The Lion King- Personality and Its Transformations (Jordan Peterson)

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RFS
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The Lion King- Personality and Its Transformations (Jordan Peterson)

Post by RFS »

Click here.

This is a lecture from Jordan Peterson's "Personality and Its Transformations" class at the University of Toronto. He walks through The Lion King, pointing out its relationship to archetypal themes developed by Carl Jung.

I watched the entire lecture series last summer, and it was like putting on glasses for the first time in the 5th grade. So much, from people's temperament to why crowds of people worldwide set up tents and camp out to watch stories like Star Wars, Harry Potter, Lord of The Rings, etc, became dramatically more clear.

I am way too stupid to accurately describe just how many knowledge ICBMs are launched from this guy's mouth, so I'll let his own quote do it:

"So here's Scar, and Scar is scarred. What that implies is that he had a rough life, and he's kind of skitty, and he's also hyper intelligent and rational. It's one of the things you commonly see in the evil adversary of the state or of the individual. Often intelligent and hyper-rational. The best commentator on that was probably John Milton in Paradise Lost, because that's how he represents Lucifer, or Satan, who is the spirit of rationality or enlightenment. Hence Lucifer, the spirit of light.

The reason for that, as far as I can tell, and this is something that Milton figured out when he compiled all these ancient stories about evil and tried to make them coherent was that, the problem with rationality is that it tends to fall in love with its own productions. It comes up with a theory and makes that a totality. It won't let it go. So the rational mind has a totalitarian element.

We know that to a degree because that kind of rationality seems more left hemisphere-focused, and the left hemisphere tends to impose structured order on the world, and be updated by the right hemisphere. And the right hemisphere generally updates it with negative information and with fantasy. And so the left hemisphere will impose a coherent structure on the world, which is necessary for you to live in it, but the problem is that there's a tension between coherence and completeness, and that's partly why you need two hemispheres. You need one to represent the world, and you need one to keep track of the exceptions, and to feed those slowly into the representational system, so it can stay updated without collapsing into complete chaos." DAMN!

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jennypenny
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Re: The Lion King- Personality and Its Transformations (Jordan Peterson)

Post by jennypenny »

His discussion with Haidt was pretty good if you missed this post ... viewtopic.php?f=13&t=4994&p=158247#p158247

Kriegsspiel
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Re: The Lion King- Personality and Its Transformations (Jordan Peterson)

Post by Kriegsspiel »

Jung is a punk.

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RFS
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Re: The Lion King- Personality and Its Transformations (Jordan Peterson)

Post by RFS »

Kriegsspiel wrote:
Thu Jan 25, 2018 10:08 pm
Jung is a punk.
Why do you say that?

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Re: The Lion King- Personality and Its Transformations (Jordan Peterson)

Post by Kriegsspiel »

Because his shit is weak.

pukingRainbows
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Re: The Lion King- Personality and Its Transformations (Jordan Peterson)

Post by pukingRainbows »

I've been following Jordan Peterson for a while now and it's really been life changing. His take on things has really put things into perspective for me and was both intellectually stimulating and pragmatic. Highly recommend!!

BRUTE
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Re: The Lion King- Personality and Its Transformations (Jordan Peterson)

Post by BRUTE »

The Lion King? brute suspected Peterson was just trolling this entire time with his Christian value stuff, but this just seems like over the top parody.

ThisDinosaur
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Re: The Lion King- Personality and Its Transformations (Jordan Peterson)

Post by ThisDinosaur »

Jung's shit is weak. So is the rest of psychology as an academic discipline. See; replication crisis.

But if you are going to evaluate the Jung Archetype idea on its merits, Disney movies aren't a bad way to do it. They are very successful, culturally relevant, and students listening will be familiar with them.

My counterargument to Jung/Peterson, is that the people who write stories that become successful are really just plagiarizing older stories that were already successful. That's why, for example, the plot of the Lion King and Pinocchio are so similar to Egyptian mythology and everything else. It's not necessarily because we have evolved to write those specific stories.

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Re: The Lion King- Personality and Its Transformations (Jordan Peterson)

Post by jacob »

More like the stories have evolved to be propagated by us.

pukingRainbows
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Re: The Lion King- Personality and Its Transformations (Jordan Peterson)

Post by pukingRainbows »

ThisDinosaur wrote:
Fri Jan 26, 2018 8:41 am
My counterargument to Jung/Peterson, is that the people who write stories that become successful are really just plagiarizing older stories that were already successful. That's why, for example, the plot of the Lion King and Pinocchio are so similar to Egyptian mythology and everything else. It's not necessarily because we have evolved to write those specific stories.
As I understand it, that's actually the point of what they are saying. Why is that ancient storyline still relevant and popular today?
The idea being that these are archetypes. That is, they embody the common experience across humanity across time. And so they will always resonate with people.

@Jacob - Yes. I think that's another way to say it.

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Re: The Lion King- Personality and Its Transformations (Jordan Peterson)

Post by ThisDinosaur »

They embody common experience. The stories have evolved to be propagated by us. I have no objection to that. My question is how much more can that understanding really carry us. How Deep and Meaningful are mythological insights in regards to how modern humans should live?

I'm two lectures deep into his Bible series. I highly recommend them. But, as a skeptical atheist, I am not sure how useful five thousand year old metaphors about dominance hierarchies are now that we have better concepts to describe them.

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Re: The Lion King- Personality and Its Transformations (Jordan Peterson)

Post by pukingRainbows »

ThisDinosaur wrote:
Fri Jan 26, 2018 10:01 am
How Deep and Meaningful are mythological insights in regards to how modern humans should live?

I'm two lectures deep into his Bible series. I highly recommend them. But, as a skeptical atheist, I am not sure how useful five thousand year old metaphors about dominance hierarchies are now that we have better concepts to describe them.
It's a good question. It's just my personal experience but I've found them quite illuminating and insightful. I was raised Catholic but had long since moved on, thinking that being religious ultimately required me to sacrifice my rational intellect. However, through JBP's lectures I found a renewed interest in religion and a pathway forward that actually engaged me both spiritually and intellectually. To be honest, I never thought it could happen.

I'm curious if you were referring to anything specifically when you mentioned modern concepts on conceptualizing reality. Did you just mean science in general? Or the work of a particular person or school of though?

ThisDinosaur
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Re: The Lion King- Personality and Its Transformations (Jordan Peterson)

Post by ThisDinosaur »

pukingRainbows wrote: I'm curious if you were referring to anything specifically when you mentioned modern concepts on conceptualizing reality. Did you just mean science in general? Or the work of a particular person or school of though?
In the Joe Rogan podcast with both Peterson and Bret Weinstein, Weinstein used the example of biblical edicts about filth preceding the germ theory of disease by several thousand years. Peterson himself always references natural selection. We have better, more precise terminology for these ideas now, so I'm questioning the value of biblical insights on these things. It's like a modern chemist trying to explain something to you but only using Alchemist jargon.

The best I can come up with is that it has something to do with acknowledging the Taleb/Burkean conservative idea of unknown unknowns.

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Re: The Lion King- Personality and Its Transformations (Jordan Peterson)

Post by pukingRainbows »

@ThisDinosaur
Previously, I had thought of religions as essentially archaic science. That is, more primitive society's attempts to explain the world around them. And I think it's true to a degree however, the biblical insights JBP is talking about addresses a different set of questions than science. I'd say they are more philosophical in nature rather than scientific.

How to best live your life? That's the type of question religion attempts to answer if you look at it from his perspective. And I agree that the idea of unknown unknowns is part of it.

His Bible lectures do a good job of unpacking these ideas, I think.

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