Jordan Peterson - How To Move Forward In Life

I talk to people very frequently whose families have provided them with too much protection and they know it themselves and that means they're deprived of necessity you know one of the things that you see in the United States for example is that the children of first-generation immigrants often do better than the children than their children and the reason for that is that the children of first-generation immigrants have necessity driving them and you don't know how much you need a necessity to drive you because maybe you're not very disciplined and if any catastrophe doesn't immediately befall you if you don't act forthrightly today then maybe you never act forthrightly right because the the gap between your foolishness and the punishment is is lengthened by your unearned wealth and so you never grow up and learn and you have to get yourself away from your dependency in order to allow necessity to drive you forward and that's to become independent and to become mature and I think part of what's happening in our culture is that the the force that's attacking the the fourth right movement forward of young men in particular is afraid of the power of men because it's confused about the distinction between power and authority and competence like another man who's who has Authority and competence has power as a byproduct but the authority and competence is everything and and people who can't understand that failed to make the distinction between power and authority and confidence and they're afraid of power and so they destroy Authority and competence and that's a terrible thing because we need authority and competence what else is going to what else is going to allow us to prevail in the long run and so you get away from your country and you get away from your kin and from your father's house right and you go out there and you establish yourself in the world it's a call to adventure that's what this the first lines in the Abrahamic story is a call to adventure so great unto a land that I will show you well you know what does that mean you know one of the things that I've been struck very hard by a number of writers Carl young obviously among them I mean he he wrote things like Nietzsche that if you understand them they just break you into pieces you know and and one of the things that Jung understood in the cycle analysts understand it's one of the most terrifying elements of psychoanalytic thinking is very tightly allied with religious thinking which is that you are not the master of your own house there are spirits that dwell in within you meaning you have a will and you can exercise a certain amount of conscious control over your being but there are all sorts of things that occur within you that seem to be beyond your capacity and control your dreams for example that's a really good example or your impulses for example you might you might think of those as so foreign from you that they're not even you don't even want them to be part of you but but more subtly even how about what you're interested in what compels you where does that come from exactly because you can't you can't conjure it up of your own accord you know so if you're a student and you're taking difficult course you might say to yourself well I need to sit down and study for three hours but then you sit down and that is what happens your attention goes everywhere and you might say well whose attention is it then if it goes everywhere because you say it's your attention it's like well if it's your attention maybe you'd be able to control it but you can't and so then you might think well Jenin just exactly what the hell is controlling it and you might say well it's random it's the ball it's better not be random I can tell you that that's that happens to some degree in schizophrenia there's an element of randomness in that it's not random it's driven by the action of phenomena that I think are best considered as something like subpersonalities although even that's only a partial description you can't make yourself interested in something interest manifests itself and grips you that's a whole different thing and so what is it that's gripping you and how do you conceptualize that is that a divine power well it's divine as far as you're concerned because it grips you and you can't do anything about it and so there's a calling in you towards what you're compelled by and what you're interested in and sometimes that might be very dark and sometimes not but you're compelled forward by your interest and so and so the idea that what moves you away from your country and your father's house and the comforts of your child at home is is something that's beyond you and that you listen to and hearken to that's exactly right and you can say well I don't want to call that God it's like it doesn't matter what you call it exactly it doesn't matter to what it is what it's called it still is and if you don't listen to it that's the other thing if you don't listen to it and I've been a clinician and talk to enough people now as old as I am to know this absolutely if you do not listen to that thing that beckons you forward you will pay for it like you cannot possibly imagine you'll have everything that's terrible about life in your life and nothing about it that's good and worse you'll know that it was your fault and that you squandered what you could have had so this is not only a calling forth but a warning unto a land that I will show thee and that's it that I will show thee that and you don't want to be too concrete about this you know there's all sorts of New Territories that you can inhabit if you there's this abstract and conceptual territories of guilty University and you study biology or you study physics or or any discipline you're in a territory right you're in the territory that all the scholars have established and then as you master the discipline you move out beyond the established territory into the unknown and and that's a new land right maybe it's even a land of your enemies for that matter but it's a new land that the frontier is always in front of you and so you know when the earth was less inhabited than it is now the frontier was the psychological frontier and the geographical frontier was the same thing and now they've separated to some degree because there's not so much geographical volunteer but there's the frontier is a place that never disappears and the land that's beyond the land that you know is always there and it's always where you should go and all of that packed into these what four phrases so well so when I've been thinking about narrative you look at the world a story you can't you can't help it and the story is what gives value to the world or or the story is what you extract from the value of the world you can look at it either way we are somewhere and it's not good enough right that's the eternal human predicament wherever you are isn't good enough and to some degree that's actually a good thing because if it was good enough well there's nothing for you to do so it's actually maybe a good thing that it's insufficient and that might be why sometimes having lessons is better than having more and I don't want to be a Pollyanna about that I mean I know that there's deprivation that can reach to the point where it's no where it's completely counterproductive but it isn't always the case that starting with little is you if you start with little you start with more possibility it's something like that so you move from always from what's unbearable about the present to some better future right and if you don't have that then you have no you have nothing but threat and a negative emotion you have no positive emotion because the positive emotion is generated in the conception of the better future and then the evidence that you generate yourself that you're moving towards it that's where the positive and fulfilling meaning of life comes so you want to set up this structure properly it's very very important and so what it means is that you want to be going somewhere that's good enough so that the going is worth the while and you can ask yourself that and that's partly what we tried to build into the future authoring program which is well we know what's wrong with life it's rife with suffering and insufficiency and deception and evil it's all of that obviously ok what would make the journey worthwhile or you can ask yourself that it's like all right in order to bear up under this load what is it that I would need to be striving to attain and if you ask yourself that that's to knock and and the door will open that's what that means if you ask yourself that then you will find an answer and you'll think you'll shrink away from it you'll think well there's no way I could do that it's like well you don't know what you could do you don't know what's possible and you're not as much as you could be and so god only knows what you could what you could do and have and give if you sacrificed everything to it and now the reason a breeze to making sacrifices and it's archaic right he's burning up like baby lambs but like well they're alive you know that's something and and they're valuable and that's something it's you have to admit even if you think about it as a modern person but the act of sacrificing something might have some dramatic compulsion to it you know to go out into a flock and to take something that's newborn and to cut its throat and to bleed it and to burn it might be a way of indicating to yourself that you're actually serious about something and it isn't so obvious that we have rituals of seriousness like that now and so it's not so obvious that we're actually serious about anything and so maybe that's not such a good thing and so maybe we shouldn't be thinking that these people were so archaic and primitive and superstitious it's possible that they knew something that we don't and certainly in the Abrahamic stories one of the things that maintains Abraham's covenant with God is his continual willingness to sacrifice it's so that sacrificial issue is so important because you are not committed to something unless you're willing to sacrifice for it commitment and sacrifice are the same thing and I think it's it borders on miraculous that those concepts are embedded into this narrative at the level of dramatic action you know instead of abstract explanation people are acting this out and then the fundamental conception is so profound that it's really quite it's quite inspiring it's breathtaking really when you understand what message is trying to be conveyed you have to make sacrifices what do you have to sacrifice you have to sacrifice that which is most valuable to you currently that's stopping you and god only knows what that is it's certainly the worst of you it's certainly that and god only knows to what degree you're in love with the worst of you so well so you move from the unbearable present to the ideal future and and you can't help that you have to live in the structure like that that's your house that's another way of thinking about it and if you want to get your house in order and if you want it to be a place that you can live properly then you have to plan the future that is perfect and then I think well what does that mean and it means it's good for you right and one of the things that I'm I do all the time with my clinical and consulting clients is try to figure out what would be good for them but we do more than that we try to think okay well what how can we set this up so it's really good for you and that all the side consequences of that are things that are good for other people and so because people are often also candid about trying to get something that's good for themselves because they feel that it's selfish or that they don't deserve it so we set it up so that well look we're going to set it up so that it's plainly obvious that this will not harm the structure of the universe for you to have what you need and to do it in a way that's of benefit to other people there's no downside

Channel: PhilosophyInsights

Views: 446,885

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, jordan b peterson, peterson, jordan, life, goal, aim, structure, plan, sacrifice, bible, abraham, psychology, advice, society, lecture, university, father, family, religion

Id: nLRkG7PccPI

Length: 11min 48sec (708 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 02 2017