Jordan Peterson: Overcoming self-defeating behaviors

out there in no-man's land out there in potential there's threat and and and like mortal threat but there's also endless opportunity and riches and wealth and and and the possibility of attracting someone and all of that and so well the dragon you can't just be afraid of it you just stay in your burrow the whole time lots animals more or less do that is you know especially the nocturnal ones they just hide away but that isn't what human beings are like because we're not only prey animals right we're also predators and then of course we're crazy we're absolutely insane chimpanzees right we're crazy and so we're always out there mucking about with things and with our you know fingers and and our thumbs and and taking the world apart and putting it back together and we're crazily exploratory and in troublemaking and so we don't just run from dragons we go hunt them down and so and so there's a story here that there's the oldest story that mankind knows and literally it is the oldest story that we know is this stories and the story basically is there's a bounded space a walled garden a walled city you know on all the original cities were walled because if they weren't barbarians would swoop in and they'd just steal all your stuff and so you know that was kind of pointless so you know you wanted to have some major league walls surrounding your territory and so that's inhabited space and inside that is your little dominance hierarchy and so all you primates knew exactly who was who inside that space he didn't have to fight with each other and you could predict each other's behavior because he believed the same things and saw the world roughly the same way and acted the same way and so you were sort of secure but then the problem is is that that can always be breached there's always something outside of it that's a danger and so that's signified by this this little creature here this is dragon and that that twirl in its tail is very common among dragons actually it's actually a symbol because you imagistic languages imagistic symbols have an ancient language and it it's referring to something that's basically eternal and see it lives down here in this in this cave because it's an underground thing it's an underground thing and you can kind of imagine what that's like and sometimes happens in initiation rituals among archaic people they're gonna when they're gonna initiate usually the young men because nature initiates women know by itself usually the young men maybe they'll put them in a cave and leave them there you know for like well who know who knows how long and cigar think what's in a cave that caves are dark man I don't know if you've ever been anyone but like they're dark and they're really dark and so not only is there whatever there is in the cave and you don't know what the hell's in the cave there's whatever you imagine might be in the cave and so when you're in that cave and you're alone you you're confronting the devils and demons and monsters of your own imagination you know and so then you have a chance to perhaps deal with that and overcome it and that's perhaps part of the initiation ceremony you know and that's part of growing up because you have to learn how to face the things that terrify and upset you and and re cast them and put them back together we talked a little bit about this idea of the pre cosmogonic chaos that that Iliad it refers to and and that's this stuff out of which order is produced at the beginning of time and it's also the stuff out of which you constantly reproduce order and the young unions the psychoanalysts especially the really deep psychoanalysts like young Freud was a more surface psychoanalyst and that's not an insult there's some things that Freud figured out they're absolutely amazing he was a precursor to Jung for sure for Jung the hero's journey was the journey inside the unconscious and that would be perhaps in some sense that the the the willingness to face everything terrible that's happened to you and to think it through and to articulate it and and to come to grips perhaps with your own capacity for malevolence that was a really important part of Union ideas that the first step towards individuation which is the manifestation of your full self let's say was the discovery of your shadow and your shadow is the part of you that will do terrible things under the right circumstances and maybe even without that much provocation and you know and it's a terrifying part of you to come into contact with because it's sort of it's sort of the way that you're specifically attached to the archetype of evil that's a that's a good way of thinking about it you know modern people they don't really think much about think much about the idea of good and evil but that's because the most of them are so they I'm naive he can just barely even comprehend it you know if you read any history if you really read it like and you and you don't come away with the idea that evil exists it's like you're just reading the wrong kind of history you know it's just unbelievable what people can do to each other and we're so imaginative you know and one of the things I figured out about people the reason that we're we have the knowledge of good and evil let's say is that because we're self conscious and we know about ourselves we know about our own vulnerability right you know what hurts you you really know what hurts you way more than an animal knows and so when you're all so creative and so once you know what hurts you man you can really hurt someone else and you can do it in such a creative way you can draw it out you can make it excruciating you can take people apart physically and psychologically and you can keep them say even right on the edge of death so that you can keep doing that endlessly and you know that happens hell of a lot more than you think it happens it happens a lot and so well and you think well you know that doesn't involve me it's like oh yes it does man that's the problem because you know you're human and that's the sort of things that human beings are capable of and I'm not saying you're all it's all probable that you do that ever or or that but I'm saying that you know you got to take that into account when you're looking at the world and you think about all the perpetrators out there it's like it's not like there's perpetrators and there's victims that isn't how it works it doesn't work that way at all and so the horrors of humanity as well as the noble elements of humanity are all elements of your central being and for you and this is the terrible thing for you the pathway to higher wisdom was through the terrible portal of well you could say hell for that matter really and and so who wants to do that man it's like no you know like maybe you're resentful about something well you probably are because like everybody is resentful about something you know and resentment is just vicious emotion it's really useful it's really useful because if you resentful about something it either means that you should grow the hell up and accept the responsibility and quit sniveling around and whining or it means that someone actually is oppressing you and pushing on you too hard and bullying you and demeaning you and you have something to say or do that you're not saying or doing and no wonder you're not saying or doing it because you know it can be really dangerous to say things or do them to free yourself from from being oppressed you can get in a lot of trouble in the short term for doing it so it's easier just to not say anything sort of day after day in the short term you protect yourself but just crushes you and then the the resentment comes up and resentment and that can just get so out of hand you know it starts with resentment and then it starts it goes to the desire for revenge you know because you'll play nasty little tricks on the person that's opressing you at any chance you'll talk about them behind their back and if they want you to do something you'll do it badly or you'll do it grudgingly or you'll do a half rate job and you'll set up little traps and you know so it puts you in a poisonous space and then if that if you really start to dwell on that say in your basement for three or four years about just exactly how terrible the world is and how that's focused on you and how everyone's rejected you and how you get to this point where you're thinking that you know existence itself is a kind of poisonous endeavor and that the best thing for you to do is go out there and do as much you know create as much mayhem as you possibly can and if you really get to a dark place you think I'm going to create as much mayhem as I possibly can by targeting the most innocent thing I can possibly imagine and so that's a bad road man there's dark things down there but you can go there and people do and they go through the hole of resentment and so resentment can tell you you've got something to say you bloody well better say it you've got a free yourself from what suppressing you you have to stand up for that because otherwise you become oppressed and then once you're oppressed that's just not so good and so like in your marriage and your relationships you got to tell people what you're thinking you don't have to assume you're right that's a whole different story because you're not cuz you're you know ignorant and you're biased and you know so you're not right but you can stumble towards your this the expression of yourself and then you can listen to the other person and hope that they tell you some way that you're stupid that's useful so you could be a little less stupid in the future because that wouldn't that be good and so you know you go after the unknown you don't protect what you know you already know what you know you go after what you don't know that's why you have to talk to people you don't agree with that's why you have to talk to your enemies cuz they're gonna tell you things you don't know you could even listen to them it's possible they know a thing or two you don't know but people don't like that you know they just talk to people who think the same way and then they just stay stupid and so that's and that's not good because if you're not wise the world will wall up you it'll flatten you and and far more than it has to and then you'll be better and resentful and you'll be part of that force that Wallops instead of the force that fights against that so well so you go after the dragon and that's what that's what this guy is doing he's going after the dragon it's it's threatening the society because it always does chaos what's outside of order always threatens order always always and so you have to step forward you know in this manner voluntarily and and and go after that when it's still manageable right and that's the case in your own life too so you know if you're if you've had a proclivity to be bullied in the past you know and you want to get out of that what you have to do is you have to make yourself awake to the to the Maite to the to the what would you say to the to the initial stages of that sort of bullying emerging in your life again that sort of domination and you have to step forward against it when it's still in its developing stages because maybe you can just not have it happen that would be better and so you have to be ready to speak what you have to say more or less on a moment's notice you you can't be impulsive about it you know like if you and I are talking and you make a mistake or I make a mistake even if it's bothers one or the other of us we should just write it off because it's like one encounter what the hell you you know maybe we had a bad night's sleep or something you know you got to be a little forgiving and what if it happens twice then you know you should be a little awake and you should remember both times and then if it happens a third time it's like that's when you that's when you act and you say look we talked and this happened and I thought yeah whatever and but then you did it again and then you just did it again well then the person is basically like what are they gonna do you know no well maybe they might argue with you but you kind of got them and you're generally if you just point that out to people just like that just that you noticed and they're willing to say something about it they'll back the hell off they'll often apologize and sometimes you even make them a little more conscious which is like hey that's not such a bad idea that's what all this means and so this caught this chaos idea it's so for young it was the unconscious right it was the contents of your unconscious and so that might be the unknown past the threatening past that you have never dealt with it might be the threatening future it might be the threatening present but you realized as his as he got older that that the unconscious was also the world and you think and so the chaos is not only your unconscious mind which meets the unknown but it's actually the unknown itself mingled together you think what the hell does that that's why the dragon is a land creature and an air creature it's matter in spirit at the same time and this sort of gets us into constructivism because the constructivist think that basically what happens is that you encounter those elements of the world that don't fit into your theory and out of those new elements you make the world through your perceptions and you make yourself by incorporating the information and transforming yourself and that's how Piaget explains the development of a child the child starts out with some reflexes basic reflexes and manifesting the reflexes produces results in the world and then the child has to reorganize its perceptions to take into account the transformations and so then it it gets a little more sophisticated and then it can do a few more things and then it can manifest more changes in the world and then it martyr it attracts them and modifies its perceptions and out to account for them and it just keeps doing that and that's how the child boots itself up like a computer does

Channel: Essential Truth

Views: 1,213,952

Rating: 4.9046755 out of 5

Keywords: Jordan B Peterson, Jordan Peterson, Essential Truth, facing fears, growing up, bite-sized philosophy, transliminal, Ideacity, manofallcreation, carl jung, hero's journey, the shadow, ScienceNET, MagiCal HD, Jocko podcast, H3 podcast, Ocean of freedom, M Czerna, TheArchangel911, The Rubin Report, Evan Carmichael, Sorting Myself Out, Psyche Matters, Rebel Wisdom, Mixed Mental Arts, Dose of Truth, StevenCrowder, Gad Saad, Ramble, Intense 5, 50 Stars, self-defeating behavior

Id: wN49uORrZIw

Length: 13min 29sec (809 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 22 2018