Jordan Peterson: Handling Your Darkest Feelings about Existence Itself

you know I read about the Columbine massacre and the kids who undertook it that'll make your hair stand on end if you want to read something that will really disturb you reading Eric Harris's writings will really disturb you no matter how much you know about human beings reading Eric Harris's writings will disturb you and Harris is a cane you know he says it straightforwardly hates human beings hates being itself he would destroy everything if it was within his power to do that and of course him and his colleague were motivated to produce far more carnage than they managed that day what was successful was only a fraction of what they had planned and and Harris said very straightforwardly that he was that he had set himself up as the judge of being and that it lacked all utility in his eyes human beings certainly should all be the should all be removed from the face of existence because of their ecology and the fundamental horrors of being itself so there's nothing in the Cain and Abel story that isn't real it's real and Kane complains to God as people will when their dreams are dashed and then it's goes for people who don't believe in God - it doesn't really matter you know it's harder I suppose if you're atheistic to figure out who to blame but that doesn't mean that the sentiment well it doesn't mean that the sentiment is any different right the same drama is being enacted you shake your fist at the structure of being rather than at God himself but it doesn't make any difference except in the details so God responds to Cain and tells him that he's got no right to judge being before he gets his sacrificial house in order and even worse he says that Cain is the architect of his own downfall and the invited catastrophe in his own house into his own house willingly and entered into a creative union with it and therefore brought about his own demise and it's that additional self-knowledge you can imagine you know imagine that you're in you're facing your life you're facing the failures of your life and let's say that you've had a failed life and you're bitter about that and then you meditate upon it and you think why has this come about and then you think well perhaps I did something wrong you know when Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote The Gulag Archipelago which is the book that detailed the catastrophes of the Soviet Union and helped bring it down it is one part of that book that just struck me so so viciously when I read it he he was in the cotton in the GU leg and he was there for a very long time and he said that he observed a variety of people in the camps who he really admired they were rare they were usually religious believers in his in his experience who were not participating in the pathology of the camp's at all period no matter what he said he learned a lot from watching those people he had a hard time believing that they even existed that they could even exist but he said that one of the things that he was brought to as a consequence of watching those people live their contract with goodness out even under the most horrifying of conditions was that it was possible that he himself was responsible for his position in the camp now it's a very dangerous line of argumentation you know because who wants to be the one who blames the victim for the catastrophe you know you have to be very careful when you walk down that road but Solzhenitsyn was speaking about himself and he said well he was a communist you know and he arrogantly and forthrightly moved the movement out into the world and had not fully gone over his life with a fine-tooth comb to find out what mistakes he had made that brought him so low but his contention eventually was that part of the reason that he ended up where he ended up was because he and many others had completely forfeited their relationship with the truth and allowed their society degenerate into deceit and tyrannical catastrophe without mounting sufficient opposition and so he decided when he was in the camps to straighten himself out bit by bit and that culminated in the production of The Gulag Archipelago in that book really demolished once and for all any moral credibility that the communist totalitarian systems had left and so one man in in the depths of catastrophe who determined through good example at least in part to stop lying produced a book eventually the demolished the foundation of the very system that had imprisoned him and that is really worth thinking about that's one example of the absolute grandeur of the human soul and the capacity for transformation that it has when let loose properly on the world so let's say you're conceptualizing your own failure you know and you meditated on it and you come to the conclusion that God forced Cain to pay not only have things not been going very well for you but it's actually your fault and not only that you brought it on yourself and not only that you knew it all the time well then you might think you'll wake up and fly right right you'll get your wings in order and fly right but there's no reason to assume that at all and that's not what happens to Cain that just makes him more bitter right and you can understand that if you think about it just for a second it's like bad enough when something horrible happens to you but then to have to swallow the additional pill right have to take in the information that he could have done something different it was avoidable and you knew it at the time and you decided to do it anyways and I think people are in that situation a lot more often than ever anyone is willing to admit you know you have that little voice in the back of your head that says don't do it and you override it and you know it's arrogance that makes you override it it's always arrogance you know it always warns you to always arrogance yeah I can get away with it it's like no you can't I don't think you ever get away with anything so and maybe your experience has taught you different but my suspicions are it hasn't and if you think it has well the other shoe hasn't yet dropped so Cain doesn't take the opportunity to let God's wisdom reorient his character and that that could have been outcome he could have got down on his knees so to speak and said oh my oh my god I've been wrong all along I've been living improperly I've been making the wrong sacrifices Abel deserves everything he has I got exactly what was coming to me you know could I possibly now Street myself out and again and and and live in repentance and improve my position but that's not what he did at all he said all right stare enough I get it it's like I'm going to go after the thing I most admire and I'm going to destroy it and I'm going to do that despite its cost to me and I'm going to do that just to spite the creator of being that's exactly what Paris did at Columbine it's exactly what he says in fact it is uncanny writings it's why the mass murders always shoot themselves afterwards not before because you might wonder if you're so upset with the structure of being why you don't just commit suicide in your basement why do you have to go out and mass murder before you top it off with a gun to your forehead well you don't make the point as effectively if you just commit suicide in your basement it's like well I'm my life means nothing to me but neither does anyone else's and neither does the structure of being itself and I'll take all my revenge as much as I possibly can and then just to show you how little I care I'll cap myself off at the end and I would say also people say all the time I don't understand how that could happen it's like I don't believe that I think an hour of thought of real thought real thought about your darkest feelings about existence itself illuminates the pathway to that sort of behavior quite clearly I think if you I mean I might be wrong I might be a darker person than most and it's certain okay okay well at least I think there are plenty of people out there who are sufficiently dark to know exactly what I mean what I'm saying these things and I would also say that if it doesn't leap to your understanding how that pathway might be illuminated then you need to know a lot more about yourself than you actually know now because whatever you might say about someone like Eric Harris he was a human being too you know there's this idea in the New Testament that Christ was he who took the sins of the world unto himself it's a very complicated idea but part of it part of it part of it is associated with the idea that he met the devil in the desert as well to take the sins of mankind onto yourself as to understand that within you dwells exactly the same spirit that commit the atrocities at Columbine or that ran the camps at OSH wits and to actually understand that that's part and parcel of your makeup and then to take responsibility for it and I think that in the aftermath of the terrible 20th century that's what we're left with we're left with the necessity to take responsibility for the most terrible aspects of ourselves and that way perhaps we can stop those terrible things from happening again that also means you know that you don't look for the you don't look for the what would you call it the purveyor of malevolence outside yourself right it isn't someone else even though sometimes it's someone else you know you know what I mean it's like they're identifiable perpetrators but that's not precisely the point the point is something more like that the proper place for the encapsulation of that malevolence at least the proper place to start is within the confines of your own existence and then perhaps within the confines of your family and that way you're not a danger to those that you misapprehend as malevolent and evil because you won't get your aim right to begin with you'll identify them improperly and you'll take your revenge in a manner that allows you to omit your own responsibility to act out your unconscious desire for revenge and to move the world just that much closer to help also Cain kills Abel and then Cain gives rise to his descendants one of whom is the person who's the first artificer in weapons of war and then comes the flood right which seems perfectly miraculously reasonable to me because what those stories do it's so amazing that the story of Cain and Abel segues into the story of the flood because it is the case that the catastrophes that beset society can best be conceptualized as the spread of individual pathology into the social world and the envy what would you call these the magnification of that pathology to the point where everything comes apart and I truly believe that if you familiarize yourself with the last hundred years of history that that's the conclusion that you would derive and the people who are most wise that I've read who commented on that say the same thing over and over which is the the key to the prevention of the horrors of Auschwitz and the gulag in the future is the reconstruction of the individual soul at the level of the each individual and that's a terrible message because it puts the burden on you but it's an amazing message because it also means that you could be the source of the process that stops that catastrophe and malevolence from ever emerging again and you know it's hard for me to imagine that you have anything that could possibly be better to do with the time that you have left

Channel: PhilosophyInsights

Views: 1,552,253

Keywords: jordan, peterson, jordan b peterson, jordan peterson, life, suffering, existence, feeling, dark, darkest, deal, problems, psychology, philosophy, handling, loss, grieve, grievance, communism, world, how to, pain, resentful, resentment, straighten, arrogance, responsibility, yourself, individualism, goal, advice

Id: Hw6rP_DjgK8

Length: 12min 48sec (768 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 20 2017