Does Evil Truly Exist?

part of the reason that my lectures i would say have been successful to the degree that they have been is because people find them encouraging and that actually seems to work like it seems to be positive because it isn't good news well it seems to me i mean it isn't necessarily the case that that would be the case you know because it could have been that i would have said encouraging things to people there's more to you than meets the eye and you're capable of more than you're demanding of yourself and you know if you took on your responsibility and faced the things that you're trying to avoid that your life would be richer and better and for you and for everyone around you and the result of that could have been that thousands of people would come to me and say you know i gave that a pretty good shot and it your advice is really awful and everything is well seriously like i took on that responsibility it just bloody crushed me and i'm way worse off than i was before and everything's gone to hell around me and like thanks a lot buddy and and that it's not like that's a completely incomprehensible possibility but that doesn't seem to be what happens is what generally happens is that young people in particular but not only come to me and say look i've been trying to take on more responsibility and to face the things i've been avoiding and everything is way better it's like okay well hmm isn't that something to something well then you ask yourself well what's the limit of that because that's the religious question fundamentally is well if you took on all the responsibility you could take on and you faced everything that you needed to face what would you be like who would you be and how would the world transform around you and well if if the partial answer is well if i do that a little bit things get a fair bit better then the next question might be well what if you did that completely and i don't think that's possible in some sense right it's like you know perfection is a horizon that always recedes but it isn't obvious to me what the upper limit of that is and certainly we do see people i mean saints let's say it's a it's a who kind of push the limit and they miraculous things happen around them maybe in the literal sense and if not in the literal sense close enough you know for all intents and purposes and so that's heartening i mean i tear myself apart about this in many ways because i think perhaps it's possible to take on too much responsibility and to crush yourself as a consequence maybe that's a sin of pride who knows it's certainly possible but my experience so far has been that when you see people bear their suffering nobly there's nothing in that but good that's something and then when you see people take on more responsibility and decide that they're going to aim up and and confront their suffering honestly and forthrightly that their lives get better and the lives of people around them get better too and so it's that's very strange as well because it also means that the pathway to less suffering is through suffering right and that's kind of that would be hopeful if the world was constituted that way it's like while they're suffering how do you make it worse run away how do you make it better confront it yeah but it's suffering it's like yeah but it's there there it is it's right there it's a precondition for existence or something like that and it's like you have something important to do as well and you confront it and that's the pathway to transcending it probably it's rough maybe we wish it would be different and maybe we don't too you know when i was reflecting on parts of your chapter one of the things i was reflecting on in in light of also the snake right well i think a good suggestion is not to have a conversation with the serpent all things being equal but he ultimately they believe the lie right in i think isn't one of the greatest lies of the culture of the evil one i would say i find it really interesting you use the word the adversary in satan which from a psychologist and a scientist in this morning you said yeah you meant that that there is an evil there is a personification of evil if you read if you read anything about auschwitz about the nazi death camps about what happened in the soviet union if you read that sort of thing seriously or if you read about people who've done like i read a lot of books about the worst serial killers and i mean that's quite the competition and to be the worst serial killer which people do compete for by the way it's not like the high school shooters don't know about the reputations of all the other high school shooters it's not like they don't try to outdo them because they certainly do and they do it consciously i mean if you read those accounts and you don't walk away with the notion that evil exists and that the notion of an adversary is like as real as it gets then you just haven't read very carefully how do your peers deal with that when you say they don't you know i mean psychologists generally don't mean some psychology clinical psychologists talk about evil but but non-clinicians tend not to and that's because they're just never they just aren't confronted by it you are if you're a clinician i mean you see things in families that are so terrible that they're inexpressible and multi-generational often you know and the only language that you can really fit that sort of thing in is a religious language it's that's the only language that's serious enough and you know people i don't know the idea of evil is taboo idea scientifically it's like have it your way you know one of the things that solzhenitsyn claimed was that the nuremberg judgments were the most significant ethical event of the 20th century or at least among them because the nuremberg judgment was that some things are wrong right you don't get the excuse i was following orders you don't get the excuse that's how my culture looks at it do you don't get any excuses that's what a crime against humanity is it's like do you believe in crimes against humanity the answer is either yes or no because those are the two answers and if it's no it's then okay you have the world where that's the belief and see how that goes and all have the world where i think that there are things that are evil and we'll see how that goes and because you're gonna not condemn the imposition of pointless suffering on people for the sake of the suffering that's not wrong in some fundamental and transcendental sense i mean you can say no you know say i don't believe in evil it's okay but that has its consequences and one of the consequences is you can't condemn evil that's a problem you know or maybe not but it's not like a world where you don't condemn evil it isn't like there aren't consequences to that decision you know and i also think that there's no good where there's no evil right and so if you dispense with the idea of evil don't you simultaneously dispense with the idea of good i mean because if something doesn't exist how does its opposite exist and if evil doesn't exist then how does good exist because in some sense those two things are they're integrally linked in their reality one of them only can't exist right it's that isn't how things work if if there wasn't something that wasn't good there couldn't be good and maybe that's the reason there's evil you know metaphysically speaking because you might ask yourself well why would god make a world that's characterized by evil and the answer is well maybe evil can exist as a possibility but not a reality it could if we did things right evil could exist as a possibility and not a reality

Channel: Jordan B Peterson Clips

Views: 53,070

Keywords: psychology, philosophy, Jordan B. Peterson, Jordan Peterson, JB Peterson, jordanbpeterson, jordanpeterson, personality, understandmyself, selfauthoring, neuropsychology, jordan peterson clips, jp peterson clips, jp clips, jordan peterson podcast clips, jordan peterson motivational clips, evil, morality, humanity, darkness, why does evil exist, why does evil, does evil exist?, good and evil, evil exists, does hell really exist, question of evil, origin of evil, evil of nature, what is evil

Id: RD00BKtYC0k

Length: 8min 23sec (503 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 13 2022