I was having yet another argument on failbook, which is a waste of time, but it helps me hone my moral and philosophical thinking in ways that mere books can’t always.  I had discussed how Jordan Peterson has a different take on motherhood, and why females don’t get above the glass ceiling that often.  He said that the data showed that really well qualified females tend to be the conscientious personality type, and just as they get really good at their jobs, they figure out that they have families who they are also conscientious about, and then they don’t accept the high-powered position that is actually offered to them because they want work-life balance.

My friend responded with the typical identity politics labels of pseudo-intellectual, anti-feminist, and transphobic.  Here’s my response:

No, he isn’t. JP is an academic ivory tower type (Nassim Taleb would call him intellectual yet idiot), somebody who acknowledges that the science shows that males and female are biologically different in personality types which makes their behavior different, and who shows that dominance hierarchies appear throughout the animal kingdom in certain circumstances.

Those short one or two word labels to describe somebody are the problem I’m having with identity politics. See, he’s called a “conservative,” even though most conservatives hate his guts. He is more than his labels, and I’m not a “blind follower” because some things he says I disagree with.

The good thing about him, is that he gets me to think through a couple issues I have in ways I haven’t done since dermot explained the true history of the relationship between the church and science. A bit like my brief flirtation with Ayn Rand’s philosophy in college, I, too, had a brief flirtation with feminism recently. I thought that I wanted equality of outcome. I thought I wanted dominance hierarchies to vanish off the face of the Earth, because I’m still anti-centralized globalized Patriarchy. But through listening carefully to the Scandinavian experience of equality of opportunity, and hearing how it drove the outcomes even further apart, I was able to understand that I actually wanted equality of opportunity, much more than I wanted equality of outcome. From there, I understood that I wasn’t opposed to hierarchies as a complete category of behavior, so long as they included separate matriarchies as well as anarchies within them for the majority of the time.

This means it is not enough to say “global civilization is a heat engine” and be against it. Nor does that automatically make me a technocopian. It isn’t either/or. I’m neither. I’m not a label. I change my mind when presented with compelling evidence. In every storm, there are pockets where living creatures find shelter from the worst effects of the devastating wind, rain, and hail.

I found that JP was all for women choosing how they wanted to live their lives. Is that not feminism? Is it freedom of choice that is feminism? Or is it equality of outcome? You can’t have both. You can’t have liberty as well as safety either. This is part of the philosophical struggles I have with some of the very basic foundational principles of western civilization. I don’t have a simple two word label for my answers, and they change. There are very specific and rare situations in which equality of outcome is actually the preferred thing. There are very specific and rare situations in which I would choose safety over liberty. Not always though.

Meanwhile, she who feeds you owns you. Jordan Peterson doesn’t feed me my breakfast. No, the grocery store, and therefore the petrochemical industrial vulture capitalist system does. What say we put aside our trivial differences and focus on our agreements, then? The equivalent of Jordan Peterson’s “Clean up your own room” translates very neatly into “grow your own food.” That’s not individually, because from a risk management perspective, that wouldn’t work, but it is very locally though.

Water is life. Water is alive. After you’ve cleaned up your house, clean up your local rivers too.