A Petersonian hyper-real refuge for the Book of Mormon?

[Moksha]

I didn't actually have any cool enough ideas for exactly what lost lore the Vast Grimoire might contain.

Maybe the secrets of life and love whispered into the ear of young Fanny Alger while impaled on the haystack or perhaps the confessions of a lusty Argonian maid? The first supposition comes from well-known Kirkland Ohio lore, while the second comes from less well-known Elder Scrolls lore.

[Gadianton]

Gadianton, I decided to watch the linked video of Peterson. It is long winded and I admit not making it to the very end but did listen to most of it. What I understand is the Peterson's thinking is pretty squarely in the area of thinking of William James and Joseph Campbell. I am sure his use of hyper real as a description is not the same as post modern usage of the term. Now I am more familiar with James and Campbell so it is possible I am missing colors in postmodern usage. Jean Baudrillard is only faintly familiar to me but what little I have heard sounds pretty alien to Peterson's thought which I heard in terms of fairly traditional approaches to meaning in literature. He proposed that what matters to us in planning and acting is more real than matter(physical stuff) I think that clarifies what he meant by hyper real.

//Gadianton I should add I enjoyed your post and thought you were making a game effort to spice up Peterson's presentation. One might find Peterson's presentation as belaboring things which might be pretty basic, trying to give them added allure through multiple words.

I'm sure James and and Campbell are much better fits for Peterson and I agree he is not familiar with the big words he's slinging around, yet he's slinging them around anyway, trying to sound like an ivory-tower intellectual that nobody might approach without many more years of study than viable to acquire, so best they accept religion in their life on the authority of Peterson's great mystical learning.

I'm saying he's less abstract when he talks about economics and he's very serious about that subject as I'm sure he's more worried about his paycheck then any other single thing. He's no longer Peterson the great mystic, but simple and specific man of facts, and his opponents don't do a great job countering him from what I've seen.

[drumdude]

My favorite Peterson-ism is his infamous “post-modern neo-Marxist.” Which many have pointed out is an oxymoron. But it sure sounds ominous and makes a lot of his audience distrust academia.

[Rivendale]

My favorite Peterson-ism is his infamous “post-modern neo-Marxist.” Which many have pointed out is an oxymoron. But it sure sounds ominous and makes a lot of his audience distrust academia.

Did he get that from Jordan Peterson? Essentially a phrase to cover anything he dosen't like. Things like arguing for wealth inequalities, advocating for marginalized groups and being asked to treat each other with dignity. Marxism is used to cover things like social change and post-modern a blanket term to cover philosophical views with faulty epistemology? I am not sure how Dan views it and where he has used it.

[drumdude]

My favorite Peterson-ism is his infamous “post-modern neo-Marxist.” Which many have pointed out is an oxymoron. But it sure sounds ominous and makes a lot of his audience distrust academia.

Did he get that from Jordan Peterson? Essentially a phrase to cover anything he dosen't like. Things like arguing for wealth inequalities, advocating for marginalized groups and being asked to treat each other with dignity. Marxism is used to cover things like social change and post-modern a blanket term to cover philosophical views with faulty epistemology? I am not sure how Dan views it and where he has used it.

I should have specified, I wasn’t talking about Dan at all here in this thread.

I don’t know what Dan’s views on Peterson are.

[Rivendale]

So you were quoting Jordan? Got it.

[drumdude]

I was quoting someone named Gomer on this website:

https://www.writingforums.com/threads/j ... ma.169915/

They had a fairly decent write-up of Peterson’s thoughts introducing the idea of hyper-real narratives that I thought was possibly applicable to the Book of Mormon.

[Philo Sofee]

It seems to be that LDS leaders are beginning to abandon the “merely real” historicity of the Book of Mormon in exchange for a Jordan Peterson-esque “hyper-real” interpretation of the book.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8Xc2_FtpHI

At around the 1:13:00 mark, Jordan Peterson begins talking about what makes good drama (I take "drama" to be interchangeable with "fiction" here.) It's good food for thought. Here is a quote from what I think is the most interesting part:

“Is the drama real? And the answer to that is, it depends on what you mean by “real.” I think that great dramas are more real than real. They’re hyper-real. They’re hyper-real because they provide guidelines about how to act that are abstract and even perhaps generic, but applicable across an extraordinarily broad range of situations. So imagine this: you get up in the morning and you do a bunch of things, and someone asks you what you’re doing, what you did and you tell them “well the first thing I did this morning was open my eyes and the second thing was think about whether I wanted to go back to sleep…and I took off my blankets and put my feet on the floor and I stood up and I was blinking while I was doing all of this and I was also breathing.” You really want to listen to that guy? You don’t want to listen to that guy. It’s like why are you telling me that? I want you to tell me something interesting. Well, what is it that’s interesting? And why isn’t that interesting? It’s not obvious.

So now imagine the guy actually tells you a pretty interesting story, a little adventure. Probably, he was doing something normal and something unexpected happened. He had to conjure up some new responses and he either settled the problem or didn’t settle the problem. Yeah, you’re interested in that, especially if he settled the problem because if he could tell you how, when he encountered some unexplored territory, he was able to sew it back together…..That’s kind of a classic story.

A classic story, roughly speaking, is there’s a guy or woman going about their life relatively normally, and something blindsides them and they’re in a state of chaos. Chaos is a place. Chaos is the place you end up when what you’re doing and the world stop matching. And the chaos can be of different degrees.”

https://www.writingforums.com/threads/j ... ma.169915/

It doesn’t matter if the book is real, because it can now be “hyper-real.” It’s beyond true, it’s archetypal. The Book of Mormon is a timeless story with endless applications for our modern lives.

This effectively sidesteps the historical question, and allows Mormons to still say they know the book is “true” in the way Jordan Peterson thinks all archetypal fairytales and morality tales are “true.”

Yes. I believe that is a step in the correct direction. They all ARE true, not because they are history, but because they are lessons of universal life experiences. Myths are not just woo woo stories in any manner, but teach universal truth. Carl Ruck is gigantic on this subject and I highly recommend his materials. Granted he brings shrooms into it, but that also gives experiences that we can have in no other way, and multitudinous people have the same KINDS of experiences with them in al alternate reality.