Best Lessons Learned from Jordan B. Peterson | Afterskool

[Music] sacrifice you get to pick your damn sacrifice that's all you don't get to not make one you're sacrificial whether you want to be or not this is the peter pan story roughly speaking is peter pan is this magical boy pan means pan is the god of everything roughly speaking right and so it's not an accident that he has the name pan and he's the boy that won't grow up and he's magical well that's because children are magical they can be anything they're nothing but potential and peter pan doesn't want to give that up why well he's got some adults around him but the main adult is captain hook well who the hell wants to grow up to be captain hook first of all you've got a hook second you're a tyrant and third you're chased by the dragon of chaos with a clock in its stomach right the crocodile it's already got a piece of you well that's what happens when you get older time has already got a piece of you and eventually it's got a taste for you and eventually it's going to eat you and so hook is so traumatized by that that he can't help but be a tyrant and then peter pan looks at traumatized hook and says well no i'm not sacrificing my childhood for that so that's fine except he ends up king of lost boys in neverland well neverland doesn't exist and who the hell wants to be king of the lost boys and he also sacrifices the possibility to have a real relationship with a woman because that's wendy right and she's kind of conservative middle class london dwelling girl she wants to grow up and have kids and have a life she accepts her mortality she accepts her maturity peter pan has to content himself with tinkerbell she doesn't even exist she's like she's like the fairy of porn she doesn't exist she's the substitute for the real thing and so but the dichotomy that you're talking about it's very tricky because there's a sacrificial element in maturation right you have to sacrifice the plural potentiality of childhood for the actuality of a frame and the question is well why would you do that well one reason is it happens to you whether you do it or not you can either choose your damn limitation you can let it take you unaware when you're 30 or even worse when you're 40 and then that is not a happy day you see i see people like this and i think it's more and more common in our culture because people can put off maturity without suffering an immediate penalty but all that happens is the penalty accrues and then when it finally hits it just wallops you because when you're 25 you can be an idiot it's no problem even when you're out in a job search it's like well you don't have any experience and you're kind of clueless it's yeah yeah you're young you know it's no problem we can that's what young people are like but they're full of potential okay well now you're the same person at 30. it's like people aren't so thrilled about you at that point it's like what the hell have you been doing for the last 10 years well i'm just as clueless as i was when i was 22. yeah but you're not 22. you're an old infant right and that's an ugly thing an old infant so the the re part of the reason you choose your damn sacrifice because the sacrifice is inevitable but at least you get to choose it and then there's something that's that's even more complex than that in some sense is that the problem with being a child is that all you are is potential and it's really low resolution you could be anything but you're not anything so then you go and you adopt an apprenticeship roughly speaking and then you become at least you become something and when you're something that makes the world open up to you again you know like if you're a really good plumber then you end up being far more than a plumber right you end up being a good employer not not that plumbers i'm not putting plumbers down it's like more power to plumbers they've saved more lives than doctors so hygiene right so you know if you're a really good plumber well then you have some employees you run a business you you make you you train some other people you enlarge their lives you're kind of a pillar of the community you you have your family it's you can once you pass through that narrow training period which narrows you and constricts you and develops you at the same time then you can come out the other end with a bunch of new possibility at hell at hand and jung talked about that he thought that the proper part of the proper path of development in the last half of life was to rediscover the child that you left behind as you were apprenticing and so then you get to be something and regain that potential at the same time very very smart well he was very very smart so that's very wise very wise thing to know sacrifice you get to pick your damn sacrifice that's all you don't get to not make one you're sacrificial whether you want to be or not that's a good thing to know as well [Music] dostoevsky said that in notes from the underground a great great book and you know he said i love this it was his an early critic criticism of the notion of a political utopia he said look if you gave people everything they wanted they had nothing to eat but cake and nothing to do but sit in warm pools and busy themselves with the continuation of the species that was his his lines that the first thing they would do well maybe after the first week was like go kind of half insane and smash everything up just so that something that they didn't expect would happen so that they'd have something interesting to do and it's it's so right because you know the the utopian notion that if you just had all the material stuff you wanted that you'd you'd be well what would you be what would you do would you just sit on the couch and watch tv i mean you'd you'd be i don't know what you'd be cutting yourself just for entertainment in no time flat you know and that's the sort of thing that people do and so we're not adapted for security and utopia we're adapted for a certain amount of security because you know we are vulnerable but mostly we want to have one foot out where we don't know what the hell is going on because that's where you're alert and alive and tense and with it and and you know i think i believe this and i believe it actually has something to do with the hemispheric structure of the physiology of your brain is because the right hemisphere looks roughly adapted to what you don't know and the left hemisphere and this is a very this is an oversimplification but a useful one is adapted to the world that you do know and the right place for you to be is halfway between them because then you can tell that that's what's so cool and this tells you that this is actually reality that's manifesting itself to you you know that sense of active engagement you have in the world when things are working well for you you know where you're where you should be at the right time you're alert and on top of things and engaged and you don't have much of a sense of time and the sense of the tragedy of life sort of recedes and that's when you're that's when you've got one foot when it's where it's secure and one foot out in the unknown and your brain signals to you that you're in the right place by making what you're doing meaningful and that sense of meaning is actually a neurophysiological signal that you've got the forces of the cosmos properly balanced in your being at that moment and that's why it feels so good now what else could it possibly be i mean you know our our brain is capable of looking beyond our vision that's what it's for and that sense of engagement there's no reason to assume that that's anything but a real signal and you can reduce it you could say well the problem with being where you know only is that you don't know everything and that's going to be a problem in the future and the problem with being where you know nothing is that's just too much man like you know you go into panic mode and because anything can happen there and you can't handle it so you've got to mediate between those two things you want to be secure enough so that your physiology isn't revving out of control and you want to be out there in the unknown enough so that you keep updating yourself constantly constantly constantly and that's that's the place where information flow is maximized and you know that because that's where you are when you're having a really interesting conversation with someone or you're gripped by a book or you're really into a movie or maybe something that you do as a you know apart from your work or maybe even in your work you're into it and that's because you are in the right place at the right time and your whole nervous system is signaling that to you and i would say that's the sort of place that you should be all the time of course you can't be because no one's perfect but it's that's that's the recreation of paradise on earth it's something like it because you are in the right place at the right time when that is happening and so we're mobile creatures right we need to know where we're going because all we're ever concerned about roughly speaking is where we're going that's what we need to know where are we going what are we doing and why it turns out that the way that we're constructed neurophysiologically is that we don't experience any positive emotion unless we have an aim and we can see ourselves progressing towards that aim it isn't precisely attaining the aim that makes us happy as you all know if you've ever attained anything because as soon as you attain it then the whole little game ends then you have to come up with another game right so it's it's sisyphus and that's okay but but it does show that the attainment can't be the thing that drives you because it collapses the game that's what happens when you graduate from university it's like you're king of the mountain for one day and then you're like surf at at starbucks for the next five years you know so yeah so what happens is that that human beings are weird creatures because we're much more activated by having an aim and moving towards it than we are by attainment and what that means is you have to have an aim and that means you have to have an interpretation and it also means that the nobler the aim that's one way of thinking about it the better your life and that's a really interesting thing to know because you know you've heard ever since you were tiny that you should act like a good person and you shouldn't lie for example and you might think well why the hell should i act like a good person and why not lie i mean even a three-year-old can ask that question because smart smart kids learn to lie earlier by the way and they think well why not twist the fabric of reality so that it serves your specific short-term needs i mean that's a great question why not do that why act morally if you can get away with something and it brings you closer to something you want well why not do it these are good questions it's not self-evident well it seems to me tied in with what i just mentioned it's like you destabilize yourself and things become chaotic that's not good and if you don't have a noble aim then you have nothing but but shallow trivial pleasures and they don't sustain you and that's not good because because life is so difficult so much it's so much suffering it's so complex it ends and everyone dies and it's painful it's like without a noble aim how can you withstand any of that you can't you become desperate and once you become desperate things go things go from bad to worse very rapidly when you become desperate and so there's the idea of the noble aim and it's it's not something it's it's something that's necessary it's the bread that people cannot live without right that's not physical bread it's the noble aim and what is that well it's to pay attention it's to speak properly it's to confront chaos it's to make a better world it's something like that and that's enough of a noble aim so that you can stand up without you know cringing at the very thought of your own existence so that you can do something that's worthwhile to justify your wretched position on the planet and whatever it is that is you has this capacity to experience reality and to transform it which is very strange thing you know you can conceptualize a future in your imagination and then you can work and make that manifest you participate in the process of creation it's an amazing idea because it gives consciousness a constitutive role in the cosmos [Music] the conditions of human life are such that suffering is an integral part of existence now it's an important thing to understand it's also a viewpoint shared by the bulk of the great religious systems of the world life is suffering why well one reason is because of society's arbitrary judgment right every single one of us has traits and features and and quirks and idiosyncrasies that are far from ideal and that are judged by the standards of society as insufficient and so you suffer because of your imperfect insufficiency in the eyes of others and you can certainly make the claim that fairly frequently that's arbitrary and so that's the claim that society is tyrannical and judgmental and needs to be constantly re constituted so that the tyrannical element doesn't take full control and fair enough you have to stay awake so that that doesn't happen but the thing is it doesn't matter what society it is although they vary in the degree of their tyranny the mere fact that you're grouped together with other people and have to come up with a common value structure in order to live together means that many of the things that characterize you are going to be sub-optimal and so the price you pay for social being is that much of you is deemed insufficient now hopefully there are various ways that you can be within a society that's sufficiently diverse so that you can find a place where what's good about you in the eyes of others and perhaps in your own eyes can flourish of its own accord because you don't have to be good at everything if you can be good at at one thing well enough that might allow you your niche and hopefully a healthy society allows for that certainly societies can become so tyrannical that they don't so you can lay one source of human suffering at the feet of tyrannical social structures but the other element of it clearly is the mere fact of the arbitrariness of the natural world if you have a lifespan that's going to be counted in the number of decades that you can count on two hands and that has nothing to do technically with the tyranny of the social structure now you could say if we got our act together more completely perhaps you could live longer and fair enough but the fact of the limits of your lifespan and the suffering that's necessarily a consequence of that the death of your parents and the death of most people that you will know before you means that that part of suffering is an integral part of existence itself and so that can't be laid at the feet of an insufficient social structure except insofar as it's tyrannical and blind it's a condition of existence and then by the same token you have your own responsibility for some of your unnecessary suffering because there's things you could be doing to make your life better and to make life better for other people that you know perfectly well that you're not doing and so if you stopped doing all the unnecessary things that make your life bad then it would improve to some degree that is not really computable because you don't know how far you could push that so there's three reasons why you suffer and one is well look at you and the way you're built it's inevitable there's not very much of you and there's a lot of everything else and so you just don't last that long and you're fragile across multiple domains and then you're harshly treated by society and there's no doubt about that and then there's responsibility that can be laid at your own feet well the existential take on that and the thing that all these diverse people that we've been talking about including victor franklin including alexander solzhenitsyn as well as um uh kierkegaard nietzsche and dostoevsky and the people that i've already talked to you about is that the proper pathway through that is to adopt the mode of authentic being and that is something like refusing to participate in the lie in deception in the lie to orient your speech as much as you can towards the truth and to take responsibility for your own life and perhaps also for the lives of other people and there's something about that that's meaningful and responsible and noble but also serves to mitigate the very suffering that produces say the nihilism or the flea into the arms of flea or or the or the escape into the arms of totalitarians to begin with you need something to shelter you against your own vulnerability and you can adopt a comprehensive description of reality that's formulated for you by someone else that neatly divides the world into those who are innocent and perhaps innocent victims and those who are guilty and perhaps the perpetrators of the suffering but none of that has anything to do with you and in addition it's simply not it's not a reasonable way of assessing the world that the suffering is built in so that's why the there's an existentialist insistence upon that so that for the freudians the psychoanalysts and even for people like carl rogers to some degree if you're in a situation that's characterized by psychopathology if there's something wrong with you mentally that's a consequence of something gone wrong but that's not the existentialist take the existentialist take is no that's just how it is that's just how it is you don't have to necessarily have done anything wrong for things to get completely out of control it's a terrifying doctrine but it's not a hopeless doctrine because it still says that there's a way forward there's a pathway forward and the pathway forward is to adopt a motive being that has some nobility so that you can tolerate yourself and perhaps even have some respect for yourself as someone who's capable of standing up in the face of that terrible vulnerability and suffering and that the pathway forward as far as the existentialists are concerned is by well certainly by the avoidance of deceit particularly in language but also by the adoption of responsibility for the conditions of existence and some attempt on your part to actually rectify them and the thing that's so interesting about that is that well two as far as i'm concerned and some of this is from clinical experience you know if you take people and i've told you this and you expose them voluntarily to things that they are avoiding and are afraid of you know that they know they need to overcome in order to meet their goals their self-defined goals if you can teach people to stand up in the face of the things they're afraid of they get stronger and you don't know what the upper limits to that are because you might ask yourself like if for 10 years if you didn't avoid doing what you knew you needed to do by the depth by your own definitions right within the value structure that you've created to the degree that you've done that what would you be like well you know there are remarkable people who come into the world from time to time and there are people who do find out over decades-long periods what they could be like if they were who they were if they said if they spoke their being forward and they get stronger and stronger and stronger and we don't know the limits to that we do not know the limits to that and so you could say well in part perhaps the reason that you're suffering unbearably can be left at your feet because you're not everything you could be and you know it and of course that's a terrible thing to admit and it's a terrible thing to consider but there's real promise in it right because it means that perhaps there's another way that you could look at the world and the number another way that you could act in the world so what it would reflect back to you would be much better than what it reflects back to you now and then the second part of that is well imagine that many people did that because we've done a lot as human beings we've done a lot of remarkable things and i've told you already i think before that today for example about 250 000 people will be lifted out of abject poverty and about 300 000 people attached to the electrical power grid we're making people we're lifting people out of poverty collectively at a faster rate that's ever occurred in the history of humankind by a huge margin and that's been going on unbelievably quickly since the year 2000 the u.n had planned to have poverty between 2000 and 2015 and it was accomplished by 2013. so there's inequality developing in many places and you hear lots of political agitation about that but overall the the tide is lifting everyone up and that's a great thing we have no idea how fast we could multiply that if people got their act together and really aimed at it because you know my my experience is with people that we're probably running at about 51 percent of our capacity something i mean you can think about this yourselves i often ask undergraduates how many hours a day you waste or how many hours a week you waste and the classic answer is something like four to six hours a day you know inefficient studying uh watching things on youtube that not only do you not want to watch that you don't even care about that make you feel horrible about watching after you're done that's probably four hours right there you know you think well that's 20 25 hours a week it's 100 hours a month that's two and a half full work weeks it's half a year of work weeks per year and if your time is worth twenty dollars an hour which is a radical underestimate it's probably more like 50 if you think about it in terms of deferred wages if you're wasting 20 hours a week you're wasting 50 000 a year and you are doing that right now and it's because you're young wasting 50 000 a year is a way bigger catastrophe than it would be for me to waste it because i'm not going to last nearly as long and so if your life isn't everything it could be you could ask yourself well what would happen if you just stopped wasting the opportunities that are in front of you you'd be who knows how much more efficient 10 times more efficient 20 times more efficient that's the pareto distribution you have no idea how efficient efficient people get it's completely it's off the charts well and if we all got our act together collectively and stop making things worse because that's another thing people do all the time not only do they not do what they should to make things better they actively attempt to make things worse because they're spiteful or resentful or arrogant or deceitful or or homicidal or genocidal or all of those things all bundled together in an absolutely pathological package if people stopped really really trying just to make things worse we have no idea how much better they would get just because of that so there's this weird dynamic that's part of the existential system of ideas between human vulnerability social judgment both of which are are are major causes of suffering and the failure of individuals to adopt the responsibility that they know they should adopt and that's the thing that's interesting too is that it isn't merely that your fate depends on whether or not you get your act together and to what degree you decide that you're going to live out your own genuine being it isn't only your fate it's the fate of everyone that you're networked with and so you know you think well there's 9 billion 7 billion people in the world we're going to peak at about 9 billion by the way and then it'll decline rapidly but seven billion people in the world and who are you you're just one little dust mote among that seven billion and so it really doesn't matter what you do or don't do but that's simply not the case it's the wrong model because you're at the center of a network you're a node in a network of course that's even more true now that we have social media you'll you'll know a thousand people at least over the course of your life and they'll know a thousand people each and that puts you one person away from a million and two persons away from a billion and so that's how you're connected and the things you do they're like dropping a stone in a pond the ripples move outward and they affect things in ways that you can't fully comprehend and it means that the things that you do and that you don't do are far more important than you think and so if you act that way of course the terror of realizing that is that it actually starts to matter what you do and you might say well that's better than living a meaningless existence it's better for it to matter but i mean if you really asked yourself would you be so sure if you had the choice i can live with no responsibility whatsoever the price i pay is that nothing matters or i can reverse it and everything matters but i have to take the responsibility that's associated with that it's not so obvious to me that people would take the meaningful path you know when you say well nihilists suffer dreadfully because there's no meaning in their life and they still suffer yeah but the advantage is they have no responsibility so that's the payoff and i actually think that's the motivation say well i can't help being nihilistic all my belief systems have collapsed it's like yeah maybe maybe you've just allowed them to collapse because it's a hell of a lot easier than acting them out and the price you pay is some meaningless suffering but you can always whine about that and people will feel sorry for you and you have the option of taking the pathway of the martyr so that's a pretty good deal all things considered especially when they are when the alternative is to bear your burden properly and to live forthrightly in the world well if you live a pathological life you pathologize your society and if enough people do that then it's hell really really i hope you found this animated lecture selection engaging and useful and would like to thank the after-school team for their work and their generosity i would also like to extend to all of those watching and listening a sincere invitation to further explore what my team and i are offering on this youtube channel my podcast and in my books your engagement is most welcome and your attention and interest most genuinely appreciated [Music] you

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 997,282

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, psychology, psychoanalysis, Jung, existentialism

Id: hJrEaLYacwc

Length: 27min 48sec (1668 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 12 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/letsgocrazy]

In this animated lecture selection, Jordan Peterson discusses the important lessons about picking your sacrifice, pursuing a noble aim, and facing suffering voluntarily. These topics are covered in great detail and the animation helps the viewer to go step by step through Jordan Peterson’s lectures on them.

Thanks to After Skool (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1Km...) for their animation and generosity.

[u/mattislife]

Roughly speaking

[u/JiveWithIt]

This was a good video. I wish my friends (and family) who most needs to hear this, would be receptive to the message.

All I can do right now is show don’t tell.