Comments by "Jim Luebke" (@jimluebke3869) on "The Education of a Journalist | Rex Murphy | EP 173" video.

  1. "Persona - a crafted presentation you use for expedient purposes" Yes, it's an interface you use, to reduce transaction costs. Personas your culture is familiar with, are a stack of expectations that others have of you, and that you have of yourself. Others don't quite know what to make of you if you don't have one, and you don't quite know what to make of yourself either. (Professor, feel free to challenge any part of this, I'm in declaiming mode and probably sound more than a little pompous. Being taken down a peg by someone obviously smarter and better versed in all this would be a mercy, compared to being taken down a peg by a random passerby. Anyway.) Personas can be an excess of order, and inhibit the flow (chaos) of conversation. Personas are also linked to madness, especially archetypal personas like "Messiah". However, more humble personas can also lead you to habitual maladjusted behavior (madness). People fully master a number of personas in their lifetimes, trivial personas like "rider on a bus or subway" or "person going to the dentist". However, your experiences and talents lead you to be more than just these personas. If you tried to operate in the world like your entire identity were just "person going to the dentist", people would (rightly) think you were crazy. You can also obviously exhibit maladjusted behavior by NOT having mastered a persona that you attempt to take on as your "identity". You can be comically inept as the persona "dentist" (if you don't happen to have any training or education as a dentist), or as the persona "subway driver." (Or "university professor.") Attempting to impersonate a persona (to fail to be equipped to live up to its expectations) is madness as well. I would argue that much of the problem with Identity Politics is exactly this difficulty with Personas. Even if you adopt the persona of every alleged identity group you supposedly belong to, you do not inhabit them perfectly -- your individual experiences and characteristics both exceed, and fail to meet, the requirements of any given identity category. They also exceed, and fail to meet, the complete intersection of all these personas. To insist that you are so, is madness. Someone who tried to do so, would habitually exhibit maladjusted behavior, as they left out some of their talents and experiences, and lay claim to characteristics they don't in fact possess. On the other hand, might be fruitful to have a discussion of the cultural expectations (personas) of masculinity and femininity, and how well those map to actual biology and any given individual. A man who doesn't live up to the ideals of manhood, and a woman who doesn't live up to the ideals of womanhood, are comical figures - but we see ourselves in them as well. Anyway, that's a brain dump of something I've been thinking about for a few years now. It doesn't compare to the decades Professor Peterson has spent thinking about things, so it could probably use some work.
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  2. Melville also wrote "Bartleby the Scrivener". It's probably a function of his frustration with himself, compared to his productivity writing "Moby Dick".
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  3. "The idea that you can concentrate your being into one small superficial attribute is nonsense." Yes. You will exceed any persona (stack of cultural expectations) you adopt as your "identity". And no, it doesn't help just to stack more personas on top of that, and call it "intersectional". That is the wrong level of granularity, to accurately define an individual, or for an individual to define themselves to will allow them to act in the world in a way that will take into account all their talents and experiences. The "Identity" in "Identity" politics is madness, just like a messianic complex is madness in that you stuff yourself into a category that can't possibly fit.
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  4. Isn't "therapist" a persona? Are there no social expectations of the role, that might interfere with the free and honest flow of conversation? The expectation to be non-judgemental (which iirc Professor Peterson doesn't observe) can get in the way, from what I've seen.
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  5.  @117Industries  Yeah, same here. There's not much difference between "judgement" and "feedback". You can be kind or unkind about feedback, but lack of feedback isn't really kindness, if people have genuine problems that need fixing.
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