Clean Up Your Room!: The Eternal Spotless Mind of Jordan Peterson

In the movie "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind", two lovers squabble and fall out. First the woman and then the man decide to avail themselves of a service (Lacuna) that can erase all memories of their relationship, making it seem as if it never happened at all. But one last memory fragment stubbornly remains - one infinitely precious reminder of their love - which predestines them to meet up again and fall in love again.

Jordan Peterson must have gone to the Lacuna clinic to have his memories erased. He forgot that he fell out of love with Christianity and ended their relationship. However, a tiny glimmer must have remained and now, fanned by Jungian psychology, it has exploded into dazzling light and Peterson is in love with Christ again. His mind is eternally spotless once more. He feels compelled to clean up his room and to tell all the rest of us to do the same. The Preacher Man is here, walking amongst us, walking on water (as far as his fans are concerned). Cleanliness is next to godliness. Mens sana in corpore sano: a sound mind in a sound body. A clean mind in a clean body. A clean body in a clean room. Peterson wants to take you to the cleaners, get you all cleaned up, get your mind spotless, get you back to Christianity, the religion of immaculately clean rooms and immaculately clean wombs.

In fact, Christianity is the Immaculate Misconception, the Original Sin, the sanctified Lie, mass deceit solemnly pronounced holy in front of the trembling crowds, desperate to have their desperate lives touched with the numinous. Henry David Thoreau said, "Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and die with their song still inside them." Christianity is the most desperate song of all, the one at the bottom of the barrel, for those with nothing left to scrape. Beneath the barrel is the abyss itself. As Nietzsche said, "And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you." Abyss-gazing is what all Christians wish to avoid.

Peterson must also have erased all memories of Nietzsche's philosophy, or remembered it so badly that he has now inverted it. He preaches the exact opposite of all of Nietzsche's radical conclusions. Where Nietzsche gleefully declared that God is dead and we have killed him, Peterson says that God is alive and we have resurrected him. God is back, bigger and badder than ever.
Jordan Peterson imagines he has a spotless mind. In fact, it's filthy. This book deconstructs his worldview and shows how dirt-encrusted it is. If you want the Truth of reality, come inside and discover the real Truth. You won't like it, but Truth is under no obligation to be what you want it to be.

Peterson claims that the Truth is "Darwinian". In fact, it is eternal. It is perfect, immutable and absolute. It has never evolved. It cannot evolve. It is what it is permanently and ineradicably.

Darwinism relates to the temporal and contingent world of becoming. The Truth relates to the eternal and necessary world of being. All Darwinian "truths" are lies. Evolution is not predicated on the promotion of Truth. It is all about survival and reproduction, regarding which lies have proved astoundingly effective, which is why all humans, whether they admit it or not, are consummate liars.

The Lie is archetypally Darwinian: ever-mutating and constantly subject to natural selection, producing the survival of the "fittest" lies, the most adaptive and useful lies - lies for living. As Hitler said, "If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed. … the broad masses of a nation … more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie…"

The biggest lies are the most Darwinian lies, those most naturally selected by the masses. The people love whoppers, the bigger the better. Humans are a Pinocchio species. They can't get enough of lies and lying.

Will we ever have a humanity that craves the truth? It will be nothing like Humanity 1.0.