Interview · moment 21 of 26
Losing Religious Grounding and the Rise of Ideological Possession
from #249 - Jordan Peterson | The Tim Dillon Show · #249
5 min
Guest
Peterson explains how the loss of religious/mythological frameworks in the West leads to nihilism or ideology-as-religion, and how locating evil solely in social institutions is itself a flawed religious claim.
- Ideological possession as misplaced spirituality, tied to Western loss of religious grounding following Nietzsche and Dostoevsky's analysis
- People need answers to what is good, what is evil, and what is the purpose of existence — questions only religion can address at the highest level
- Traditional cultures structure ritual, myth, dance, music, and story around that uppermost domain; when fragmented, people turn to substitutes
- Two common substitutes emerge: either nihilism with terrible psychological consequences, or elevation of ideology to religious belief status
- The rationalist objection to God assumes nothing is God's, but something must exist there — even that critique falls into a religious story
- Blaming social institutions for evil is itself a religious claim, and a faulty one that will twist you because it's incomplete
- Locating evil only in the social world gives you a convenient enemy for unexamined spite, resentment, cruelty, and homicidal tendencies
- More sophisticated observers place the battle between good and evil inside the human soul; it manifests in institutions but that's not the primary locale
- Christopher Hitchens argued religion should be replaced by the literary canon, but the deepest literature is itself religious
- A cathedral expresses something about the structure of being that can't be said rationally — the same applies to music, which is fundamentally religious whether sacred or secular