Unfettered Compassion versus Callous Free Choice

Compassion is one of five complements of emotion that makeup a singular feeling from the subconscious archetypes that make up feeling. Free choice is the complementary emotion to compassion and, while callous free choice is undesirable, unfettered compassion is likewise undesirable. It is always necessary to both limit unfettered compassion with some individual free choice as well as to limit callous free choice with some compassion. Just as the callous free choice of the state can result in the tyranny of the state over individual freedom, the unfettered compassion of the state can also result in tyranny of the state over individual free choice.

Thus, there are limits to compassion just as there are limits to free choice. In fact, there are four other emotion complements that makeup our feelings as a result of our subconscious archetypes: pleasure and anxiety, joy and misery, serenity and anger, and pride and shame. Pleasure of other people and the world drives much of what we do but we must also have a certain amount of anxiety about other people and the world as well. While the emotion joy can be very pleasant, there is no pleasure of a time of joy without some complementary time of misery as well, misery being the complement of joy.

Serenity is a very desirable feeling of peace within and among other people, but anger is also a very necessary complement that limits other people's undesirable free choices. Pride is how people show acceptable behavior while shame is how people show unacceptable behavior and both pride and shame are therefore necessary for socialization.

An emotion spectrum shows how a singular feeling point emerges and it is by this singular feeling that we choose a desirable future. Our subconscious archetypes form the basis of feeling from emotion and feeling is what drives free choice. Indeed, feeling is at the root of all meaning and purpose and feeling is how we choose desirable futures.

The five factor personality model divides personality into a spectrum according to whether a person is:

creative nonconformist or conformist

conscientious or feckless

assertive or accepting

agreeable or contrary

sensitive, anxious or callous free choice

according to their answers to a standard series of questions. These questions are about how a person feels about different circumstances and each person's feelings vary according to their emotion spectrum for each circumstance.

Steven Pinker has said that the enlightenment has brought reason, science, and morality and therefore enlightenment has also brought the global prosperity and peace as a result of individual free choice and capitalism. Reason and science are both products of a small number of very curious and conscientious people with high IQ. Reason and science are successful because they allow people to predict an outcome given some knowledge of its precursors.

Morality, though, is a product of a small number of very sensitive and very conscientious people with high IQ along with a much larger number of agreeable people as followers or adherents. The overall goal of morality is to reduce suffering and misery for everyone and therefore increase the likelihood of survival by cooperation. Morality comes from the grand narratives of civilization that imbue people with subconscious archetypes that provide purpose and meaning.

There are therefore limits for reason and science in defining morality, which ultimately derives from emotion and feeling about right and wrong as opposed to reason and science. While reason and science can also reduce suffering and misery, without the purpose and meaning of our subconscious moral archetypes, reason and science alone are not enough to sustain free choice.

There is then a very dangerous notion that reason and science alone can define morality and therefore sustain free choice without the grand narratives that actually are what have built our subconscious archetypes. In particular, there is a feeling that religion and mysticism have no place in the outcomes of our post modern enlightenment. Even though the grand narratives of literature, art, music, and religion have all also contributed to building the subconscious archetypes of our precursors, some feel that religion and mysticism have no roles in building the outcomes of subconscious archetypes for our progeny.

Individual Free Choice versus Group Coerced Choice

The western archetype of individual freedom and free-market capitalism is limited by some minimal state authority and seems to be a very successful archetype today despite the persistence of many unequal outcomes as well as many contradictions. Archetypes are the unconscious neural templates that determine how people actually subconsciously choose outcomes and make decisions as opposed to rational conscious narratives by which people often describe their archetypal choices.

Over the last 40 years global literacy rates and education levels have both been increasing, global life spans have been rising, and per capita GDP has also been rising and all three are indices of successful human development, the HDI. However, the success of the archetype of individual freedom does not mean that there are no inequalities of outcomes and injustice and tyranny and so it is necessary to have ongoing civil discourse about the relative roles of group authority and individual freedom that lead to acceptable inequalities of outcome. The success of the archetype of individual freedom with minimal group authority contrasts with the abject failures in the 20th century of the Marxist and Fascist archetypes of tyrannical states that all limited individual freedom.

In fact, pollution of the air, drinking water, and ocean are all still problems...albeit all declining problems. Thus there are still species going extinct, certain faction incarceration rates too high, and inequality of wealth outcomes. Naturally, there are no perfect archetypes and so there are really only archetypes that are more successful at reducing human suffering and misery and there are no perfect archetypes that reduce all suffering and misery. There are only archetypes that demonstrably reduce human suffering and misery and those archetypes are of individual freedom and capitalism.

Although inequality of wealth in a population can increase crime for that population especially when some inequality in wealth may be due to the tyrannical injustice of one group over another, which breeds resentment and conflict. However, when wealth inequality comes from the personality and physical traits of group individuals, in particular, the traits of high IQ and conscientiousness show a very high correlation with successful creation of wealth. The neo-Marxist notion that the inequality of wealth is always due to the tyranny of the rich over the poor as victims is a very pernicious archetype that persists even today. While it is true that there must be some limits placed on wealth inequality to minimize conflicts, neo-Marxist notions of tyrants over victims have resulted in the failures and deaths of the USSR, Maoist communism, and Pol Pot Cambodia, among many others. In contrast, the archetypes of individual freedom have resulted in better lives given its limited group authorities.

Every civilization has its hierarchies of competence and there is always some fraction of individuals who are suffering, anxious, miserable, and lonely. As a result, a few can be therefore angry about and ashamed of injustice and inequality within a group hierarchy and this few can then feel entitled to inflict anxiety, suffering, and misery onto others. Civil discourse can reduce the underlying inequality of this misery, but only if the vengeful individuals are competent in civil discourse. Otherwise, there are various other strategies people have for assuaging their vengeance as a result of inequality such as counseling, therapy, coercion, or even incarceration for criminal behavior.

Equality of opportunity for members of a group does not therefore necessarily mean equality of outcome. Each individual of a group has a different competence and that means that there is a hierarchy of competence within the group that follows from the personalities and physical traits of individual consciousness. Competence hierarchies necessarily result in inequality of outcomes and reducing inequality necessitates some kind of group tyranny over individual freedom. However, there is an acceptable level of inequality in every group competence that results in a balance between individual freedom and group tyranny. An acceptable level of inequality versus tyranny in a competence needs to follow from an ongoing civil discourse that becomes part of the conscious group narrative as well as part of the unconscious archetypes of group members.

With the chaos of individual freedom comes order from individual responsibility and so the chaos of individual freedom is necessarily limited by the order of the state. State authority must remain as minimal as possible in order to sustain the archetype of individual freedom and responsibility.

Groups necessarily promote their authority over individual freedom and groups must then indoctrinate their members with both conscious narratives or dogma as well as unconscious archetypes in order to sustain the group identity and hierarchy. Therefore accepting group authority necessarily reduces individual freedom and all groups must also then have some responsible limit for their authority, narratives, dogma, hierarchies, and unconscious archetypes. There is a further group responsibility to tolerate a certain amount of individual freedom even in the face of some kind of absolute moral archetype that can otherwise result in excessive tyranny and injustice.

Here is a chart that compares China, U.S., Russia, Namibia, and Norway across 14 different dimensions of inequality that include freedom, diversity, per capita gdp, life span, and education. These metrics come from a variety of sources and those of incarceration rate, education, life span, and per capita GDP are all normed to the U.S. to allow comparison on a single scale of percent relative to the U.S.

As is so often the case with inequalities, there seem to be a large number of tradeoffs among these five nations and these tradeoffs represent our global economic world order with the limited set of these five nations. It is immediately obvious that although the U.S. has both high freedom and income, Norway has even higher freedom and income. The U.S. has a high gini, but China and Namibia's ginis are even higher. The U.S. has a great deal of diversity, but Namibia has even more diversity. The U.S. has the highest incarceration and education rates but Namibia has the highest poverty rate by far.

Weighting these 14 dimensions with personal freedom gives an optimized global economic order with a population growth of 0.9%, a gdp growth rate of 2.5%, an inequality gini of 43%, education of 10.8 yrs, $37,700 per capita gdp, and an incarceration rate of 48% of U.S. What this means is anyone's guess...

The Polarization of Chaos and Order

There is much concern today over the polarization of civil discourse and yet ironically, it is the attraction of polar opposites that is what actually binds the universe together. Charge force, for example, is how matter bonds with the attraction of opposite charges limited by photon exchange. The conflict of quantum chaos is why opposite charges do not completely collapse into each other but rather only collapse until the conflicting force of their photon exchange equals the force of collapse. In other words, a perpetual civil discourse between an electron and proton is binds the opposite charges of all matter.

The polarization of civil discourse is also ironically what leads to a stronger civilization of increased meaning and purpose. The more people disagree, the more angry they become and that anger can result in an increase in misery and suffering of conflict for that person as well as for others. However, anger is a very important emotion that shows people the limits of acceptable selfishness and anger necessarily always complements serenity as part of our unconscious archetypes. Therefore, the polarization of discourse can actually lead to a stronger bonding of people in a civilization with the meaning and purpose of individual freedom limited by the anger of selfishness. This is what we call civil discourse, which of course does not mean that people change each other's minds and so people do get angry with each other. Civil discourse does mean, however, that people exchange ideas and reveal their emotions to each other with the desirable future of reducing misery and suffering even while tolerating certain inequality of outcomes.

There is a deep and fundamental mystery in why two political parties with two different narratives emerged almost immediately upon the founding of American Greatness. Actually, two party government has occurred in all other successful democracies as well. In contrast, authoritarian state rule believes and enforces only one virtuous state narrative and therefore the state only allows one party with only one virtuous narrative. The ultimate virtue signal is that there is only one virtuous narrative and all other narratives are inherently malevolent and therefore dangerous. The vice of the malevolent narrative of the other precursor must then be banished with violence, if necessary, and replaced by the virtue of a good narrative.

Gravity force bonds macroscopic bodies together and is also a result of that same matter exchange as charge force but gravity is biphoton and not a single photon exchange. Just like charges do not collapse into each other, gravity matter also does not collapse into other matter and become a black hole but rather gravity matter collapses until the compression of charge force of biphoton exchange equals the collapse of gravity force. Therefore gravity is not limited by the single photon exchange of opposite charge attraction but rather gravity is limited by the biphoton exchange of charge force compression. Once gravity force reaches the threshold of light capture, science calls this a black hole since space and time no longer have any meaning.

Thus, the universe is made up of the bonding of polar opposites stabilized by the exchange of light just as a civil discourse is what bonds people in an argument. We shine onto other people and they shine onto us and that exchange or discourse is what binds us to them and them to us. The fundamental composition of the universe is in the duality of the chaos of discrete matter and order of discrete action and the coexistence of the collective consciousness of civilization with individual consciousness of its many people. Consciousness depends on the existence of unconscious archetypes that bond the chaos of matter with the order of action by discourse and photon exchange.

The universe exists with both order and chaos and yet either chaos or order can lead to undesirable suffering, anxiety, anger, and misery as well as to desirable pleasure and joy and serenity. We must therefore learn a number of unconscious archetypes as we grow up to provide us with meaning and purpose in our lives and therefore bond chaos into some kind of order. These unconscious archetypes guide the chaos of our conscious choices with a desirable future of order, which is the order of the state that reduces suffering, anxiety, and misery, especially for other people. However, the chaos of the individual can also lead to pleasure and joy even though either the chaos of the individual or the order of the state can also each lead to many undesirable futures as well.

There is a great deal of ancient wisdom that teaches the archetype of the chaos of a sovereign individual freedom over the archetype of the order of a state tryanny. However, both the chaos of the individual and the order of the state are necessary parts of a dual universe that bonds the chaos of matter with with the order of action. A cosmic wave background (CMB) surrounds us in the cosmos with the order of a very cold 2.7 K at the limit of what we can know as illustrated by the Mollweide diagram below. The upper and lower center show up and down while the very center shows straight ahead and the left and right points both show what is directly behind. The simple ellipse of the Mollweide diagram represents the heavens that surround us in three dimensions and so the entire universe in one plot.

Since we move with respect to the fixed CMB, our motion results in a CMB dipole order because of our motion of 371 km/s relative to the CMB, which is just 0.1% of the speed of light. Our motion shows the ordered action of our common destiny against the chaotic CMB of our origin. The CMB represents an archetype of meaning and purpose not unlike the Yin (female, earth, chaos, discrete aether, darkness) and Yang (male, heaven, order, discrete action, light) of the Chinese Dao shown below.

What people do not yet understand is that it is exactly the polarization of political discourse and exchange of ideas that bonds people into the collective order of civilization. There must be an increase in chaos for an older order to evolve into a newer order and that chaos then is the mother of the new order that evolves from the father of the old order.

What is important for the evolution of a new order, though, is civil discourse that is the light exchange that bonds the chaos of aether with the order of action. The evolution of a new order can easily decay into the order of an overly tyrannical state that overly suppresses the chaos of individual freedom and there are certainly plenty of tyrannical state archetypes throughout history. The more desirable archetypes show the desirability of sovereign individual freedom and therefore the desirability to limit state tyranny to the bare minimum needed to sustain individual freedom.

Along with individual freedom comes individual responsibility as a contract to maintain an archetype of purpose and meaning in each life within the limits of constitution and laws that govern behavior. Likewise it is responsibility that limits state tyranny and state responsibility shows up in that constitution and laws that govern individual behavior and limit state tyranny.

Civilization is made up first of all of individuals and then second of all of a large number of group or tribe identities with more limited freedom and increased tyranny. Those groups each need to support individual freedom and so there is a group responsibility to limit group tyranny. Individual freedom is especially important when one tribe conflicts with another tribe since those conflicts can result in either civil discourse as well as the diatribes of demagoguery.

Since most tribal members are not competent to engage very effectively in one-on-one civil discourse with a person from a conflicting tribe, it is the hierarchies that engage in discourse. So most people must rely on a group diatribe and demagoguery to maintain a tribal conflict and it is therefore important for conflicting tribes to adequately indoctrinate their members with specific diatribes and demagoguery to sustain that tribal conflict. It is up to the competence hierarchies of the two conflicting tribes to lead a civil discourse to resolve that conflict since most tribal members do not have the competence for civil discourse.

When a group identity claims an absolute moral without any responsibility to any other group, there is then no place for civil discourse. Absolute moral claims often result in a state tyranny suppressing hate speech or apostasy but it can sometimes be impossible to draw a boundary between hate speech for one group and speech that is simply unpleasant to hear for another group in conflict. Suffering and misery often result from conflicts that arise from different absolute morals. This suffering and misery then evolves into a narrative of the tyranny of one group over another and so suffering and misery can sustain a conflict that actually bonds two tribes as opposites.

Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris

Peterson and Harris have two very different beliefs; Harris believes in an subjective atheistic Zen Buddhism archetype while Peterson believes in a romantic and pragmatic Christian archetype. An archetype as per Carl Jung is an idealized person or myth whose behavior people then choose to emulate to improve their own lives as well as the lives of those who they touch. The Buddhist and Christ archetypes therefore both have very large followings around the world and have many similarities as well as many differences. Both the Buddha and Christ narratives teach that life is full of misery and suffering and both narratives seek to therefore reduce that misery and suffering and so improve life. Each archetype then has a series of rituals that further help people to lead more compassionate and less selfish lives.

They have posted two very interesting videos, one and two, along with each of their own followups, three and four, that are all well worth viewing. The notion of discrete aether wisdom is as shown in the diagram and is a way to understand what Peterson and Harris are saying. That is, that wisdom derives from both classical knowledge like the facts of science, as well as from quantum intuition, which comes from reason and intuition. It is quantum intuition that allows people to know the substantial amount of wisdom that comes from outside the facts of science. This includes great literature, philosophy, and religion, which are all parts of the universe that define the quantum unknowable.

While the essence of Peterson's Christ archetype brings objective order from subjective chaos, Harris's Buddhist archetype also brings order from chaos with only a belief in the archetype of the tools of science. Harris admits that there is much that science does not know about the world and even that science typically refuses to even consider any questions that have no measurable and objective facts. This is in spite of the fact that Harris does follow to a Zen Buddhist archetype, but seems to say that Harris has extracted the useful wisdom of the Buddhist archetype with the rational maeasurements of science. Harris has stated in many previous discourses, though, that there are still very deep mysteries with consciousness. Harris is nevertheless confident that the tools of science will eventually be able to extract a useful wisdom from measurements of consciousness.

The Harris atheist myth, on the one hand, patterns life based on a subjective feeling of what is right, which is an archetype of self image and therefore atheism is inherently selfish. The atheist archetype rejects any role for mysticism or spirituality in life but it really takes a very devoted belief in the atheist archetype given that it is beliefs in archetypes that anchor consciousness, not just a belief in the facts of science. While Buddha teaches salvation through meditation and loss of self, Christ teaches salvation through prayer and compassion for others. Harris denies that there could be any such thing as an atheist archetype or belief since atheism is the belief that religions are false and destructive narratives. Since archetype belief is what anchors all consciousness, everyone has a set of belief archetypes and so Harris goes on to say that atheism is closest to his archetype belief in meditation as a means of addressing the mystery of self and consciousness. 

The figure below shows the dipole cosmic wave background and the CMB archetype shows the absolute direction from our birth to where we are all heading in the universe. We are coming from to constellation Pisces and heading towards the constellation Virgo in the sky, which means we were created at our own CMB in free space and are collapsing into the Virgo galaxy cluster and then supercluster final destiny. This diagram is reminiscent of the Yin-Yang archetype of Daosim, which supposes people on the border between chaos of many possible futures versus the order of the past...

As a result, it would appear that atheism is also an archetype of order from chaos after all. After all, a belief in the archetype that nothing is something after all is of course a contradiction that has a long history of discourse. There is actually no way to assign nothing to an archetype without the contradiction and as a result, the archetype of nothing has been a theme of philosophical discourse for several millennia.

When two people share their archetypes in discourse of narratives, there is an opportunity for them and others to learn more about the archetypes from those narratives. However, it is also possible for any such discourse about beliefs to get bogged down in some semantic differences in language and definition of terms. In fact, Harris and Peterson did get bogged down with their respective descriptions of values and truths and that resulted in just such a dead-end that ended their first session. However, their next session managed to table the issue of values and truths and move on to other more revealing discourses on the value of great literature and other ancient wisdom.

While Harris is an avowed atheist apologist who does not like the word atheism to describe his belief that there is really no useful role for the false narratives of religion even though Harris is a devoted meditative Buddhist. Peterson is an avowed Christian apologist and is dedicated to a pragmatic salvation by resurrection and emulation of various religious narratives which are not true and also not false. So naturally their discussion included the role of science and measurement and both agreed that the measurements of science are useful tools. Peterson called Harris a Newtonian as opposed to calling himself a Darwinian romanticist or pragmatist. Harris prefers to call himself a skeptical materialist in that he doubts anything that science cannot measure and yet is certain that the world exists outside of his mind. He further believes that the false narratives of religion have little value for his outcomes and further argues that religion has therefore little value for civilization as well.

Peterson has a great deal of derision for the moral relativism that he calls post-modern neomarxism. Peterson's derision is therefore interesting since Harris is really the embodiment of a post-modern relativist. Harris even believes that the facts of science can define moral behavior better than religion, which is a belief called scientism. Since the subjective truths of moral behavior are based on belief and not on the facts of science, this simply is not true. Harris is not quite sure why Peterson calls him Newtonian versus Darwinist since Harris most certainly views Darwinism as part of science. Peterson criticized Harris along with Dawkins in previous discourses for calling themselves scientific Darwinists and yet completely ignoring the role of hidden knowledge in the evolution of morality. After all, much of Darwin’s evolution takes place with a blind determinism but is really subject not only determinism, but also to the free choice of behavior. Instead of just determinate blind fate driving evolution, then, quantum free choice also drives human evolution including moral feeling.

While Peterson recognizes science and measurement as great tools for collecting facts, Peterson also argues that there are limits to any wisdom from the facts of science. One example that he poses is that there is wisdom and therefore great truths in the literature of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and that wisdom and truth have little to do with the fact-based wisdom of science. In fact Harris gave Peterson this point and Harris also then accepted that there is much useful wisdom in the ancient stories of religion. But Harris then went on to say that he saw little future value for religious wisdom since religious stories are not based on the facts of science. 

Harris then described how he invented a mystical story from a randomly acquired recipe. Such an invention Harris claimed was an example of how human ingenuity generates mystical stories without any basis in the facts of science. Peterson countered that just because Harris invented a mystical story does not then mean that it is a very good story and just like there is much literature that is not very good, there is also many religious stories that are not very good either. The value in any particular set of myths is in how well it resonates with people over the ages and if it is therefore creates archetypes that are useful in guiding behavior. Peterson is a pragmatic romanticist since he believes that the archetypes of ancient stories are often good to emulate for improving your life.

Both Peterson and Harris would likely agree that there are many mysteries about the world, even given all of the facts of science. However, they did not further differentiate mysteries that result from what we just don't yet know but can still possibly know from mysteries that result from what we cannot ever know. The irony is that philosophical and religious discourse about things that we cannot ever know do not actually answer any questions, they merely rehash discourse that sometimes spans millennia. Can such discourse about what we cannot ever know contribute to wisdom? Is the ancient wisdom of religion useful for discourse about questions that have no clear answers? Is there still wisdom possible in the unknowable?

Why are we here?

Why are we right here right now?

Why is it us and not someone else who is right here right now?

Science is about facts that come from measurements and science does not address questions that are not amenable to measurement. Some in science go on to suppose that questions beyond the facts of science are not useful questions and therefore cannot contribute to wisdom. However, there is much great literature that does not derive from the facts of science and yet that great literature does contribute to wisdom that is beyond the facts of science. Harris agrees that there is much great literature that does contribute to wisdom, but he denies that there might therefore be any useful future role for the mysticism of religion. Peterson then simply asks, “Why not?”

Atheist apologists like Harris believe the fundamental archetype that all true wisdom derives from only the facts of science. Atheism further argues that although there has been much useful ancient wisdom from historical religions, the tools of science have already extracted all of that useful wisdom from ancient religions and therefore people have no future need for religion. Furthermore, there are malevolent and therefore undesirable aspects of religious archetypes and so it is better to abandon religious archetypes.

The atheist argument is that science can measure the well-being of a moral life and differentiate a moral from an immoral life...but science cannot judge a moral life. Religions therefore believe that they still have an important future roles in judging morality along with future study of other great literature as well. After all, without moral archetypes to anchor consciousness, there is no reason or meaning for a moral versus an immoral existence. And without the continuing evolution of the ancient wisdom of morality, there are no archetypes for consciousness.

A further argument for a future need for religion is that civilization goes through periods of upset where new behaviors emerge along with a slow normalization of those new behaviors. People can easily become lost and disengaged by this renormalization of behavior during upsets without the anchors of moral consciousness. During renormalization, behaviors that were normal become abnormal and abnormal behaviors also then become normal.

Therefore it is very important for civilization to have some conservatism and only change acceptable behavior slowly enough to avoid falling into the bottomless pit of an absolute moral relativism along with the victimization of all inequality. Civilization has experienced many past episodes of violence and war that clearly resulted from upheaval and change and in particular, a dramatic change in beliefs. It is very desirable for civilization to therefore anchor human consciousness in a variety of different adaptive methods in case one of those belief archetypes changes. Different archetypes for consciousness do need to share a fundamental belief system that limits permissible behaviors and yet still gives people’s lives purpose and meaning.