Jordan Peterson: 60 Minutes for the NEXT 60 Years of Your LIFE (MUST WATCH)

the modern idea is you're supposed to accept yourself I think that's an insane idea by the way really I think I can't think of a more nihilistic idea than that you're already okay it's like no you're not and the reason you're not is because you could be way more than you are so what do you want to be you want to be okay as you are or do you want to strive towards what's better human beings are insufficient in and of themselves and need the movement upward and so they need to conceptualize something like the highest good and then to strive for for that you should love and feel good about the person you are now and that's actually a dubious proposition for a variety of reasons one is whatever yourself is is not only what you are yourself is also what you could become and so To Love Yourself properly is not only to love what you are who you are whatever that means but to love who you could become now one of the things I've observed is that it's very demoralizing for the typical young person who's miserable and maladjusted psychologically and socially if you just go to them and say well you should feel good about yourself because they think you're good just the way you are you're perfect just the way you are you should accept yourself just the way you are it's like well okay so what does that say about who I should become is that just now off the table because I'm already good enough in every way so am I done or something what about who I should become and then well how should I feel good about myself when I don't because I'm not getting along with myself I'm anxious and hopeless and nihilistic and depressed and I'm not getting along with other people so how is it that that's all somehow something I should feel good about without being deluded and these are complicated questions because you don't want to beat yourself with a stick which might be the opposite of that as well feel bad about yourself it's like no be judicious and merciful with yourself and think that you need to accept yourself in some way the way a mother accepts a child but the maternal spirit is not the only spirit that governs the love that a child requires properly you have the paternal Spirit of encouragement as well which is well we need to shelter and protect you and to provide for your security the way you are but you could be a lot better and should be and I have faith that you could be which is the love that I'm delivering to what you're becoming rather than what you are and so love that you direct towards yourself is partly directed towards that maternal care that's sort of the minimum precondition for basic flourishing combined with an attitude of encouragement towards the possibilities of your being and so that's a much more sophisticated so-called self-love partly because it's the kind of love that envisions you as something that unfolds across time and it's it's a much richer conception because it also implies that there's a responsible adventure to your life you're not all you could be and there's pain in that and there's the necessity for a certain amount of judgment about that and even a certain amount of exclusion because what you are that is insufficient in some sense should be not be allowed to propagate further but if it's conjoined with encouragements like yeah you're in a rough situation there kiddo but you know here's some things about you that are virtuous and good and they're pretty powerful actually and if you just made those more manifest you could dispense with a lot of this immaturity and misery and you could expand yourself out into life physically and psychologically and you could start walking this pathway that makes things better and the thing is that as soon as you start walking the pathway that makes things better then things immediately become better because your whole orientation changes and you know if you're in a bad place but you're escaping in that's pretty positive even if it's a bad place and you might think well it's still bad but it's better it's like well that's a lot that's a lot better than a bad place that's getting worse that's for sure cuz that's hell hell is a bad place that's getting worse that's for sure and so if you take the bad place and it's getting better well it's already not hell that's a start and so this notion of Love we've confused this with the maternal Instinct for an infant it's like cuz an infant under 6 months it's like well of course your attitude towards infant is you're exactly okay the way you are but that's not what you do to any child that's older than 6 months you start laying down some criteria for becoming for improvement and some of that Improvement CU we could Define it well there's nothing more perfect than a child than a baby it's like yeah but that's not true if the baby's 14 years old right it's true if the baby's 6 months old and actually a baby but by 9 months well the child is going to be start to interact socially and now there's some principles that the the child has to learn to abide by so that social interaction is optimized you want to take the infant who's entirely dependent and turn them into something that's autonomous and then socially integrated and then socially integrated in a manner that's moving them towards individual responsibility and the love is not only love that's devoted to what they are at any point which is that encompassing maternal love say but the love that says yeah kid you know we're pretty happy you're you're around but the the new you is going to even be better and that's encouragement and that's part of love it's half of love that's for sure and you want to direct that to yourself as well it's like you don't want to judge who you are so harshly that you just destroy yourself and everything is cast into the pit you want to take a look at yourself and say look you know you're a person among persons and you have intrinsic worth and you have your flaws your sins your your domain of ignorance and in that adequacy but that doesn't mean that you're entirely worthless because of that you have a base level value that's intrinsic worth let's say that that's reflective of the fact that you're made in the Divine image in the most fundamental sense you have intrinsic worth and that's due a certain degree of Baseline love but there's the becoming problem it's like well especially when you're young most of you is still in the becoming phase and so why wouldn't encouragement be the Hallmark of love it's like get the hell up get your act together adopt some responsibility put your life together develop a vision expand yourself beyond the narrow confines that are causing your misery and we think you can do it you could do it you should do it the world would be better off if you did it you'd be doing better if you did it everything would work out better why would we not work to make everything work out better and you're the person who could do it and you tell young people that and they think well no one ever told me that before in that way and they think well maybe I should get my act together and then they go out and try to get their act together then they think well huh turned out that worked and I'm less miserable I could try doing it a little bit on a broader scale and they try that and they think wow people seem a lot happier with me I have more friends and I'm more popular and I'm a little more physically attractive cuz I'm standing up a little bit straighter and then away they go and unfold man be a force for good in the world then that'll be the adventure of your life aimless is not nothing aimless is bad Nisha said if you had a a why you could bear any how most people find the meaning in their life through responsibility I believe the the fundamental religious truth of the idea that life is suffering it's suffering because we're mortal and fragile and because we're also subject to malevolence at our own hands into the at at the hands of others it's a it's a constant existential problem and that can make you bitter and can make you hopeless and nihilistic and depressed and anxious and pro and likely to abuse uh substances of various sorts as as a medication or an escape it it can augur you in in a very large number of ways and I'm suggesting to people that there is a way out of that and the way out is to confront that forthrightly and to adopt responsibility in your own life and to try to make the world a better place and that it's necessary to do that and that if you don't do that that things go badly I think the deck is stacked against everyone to some degree because life is very difficult and we all die so but people some people do have it harder than others and and all of us have it very hard at sometimes in our lives it's like well what's the what's the alternative you take responsibility for that and try to struggle uphill because the alternative makes everything worse find something in your life that's so worthwhile doing that the fact that you're going to suffer is justifiable yeah life's rough no doubt about it and if good luck comes your way then you should be grateful for it and if happiness manages to manifest itself you should be grateful for that too so then you might ask yourself well what's the best antidote to the discomfort of life and you might say well it's comfort and I suppose that's what you act out when you swaddle a baby but a better antidote is something like Adventure to Excellence and that's far better antidote to suffering than the mere absence of suffering so not than the mere absence of suffering so not to say that the mere absence of suffering that's not nothing I've been a psychotherapist for 20 years I've seen things you can't imagine horror shows that you can't fathom and people who have been hurt in so many ways so many dimensions it's like should they be bitter should they be resentful should they become violent these things don't help they have to struggle uphill despite their excess burden and it's responsibility not guilt it's the female crucifixion so and and that's exemplified best in well the best portrayal of that I've seen is Michelangelo's Pi you know it's it's a statue of Mary uh and she has Christ's body on her as an adult on her lap he's broken and destroyed and you know she's displaying that that's that's The Bravery of a mother to allow that to happen but not only that to to facilitate it facilitate it there you go kid where you go where you go well why it's dangerous out there it's like yeah no kidding it's more dangerous here if you stay with me by a lot so you might lose your body out there in the world but if you stay here you lose your soul you know I mean it's a pretty competitive world there's lots of competition for young men in particular there's competition for status and limited resources and for the attention of women and just because you're nice doesn't necessarily mean that you come out particularly well in those competitions I would like to say that you should all be smarter but I don't know how you could be smarter we don't know anything about how to improve intelligence and I suppose we don't really know anything about how to improve industriousness either but I can tell you that people who are industri come up with a strategy for solving the problem that's ahead of them and then they do whatever they can to stick to the strategy and so for example if you sat down today or tomorrow for a couple of hours 3 hours and you filled in a Google Calendar whatever you happen to use with a a strategy for studying and a list of when all your assignments are due and all of that and when you're going to sit down and study then you won't be in a position where you have to cram for 10 hours a day hopelessly right before you know an important exam is beautifully put that uh love is the the highest ideal to reach for and Truth is it's handmaiden I try I thought about that for a long time right this hierarchy of Ideal and the thing about truth that bitter truth let's say that cynical truth is it can break the shackles of naivity and actually a burnt cynicism is a moral Improvement over a blind naivity even though one is in some ways positive but only because it's protected and the other is bitter and dark but still better but you're not done at that point you're just barely started I think optimally we exist to have something like a playful Adventure right we're built for an optimal challenge it's partly why we like to play because in play you find an optimal challenge it's almost like the definition of play and so if you can organize yourself and the world optimally then you have adventure and maybe you have the adventure of your life and if you can do that brilliantly then you can do it in a spirit of play that's what you need and want I saw in Endless repetition in my clinical practice and in my own private life when my eyes were open the conse quences of not saying what was true it's like whatever hell you might fall into by opening your mouth when you have something to say that isn't popular it's nothing like the hell that you're going to envelop yourself in if you lose control of your own tongue and mind and I like I said in my clinical practice I never saw anyone get away with anything even once and so all you have in a situation like that is what is the truth now you know of course you only have your approximations to the truth but that's better than nothing and so you need to be afraid of the right thing and you should be afraid of contaminating your soul with deceit that's what you should be afraid of what happens is you know garbage in garbage out the old programmer saying goes and so you'll fill your head with nonsense and no one will call you on it except you but you can steal that voice if you try hard enough you just wait until you get in real trouble you know one day there'll come a point where you have to make a decision and the decision is the difference between life and death or Worse between someone else's life and death or Worse between health and the suffering that's worse than death and because you've compromised yourself to such a degree you will not be able to rely on your judgment and you'll make the mistake you shouldn't make and then you're done and that will absolutely happen yeah well I mean you you set what's great against what's tragic yeah I mean what else could you possibly do and so then you say well how do you find what's great in your own life and part of that is you watch it's like when is it that I'm doing something that alleviates my suffering right it's a real you have to ask that question to yourself honestly one of the things you have them do is say well why don't you just watch for a week like watch yourself like you don't know who you are and just see when you're not quite as miserable and then let's see if we can figure out what it is about what you're doing in that situation that's lifting the Gloom it's like okay okay there's something in that that's Curative right and that's something in that that's Curative is related to well you might say your purpose it's like maybe part of the reason you're depressed is because you're too isolated and now we can work on that so let's see if we can increase the amount of time you're spending with your friends by like 20% or maybe you need a couple of new friends or maybe you need to work on your comic material you know because you can set that against the tragedy of life I've been trying to figure out what gives people's lives meaning and if you look at it technically in order to have any positive meaning in your life you have to have identified a goal and you have to be working towards it and there is a technical reason for that and the technical reason as far as I can tell is that the circuitry that produces the kind of positive emotion that people really like is only activated when you're proceeding towards a goal that you value and so that means that if you don't have a goal that you value you can't any positive emotions so technically that's the incentive reward system and it's the underlying circuitry is dopaminergic and when that circuitry is activated then it's part of the exploratory circuit it makes you it gives you the sense of being actively engaged in something worthwhile you know you you tend to think of positive emotion as something produced by reward but there's two kinds of positive emotion one is the reward that's associated with satiation and that's consumatory reward and that's the reward you get when you're hungry and you eat but the thing about eating when you're hungry is that it destroys the framework within which you were operating right it's time to eat while you eat and then that framework is no longer relevant so the consumatory reward eliminates the value framework and then you're stuck with well what are you going to do next and so the consumatory reward has with it its own problems but the incentive reward is constantly what keeps you moving forward and incentive reward because it's dopaminergic also is analgesic literally analgesic so if you're in pain pain you take opiates and that that will cut the pain but so will psychot stimulants like cocaine or amphetamines and so it's literally the case that if you're engaged in something that's engaging and you're working towards a goal that you're going to feel less pain and you can see this happening with athletes who you know they'll break their thumb or something or maybe sometimes even their ankle and they'll keep playing the game of course afterwards they're suffering like mad but the fact that they're so filled with gold directed enthusiasm means that with a pain system are in some sense shut off so that's an interesting thing because what it suggests I mean then you could imagine I might say well how happy you are you that you've made a certain amount of progress and if you think about it what you'd say is well it depends on how much progress and in relationship to what so hypothetically you're going to be happier if you've made quite a bit of progress towards a really important goal and then you have to think through what it means for a goal to be really important cuz that's not obvious now you could say you're in this class and you're listening to some information and maybe there's two reasons for that you might find the information interesting per se but let's forget about that for a minute you need to listen to the information so that you can do well on the assignment so that you can do well in the class you need to do well in your classes so that you can finish up your degree you need to finish up your degree so that you can find your place in the world you need to do that so that you're financially stable and maybe you can start a family and have a life and that's all part of being a good person something like that and so that's a hierarchy of goals and you might say that being a good person would be the thing however vaguely thought through that's at the top of that hierarchy and then when you're doing things that serve the that ultimate purpose then you're going to find those more meaningful and that meaning is actually produced as a consequence of the engagement of this exploratory circuit that's nested right down in your hypothalamus it's really really old it's as old as thirst and it's as old as hunger it's really an old system and so you want to have that thing activated it might be that the sense of meaning that life can provide to you is proportionate to the amount of responsibility you decide to take on and that that'd be very strange if it was the case you know because responsibility of course is a kind of weight obviously and it's difficult to take on responsibility but if any positive emotion that you feel and and your control of anxiety and the control over pain is dependent on the activation of these systems that watch you move towards a desired goal then the more complete and weighty the goal is the more kick there's going to be in the observation that you're moving towards it and you know you kind of already know this because you'll you'll have observed in your own life that when you're engaged in something that you believe in that the time passes properly you know you can see this even if you're maybe you're reading a paper and it's actually related in some intelligible manner to something that you want to learn so even though it's difficult you get engaged in it you can remember it better you can process it better and you're not so likely to fall asleep and you're not so likely to want to find distractions all of that you can get into it and it would be very interesting if that was proportionate to the degree of responsibility that you're willing to shoulder and I I think you can make a strong case for that I've also often wondered imagine you could offer people a choice here's the choice you could say well your life isn't meaningful the nihilists have got it right there's no meaning in your life and because of that there's no reason for you to accept any responsibility so you can live a responsibility free life and maybe one of impulsive pleasure seeking but a responsibility free life but the price you pay is that it doesn't get to be meaningful or you could say to someone no we're going to do the opposite we're to say you can live a meaningful life but it's only going to be as meaningful as the amount of responsibility that you're willing to bear and then you might say well what would people choose cuz everybody also always makes noises about wanting to have a meaningful life but if the price you pay for that is the adoption of responsibility then it's not so obvious that people would choose meaning over you know over pointless Pursuits if the benefit they got for choosing the pointless Pursuits was that they really didn't have to care about anything they ever did right there's no responsibility when you go from a bad place to a better place you go to a worst place first it's a great thing to know because it also tells you why you might be unwilling to take the next step you know you're aiming up but to in order to aim up you have to let go of something you already have and then that'll put you into a state of chaos and unless you're willing to undergo that intermediary state of chaos and you might not recover from it you're not going to get to the next level many of you I presume have seen breaking bad you have this ordinary High School teacher who really thinks that he's an Axe and his family as well you know like your typical Persona roughly speaking he's just a normal guy but part of the reason that he's a normal guy is because he actually hasn't been put in abnormal circumstances and then all of a sudden he is and he has a genuine moral conundrum right he's going to die of lung cancer and his he has a has son who's got got a lot of health problems and he's terrified that that he's going to leave his wife and his child behind with nothing and so he decides to do something that temporarily that he regards as what he would normally regard as reprehensible and of course he just gets tangled up in that but then as the story unfolds you see that there's it's more complicated because it's not that he was just innocent good guy and he decided to turn bad he's also very resentful and angry and it's partly because he's a bit of a pushover at the beginning or maybe more than a bit of a pushover and also that he didn't really fulfill his own potential and that you know he he had friends who walk down the entrepreneurial path and maybe they weren't quite fair to him but whatever he ends up not very successful as a high school teacher so he's really angry about that and so there's more motivation for him opening up the door to to the terrible elements of his personality than just the fact that he's got good motivations to do so and that that unfolds you know and so you see the warps and twists in his resentful character increasingly manifest thems as he walks down this road to really total brutality so it's one step at a time and that's the thing is that you end up in very bad places one step at a time so you got to watch those steps sometimes you take a leap forward and you learn some things but you can't catalyze a new identity so you try to go back and hide in your old identity and that actually doesn't work because well things have changed and you've learned something and that isn't who you are anymore and so it's like you have to cut part parts of yourself off in a destructive manner to fit back into the person that you were one of the times in your life when you actually realize that you're an individual is when you'll go and ask your parents something and you'll realize they actually don't know any more about what you should do then you do and that sucks and that's partly why people are often willing to maintain a tyrant slave relationship with their fathers like on the one hand you have to be inferior in a relationship like that you know you've always got the judge watching you but on the other hand there's always someone who knows what to do there's always someone standing between you and the unknown that you can go ask what should I do well at some point you'll realize that the reason you can't ask that anymore is because they actually don't know any more than you do and then that's a pain like that that is a symbolic death that's also when you establish a more individual relationship with your parents it's at that point that you could conceivably start taking care of them instead of the reverse and that's a time that should come but you have to let that image of perfection go and that exposes you when you're doubtful say you're trapped you ask yourself well why am I trapped that's a hard question right some of it's your own inadequacy you ask yourself you sit on the bed and say okay man I'm ready to learn something like what's one thing I'm doing wrong that I know I'm doing wrong that I could fix that I would fix it's like you meditate on that you'll get an answer and it won't be one you want but it'll be the necessary one we kind of experience life as if we're tossed into it you're male and not female you're Hindu and not Christian you're tall and not short you have an arbitrary range of talents and an arbitrary range of limitations none of which in some sense you chose it's the cards you're dealt now some of those are cards of privilege no maybe you're born intelligent maybe you're born symmetrical maybe you're born healthy maybe you're born into a culture where it's much easier not to be absolutely deprived and so all of that in some sense is unearned now the way you pay for your privileges with your virtue you have these opportunities and this existential guilt and the way you expiate that and atone is by doing your best to live the best possible life you can manage to speak the truth to treat people with respect to abide by the principles of the Dignity of the individual and to put your house in order and that's how you pay for your unearned [Music] privilege and we all have our Privileges and our curses all of us have that that's why it's not useful to be envious of people people Carl Yung said people in the modern world don't see God cuz they don't look low enough and so imagine you're in your messy bedroom and you're sitting on the edge of the bed trying to have an honest dialogue with yourself and the little voice says you know it's pretty disgusting in here and you think well I'm way above Such trivial niceties as organizing my room well that's Pride if you're above organizing what's actually yours how in the world are you ever going to organize anything else well it's time to take a brush to the toilet and maybe that's where you start and that works you start making those micro improvements like real micro improvements real on the ground actual micro improvements to things you know that are wrong you'll improve unbelievably [Music] rapidly just look at how much opportunity you have to make things better not that it's easy we're built to walk uphill and when you reach the Pinnacle of the Hill you want to stop and appreciate the vision but the next thing you want is a higher Hill in the distance because it's from the uphill climb that we derive our value and I mean this technically almost all the positive emotion we feel especially the emotion that fills us with enthusiasm that's experienced in relationship to a goal you want a goal that you can never attain so you can always move closer to the goal that recedes as you move towards it you think well that's frustrating it's like sopus pushing the rock uphill but it's not because as you pursue that goal you put yourself together and your life does get better and richer and more abundant you're here to live not to sleep the problem with the vision of my Ties on the beach is that first of all that's a a vision of drug induced unconsciousness second it's only going to work for about a week third you're going to be a laughing stalk in a month and depressed and aimless I think the right solution to the most serious problems is to be found at the level of the individual Yung said for example that we all acted out a myth and whether we knew it or not and you know maybe you're acting out a tragedy may maybe you're acting out narcissist you don't know because you've put that on yourself in an attempt in some ways to deliver to people what they want or more accurately to look as though you're delivering to people what they want someone who's really infantile and dependent someone who's never left home part of their problem is that they haven't crafted a Persona so you don't want to denigrate it entirely but it's no substitute for the real thing and it turns out that not only is what we want from each other the real thing but that's also the adventure of your life if you aren't truthful and that means unfortunately especially at the beginning when you start to be truthful it means deeply coming to terms with your inadequacies in humility so it's very painful without that you don't have the adventure of your life you have the role that you've acques to in my clinical practice in 20 years where working with every sort of person you could imagine I never ever saw anyone get away with anything even once we're all subject not least to the Judgment of our own conscience try to escape from that no one can escape from that we have to contend with that wisely and then you ask well how do you contend with things wisely and I would say well don't pollute your thoughts with deceit you compromise your own wisdom how are you going to make intell ENT not Intelligent Decisions wise decisions that's why you shouldn't lie you're warping the mechanism that orients you in the world I think Pinocchio is brilliant work of art and if you're a puppet and an actor and Pinocchio is both at times in that movie both a puppet and an actor so why an actor like why is there why is there something wrong with being an actor well the first question is who sets your role and then the second question is who's pulling your strings because you have to act out your ideals to some degree right and and you also have to formulate a avatar of yourself in some sense that's a mediator between you and other people you need this this functional shell the problem arises when that functional shell is all that there is and and then the real person underneath is just desperate and and unhappy because nothing of what's being acted out reflects a true underlying reality you don't want someone else's fate man your Fate's enough so you speak truthfully and you Watch What Happens will truth beauty and love save the world well you could find out [Music] don't overestimate yourself but don't underestimate who you could be that's a much better way of thinking about it you know psychologists of the careless sort I would say have been pushing the idea of self-esteem for a very long time probably since the early 60s you should be content with yourself the way you are it's like no you shouldn't seriously like you're nowhere near what you could be you're not even close right and so that's a that's a way more optimistic message like it's you ain't seen nothing yet that's the right message and so I would say don't overestimate yourself now but don't underestimate your future self and you have so much influence as an individual if you get your act together that you can't believe it there isn't anything that has more influence than that you have all the power that there is right where you are to put things right around you you start now you develop a noble vision right of who you could be you start to put that into practice develop some discipline familiarize yourself with the great works of the past learn to read learn to write learn to speak learn to think man you'll be [Applause] deadly what you could bring to the table that hasn't been brought to the table for years is an emphasis on individual responsibility and the the right way to do that as far as I'm concerned is to start with yourselves is develop a vision for your life you start to think about if you could be who you could be what would that look like that's the beginning of a mature philosophy of being if you could be the person that you would admire who would that person be how would you configure yourself how would you configure your career your education your family your your the use of time outside of work if you wanted to be the noblest person that you could be who was adopting the maximum amount of responsibility how would that look then you need to stry to put that into place and that's the way you change things properly and also the way you do the least amount of harm while you're changing them and so it should be an individual an individual focused set of ideas and that way you can sidestep the identity politics traps and that would be a very good thing and I think a modern conservatism which isn't really all that distinguishable from a Classical liberalism as it turns out is to put tremendous stress on the responsibility of the individual and one of the things that's one wonderful about that as far as I'm concerned and I made reference to this a few minutes ago is that you need a meaning to offset the tragedy of Life otherwise you just suffer stupidly and you tend to make people around you suffer the same way the way that you find that meaning is by adopting as much responsibility as you can and what's also so fascinating about that is you know you you're you're characterized by an indefinite potential and it isn't easy to understand exactly what that is that potential but you know it's what people call you on when they say you know you're not living up to your potential whatever that is that potential will be called forth from you as a consequence of adoption of responsibility because it won't manifest itself unless you take on a load you're not going to develop in all the ways you could develop unless you set yourself a serious challenge because it takes the challenge to pull that out of you and also to motivate you to rid yourself of all the weaknesses and and personality flaws that you've accumulated across the years and to let those disappear and burn off you you you need to load yourself up before the demands of life will be such that you will discipline yourself properly and a noble goal is a very good way of of beginning that the truth of the matter is as far as I'm concerned that each of us has enough potential character power of character let's say if it's properly manifested to contend with that in a noble way and to rise above it and to transcend and and to deal with it in in large part because we can make the world a much better place than it is for each of us individually and for our families and for our community and we can constrain the malevolence at least in our own hearts and and perhaps have a positive effect on those around us as a consequence and that actually does make things better and we actually can do that and that's where the meaning in life is to be found and that meaning you know that goes along with the adoption of that kind of responsibility is actually the antidote to the suffering you know that perfectly well because all of you need a reason to get out of bed in the morning especially on a rough morning you know when things aren't going so well in your life and there will be plenty of times when things aren't going so well in your life and you still need a reason to get up and get moving and get out there and if you have adopted the responsibility at an individual level to make things better given how bad they are if you've adopted the respons responsibility to make things better then you have a reason to get up and so one of the things that I've been stressing to people is that there's very little difference between the meaning in life that gives you fulfillment and that engages you in existence and the willingness to shoulder as much individual responsibility as you can possibly handle those are the same things and that's a really useful thing to know and you kind of know this right everybody knows this because first of all if you're not living up to your responsibilities even to take care of yourself the probability that you're going to be ashamed of that at some level is extraordinarily high and so your own soul tells you that you're in error so to speak but also if you look at who you spontaneously admire which is a good indication of where where your value system really sits you'll see that the people you admire are always people who take responsibility for themselves and responsibility for their family and responsibility for the community get your act together you've got things to do in the world the absence of your full being in the world leaves a hole that that is filled by terrible things at minimum so at minimum you have an ethical responsibility to ensure that the world doesn't devolve into something approximating hell and at maximum you have the responsibility again the ethical that is a heavy ethical responsibility to do everything that's in your power to make things as good as you can possibly make them in this sophisticated manner that takes you and your family and your community into account and it's on you right and that's meaning you know people say well I'd like to have a meaningful life it's like well fair enough but the the price that you pay for the meaning that transcends tragedy is the adoption of responsibility for the catastrophe of existence but that ennobles you right it makes you into someone strong and someone competent and someone who who's worthwhile and who lives in a manner that justifies their own suffering and that's what there's nothing better than you can possibly do than that although there is a very large number of ways of looking at the world or perhaps a near infinite number of ways of looking at the world there isn't a near infinite number of ways of acting in the world in a manner that actually is successful so and so there are constraints on how you can how you can interact with the world in a successful manner let's assume that you don't want undo pain and anxiety we could just start with that and I think that's a reason reasonable proposition you can tolerate some pain and anxiety if it's in the service of something greater obviously but I just mean pointless pain and anxiety we don't want any more of that than is necessary and that means that you have to take care of yourself to some degree but the manner in which you take care of yourself is severely constrained this is partly what why you have to be intelligent and careful and plot your way through life properly you have to take care of yourself today but you have to take care of yourself in a today in a way that doesn't interfere with you taking care of yourself tomorrow and next week and next month and next year and 5 years from now and 10 years from now so you can't do just what you want to in the next hour because if it's impulsive pleasure seeking let's say something like that um excess alcohol use or excess drug use or careless sexual behavior or betrayal of people to to gain you some gain you something in the moment you're going to pay for that you're going to pay for it tomorrow tomorrow you're going to pay for it next week and next month and next year so because you're going to exist in the future and because you have to live with yourself there's only a certain number of ways that you can act that are going to work but it's more than that it's not just that you're responsible to your future self or the set of all your future selves is that you also have to act in a way that works for your family because otherwise your family is going to disintegrate and break down and cause you and them all sorts of misery and grief and and not just your family now but also your family into the future and then not just your family either but also your community and so you have to set your aspirations so that they serve you in the broadest sense over a long period of time and they also serve your family and they also serve your community and that's a very tight set of constraints and I think that the best solution to that set of constraints from a philosophical perspective or maybe even a theological perspective is to view the world as a place not of groups but of individuals of Sovereign individuals who are responsible for their Destinies responsible for their families and for their communities you learn to use minimal necessary Force it's like you don't defend yourself any more than you have to like be careful don't push any harder than you need to because all you do is you generate a counterforce by by pushing harder than you need to and then and then you're in conflict and you think well I like a little conflict it's like look fair enough a little conflict man no problem it keeps your life kind of interesting and maybe that's on the problem solving Edge but a little conflict can become a lot of conflict very very rapidly and if you have any sense at all that's not what you want you know especially if you have other things that are better to do and you should have other things that are better to do 18-year-old kids one sentence what would you say to them what's the restorative the Redemptive sentence what should they do don't be thinking you're in ambition is corrupt you know cuz that's part of the message now human beings we're a cancer on the planet we're headed for an environmental apocalypse the entire historical structure is nothing but atrocity etc etc anyone with any ethical aim whatsoever is just going to pull back you don't want to manifest any ambition support the patriarchal structure exploit the environment you got to crush yourself down you shouldn't even have any children it's like no there's no excuse for that there's zero excuse for that I saw a professor at at an event something like this he came out and trumpeted this bloody environmentally friendly house he built and you know fair enough man it was a it was a pretty interesting house but not everybody had the $4 million that that it took him to build it and I'm not criticizing his money even it's like he's had some money good for him he built the house okay but then to trumpet that as a moral virtue well you're pushing it there and then he came out to all the kids and he said you know my wife and I decided that we we're only going to have one child and I think that's one of the most ethical things we could have possibly done and I would strongly encourage you to do the same I thought you son of a you get up in front of these young people a lot of these kids were uh children of first generation immigrants from China and and he showed all these images you know of these terrible factories in China these endless rows of sterile mechanism that were subordinating all the Chinese people to this terrible you know capitalist uh machine and I thought you don't understand half the audience is looking at those factories and thinking that's a hell of a lot better than struggling through the mud under ma buddy and so I don't know where he thought he was but to come out in front of all those kids and basically tell them that the whole human Enterprise is so godamn corrupt that the best thing they could possibly do is limit their multiplication and to think of himself as a scholar and an educator I did say something by the way was rather uncomfortable and he stomped off the stage but that's no message for young people that's no there's no excuse for that and you think well you know we're going to destroy the planet we have to do this we have to demoralize the youth to be ethical it's like yeah really that's your theory you're going to demoralize young people to be ethical that's your theory it's like you should go and think about that for like a year and I'm passionate about this you know because you have no idea how many people that's killing you have no idea I see people everywhere all over the world is so demoralized espe especially young people especially young people with a conscience cuz they've been told since they were little that there's nothing to them but corruption and power it's like how the hell do you expect them to react if you Orient yourself ethically in the most fundamental sense then in some sense you have the force of God on your side and then maybe you can Prevail despite the difficulty and I think that's I think that's right I I I think it's I think that's true true so and you can ask yourself I try to ask these questions seriously you know and I would also say that I've been driven to my religious belief such as it is by necessity not by desire what do you want to have on your side when you're contending with the unknowable future and its vagaries uh how about truth how about beauty how about Justice you want allies those are powerful allies people have to they have to act as ethically as they are powerful and so I've been trying to convince people to do that I suppose or to put forward not to convince them precisely but to put forward an argument about why that's necessary and why it's on them it's like no this is on you you you don't you you got to understand this this problem it's you you don't get it right it isn't going to work and so how do you do that well you start with what you have under control in your own life cuz where else you're going to start you look to yourself put your house in order don't be worried about some other person walking the satanic path and that's what activists do all the time right it's you it's the corporations like it's someone else no no it's you and I think that's also fundamental to the judeo-christian doctrine is that it's you it's on you Redemption is an individual matter and so my hope is that if enough people take themselves with enough seriousness then we won't end up in hell because we certainly could it's it's a high probability and so and I also don't think that you can be or you can be motivated enough to put your house in order to the degree that's necessary merely by being attracted let's say to the potential Utopia that might emerge as a consequence of that so that' be a vision of Heaven let's say no you need to also be terrified of Hell think well there's no such thing it's like just because you haven't being there doesn't mean there's no such thing it's like you have to be pretty bloody naive to think there's no such thing like how much evidence do you need and how does it come about well it comes about at least impartial consequence of the sins of men and I think that's true so I go around and I talk to people I say look there's there's not only more to you than you know there's more to you than you can imagine you have an ethical responsibility to act in that light and you might claim not to believe that but I would say well your whole culture is predicated on that belief and in so far as you are an active member of that culture and a believer in its structure then you believe it you might not be very good at believing it you might be full of conflict and doubt and you might not be able to articulate it but it's still right at the Bedrock of your culture this notion of what the Divine sovereign an individual is that not what your culture is predicated on that idea the logos inherent in each person it's something other than that I've never seen a credible argument made to show that it's anything other than that you know you can say well rights are attributed to you by the state it's like sorry that's a weak argument because the state's dependent on your actions so you know to believe that you have to believe that the state is The Entity and that individuals are just subordinate in some fundamental sense to the state like no the state is dependent on the individual to exactly the same degree so we're the active agent of the state in some sense we're the Seeing Eye of the state the the speaking mouth of the state because the state's dead without the individuals that compose it see Le if I swallow the scientific cosmology as a whole meaning only all that exists is what we can perceive through our senses then not only can I not fit in religion relig I cannot even fit in science if minds are wholly dependent on brains and brains on biochemistry and biochemistry in the long run on the meaningless flux of the atoms I cannot understand how the thought of Minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees MH you feel that one as well yeah well that's a complicated problem that um first of all I do believe that I don't think science is possible outside of an compassing judeo-christian ethic so for example I don't think you can be a scientist without believing as an axiom of faith that truth will set you free or that will set us free so we don't know the conditions under which science is possible you know um and we tend to overestimate its epistemological potency it's only been around I mean you can stretch it back to the Greeks if you're inclined but in a formal sense it's only been around for about 5 centuries and it's only thrived for a very short period of time and it's perfectly reasonable to assume that there were particular preconditions that made its rise and ascendancy possible it is a historical phenomenon it happened at a specific moment in time right and for and at least in princi for particular reasons yeah and I think one of the conditions well there's a bunch of them one is for example there there's an intense insistence in the Christian tradition that the mind of God in some sense is knowable yes so we could say well the structure of the cosmos and you have to believe that that's the case before you're going to embark on a scientific Endeavor you have to believe that there's some relationship between logos logic let's say but logos is a much broader concept that logic that's for sure you have to believe that there's some relationship between that and the structure of the cosmos you have to believe that the pursuit of Truth is in itself an ethical good because why would you otherwise bother you have to believe that there is such a thing as an ethical good and those aren't scient those are not scientific questions which is why I think the arguments of people like hitch and are weak it's like yeah Hitchens Dawkin people like that they have a metaphysic which they don't know and they assume that metaphysic is self-evidence it's like well sorry guys it's AB actually not self-evident and they assume that it can be derived from the observations of empirical reality and the answer to that is no there's going to be axioms of your perceptual system that aren't derivable from the contents of your perceptual system and you might think well that's not very scientific and I would say well take it up with Roger Penrose and see what he thinks cuz I just talked to him for like 3 hours about partly about this topic about say the role of Consciousness and and the structure of Consciousness and it's by no means obvious that the materialist reductionists have the correct theory about the nature of Consciousness and not surprisingly it's like we we don't understand the relationship between Consciousness and being at [Music] all the conditions of human life are such that suffering is an integral part of existence life is suffering why well one reason is because of society's arbitrary judgment every single one of us has traits and features and and quirks and idiosyncrasies that are far from ideal and that are judged by theate 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 reconstituted 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 suboptimal 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 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 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 the other element of it clearly is the mere fact of the arbitrariness of the natural world 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 be 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 in so far as it's tyranical 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 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 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 flee 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 needly 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 not a reasonable way of assessing the world the the suffering is built in 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 mode of 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 is far 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 they well two as far as I'm concerned and some of this is from Clinical experience you know if you take people 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 de 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 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 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 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 4 to 6 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 4 hours right there you know you think well that's 20 25 hours a week it's 100 hours a month that's 2 and a half full work weeks it's half a year of work weeks per year and if your time is worth $20 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 most people find deep meaning in their life as a consequence not not of their rights or or their impulsive Pleasures even but as a consequence of bearing responsibility for themselves for their family for their community and the heavier the responsibility the better well Professor Steven Hawking before he died gave me his last television interview and he said that the biggest threat to the future of mankind was when artificial intelligence learned to self-design what do you think the biggest threat to mankind is narcissistic compassion now ai you know it's a threat too but if we if we if we had our act together ethically it's possible that AI could become a a useful servant rather than a tyrannical Master you don't want to automate your tyrannical Masters the ideal that you're observing that makes you jealous and resentful is in large part an illusion that's created by your own mind you know I I can give you just one example is like I know a fair number of extremely wealthy people and and I tell you man they have a burden of responsibility that would would crush me would crush the typical person they're they're just working flat out like 90 hours a week you know they have their money and and they have their status and that's not nothing but don't be thinking that there isn't a price to be paid for that you know they don't see their families they're often divorced they don't see their children grow up and they don't have time off now there are wealthy what would you call Playboy types I suppose who live out the dreams of wealth of a foolish 14-year-old but they're not that common and you have to be careful of what you're jealous of because you don't really know what it is and and then the other thing to understand you're you're quite different from other people and you shouldn't be comparing yourself to them because they're not like you you know they they don't have your family they don't have your temperament they they don't have your troubles they don't have your abilities the only the only person that has those is you compare yourself to who you were yesterday and not to who someone else is today and see that's a game you can win because you could be a little better today than you were yesterday most of the time when you're discussing something that needs to be discussed everybody's actually rather upset about it you know if you're actually talking about something important right because why talk otherwise unless you're just shooting the breeze but if there's an issue at hand that has to be discussed then people are already upset and they have different viewpoints and and the the the offensiveness in some sense is built into that and you know that because if you have a family if you have a wife if if you have an intimate relationship and you're discussing something that's difficult the probability that you're not going to offend each other if you're actually having the conversation is zero and so you don't have to think unless you have a problem and if you have a problem then when you think you're going to offend people and so what are we not going to think that seems like a bad idea Liberals are higher in openness that's trait creativity and lower in conscientiousness especially orderliness and that seems to be because they believe or their their their Niche is an informational Niche they believe that the free flow of information is worth the risk so that'd be the free flow of people across borders the free flow of ideas across borders the the free flow of Concepts across categories they'd rather that the borders were permeable now the conservatives are low in openness and high in conscientiousness especially orderliness and they take the opposite attack they think well yeah there's danger in too much openness there's danger in borders that are too permeable things can change too fast entire societies can become destabilized and everyone can end up not knowing which way is up and the thing is is that both of those attitudes are correct it depends on the time you know sometimes things are changing so fast that everybody's knocked off their feet and and things are falling apart and some times thing things are so rigid that there isn't any new water flowing and and everything's ground to Halt you need liberals because now and then the right thing to do is to come up with something new and you need conservatives because now and then the right thing to do is to do what everybody's always done and the reason you need political dialogue is so that the Liberals and the conservatives can continue to argue about which of those Solutions is appropriate right [Music] now the game of dividing human beings up by their group identity ends in disaster no matter who plays it and no matter what the reasons are adopt a stance of ready engagement with the world and to reflect that in your posture and the reason that I write about lobsters is because there's this idea that hierarchical structures are a sociological construct of the western patriarchy and that is so untrue that it's almost unbelievable and I use the lobster as an example because the lobster we we de divulg from lobsters in evolutionary history about 350 million years ago common ancestor and lobsters exist in hierarchies and they have a ner system attuned to the hierarchy and that nervous system runs on serotonin just like our nervous systems do and the nervous system of the lobster and of the human being is so similar that anti-depressants work on lobsters and it's part of my attempt to demonstrate that the idea of hierarchy has absolutely nothing to do with sociocultural construction which it doesn't

Channel: Motivation Madness

Views: 62,970

Keywords: motivational video, motivation, motivational speech, speech, motivational, success, inspirational video, motivational speeches, motivational speech for success, motivation madness, 2023, 2023 motivation, 2023 motivational speech, study motivation, life advice, inspiration, motivation for 2023, powerful, jordan peterson 2024, jordan peterson compilation, jordan peterson motivation, jordan peterson speech, jordan peterson interview, peterson, jordan, best jordan peterson, 2024 motivation

Id: fDazo-ZNvGA

Length: 67min 56sec (4076 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 11 2023