Review: Origin Story: A Big History of Everything

This is a good book and I recommend it. If you’ve read Sapiens, you’ll recognize the style: when you zoom out of the trivial century-to-century history, where we think that tweets determine what’s going to happen to our civilization, then you’ll see a picture that’s more deterministic, stable and inexorable: Entropy rages against all things, from suns to sons, and all things rage back, from light to life.

Take Sagan’s cosmic calendar and expand it to a chronological book and you’ll have this book. That’s a good thing. It’s important to meditate on how you literally are the center of the universe, how you are made of starstuff, and how you represent a sampling of the most complex things in the universe.

What Sagan and other scientists often fail to mention, however, is that we have a lot of life yet to live in this universe. If you lived ten times our universe’s live- 130 billion years- then you would still have another 1000 lives to go. Everything- inflation, the formation of stars and galaxies, of life, humans, civilization... you.

EVERYTHING so far is just a prelude. This book is just a prologue worth reading.

Review: Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief

Jordan Peterson is obviously not an idiot. But he continuously repeats himself like one. He doesn't need as many words as he uses. People seem intimidated by the length of the book, and literally say, "It can't be summarized". Here's a summary:

Humans are animals, and animals have systems that help them navigate the world. Humans create a model of the world. Things that go according to the model are considered good or at least not terrifying. Things that don't go according to the model are the fucking worst. Why? Because everything that can go wrong will go wrong is baked into our brains. This creates the primordial bifurcation of "Order" and "Chaos".

Humans, being the most advanced animal, has to integrate these models between people spatially and overtime in order to survive. They have to filter out a great deal of noise, too. This creates culture. All cultures are fundamentally constrained and shaped by the model of the mind above. What's the evidence for this? Cultures keep saying the same damn thing over and over again, or at least given enough time a culture will say the same thing as another culture.

Now, culture, by connecting humans spatially and temporally, promises peace and the fulfillment of goals of the individuals within the culture. This is great until something threatens the culture- outsiders, new or antithetical value systems, for example. When these threats arrive, people will do anything they can to protect the culture. Hence the Nazis.

Literally, hence the Nazis. That's the entire point of the book. "Why did the Nazis do what they did?" Because of these traits that trace themselves back to the basic nature of humanity.

There's also a bunch of crazy shit in here copped from Jung and then expanded on. Also Campbell. Also the Bible.

Anyways, the book never is like, "What if I'm wrong?" It purely postulates things and does not try to defend itself against any critiques.

Honestly, this is a waste of time to read. I think Peterson will probably get a book deal in the next five years and he'll get a graduate student or assistant to just make a more concise sensical version of this. Hell, there's probably a Lobster-hat wearing Canadian writing up a shorter, 100-200 page version of it right now.

Read that one.