Jordan Peterson: The victim mentality

Pinocchio was transformed into a victim and he's offered this he's offered this identity and he takes it now it's partly because he's deceived and manipulated but it's also partly because the Fox offers him the abandonment of responsibility as payment for as payment for adopting the victim identity so this is where his own lack of morality let's say because this is all about Pinocchio development as a character plays a role in his demise so if I'm a victim then everyone else owes me something and I don't have to take any responsibility and so one of the things I've wondered here's something to think about 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 denial 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 no 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 responsibility 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 right there's no responsibility and that's really what Pinocchio is offered and that's what the coachmen offers them and that's interesting because you know so far it's beating the Fox and the cat and they're kind of two-bit hoods and so the pathological pathway that they offer Pinocchio is not the worst of the pathological pathways but here at least as far as the imagination the collective imagination that created this movie is concerned is this is where you get to the most pathological form of let's call it temptation and that's the temptation to engage in to abandon responsibility and to engage in impulsive pleasure seeking short-term pleasure seeking so here's the Fox pretending to be a doctor investigating Pinocchio's illness and he makes some notes which is all just meaningless scribble right it's like white noise and it doesn't matter that the arguments that he's making is are completely incoherent and it doesn't matter that he actually doesn't know anything he what he's selling is easy to buy and so Pinocchio buys it and by the end of the conversation with the Fox he's pretty convinced that he's useless and they need to make no this is an eatable such an edible situation as well which I touched on the other lecture I mean it's fair let's imagine that you have a child that is little on the neurotic side so high negative emotion and maybe one that's also a little bit on the sickly side so has a variety of let's say relatively minor ailments but the ailments nonetheless and so what that means as a parent will say mother for this example because I want to use the eatable example you have to make a decision all the time about exactly how are you going to treat that child one decision is well I'm not going to you don't have to go to school today because you're not feeling well it's like fair enough but do you make the same decision the next day and do you make the same decision the next day and let's imagine that you enable the child to avoid responsibility as a consequence of capitalizing on their illness well then that's not going to be very good for the child the rule with a sickly child has to be something like I'm gonna push you right to your limit because otherwise how is the person going to figure out what they can do and if they can't figure out what they can do then they're not gonna be able to make their way in the world at all and then that gets muddied very badly if you're not exactly sure that you want them to make their way in the world you know maybe you're just as happy because you'd be sitting at home alone if your child was there with you and maybe you'd be just as happy at some level if they never grew up at all because then they won't leave and so and maybe that's because you have a terrible marriage and you're lonesome you know maybe it's an abusive marriage and your husband has chased away all your friends and so you don't have anything at all and maybe that's because he didn't stand up for yourself very well apart from the fact that he was you know tyrannical in his central nature and so then all those little warps and bends in your psyche are gonna manifest themselves right right in the background of every single one of those decisions my daughter had a lot of illnesses when she was adolescent and they were very serious and it was very diff to figure out what to do about that because you couldn't exactly apply normative rules right and we always had to figure out if she was communicating her symptoms to us how seriously to take those and the answer was the least amount of serious possible it's something like that because we needed to know and she needed to know what she could do in spite of the fact that she had problems and one of the things I really tried to instill in her and I think it worked is that you don't ever want to use it your illness as an excuse for not doing anything not consciously you know sometimes you might not know I'm not feeling well how what can I do well you don't know right because sometimes when you're not feeling well you can do more than you think and sometimes you can do less than you think it's not like it's obvious but sometimes it's obvious you know this little temptation Flitz through your mind and you think well I don't really want to do what I'm doing today and I'm not feeling very well so I don't have to do it you do that a hundred times then you don't know how sick you are anymore and then you're then you're in real trouble because not only are you sick but you actually have you've muddied the waters and so you have both problems that is you're actually ill and you've betrayed yourself by using that as an excuse not to pursue your responsibilities and that I think if you do both of it those both of those things happen to you at the same time you're in real trouble that's really hard not to have that happen so anyways Pinocchio gets enticed into believing that he's a victim the fact that he's insufficient is used as an excuse by the Fox and them and the cat to offer him a trip to Pleasure Island and this is I think where the movie gets particularly dark and so off they go singing away they have to carry him so you could say in some sense he's carried by societal pathology in his own trouble he's carried like a puppet off to Pleasure Island and so the Cricut the Cricut is again left behind he's not the world's best conscience at this point so Pinocchio goes off to meet the coachman and the coachman has already said he's collecting bad little boys and he's he's got them all in the coach they're all delinquent types here and the ticket on the coach was the Ace of Spades which is what Pinocchio was holding and he's with this character here called lamp-wick that's an interesting name so he's the he's the thing that burns in the middle of a light lamp wick and that's interesting because it's a play on Lucifer because Lucifer means bringer of light and so lamp wick is a play on that and lamp wick is really a nasty piece of work he's got this false arrogance about him he's got this likes in a cynical voice really deeply cynical voice and he's only I don't know how old he's supposed to be in this maybe 12 or something like that or thirteen and so he's one of those kids who's become prematurely cynical

Channel: Essential Truth

Views: 646,718

Keywords: Jordan B Peterson, victim mentality, overcoming victimhood, overcoming oppression, Essential Truth, PowerfulJRE, Transliminal, M Czerna, StevenCrowder, Ben Shapiro, snowflakes, Millennials, pinocchio, maps of meaning, philosophyinsights, ColdWindGreen, Gad Saad, independent man, The Thinkery, psychology, AP Psychology, personality psychology, MBTI, Myers-Briggs, the liberty hound, ocean of freedom, stefan Molyneaux

Id: UcX1MeyJEqc

Length: 9min 43sec (583 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 25 2017