First thing I want to say thank you so much, that was an amazing talk and I was wondering if you could elaborate What I noticed a lot I go here to ebc is that a lot of students and young people They're often desensitized to, for example, the atrocities that communism or ideologies that forced terrorism And maybe it's some sort of Stockholm syndrome that I'm seeing where it's like people are just- they're like trapped and they can't- they feel in a way they can't do anything about it and then they start to like Like, like communism or they start to see more socialists or adopt socialist policy that in the end will get them killed will get them hurt I was wondering if you could kind of like elaborate that on what you think can be done about that or even if something can be done in that respect. PETERSON: Well I think something can be done, I mean, I've been trying to educate people about the horrors of the nazi regime and the soviet regime in particular I've concentrated mostly on those two but that's good enough And trying to let people know that it was through the fault of people much like them that those systems arose and and that there are steps you can take to limit the probability that you would participate in such a thing and that those steps are associated with trying to be truthful in your speech and actions because the stability of those systems depends on the willingness of individuals to lie and also on your willingness to take responsibility for the malevolence in your own heart that manifests itself in those social movements and so that when I when I do my lectures, when I do talks like this when I put them on YouTube, what I'm trying to do is exactly that because that was the best pathway forward through such things that I could think up over 20 years of thinking about it No one is so habituated to suffering that they can read the Gulag Archipelago, which is actually quite hard to read, without having it affect- like your psychopathic if that book doesn't affect you, you know it should if you read it properly it affects you deeply and it's not the only example of that kind of literature So the people who are "habituated", aren't They've just been shown low resolution representations of things they don't understand that look vaguely bad You don't know a damn thing about them And our education system has done a tremendously appalling job of educating young people about the absolute catastrophe of radical leftism Now, it's not much better with regards to, say, the actions of the nazis Although I would say on average, people are more aware of that but they don't- but it's shallow, shallow knowledge so you make the knowledge deep and deep knowledge changes people and wakes them up you know I mean The only reason that I ever got convinced that good and evil were real, more real than anything else, wasn't because I learned that good was real That's hard That's- that's hard It's hard to learn that You have to find examples of transcendent good, you know They're rare Evil? All you have to do is look You read history a bit And read it like it's about you And there's no way that you can do that without a transformation But people won't do it It's like, you want to imagine yourself as an Auschwitz guard? That's a rough thing, you see, because you have to figure out- See, Jung said if you confronted the shadow, which is the dark side of people, the aggressive side, the malevolent side, that it it really reaches all the way down to hell, and Dante sort of was trying to put forward the same thing when he wrote the Inferno Right, with the levels of evil, right, because it was a voyage through the levels of evil right to the bottom He thought the bottom was betrayal It's pretty good The most- the center of malevolence is betrayal I like that because to betray someone you have to get them to trust you and trust is a moral virtue, right, especially if it's courageous trust because it it puts you in alignment with other people and allows you to move forward into life and if you betray that, you really, it's like a knife in the It's like a knife in the heart through the back Especially if it's someone who loves you betrays you And especially if they betray you for your virtues That's a really nice twist So I believe because I think that people are capable of good That if they know enough about evil that that will straighten them out So But who wants that? You know, this is one of the things I really like about Jung He's often regarded as a new-age thinker That's wrong He's no new-age thinker He knew that the the pathway to enlightenment was barred by the necessity of a passage through hell And that no one was going to do that That's why there isn't a world full of enlightened people, you might say Like if it was just a matter of doing nice things, following your bliss, let's say However you might put it Then why wouldn't everyone walk up the stairway to heaven? That isn't how it works That's not how it works at all I don't think you can be convinced of the necessity for moral action until you understand exactly how dark and terrible things can get and that it's your fault that they're getting that way Who wants to think that? So You can think it though But not not without it burning you
