Month: August 2018

12 Rules

Here’s a set of “12 Rules for Life” that highlight potential contradictions or loopholes in Jordan Peterson’s philosophy, offering an alternative set of guiding principles:

  1. Don’t Pretend Order is Always the Answer: While Peterson emphasizes order, life’s complexity often demands flexibility. Embrace uncertainty and don’t force rigid structures onto situations that require fluidity.
  2. Stand Up for Yourself, Even if It Means Disrupting the Peace: Peterson advises standing up straight with confidence, but real courage sometimes requires challenging the status quo, even if it causes discomfort.
  3. Treat Yourself Like Someone You Can Afford to Disappoint: Peterson encourages treating yourself with care, but sometimes it’s okay to fall short of your own expectations. Self-compassion includes accepting your flaws.
  4. Make Friends Who Challenge You, Not Just Those Who Support You: Instead of only associating with people who want the best for you, also engage with those who question you, as they often provide the most growth.
  5. Compare Yourself to Who You Want to Be, Not Who You Were Yesterday: While self-comparison can be useful, aim for aspirational goals rather than dwelling on small, incremental changes.
  6. Pursue What’s Intrinsically Valuable, Not Just What’s Meaningful: Meaning can sometimes be subjective or imposed by society. Focus on what feels genuinely valuable to you, even if it seems trivial to others.
  7. Tell the Truth, but Acknowledge the Power of Strategic Silence: Honesty is important, but there are times when silence or withholding information can protect others or yourself.
  8. Assume Responsibility for Your Choices, but Recognize When to Delegate: While taking responsibility is vital, understand your limits and the importance of sharing burdens with others.
  9. Speak Your Truth, Even if It’s Unpopular: Instead of just listening, assert your perspective, especially when it goes against the grain. Your voice matters, even in dissent.
  10. Be Precise in Your Actions, Even When Words Fail You: Precision in speech is valuable, but actions often speak louder. Focus on how you behave rather than getting lost in the minutiae of language.
  11. Encourage Risk-Taking in Safe Spaces: Instead of just leaving kids to skateboard, create environments where risks can be taken with safety nets in place. Growth comes from pushing boundaries, but there’s wisdom in knowing when to protect.
  12. Find Beauty in the Mundane, Not Just in Moments of Crisis: Instead of seeking solace in life’s darkest moments (like petting a cat on the street), cultivate appreciation for everyday beauty and simplicity, without waiting for things to go wrong.

These rules aim to address the nuance that Peterson’s principles sometimes overlook, acknowledging the complexity of life where contradictions and exceptions are often the rule.

Music is Substrate Independent

Music, like all forms of art, transcends the material world. While instruments are the vessels through which music is expressed, they are not the source of its creation. Instruments are finite, perishable objects—wood and metal that can be shattered or silenced. But music, the vibration of the universe’s hidden strings, exists in the realm of thought and emotion, a plane beyond physicality.

In the same way, knowledge, like music, is substrate independent. It isn’t confined to the pages of a book, the neurons of a brain, or the circuits of a computer. It’s an abstract entity, an emergent pattern that can manifest across various mediums. Destroy the medium, and the pattern can still emerge elsewhere, like a phoenix from the ashes, or a song that finds a new instrument to play it.

The real challenge is not in the destruction of instruments or the media that convey knowledge, but in the obliteration of the pattern itself. As long as there are minds capable of resonating with the tune, the song persists, waiting for the next instrument to bring it to life.

The Gap Between the Sign and the Value

Let’s call it what it is—the gap. The distance between the sign and the value, between what’s real and what they tell you is real. You hold a dollar in your hand, crisp, clean, stamped with symbols and numbers. They say it has power. But the power isn’t in the dollar—it’s in the belief, the collective hallucination that this piece of paper, this sign, has value. And the farther we go, the bigger the gap becomes. More signs, less value. More noise, less meaning.

Finance is a hall of mirrors, reflecting back at you endless possibilities, none of them quite real. You think you’re making choices—invest here, buy there—but what you’re really doing is feeding the machine. You’re part of the spectacle, caught in the loop of generating signs—money, contracts, assets—that only exist to sustain themselves. It’s counterfeiting in the purest form, a conjuring trick that turns air into wealth and wealth into power. But where’s the value? Where’s the substance beneath the sign?

On the reactionary side they tell you Money used to be a stand-in for something real—gold, labor, land. Now it’s a stand-in for itself, a self-replicating loop of signs that point to nothing. And yet they do not seem to have a problem with the shapes it creates at the top. It shapes everything. It decides who eats and who starves, who drives a red Ferrari and who’s left with the scraps. Every dollar is a vote, they say, but it’s more than that—it’s the architecture of our reality. The economy bends to those who hold the most signs, and the rest of us? We’re left living in the gaps, in the spaces between the choices we never really had.

The Gap Between the Sign and the Value

Counterfeiting is the art of illusion. You’ve got the sign, all right—the dollar, the asset, the stock. You can print them by the truckload, flood the world with the symbol of wealth. But the value? It doesn’t materialize just because you’ve duplicated the sign. This is the gap, the rupture between the sign and what it’s supposed to represent. It’s not just about printing fake bills; the counterfeit runs deeper.

Look at financial services—aren’t they doing the same thing? They churn out new forms of money, securities, derivatives. They’re stacking signs upon signs, layers of abstraction that multiply like rabbits. But for all that multiplication, what’s being created? More signs, more indicators of wealth. Yet underneath it, there’s a hollow core—a failure to produce real value. This is counterfeiting in a suit and tie, wrapped in the language of economics.

Every time you trade a stock or bundle a loan, it’s another step removed from the ground. The asset becomes a symbol, then the symbol gets traded and turned into another symbol, and on it goes. Financial services turn the crank, generating signs of wealth without ever generating the wealth itself. It’s all valid, all legal, but it’s counterfeit in spirit. It’s the creation of something from nothing, without the labor or material that used to back those signs up.

And money—money isn’t just a tool of exchange. It’s a vote. Every dollar says what the economy will produce, where the resources will flow. You want red Ferraris? Then that’s what the economy will give you if you’ve got the signs to back it up. You want corn? Too bad if the guy with all the dollars wants something else. It’s not just currency; it’s a weaponized form of choice. The people holding the most signs get to dictate the landscape, what’s produced and what’s left to rot.

The real trick of the counterfeit economy is making us believe that it’s all real. That more signs mean more wealth, more value, more choice. But when the signs multiply and the value doesn’t? That’s when the gap widens, and we’re left chasing shadows, living in a world built on counterfeit choices.