Jordan Peterson: Why some men can't get women

so imagine you're dealing with someone who's hoarding now people who are hoarding are often older or neurologically damaged or they have obsessive-compulsive disorder but then you walk into their house and there's like 10,000 things in their house there's there's there's there's maybe a hundred boxes and you open up a box and in the box there's some pens and some old passports and some checks and they're their collection of silver dollars and some hypodermic needles and some dust and you know a dead mouse and and and there's boxes and boxes and boxes like that in the house it's absolute chaos in there absolute chaos not order chaos and then you think is that their house is that their being is that their mind and the answer is there's no difference there's no difference so you know I could say well if you want to organize your psyche you could start by organizing your room if they if that would be easier because maybe you're a more concrete person and you need something concrete to do so you go clean up under your bed and you make your bed and you organize the papers on your desk and you think well just exactly what are you organizing are you organizing the objective world or are you objecting your field or are you organizing your field of being like your field of total experience and young believe that and I think there's a Buddhist doctrine that's sort of nested in there that at the highest level of psychological integration there's no difference between you and what you experience now you think well I can't control everything I experience but that's no objection because you can't control yourself anyway so the mere fact that you can't extend control over everything you experience is no argument against the idea that you should still treat that as an extension of yourself so you could say well let's say you have a long-standing feud with your brother well is that a psychological problem is that him is it a problem in the objective world or is it a problem in your field of being and it's very useful to think that way because you might ask what could you do to improve yourself well let's step one step backwards the first question might be why should you even bother improving yourself and I think the answer to that is something like so you don't suffer anymore stupidly than you have to and maybe so others don't have to either it's something like that you know like there's a real injunction at the bottom of it it's not some casual self-help doctrine it's that if you don't organize yourself properly you'll pay for it and in a big way and so will the people around you know and you could say well I don't care about that but that's actually not true you actually do care about that because if you're in pain you will care about it and so you do care about it even if it's just that negative way you know it's very rare that you can find someone who's in excruciating pain who would ever say well it would be no better if I was out of this sort of pain is one of those things that brings the idea that it would be better if it didn't exist along with it it's incontrovertible so you get your act together so that there isn't any more stupid pain around you than necessary well so then the question might be well how would you go about getting your act together and the answer to that and this is a phenomenological idea too it's something like look around for something that bothers you and see if you can fix it so now you think well let's say there let's say you go into a you can do this in a room it's quite fun to do it just when you're sitting in a room like a room maybe your bedroom you can sit there and just sort of meditate on and think okay if I wanted to spend 10 minutes making this room better what would I have to do and you have to ask yourself that right it's not a command it's like our genuine question and things will pop out in the room that you know you like there's a stack of papers over there that's kind of bugging you and you know that may be a little order there would be a good thing and you know you haven't there's some rubbish behind your computer monitor that you haven't attended to for like six months and the room would be slightly better if it was a little less dusty and the cables weren't all tangled up the same way and like if you if you allow yourself just to consider the expanse in which you exist at that moment there'll be all sorts of things that'll pop out in it that you could just fix and you know I might say well if you were coming to see me for psychotherapy this easiest thing for us to do first would just be to get you to organize your room you think well is that psychotherapy and the answer is well it depends on how you Seve the limits of your being and I would say start where you can start you know if something announces itself to you which is a strange way of thinking about it as in need of repair that you could repair then hey fix it you fix a hundred things like that your life will be a lot different now I often tell people to fix the things you repeat every day because people tend to think of those as trivial right you get up you brush your teeth you have your breakfast you know you have your routines that you go through every day well those probably constitute 50% of your life and people think well they're Monday and I don't need to pay attention to them it's like no no that's exactly wrong the things you do every day those are the most important things you do hands-down all you have to do is do the arithmetic you figured out right away so a hundred adjustments to your broader domain of being and there's a lot less rubbish and there's a lot less rubbish around it a lot fewer traps for you to step into and so that's in keeping with the ewings idea about erasing the dis once you've got your mind and your emotions together and once you're acting that out then you can extend what you're willing to consider yourself and start fixing up the things that are part of your broader extent now sometimes you don't know how to do that so you might say imagine you're walking down Bloor Street and there's this guy who's like alcoholic and schizophrenic and has been on the streets for 10 years he sort of stumbled towards you and you know incoherently mutters something that's a problem and it would be good if you could fix it but you haven't got a clue about how to fix that you just walk around that and go find something that you could fix because if you muck about in that not only is it unlikely that you'll help that person it's very likely that you'll get hurt yourself so you know just because while you're experiencing things announce themselves as in need of repair doesn't mean that it's you right then and there that should repair them you have to have some humility you know you don't walk up to a helicopter that isn't working and just start tinkering away with it you have to stay within your domain of competence but most of the time if people look at their lives you know it's very interesting thing to do I like that I like the idea of the room because you can do that at the drop of a hat you know you go back to where you live and sit down and think okay I'm gonna make this place better for half an hour what should I do you have to ask and things will just pop up like mad and it's partly because your mind is a very strange thing as soon as you give it a name a genuine name it'll reconfigure the world in keeping with that aim that that's actually how you see to begin with and so if you've said it a task especially if you have to be genuine about it which is why you have to bring your thoughts and emotions together and then you have to get them in your body so you're acting consistently you have to be genuine about the aim but once you aim the world will reconfigure itself around that aim which is very strange and and it's it's it's technically true you know the best example of that you have all seen this video where you watch the basketballs being tossed back and forth between members of the white team versus the black team and while you're doing that a gorilla walks up into the middle of the video and you don't see it it's like you know if you thought about that experiment for about five years that would be about the right amount of time to spend thinking about it because what it shows you is that you see what you aim at and that man if you can get one thing through your head and as a consequence of even being in university that would be a good one you see what you aim at and so because one inference you might draw from that is be careful what you aim at write it what you aim at determines the way the world manifests itself to you and so if the world is manifesting itself in a very negative way one thing to ask is are you aiming at the right thing now you know I'm not trying to reduce everybody's problems to an improper aim people get cut off at the knees for all sorts of reasons you know they get sick they have accidents there's a random element to being nuts for sure but and so you don't want to take anything even that particular phrase too far you want to bind it with the fact that random things do happened to people but is still a great thing to ask okay so Rogers was a phenomenologist and he was interested in he didn't start his philosophy from the perspective of subject versus object or from the idea of psyche like sort of inside you your mind with its layers that's not how we looked at it and so let's go through well I'll introduce you to Rogers I think and then we'll talk about it more next time I'm gonna start though with something that I learned from him that I think it was of crucial importance and so we'll set the stage for the further discussion with with this and I'm gonna read it to you assuming a minimal mutual willingness to be in contact and to receive communications we may say that the greater the community communicated congruence of experience awareness and behavior on the part of one individual the more the ensuing relationship will involve a tendency towards reciprocal communication with the same qualities mutually accurate understanding of the communications improved psychological adjustment and functioning in both parties and mutual satisfaction in the relationship it's quite a mouthful what does it mean assuming a minimal mutual willingness to be in contact and to receive communications okay we're having a conversation I'm deciding I'm going to listen to you right that's different than people how people generally communicate because usually when they communicate they're doing something like okay we're gonna have a conversation and I'm gonna tell you why I'm right and Alwyn if you agree or maybe you're having a conversation where I don't know what you're trying to do maybe you're trying to impress the person you're talking to so you're not listening to them at all you're just thinking about what you're gonna say next okay so that's not this this is you might have something to tell me and so I'm gonna listen on the off chance that you'll tell me something that would really be useful for me to know and so you could think about it as an as an extension of the PIA jetty and you know Piaget talked about the fundamental the fundamentally important element of knowledge being to describe how knowledge is sought the process by which knowledge is generated well if you agree with me and I find that out I know nothing more than I knew before I just know what I knew before and maybe I'm happy about that because you know it didn't get challenged but I'm no smarter than I was before but maybe you're different than me and so while I'm listening to you you'll tell me something I wouldn't I don't like maybe it's something I find contemptible or difficult whatever maybe you'll find you'll tell me something I don't know and then I won't be quite as stupid and then maybe I won't run painfully into quite as many things and that's a really useful thing to know especially if you live with someone and you're trying to make long-term peace with them is they are not the same as you and they're away they look at the world and the facts that they pull out of the world aren't the same as your facts and even though you're going to be overwhelmed with the proclivity to demonstrate that you're right it is the case that two brains are better than one and so maybe nine of the ten things they tell you are dispensable or maybe even 49 out of 50 but one thing all you need to get out of the damn conversation is one thing you don't know and one of the things that's very cool about a good psychotherapeutic session is that the whole conversation is like that all you're doing is trying to express the truth of the situation as clearly as possible that's it and so now Rogers proposition and I'll tell you why he derived it was that if you have a conversation like that with someone it will make both of you better it'll make both of you psychologically healthier so there's an implicit presupposition that the exchange of truth is curative well that's a very cool idea it's a very deep idea I think it's the most profound idea it's the it's the idea upon Western civil on which Western civilization although not only Western civilization is actually predicated the idea that truth produces health but for Rogers that was the entire purpose of the psychotherapeutic alliance you come to see me because you want to be better you don't even know what that means necessarily neither do i we're gonna figure that out together but you come and you say look things are not acceptable to me and maybe there's something I could do about that so that's the minimal precondition to engage in therapy something's wrong you're willing to talk about it truthfully and you want it to be better without that the therapeutic relationship does not get off the ground and so then you might ask well what relationships are therapeutic and the answer that would be if you have a real relationship it's therapeutic if it isn't what you have is not a relationship god only knows what you have you're a slave they're a tyrant you know you're both butting heads with one another it's a primate dominance hierarchy dispute oh I don't know you're like two cats in a barrel or two people with their hands around eat each other's throats but you what you have is not a relationship so all right we may say that the greater the communicated congruence of experience awareness and behavior on the part of one individual that's that's a reference to the same idea that I was describing with regards to yoke so let's say you come and talk to me and you want things to go well well I'm gonna have to more or less be one thing because if I'm all over the place you can't trust any continuity in what I say there's no and you there's no reason for you to believe that I'm capable of actually telling you I'm capable of expressing anything that's true so the truth is something that emerges as a consequences of getting yourself lined up and beating all the what would you call all the impurities out of your out of your out of your soul

Channel: Essential Truth

Views: 1,377,662

Rating: 4.7582355 out of 5

Keywords: Jordan B Peterson, Essential Truth

Id: XdsLeeQ4s_Q

Length: 14min 57sec (897 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 26 2018