Scrambled eggs according to Jordan Peterson

posted in: How to human | 0

Jordan Peterson is a Canadian clinical psychologist and media figure with a tendency to occassionally present simple ideas by extensively citing the Old Testament, Pinocchio, and Inuit creation myths.

While the ideas are often decent, they’re also simpler than he makes them out to be in his own version of the jargon-laden esotericism he rightly critizes the bloody postmodernist neomarxists for. This is a good place to emphasize he’s very much one of the good guys in the current culture war (at least relatively speaking), but the trait is so satirizable I basically can not resist. So.

Here’s the recipe for “Eggs Peterson”:

Take two eggs, which are of course deeply symbolical of the raw potential of existence.

Raw potential nested in the embrace of chaos

The eggs are in a state of undifferentiated potential, and to make something of them, you have to break them – and this symbolizes the sacrifice of raw potentiality you have to make to make yourself BE anything real, otherwise you’re forever undifferentiated and that’s the Peter Pan situation, and you don’t want that.

So you sacrifice the potential crépes and the potential waffles and the potential sauce hollandaise to make the actual scrambled eggs, man. This is LIFE in miniature, man *voice cracks*.

And this is the sacrifice you make when you decide what to be, implicitly sacrificing all the potential that is not compatible with that. All actualization entails sacrifice! Do you understand that?

So break the eggs, and pour the shapeless mess within – which is not unlike yourself – into a pan.

Then, applying constant heat, which is the threat of Hell you must contend with if you fail, stir the eggs into a chaotic mixture using a wooden spoon that serves a symbolic role similar to the staff of Moses, parting the yolk and ordering the protein chains so to speak.

When the eggs are just the right amount of cooked, reflecting the thin edge between order and chaos, or solidity and runniness, the golden mean (much like the golden yolk!) where life happens (that’s where the chicken embryo would be!), put them on a plate.

Sprinkle with salt (an ancient symbol of wisdom), add parsley (tree of knowledge) and eat using satan’s fork.

Then immediately clean your kitchen, bucko. Don’t make your wife into your maid.

By the way, “Pan” is the Greek god of flocks and natural dynamism.


I have a favour to ask you.