by: Jordan B. Peterson 2018

1 "The world can be validly construed as a forum for action, or as a place of things." Isn't this equivalent to Cartesian Mind/Body Dualism?
1 "We need to know four things:| what there is,| what to do about what there is,| that there is a difference between knowing what there is, and knowing what to do about what there is | and what that difference is." This is my 'Two interesting questions' except it says that both are important.
7 "Our great rationalist ideologies, after all—fascist, say, or communist—demonstrated their essential uselessness within the space of mere generations, despite their intellectually compelling nature. Traditional societies, predicated on religious notions, have survived—essentially unchanged, in some cases, for tens of thousands of years....Is it not likely that this indicates modern philosophical ignorance, rather than ancestral philosophical error?"
8 "We have not yet found God above, nor the devil below, because we do not yet understand where "above" and "below" might be found." Exactly!! Edwin Abbott has given us the clue.
12 "We also presently possess in accessible and complete form the traditional wisdom of a large part of the human race—possess accurate description of the myths and rituals...Accurate specification of underlying mythological commonalities might comprise the first developmental stage in the conscious evolution of a truly universal system of morality."
41 "The dilemma of contradictory simultaneous meanings can be solved in only two related ways (although it can be avoided in many others). We can alter our behaviors, in the difficult situation...Alternatively we can reframe our contexts of evaluation (our goals and interpretation of the present), so that they no longer produce paradoxical implications" This is my 'Roadmap to Happiness' from 1987.
50 "This process of signaling [within the limbic system] necessarily involves comparison of the undesirable present, as currently understood, with the ideal future, as currently imagined." This is exactly the sort of traffic one would expect to find on the Mind/Body interface in a Cartesian dual system.
51 "Halgren considers the N2/P3 and the autonomic orienting reflex" different parts of an overall organismic reaction complex evoked by stimuli that merit further evaluation." This process itself "merit[s] further evaluation"! Consider the corresponding function on a Mars Rover.
51 "The amygdala and hippocampus are also directly responsible for the production of this waveform—and, therefore, for contextual synthesis, which is a vital aspect of the derivation of meaning, which is significance for behavior, given the desire to attain a particular goal." It seems logical to interpret the amygdala/hippocampus as the transponder in the brain which communicates with a mind (outside the brain) with the claustrum acting as the antenna.
51 "The processes that reveal themselves behaviorally in the orienting complex and electro-physiologically in the N2/N4/P3 waveform appear to play a central part in the manifold processes we experience (and understand) as consciousness." Exactly! And it makes sense to consider the seat of consciousness to reside outside the brain.
51 "...orienting initiates a sequence of "controlled processing," which is difficult, slow, accompanied by awareness, sequential and generative..." The slow speed and difficulty are logically explainable as transmission delays across the Mind/Body link.
51 "'automatic processing' ... is habitual, 'unconscious' and immediate (and ... occurs in 'explored territory')." Me: 'automatic processing' is explainable as being localized in the brain and not requiring the link—comparable to the processing occurring in on-board computers in a Mars Rover.
52 "Consciousness (affiliated tightly with orienting, for the purposes of the present argument) therefore appears as a phenomenon critically involved in and vital to the evaluation of novelty—appears vital to placement of the unpredictable into a defined and determinate context as a consequence of behavioral modification undertaken in the territory of the unknown." This is exactly the role played by JPL for the actions of Spirit and Opportunity.
57 "Classical behavioral psychology is wrong in the same manner our folk presumptions are wrong: fear is not secondary, not learned; security is secondary, learned"
62 "Action and thought produce phenomena. Novel acts and thoughts necessarily produce new phenomena. Creative exploration, concrete and abstract, is therefore linked in a direct sense to being. Increased capacity for exploration means existence in a qualitatively different—even new—world. This entire argument implies, of course, that more complex and behaviorally flexible animals inhabit ("construct," if you will) a more complex universe." This makes total sense when interpreted in the context of my Mars Rover analogy.
62 "Various indices of development have been used to signify the nature of the relationship between the brain and intelligence." The Mars Rover analogy suggests that the index should be defined as the bandwidth of the link with JPL.
62 "However, it is structure and organization of cortex, not simply mass, or even relative mass or surface area, that most clearly defines the nature and reach of a species' experience and competence. More particularly, it is embodiment of the brain that matters. Brain structure necessarily reflects embodiment, despite the archaic presumption of the independence of spirit and matter (or soul and body, or mind and body), because the body is, in a primary sense, the environment to which the brain has adapted." Not necessarily. Consider the "nature and reach" of a smartphone's capability. It is not only the embodiment of the electronics in the instrument that matters. That instrument is indeed the environment for which the software and firmware in the smartphone were adapted, but there is much more complexity involved that is outside the instrument that is necessary in order to arrive at a complete understanding. The same is likely true for the brain.
63 "The body is specifically represented in the neocortex. This representation is often given schematic form as the homunculus, or "little man."" This is the modern connotation of the word 'homunculus'. It ignores the earlier attributes of being the focal point of consciousness and of being disembodied. Those may be important if true.
69 "...generation of metaphor (key to the construction of narratives—dreams, dramas, stories and myth) might well be regarded as the first stage of hypothesis construction."
71 "Knowing what to do, after all, is classification, before it is abstracted: classification in terms of motivational relevance, with the sensory aspects of the phenomena serving merely as a cue to recognition of that motivational relevance." IMHO a much more satisfactory explanation of "knowing" and even more detailed than Kling's et. al. explanation in Note 159, can be inferred by positing 1) Cartesian duality and 2) the functioning of the amygdala/hippocampus/claustrum as the brain's transponder. The "knowing" occurs when the transponder transmits the novel information along with relevant on-board memory information and then the conscious mind, after evaluating the transmission, along with further relevant information from out-board memories, generates and transmits a response (likely many responses) back to the brain.
71 "...many of our skills and our automatized strategies of classification are "opaque" to explicit consciousness...This opaqueness means, essentially, that we "understand" more than we "know"; it is for this reason that psychologists continue to depend on notions of the "unconscious" to provide explanations for behavior. This unconsciousness—the psychoanalytic god—is our capacity for the implicit storage of information about the nature and valence of things." Conflating "understanding" with "unconsciousness" doesn't seem to make much sense. It makes more sense to define unconscious processes as those not requiring transponder traffic. "Understanding" then belongs in consciousness at a notch somewhat higher than "knowledge" which seems more reasonable. As for the multiple memory systems, it makes sense for them to be divided between brain and mind just as they are between the Rover and JPL.
71 "We watch ourselves act;" Who's we, white man? The mind watches the body act.
71 "Before we truly master something novel...we imagine what it might be." It makes sense to ascribe imagination to consciousness as well.
72 "Knowing how is skill." I would quibble with this: I would say that "knowing how" is strictly mental, i.e. in the conscious mind with the literal meaning, where skill is proficiency gained by actual motor rehearsal and repetition with results stored in the cerebellum. For example, I know how to swallow as I sit here even without swallowing; I can demonstrate my skill by actually swallowing.
72 "...knowing that—I prefer knowing what." Another quibble: I'd say both are important and different: the former is dynamic; the latter static. Same distinction as between event and thing in vernacular usage.
72 "This new sensory input constitutes grounds for the construction, elaboration and update of a permanent but modifiable four-dimensional (spatial and temporal) representational model of the experiential field, in its present and potential future manifestations. This model, I would propose, is a story." This is a good definition of 'story', but the handwaving that follows could be improved by augmenting "permanent memory", "higher cortical structure" and "mnestic representation" with "cerebellum" and especially a dis-embodied mind a la Descartes.
88 "The unconscious may then be considered as the mediator between the unknown, which surrounds us constantly, and the domain that is so familiar to us that its contents have been rendered explicit. This mediator, I would suggest, is those metaphoric, imagistic processes, dependent upon limbic-motivated right-hemispheric activity, that help us initially formulate our stories." And I would further suggest that the antecedent of 'us' as used in your suggestion is precisely the conscious mind directly connected to the limbic system via the claustrum.
88 The "Multiple Memory Systems" have logical parallels in the Rover Analogy: Procedural memory is on-board the Rover and immediately accessible to motor functions; Episodic memory is split between the Rover and JPL and which facilitates 2-way communication between them; Semantic memory is strictly resident in JPL, both in the JPL computers and in the minds of the scientists.
89 "The higher-level stories, which cover a broader expanse of spatial-temporal territory, are increasingly complex and, therefore, cannot be as simply formulated. Myth steps in to fill the breach." Taking this up a notch and applying the Rover Analogy, we would have the equivalent of a parochial Martian encountering a Rover and asking about the Rover's existence, history, and purpose. JPL scientists could compose and send an explanation—the equivalent of a "religious experience" for the Rover. The Martians could then base a myth on the revelation.
89 "[Three] constituent elements of experience[:...] The unknown, the knower, and the known make up the world as a place of drama"" From the Rover's point of view, these are JPL, the scientists, and the Rover (and its Martian environment).
92 "How can the fact of patterned stories—archetypal stories, if you will—be reconciled with the apparent impossibility of inherited memory content?" One possibility is that all, or many humans have access to a greater reality, but that reality is ineffable (as they all seem to report). The resulting stories, though attempts at explaining the ineffable reality, nonetheless bear similarity.
100 "The unknown is intrinsically interesting, in a manner that poses an endless dilemma. It promises and threatens simultaneously. It appears as the hypothetical ultimate "source" of all determinate information, and as the ultimate unity of all currently discriminable things. It surrounds all things, eternally engenders all things and takes all things back. It can therefore be said, paradoxically, that we know specific things about the domain of the unknown, that we understand something about it, can act toward and represent it, even though it has not yet been explored. This paradoxical ability is a nontrivial capacity." A profound understatement! Identifying the "knower" as an individual human is a gross parochial simplification.
103 "This archetypal environment was (is) composed of three domains" These can be identified with Penrose's three worlds: unknown = Physical World, known = Ideal World, knower = Mental World.
107 "God==>Mary==>Christ [] is only one of many "valid" configurations" If you close the loop, a la Penrose, there are only two: G > M > C > G, and G > C > M > G, but only one of these works in Penrose's interpretation.
108 "The world of order and chaos might be regarded as the stage, for man—for the twin aspects of man, more accurately: for the aspect that inquires, explores and transforms (which voluntarily expands the domain and structure of order, culture) and for the aspect that opposes the inquiry exploration and transformation." It might also be regarded as the domain of science with the two aspects being Kuhnian "ordinary science" and paradigm shifts.
108 "The great story is, therefore, good vs. evil, played out against the endless flux of being, as it signifies. The forces of "good" have an eternal character (in the same way that Platonic objects are represented, eternally, in supracelestial space); unfortunately, so do the forces of evil." With respect, I think this is an error; I think nothing is eternal. Sometimes constituents of the known, or Platonic World (e.g. F=ma or Euclidean Geometry) are discovered to be "wrong" and are superseded.
108 "This eternality exists because all members of the species Homo sapiens are essentially equivalent, equal before God" This notion of "eternality" far exceeds the scope of the parochial human context and so it can't be asserted with certainty. But you are right about the ambivalence of the universe.
136 " The totality of the world, which includes the significance of experienced things, as well as the things themselves, is composed of what has been explored and rendered familiar; what has yet to be encountered, and is therefore unpredictable; and the process that mediates between the two. One final element must be additionally considered: the state of being that includes or precedes the division of everything into these three constituent elements."
137 "The source of things is the boundless. From whence they arise, thence they must also of necessity return. For they do penance and make compensation to one another for their injustice in the order of time." --Anaximander
137 "It seems impossible to determine what it is that was before anything was; myth attempts that task, despite its impossibility. It does so using the tool; of metaphor." I don't think that's quite right. I think metaphor is used as a tool only in the attempts to relate the ineffable experiences of Shamans, prophets, etc. after altered states of consciousness. The resulting related stories then developed into myth. The commonality, therefore, is probably because of some reality behind the experiences.
137 "Metaphor links thing to thing, situation to situation, concentrating on the phenomenological, affective, functional and motivational features the linked situations share. Through such linkage, what might otherwise remain entirely mysterious can begin to become comprehended." I agree completely. So, I suggest we seriously consider the metaphor of consciousness as explained by the Mars Rover analogy.
137 "Myths of the origin metaphorically portray the nature of the infinite potential that characterized being prior to the dawn of experience." Careless, but forgivable, use of 'infinite'.
137 "The process of metaphorical representation provides a bridge—and an increasingly communicable bridge—between what can be directly explored, experienced and "comprehended," and what remains eternally unknown." Yes! "increasingly communicable". So let's update our metaphor to a modern one like a Mars Rover.
149 "We are in fact capable of a set of paradoxical abilities: we know what to do, when we do not know what to do; we know how to represent what to do, when we do not know what to do; finally, we know how to represent what we have not yet encountered. These adaptive capacities—impossible, at first glance—immensely further our capacity to behave, successfully, in the face of our mysterious experience, and to communicate and broaden that capacity." Yes! So, let's modernize our cosmogony.
150 "Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them." – A.N. Whitehead
152 "Desire to formulate a representation of that which supersedes final classification and remains eternally motivating might well be understood as a prepotent and irresistible drive. That drive constitutes what might be regarded as the most fundamental religious impulse—constitutes the culturally universal attempt to define and establish a relationship with God—and underlies the establishment of civilized historical order." This is exactly the answer I gave to Greylorn when he asked, "Why would God create the world?"
152 Jung's description of "the living social symbol". If I understand him correctly, in the '50s the automobile would be such a symbol; today it would be the smartphone.
482 "This list of first rank schizophrenic symptoms is uniquely fascinating in the present context, for, as Nasrallah astutely phrases it, they can all be summarized by the basic idea "that in the schizophrenic brain the unintegrated right-hemisphere consciousness may become an 'alien intruder' on the verbally expressive left hemisphere." They can also all be summarized in the context of the consciousness-as-Mars-Rover hypothesis.
483 "Epileptic seizures, often...partake of the quality of revelation—producing apparently profound subjective insight into the deepest meaning of the universe, for example..." These, too, could be explained by the Mars Rover hypothesis, not to mention the many unconfirmed and largely dismissed reports of pre-cognition, remote viewing, etc. which could be explained easily in the context of the Mars Rover hypothesis, and not at all conventionally.
153 "Such "complexes" may "construct themselves" over the course of many centuries, as a consequence of the exploratory and creative endeavors of many disparate individuals, united within the communicative network of culture." Or, they could be the result of "exploratory and creative endeavors of many disparate" conscious individuals actually extant in higher dimensions as predicted by the Mars Rover hypothesis.
153 "Jung described the "space" occupied by such "spirits" as the pleroma (a gnostic term)." Why not take the Gnostics seriously?
154 "[The pleroma, ] appears to have a four-dimensional structure, like that of objective space-time (and of memory),...but is characterized by a tremendous vagueness with regards to category and temporality." Yes! This is exactly what the MRH predicts due to the mathematical features of manifolds.
154 "The "spirits" which inhabit the pleroma, in its "natural" condition, are deities—undifferentiated mixes of subject and object, motivational significance and sensory aspect, elaborated into personified representations by the effort of many." This is an unwarranted modern assumption. The spirits may be every bit as differentiated and personified as human beings are. The "efforts of many" have been largely unsuccessful attempts to discover their true nature.
154 "The category of all events that cannot yet be categorized can nonetheless be modeled, through metaphoric application of partially comprehensible yet affect-inducing occurrences whose emotional relevance in some way matches that of the unknown." I respectfully disagree. "All events" cannot be modeled without introducing inconsistencies (see Grim). All events within a manifold, however, can be modeled if the modeler is outside the manifold.
154 "The archaic "limbic system" has its own method of classification, so to speak, experienced privately as emotion—or as behavior spontaneously undertaken—manifested outside the realm of conditional abstract culturally determined presumption." The MRH neatly explains this observation.
154 "The unknown, as such, surrounds all things, but exists only in a hypothetical state, and finds representation in symbolic form as the uroboros, as we have seen." Not quite. This is a careless use of 'all' More accurate might be a finite set of concentric spheres (Matryoshka Dolls) representing a set of nested, embedded manifolds. From the perspective inside any manifold, the inner ones are "known" and they become successively less-well known as you go out. The last one is completely "unknown". 'All' is relative.
156 "An immense difference obtains between the possibility of something unknown and an actual unknown (the difference between potential and reality)." Yes! Immense indeed. I say that the difference is that between finitude and infinitude. The notion of infinity implies inconsistency and thus cannot participate in reality. All of reality is finite (Lao-Tzu's "uncarved block"), including the set and extents of nested manifolds.
166 "...primal generative capacity characterizes both the "source of all things" and the exploratory/hopeful attitudes and actions that make of that source determinate things."
180 "...the nature of human experience can be (should be) improved by voluntary alteration in individual human attitude and action. This statement—the historical hypothesis—is an expression of faith in human possibility itself and constitutes the truly revolutionary idea of historical man."
185 "Containment of this pattern [of action capable of making creative use of that unknown] in dynamic image, in myth, follows centuries of observation, and generation of hypotheses, regarding the core nature of Homo sapiens, the historical animal. The development of such containment followed a complex path of increasingly abstracted description and redescription of self and other." It is time for a major upgrade to this abstraction in light of modern scientific knowledge.
185 "Figure 40: The Process of Exploration and Update, as the Meta-Goal of Existence schematically presents the "highest goal" of life conceptualized from such a perspective: identification with the process of constructing and updating contingent and environment-specific schema given necessary precedence over identification with any particular, concretized goal. Spirit is thus elevated over dogma." And, this schema fits perfectly nicely onto a pleroma resident in hyperspace.
186 "...respect for belief comes to take second place to respect for the process by which belief is generated." i.e. respect consciousness over belief.
218 "Rousseau...repeatedly placed his own children in foundling asylums because their existence was inconvenient to him (and, we must presuppose, detrimental to the flowering of his intrinsic goodness)."
228 "...individual philosophical concepts are...in fact, far less a discovery than a recognition, a remembering, a return and a home-coming to a remote, primordial, and inclusive household of the soul, out of which those concepts grew originally: philosophizing is to this extent a kind of atavism of the highest order." – Nietzsche. In TDB, the question arises as to the nature and extent of "philosophizing" by "X" when not connected to a brain.
235 "A paradigm is a complex cognitive tool, whose use presupposes acceptance of a limited number of axioms (or definitions of what constitutes reality, for the purposes of argument and action), whose interactions produce an internally consistent explanatory and predictive structure."
237 "...the presupposition that space has three dimensions, in the case of Euclidean geometry [is] a presupposition which is clearly questionable[]." Most true.
238 Nietzsche's critique of Descartes' premise: "I think".
239 "...knowledge serves the ends of life, rather than existing in and of itself."
246 "The Word—in its guise as painstakingly abstracted action and object—can create new worlds and destroy old; can pose an unbearable threat to seemingly stable cultures, and can redeem those that have become senescent, inflexible and paralytic. To those who have sold their souls to the group, however, the Word is indistinguishable from the enemy."
259 "...Homo sapiens' unique heroic " thesis," as stated previously: that the nature of experience can be altered, for the better, by voluntary alteration of action and thought." It makes sense to me that this thesis should also apply to, and extend into, the pleroma.
269 "My position was terrible. I knew that I could find nothing in the way of rational knowledge except a denial of life; and in faith I could find nothing except a denial of reason, and this was even more impossible than a denial of life. According to rational knowledge, it followed that life is evil, and people know it. They do not have to live, yet they have lived and they do live, just as I myself had lived, even though I had known for a long time that life is meaningless and evil. According to faith, it followed that in order to understand the meaning of life I would have to turn away from reason, the very thing for which meaning was necessary." – Tolstoy
270 "Ever since Plato, most literary critics have connected the word "thought" with dialectical and conceptual idioms, and ignored or denied the existence of poetic and imaginative thought...[T]here are still far too many literary critics who are both ignorant and contemptuous of the mental processes that produce literature." Consider this in light of Einstein's stated objective: to know the thought of God.
274 "The shaman, the ecstatic in general—equally, the revolutionary philosopher or scientist, true to himself—is characterized by stubborn adherence to his own idiosyncratic field of experience, in which occurrences emerge, procedural, episodic or semantic in structure, that are foreign to the predictably socialized man and his prosaic moral expectation." – Frye. I think that describes me.
509 Buy this book: E. Newman, The Origins and History of Consciousness
288 "It is primordial separation of light from darkness—engendered by Logos, the Word, equivalent to the process of consciousness—that initiates human experience and historical activity (which is reality itself for all intents and purposes). This initial division provides the prototypic structure, and the fundamental precondition, for the elaboration and description of more differentiated attracting and repulsing pairs of opposites:
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
And God said, Let there be light; and there was light.
And God saw the light, that it was good; and God divided the light from the darkness. (Genesis 1:1–4)" This can be interpreted nicely in the context of TDB/SG Theory.
289 "The central metaphor underlying "beginning" is not really birth at all. It is rather the moment of waking from sleep, when one world disappears and another comes into being. This is still contained within a cycle: we know that at the end of the day we shall return to the world of sleep, but in the meantime there is a sense of self-transcendence, of a consciousness getting 'up' from an unreal into a real, or at least more real, world. This sense of awakening into a greater degree of reality is expressed by Heraclitus...as a passing from a world where everyone has his own "logos" into a world where there is a common "logos.""
290 "The temporary nocturnal state of nonexistence appears similar to the more permanent situation theoretically prevailing prior (?) to the dawn of awareness as such, where there was no subject, no object, and no experience at all—but where the possibility of such things somehow lay dormant." Not only does it "appear similar", but it is suggestive of what might possibly be the real explanation of the need for sleep.
290 "In the mythic world, the very existence of experience—past, present and future—appears dependent upon experience of the spatially and temporally limited observer. Restricted in their manifestation in this manner—that is, manifest in the domain of individual experience—things attain a brief, differentiated existence, before they crash into their opposites and vanish forever." This describes Stylus Guy.
488 Nietzsche hypothesizes that a pure Penrosian Mental World could give rise to, not only the "mere" appearance of an Ideal World, but also (and subsequently) to the Physical World.
291 "...the world of experience appears generated by the actions of consciousness—by dawning awareness—in more than one "stage."" Yes. My guess is eleven turns around the single helix.
359 "The fact, regardless of content, is not evil; it is mere (terrible) actuality. It is the attitude to the fact that has a moral or immoral nature. There are no evil facts—although there are facts about evil; it is denial of the unacceptable fact that constitutes evil—at least insofar as human control extends."
368 "...the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains...an uprooted small corner of evil." – Solzhenitsyn.
403 "In classical physics, up to the end of the 18th century, one of the working hypotheses, arrived at either unconsciously, or half-consciously, was that space had three dimensions, an idea which was never questioned. The fact was always accepted, and perspective drawings of physical events, diagrams, or experiments, were always in accordance with that theory. Only when this theory is abandoned does one wonder how such a thing could have ever been believed." – Marie-Louise von Franz
500 "Piaget also points out (a) that consciousness arises in personality "when the environmental situation in which some person finds himself or herself blocks some ongoing (goal-directed) activity. Children act in accordance with their needs and everything takes place without conscious awareness or the equilibrations going on until there is a frustration [Piaget's terminology likely equivalent to emergence of the unexpected (and punishing?)]...Each of these frustrating circumstances serves to focus the child's attention on the reasons for the disequilibration rather than simply on the desired goal" This could explain my early recognition of my own consciousness.
443 Syzygy and the relationships among Penrose's three worlds.
447 Nietzsche's vivid description seems to apply to modern Liberals and Postmodernists (SJWs).
466 "The mythic view of history cannot be credited with reality, from the material, empirical point of view. It is nonetheless the case that all of Western ethics, including those explicitly formalized in Western law, are predicated upon a mythological worldview, which specifically attributes divine status to the individual. The modern individual is therefore in a unique position: he no longer believes that the principles upon which all his behaviors are predicated are valid."
466 "It is confusion of empirical fact with moral truth that has proved of great detriment to the latter."
467 "Interest is meaning. Meaning is manifestation of the divine individual adaptive path. The lie is abandonment of individual interest—hence meaning, hence divinity—for safety and security; is sacrifice of the individual to appease the Great Mother and Great Father."
468 "Rebirth is re-establishment of interest, after adoption of culturally determined competence. The rebirth of interest moves the individual to the border between the known and the unknown and thereby expands the social world. In this manner, God acts through the individual, in the modern world, and extends the domain of history."
468 "The human purpose, if such a thing can be considered, is to pursue meaning—to extend the domain of light, of consciousness-despite limitation. A meaningful event exists on the boundary between order and chaos. The pursuit of meaning exposes the individual to the unknown in gradual fashion, allowing him to develop strength and adaptive ability in proportion to the seriousness of his pursuit. It is during contact with the unknown that human power grows, individually and then historically. Meaning is the subjective experience associated with that contact, in sufficient proportion. The great religious myths state that continued pursuit of meaning, adopted voluntarily and without self-deception, will lead the individual to discover his identity with God. This "revealed identity" will make him capable of withstanding the tragedy of life. Abandonment of meaning, by contrast, reduces man to his mortal weaknesses." As an example, consider the log house at Camp Serendipity. It is built on bedrock. The boundary between order and chaos is the surface of the exposed bedrock on which the footings were poured.
469 "A society predicated upon belief in the paramount divinity of the individual allows personal interest to flourish and to serve as the power that opposes the tyranny of culture and the terror of nature. The denial of meaning, by contrast ensures absolute identification with the group—or intrapsychic degeneration and decadence."
xii "Orwell said, essentially, that socialists did not really like the poor. They merely hated the rich...Socialist ideology served to mask resentment and hatred, bred by failure."