Jordan Peterson: Wimps, Alphas & Good men

I see that in resentful men all the time they're very antipathy towards women and they blame their misery and resentment on the fact that women won't have anything to do with them while the women are making them self-conscious for not being all they should be because the women think why should I bother with you if you're not the embodiment of the spirit that will move into the unknown and and face the Leviathan which is exactly what she should be saying and you're thinking well I don't want to have anything to do with that but I'd like women to like me anyways it's like well good luck with that so that doesn't work out right and that's exactly what happens when God finds out that Adam and Eve have become self conscious the for one of the first things he says is haha jigs up now man you're gonna be working forever toiling forever it's your destiny there's no escaping from it well human beings work what does that mean they sacrifice the present for the future and that's partly as soon as this happens like the next story which is Cain and Abel you see the motif of sacrifice emerge write that story circulates around the motif of sacrifice sacrifice the present for the future well what's the price you pay you don't get the present that's a big price right because what you do is what you're doing essentially is you're taking all the potential suffering of the future and putting it into the present all the time well so what happens well maybe you live longer and you live healthier but you're not without the burden that that puts on you there's very little difference between self-consciousness and shame in fact if you do psychometric analysis of the state of self-consciousness it loads with neuroticism so loads with anxiety and emotional pain so to become self-conscious what does it mean to become self-conscious it me becomes it means you become aware one way of thinking about it is you become aware of your vulnerability or another is that you become aware of your insufficiency okay so let's say that you're standing up in front of a crowd talking and you become self-conscious what happens well first of all you can't talk anymore the second is he kind of fall inside the third is you feel ashamed and the fourth is that you retreat and you look down so it's a low status operation and it's associated with heightened anxiety and so then you might say well why would you become self conscious before a crowd well the answer is they can see you right and they can judge you and you can make an error in front of them and you can make a fool of yourself so they put you down that you can you can display yourself in a manner that ratchets you down the dominance hierarchy that's to become self-conscious and so well at least you have the advantage of being covered up in front of the crowd but let's say all of a sudden you're stripped of your clothes so what's the problem with that well all of your insufficiencies let's say are on painful display you can be evaluated by everyone but even more importantly than that if possible is that clothes actually protect the most vulnerable parts of you human beings are upright animals right we're very strange animals you take a cat or a dog they're basically armored the part of them that you see their back is heavily armored heavily protected human being stretched up right and so the softest part of parts of us are there for display well what would you want to be king you could say king of the world or king of your own soul what do you want to subordinate yourself to how about your heroic willingness to encounter the unknown and articulate it and share that with people there's no nobler vision than that and I don't see that it's merely arbitrary and so and it's not merely arbitrary - because if you do that to the degree that you do that assuming your society isn't entirely corrupt you will be successful it will actually aid you practically you'll rise up above men you'll be selected by women you'll be admirable you'll be valued and and you know that because if you look at the people that you admire and value again unless you've taken a detour into dark places and are possessed with admiration for people who are working for malevolent purposes and for destruction you just have to watch the people that you admire and try to figure out what's common across them and draw your own conclusions and you can ask yourself - when you're torturing yourself with your conscience because you're not doing what you should be and you know it what is it that you're torturing yourself in relationship to you have a vision of your own ideal and you torment yourself if you're not matching it what's the ideal well you don't know right it's it's kind of incoherent and and poorly articulated but that doesn't mean it isn't trying to manifest itself and and make itself known to you who's more self-conscious women are men and the answer to that is women are more self-conscious than men and even further you might say that women taught men to be self-conscious and I believe that to be the case maybe babies taught women to be self-conscious but women taught men to be self-conscious and they still teach them that all the time because there's nothing that makes a man more self-conscious that to be rejected by a woman that he desires so the woman is always offering self-consciousness to men and it isn't necessarily a gift that they exactly appreciate and that motif of course runs through the Adam and Eve story centrally because Eve is damned forever in some sense for making out himself conscious well he didn't want to be self-conscious things were pretty good when his eyes were closed and he was wandering around not worrying about whether he was naked or not well the women became self-conscious why because of snakes well maybe right maybe that's exactly what happened you know she imagined we're being preyed upon for millions of years by predatory reptiles right and we become more and more alert to threat and more and more alert to threat and then one day we get so alert to threat that we can see threat lurking in the future and then all of a sudden we become aware of the future and then we become aware of death and then we're really self-conscious but it's pretty good if you want to keep the snakes down which we've been doing quite successfully ever since then but it's a big price to pay we got so damn sensitive to threat that we were finally able to conceive the ultimate threat not proximal threats but the fact of threat itself and the fact of mortality itself and the fact of finitude itself and maybe women learned that because they become painfully aware of the mortal limitations of their infants first right this small thing could die could end a little and certainly as an object of predation and the problem again for men with being allied with women and infants is that it also heightens their self-consciousness because you're tougher and more indomitable say if there's just you but as soon as you have a wife say and then you also have an infant well all the burden of their self-consciousness and their vulnerability is placed upon you well it's a hell of a bargain well why did men accept the bargain well it's partly because women stood in front of them offering them fruit right well part of the price that the men paid for that was to wake the hell up well who the hell wants that it's a lot more it's a lot more calming to remain asleep with no knowledge of the sort of burden of mortality that you would bear if you became self-conscious so fine so now they're done with it they the snake and the fruit woke them up and they can see and the scales drop from the rise and so we can really see well so what does that mean how far brain is visual is devoted to visual processing so as well as long as as our eyes got better our brain got bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger what happens when it gets big enough well not only can you see you can Metis see it's you can start to see into the future well that's exactly what happened to us not only could we see with our eyes we could see with our imagination and our imagination is or you can see with your eyes closed right close your eyes bring up a vision you can imagine the future well what do you see you're seeing a potential future with your eyes closed the circuitry is there once it's developed you can use it to imagine you can project your project your vision into places that don't even exist and you can start to conceptualize the future what happens when you conceptualize the future well this is a I'm spoiling the punchline you have to work because you can see the future coming you think oh oh the future is coming it isn't just the present anymore I don't have to just worry about whether or not I'm hungry right now I'm gonna have to worry about whether I'm hungry tomorrow and next week and next month and next year and for me and for my wife and for my child and for the community it's like you can forget about your day-to-day existence in paradise at that point there's no evidence that people in industrialized societies are happier than people in non industrialized societies in fact quite the contrary we're less happy why well because we fully and constantly bear the burden of the future well that's good because we don't die and we live maybe 30 years longer and we have fewer horrible diseases and all of that but that doesn't mean it's any picnic you have to carry that along with you wherever you go that's the burden of self-consciousness every social animal and even many animals who aren't social are embedded in a dominance hierarchy the dominance hierarchy has a structure we couldn't call it a dominance hierarchy dominance hierarchy a b c d e thousands of them across thousands of years you extract out from all of them what's central to all of them that's the pyramid of value what's the what's the question do you need answered about the pyramid of value what's at the top because that's the ideal that's the eye at the top of the pyramid or the golden buddha in the in the lotus it's the same thing it's the same thing as the crucifix paradoxically enough and that has to do it has to do with something like the voluntary acceptance and therefore transcendence of suffering it's something like that these are not arbitrary ideas they're deeply that's my case anyways they're deeply deeply deeply rooted in biology and culture they're they're as deeply rooted in biology as the dominance hierarchy is rooted in biology and we already know the answer to that the dominance hierarchies been around for 350 million years it's a long time you don't get to just brush that off and say well morality some sort of second-order cognitive problem it's like no it's not I can tell you something about its instantiation in your nervous system you have a counter at the bottom of your brain that keeps track of where you are in terms of your status and it bloody well regulates the sensitivity of your emotions so if you're at the bottom of the hierarchy barely clinging on to the world everything overwhelms you and that's because you're damn near dead and so everything should overwhelm you you've got no extra resources any more threat you're sunk so you become extremely sensitive to negative emotion and maybe also impulsive so that you grab well the grabbing is good and if you're near the top in the dominance hierarchy and your counter tells you that then your serotonin levels go up you're less sensitive to negative emotion you're less impulsive you live longer like everything works in your favor your immune system functions better and you're oriented at least to some degree towards the medium and long-term future and you can afford that because all hell isn't breaking loose around you all the time and so then the question is is there a way of being that increases the probability that you're going to move up dominance hierarchies well that doesn't seem to be a particularly provocative proposition unless you think that it's completely arbitrary and random and that you can think that if you want but I don't think there's any evidence for that whatsoever I mean we certainly have even for sexual selection we impose criteria they're not rammed random and arbitrary this is the dominance hierarchy idea doormen desire key set themselves up as a matter of course they're the standard way that animals organized themselves in a territory well ok human beings are watching those dominance hierarchies since we became self-aware thinking what the hell are we up to what the hell are we up to what's and and there's a question that lurks in there what constitutes acceptable power what constitutes acceptable sovereignty who should lead who should rule what should be at the top well we talked about that the Mesopotamians figured that out speech and vision that's Marduk speech vision and the willingness to confront the terrible unknown that's what should rule well what's that an arbitrary idea or is that a great idea how could it be any other way well that's what human beings are like and I don't think that you can read the Mesopotamians story and understand the reference which isn't an easy thing to do and fail to draw that conclusion Marduk has eyes all the way around his head he speaks magic words he goes off to fight time at the dragon of chaos well what's that that's the reptilian predator that lurks in the unknown well is any of that is there anything about any of that that stands in opposition to what you would presume if you were just analyzing our situation from a purely biological perspective where prey animals were predators we'd be threatened by reptiles forever why wouldn't we use the predator that lurks in the dark forest or the water as a representative of the unknown why wouldn't we harness that circuitry we already have it at hand and even more to the point how could we do anything else it's it makes perfect sense well so then what you might say

Channel: Essential Truth

Views: 739,376

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Keywords: Jordan B Peterson, Jordan Peterson, Alpha males, Essential Truth, bite-sized philosophy, Intense 5, Ramble, men and women, self-help, philosophyinsights, PowerfulJRE, ScienceNET, Psyche matters, sorting myself out, mulliganbrothers, archangel911, manofallcreation, ocean of freedom, jocko podcast, H3 podcast, transliminal, Gravitahn, M Czerna, Gad Saad, Bearing, Independent man, Evan Carmichael, The Rubin Report, MGTOW, MagiCal HD, psychology, dominance hierarchy, Myers-briggs, MBTI, Jung

Id: WvmlIZwunHE

Length: 13min 48sec (828 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 10 2018