RESPONSIBILITY - Powerful Motivational Video | Jordan Peterson

what happens at the beginning of the abrahamic stories is basically God comes to Abraham and just says go get going man do something do something get going and you might think well where should I go and God is somewhat vague about that and where he sends Abraham it's it's a real fixer-upper man it's like there's starvation there and there's tyranny and there's marital dissolution and there's deceit like it's just like where you live you know it's exactly the same thing it's tyranny and catastrophe so that's the tyrannical Great Father because Abraham ends up having to sojourn in Egypt and there's a famine and some other nature is on the rampage and Abraham lies about his wife has we'll see and so it's the world it's the world it's tyranny and and vulnerability and deceit and yet God says go because if you do go then you'll become a father of Nations and you think well again that's pretty good news although it's strange because you'd expect that if God chose Abraham then he'd send him immediately to the land of milk and honey and that isn't what happens at all it doesn't happen at all and Abraham never gets there but his mission is still regarded as divine and thank God for that because that's what your mission will be because that's what you will encounter in your life those are the archetypal things everyone encounters the tyranny of the social structure and the rapaciousness of nature and the deceitful of quality of the human psyche it's like that's the world now that's a negative view in some sense but it's positive in this story because what it basically says is something that's akin to the Sermon on the Mount which is that if you're aligned with God and you pay attention to the divine injunction then you can operate in the midst of chaos and tyranny and deception and flourish and you could hardly hope to have a better piece of news than that given that that's exactly where you are so and I didn't see any of that neighbor hammock stories to begin with so it's been very interesting to have that sort of reveal itself and one of the things that has just blown me away in the last year because I've talked to lots of people lots of people live you know but also lots of people online but it's obvious live and it's obvious in this theater as well is that I've gone around and spoken and a large proportion of my audience has been young man you know under 30 something like that and I've spoken to them a lot about responsibility and what's so odd about this is that of all the things that I've spoken about because I can see the audience and I can feel how the audience is reacting because I'm always paying attention to all of you insofar as I can manage that so I I get some sense of how what I'm saying is landing you know what you have to do if you're going to speak effectively to people and what happens is if I talk about responsibilities everyone is silent just like they are now is silent and and not moving right focusing attentive say pick up your responsibilities pick up the heaviest thing you can and carry it and the room goes quiet and everybody's eyes open and I think I've always makes me break up I was I don't I don't know why I was speaking to an English journalist today he was gonna write a an article in Spectator magazine I was talking about this and at the same point in the discussion I had the same emotional reaction I don't really understand it I think it's something there's something about it that's so crucial because you know we've been fed this unending diet of rights and freedoms and there's something about that that's so pathologically wrong and people are starving for the antidote and the antidote is truth and responsibility right and it isn't because that's what you should do and some I know better or someone knows better for you what you should do sense is that that's the secret to a meaningful life and without the meaningful life then all you have is suffering and and nihilism and despair and all of that and self contempt and that's not good and it's necessary to stand up and take responsibility and they all know that and are starving for that message and and the message is more that that's also a good thing to stand up and take responsibility because you're cursed so much now from when you're young with this notion that your active engagement with the world is part of what is destroying and undermining the planet and adding to the tyranny of the social systems it's like how about not so much of that hey because it's to soul deadening it's anti human right to the car and my sense instead is that you know if you were able to reveal the best of yourself to you in the world that you would be an overwhelming force for good and that whatever errors might be made along the way would wash out in the works and that's the other thing that you see in the Abrahamic stories because Abraham is not a perfect person by any stretch of the imagination he's a real person and he makes mistakes but it doesn't matter the overarching narrative is maintain your covenant with God and despite your inadequacies then not only will you prevail but your descendants will prevail it's like great that's really good news you know so it's been really something to see that in this stories so that's responsibility it's not just that Abraham is kinder gentler more intrepid and ethical or a better debater than his ancestor Noah rather both the Noah and Abraham stories are pieces development of an increasingly stronger stance of humans relative to the deity before the story is over humans will become a good deal stronger and bolder than Abraham see what happens as the story progresses is that Abraham and Sarah are eventually granted a son but it's way late in the story and they're very very old by the time it happens and of course you're not going to be a father of Nations without having a child and so the writers are attempting to make the case that if you forthrightly pursue that which God directs you to pursue let's say that all things are possible that's the idea and the narrative and you might say that's naive and it's not you think it when you're naive right and then you dispense with that idea and then when you stop being the sort of person who dispenses with ideas then you come to another place and that's the place where you think you have no idea what might be possible for you if you've got things together and pursued what you should pursue you don't know how much what's impossible to you right now would become possible under those conditions it's an unknown phenomena and like I've watched people who put themselves together across time know incrementally and continually and they become capable of things that are not only jaw-droppingly amazing but also sometimes metaphysically impossible to understand and so we don't know the limits of human endeavor we truly don't and it's premature to put a cap on what it is that we are what it is that we're capable of and so you know you're already something and maybe you're not so bad in your current configuration but you might wonder if you did nothing for the next 30 years except put yourself together just exactly what would you be able to do and you might think well that's worth finding out but of course that's that's the adoption of responsibility and one thing I've also learned over the years because I've been curious about this battle between meaning and nihilism you know and I could see for a long while the rationale in nihilism and the power of the nihilistic argument but it occurred to me across time that despite that the power of the nihilistic argument is more powerful than naive optimism that's not more powerful than the optimism that is not naive because the optimism that is not naive says it's self-evident that the world is a place of suffering and that there are things to be done about that and it's self-evident that people are flawed and that there's things to be done about that and then the non naive optimist says the suffering could be reduced and the insufficient see could be overcome if people oriented themselves properly and did what they were capable of doing and I do not believe that that's deniable I think that human potential is virtually limitless and that there's nothing perhaps that's beyond our grasp if we're careful as individuals and as a society and so I think that there's no reason for nihilism and there's no reason for hopelessness and there's no reason to bow down before evil because we're capable of so much more and I think you know that first because you're not happy with who you are and you're ashamed and embarrassed about it as you should be and you know it because if you look out there you see people who are capable of doing great things and you know that we're not giving it our all and still we're not doing so badly though and so you might wonder if we devoted 90% of our effort to putting things right instead of 55% of our effort or maybe even less than that you might wonder just how well could things be put together and I think that you can figure that out by starting with your room by the way

Channel: WordToTheWise

Views: 359,288

Rating: 4.919241 out of 5

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Id: nDDCnMgPnlY

Length: 10min 3sec (603 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 24 2019