/lit/ - Literature

>>11067556
>>11067577
>>11067849
>>11068359
This is view of people who've never had to make moral decisions about large groups of people before. Imagine saying this shit to a general or a politician. Some people just look at fiction as fiction, or even the news as fiction. Because you can't let empathy run amok when you're the one making important decisions. This is why women as less likely to enter the leadership roles that affect large amounts of people, because they believe emotional responses are the end all be all to every situation and that to think rationally is a malfunction or a disorder. If a surgeon felt this way about every book he read, I'd never let him work on me. And if you're compassion and empathy is only produced from aesthetics, you're scum and should be purged. Anthropocentric empathy is the greatest folly the world has ever known.

>>11008828

>>10881817
Best of Friends, really. It is the funniest part of any Peterson backlash. I imagine David would have made a good father though too.

This article seems like one of you wrote it. Fail hero's journey given Stoicism = utility, or individual moral value.

Is it bad that Cain and Job both seem to flourish in the same way to me? Should I become smarter, less artful in my grievances with an unjust God?

Who's this Mr. Rogers anyhow? And why didn't he utilise his aggression instead of acting infantile and irrational? Wouldn't he have done a better job of making people suffer by imposing on the world a great work of art?

Are their any Cain like artists before the industrial revolution - not that that has anything to do with any of this, but....

http://quillette.com/2018/01/06/failed-heros-journey/

I've been thinking a lot lately about life and ethics and the question "What would Peterson do?" comes to me more and more since I started listening to his podcasts. I sincerely want to change my life and have put some of his advice into practice, but I'm left which deep questions about my conceptions of human ethics that I just can't reconcile with what I hear from Peterson.

My problem is that there are only two conceptions of human ethics, and they are at opposite poles. One of them is Christian and humane, declares the individual to be sacrosanct, and asserts that the rules of arithmetic are not to be applied to human units. The other starts from the basic principle that a collective aim justifies all means, and not only allows, but demands, that the individual should in every way be subordinated and sacrificed to the community - which may dispose of it as an experimentation rabbit if necessary.

The problem seems to me that Peterson speak as and to people who will never be burdened with the power and responsibility of having to declare "exceptional circumstances" which demand exceptional measures of defence. Since the existence of religions, nations and classes, they live in a permanent state of mutual self-defence, which forces them eternally to defer to another time the putting into practice of humanism.

This vague bunch of thoughts has even pervaded my reading of Crime and Punishment, which I used to consider such a classic. But now it's all just humanitarian fog-philosophy and Raskolnikon, if he hadn't been acting in personal interest but in the name of some higher good, would have been justified. I just don't see how the individual can be sacrosanct? Imagine a general treating his army as sacrosanct individuals. What would become of our nations if we didn't choose to apply the rules of arithmetic to people. It'd be chaos.

Would Peterson admit that humanism and politics, respect for the individual and social progress, are incompatible? Isn't his and his youtube followers conception of a good society naive or even deceptive? Could any of those Christians here be a General and defend the idea that the individual is sacrosanct? What would General Peterson say?