Pursuing the logos
Following the conversation between Jordan Peterson and John Vervaeke, a tough to wrestle part of the conversation was about the central spirit of western civilization — whether or not the central spirit is fundamentally rooted in the pursuit of the logos or the power structures that exist. I’d like to point out that I’m not qualified in any way to make the assertions that I’m making — I just enjoy thinking.
A few thoughts come to mind on this topic.
Hierarchies are present in nature — a fundamental concept outlined in 12 Rules. When considering climbing a hierarchy and retaining it as two discrete functions, a member of a population can rise up the hierarchy through competence, which is something like “acting in accordance with the game that the majority of the population wants to play” or through power, which is threatening to act out or acting out violence, physical or otherwise. The first strategy is visibly the superior one because it also builds in the sustainability of retaining a position once it is reached, while the second strategy operates under the fundamental belief that once a high enough position is secured, retention is based on the application of amassed power to prevent the competent or less powerful from climbing the hierarchy. Both these phenomena can be observed in the real world.
Climbing hierarchies — just climbing — can be done either way, while retaining the position becomes a whole different game. The further back you go down the evolutionary chain, the more competence and power seem to overlap. As Qui Gon Jinn so astutely stated in Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace, “ There’s always a bigger fish” and the bigger fish eats the smaller one. Whether the size of the fish being part of its competence is questionable — it seems that competence equals power when social factors are negligible in a species. Lizards, spiders, snakes and even amoeba that work as a single unit tend to operate this way.
When social factors play more of a role, competence becomes increasingly disassociated from power, providing an alternate method of climbing a hierarchy. Amassing competence is a much harder task and the behavioural sciences outline this as perceived effort (Harder things are harder to do, therefore fewer people are likely to do them). Being competent comes with the baggage of acquiring skills, socially, intellectually and kinesthetically, and orienting oneself to do the right thing even if it’s very hard to do. Taking the path of least resistance is by far, easier to do and it’s easy to misconstrue that the pursuit of power is the path of least resistance over the pursuit of competence because the gratification is instant. Combining this ancient behaviour with the fact that climbing a hierarchy is necessary for improving an individual’s life and if competence is too hard a method to enact, then power becomes a viable, if not perceived as the only available alternative.
History is rife with examples of this, where a king of a nation, (the visible top of the hierarchy and usually christened as a being appointed by God) has power, even if they don’t necessarily have the competence for the position. The added complexity of dynastic transference of kingship also meant a peasant, no matter how competent, had no chance of becoming king. The only way a king could be crowned outside a dynasty is through an invasion by a rival kingdom or the use of power.
What this points to, is a hierarchy of modalities for climbing hierarchies or a meta-hierarchy of climbing hierarchies. If everything falls into a hierarchy, why not a hierarchy of “how to climb hierarchies”? Competence and power take different positions based on a sense of morality, personality, biology etc and there might be many more steps to this hierarchy that I simply don’t know of. Depending on the domain the hierarchy is in and the fundamental belief of the people within those hierarchies, they would skew towards one or the other. Competence and the use of power can also be mapped on to the ideas of Good and Evil though I’d be out of my depth to say I have the capacity to do that with the rigour it deserves.
If this is indeed the case however, the path taken in pursuing the logos simply becomes the guideline of moving away from a power-based hierarchy to a competence based hierarchy, the movement away from basic lizard-brain behaviour to higher primate behaviour, the movement away from living in the darkness of chaos and enforcement of order, to the awareness of both states and how to act.