#Foreword (Norman Doidge, MD)

Rules? More rules? Really? (Ou ambiguous relation with rules)

- Plastic brains;
- Moses biblical passage;

A life without rules wouldn't be a free life.

- We can quickly become slaves to our passions;
- we are quick to aim low and worship qualities that are beneath us;
- as bible explains concepts by tales in order we understand life will become
fuller and freer;

Meeting Jordan Peterson

- Jodan, Doidge, Wodek and Estera (Szember-Bekier)'s 'second franch party';

Jordan is the kind of person Wodek Szember looks for

- The way the 'Albertan Cowboy' talked about erudite stuff;
- His thinking was motoric
- Thinking through a problem was, for him, a dialogic process.

Jordan, the practical egghead

- examples filled with appications to everyday life;

Explaining through contrast

- mid-Western, Prairie types vs. urban couterparts;

What attracted Norman Doidge friendship

- not only loved soulful Russian novels, philosophy and ancient mythology, but
who also seemed to treat them as his most treasured inheritance.
- his work as academic;
- he keep on with a clinical practice;

The remarks from USSR paintings

- human capacity for evil in the name of good;
- and the psychological mystery of self-deception
(how can a person deceive himself and get away with it?)
- the human capacity for evil for the sake of
evil, the joy some people take in destroying others
- not repeat mistakes of the past.

Maps of meaning
- relation of cultures with chaos;
- this chaos definition;
- Influences of the book;
- understanding how human beings and the
human brain deal with the archetypal situation that arises whenever we, in our
daily lives,
must face something we do not understand.
- the brilhance of the book;
- 12 rules as an introduction ot maps of meaning
- despite of experiences, the escape from chaos is a universal constant of life;

Identity, ideology and totalitarism

- Definition of ideology
- Ideologues & 'set your house in order';

Ideologues are always harmful when they achieve power;

- know-it-all approach;
- blame others by the aftermath mistakes of their simplifications;
- Lewis Feuer view of ideology as a kind of religion w/o narrative and psycological
richness;
- The deep study of JP about nazism;

Description of Jordan's effects on his students:

- breathtakingly systematic summary of a series of scientific studies;
- master at helping students become more reflective;
- He taught them to respect many of the greatest books ever written.;
- He gave vivid examples from clinical practice, was (appropriately) self-
revealing, even of his own
vulnerabilities;
- made fascinating links between evolution, the brain and religious stories;

Links made Jordan between evolution and religion

- showed his students how evolution,
of all things, helps to explain the profound psychological appeal and wisdom of
many
ancient stories, from Gilgamesh to the life of the Buddha, Egyptian mythology and
the
Bible.
- stories about journeying voluntarily into the
unknown—the hero’s quest—mirror universal tasks for which the brain evolved;

Alerted his students to topics rarely discussed in university

- life is suffering;
- It is because we are born human that we are guaranteed a good dose of
suffering.
- Things we do in life are hard and doing all that totally on
your own, without the benefit of a loving relationship, or wisdom, or the
psychological
insights of the greatest psychologists, only makes it harder.
- He wasn’t scaring the
students; in fact, they found this frank talk reassuring, because in the depths of
their
psyches, most of them knew what he said was true
- adults in their lives had become so naively overprotective
that they deluded themselves into thinking that not talking about suffering would
in
some way magically protect their children from it.

Jordan's triumphant hero substitutes the Freud's failed-hero

- The need of a reborn;

Sucess of Jordan:
- Be righteous and coherent is his discourse;
- An empty life as consequence of lack of responsability
- Millenial yougsters need for responsability;

Contradictory moral values of Millenials (pt1)

- Moral is relative;
- Definition of relativism;
- Arg.1: morality is cultural-based;
- Arg.2 (post-modernists): morality is (nothing but) a form of oppresion;
- Cor.: all we have to do is be tolerant toward people's actions;

-Millennials, often told they have received

the finest education available anywhere, have actually suffered a form of serious
intellectual and moral neglect.
- Cor. 'the most inappropriate thing an adult can do is give a young person advice
about how to live.'
- The relativists as professors devalue thousands of human knowledge and the value
of 'virtue';

-Virtue Vs Moral
- Aristotle's Nocomachen Ethics;
- Relativists are not able to make judgements about Moral or Value, being Tolerance
their approximation of Virtue;
- Counterexample. (Facebook 'virtue' signalling);
- Intolerance Vs. tolerating a moral vacuum;
- Moral vacuum as an explanation to dispair, nihilism, the acceptance of binded
certainty offered by ideologies;

Contradictory moral values of Millenials (pt2)

- instead they are given ideological attacks on them, based on some
appalling simplification.
- Where the relativist is filled with uncertainty, the ideologue is
the very opposite

Relativism origins
- Various moral codes around the globe;

Scientific materialism
- What we see feel is real/ objective;
- Moral and values are subjective, maybe we can analyse then materialistic in some
future,
bu not now;
- Cor. Values are treated secondary;

Philosophy as the greek response to this conflict

- Aristotle: despite the fact human moral codes are different, their need of them
is a constant;
- Cor. This may be a biological human constant and pursuing a life w/o rules would
be just a fantasy;
-