The meaning behind Harry Potter | Jordan B Peterson

so in the second volume of Harry Potter correct me if I have any of these details wrong you rember there's that snake the basilisk so this is Magic Castle right you guys have no problem without Magic Castle no problem there's a North he's an orphan he goes to the Magic Castle to learn how to be more than normal right the muggles he has a muggle family we're not too happy with the muggle family like as representatives of normal people they they have some blacks now of course the reason for that is that well that's what teenagers often feel about their parents right they failed Jesus these couldn't really be my parents I must have some other parents who are like together those are like magical parents right parents that live in the sky and of course Harry Potter has earthly parents that's the muggles and their Dursley I think is the kid he's a one he's a wonderful piece of work and you know ill-formed a spoiled ill-formed selfish very far from the ideal he's a foil for harry and of course he's appreciated and doted on and harry is actually punished for his virtues that's a classic story right to to be punished for your virtues I mean if you look at the story the central story in Christianity the central story and Christianity is about someone who is precisely punished in the worst possible way for the highest possible virtues that's what it makes it an archetypal story because there isn't anything more unfair than that and so it's a limit in a sense you it can't be worse than that being punished for being you know unworthy it's like yeah yeah well at least makes sense but to be punished because you have your act together and you're a good person that's real punishment and that's what happens to Harry so luckily he finds out that he's magical which is quite convenient and off he goes to Wizarding school and you know that's actually like taking that's actually like going and studying the humanities I mean it was when they still were you know because you it's through the humanities that you that you make contact with the magic of your culture and that makes you more than merely the child of your parents because you are more than merely the child of your parents here the child of nature and you're the child of culture and until you understand what that means understand that you have two sets of parents like the divine hero always has two sets of parents you you can't construe yourself properly as an individual you're not situated properly in the world you don't know what your responsibilities are you can't orient your values property and you will suffer for that because as far as I can tell because life is so difficult you have to do something that's truly worthwhile in order to justify it and so well that's what all these stories tell you that's what the story of Jonah is telling you it's like you have an ethical duty to straighten things up and if you don't do it you're gonna be sorry and that stories echoed everywhere while now st. George well let's go to Harry Potter well that's what we were talking about so he goes off to the Magic Castle and he's learning to be a wizard and he's kind of an interesting character a because he's not really good and we find out I think that's because does he have a piece of the old imarti in him he's not what happens yeah and that's what that means is that to be good truly good you can't just follow rules that's that's very clear in the Harry Potter story and you also have to be able to understand and malevolence and in order to understand malevolence so that you can withstand it you have to understand that part of you that's malevolent because if you don't you're naive and if you're naive you're easy pickings and so that's a union idea to and the Union idea is that part of personality development is to understand your shadow and the shadow is those things about you that you do not want to admit to and you can learn about your shadow by reading history you know you can read about Auschwitz you can read about the concentration camps in Russia and you can imagine yourself as a guard instead of as a heroic rescuer of unfortunate victims which would be very very unlikely and once you can imagine yourself as a guard which is a terrifying thing to do then you understand something about yourself and I actually think and I think this is also from student studying young that you cannot have proper respect for yourself until you know that you're a monster because you won't act carefully enough you know if you think well I'm a nice person I'd never do anyone any harm it's like you're no saint you can be sure of that and the harm that you do people can come in many many ways and so if you regard yourself as harmless inoffensive nice well why do you have any reason to be careful you're like a teddy bear sitting on a shelf even if you throw it at someone no one's gonna get hurt but that isn't what you're like because you're a human being and human beings are some vicious creatures and there's utility in knowing that because it's also the case you know in the Harry Potter series Harry could stand up against full-dome art and understand him and speak his language because he was infected by him to some degree a very very interesting idea anyways in the second ten the reason I'm telling you this and this is worth thinking about it's like how long were each of those books like 500 pages they're long eh and there was how many of them seven and how many of them were sold I mean how many of you read every Harry Potter book right that's how many of you read at least one okay how many you saw the movies it's like you're all in a cult you are I'm telling you really that's the truth it's really the truth so in the second volume there's this snake that's zipping around there the basilisk right and it lives in the underground that's chaos that's chaos and that's because wherever you are you're on thin ice and underneath your thin ice is chaos and here we are in this unbelievably civilized environment and everyone's getting along so perfectly but you know we've got hot guard lights with electricity the sewage system is working no one's hungry it's like we can be peaceful but if any of that fell apart and it could easily fall apart because it's a bloody miracle it ever works at all then the chaos that's just underneath the surface is going to come up right now and it's useful to know that because it makes you properly grateful if you really understand it it makes you properly grateful for the bloody miracle that it is that you can be here in peace so anyways there's this snake that's underneath the surface and it's you know no joke that thing it's big and it's ancient it's always been there and what happens if you look at it it turns you to stone right it paralyzes you well that's the more that's the Gorgon that's Medusa the woman with the head of snakes and if you look at her it paralyzes you what does that mean well you're walking through the jungle and big snake appears what do you do you freeze and no bloody wonder because you're a prey animal and that's what they do when they see things that are going to eat them and so the snake well lots of people still die from snakebite and our ancestors were and I mean our ancestors like you know tens of millions of years ago when they were living in trees and weren't very big they made a nice snack for a snake and there's a woman named Lynn Isbell who's an anthropologist at UCLA who's correlated the presence of carnivorous snakes with the acuity of primate vision and what she found was that the more snakes around better the primates could see so and we're particularly good at picking up patterns like snake camouflage in the lower half of our visual quadrant you know when people generally don't like snakes you can learn to handle them but no snake fear appears to be an eight to Nate in chimpanzees and it tends to increase as you age rather than decreasing you can overcome it but well my daughter had snakes and one day her snake bit her it was a fairly big snake and she hadn't paid attention to it for a while so it nailed her and from then on she had very difficult time grabbing the snake it was like bitten once you know shy permanently she also told me years later she had nightmares about snakes all the time when she had a snake in her room it's like you know and I think it was probably the smell so anyways so Harry Potter decides he's going to go after the basilisk wreck he's gonna go out there and face the thing that he's most afraid of so he does that way down in the depths so it's like Jonah going down into the depths and he faces the basilisk and it bites him and you know that's a that's right because if you go down into the depths you can get bitten like it's no joke and this is a hero story but the thing about the hero stories it's actually real the thing that you're facing is actually dangerous and even though facing it voluntarily might be your best bet and is likely your best bet because that's the central story of humanity that doesn't mean you're going to succeed it's the real thing so anyways he gets bitten right and he's gonna die now he's rescuing Ginny so that's the st. George story if you go after like dragon dragons like to capture virgins god only knows why I think it's because I think it's because one of the things that male humans have done from the beginning of time is chase the damn predators away and I suspect that the males from god only knows how long ago who were particularly good at that were rewarded with female attention and why the hell not so it's deeply rooted inside of us that idea of facing the unknown and freeing the woman so the idea there is that if you it's a male idea and in large part I can talk about the central female myth and I will as we proceed the idea is that if you're this sort of person who can stand up against the unknown and the frightening then you're also likely if you develop into that sort of person then you're also likely to develop into the sort of person that other people will find attractive so you know and that's why young believed that the inside the shadow was the anima which is like a female figure and so his idea was something like you know if you look watch movies there's always this beta male guy if they're romantic movies and he's a nice guy and he's the friend and you know the woman tells him everything but she doesn't like him a bit she likes the guy who's like got an edge and and who's capable of I would say mayhem but at least of aggression now that doesn't mean she wants them to be aggressive but what it does mean is that she wants him to be able to be aggressive that would be good and so he's the romantic target and so he's the person that's incorporated the shadow and he's someone that is respectable and perhaps useful and so well that's a very old story so let's let's think about this for a minute I've already offered you a proposition and I think it's an important proposition and I'm I'm offering you this proposition so that you can make sense of art and literature and mythology and religion and dance and all those strange ritualistic things that human beings do which seem central to us including including not least the in eradicable tendency of us to seek out stories of heroes I should finish the Harry Potter story so Harry Potter goes down there to rescue Virginia you know it's that's not her name what is it Ginny yeah but there's a there's a formal name for that it's a variant of Virginia anyways which is a very divergent so um and he gets bitten Jen yes Ginevra that's it he gets bitten and the bite is poison and so there is dying which doesn't seem to be so good and then what happens and again you guys swallow this it's no problem so what's his name the Dumbledore character he's got a bird right so he's the wise old man he's the ruler of the castle he's the ruler of the Magic Castle he's the Magic King you know he's like God the Father as far as Harry Potter is concerned and he has a bird what kind of bird is it it's a Phoenix right and one of the things that's very strange about a Phoenix is that well it's immortal but in a strange way you know it lives and lives I think a hundred years and it gets older and older and then one day poof it bursts into flames and turns into an egg and then you get a new Phoenix so that's a symbol of transformation it's a symbol of transformation the bird is a spirit or psyche and so here's what it means in part you know you know how when you learn a lesson in your life that that's not very pleasant right it's not like when you learn something important it's the best day of your life it's often the importance of what you learn is often proportionate to just how wretched it is to learn it you know you learn things the hard way you learn things by getting hit because obviously if what you're doing is working you get where you want there's no learning in that and that's happy it's when you're doing something and you hit an obstacle and maybe ya bloody well hit it hard and then you know you recoil and then you down into the depths you go and you have to sort yourself out and you realize that you're you know this particular kind of idiot and that you should probably fix that and that's really annoying and difficult and you know and maybe you're down in the dumps and anxious for quite a while and then you get it repaired more or less and you know you put yourself back together that's the Phoenix poof into flames bang egg new you and so you know that's the ability to learn now human beings are very strange creatures right because we're very malleable compared to most animals you know like grizzly bears now and grizzly bears a thousand years ago it's like whatever they're the same thing they do the same thing there's no transformation about human beings we have this massive brain and you know it's a pain because it means you have to take care of human children until they're 40 and and that's a big burden and so you know we pay a big price for it it also makes childbirth very difficult and and it's costly you have to eat a lot because you have a big brain because it uses up a lot of energy and so you know you pay a price for it but the advantage is your plastic you can learn now learning is a strange thing because you can think of it as just acquiring more information but you could also think of it and this is more accurate as finding out something that you're doing wrong so that's sort of built into you like a character a carrot of your character a presumption of your perception or a deep habit it's really built into you it's a neural structure right it's a little it's alive and you have to kill it because it's working properly and the pain that you go through in part when you're suffering because you did something stupid is it's something like your your the neurology I can never get this quite right it's the pain of the death of that structure and that could be a huge chunk of you you know if you really have to go through a massive revision it's like the person that comes out the other end might hardly be the same at all you know that happens for example if you're trying to combat alcoholism which is just you know a wretched thing to do because well all your friends are alcoholic mmm all your family drinks too much the only thing you know how to do when you're socializing is to go to the bar and drink too much you know and you spend like 20 hours a week on it it's like it's not just that you're addicted to the substance it's like that's how you live and so if you want to stop being an alcoholic not only do you have to stop drinking alcohol but you have to stop seeing all your drunk friends and then maybe you've had them for your whole life and you have to have continual battles with your drunk family and then you have to figure out something to do with that 20 hours that's now like hanging around your neck like an albatross and so you have to let that whole part of your personality die and a new part has to spring forth and that's what the Phoenix is and the Phoenix is the capacity of the person to transform and so when Harry gets bit by the snake that freezes him he gets seriously injured the Phoenix comes in Christ some tears in his wound it prepares him bang he's back to life and the strange thing is that that's okay with all of the viewers now why would that be there's nothing about it that's rational nothing right Magic Castle that's not rational giant snake underneath it that's a little more irrational turning you to stone going down there to face it being rejuvenated by a Phoenix it's like yeah yeah that's okay we can we'll watch that clue well swallow it will be completely engaged in it and the reason for that is because it's a myth it's about how people it's a meta story about how to act about how to conduct yourself in the world to face the things that you're afraid of that would otherwise paralyze you to let the death of what is insufficient about you occur and then to wait for the rebirth

Channel: Jordan B Peterson Clips

Views: 677,580

Keywords: psychology, philosophy, Jordan B. Peterson, Jordan Peterson, JB Peterson, jordanbpeterson, jordanpeterson, personality, understandmyself, selfauthoring, neuropsychology

Id: jnTFpCemVrA

Length: 19min 51sec (1191 seconds)

Published: Fri May 29 2020