Trial of Socrates | Jordan B. Peterson

socrates trial you know he was tried by the athenians for corrupting for for failing to worship the correct gods and corrupting the youth of athens by like teaching them stuff and asking them questions you know which is a great way to corrupt people and um so he knew the trial was coming and athens wasn't a very big place only had about 25 000 people everybody knew everybody everybody knew who the powerful guys were and everybody including socrates knew that the trial was a warning to like get out of town right so we're gonna put you on trial in six months and the potential penalty is death got that it's like so so socrates had a chat with his compatriots and they were contemplating fair means and foul to set up a defense for him so that he could or to leave so that he could not be tried and put to death and uh he decided that he wasn't going to do that and he also decided that he wasn't going to even think about his defense and he said why and this is quite an interesting thing he said why he told one of his friends that he had this voice in his head a demon a spirit something like that um that he always listened to and that that was one of the reasons he was different from other people because he always listened to this thing it didn't tell him what to do but it told him what not to do it always told him what not to do and if it told him not to do something then he didn't do it if he was speaking and the little voice came up and said no then he shut up and he tried to say something else and he was very emphatic about this and he said that when he tried to plan to evade the trial or even to mount his own defense the voice came up and said no don't bother with it and he thought well what what he what the hell do you mean by that like there's a trial coming and i'm gonna be put to death and well he eventually concluded that he was an old guy you know the next 10 years he was in his 70s perhaps the next 10 years weren't going to be that great for him he got a chance maybe the gods were giving him a chance just to bow out you know to put his affairs in order to say goodbye to everyone to avoid that last descent into catastrophe which might have been particularly painful for a philosopher and to and to walk off the world on his own terms something like that the point i'm making with that is that socrates attended to this internal voice that at least told him what not to do and then he didn't do it and of course socrates was a very remarkable man and we still hear about him today and we know that he existed and all of those things and so back to the back to the walking with god idea you know as you elevate your aim you create a judge at the same time right because the new ideal which is an ideal you even if it's just an ideal position that you might occupy even if it's still conceptualized in that concrete way that becomes a judge because it's above you right and then you're you're terrified of it maybe that's why you might be afraid when you go start a new job right because you're this thing is above you and you're terrified of it and it judges you and that's useful because the judge that you're creating by formulating the ideal tells you what's useless about yourself and then you can dispense with it and you want to keep doing that and then every time you make a judge that's more elevated then there's more useless you that has to be dispensed with and then if you create an ultimate judge which is what the archetypal imagination of humankind has done say with the figure of christ because if christ is nothing else he is at least the archetypal perfect man and therefore the judge you have a judge that says get rid of everything about yourself that isn't perfect of course that's also what abraham that's also what god tells abraham right he says to be perfect to pick an ideal that's high enough and you can do this the thing that's interesting about this i think is you can do it more or less on your own terms you have to have some collaboration from other people but you don't have to pick an external ideal you can pick an ideal that fulfills the role of ideal for you you can say okay well if things could be set up for me the way i need them to be and if i could be who i needed to be what would that look like and you can figure that out for yourself and then instantly you have a judge and i also think that's part of the reason people don't do it right why don't why don't people look up and move ahead and the answer is well you know you start formulating an ideal you formulate a judge it's pretty easy to feel intimidated in the face of your own ideal that's what happens to cain versus abel for example then it's really easy to destroy the ideal instead of to try to pursue it because then you get rid of the judge but it's way better lower the damn judge if it's too much like if your current ambition is crushing you you know then maybe you're playing the tyrant to yourself and you should tap down your ambitions not get rid of them by any stretch of the imagination but at least put them more reasonably within your grasp you don't have to leap from point one to point fifty in one leap right you can do it incrementally but i really like this idea i think it's a profound idea that the process of recapitulating yourself continually is also the process of it's a phoenix-like process right you're shedding all those elements of you that are no longer worthy of the pursuits that you're that you're valuing and then i would say the idea here is that as you do that you shape yourself ever more precisely into something that can withstand the tragedy of life and that can act as a as a beacon to the world that's the right way of thinking about it maybe first to your friends and then to your family it's like it's a hell of a fine ambition and there's no reason that it can't happen you know every one of you knows people who are really bloody useful in a crisis and people that you admire right those are all you can think of all those people as you admire that you admire us partial incarnations of the archetypal messiah that's exactly right and the more that that manifests itself in any given person then the more generally useful and admirable that person is in a multitude of situations and we don't know the limit to that but people can be unbelievably good for things you know it's really something to behold

Channel: Jordan B Peterson Clips

Views: 345,358

Keywords: psychology, philosophy, Jordan B. Peterson, Jordan Peterson, JB Peterson, jordanbpeterson, jordanpeterson, personality, understandmyself, selfauthoring, neuropsychology, socrates, athens, fariness, peterson, lawyers, lecture

Id: te-s7e1XAvk

Length: 6min 34sec (394 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 26 2020