Abandoning small towns
Dr. Peterson, You speak a lot about small rural towns in America and Canada. I hear you say quite often that we should stop telling people that these small depressed rural towns are coming back. I take issue with this because many of these small rural places are heavily based in agricultural and food production. My question is, where do you believe that most of Americas food will come from if we abandon small agricultural towns? The experiment of ushering farmers and ranchers into cities has been tried, and it ended with millions of people starving to death. Our family is a ranching family in a small rural American town and for us moving to town would be soul crushing. I feel like I am suffocating in big cities. My calling and meaning life is tending animals and the land and producing good healthy food for America. You have changed my life (for the better) and been more influential than anyone else in my life, I respect you immensely and have listened to hundreds, if not thousands of hours of podcasts and interviews in hopes you’d answer this question. Thank you so much for what you do, I am eternally grateful for what I have learned from you.
Do you have any advice on networking?
I recognize is essential for my career as a banker but it feels wrong to judge the worthiness of other people for my network and then pursue a relationship on that basis. I have an immature attitude towards network. Can you offer any advice for overcoming my feelings?
Nature of God
In your college lectures you've asked your students what does a God who is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent lack? Your answer is "he lacks limitation". I’ve thought about this a bit and I think that's incorrect. I think God is bounded by the laws of nature and there for has limitations. I don't think he can muck around with those laws without there being serious consequences. Plus I don't think God can produce falsehoods, which is what would happen if he starts changing natural laws. With that being said there is a natural law called the Transitive Property of Equality, which states if A=B and B=C then A must equal C. So if Christ is a God and Chrsit was a man, then God must be man. So my question is; What are the limitations of a God who is a man? Or better yet, considering statements you have made concerning the upper limits of someone who truly got their act together and what would their life be like? Could an individual transend themselves into a deity? I would love your thoughts on that and thank you for your time.
Advice for rescuing the father, and did the father make a mistake?
I have heard you describe the concept of rescuing the father through the story of Pinocchio several times, and this piece alluded me until now. Listening to it again on your podcast's episode 250, I both see what I didn't understand, and the question it now begs. A struggle I have with my parents is that they are set in their ways, and have a somewhat dogmatic response to a lot of their beliefs. I see the struggle they are in to make sense of the world that is new and continually updated, while their internal mechanisms to keep themselves updated have not kept up. In some sense I'm concerned I will end up the same way, holding onto beliefs that need to be updated. On the other hand, it's difficult to relate to my parents when in a sense they are stuck in their ways which are in the past as far as the world is concerned. I would like to as the story of Horrus suggests, give them an eye to see the world, but continually run into the dead part of their beliefs that are somewhat an auto-response for them. Perhaps understanding the piece of rescuing the father, falling into place now, will work its way into my interactions with them, and work itself out. Any advice on how to be more intentional (if that's desirable) about it would be appreciated. Back to the fear of becoming like the father. Is this a natural part of life? We develop heuristics to interact with the world, and rely on them for so long we forget we're using them, then the heuristic fails because it's based on variables that change, and then we just get stuck? We forget how to contend with those origin variables that we don't even see them anymore? Or can we operate in a way that is continually renewing, so that we don't let our beliefs get outdated?