Freedom Requires Responsibility | Dr. Jordan Peterson #CLIP

you want to take on responsibility you want to take on the heaviest load that you can conceive of that you might be able to move because it gives your life nobility and purpose and that offsets the tragedy and and not only psychologically not only does it offset it psychologically because you have a purpose and and something to wake up for right and to face the difficulties of the day but also because if you face the difficulties of the day properly you actually ameliorate suffering not only in the psychological sense but because you make the world at least a less terrible place and that's something right to move things away from hell is something even if you're not you know self-evidently moving forth rightly to heaven to to move things away from the worst they can be is well that's a noble goal in and of itself so and and young people are starving for that idea it's very interesting to watch as i look at it it seems to me that that acton had it right freedom properly understood it needs to be seen as a negative and as a positive the negatives is is a sort of concept of freedom from fear addiction persecution tyranny uh in a personal sense and then freedom to be is to reach your potential but it seems to me that what's missing is an understanding that freedom exercised within a framework of responsibility are you doing what you ought will guarantee your ongoing freedom for yourself and for your neighbors freedom exercised in a way that confuses it with license tends to destroy freedom in fact you could even go so far as to say that misunderstood freedom turns out to be its own worst enemy well that's that's the that's the difficult distinction between freedom of the moment and and freedom of of the the freedom with everything taken into account i mean i'm a real admirer of the work of jean piaget and piaget is a developmental psychologist and few people know the world's most uh well-known developmental psychologist and few people know that he was actually motivated in his intellectual pursuits by the desire to reconcile science with religion that was what his driving force from the time that he was a young man he wouldn't know that even necessarily by reading his writings because it's implicit rather than explicit in them but he he he has a different model of what constitutes morality than than freud freud's model is combative it's sort of the superego as tyrant so the superego would be the strictures of society the id the biological impulses and the ego crushed between those right so the ego is this thing that's crushed between nature and culture and so it's a really it's a tense and combative model of the human psyche and there's something about it that's that's that's accurate because some of the restrictions that are put on your impulse gratification are imposed on you in in a sense tyrannically but piaget's perspective was much more optimistic and i think much more accurate he noticed that as children organized themselves spontaneously as they developed especially within the confines of their own spontaneous play they didn't so much subsume or or inhibit their dark and aggressive impulses as make them sophisticated and transform them into universally acceptable games so for piaget a game that a group of children were playing that all of them were playing voluntarily and that was going well and that they all wanted to continue playing was a microcosm of society and literally a microcosm of society the reason the children were playing those games was to practice being productive members of society and he felt that the appropriate game tended towards what he described as an equilibrated state so an equilibrated state would be a game that you'll play because you've decided it's a good game but that you can play with others because they've also decided that it's a good game and so that can work at the individual level and at the familial level and at the social level and if you get all those things working simultaneously then you have a sustainable enterprise and it's it's predicated not so much on the on the uh inhibition of impulse or on the regulation of it but of the integration of impulses into a into a pattern of being that gratifies them on a relatively permanent basis so you know if you want to go to university and become a physician i think there's a lot of sacrifice of impulsive gratification that goes along with that but if you become a physician then it's a noble enterprise people support you socially and all the needs that you need to have fulfilled will also be fulfilled by that enterprise well that's a way better model and so it's strange that the maximum freedom comes with the adoption of a discipline and then also the adoption of responsibility that frees you up and everyone else around you in the long run and if you explain that to people especially in this day and age when they be fed a never-ending diet of idiot rights and freedoms they're immediately on board with it because they know they know that most of the meaning that people experience in their life is a consequence of adopting responsibility so they're starving for that our idea to be articulated opens up a whole can of very very interesting issues let's try and pick a couple of them but the but if i do it's evident to me and i'm enormously encouraged by this because you know i'm a passionate australian i want this country to be the sort of place that offers opportunities of the sort that i had when i was young you know i've had my opportunities but i look at my kids generation what's going to be there for them if we keep feeding the sort of um thin gruel in reality the people turning out in vast numbers every one of your talks in australia has been oversubscribed massively it tells you they kind of get there's more to this i think they're being told oh yeah they know well it's one of the things that's so interesting about dealing with archetypal themes you know archetypal themes are archetypal because they actually speak of the structure of human experience that's why they last and so it's human nature and human experience has a pattern you don't have the capacity to articulate that pattern as an individual in part because your life is too short you just can't figure it out but the the ancient representations of those patterns are everywhere around you and you you know some of them in the image you you cotton onto them automatically you you you fall into them if you go to a movie for example because movies always express archetypal themes if you hear them articulated you think i i knew that i knew that i just didn't know how to say it that's that's the platonic idea of of uh of of learning as remembering your soul already knows but it doesn't have the words yeah and so when people talk to me about watching my lectures let's say they say they basically say one of two things if if it's not just a simple thank you they say one of two things a third of them say a quarter of them say when i listen to you talk it's as if you're telling me things that i already know it's like yeah well that's exactly right because that's what archetypal stories are they're the description of what you already know but that can be articulated and then who you are and how you see yourself and the way you describe yourself all become the same thing so that's wonderful then you're not at odds with yourself you know and then you have then you're a functioning unity and that makes you much stronger and more indomitable than you would otherwise be and then the other thing that people say and this is more like three quarters of them is that they say i was in a very dark place i was addicted i was i was drinking too much i had a fragmented relationship with my fiance and i wasn't getting married things weren't going very well with my family my relationship with my father was damaged i didn't have any aim i was wasting my time some variant of that some combination of those and they said well i've been watching your lectures i've decided to establish a purpose i'm trying to tell the truth and things are way better and i've and so let's say i've done maybe eight or nine large-scale public talks in the last two months so that's probably 20 000 people and about half of them a third to half of them have stayed afterwards to talk to me so that's about 7 000 people who have said that to me and then people stop me on the street all the time and tell me exactly that story which is just wonderful like you can't imagine how good it is to be able to go to places you've never been and to have people stop you on the streets spontaneously and say look my life is way better than it was it's like it's so good and so and i've got like i don't know 35 000 letters from people since last august it's more than that i can't keep track of them and it's exactly the same thing like three-quarter a quarter of them say well you've given me the words to say what i already knew was true and thank you for that i can see that in the audience it's so interesting because i can lay out a story people go like this and say they're doing that all the time it's like the lights are going on and that's a really well there's almost nothing better than that to watch lights go on when you're talking to people it's like that's just absolutely fantastic but to get this response from people my father i have my father's about 80 and 80 he's 83 i think 81. he's 81 and uh i put him in charge of of going through my viewer email which is an overwhelming job but you know he we've had discussions about this constantly he's overwhelmed by the fact that so many people are writing and saying the same thing it's like well i have a purpose man my life actually matters i finally realized that and i'm putting it into practice and i'm bearing up under the heaviest load i can imagine and it's really helping it's like god and that's tens of thousands of responses now so it's it's you couldn't hope for anything better than that there's zero harm in it right it's just people putting their lives together they're not mucking about with other people they're not trying to make broad-scale social transformations about which they have no idea they're trying to make their immediate environment better and it's working it's like great it's great you say there's zero harm in it i'd say as a former legislator that there's an enormous amount of good in it a country is only the sum total of the people that make it up to the extent that they're put together resilient able to contribute don't have to ask others to help them the stronger the nation in the society and rapidly like i mean i think i was thinking the other day some a journalist asked me why the audience why people are responding so positively to what i'm saying the young men for example and i thought my yeah that's a good question he says well i'm actually on their side i'm pretty happy that i'm really happy that they're not wasting their lives i'm really sad to see that people are disenchanted and nihilistic and depressed and anxious and aimless and and perverse and vengeful and and all of those things it's terrible and then to see people question whether that's necessary and then to start to rise out of it it's like it's so fun like last night i was at after my talk it's overwhelming i don't usually think about these things but i was i was after my talk last night and so all these people line up and you know they have their 15 15 seconds with me and they're kind of tentative they're excited and attentive when they come up to talk to me and then they have you know 15 seconds of time to tell me something i'm really listening to them and they're hesitant about whether or not to share the good news about their life you know and i think it's often because when people share good news about their life people don't necessarily respond positively you know they don't get encouragement and people need so little encouragement it's just unbelievable and so they'll tell me something good and i think oh that's so good you know somebody says oh i'm getting along way better with my father i haven't seen him for 10 years and now we get along he's like god great and then the power of that you can't overstate the power of that for individuals to get their life together the individual is an unbelievably powerful force and every single person who gets their act together a little bit has the capacity to spread that around them it's it's a chain reaction and so it's a lovely thing to see you

Channel: John Anderson

Views: 23,953

Keywords: John Anderson, John Anderson Conversation, Interview, John Anderson Interview, Policy debate, public policy, public debate, John Anderson Direct, Direct, Conversations

Id: x0_aUmx4uVI

Length: 12min 28sec (748 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 06 2022