Truth
A few years ago, I watched a Sam Harris podcast where he spoke extensively on why he does not lie. In fact, he believes so much in not lying that he has a book published on the matter titled Lying. He writes:
Among the many paradoxes of human life, this is perhaps the most peculiar and consequential: We often behave in ways that are guaranteed to make us unhappy. Many of us spend our lives marching with open eyes toward remorse, regret, guilt, and disappointment. And nowhere do our injuries seem more casually self-inflicted, or the suffering we create more disproportionate to the needs of the moment, than in the lies we tell to other human beings. Lying is the royal road to chaos.
I completely agree with this and have seen this play out in my life and the lives of others countless times. I am at the stage of my life where I don’t feel the need to lie such that when I do, it keeps playing in my mind. When I was a little younger, I would catch myself lying about things so insignificant that telling the truth would not have made much of a difference. It’s that thing that we human beings do, when we airbrush the truth so that it paints us in a better light; habitually lying to be seen in a better light than we actually are. Sometimes we lie about small things like our heights on dating profiles- men, I am talking to you- our short kings get lonely too. Or women lying about their ages or posting filtered pictures of themselves. Other times we lie about big things like finances, education, or relationships. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learnt that it is easier to just face reality and deal with it so the compulsion to lie has decreased substantially. I don’t lie about my age, what I do, where I stay etc. It just is what it is. This doesn’t mean I am just resigned to my life, I am actively trying to grow, but I can also accept how my life has played out and all the decisions I made in that process, the good and the ugly. All things said, I am also mostly satisfied with my life so there is no need to portray things other than what they are. With regards to the things that I don’t like, best believe I am doing something about them. Besides, once you make peace with reality, how you come across to other people diminishes and so does the need to lie. It just is what it is.
While Harris was saying that he does not lie, he does provide two instances where he felt the need to lie. I don’t quite remember what they were in detail, but I do remember him saying that he lied to protect his daughter from information that she was too young to be exposed to. I am not quite sure how often he has found himself in these situations since that podcast, but I have a feeling that the number has increased. There are times, not often, where telling the truth is about much more than just providing prepositional facts. Let’s use a famous historical example: A Nazi soldier knocks on your door, and you have a family of Jewish people hiding in your attic. When asked where this family is, do you in fact disclose their whereabouts, tell him that you know where they are, and you are not going to tell him, or do you lie? Most people would lie here, me included, and I also would not feel the slightest bit bad that I lied. I would have felt that to have told the truth, “they are in the attic,” would have been a moral failing on my part and to have told them that I knew where they were but would not be telling him would also not be an option for me because it would mean death for me, which is needless in this situation, but more importantly it would also spell death for the family because the soldier would look for them until he found them.
In his astounding book, The Edge of Words, Rowan Williams writes that the lying that most of us engage in is not the lying outlined above. It is “the utterly habitual untruthfulness of human intercourse, the party chatter, the gossip and self-excusing and self-promoting we are accustomed to (and accustomed to not thinking about in moral terms)” which is “an abuse of language and a tacit but serious betrayal of the image of God in us”. The word is God, therefore anytime we cheapen language through this habitual untruthfulness, we undermine God. Truth is God given but this truth “requires not just a faithful reproduction of data but a faithful alignment with whatever can be discerned or received of a merciful purpose, of the eternal generosity of the divine life; and that may leave us a little more open to taking the risk of fiction when confronted with the hard cases” such as these. This may be a transgression, but the alternative would rip the still beating hearts out of our bodies and sacrifice them to a god that goes by a different name.
There is also the fact that some of us use truth to be a-holes. We weaponize facts to hurt other people. Sure, what you are saying may be factually correct, but it serves no other purpose than to draw blood. How is this an expression “of the eternal generosity of divine life?” Williams writes that trust and truth go hand-in-hand, and I would have to agree. It is this trust that can help us to not be a-holes, the world does not need any more a-holes.
In the South African dating scene, there is a proliferation of unfaithfulness among married people. The number of times that I have been approached by married men is staggering. The men are usually upfront about their marital status, apparently this is du jour. Somehow, their honesty is meant to earn them brownie points because they are “just being honest.” And when you let them know, rather politely, that married men are not your cup of tea, they say, and I quote: “women want to be lied to.” It is at this point where I exit the conversation because I know manipulation when I see it. Are they really being honest? How are they showing fidelity to their wives? On what basis of trust is this honesty standing on? It is a breaking of trust on the side of the wife and also on my side. How can I go on to trust a man who is not already demonstrating his trustworthiness? This whole extra-marital affair thing may have worked out for LeAnn Rimes and Eddie Cibrian, but I don't like those odds. Most of the time it ends in tears, and I am not a fan of crying.
When comedienne Tumi Morake shared her story of being sexually assaulted, she said something that hit home in a real way. She said that the language that is used around sexual assault is very troublesome because it places the burden of the assault on the victim. “I was sexually assaulted” is more common than “he sexually assaulted me.” This slight difference may seem minor, but it is loaded with meaning. I think married men also engage in a similar sleight of hand. A married man approaches you, of his own violation, fully knowing that he is married and places the decision to date him or not on your shoulders. The ball is now in your court and the burden of the decision becomes yours. All of a sudden you are playing a ball game that you did not ask to play. It is one thing for a single woman to approach a married man, but another thing for a single woman to be approached by a married man. You may be thinking, “just say No,” but my issue is being put into that position to have to say no in the first place. Why does the onus fall on the single woman instead of the man who should be more responsible with his actions?
In Right Thing, Right Now, author Ryan Holiday shares a story about Captain Arthur MacArthur who was serving in New Orleans after the civil war. In an attempt to win a contract of sorts, a cotton broker left a wad of cash in MacArthur’s hotel room. MacArthur sent the money to the US Treasury and asked to be relieved from his position because, “they are getting close to my price.” You can only say “No” so many times before as the comedian Bryan Callen puts it, “before the strongest fort is breached.” After all, if a tall, dark, successful married man keeps knocking at my door, it is only a matter of time before I open the door. It is the initial exposure that places me at risk, not the decision to say yes or no. I thought that there was something in married people’s vows that says how the man won’t go knocking on other women’s metaphorical doors, “forsaking all others” or something along those lines. Or was I watching an entirely different show?
On the question of being a Jewish defender, Williams asks, “And what if the only way of changing a profoundly and systematical untruthful linguistic environment is to refuse its demands for the ‘manifestation’ of facts, even to the point of producing fiction?” And he continues that “we could say that what fostered trust was something more like an adherence to the truth about human beings before God and a systematic resistance to the prevailing outrages against that truth in current political practice.” Married men, as an example, manifest facts in order to perpetuate an untruthful dating linguistic environment. One could also write that since most marriages appeal to the authority of the state and ultimately God; trust is undermined precisely because of a lack of adherence to the truth about married people before God. Even in my own cultural context where marriages lean heavily on the authority of ancestors, this means that once we have appealed to these authorities, there are then ways in which we need to conduct our lives as married people from that point on. Speech is an act, “I do” is an action and it is not an arbitrary one either. When you respond with “I do,” you are then also saying that you understand what you are saying “I do” to. As Williams writes, "to understand is to be in a position to act, to follow” through on what you said “I do” to in the first place. Therefore, we cannot decouple the use of language from trust which is the fundamental building block in the relationships of human beings. We can also not decouple the use of language from the primary relationship we have with ourselves.
The Self
While I may not have lived through the first two great wars, in 2024 I bore witness to a great world war. The whole world went up in arms when two Greats went toe-to-toe on the international stage. “Psst, I see dead people,” said the victor of this massive war and one can assume that he was alluding to his opponent and his opponent’s large fan base. It was absolute carnage. Yeahp, this year musician Kendrick Lamar declared war on every other rapper on the scene to establish himself as the greatest of our time. Only one other rapper rose to the challenge, Drake, and it did not end well for Drake. It actually ended in tears and dead bodies apparently.
I was watching a video of the fittest woman on earth, Tia-Clair Toomey, and her videographer asked her if she listens to Kendrick Lamar. To which she replied, “Who is Kendrick Lamar?” I laughed hard and decided that perhaps we were dealing with a battle, and not a world war after all. Regardless, apart from watching Simone Biles be Simone Biles at the Olympics and Usher’s Super Bowl performance, the Kendrick Lamar-Drake rap beef was just next-level entertaining. As someone who went into the battle with ‘ah-zero’ dog in the fight, because I am team Lupe Fiasco all the way, it was nonetheless interesting to follow. Like I wrote before, it ended in tears. A few months or so ago, a very heartbroken Drake was out in the streets at a party and his defeat was palpable. He sounded, I didn’t see the video, like a man who had lived through many winters in one year. He gave some sort of speech; I do not remember exactly what he said but he decided to close off his little soliloquy with a song request. I was expecting something like “Right above it” by Lil’ Wayne and himself, where he still tells the world that he is the best. Instead, the DJ played “Me, Myself and I” by Beyonce and the whole room exhaled and dropped their heads in unison. It was such a cringe moment. No offense Beyonce but bruh!!! Shout out to Scott Storch though.
Song selection aside, there is still something to be said about how language can be used to represent the self. In this particular case, Drake was letting us in on himself through his song choice. The song was a revelation on a vulnerable moment for Drake. It did not just draw us to the emotions that he was feeling at the particular time, but it was also letting us in on an aspect of his identity, how he bears and makes sense of tough times through the words of someone else. It is not a stretch of the imagination to assume that Drake felt considerably lonely. Musician Stanley Crouch once said that the greatest blues line of all time is “Father; why hast thou forsaken me?” Drake was symbolically reiterating Crouch’s words by drawing on a rhythm and blues artist to express his forsakenness. Except, it was not God who had done the forsaking, it was people. Since as Williams writes, “Language has to be understood as something more or other than a tool for getting information from one container to another. In Merleau-Ponty’s words, it manifests a link between human agents and between agents and the world… It establishes a world in common, where someone who is radically unsure as to whether their own response to the environment is recognizable and viable can find assurance that they are not isolated.” Unlike Jesus, Drake was pointing an accusatory finger to the people within the room and to all those watching and listening in. In his complete humanity, he accused the crowds of his public crucifixion. Ironically, this public cry for help was an attempt to relieve himself of his psychological isolation. His response to his crushing defeat, a show of vulnerability, was recognized and deemed unviable as it was met with derision which was a blow that sent him flailing further into the depths of loneliness. All this to say, you can take the crowd, of which I am a part, out of ancient Rome but you can’t take ancient Rome out of the crowd.
The self, which is temporal, relies heavily on interactions with others in its ongoing formation. Language is the tool that facilitates these interactions. The self is an open-ended question which has no sense of finality or objectivity because while we can point to a person as a physical manifestation, we cannot point to the self as a finite object. The reason why solitary confinement is so unbearable to most people, is because there is no one to recognize your selfhood through. When you speak and are met with non-negotiable silence, your selfhood comes into question including whether or not you matter. When we speak, a la Drake, we are letting ourselves matter to others. As philosopher Stanley Cavell writes,” To let yourself matter is to acknowledge not merely how it is with you, and hence to acknowledge that you want the other to care, at least to care to know. It is equally to acknowledge that your expressions in fact express you, that they are yours, that you are in them.” Drake sought to be primarily seen and subsequently understood with his ill-advised song request. Cue Nina Simone, “Oh Lord! Please don’t let me be misunderstood.” Did I mention Drake requested Beyonce though? Bruh!
Perhaps we should take a step back and consider the self from the perspective of the individual. Others are of course important, but many of us would recoil against the idea that we are the sum total of other people’s perceptions or projections. In the face of interdependence, independence becomes key. One of the things that I have always been fascinated with when it comes to human beings, is how we make sense of things through narrative. We tell stories about ourselves and others in an attempt to find meaning or justification for our actions in our umwelt. “What is the real self?” Williams asks. “The only defensible answer in this context, it seems to say that it is the action that here and now gathers events narrated from the past and possible courses of action in the future into one story that is unceasingly being revised from one utterance to the next.” What language offers us is coherence. The, otherwise disparate, things that happen in our lives can be strung together into a coherent narrative. Cause and effect can take centre stage, and we can provide a throughline through facts. These narratives are essential, indispensable even, to our sanity. Just imagine if the full weight of the randomness of the universe should be heaped onto our shoulders. We would shrivel up in horror. The immensity of the implications would do us in. Our sense of self would detonate into fragments that, like Humpty Dumpty’s shell, could not be put back together again. For most of us, self-delusion here and there keeps the madness away.
In my own life, the preciousness of language is best understood through the languages that I am not fluent in. My mother spoke seTswana and my dad xiTsonga but the people I spent the most time with when I was younger spoke isiZulu. They were my next-door neighbours, and it didn’t take too long before the language eclipsed my home language seTswana. When the English language came on the scene, none of the other languages stood a chance. They were all swept under its giant waves. Even isiZulu, the final bastion which put up a good fight, was swept. I do everything in English; I think in English, pray in English and dream in English. I take solace in the fact that the English language has been good to me; I can reliably and effectively draw on it when expressing myself. I am no Christopher Mastropietro, whose ability to play with the language is nothing short of astonishing, but I get by. It is very easy to take language for granted when it plays along but when I have to switch to using a different language, the importance of language becomes stark. Stringing a sentence together in isiZulu can sometimes have me breaking into a sweat. I feel like a chicken pecking at the ground in search of appropriate vocabulary. One word after the other, speaking can become laborious. Quite often, my grammar is corrected by the person I am addressing, at which point, I am simply glad that my attempt at communication was successful. It may not have been pretty, but the message was received; I count that as a win. But the importance of language is felt more deeply when the language cannot be taken for granted. Fundamentally, language should not be taken for granted and we should use it with care and consideration.
Imitation
A Netflix docu series was released on a writer named Elisabeth Finch whose need for fame and success exceeded her need for authenticity. Anatomy of Lies chronicles all the lies that she told in order to keep her name in the spotlight and to keep her relevant which has become the most important thing in the age of social media. Being irrelevant is worse than death for some; you may as well not exist. Avada Kedavra! Once people get a taste for fame, it becomes very difficult to not crave it afterwards. Social media is a giant effort for people to reach virality and keep it which leads to a lot of attention seeking and grabbing behaviour, sometimes even to the point of bringing harm upon themselves. The problem though is that because fame has essentially been decentralized, it means that the efforts to attain and keep it are even more desperate. The allure of the possibility for anyone to be famous, is the dangling carrot that used to only be reserved for a few. Now it dangles before each and every one of our eyes as long as we have an internet connection, and it takes a lot of self-control to not reach out and grab it.
Finch’s modus operandi involved taking other people’s traumas and claiming them as her own. Once she had appropriated these traumas, she then used them as material for the medical drama series Grey’s Anatomy. She was one of the writers and secured her spot on the prestigious writing team by lying about being a victim in the #MeToo movement which had social media in an uproar at the time. Unbeknownst to Shonda Rimes, she lied and manipulated her way onto the writing team. The lies she told are inexhaustible: having cancer, being sexually assaulted by her brother, being a part of the #MeToo movement, having friends connected with the Pittsburgh mass shooting, being nominated for an Academy award etc. There wasn’t a place that she was not willing to go, if it meant that she remained Jam Alley middle-centre relevant. Friends and family be damned.
While her pathological lying was, as Joe Rogan with raised eyebrows would put it, “astonishing”, there is something else that deserves a little bit of attention. Finch used language to engage in a sophisticated form of imitation which, reflecting upon her life now, makes me realize that it is this imitation which puts her entire existence into question. Living is a creative act, and it becomes a creative act we can own only when we live authentically, regardless of the outcome. Taking parts of other people’s lives and stitching them together into a quilt of drama does not constitute a life. Life is active, not retroactive. At some point, Finch stopped living. She discarded the image of God and hung up the gloves of creativity. She was not going to wrestle with reality to turn her life into a fine art; she was plainly satisfied to outwardly look as if she were in the ring of life and yet have no true substance to her life. She didn’t fight cancer, sexual harassment, sexual assault, or anything else she purported to; she didn’t even fight off writer’s block. During those lucid times when her writing demanded something from her, she caved under the pressure and reached out to someone else’s life to put words on the page.
Using other people’s lives as material is not the concern here, we all tell other people’s stories or use other people’s stories to create something of our own. What we don’t do is “plagiarize”; and take credit for other people’s stories. There is nothing she can point to and claim as her own, her life is hollow. And sooner or later, pneumatic pressure can only hold so much before the emptiness gives way and collapses, which it later did culminating in the documentary series. Imitation is only just the beginning, and it is pardonable when it is treated in this way. Imitation as inspiration is something that we can all get on board with. I mean, I have burgundy braids because when I started taking fitness seriously, I sought to emulate a fitness influencer, Hannah Eden, who had red hair at the time. This little spark of imitation and inspiration was the beginning to what has been an incredible journey of mastering my physical body through fitness pursuits. I did not stop with imitating Eden but have pushed the boundaries of fitness. I have made fitness my own and have turned it into a craft. Every day I work HTLT (wink wink Greg Doucette) and I am constantly surprising myself with what magic my body is able to conjure up with just a little bit of dedication. If you haven’t figured it out by now, I am sporty spice. Imitation is a human phenomenon, but it is not the complete story. “Simple imitation is not a sustaining satisfaction; the skill has to evolve. The slowness of craft time serves as a source of satisfaction, practice beds in making the skill one’s own. Slow craft time also enables the work of reflection and imagination… saying what has just been said, doing what has just been done, is not a good index of understanding. A craftsman who does nothing but imitate step by step what has been done will not yet necessarily have grasped the logic of the process, which emerges only when the principles of the process are deployed to produce something different, even if only slightly” (Williams). This means that the creative act is indispensable to self-understanding and knowledge. When we merely imitate, the conversation that we have with ourselves becomes stunted. When we stop at imitation, then our personal development hits a dead end, we forfeit the ability to become a Jordan Petersonian “aiming creature.” In his latest book, We Who Wrestle with God, Peterson ties character and aim together. He writes, “Character is aim embodied, the habitual pursuit of aim. That is the point of someone’s action.” Finch does not have character, nothing affirmative characterizes her. She expresses but does not act. She puts her name at the bottom of the page of other people’s agencies. She is not an agent because she does not aim. Even if she does aim, she stops short of manifesting those aims in ways that build her as a person. When we remove all the lies, she has nothing to say, nothing to be. When we aim, and try to move towards those aims, and fail in doing so, we still have a story to tell. Those failures are ours; we own them because we have lived them. We bear the scars of having entered the ring of life even if we weren't entirely successful in subduing chaos. We bear the scars of bearing the image of God.
“God is therefore the spirit who faces chaos; who confronts the void, the deep; who voluntarily shapes what has not yet been realized and navigates the ever-transforming horizon of the future. God is the spirit who engenders the opposites (light/darkness; earth/water), as well as the possibilities that emerge from the space between them” (Peterson). The image we bear compels us to confront the chaos that is the potential of our lives and turn it into order. That is the responsibility of being a human being that we cannot hide from because when we do, the self is placed in jeopardy. “If the ‘sense of self’ arises out of the awareness of a cumulative process of developing strategies, verbal and tactile, then the consciousness of being self now is the consciousness of being able to ‘perform’ [or act] in certain ways, to add to the cumulative sum of enacted strategies” (Williams). When we are able to ride the wave of chaos like Kelly Slater then we open our lives and selves to new possibilities. The tragedy of Finch is not the deception she engaged in, but rather that she squandered her consciousness on being relevant which is low on the hierarchy of meaning and becoming. She majored in the minor at the expense of the major. The temporality of the self makes it that more important to take full advantage of consciousness. In Language and Religion, William Downes writes, “Consciousness as an experiencing self is the evanescent moving point between memory and anticipation… but the context of this ‘moving point’ is an environment sufficiently stable to allow a sense of duration to inform the sense of the transition point between what has been and what might be.”
Opponent Processing
Before a single stone is laid, “the astrologer shows what spot in the foundation is exactly above the head of the snake that supports the world. The mason fashions a little wooden peg from the wood of the Khadira Tree, and with a coconut drives the peg into the ground at this particular spot, in such a way as to peg the head of the snake securely down. If this snake should ever shake its head violently, it would shake the world to pieces.” A foundation stone is placed above the peg. The cornerstone is thus situated exactly at the “centre of the world.” But the act of foundation at the same time repeats the cosmogonic act, for to “secure” the snake’s head, to drive the peg into it, is to imitate the primordial gesture of Soma or of Indra when the latter “smote the serpent in his lair” when his thunderbolt “cut off his head.”
In a recent conversation, Richard Dawkins accused Jordan Peterson of “being drunk on symbolism.” I have never been drunk in my life but being drunk on symbolism sounds like it will lead to a good hangover the next morning. Where do I sign up? But in classic Dawkins mien, it was not meant as a compliment. There is really no other way to take it though. If someone had told me that I am drunk on symbolism, I would give myself one of those high-fives I often give myself in the gym when I feel like I am winning at life. Because I am not only fluent in ‘big muscles,’ I speak Dawkins as well; Dawkins was implying that symbolism gets in Peterson’s way of seeing reality and the facts. I would argue that symbolism allows us to see reality better. Ever since the Pageau brothers digitally waltzed into my life, I have been completely enamoured with symbolism. Matthieu Pageau’s (a name drunk on French) book The Language of Creation is an absolute game-changer and it really helped me iron out what first appeared to me as Biblical inconsistencies. A lot of things have made a lot of sense to me because of symbolism. So being drunk on symbolism, for me, is a step in the right direction. Hair of the dog.
Anyway, when I read the excerpt above from Peterson’s book, I could not help noticing a pattern arising between what he wrote to describe Eden and Finch’s life. He writes about how the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil were the centring peg on which the foundation of Eden could be built. There has to be something that cannot be moved by human understanding, an ineffability to existence from which all other understanding stems from. “Something has to be the unmovable object- the sacred staff, the unshakeable pillar, and even, perhaps, the tree of the serpent. Something has to be that around which everything else arranges itself. That is God Himself, ineffable though He may be.” This is how things don’t fall apart, when the centre holds. As creatures bearing the image of God, it only makes sense to me that there is therefore a part of each and every one of us that, as my yoga teacher Travis Eliot puts it, that “rain cannot wet.” We all have a centre that is beyond human interference and contrivance, and we would be wise to keep that in the forefront of our minds. Finch exposed her centre to destabilization, the sacred part of herself to the profane. The peg was removed from the head of the snake and chaos was let loose. The centre could no longer hold, things fell apart in an ouroboran sense. Her life was feeding on itself.
Interestingly Williams uses similar grammar in how we use language to establish ourselves in the world. He borrows from philosopher Gillian Rose’s idea of “staking.” He writes, “To stake a position, to articulate a perception, is to acknowledge that my judgment of my perception, is not self-contained and self-justifying; it is to be exposed to contradiction, to the verbal challenge and probing of partners in the language world, and thus to the ‘speculative’ development that returns us finally to where we started but with a completely different kind of awareness.” We return to the centre of ourselves a little different but better. I can’t help but think how vampires, chaos personified, are killed with a stake to the heart akin to the peg in the head of the snake.
What we miss is that staking involves exposing ourselves to contradiction which becomes necessary for our growth. Not all “ops” are bad for us. In fact, most of the time our personal blind spots are revealed through friction. Language affords us this development if we are mature enough to not tie our identities with the positions we have staked. The self is dynamic and comes into its own when this dynamism is not thwarted, in any way, by ideology. On Tom Bilyeu’s Impact Theory, cognitive scientist John Vervaeke shines a light on the current state of affairs in our current zeitgeist. He explores the dangers of our current culture wars and how the way they are playing out pose a danger to democracy. One of the ways that victory is sought in these culture wars is through the complete destruction of all opposition. Except how does development take place without opposition? To homogenize in this way is to risk the pitfalls of imitation: stagnation, regression and a true loss of identity.
It was Vervaeke who introduced me to the concept of opponent processing in his series Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. “The best way that I can correct myself is through you and the best way that you can correct yourself is through me,” he says, “but if we get taken over by the spirit of adversarial processing it turns into gridlock and mutual self- destructiveness.” Muscles work in the same way, agonists and antagonists work against each other in a mutually beneficial relationship. I also think that Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic became the best tennis players in the world because they were competing against each other, they were continuously making one another better. That is the beauty of opponent processing and linguistically, opponent processing encourages us to move to the edge of words. We gain the confidence to move right to the boundaries of our capabilities and then strive to increase those boundaries through performance.
Of course, language can be used in ways that are truly adversarial, in a way that attempts to destroy rather than build. And it can get really ugly. Podcaster Joe Rogan likes saying that the antidote to hate speech is more speech, not less. Hear, hear Joseph!!! Trying to silence people who differ in opinion to us is a recipe for eventual destruction. Instead of expanding our boundaries, censorship makes our reality ever smaller. Our world closes in on us and we become claustrophobic. It seems counterintuitive to embrace different views, but it is important for growth. We always have a choice when it comes to other people, we can choose to engage or disengage. There are, to borrow D.C. Schindler’s term, misologists out there, people who hate logos, who simply seek to maintain their position by all means necessary even when new information is presented to them. Personally, I don’t engage with people like this because we are working at cross purposes here which can only lead to frustration and the pulling out of one’s hair. When I engage in conversations with others, and even if their opinion may differ vehemently from mine, but if we are working towards the same goal i.e. coming ever closer to understanding reality, then I am completely onboard. Trying to convince someone to move from a position that they are hell bent on maintaining is a colossal waste of time therefore I just let people like this be. We should be able to differentiate between misologists and logophiles (love of logos) so that our attention is turned toward enterprises that are worthwhile. Mind you, I don’t think misologists should be silenced, they should be left to their echo chambers. I also don’t think that they deserve an iota of our emotional energy, letting them rile us up is not a great way to expend our energy.
The words ezer kenegdo are the Hebrew words that are used to describe Eve’s role in the creation myth. We have translated this to helper, but there is more to the words than this. Peterson writes that it is more accurate to translate the words as striving with or aiding against which is quite telling. Men and women are different, think Venus and Mars, and that difference has been weaponized in modern society to be strictly adversarial. According to Peterson’s interpretation, men and women are basically there to help each other see each other’s blind spots, not to compete with each other. Now, a man who even dares display his masculinity, is immediately called toxic and problematic. Masculinity is not inherently toxic nor is femininity. They can be toxic in their perversion but not inherently. Men, much to my chagrin, are becoming more and more feminized. There are few things that give me the ick like a heterosexual man who acts like a woman. Urgh! Perhaps it is not the men’s fault, the homogenizing agenda is on the rise. Men and women do not need to be the same. As Bilyeu once said, in relationships as in business partnerships, if both of you are the same, then one of you is redundant. Seeing that the survival of the species relies heavily on men and women, in their difference, coming together and getting along enough to raise a healthy family together, oh hell, we may as well throw love in there as well; I am not quite sure if this is the particular hill we want to die on. We need to move away from the idea that life is made easier when everything's made the same, that doing away with the difficulty of opponent processing will lead to a desirable end.
All the answers to life’s big questions can be found in language. Afterall, the Word is God. Life can be found when we throw ourselves into the possibilities language offers beyond mere communication. It is in language where we discover who we are and weave the story we tell about ourselves to ourselves and others. It is language that we can reliably depend on to sail through the difficulties of living in a coherent manner. Afterall, in the beginning was the Word. It is language that binds and unites communities and also offers the individual companionship in times of reflection and meditation. After all, the Word was with God.
The unfinished character of human language establishes us as speakers in a particular imaginative context, as subjects constantly seeking to respond to changing opportunities of participation in our environment and being variously enlarged by those responses… To speak of enlargement is to gesture towards an assumption that the relation between the knowing subject and its environment is fundamentally and irreducibly nourishing, making for growth- not exclusively (though importantly) growth in some controlling capacity but growth in an awareness of connection that allows not only a more successful negotiating of the environment but a celebration of its resource: language as a festive ‘holding-up’ of what is represented so that it can be seen freshly, art and contemplation as well as techne and politics. (Williams)
