Trauma Metaphysics [Trenchant Edges]

Estimated reading time: 11 minutes, 26 seconds. Contains 2287 words

Good morning everyone! This is Trenchant Edges, a newsletter about weird ideas and the people who have them.

I’m your host, Stephen, and today we have an unexpected subject.

Content Warning: Mass shooting, antisemitism, fascism, Jordan Peterson, etc. Nothing graphic, but if you’re not in a good place mentally… maybe read something else.

Yesterday a self-described fascist murdered ten people and injured three others. I’m not going to discuss him exactly, but the structure I think underlies a lot of the motivations people have for this kind of extremism.

An ongoing theme of this newsletter is the question, “What makes something believable to people?”

This shooter was a deep believer in the most extreme antisemitic conspiracies available. Such belief doesn’t come from information but from a paranoia-edged worldview that reevaluates everything in the world and defines it according to its own logic.

Ouroboros vomiting itself into being

These worldviews are dangerous because they can pull you down like a riptide if you don’t recognize what’s happening soon enough.

Because the assumptions organize all information around a person, the way they distort reality is invisible to that person and they literally can’t see the contradictions obvious to other people.

But what makes people vulnerable to these worldviews in the first place?

Well, obviously, there’s not just one explanation.

There is a strong trend in one direction though. But first, we have to ask one of the most obnoxious questions in philosophy.

What Is Metaphysics?

If you’re not hep to Ancient Greece, Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy dealing with, well, depending on who you ask it’s dealing with everything or nothing.

Let’s take a short historic view: Literally, metaphysics is a book written by Aristotle, and its original name translates to, “The Book After Physics.”

It’s one of the core books in Aristotle’s canon and contains a great deal of speculation on the first principles and the way they order the natural laws laid out in Physics (Aristotle’s titles may seem quaint, but he did have the fortune to be writing *the book* about pretty much whatever he wanted to write about)

This is where we get the “dealing with everything” bit.

A widespread criticism both in and out of philosophy is that Metaphysics is unanchored speculation, too abstract to be meaningful. And that’s where we get the nothing.

And it’s the tension between these two extreme ways of parsing the field of metaphysics that interest us today. Our focus is on personal metaphysics, or what an individual’s assumptions, heuristics, biases, prejudices, and feelings say about what is and isn’t possible in the world.

This is also wrapped up in a person’s Ontology or theory of being (IE: What does and doesn’t exist), but we’re going to ignore that bit because it’s maybe even thornier than metaphysics.

Point is, we all develop a janky worldview built out of a bird’s nest of nature and nurture a sense of what the world is like and who’s who.

And if you’re a propagandist, this is pretty much the sweet spot for influence. It’s why Coca-Cola and the US military spend so much money hitting people with positive messages at every opportunity. If they can drill in a positive association it will be very hard for someone to push against that without confronting the propaganda itself.

Which they’ll be resistant to.

Much of what far-right figures call “The Red Pill” is information that resets someone’s metaphysics.

Something that changes *how* someone believes as much as what they believe.

And I think that’s enough background for us to see the subject of today clearly enough:

Trauma and Jordan Peterson

I owe Dr. Jordan Peterson some credit for this essay. After his harrowing experiences in a medically induced coma and getting covid shortly after, I followed him because I was interested to see if going through an almost literal death and rebirth process would change his views on anything.

If you’re fortunate enough not to know Dr Peterson, he’s a Canadian clinical psychologist who got famous for lying about a Canadian law that makes trans people a protected class. He claimed it’d make misgendering people, a thing he wanted to do, a criminal offense. But the law in question made it illegal to discriminate against trans people for housing, employment, and so on.

His worldview is messy and highly idiosyncratic, to the point where parsing what should be simple statements requires dozens of hours of listening to the man to decode.

Much of his worldview is encoded into mythopoeia and he claims to be largely apolitical.

I bring him up here because I first coined the phrase “Trauma Metaphysics” to describe the idiosyncrasies of his worldview:

He's melded a sloppy understanding of Jung, Plotinus/neoplatonism, Christian gnosticism and the John Birch Society together with a trauma metaphysics that says only suffering is real.

To put this another way, Peterson believes that certain myths are more real than the physical world and determine what happens within that world, that those myths can be best interpreted through Jungian psychology, and that they point to the revealed truth of both cultural Christianity and the politics of the John Birch Society.

OK, I’ll admit that saying he buys into 100% of the JBS’ political program is probably hyperbole. But his main political concern is discrediting left-wing ideas by painting them as part of an infiltration plot by the secret enemies of “The West” to destroy culture through degeneracy.

(He doesn’t say degeneracy, but it’s what he usually describes)

He rebranded all this as “Postmodern Neomarxism” after just straight-up calling it “cultural marxism” got him too much pushback. And since we’re discussing antisemitism, it’s probably worth noting that he regularly talks about “Jewish overrepresentation” and characterizes Karl Marx as somehow non-European.

Anyway, no matter how much I dislike and distrust Dr Peterson, there’s no denying that he’s a man who feels deeply and is in a lot of pain. That was true before his trip to Russia for a little vitamin Coma, and it seems to only have extended now.

So when someone super into mythopoetics does as near close to dying and being reborn, I get curious. What elixirs will they bring back from the underworld?

Spoilers: None.

Dude’s just the same as he was before.

Now, I’ve heard his new book takes a more phenomenological view than his previous book, which is rad as fuck if true. I hope so, but all I can think is of the despair in his voice when talking about his research into addiction should have protected him against becoming addicted himself.

Incapable of either admitting he was vulnerable as anyone is or not condemning himself for a failure. The distinct sense of someone who’s been torturing themselves without knowing why.

I hope he’s better now.

OK, so I clearly have written way the hell more about this guy than I intended to. But Dr Peterson is a pretty good example of the way searching for who to blame for our suffering can distort our thinking.

He’s been doing his “postmodern neo-Marxist” song and dance for long enough that when Slavoj Zizek asked him for examples of professors doing that, he couldn’t.

Dr Peterson isn’t a stupid man. And he’s had an about as good education as money can buy. So, uh, the fact that he didn’t know a SINGLE PERSON who was doing his HUGE ALL-ENCOMPASSING CONSPIRACY didn’t register as a problem.

He eventually did what looks to have been 5 minutes of googling to produce this tweet from two months ago:

13 people, two of whom are Michel Foucault. Most of whom are just popular writers he disagrees with.

He deleted the tweet.

The question isn’t why he did such sloppy research so much as why he thought that he needed to end the tweet with, “This list is not complete”.

A possible answer, since we can’t know what’s in his heart, is he didn’t feel any friction between making the list and sending it.

That the claim he made was self-evident.

The actual complexity of theoretical views and *many* disagreements between these authors get glossed over and reduced to a catchall term for, “Bad person trying to hurt western culture (which is good)”.

Trauma Metaphysics

I’ve been dancing around the idea, but let’s put it in clear terms: A Trauma Metaphysics is a worldview where a person’s suffering is the only credible point of view.

Such a worldview may or may not be accurate.

You can’t really tell from the inside.

It’s a bit like wearing a blindfold instead of rose-colored glasses.

So I’m going to bring in another character here, the Ahedonic horror writer Thomas Ligotti.

His Conspiracy Against the Human Race is a compelling portrait of this metaphysics:

“This is the great lesson the depressive learns: Nothing in the world is inherently compelling. Whatever may be really “out there” cannot project itself as an affective experience. It is all a vacuous affair with only a chemical prestige. Nothing is either good or bad, desirable or undesirable, or anything else except that it is made so by laboratories inside us producing the emotions on which we live. And to live on our emotions is to live arbitrarily, inaccurately—imparting meaning to what has none of its own. Yet what other way is there to live? Without the ever-clanking machinery of emotion, everything would come to a standstill. There would be nothing to do, nowhere to go, nothing to be, and no one to know. The alternatives are clear: to live falsely as pawns of affect, or to live factually as depressives, or as individuals who know what is known to the depressive. How advantageous that we are not coerced into choosing one or the other, neither choice being excellent. One look at human existence is proof enough that our species will not be released from the stranglehold of emotionalism that anchors it to hallucinations. That may be no way to live, but to opt for depression would be to opt out of existence as we consciously know it.”

There are many flaws in his reasoning here, the most obvious being that depressive affect is still affect.

Add in a bit of cybernetics and the fact that your experience is a hallucination approximation of the phenomenological world just becomes a kind of obvious neutral fact.

Like, what did you think the brain was doing in between your senses and experience? Processing noise into a hopefully useful approximation of the world.

We shouldn’t be too hard on Thomas Ligotti though. He claims to be fully Ahedonic, and his writing surely reflects this. As someone approaching finishing his third decade with depression, I’ve felt all this myself many times.

I remember the moment I realized this truth. It struck me like lightning: The pain of being myself was optional. I was DOING trauma. And I didn’t have to.

That was 15 years ago and I still carry much of the trauma I felt then, but it’s no longer all I can see.

There was a moment about 10 years ago, that was the end of my crazydays. When I realized my spiritual pursuits and wild gnostic questing had just recreated the alienation that drove my suffering as a teenager.

I would have to cultivate connection directly.

All of this has led to an absurd situation: Despite the pandemic and spending most of the last 3 years bedridden, I feel less alienated than I ever have before.

I’m still depressed, but there’s quiet happiness under it untouched by the various pains of my body or heart.

Trauma is the lasting harm done to the machinery of self and like the proverbial bell it can’t really be undone. One can heal the broken bits and rebuild them into something new though.

Our thoughts and beliefs can either reinforce or oppose that trauma and both can prolong its effects.

Actually dealing with it requires we withdraw emotional energy from the wound, unknot the damage, let go of the pain that goes with it, and then build a new structure to replace it.

It’s not unlike escaping from a hyperdimensional Chinese finger trap: The more you try and pull on a wound the tighter it will hold. And because multiple wounds can accumulate and interlink, the difficulty just scales upwards.

And of course, the whole process is extremely uncomfortable and exhausting.

We live in a society slowly coming to terms with this fact, moving from moralizing scorn for broken people toward the recognition of our shared vulnerability and resilience.

But in the meantime, we’ve got millions of people who confuse pain with wisdom and seek out the most painful ideas so they at least have someone to fantasize about getting some revenge against.

At least they’ll have someone to hate.

I realized I’d accidentally just written this quote badly so here’s James Baldwin.

And, uh, dealing with pain is Work.

The funny thing is, regardless of one’s physical circumstances, Trauma Metaphysics is optional.

Mind you, I’m saying that as someone who hasn’t been out of pain in almost 20 years and who expects to be in increasing amounts of pain until death.

This isn’t Pollyanna optimism, but the hardened knowledge built up over years of living anyway despite it all.

I’m certainly lucky on many levels. The life it’s taken to build that knowledge has been, uh, pretty weird and inaccessible to most people.

There’s no substitute for time and attention and those have to be bought under capitalism. Not an ideal circumstance.

But that’s the way of it sometimes.

Conclusions

Alright, well, that was pretty heavy.

I find myself drawn more and more to try and pin down the ideas and emotions driving the far right. There’s such a convoluted history there and trying to map it out has turned into a significant part of my life.

So, uh, I hope that was at least interesting.

If you like it, please consider subscribing. I’ve been on a razor-thin margin lately and everything helps. Value for value.

Alright, I’ve got a few drafts laying around to be finished this week so I’ll see y’all soon.

-S