstein quite sanely pushed back on this arguing that this worldview makes everything meaningless and while potentially plausible should be discarded as unworkable. Sam argues that we retain meaning because we experience agency. That's all we get but it's enough.

We participate in experientially and emotionally like we do with movies. We enjoy them, have the cognitive experience of participation, and that should be enough for us.

The evolutionary argument against natural has been around a long time. Lewis sights Haldane in his use of it in Miracles. Alvin Plantinga is most famous for making it these days. Here's a short cartoon version.

Here is Alvin Plantinga making his argument.

Now we human beings have an amazing capacity for not emotionally realizing the logical consequences of our belief systems. Most people today would agree that diet and exercise are essential for the health and longevity we desire, yet we do not do as we say we ought.

I also suspect, however, that this disconnect produces within us a degree of nagging anxiety. While we are quite good at both denial and distraction, in our quieter moments we know we are going to have to pay for all our TV watching and junk food eating.

In the case of Sam Harris' worldview the movie we participate in somewhere deep in our psyche sets us up for nihilism-induced depression. I stumbled into this interviewing fans of @jordanbpeterson. People were finding relief from depression listening to his videos.

Person after person came to me with the same story and the pattern began to emerge. I made this video about it in 2019.

.@StruanCumming eventually pointed me to @vervaeke_john who gave me a lot more vocabulary to talk about "The Meaning Crisis". Sam Harris' worldview has emotional consequences for its adherents. This was why @jordanbpeterson was eating Sam Harris' fanbase.

The second piece of Sam Harris I was failing to appreciate was the popular-app-making-psychedelic-promoting-mystic-guru and its connection to the nihilistic-worldview-promotor.

A spoon full of sweet mysticism helps the bitter pill of deterministic naturalism go down. Despite railing against "religion" he offers a religion that has a therapeutic answer for everything which is a sort of Western adaptation of Buddhism.

You can see it in his answer to a man suffering with intrusive memories. Your memories are attached to the illusion of your self. Work harder on removing this illusion of the self and your suffering locate in that self will go away.

This is sort of the faithless fideist counterpart to having enough faith so that God will heal your problems. If the problem persists you're not believing hard enough. In this case if your suffering persists you're not disbelieving in your selfhood hard enough.

I then realized that you can find versions of this trick littered over our storytelling landscape. I always get recommendations from listeners for commentary on films or videos and recently a number of people recommended Midnight Mass on Netflix. https://www.netflix.com/title/81083626

I've got spoilers in my video but I'll hold off on them here. It's a pretty good story but it undermines itself at the end because as with many stories that deal in the miraculous the writers have to land the plane somewhere.

They don't end in a world of horror, but victory achieved by sacrifice and then embracing the same nihilistic "life is but an illusory dream" warm bath.

The trouble with this move is that if you START with the "life is an illusory dream" realization it undercuts all the drama of the meaningful participation in the life and death struggle.

Sure, the Midnight Mass Limited Series can play this card at the end to try to resolve some emotional plot-line development but what happens when you play this card in real life?

People "check out" all the time. Check out from a job, a marriage, parenting, etc. @nytdavidbrooks called it "the Golden Age of Bailing" https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/07/opinion/the-golden-age-of-bailing.html

Young people don't marry or reproduce. Young men spend their lives on video games covered with Dorito's dust. 1 in 7 men don't work at all. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/7-ways-men-live-without-working-in-america-092147068.html

The world isn't ending with a whimper, it's ending with a shrug. For people struggling to understand @jordanbpeterson he is basically the anti-shrug.

Sam Harris finally nihilism plus a dose of secularized mysticism to try to buffer its impact. Mysticism has been secularized

. Sam's efforts, however, for at least part of the population is bottoming out. Ontology can't be avoided forever.