Meaningful Maps, Global Brain Singularity, and Real Speculations (Part I)

Considering Last and Peterson After Rieff

Photo by The New York Public Library

‘[O]ne has to have one’s own spiritual skin and bones in the game’ if one is to think; we must ‘let the contradictions of one’s actual life positively inform the cultivation of one’s thought.’¹ If our life is not at risk in our thinking, we will not think as deep as we should, and then we better hope our life is not at risk — a bet I wouldn’t want to make. “Maps” and ideologies though work tirelessly precisely to keep our lives bracketed out from our thinking, to keep us protected and safe from destabilization and possible encounters with “The Real” (for good and for bad). This is to say that in the name of avoiding risk, “maps” put us at risk of suffering the consequences that follow when we fail to think with skin in the game. What are those consequences? We can allude to them, as also discussed in Belonging Again, with what Cadell writes: ‘From the ‘existentialist excess’ itself we must reprocess ‘theopolitical lack’ in order to build something that can withstand a world in the midst of a social apocalypse.’² What does “social apocalypse” mean? Pickup a copy of Real Speculations today to find out.

I

Cadell begins his book by “dialectizing new atheism,” which provides a brilliant account of the history of thought that brought us to our moment as of 2025. Cadell thinks together ‘the atheistic work of Dawkins and the futurist work of Kurzweil,’ and makes the case that ‘[w]hat is at stakes […] is how to think of the truth as the relation of the unity between subject and substance.’³ ⁴ Hegel is famous for teaching us that “subject is substance,” but if we take this seriously we cannot leave out the subject in our consideration of substance: if we ignore something about ourselves in our efforts to learn about the universe, we do not learn about the universe. Again, substance is subject, so if we learn about substance independent of us, we do not learn about substance but instead learn about fanaticisms. Kant is famous for splitting subject and substance, but Hegel argues that the noumena is “in” phenomenon, “for us”: it is precisely evidence that subject and substance dialectically relate, not that they have nothing to do with one another — but this is a case expanded on throughout Logic for the Global Brain, another publication from Philosophy Portal.

If substance is subject, it follows that we must take our history and current moment seriously, for the subject is always bound to “now,” and hence we will only be able to think “subject/substance” in thinking not the past or future but the present: we ‘must tarry with the moment to moment historical process as it is unfolding, and surprising us, in that unfolding.’⁵ Indeed, we must be careful to dream dreams in which ‘the role of human subjectivity’ proves left out; otherwise, we will repress something that will later come back to haunt us — as Cadell suggests has been the case with the rise of Jordan Peterson.⁶ New Atheism followed from a valid tradition of the Enlightenment which arose in light of ‘the madness and war of monarchy and religious authority’ — it would be a mistake to argue the Enlightenment was not justified in its emergence, or that the Enlightenment is not something we still need to this very day — but in leaving out subjectivity, a reality was ignored that ultimately cannot be ignored.⁷ Our efforts after the Enlightenment were too a real degree valid and understandable, but they were also seriously incomplete.

It could be argued that Enlightenment in the name of stopping religious war and madness enabled the rise of modern madness and total war, similar to how Dawkins enabled Peterson; as Cadell writes: ‘what Enlightenment rationalists never sufficiently grapple with, is the fact that the Enlightenment project itself, as an actual process, led directly into a confrontation with the real of madness at the core of our own psyches.’⁸ Cadell’s argument is that ‘the Freudo-Lacanian lineage of psychoanalysis’ alongside ‘the German Idealist tradition’ are necessary to think this trajectory, which ‘open[] up, not a return to a higher positive supernatural entity, but a darkness or a negativity, internal to the reason of the human social body itself.’⁹ As I might say that rationality eventually, according to its own internal logic, ends up in autocannibalism (“autonomous”), so Cadell argues that human society necessarily entails a negativity that cannot be “reasoned away,” precisely because this negativity is a result of reason itself. This is arguably a traumatic realization, but it is also a necessary one if we are to avoid repression and the consequences which follow. Here, ‘we might start to entertain the post-Enlightenment idea of the German Idealists, that Enlightenment reason reaches the limits of its own imaginary totalizations on the level of the real of historical subjectivity, and the real of world historical human conflict.’¹⁰ Totalization fails in history, not in the mind, and when it fails, the question is how we will respond, a traumatizing question that we can avoid by not thinking in our historic moment — a temptation Cadell has avoided.

Cadell describes how New Atheism began to break in different directions with Sam Harris, who saw New Atheism with its ‘reductive and scientific materialism’ as lacking room for ‘the dimension of inner subjectivity,’ which then leads to a consideration by Cadell of Jordan Peterson.¹¹ ‘While Harris represents the break from reason to spirit, Peterson breaks from spirit to religion itself,’ Cadell writes, and, despite any possible shortcomings, we should acknowledge that we see in Peterson a key critique of New Atheism.¹² Cadell writes:

‘[…] for Peterson, Dawkins’ project of atheists ‘coming out’ and expressing their doubts about the probability of God misses the point, since people who consciously express such doubt in logical propositions may still be unconsciously acting as if they believe. In other words, the entire logical game set up by the New Atheists, that of debating the logical propositions of evolutionary science and theology, obfuscates the dimension of unconscious action, where we may find out what a society actually believes without knowing it.’¹³

“God” is a means of addressing the subconscious; “God” is in the business of what logical proposition cannot do, and this inadequacy of rationality can manifest precisely as it attempts to replace “God” with itself. If it is indeed “the unconscious” that is our main challenge versus superstition or irrationality, which is to say if our main challenge is “the madness in rationality itself,” then even if removing “God” somehow increased our rationality and intelligence, this would not address our main challenge. In fact, it could make our main challenge worse, perhaps precisely when we are most unprepared for those consequences, enjoying the pleasure of a perceived evolution and success.

II

I personally associate Jordan Peterson’s thinking, especially from Maps of Meaning, with Philip Rieff’s Triumph of Therapeutic, which helped launch the Belonging Again project. Rieff and Peterson are not identical, but there are incredible overlaps, as there are overlaps between Peterson and the Counter-Enlightenment that I often discuss. Since I resonate with Rieff, I also resonate with Peterson, and while Rieff perhaps settled with tragedy for the problems he identified, Peterson is attempting to address “the unleashing of the unconscious” through mythology and religion, which is a direction Rieff never took but gestured toward. O.G. Rose in Belonging Again questions if this is a return to classic means of “belonging” which is not tenable today, but all the same, I sympathize with Peterson’s move, given what Rieff identified and is ultimate quietism.

The very first paragraph of Maps of Meaning by Peterson is reminiscent of Rieff (and it is relevant to consider in light of what Cadel has written:

‘Something we cannot see protects us from something we do not understand. The thing we cannot see is culture, in its intrapsychic or internal manifestation. The thing we do not understand is the chaos that gave rise to culture. If the structure of culture is disrupted, unwittingly, chaos returns. We will do anything — anything — to defend ourselves against that return.’¹⁴

Rieff warned of the loss of constrains (or what I call “givens”) leads to an “unleashing of releases” that would psychologically destroy us, and Peterson is arguing like Rieff that culture provided a repressive constraint on “chaos” and/or “releases,” without which we could be destroyed. And if the chaos and resulting “existential anxiety” began to return, we would do “anything to stop it,” such as become fascists, turn to totalitarianism, violence, etc. Both Rieff and Peterson agree on this, but while Rieff goes in a Freudian direction, Peterson goes in a more Jungian direction, and that makes all the difference. Ultimately, for Rieff, it means Peterson would not be a psychoanalyst, and in this way, we could say that Cadell is suggesting Peterson cannot move from Religion to Absolute Knowing in Hegel because he lacks psychoanalysis (as we’ll expand on). With Rieff, I agree, and in fact we might see in Peterson evidence that Rieff was right to be skeptical of how much Jung could address our moment, even though Rieff was sympathetic to Jung’s efforts to solve (versus “manage”) our dilemma. But our dilemma cannot be “solved” only “addressed”; it is a negativity with which we must tarry (we must accept ‘the impossibility of locating the subject in the ‘great chain of being,’ into the Whole of the universe’).¹⁵

As a note before moving forward, please keep in mind that in this work I will be discussing “Jung” as understood by Peterson and Rieff, mainly for the sake of helping draw distinctions between Cadell Last and Jordan Peterson: in no way would I assume that this is “the right reading of Jung.” Carl Jung is a complicated thinker, and there is more to him than what is described here. Also, we are going to argue in this paper that to move from Religion to Absolute Knowing, which is basically a movement from Peterson to Last, precisely helps align Jung, Freud, and Lacan, which means Jung is brought more into the “address” and conversation. This paper is not arguing “Jung was wrong”—that is not the goal of dialectical thinking according to Hegel—this paper is mostly arguing with Last that we need to move from Religion to Absolute Knowing in light of Global Pluralism, Global Capitalism, and the Global Brain Singularity. Sam Willman also commented eloquently:

‘I don’t think [Jung] sought a ‘cure,’ so much as an ‘alignment’ between personal and impersonal forces, the his work represents a communicative diplomacy between the spirt and the spirit realm more so than a therapeutic adaptation between the spirt and the spirit of the times […] I think Jung paints a very porous picture of the individual and subject. I think he is misunderstood because he describes leaning into this porosity as ‘individuation.’ ’

I very much like what Sam wrote, so please keep in mind that how we treat Jung in this paper is not authoritative. Our take on Jung is mostly just to help us understand Peterson compared with Last, and I ask for forgiveness if what is employed is too misguided. (Check out Sam’s awesome Substack today!)

Anyway, to resume, “The Conclusion” of Belonging Again (Part I) goes into much greater detail on the differences between Freud and Jung, and what consequences might follow if one follows Freud more than Jung or Jung more than Freud. To take quotations from the mentioned Conclusion, we could say that ‘Freud’s object was personal capacity, not general cure,’ or so Rieff tells us, while ‘Jung sought […] a cure.’¹⁶ As also discussed in the Conclusion:

‘[B]oth Adler and Jung sought in psychoanalysis a total theory, to which a patient could commit himself whole. But [for Freud] all such therapies of commitment belong to the religious category of cure: that of souls. More modestly, Freud sought to give men that power of insight which would increase their power to choose; but, he had no intention of telling them what they ought to choose.’¹⁷

As “Owen in the Agon” discusses, Rieff had concerns with Jung, who could lead everyone into a “private religion” that was ultimately just another “triumph of the therapeutic,” but again Rieff still sympathized, noting that ‘Freud’s [accomplishment] was a sheer triumph of intellectuality, of detachment. And yet he could not quite confront the issue to which Jung pointed, however unsteadily: the content of the choices that mankind would be freed to make.’¹⁸ Cadell is confronting this, but to do so with Freud, it requires bringing in thinkers like Hegel, Nietzsche, Lacan, Zupančič, and Žižek, exactly as Cadell has done in his work.

Peterson is more Jungian, and again for Freud that means he is not a thinker of psychoanalysis; according to Rieff, ‘[w]had Adler and Jung did […] [was] patently not psychoanalysis. Freud insisted on keeping the differences intact [though] [h]e did not deny that the cures others might develop may be efficacious modes of therapy.’¹⁹ Indeed, Peterson and Jung help people, but Freud would still not consider them psychoanalysts. Also, ‘Freud only believed in managing our deepest human problems […] Jung believed in solving them, and ‘Freud never forgave Jung for this improper use of his theory […] Freud slaps him hard on the back and sends him on his way, back to the invisible church of his fathers.’²⁰ So Freud would treat Peterson, and indeed, Peterson resides in the Religion of Hegel’s “Phenomenological Journey,” which is respectable, but also problematic if our age requires a move into Absolute Knowing (as Cadell discusses).

If Lacan is a psychoanalyst while Jung isn’t, then between Peterson and Lacan we have a difference that could lead to different consequences politically, socially, economically, and the like. Peterson responds to Rieff more with Jung, while Cadell responds to Rieff more with Lacan, which is more Freudian and aligned with Rieff himself. Still, similarities should be considered, precisely to help refine differences that might be generative. For Peterson, we are “always already” mythological down to our very experience of world, which forces us ‘to know what things are not to know what they are but to keep track of what they mean — to understand what they signify for our behavior’ (a point which brings Dr. Vervaeke’s “relevance realization” to mind).²⁰ For Hegel, “subject is substance,” and in that sense Hegel agrees we are “always already” mythologically structured, which is similar to Peter Burger’s thinking and stress that we are “always already” socialized. We are “mapped,” per se, and today we find ourselves needing “maps of meaning” (“myths”) in a world that has undermined the validity of “maps,” as if escaping them was possible (like escaping “the subject,” as Cadell discusses). Hence, ‘[w]e have become trapped by our own capacity for abstraction: it provides us with accurate descriptive information but also undermines our belief in the utility and meaning of existence.’²¹ We require that which we cannot accept. We are a “Buridan Donkey,” a “suboptimal result,” needing the (nonrational) “Impossible” of Shestov and Fondane.

Peterson seems to see us as having to live religiously while unable to believe in religion, which is indeed an insight that could chart a path toward Absolute Knowing in Hegel (say through “Christian Atheism”). However, Peterson takes a Jungian path that seems to keep him in mythology and/or Religion (for good and for bad). Rieff saw this move, and he did not think it would politically or socially suffice. I agree, but Rieff lacked Hegel’s Science of Logic to advance from a quietism. Still, Peterson is right to warn that ‘individuals will go to almost any length to ensure that their protective cultural ‘stories’ remain intact,’ as he is right to argue that if what Rieff saw isn’t taken seriously, the consequences will be dire.²² The very intelligibility of reality itself is at stake, and humans basically die without that, unable to handle the released unconscious, so if the choice is an incomprehensible reality or fascism, fascism is the easy choice. And this is us.

III

Cadell writes that ‘[Peterson’s] crusade against woke belief and the consequences of its actions, must be situated in his belief that it opens our world to social self-destruction by undermining the belief structures that actually built the Western world.’²³ In the name of freeing us from superstition, efforts of rational critique could unleash what Cadell has called a “social apocalypse” — and yet the option of “going back before the Enlightenment” is also misguided. In his work, Cadell is attempting to think a path that doesn’t make a strawman out of the Enlightenment, presenting it as “the source of all our troubles,” but at the same time he is taking the concerns of Peterson seriously. We need the Enlightenment, but we also need to employ Hegel, Nietzsche, and Lacanian psychoanalysis to think the contradictions we find ourselves in after the Enlightenment; otherwise, our gains will crush us, and/or we will end up like Peterson, stuck in ‘a type of regression in an endless tarrying with mythology.’²⁴

If this is a fair way to approach Peterson, then I think we can associate him with the Counter-Enlightenment, as discussed by Isaiah Berlin, which is a movement of great interest to me personally. I would argue that Peterson is attempting to heal “the loss of givens” and its results through “myths” (to speak generally), which is to say he is trying to regain the social stability and possibilities that “givens” afforded us through “maps (of meaning).” This begs the question: can “maps” function the same as “givens” and heal the damages caused by their loss? To cut to the case, at best, I think they could restore conditions “like givens” (because they are “internally consistent” and hence “indestructible” to those who ascribe to them), which means the “address” they could provide our current moment is at best a return to previous forms of “belonging” and social stability (which we have argued in Belonging Again are problematic). Ultimately, I don’t think “maps” are sufficient, because ultimately they will lead to people finding the “map” that works for them, which leads us toward atomization and something like decentralization, which is better than nothing, but we are still left with the problem of how Global Pluralism can get along, as we still have “the logic of Capital” to work with as it works on our habits, trains our subjectivity, etc. — as discussed and elaborated on in Belonging Again (Part II) (where it is also discussed why it is problematic if Cadell is right that, ‘Peterson’s thinking […] tends towards a mythological regression [and] tendency to avoid […] dialectics for a one-sided positionality: capitalism over communism, traditional Christian culture over woke politically correct culture’).²⁵

How might we think of the Counter-Enlightenment? A key quality is a belief in the need for something we might call “a social noumenon,” or else there will be no defense against “the barbarism of refinement” and/or “autonomous rationality,” which will lead to self-effacement. Isaiah Berlin in his lectures on the Counter-Enlightenment stressed how it was argued that the justification and basis of say “tradition” had to be kept hidden and “in darkness,” and that if rationality “pulled it up” to examine it, rationality would always find tradition unjustified (a point which applies just as well to theology, politics, and the like). In other words, as we have discussed throughout The Map Is Indestructible, rationality without nonrationality will end up destroy itself and prove a force of destruction; hence, for the Counter-Enlightenment, something must always be outside and beyond rationality if human civilization is to survive and rationality itself not end up autocannibalistic. I agree, but the question is how (non)rationality is to be established, and ultimately, in my view, efforts based on “a social noumenon” and/or “individual mythology, theology, etc.” will always fall back into the (unaddressed) problem of Global Pluralism while leaving Capital untouched — which isn’t inherently bad, please note, if Global Pluralism and Global Capitalism are functioning well. But this is where the AI-Causer discussed in II.1 is important, and where our discussions about “The Problem of Demand” in Keynes and “Great Stagnation” also matter — but elaborations on those topics are done elsewhere.

There is a negativity at the heart of civilization that the Counter-Enlightenment (CE) took seriously, and Peterson does the same. Peterson argues that we need myths, and if we try to rationally justify them, we will destroy them and unleash our repressed subconscious to untold horror and consequence; similarly, the CE warned that if we don’t leave certain things beyond rational justification, we will destroy ourselves (a point we might associate with the tension of Love(craft) I like to discuss, and/or the tension between “holiness and inclusion” that Ross Byrd brilliantly elucidates). Again, the CE tried to deal with that negativity and madness through various “social noumena,” where basically justifications for worldviews, civilizations, etc. were placed beyond rational justification (“it’s the will of God”; “it’s our tradition”; “it’s what our people do”; etc.). Of course, this very move of claiming and acting as if rationality required nonrationality itself could not be readily rationally justified, and so it was easy for those who so wanted to deconstruct CE arguments, and there was little the CE could do about it.²⁷ We just had to know better, but how is that rational? (Can it be without Hegel?)

Steven Pinker might be seen as an example of someone who mostly supports deconstructing what cannot be rationally justified, which on the face of it sounds wonderful, but ultimately this is problematic if “autonomous rationality” is indeed self-effacing. Pinker stresses ‘[t]he Enlightenment principle that we can apply reason and sympathy to enhance human flourishing,’ which is not wrong, but what do we do in a Multipolar Trap or when Capital “flattens” us into losing “intrinsic motivation” and capacities for “conviviality”?²⁷ Still, Pinker provides us with a very straightforward view of a take on the Enlightenment that I would associate with “autonomous rationality,” writing:

‘Reason is nonnegotiable […] If there’s anything the Enlightenment thinkers had in common, it was an insistence that we energetically apply the stand of reason to understanding our world, and not fall back on generators of delusion like faith, dogma, revelation, authority, charisma, mysticism, divination, visions, gut feelings, or the hermeneutic parsing of sacred text.’²⁸ ²⁹

If “reason is nonnegotiable” as such, then that could mean Nash Equilibria are unavoidable and unleashing madness inevitable (which if history is a guide, means war is nigh, and when it manifests, someone like Pinker might be able to say the cause was that people weren’t reasonable enough) (“the problem of internally consistent systems”). Now, Pinker doesn’t believe humans are perfectly rational, but he believes the social must be organized primarily by the rational (perhaps like Jonathan Rauch, who I respect), or else we will be in tremendous trouble. I don’t disagree that the irrational or “autonomously nonrational” aren’t sufficient, but “autonomous rationality” is also not enough: “chaos” would be unleashed, exactly as Peterson, Rieff, and Last admonish. This doesn’t mean the Enlightenment isn’t invaluable for ‘a paradigm of how to achieve reliable knowledge,’ but it does mean there is more beyond “reliable knowledge” with which we must wrestle.³⁰ If that “other knowledge” is ignored though, a danger is that Enlightenment thinkers with a focus on ‘[h]uman-made systems’ might find themselves justified to “deal with” the others who fail to adequately follow the Enlightenment (there is something ominous when Pinker writes ‘[h]uman-made systems like governments, laws, schools, markets, and international bodies are a natural target for the application of reason to human betterment’).³¹ But of course the loss of institutions can invite fascism and anarchistic madness, so we are caught in a serious and grave time. Yes, the Enlightenment in repressing fascism can help us with ‘peace,’ but Peterson, Rieff, and Last warn that we should be very careful to assume this can work forever.³² A day may come when people snap, at which point the Enlightenment-emphasizers may respond with “rational force,” which could incentivize a reaction — on and on, evidence all the while to the Enlightment-emphasizers that more rationality is needed, and evidence all the while to the people reacting that “the rational” is a cover-term for power and corruption (“the problem of internally consistent systems”).

More can be said on Pinker, but for now we will return to focusing on the idea that a “social noumena” is needed according to the CE, but that this noumena cannot be rationally justified and so is easily deconstructed by an (overfitting) Enlightenment-effort.³³ ³⁴ Having considered the Counter-Enlightenment, we might think of Kant here on the Continental side coming in to justify “an individual noumena” for similar reasons as the CE (even if ultimately Kant, at least as popularly understood, and the CE are in contradiction). This is because Kant tries to save and defend theology from rationality with his noumena, which entails placing the moral life beyond rational critique. I will leave it to others to debate if Kant succeeds in this and to expand on the details of Kant’s work, but the point is that in Kant we see a similar concern as the CE, but unfortunately even if Kant succeeds in this, by individualizing the noumenon, its potential for defending the Social arguably fails. Sure, perhaps the Social doesn’t suffer autocannibalism like it could have, but “an individualized noumenon” can lead to social isolation, atomization, struggles to socially act and communicate, etc., and this way the Social is lost all the same.³⁵ Kant easily tried to correct this error through his Third Critique on judgment and the sublime, but again I’ll leave others to decide if he succeeded.

Ultimately, despite my love of Hume, I came to conclude the Counter-Enlightenment and similar “noumenal”-strategies were not sufficient on their own for “a new address.” Similarly, like the CE, as Cadell puts it, ‘we can say that Peterson, unlike Dawkins and Harris, confronts the ‘absolute negativity’ opened by the process of Enlightenment idealization, but admittedly, fails to think of its solution outside a turn to mythology, that is, outside of a turn to religion.’³⁶ ³⁷ Is this a fair claim to make of Peterson? More must be considered.

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Notes

¹Last, Cadell. Real Speculations. Philosophy Portal Books, 2025: 1.

²Last, Cadell. Real Speculations. Philosophy Portal Books, 2025: 5.

³Last, Cadell. Real Speculations. Philosophy Portal Books, 2025: 9.

⁴Last, Cadell. Real Speculations. Philosophy Portal Books, 2025: 10.

⁵Last, Cadell. Real Speculations. Philosophy Portal Books, 2025: 10.

⁶Last, Cadell. Real Speculations. Philosophy Portal Books, 2025: 12.

⁷Last, Cadell. Real Speculations. Philosophy Portal Books, 2025: 17.

⁸Last, Cadell. Real Speculations. Philosophy Portal Books, 2025: 18–19.

⁹Last, Cadell. Real Speculations. Philosophy Portal Books, 2025: 19.

¹⁰Last, Cadell. Real Speculations. Philosophy Portal Books, 2025: 25.

¹¹Last, Cadell. Real Speculations. Philosophy Portal Books, 2025: 21.

¹²Last, Cadell. Real Speculations. Philosophy Portal Books, 2025: 25.

¹³Last, Cadell. Real Speculations. Philosophy Portal Books, 2025: 26.

¹⁴Peterson, Jordan B. Maps of Meaning. New York, NY: Routledge, 1999: xi.

¹⁵Žižek, Slavoj. Tarrying with the Negative. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993: 12.

¹⁶Rieff, Philip. The Triumph of the Therapeutic. Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2007: 74.

¹⁷Rieff, Philip. The Triumph of the Therapeutic. Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2007: 74.

¹⁸Rieff, Philip. The Triumph of the Therapeutic. Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2007: 77.

¹⁹Rieff, Philip. The Triumph of the Therapeutic. Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2007: 76.

²⁰Rieff, Philip. The Triumph of the Therapeutic. Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2007: 75.

²¹Peterson, Jordan B. Maps of Meaning. New York, NY: Routledge, 1999: 3.

²²Peterson, Jordan B. Maps of Meaning. New York, NY: Routledge, 1999: 6.

²³Last, Cadell. Real Speculations. Philosophy Portal Books, 2025: 28.

²⁴Last, Cadell. Real Speculations. Philosophy Portal Books, 2025: 29.

²⁵Last, Cadell. Real Speculations. Philosophy Portal Books, 2025: 31.

²⁶If our strategies for honoring nonrationality involve us taking a concrete stand on a metaphysical and/or theological position we cannot entirely justify rationally, although this might help us individually and those like us avoid autocannibalism, this alone will not necessarily mean we are able to get alone with people who are different from us in Global Pluralism, nor will it mean that our subjectivity is not still habituated by Capital in a manner that lessens “intrinsic motivation” and keeps us from experiencing Beauty. Again, these are topics elaborated on throughout O.G. Rose, but the point is that more must be done: Peterson can be a step on the path, but the path keeps going.

²⁷Pinker, Steven. Enlightenment Now. New York, NY: Viking, 2018: 4.

²⁸Pinker, Steven. Enlightenment Now. New York, NY: Viking, 2018: 8.

²⁹We might see Peterson as someone who wants to agree with Pinker but also cannot deny unchecked reason unleashes madness.

³⁰Pinker, Steven. Enlightenment Now. New York, NY: Viking, 2018: 11.

³¹Pinker, Steven. Enlightenment Now. New York, NY: Viking, 2018: 12.

³²Pinker, Steven. Enlightenment Now. New York, NY: Viking, 2018: 13.

³³See The Map Is Indestructible for the note.

³⁴See The Map Is Indestructible for the note.

³⁵See The Map Is Indestructible for the note.

³⁶Last, Cadell. Real Speculations. Philosophy Portal Books, 2025: 30.

³⁷Overall, my claim is that no simple return to any “map” will be enough, and the hope of this book has been to help explain “maps” as “internally consistent systems” and why simply embedding ourselves in one will not be sufficient for Global Pluralism, even if “embedding ourselves in a map” is a necessary part of the address. How we so embed ourselves, say in light of a Gödel Point or in denial of a Gödel Point, will be everything, and if we simply say “the map isn’t the territory” and leave it there, we could be socially, economically, and politically accepting “a noumenon strategy” for the problems of our age, which I believe is strongly insufficient. We must think “map/territory together,” which is the move of someone like Hegel, which is a step made possible by realizing “the map is not the territory,” but that is only a first step needing the second. Peterson is right that “maps of meaning” matter and cannot be erased — that is the mistake of Dawkins and Harris — but “maps of meaning that are practically noumenal,” whether in light of the CE or Kant, will not suffice. We must bring the noumenon into ourselves and make it imminent, which means we must encounter limitation (as Alex Ebert emphasizes in “Fre(Q) Theory”).

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