![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
asher553'After breaking the world into large, undifferentiated pieces, describing the problem(s) that characterize each division, and identifying the appropriate villains, the ism theorist then generates a small number of explanatory principles (which may indeed contribute in some part to the understanding or existence of those abstracted entities). ... Finally, a school of thought emerges to propagate the methods of this algorithmic reduction (particularly when the thinker is hoping to attain dominance in the conceptual and the real worlds), and those who refuse to adopt the algorithm are tacitly or explicitly demonized.
Incompetent and corrupt intellectuals thrive on such activity, such games. The first players of a game of this sort are generally the brightest of the participants. They weave a story around their causal principle of choice, demonstrating how that hypothetically primary motivational force profoundly contributed to any given domain of human activity. ... Their followers, desperate to join a potentially masterable new dominance hierarchy (the old one being cluttered by its current occupants), become enamored of the theory. While doing so, being less bright than those they follow, they subtly shift "contributed to" or "affected" to "caused". The originator(s), gratified by the emergence of followers, start to shift their story in that direction as well. Or they object, but it does not matter. The cult has already begun.'
- Jorday B. Peterson, 'Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life'
Incompetent and corrupt intellectuals thrive on such activity, such games. The first players of a game of this sort are generally the brightest of the participants. They weave a story around their causal principle of choice, demonstrating how that hypothetically primary motivational force profoundly contributed to any given domain of human activity. ... Their followers, desperate to join a potentially masterable new dominance hierarchy (the old one being cluttered by its current occupants), become enamored of the theory. While doing so, being less bright than those they follow, they subtly shift "contributed to" or "affected" to "caused". The originator(s), gratified by the emergence of followers, start to shift their story in that direction as well. Or they object, but it does not matter. The cult has already begun.'
- Jorday B. Peterson, 'Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life'
