THE FIRST INTRO
I want to start with a comment posted on Part 1 from a recent Internet acquaintance of mine who attended ARC and who I pestered into commenting. Christian Baxter runs a great podcast / YouTube channel where he practices the craft of conversation. Christian and I sat down in March for a chat. He also vlogged large portions of his time at ARC. A couple things I’ve enjoyed from his channel:
And now Christian’s comment:
What stuck out to me was the “I met some people really important to me at ARC”.
As I work my way through all these digital lectures trying to gain a better understanding of ARC, I will never experience one of the things that is central to Christian’s experience of ARC: flesh and blood, sharing a meal, a handshake / a hi-five / a hug. Yeah, let’s end there with the full sentimentality of hugs.
THE SECOND INTRO
The first video ARC posted was ‘Jordan Peterson: The Choice That Could Save Civilization (Or Doom It).’ As soon as you start the video, you can see a powerpoint behind Jordan that has a different title: ‘The Best of Our Inheritance: A Call to Remember.’
Let me quickly lay out my experience with Jordan in 10 bullet points, since our parasocial relationship goes back years.
I’ve listened to easily over 100 hours of Jordan Peterson. Probably 100s.
Maps of Meaning is the only book of his I own. I’ve never finished it.
I borrowed 12 Rules For Life: An Antidote To Chaos and finished it in a couple weekends. I thought it was good and that it was a very condensed form of his Harvard lectures.
His Harvard lectures are outstanding. There’s a playlist of all his professorial work. It’s the best work he’s created in my opinion. It profoundly transformed me. In no particular order:
His lectures on Genesis are also quite good, despite occasionally saying things that make even my apostate heart shudder:
Two things I’ve heard Jordan say that I’ll always remember. (These are loose quotes…) “Find the heaviest object you can see, try to pick it up, and see what happens to you.” After dropping out of undergrad twice, I went back and finished. This mattered to me and my family. “The only thing worse than nothing mattering is everything mattering.” I heard that when nearly nothing mattered to me and went off in search of how to become the kind of human who could handle everything mattering—that search changed me from skin to soul.
I wish Jordan had never gone anywhere near politics. At the same time, millions of people have had their lives bettered to a degree because of Jordan’s now enormous reach.
I’d like to know if 12 more rules for life was Jordan’s idea first or the whisper of a publisher promising a great reward.
I want to know how a man who entered the world stage courageously arguing for free speech became a man who runs a podcast where advertisements interrupt his guests talking in the very middle of their sentences. I know this cowardly ad model exists to maximize profit. I want to know why some profit isn’t enough. Mainly, I want to know how to never become the second man even though I spent part of my life trying to be like the first man. I think it has something to do with sabbaticals and lying fallow.
I imagine Jordan Peterson is a great husband, a great father, a great grand-father, and a great friend. I also imagine he’d be better off if someone changed his X password and threw it away.
THE FINAL INTRO
Without further ado. The reason we’re here and a third title: “SACRIFICE OR CHAOS?”
We’re going to need to cover the style of his speech before we can talk about any of the content. If you’re only listening, this is still somewhat evident, but if you are watching Jordan then it is obvious he is struggling with finding words in his head that he did not write down or have available to him on a teleprompter. It’s obvious there’s no teleprompter because he has his eyes closed a fair amount.
I believe this was the first speech at ARC 2025, so it’s a keynote. I can’t imagine why anyone would give a keynote without notes available. You don’t even need a teleprompter. You can have a powerpoint with four slides. Each slide can have a few words that you riff on for five minutes then move forward to the next slide. There are near endless public speaking techniques. This is a sloppy performance. And this is not even ‘sloppy’ as a commentary on sloppy performances.
I really have no idea the background to why this sounds the way it does. If someone has personal stuff going on and isn’t in a place to deliver a not-sloppy keynote speech, then they should pass it on and give someone else the opportunity. Or do a roundtable discussion, so all the pressure is not on one human’s shoulders.
The Youtube video itself is broken up into five sections if you scroll across the bottom. Jordan doesn’t seem to have any structure to the talk, so we’ll use what we got.
The Civilizational Crossroads
Why Hedonism and Power Fail
The Lost Unifying Principle
Sacrifice: The Heart of Civilization (including the most replayed part)
Reuniting Conservatism and Liberalism
According to whoever titled these sections, Jordan’s and ARC’s aim is a political one. I’m going to transcribe a bunch of this talk, but not all—errors are my own. Again, the video is right above for reference.
I: The Civilizational Crossroads
Jordan:
“So what is the defining characteristic of this civilizational moment? I would say that what lies in front of us, perhaps for the first time, is the opportunity to make the foundational principles of our civilization conscious, explicit, and propositional and in so doing to pave the way for a genuine and mutually appreciative union of traditional conservatism and classical liberalism.”
Ethan:
Perhaps for the first time? This screams at me ‘globalist egomaniac’! Like does he really mean that he thinks that for the first time in human history, ARC leaders, including himself, are perhaps the first humans to make that which undergirds civilization conscious? As if every human before now has been asleep? This is what I mean when I say sloppy. You are talking to 4,000 people and this will go online where people like me will transcribe what you say and take your words seriously. How else am I supposed to understand your meaning? We are 1 minute in to a 17 minute speech and we have a claim that I read as an ego out of control.
II: Why Hedonism and Power Fail
Jordan:
“To undertake such a venture the first question that we must address is the nature of motivation for life, for being and becoming, and I think we’ve proceeded far enough in our philosophical, theological, and psychological, biological investigations to provide an answer to that. The default drives that motivate us, or personalities that posses us, might be regarded as those that foster a narrow and self-absorbed hedonism.
And I would say that that’s the default state of, the default state that characterizes human immaturity, that possession by implicit fragmented whim must be transcended by a more sophisticated uniting principle in order for the psyche to be integrated and to be sustainable across time in an iterated manner and for community itself to exist.
Hedonistic pleasure seeking, the gratification of immediate desire, the simple avoidance of pain or displeasure, is not a principle that can improve when it’s implemented or unites people in productive cooperation and competition so that a society can be established.
The dominance of the personality by local, narrow and self-serving whim is not a playable or noble game and it allies itself necessarily with the force that cynics, like the postmodernists, like the neo-marxists, believe is the only viable uniting force, that of power.”
Ethan:
I was recently talking to a close friend of mine about my recent return to trust in God, trust in the death and resurrection of Jesus the Anointed One and trust in the Spirit of God, bolstered by my close community and reading of tradition. I told him that I gave my allegiance to God, that my life was not my own and that I now served God.
He responded that he was done with hedonism, but he still saw himself as the center of his world. We talked about how nice it is to be on the other side of going out, chasing girls, seeking oblivion and annihilation every other weekend. I told him at some point his self wouldn’t be strong enough for life and that he’d be better off returning to trust in God / giving his allegiance to God / replacing his self with God as the center of his life.
He remains unconvinced of my argument, but life is long and we won’t stop talking any time soon. You can say important things with less complex words.
Also, ‘ol Jordan is absolutely blind to what Postmodernism is. He continually refers to it as one, unified project. It is not. Just like there is not one Christian Church, but many denominations. Most Postmodern authors did not view themselves as part of any unified Postmodern project and certainly did not see themselves as aligned with other so-called Postmodern writers / intellectuals.
Yes, there are many overlapping themes. But a Catholic is not a Protestant is not a Unitarian is not a Lutheran is not a Christian Buddhist is not a Christian absurdist is not a Christian pulling cards and rolling dice. Although… despite denominational differences, this splintered Christian Ecclesia that I travel with as a Wandering Wisconsinite is on a path. And this path has many trails that seem to diverge and even if you take the one less traveled, you may be surprised to find yourself emerging as the lanes that once diverged get wed with dust and dew. The path of following Jesus the Nazarene, the Anointed One is narrow, but even in a narrow place, there is room for argument. Postmodernism will one day be resigned for the history books, but Christianity has yet to be bound up with simple words as chains. How do you capture something that people will die because of? If we knew that, then we could box up Nihilism and chain it up in a deep, dark abyss where it belongs.
There are things beyond books of text that must be contended with, but that starts with becoming the kind of human that can ‘tend’ something and a garden, or a bricklayer’s line, is a good place to start.
I assume Jordan wants to simplify Postmodernism, so he can paint his enemy with poor strokes. Postmodernism offers us many tools that are worth having in our tool belts and to pretend otherwise is foolish, arrogant and self-centered. The way forwards is not a return to the early 1900s; you cannot claw your way back into Eden; it does not matter what new technology your friends have. The way forward is tomorrow and the next day and soon it will be 2026, soon we shall all stand with faces in full light of all we know. If the old can’t see it, then the young need to shout louder.
I agree that when hedonism and power-seeking blend, bad things happen at an individual level and at a societal level.
Jordan:
“Why is hedonism wrong? Why is power wrong, technically? I think it’s because both of those motivating forces, or sets of motivating forces, degenerate when they’re iterated.”
Ethan:
I agree hedonism and power can be and often are wrong, especially as a central drive for existence, but I don’t need a technical definition. I have lived these drives and I have found them empty. I found my life annihilated and obliterated on a weekly basis. I have watched as nearly everyone I knew left church to try on hedonism and power since my old church had tried them on long ago by selling 1,000 calorie coffee drinks and building multi-million dollar building expansions to look impressive in the suburbs.
Here’s a wildly over-simplified plot synopsis of The Stand by Stephen King, one of the greatest postmodern meditations on evil. A good old lady and a very evil man start recruiting followers. The good old lady sends a few goodies to confront the baddies. The goodies don’t all make it back, however the baddies’ evil becomes too heavy for their own shoulders and evil collapses in on itself, decimating the baddies. Sorry Jordan, you’re nowhere near the first person to have these thoughts. What’s that? A man named Jesus sacrificed his life and claimed evil had collapsed in on itself? Surely that will come up later…
III: The Lost Unifying Principle
Jordan:
“The Biblical Library that lays out the narrative principles upon which free Western societies are founded, is an elaborated exploration of the theme of sacrifice, taken at face value the dramas of sacrifice that are portrayed in our foundational texts have a impenetrable and opaque quality.
What does it mean to offer something of value to the divine? It’s a drama that’s predicated on the realization that sacrifice is by necessity the foundation of civilization. Civilization is social and future oriented. And that means since it’s social, that the individuals who come together to constitute society have to sacrifice their narrow, pleasure-seeking individuality, demanding gratification in the moment for the sake of their mutual reciprocal relationships with others.
Locally first in marriage, in family and town, in city, expanding to province and state and country, nested all under the auspices, let’s say, of the divine. That’s a sacrificial process.”
Ethan:
An impenetrable and opaque quality? To who? I find the Bible inspiring and electric and mystifying and volcanic. I’m not saying it’s an easy read, but impenetrable has never been a word that I would choose.
And here we go with ‘the divine’ talk. I recently heard and have continued to parrot the line that Jordan Peterson is re-hashing the Emergent Church movement from a couple decades ago, but with some more conservative flavors. Everybody wants to abstract God as a way of keeping God at arms length. To be clear, two arms are not enough to hold back a 1,000lb Alaskan moose let alone God, then again, the word God don’t mean much these days. See, a word ain’t quite the same thing as a name; a name is far more difficult to abstract and rarely bends to the speaker’s will.
Sacrifice is not the foundation of civilization. A relationship with the center of your / the Cosmos is the foundation of civilization: now I’d recommend a relationship with Yahweh, but you’re free to pick your Self or any ‘ism’ that’s particularly tantalizing. A civilization can be founded on Communism, on one man’s ambition, on lust of one woman (or many women), on Conservatism, on Liberalism, or even on the belief that humans are animals and should live in fur-suits.
And again, Jordan even hesitates at the end with his willingness to put even the abstraction of God as the ultimate principle. Woe To You.
IV: Sacrifice: The Heart of Civilization
Ethan:
I should give some credence to sacrifice! Sacrifice is wildly important! These impenetrable Biblical dramas lay out quite penetrably that sacrifice is how one re-establishes their relationship with God and some people even claim that the sacrifice of Jesus the Anointed One allows for any who call on His name to approach God and begin a relationship.
I like much of what Jordan says. However, my dislike for his generality far outweighs my agreeance with parts of his sacrificial claims. Let’s see some more.
Jordan:
Jordan’s referencing child development, “I have a turn! Then you have a turn! I have a turn! Then you have a turn!
The sacrifice there is that it’s not always my turn. And that sacrificial reciprocity is the foundation, foundational principle of the reciprocity upon which even the most primordial forms of society, friendship in childhood let’s say, are predicated.
The foundational texts of Western civilization, the Biblical texts in particular, are an extended study in the intricacies of sacrifice, predicated on the emergent discovery, or realization, that the sacrifice most pleasing to God that sets the world right, that creates the order that is good, or very good, is the sacrifice that tends towards the ultimate.
And the Christian drama portrays the sacrificial process in its arguably ultimate form. And it’s no chance occurrence that the sacrificial altar is at the center of the church and the church is at the center of the town and the town is at the center of the state and the state organized under the divine principle of sacrifice that constitutes our proper association with the divine spirit that establishes the state that leads the desert to bloom and the land to abundance.
(first big applause break)
And it’s not just sacrifice. It’s voluntary self-sacrifice towards the highest possible end. That’s the foundation of civilization, the Postmodernists be damned. Which is virtually a certainty by the way.
(second big applause break)”
Ethan:
You can tell he is struggling to find the precise words he wants to use. Again, I think it’s incredibly sloppy and arrogant to not take the time to pick your words before going on stage in front of 4,000 people followed by the Internet, but I credit him for struggling and taking the time needed to be as truthful as he can with his language.
Though this all still feels hollow. It feels like an audience has gathered to watch a man dig a hole down to treasure that many before him have dug and found, while the man claims he is perhaps the first to find it. Oh, also, he’s only using his mind to move the shovel and his clothes / hands are dirt-free. None of this feels personal. It feels like armchair intellectualism, which is a fine starting point, but I want to hear from someone who has lived this, who has sacrificed their life in service, who has followed Jesus into and through death despite the consequences, who has actually made the land abundant by the sweat of their brow, who accomplished things in a place where God was the only observer, and now comes back to tell the raucous tale.
Those early Harvard lectures were full of ‘sweat of Jordan Peterson’s brow’ stories. Jordan doesn’t even tell one, single personal story, which tells you everything you need to know. Yes, this is interesting. No, it’s not worth the price of admission.
Oh, and Jordan follows up an applause break that is loosely pointed towards the power of God by seeking laughter and applause by damning humans in front of a quietly cheering, loosely Christian crowd. I find that cruel and despicable. We have to be better than this. This is the moment you stand up and walk out. This is the moment you draw a line in the sand and say, “If you think you can damn people, then dammit I’m out.” This is the moment you trust in the Spirit of God to be fearless in front of powerful political players, but that requires real sacrifice.
And this will be a moment much like when I watched my friends and fellow millenials walk out of church. Many will walk out of the wealthy, powerful house that Peterson built as he roasts his enemies over flames. And the quiet tide of nihilism will gather up loose and lonely humans who thought they’d found a place to lay their head, only to discover it was a siren song and soon they’d be seen as chaff to char. To those of us that learned to tread the dark: it’s time to whitestonenamewater-raft. It’s time to carry the fire.
V: Reuniting Conservatism and Liberalism
Jordan:
“The explicit understanding of the centrality of that principle [the principle of voluntary self-sacrifice] in my estimation, allows for the intelligent union of the traditional Western Conservative with the traditional Western Classic Liberal.
The hypothesis being that the stage is set for the emergence of a liberal, of the liberal individualism that we associate with the free Western world. The stage is set for the emergence of that ethos when the bedrock of reciprocal voluntary self-sacrifice is established and firm. And the conservatives stand for the self-evident foundation of Western civilization and the Classic Liberals stand for its manifestation at the level of the individual. A manifestation which only maintains its validity when the underlying presumption of voluntary self-sacrifice is, serves as the proper foundation.
So what’s this civilizational moment? This civilizational moment is the opportunity that we have in front of us to wake up, and to realize consciously and explicitly the nature of the dream that has enveloped us for the 1,000s of years of Judeo-Christian civilization.
That dream is the, the, celebration, the worship, the divi-, the deification of the principle of reciprocal voluntary self-sacrifice, the sacrifice of self to the future, the sacrifice of self to the community, as the necessary, inevitable and revolutionary foundation of the civilization that makes us free and abundant.
(applause break)
And so, it’s a core part of ARC’s mission, to get our story straight. And in the free West, the destination of the oppressed across the world, we’ve acted out the appropriate story and benefitted in consequence and now we have the opportunity to understand that story explicitly and to unite our understanding with our mythos, with our drama, and to fortify ourselves with the re-union of our cynical and skeptical mind and the bedrock foundation stone: the corner stone rejected by the builder that constitutes the true basis for civilization and so, that’s what we’re doing.
(applause break)
And so with that, we’ll turn to some music…”
Ethan:
WOOF. I want to go back to the end of Section IV real quick. Jordan lays out that the Christian drama portrays sacrifice in its highest form. It’s interesting how he doesn’t use the name Jesus; he keeps everything nice and tidy in the abstract. The altar is the center of the church which is the center of the town which is the center of the state which is organized under a divine principle which properly associates you with a divine spirit that establishes a state that leads the land to abundance.
The state leads the land to abundance and maybe there’s a divine spirit behind the state’s action and maybe that divine spirit comes from the Christian drama.
But there’s no maybes about the majority of the authors of the Hebrew Scriptures and the Greek New Testament thinking there really were many divine spirits out and about in the land. It was of paramount importance that you knew which divine spirit you were dealing with. In fact, it was their claim, that the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob was the King Spirit above all other king spirits.
So Jordan thinks that the next logical step after loosely pointing at God and Jesus, but in my estimation he could be pointing at any divine spirit, is to begin his real argument: the fusion of Western Conservatism and Western Classical Liberalism. Again, God was just a prelude to the Leviathan of State, to a new bipartisan consensus promising prosperity while barrel-bending the youth. I watched this play out with the Emergent Church and Progressivism, except they never had any real kind of power center—a bunch of ‘Christian’ ‘zen’ ‘non-dual’ ‘hippies’ arguing for Progressive policies might annoy you, but it’s not actually threatening if you’re being honest.
Again and again, I hear Jordan arguing for his own principle that perhaps he alone has discovered, THE PRINCIPLE OF RECIPROCAL VOLUNTARY SELF-SACRIFICE, as the principle to be the bedrock of ultimate civilization’s foundation. I hear a modern Nietzsche declaring himself the smartest man in the world. Nietzsche was smart. I agree with many things Nietzsche saw and said, but I also agree with the history textbooks that Nietzsche’s work was hijacked by Nazis. If you don’t want your work to be hijacked by vicious and cruel humans, then you had better be absolutely clear about what you’re saying. That’s the only chance you got. The sloppier you are, the more likely anyone can claim your ideas for themselves and people won’t even try to tell them they’re wrong.
I strongly fear that Jordan’s literal claim that the dream of 1000’s of years of Judeo-Christian history has been the “celebration, the worship, the divi-, the deification of the principle of reciprocal voluntary self-sacrifice, the sacrifice of self to the future, the sacrifice of self to the community, as the necessary, inevitable and revolutionary foundation of the civilization that makes us free and abundant” will be so tantalizing and so pleasing to the eyes and ears of a couple thousand power-hungry, rising, applauding elites that some of them will try to enact this ‘dream’ in their states.
It is this enactment that honestly terrifies me because many people will go along with it thinking they are doing God’s will by following a strong God-appointed leader. I find this far scarier than Trump’s America or Kamala’s America, both of whom are humans driven by pure self-centeredness. Humans driven by ideas that can possess you are something we should all fear and take seriously. Have we learned nothing?
And of course we have a wild claim that the West has “acted out the appropriate story” without a single mention of any fault the West has. Also, who is not included in the West? These are exactly the kind of claims that will drive another generation of young Christians out of all kinds of different denominations as their pastors and priests and bishops and powerful people in pulpits begin to go along with this rhetoric. I remember the sermons about how America was rightfully invading Iraq because of 9/11; I won’t ever forget those sermons; although someday I do need to forgive the people who gave those sermons; I am on The Way.
Let’s start to wrap this up. Jordan’s final applause break comes after he claims the West can now unite its understanding of the story, (the West’s story? ARC’s story? Jordan’s story? My guess is the story is Jordan’s desire to deify the principle of reciprocal voluntary self-sacrifice.), with the West’s mythos, (Honestly no idea. He hasn’t really used that word until now I don’t think.), and the West can also fortify itself with the re-union of its skeptical mind, (Is this referring to Postmodernism?), with the bedrock foundation stone. So what in seven hells is going on here?
ARC wants to fuse together Conservatism and Classical Liberalism.
ARC wants to fuse together Jordan’s deification of the principle of reciprocal voluntary self-sacrifice with the West’s mythos?
And ARC wants to fuse together cynical minds with the bedrock foundation stone. ARC has already highlighted that it intends to re-lay the foundations of civilization. Jordan offers a definition of this “bedrock foundation stone: the corner stone rejected by the builder that constitutes the true basis for civilization” which is strange. I have no idea who the ‘builder’ is in Jordan’s worldview. And if you’re not pretty Bible-literate then you won’t know who “the rejected corner stone” is referring to and Jordan can’t bother himself to use the name Jesus.
This reference comes from Acts 4 and I’ll let the author of Acts sound us out. See if you can spot any differences in these dramas.
Ta ta for now!
“As [Peter and John] were speaking to the people, the priests and the captain of the temple guard and the Sadducees came up to them, being greatly disturbed because they were teaching the people and proclaiming in Jesus the resurrection from the dead. And they laid hands on them and put them in prison until the next day, for it was already evening. But many of those who had heard the message believed; and the number of the men came to be about five thousand.
On the next day, their rulers and elders and scribes were gathered together in Jerusalem; and Annas the high priest was there, and Caiaphas, John, and Alexander, and all who were of high-priestly descent. When they had placed them in the center, they began to inquire, “By what power, or in what name, have you done this?” Then Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, said to them, “Rulers and elders of the people, if we are on trial today for a benefit done to a sick man, as to how this man has been made well, let it be known to all of you and to all the people of Israel, that by the name of Jesus Christ the Nazarene, whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead--by this name this man stands here before you in good health. He is the stone which was rejected by you, the builders, but which became the chief cornerstone. And there is salvation in no one else; for there is no other name under heaven that has been given among mankind by which we must be saved.”
Acts 4:1-12
Keep letting it out brother