CHAPTER 16
Live Your Own Path and be Cool
Cool people are charismatic.
Jordan Peterson is charismatic; ergo, Jordan Peterson is cool. This is an
irrefutable syllogism. So, how did Jordan Peterson become cool? And, better still,
can his book 12 Rules for Life: An
Antidote to Chaos make one cool?
Is this why his message is so attractive
to the younger generation, especially wayward young men (to date, about 80% of
his youth audience is male), because they find him cool and want to know his
secret? And when he tells them the secret is to simply shoulder the
responsibility for their own life— “You
can start be cleaning your damn room!” —why do they not flee in horror but
instead want more? That’s the mystique of Jordan B. Peterson.
The concept of cool fascinated me
no less than it did David Brooks, whose column I follow in The New York International Weekly that’s inserted into my weekend Toronto Sunday Star (along with The New York Times Book Review section),
so much so that I wrote a spiritual musing inspired by him which I posted on my
blog Saturday, October 7, 2017:
The Essence of Cool
I really didn’t
want to, but I jotted the idea down in my notebook just in case I ran into a
dry spell (which happens rarely) and needed an idea to explore just to keep the
creative juices flowing, and I forgot about it until this morning when I
noticed the highlighted passage in David Brooks’ op-ed piece in the folded
newspaper page that I had on my desk which I intended to explore but never got
around to until it caught my eye this morning as I was going through notebooks
and papers on my desk.
Brooks’ piece is
titled “What Has Replaced Cool in America” (The
New York Times International Weekly, Wednesday, July 30, 2017), and I
highlighted in blue marker the passage that inspired the idea for a short
spiritual musing on the essence of cool:
“The cool person is stoical, emotionally
controlled, never eager or needy, but instead mysterious, detached and
self-possessed. The cool person is gracefully competent at something but
doesn’t need the world’s applause to know his worth. That’s because the cool
person has found his or her own unique and authentic way of living with
nonchalant intensity.”
How cool is that?
Given that description of what a cool person is, I can’t imagine anyone not wanting
to be cool; but that’s why the idea for a spiritual musing on cool seized me,
because not everyone can be cool. That’s what makes one cool, if one can
appreciate the irony. But just in case, let me explore the irony of being cool
in today’s spiritual musing…
For some reason
known only to my oracle, I was nudged to browse through one of the bookcases in
my writing den yesterday morning, and as I sorted through the top shelf I came
upon The Seasons of the Soul, a
collection of poems by Hermann Hesse previously unpublished in English,
translated and with a commentary by Ludwig Max Fischer and a forward by spiritual
activist Andrew Harvey, and even though I had read it already, I felt strongly nudged to read it again, which I did
throughout the day in the pleasant comfort of our front deck; and this morning
I was called to read My Belief,
essays on life and art, also by Hermann Hesse, which I had read two or three
times already, and only upon reading the introduction again did I make the
connection with Hermann Hesse and the idea for my spiritual musing on the
essence of cool, and I had to smile at the remarkable “inspired” coincidence.
I had highlighted
one more passage in David Brooks’ article, a single sentence that summed up
what I felt to be the essential quality of a cool person, which popped into my
mind while reading the introduction to My
Belief, and I knew instantly why I was called to re-acquaint myself with
the writer I had read many years ago while on my own spiritual quest like
Hermann Hesse. The sentence that I highlighted said it all: “The cool person is guided by his or her own
autonomous values, often on the outskirts of society.”
That was Hermann
Hesse, a man guided by his own autonomous values and on the edge of society, a
definition which, at the risk of sounding immodest, applied to me no less than Hermann
Hesse, because my whole life I’ve always lived by my own guiding inner light
which set me apart from everyone; so, there it was then, my reason for being
called to write a short spiritual musing on cool—to demystify the je ne sais quoi of this elusive quality
of being cool.
In truth, I
already have a gnostic awareness of what constitutes the essence of cool; but
it would be presumptuous to state this up front without providing the context
that gave birth to my realization of this alluring character trait, because
it’s in the context of my own quest for my true self that pulled Hermann Hesse
into my life with his book Journey to the
East first and then his novel Magister Ludi, also known as The Glass Bead Game.
I had already
highlighted the passage, in yellow highlighter this time, but it jumped out at
me again as I read the introduction to My
Belief this morning: “Hesse maintains that the idea of the
underlying unity of all being is a synthesis that can be achieved only through
a reconciliation of conflicting opposites. This dialectical process shows up
over and over again in Hesse’s novels.”
This speaks to
what C. G. Jung called the individuation process, the founding premise of his psychology
(it can’t be a coincidence that Hermann
Hesse underwent Jungian therapy during the most trying period of his life);
but not until one learns how to reconcile the conflicting opposites of their
personality can one achieve what Jung called “wholeness and singleness of
self.” That’s why Hesse became a cult figure for the mind-expanding, paradigm
shifting counterculture movement of the mid-1960s, because his novels spoke to
the longing in one’s soul for wholeness and completeness.
Hesse’s best-known
works include Demian, Steppenwolf,
Siddhartha, and The Glass Bead Game,
each of which explores an individual’s search for authenticity, self-knowledge
and spirituality, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946;
and it was their search for a way to reconcile the conflicting opposite aspects
of one’s ego/shadow personality with one’s inner self that preoccupied both
Jung and Hesse their whole life, with Jung succeeding and Hesse dying
unresolved.
This is the
context that awakened me to the secret way of life that both Jung and Hesse had
become aware of, which Miguel Serrano alludes to in his short memoir C. G. Jung and Hermann Hesse, A Record of
Two Friendships; and like Jung and Hesse, I came to the same realization
that self-reconciliation is the only
way to one’s true self, and I embarked upon this perilous journey to
authenticity that essentially makes a person cool. In short, the
more true one is to oneself, the more cool one will be; but it wouldn’t be
cool to vaunt this because the cool person just is, and that’s the irony of being cool.
———
A
cool person, says David Brooks, “is guided by his or her own autonomous values,
often on the outskirts of society,” which describes the outlier Jordan Peterson,
who stands just outside the mainstream with his personal worldview that he
expressed in his runaway bestseller 12
Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos that David Brooks, in his July 18, 2018 op-ed in The New York Times, says are “joyless
and graceless calls to self-sacrifice.”
But despite how
harsh professor Peterson’s 12 rules may be, they speak to the young people,
especially to young men who are so desperate to find a way out of the
existential vacuum of this crazy world that they will do anything to fill the
hole in their soul, and they take Peterson’s stern message seriously because he
made it painfully clear that the alternative would be more of the same soul-sucking
nihilism that gorged the archetypal shadow of the world that gave rise to the
brutal dictators Stalin, Hitler and Mao who murdered millions and millions of
people for the sake of delusory utopian dreams.
“Stop doing what you know to be
wrong,”
says Peterson. “Say only those things
that make you strong. Do only those things that you could speak of with honor.”
Stern advice from an outlier whose personal imperative is to help young people
find their own way out of the social pressure cooker that’s responsible for all
their stress and anguish; but not to give the wrong impression, David Brooks’
piece on Peterson’s book 12 Rules for
Life was not negative by any means, because from what I’ve read David
Brooks is not that kind of writer. He tries to be honest and fair in his
opinions.
“Parents,
universities and the elders of society have utterly failed to give many young
men realistic and demanding practical wisdom on how to live. Peterson has
filled the gap,” Brooks wrote in his July
18, 2018 New York Time’s column,
which he brings to an honest and fair resolution: “The Peterson way is a harsh
way, but it is an idealistic way—and for millions of young men, it turns out to
be the perfect antidote to the cocktail of coddling and accusation in which
they are raised.”
Curiously enough, David
Brooks wrote his own book on self-improvement called The Road to Character, and he was interviewed on CBC’s Tapestry, which by another one of those
strange coincidences I happened to listen to one Sunday afternoon. “I
wrote it to save my own soul,” he told Mary Hynes, the host of the show; and I made
a point of putting The Road to Character on
my Amazon wish list but never got around to ordering; but I will now, along
with Peterson’s Maps of Meaning, just
to see how they compare in their separate journeys to wholeness and completeness,
because no matter what path one takes in life they all end up to the place that
Jesus called “the eye of the needle,” which takes special wisdom to pass
through. Maybe this is why rumor has it that Jewish born and bred David Brooks
may be converting to Christianity? Life is strange, and when it calls it
calls…
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