Why The Political Should Not Carry The Spiritual It is psycho | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson Official Telegram Channel

Why The Political Should Not Carry The Spiritual

It is psychologically dangerous to confuse political explanations and ideologies with religious and spiritual ideologies and movements. You do not want the political to carry the weight of the spiritual, I do not think. I think it is dangerous. I also believe that ideologies essentially function as crippled religions. So they have the motive force of religious belief and the attractiveness of religious belief, which I think is actually a necessity for human beings because we are religious by nature, but they do not have the symbolic complexity that a religion has — a well-established religion with its mystical elements and its dogmatic elements.

The problem with ideologies, as far as I am concerned, is that they are not useful as practical, problem-solving guides. Most of the problems that beset us are very, very complex. They need to be decomposed in a sophisticated way into their constituent elements until they are differentiated enough so that partial solutions for some of the problem can arise as a consequence of practical endeavors. That requires the willingness to do that kind of detailed thinking, and it requires the development of specialized expertise. Ideology can blind you to your own stupidity, and that is actually dangerous.