I grew up in America, and now I live in Japan. America is a heterogeneous society with a diversity of races and cultures, while the Japanese have cultivated a homogenous society with just one race, culture, and language. For a long time, I wondered why America has made one decision and Japan the other. Why has America turned multicultural, while Japan remains an ethnostate? Over time, I recognized patterns. There are a lot of differences between America and Japan which seem related.
Author Archives: Eric Wulff
A Culture of Generalization
Imagine that you’re part of a primitive society and someone in your tribe sees lightning for the first time. They witness a line of light cutting through the night sky, and several seconds later they hear a loud crash. They tell the rest of the tribe what they saw: “From the Heavens appeared a long line of jagged illumination perpendicular to the Earth, and several moments later was a startling sound.” But then let’s say that the tribe observes lightning and thunder many more times. Before long, everyone in the tribe would know the pattern: “When the jagged lines of light appear, afterwards comes a loud crash.” This marks a transition from talking about particular bolts of lightning and particular rumbles of thunder to making overall generalizations about the categories lightning and thunder.
Closed for Renovations
When you consume nothing but water for several days, you get tired. It’s natural to interpret this fatigue as a sign that the fast is harming your health, but I believe that this subjective sensation of fatigue is just the body’s way of asking you to rest. While eating a meal and then drinking a cup of coffee is like an upshift, a meditative water fast is like a downshift. Coffee is a great tool if used in moderation, but overdoing it can lead to burning the candle at both ends. A rested water fast, on the other hand, is like burning the candle at neither end. It’s the opposite of a stimulant. Your body gets a chance to put all its effort into recovery.
A Radical Form of Rest
Water fasting promotes a deep form of rest. When people go longer than they’re used to without food, they tend to crash. They get exhausted, and they generally interpret this fatigue as a bad sign. How could it be heathy to do something that makes you feel like your body is falling apart? Aren’t you just starving your body of nutrients? But I would argue that this is a misinterpretation of the body’s signals. When you fast, it’s not that your entire being loses vitality. It’s that your energy is allocated away from conscious behavior and toward your body’s healing-related systems, which operate at a high level of complexity despite being unconscious. Although as conscious entities we feel like our consciousness is our whole self, this isn’t true. There are a lot of systems that we don’t consciously control, such as our immune system. Fasting feels like it shuts us down, but in doing so it actually wakes up a different part of us.
Jordan Peterson’s Red Pill
Those beholden to social justice criticize Peterson for supposedly being a darling of the alt right, while the alt right criticizes Peterson for being a lightning rod that neutralizes people who would otherwise join the alt right. In other words, the left accuses him of being far right, and the far right accuses him of pushing people to the center. To the SJWs Peterson is a right-wing radical, and to the alt right he’s a cowardly centrist.
From Ethnostatism to Multiculturalism
Most people engage in extensive compartmentalization. They have certain beliefs in one part of their mind, and they don’t allow those beliefs to propagate to other parts of their mind. A classic example is a person who’s able to think scientifically, but refuses to apply their scientific patterns of thought to their religious beliefs. If you try to dissect their religious beliefs with logic and show them they’re irrational, they’ll put up a wall. Your arguments will do nothing to them.
A Double-Edged Sword
Unable to grapple with his arguments on religion, culture, and society, many of Jordan Peterson’s detractors turn their attention to his diet. Searching for a way to swiftly discredit him, they make fun of his strict program of beef, salt, and water. Surely a man following such a strange diet is a lunatic! Peterson’s pseudoscientific worldview goes far past a mere obsession with rekindling toxic masculinity, they argue. It embraces a fad diet which rejects well-established science in its reckless promotion of red meat.
Jordan Peterson’s Descent into Chaos
(Note: See here for discussion on this post.)
With Peterson’s personal disaster comes a horde of vicious haters using it as an opportunity to tear him down. When he was well, they twisted his words. And now that he’s sick, they’re using it as a chance to launch a new type of offensive. They rejoice in his suffering, and ask what they consider to be a slam-dunk question: “If Peterson can’t keep his own life together, then why should we listen to his life advice?”
A Not-So-Paradoxical Reaction
(Note: See here for discussion on this post.)
Mikhaila Peterson just came out with a video where she gives an update on Jordan Peterson’s health. He almost died, in large part due to a “paradoxical reaction” he got from a particular anti-anxiety medication. When I watched the video, I immediately remembered something that Peterson said long before any of this happened: “I’m surfing a 100-foot wave, and generally what happens if you do that is that you drown.”
The Aesthetic Landscape of Culinary Tradition
When deciding what to eat, aesthetics should hold no less important of a place than nutrition, even for the utilitarian. The artistic presentation of food not only provides the connoisseur with an outlet for pleasure, but also provides the dryly practical individual with valuable information. The presentation paints on the outside an aesthetic which reveals to the cultured mind what exists within the internal substance.