Thoughting #3: The Peterson mask

“If my stuff were popular, the world would be insufferably deep.”

That was my disarming answer to a fellow Slate.com commenter who suggested – by the process of catty free association – that I am jealous of idea-farter du jour Jordan Peterson, after I wrote that I’d enjoy having him as a therapy client. Indeed it would be delectable: Pontifical, vaporous and attitudinally toxic conjecture – Peterson's modus vivendi – is always an escape from root, child-level pain and loss of self. In therapy I’d be helping him reach existential pay dirt by questioning the validity of his universals – global prejudices that are dissociative self-medications of that pain and loss. I’d help him reach feeling that had no multisyllabic vocabulary, that was just the true self. Questioning the intellectualism defense, and so many other defenses, is always moving.

But what is good for one person would be insufferable for the world. We need to be our surface lives and pleasures. We need to believe our thoughts are valid. We need to have ideas and feel they’re wise or perceptive. We need to slide along in life confused or spuriously certain, then find a palliative bunny to see, then slide on again. We need to assume that we, adults, are grown up. Woe to us if we opened the door inside us and found a stillborn child still waiting to be held. What if we learned that we never recovered from that bully’s outrageous dignity rape, never moved on, still needed to be that child, finally helped deep and long? What if we realized that our ideas, colored balloons floating high, are connected by frayed string to sharks swimming in the night? What if we learned they are masks over a different dimension?

The world couldn’t take that.

Which brings up the questions: What kind of world is this? What kind of people are we?