Rites of Passage

I've been watching a series of lectures by University of Toronto professor Jordan Peterson again.  Peterson is very unusual, because his thinking seems to be a mishmash of a large number of different academic disciplines.  which don't normally work terribly closely together. (Developmental theory, behaviourism, anthropology and mythological symbology, psychoanalytic theory, evolutionary theories, neuroscience and other stuff.)  Most "experts" want to follow just one or two of those, as a discipline, and see what it talks about, and ignore what it doesn't hit upon.
  Peterson is making strange stuff out of bits and pieces cobbled together from all of it.  He draws apparently abritrary, but research-supported conclusions, like the idea that right-wing thinking increases proportionately with one's inability to deal with clutter.  He thinks the ancients were pursuing vital, real, human experiences, concerns and challenges that we have lost sight of.  Problems we have stopped wrestling with, though they are deeply important and utterly unsolved.  He thinks the world is about meaning, not matter.  Objectives, not objects.  And that the idea that the latter things are "real" and the former ones are just subjective made up stuff?  The idea that the former stuff will somehow become handleable and understood eventually, through extensive cataloguing of the latter?  Ridiculous. (Irresponsible, even.)

   He looks a lot at commonality.  Stuff that's the same over centuries and across cultural divides.  Things that all animals and human beings have in common, in terms of stages of development, instinctual responses to millennia of danger situations, and so on.  So, he points to the fact that dominance hierarchies (pecking orders) are deeply ingrained in not only human brain development in "patriarchal, western socieity," but in all animals, pretty much forever.  We can't, he doesn't feel, simply decide to be less focused on status.  He thinks our brain is literally wired to navigate those concerns.  Has built in "response circuits" which read the situation in those terms.
   Bad news for people complaining about our patriarchal status-based society, he says.  You can't make it less status-focused, because it's been like that for millennia, and it's because of the physical construction of our brains.  That's too ancient and deep to fix with a campaign.   You can change how you engage in status seeking, though.  You can broaden who can contend for it, and how it is measured and acquired.   The game stays.  But maybe more people can play, and there are a few new rules or pieces of equipment.

Fighting Lobsters

Peterson points to the fact that male lobsters (with such simple brains that crustaceans are, compared to humans, barely sentient) continually fight each other to occupy the top of the status pyramid.  He says that all creatures, including humans, predictably, statistically tend to die "from the bottom" of such status pyramids, upward.  The lobster or CFO or 5 star General at the top generally is least likely to die on any given day, even though everyone's fighting for his position.  Good reason to want that position.
   Peterson cites research relating to how, when a male lobster loses a status fight, he crawls into a hole and "sulks" until he once again is ready to fight.  He won't budge until he once again believes or feels he is ready to win.  Peterson said that while a male lobster is sulking, he will withdraw from any fights he is challenged to, and won't even respond if poked with a stick, except to hide deeper in his hole.
  BUT: if a male lobster who has lost a fight is given anti-depressants (serotonin uptake disrupters, primarily) he will instantly fight and pick fights, without needing to sulk at all.  It's like you can disrupt his brain's need to deal with failure altogether.  The brain can no longer even interpret failure as failure, nor deal with the experience of failure as evidence that failure is likely in future, without some kind of new tactic.  The lobster fights on and continues to lose.

   Peterson uses this research to indicate the universality of the human experience of handling (bouncing back from) setbacks that adversely affect one's status.  The attempt, the failure, the retreat and re-evaluation and possible future attempt.  Lobsters do it.  We do it.  We always have done it.  With something so universal and so ancient, he argues, we can't simply stop thinking that way, or stop letting it affect us, (without artificially altering how our brain works.)
   He points out that ancient people used drugs not to daily shut out the fear and chaos, but to give themselves artificially intense and accelerated (often one-time) experiences of just those very things.  There's a reason, he argues, why mushrooms in fairytale drawings so frequently have exactly the same red colour (with white dots) as the very strain of hallucinogenic mushrooms commonly used by the ancient to bring on visions in order to confront the stuff they felt sane people were hiding from and unable to gaze upon.
   And I can't help but notice that God speaks in the bible, not of stopping the Status Game, but of making the first, last and the last, first.  Changing how status is gained, but maintaining the status hierarchy.  Just as if the game, as it is played on earth, rewards the wrong characteristics and results in the wrong people ending up holding power. The ones who can be least trusted.

People Who Fail To Be Normal/Fail To Ignore The Unusual

Peterson thinks that ancient alchemists, artists, shamans, scientists and religious theologians were all trying to discover important things about the world, and that the relatively recent decision to view the whole world in terms of matter and energy only, and to dismiss all other considerations, no matter how vital our need to understand them may be, is dangerous and irresponsible.
   So, Peterson thinks that when people get into a real struggle, as to their mental health, as to their psychological and spiritual development, that there are things going on that we just really don't know anything about, really.  Things that ancient drawings and stories and rituals (and mushrooms) were attempts to engage with, explore and help.  Things that are not really permanently helped by trying to drug the person so you could make their ability to try to deal with it stop.  Things that were no doubt made instantly hellish by giving the person hallucinogens to allow that chaos to flood in uncontrollably, in an attempt to deal with it all, once and for all.

   I was watching Peterson describe various cultures' shared observations about wise men, prophets or shamans.  Now, the descriptions of what they went through (wandering off into the forest a lot, not eating, hearing voices, seeing things, engaging in self-harm, oddities in sleeping habits, odd connections to geography and nature, and eventually coming back into society hugely changed, as if they'd become a whole different person) sounded like:

a) biblical stories of demon possession

b) modern stories of schizophrenia/psychotic breaks

c) biblical stories of people who interacted with God in really any direct way.

The view seems to be, fairly universally, that human communities are predominately made up of people who are able to accept what their society deals with and not worry about much else.  Most people can successfully avoid thinking about the mysterious, the unsolvable, the stuff that the society itself really doesn't seem to have sorted out.
   Societies are not perfect, and they focus upon a few things and recommend people not engage with all the other things.  Cultures decide what is known and under control, and they focus upon that, and carefully avoid looking at what they decide isn't known and isn't even predictable. To focus upon what can be explained and planned for.  Handled.  Orderly.  What isn't known is chaos.  Unpredictable.  You can't plan for it.    Stay out of the woods.  Don't go outside at night.
   Peterson mentions Sleeping Beauty, and how, because the witch wasn't included in the infant's preparation for life, her revenge is that she will be part of the young princess' life in a very big way. By the end, she's a dragon.   And the princess will be asleep.  Some people, Peterson explains, cannot be, or a purposely not shielded from the choas that can happen.  And they can't stay asleep, or ignore it.  They find they have to deal with it instead.

   Because there always seem to be people who can't escape dealing with Everything Else.  With the stuff that the society can't quite explain.  They can't look away.  They see things others want to deny the existence of, or forbid discussion about.  These are people who have urges and thoughts that aren't what everyone's expecting, and which their community can't deal with.  People who seem destined to become lunatics or wise men and women.  Experts.  Artists.
   Of course, some people just have stuff wrong with their brains and the chemicals flowing in and out of them, and that's very sad.  But other people have brains that are more complicated, or differently constructed than the regular folk, and quickly demonstrate special needs, special interests, special weaknesses and special strengths.  And mostly, the latter group tends to get locked up and medicated with the former.

A Dark Journey of Rebirth

And for these kinds of people who fail to fit, there's obviously a "dealing" process they are inevitably going to have to try to go through.  A readjusting of their expectations and orientation to life.  Because society has not prepared normal people for this.  Now, their society might even have a special system in place to help people like them, a support group of others who have gone through the tough time that invariably arrives for people like that, when they're first trying to live as functioning adults. Or more often it may just cast such people out, burn them at the stake, mark them and warn against them, throw them off a mountain or chase them out of the region.  Or medicate them to make their brains stop wrestling with these matters.

   From Harry Potter through The Hobbit/Lord of the Rings and earlier, one can trace an unbroken lineage of stories back farther than we can measure.   Joseph Campbell called it "the hero cycle" but people in it don't feel like, and don't always end up acting like, heroes.  These are stories of someone who, like Jonah, has an insight, a message, a role he or she absolutely must fulfil.  There's no one else.  He or she is uniquely made for that one job.  But doing that job, playing that role, isn't something for normal people.  And he or she invariably tries to be normal, tries to fit in, tries to hide, tries to run away, tries to not use the Ring, not cause magic, not hear what the animals say, not hear the voice of the Lord outlining his dissatisfaction with Ninevah, not see the burning bush, or whatever.
  And he or she usually can't, and then starts really losing it.  And flees his or her destiny.  Flees who he or she is.  And ends up, like Jonah, in the belly of a monster/dragon/fish/cave.  In the eye of Chaos.  Alone.  A place where everything one has learned, everything one does out of habit, everything one was prepared for and expects, suddenly have completely random and chaotic, unpredictable effects instead of just working.

   If he or she can survive, can hold it together, he or she does it, ironically by symbolicly dying, in terms of ceasing to be merely that person who couldn't deal, and is born again. A new person.
   In shamanic tradition, the symbology was that you would die, having your flesh stripped down to the bone, and then "them dry bones" would be resurrected.  Would generate a new body, and one more suited to dealing with what had destroyed the previous one.
   Peterson thinks, in terms of evolution, of a species of animal, and how ones with traits that aren't working die off, and ones with special traits that help, continue.  And connects an animal species adapting, to an individual adapting.  Some ways to be dying off because they don't work, and some ways to be continuing on, or springing up as adaptations to external dangers and needs.
  In most ways, really, the "reborn"  person in the story has become someone who has somehow found a way to come to terms with the very real chaos.  With having a special role.  With not being able to "do normal" and having some idea about and intentions toward doing Something Else.  The person doesn't learn that the world isn't, after all, chaotic and scary. The person learns to become more than he or she was, and to deal with the world, as it really is.  And in the real world, there be dragons.  And they will eat your sanity.  Addictions will burn you and take your gold.  Stress kills.  Literally.

   These stories resonate strongly with people who become paraplegics, who kick addictions, who have some kind of emotional breakdown, who leave their birth culture and who remake themselves/are remade into people who can deal. Orthodox Jews who've moved to Ohio and "gone native."  Lesbian Sikhs.  Muslims who write books critical of Islam and survive fatwas.  Heroin addicts who open treatment centres.  Amputees who train for wheelchair basketball teams and become captain. War veterans who try to express the horrors of needless death in poetry or painting.

   The one thing all these stories have in common is that it's absolute chaotic, terrifying, unprecedented hell while in the belly of the monster.  You can't see in there.  Can't breathe.  Everything has changed.  Nothing works anymore.  So, it's chaos. While learning that one's life is going to be different now.  While contemplating that one is going to be born again and in many ways live a new life. And no one's going to understand.  What one might need is simply to talk to others who've been through the closest one can find to "pretty much sort of the same kind of thing."  To be less alone.  To be not the only one.
 

End Result?

And then, if one survives all of it?  A curious role.  People come to seek one out as to trouble that their society doesn't seem able to deal with.  But one is forever "outside" the village.  Maybe documenting it, looking in on it, celebrating and also seeing the flaws in it.  Trying to be a "catcher in the rye" for children who wander outside it and don't know what to do, who aren't ready for what dangers lie outside.
   A true prophet, shaman, wise woman, seer, journalist or scholar?  Is outside looking in.  Outside where one isn't supposed to go.  One foot in societal order and the other in the chaos.  Outside on the edge where visitors will only come out of desperation, because Society On Autopilot doesn't seem to be handling something Unknown that is starting to get downright chaotic sounding.  When the tides of chaos seem to be up past one's chest. When someone saw a sheep get burned and eaten by a dragon, and the King says there're no such things as dragons.
    But if you're been in the belly or the cave of the dragon, you know they exist.  Then people like you become uniquely important.