Jordan Peterson: P.s.y.c.h.o.pathic traits, antisocial behavior & hedonism

I had a friend he he he he didn't come to a good end this this person it was a real good friend of mine when I was in junior high and high school and he was kind of crazy and he was tall he was about six foot seven and he was pretty thin and we used to go up to the bar now and then and in many of the bars that we were in we lived in this little town there were bullies and these were guys and I worked in the bars and I used to watch these guys and they'd basically there's a handful of them in town pretty psychopathic types and they'd go to the bar and all they do is sit there and wait for someone to come in who they could beat up and they knew who it was as soon as they walked in that's actually why they were at the bar and so they'd wait till someone came in who didn't look very confident and who could likely be intimidated by by this sort of thing and then they'd tell him to come outside for a fight and if they didn't well then they of course make fun of them and if they did well generally they beat them up my friend kind of caught on to this trick and he started going to bars and every time that someone like that came near him he'd go outside and fight with them and one of the things he observed right away is that almost inevitably when he went outside with them they'd shake hands and make friends so as soon as he's and it was really remarkable watching him cuz he wasn't he wasn't a particularly physically powerful person although he was extraordinarily tall but he had started to play this game and he did it for a long time and I don't remember him ever actually having to fight he just stared them down fundamentally so it was very interesting thing to watch but it was an indication to me of exactly how shallow this kind of bravado bullying actually is but people don't people don't find that out because they won't stand up and it's not surprising but anyways they load up on food Pinocchio's carrying a pie and an ice cream cone simultaneously and then they're off to have a fight and lambic says something like it's good to punch someone in the nose sometimes just for the I think he says heck of it and so Pinocchio adopts this strut and then they go to the roughhouse and then in the next scene you see this model hole up for destruction it's quite an interesting scene symbolically the kids are starting to burn this place and to trash it and they're dragging a grand piano down the down the stairs the destruction of high culture about which they're nothing but cynical because they don't believe that hard work and sacrifice can can produce something of any value and they want to bring it down and destroy it you shouldn't take some risks when you're a teenager and also later in life and so if you won't take any risks there's actually something wrong with you but there's a negative element in that well you know teenagers do all sorts of stupid things and perhaps it's amazing that we all live through it actually as far as I'm concerned and some people take extraordinarily risk extraordinary risks and they don't make it through at all or they end up in a permanently antisocial population and then they're you know basically career criminals five percent of the criminals commit 95 percent of the crimes it's another period of distribution so I used to live in Montreal I lived in a poor neighborhood and one day I was out in the back alley building a fence because I was putting a little fence around my back my little tiny backyard and there was a house across the alley down the street aways where there was a lot of like not good partying a lot of bikers were hanging around there and I knew there was a little kid that lived there as well anyways I was out there in the back alley pounding away on my fence and these little kids came up and they were little they were like three and four years old hey and they spoke you all right kind of really heavily accented came back off French and so my French isn't good so I could hardly understand them but they were what they were watching me hammer and they got a little closer and they had one one kid who was clearly the leader had a real scowl on his face Hey and so they were watching and I kind of motioned to one of them that they could use the hammer and that kid said and I'm gonna mangle this but he said gee of olay or something like that and what it meant has I'll steal that and so I thought you know and then he came over and he tugged on it and he wanted me to take it and he was quite angry and well I was gonna let him take it and then so so I couldn't engage him I couldn't get him to play you know and his buddies were sort of hanging around behind him and they wouldn't come and play because he wouldn't and so he was hostile right away to me and then so the fence piece was laying out in the alley and these little monsters started running across it which I thought was really remarkable you know but it was a terrible at the same time because they were really little kids that shouldn't be happening when you're like three or four if that's happening at that age things are not good and so that kid was already like seriously not happy with the world and you know I'd been studying antisocial behavior for a long time by that point and I knew that the kids who are destined to jail later in their lives are kids who are rough and tough when they're 2 years old but then don't get socialized or maybe worse they get anti socialized which is exactly what happened to this kid he'd obviously been ignored and abused certainly no one had ever played with him in any real way because he he wouldn't play and it's not good if a kid is that little and you can't get them to play something's gone seriously wrong because they're so playful at that age that like it's like 90% of them anyways so they were running back and forth on this fence I thought stomping on it you know and I was right there I thought well I first of all I thought that was remarkable but I also thought it was absolutely horrifying because you know in some sense I could see where this kid was headed and why at that early stage in his life it's really it's not a pleasant thing to behold if you're not doing very well especially if that's your own fault if you're not doing very well and you're around someone who's doing very well it's very painful because the mere fact of their being judges you and so it's very easy to want to destroy that to destroy that ideal so that you don't have to live with the terrible consequences of seeing it embodied in front of you and so part of the reason that people want to tear things down is so that they don't have anything to contrast themselves against and to feel bad and that's exactly what's happening here the kids are destroying all of this culture roughly speaking because it judges them the fact that it exists judges them and I've often thought this about Michelangelo's Statue of David which is this heroics so David was a shepherd obviously and it doesn't sound like much but back in those times being a shepherd was a big deal because their reliance and you had a slingshot and so like you got to defend your sheep from lions with a slingshot so you weren't exactly this like 19th century English guy dressed in a you know fully blue suit you were tough as a bloody well someone who would go after a lion with a slingshot it's no joke anyways the statue is very heroic and you know you look at that you think well that's the possibility of of humankind but by the same token it's also what you're not and so as well as being an ideal it's a judge and every ideal is a judge this is Pleasure Island here it's full of amusement park rides and you know one of the things that's kind of interesting about horror movies you I'm sure you've noticed this is that they're often sat at amusement parks and clowns are often characters of horror will leave the clown's aside for now but the amusement park thing that's pretty interesting it's like why in the world with an amusement park be a place of horror and the first question might be well have you ever been to an amusement park because there is something about them that's really they have a dark side a clear dark side and part of it is that people with nothing better to do are spending money stupidly and they're being fleeced by the people who operate the the amusement park you know and they have let's say a stereotypically dark reputation and they're moving around all the time which is also something that Psychopaths do and all they're doing is moving from community to community and taking the money from the rubes fundamentally and so the amusement park well if you walk through an amusement park with that sort of thing in mind maybe that's also coloring your vision of course but it's something that you can see very immediately so there's something about them that's sort of deeply sad but there's also that under there's an underlying horror that characterizes them that it's easy for horror movie and/or horror novel writers to immediately expand upon and there's something about it that that makes sense to people so it's too easy maybe that's and it's also all short-term gratification that's the other thing so you spend your money very rapidly and it's gone and so part of the problem with the hedonic answer is happy win exactly and over what period of time and also who's happy because maybe something makes you happy but makes your family miserable now you could say well I don't care but you do care if you have to live with your family because they're gonna take it out on you so so the the impulse of hedonism which is also fostered say by a positive emotion it tends to put people into a state of the pursuit of short-term hedonism it's not a good long-term or medium to long term solution I actually think that's why people evolved conscientiousness right because conscientiousness is not happy conscientious people aren't conscientious because it makes them happy we're starting to think that their conscientious because they actually feel terrible if they're just sitting around doing nothing and so it's a way of staving off stress the stress that's related to enforced leisure something like that you know you if you know industrious people some of you'll have it some of you are industrious some of you'll have industrious parents they just can't sit around and do nothing they have to be working they don't feel good unless they're working so what thing about conscientiousness is that it involves continual sacrifice right you're doing difficult things in the present hypothetically to make the future better but that's not driven by hedonism by any stretch of the imagination and conscientiousness is actually a pretty good predictor of long-term life success in stable societies because there's also no point in being conscientious and saving things up and storing things if a bunch of thugs are going to just come in randomly in and take it all away so conscientiousness actually only works intelligently in societies that have some medium to long term stability you know because you can get wiped out by hyperinflation too because hyperinflation kills off the conscientious people the people who accrued debts are thrilled with hyperinflation kicks in because it wipes out their debts but of course those debts are things they older people who were conscientious enough to save 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 not that would 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 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 kicked 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 don't you know it's 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 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 the 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 not we're gonna do the opposite we're gonna 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 because everybody also always makes noises about wanting to have a meaningful life but if the price you pay for that is the adoption of respond ability that it's not so obvious that people would choose meaning over you know over pointless pursuits if they had to if the benefit they got for choosing the pointless pursuits was that they really didn't have to care about anything they ever did as the situation degenerates then people have to be offered stupid amusements more and more frequently in order to for them to ignore what's actually going on in the background

Channel: Essential Truth

Views: 1,247,943

Rating: 4.8800092 out of 5

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, dark triad, Essential Truth, antisocial, hedonism, hedonistic, psychology, bite-sized philosophy, ideacity, philosophyinsights, Ramble, Intense 5, 50 stars, StevenCrowder, The Rubin Report, Evan Carmichael, Manofallcreation, Archangel911, MagiCal HD, mulliganbrothers, Jocko podcast, M3 podcast, M Czerna, Sorting Myself Out, Gad Saad, Independent man, Bearing, Gravitahn, PowerfulJRE, ScienceNET, What's trending, What's new, transliminal, psyche matters

Id: GHYVwnVbaxw

Length: 13min 47sec (827 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 04 2018