You'll Be HURT, But You Have To DO IT | Jordan Peterson: "This Will Set You FREE"

nietzsche said that you could tell much about a man's character by how much truth he could tolerate which is very interesting you know there's a an idea in the great western tradition that the truth is the way and the path of life and that no one comes to the father except through the truth and i believe that to be the case because i don't think that you can manifest who you are without the truth and so i think it's it's it's literally and metaphorically true that the the pathway to who you could be if you were completely who you were is through the truth and so the truth does set you free but the problem is is that it destroys everything that isn't worthy in you as it sets you free and that's that's a process of burning and it's it's painful because you cling to what you shouldn't be um partly out of pride and partly out of ignorance and partly out of laziness and and so then you encounter something true and you all know this you all know this perfectly well because when was the last time that you learned something important that wasn't a blow of some sort you know and it's often you look back at your life and you think oh god i really learned something there i wouldn't want to do that again but it really changed my life i mean sometimes it can really destroy you you know an encounter with the truth and you never really recover but now and then something comes along and straightens you out and a lot of you has to go a lot of you has to burn away you know and and i suppose in some sense the idea is that everything about you that isn't worthy is to be put into the flames you know i learned when i was kid about 25 or so a little older than a kid that almost everything that i said was one form of lie or another and i wasn't any worse i would say than the people that i was associating with or any better and the lies were manifold you know they were attempts to win arguments for the sake of winning the argument that might be one attempts to indicate my intellectual prowess when there were competitions of that sort maybe just the sheer pleasure of engaging in an intellectual argument and winning my inability to distinguish between ideas that i had read and incorporated because i had read but hadn't realized that i hadn't yet earned the right to use all of that and you know i had this experience that lasted a long time well i would say it's really never gone away that and i think this was the awakening of my conscience and i didn't realize this until much later when i was reading socrates apology this voice for lack of a better word made itself manifest inside me and it said every time i said something that wasn't true and that's usually what it said that's not true you don't believe that or or there was a sensation that was associated with it i don't think this is that uncommon you know i asked my psychology classes for many years in a row if um they had an experience this experience that they had a voice in their head let's say it's a metaphor or a feeling uh that communicated to them when they were about to do something wrong and it was universally the case that people agreed with one of those statements or another and the other thing i would ask is well do you always listen to it and of course the answer to that was definitely no you know i learned that so much of what i was doing was false and i think i learned this see there was a reason that this came to me so clearly i was trying to understand why people did terrible things and i was really concentrating on the terrible terrible things that people do and i was interested in auschwitz for example and and not in not as a political phenomenon but as a as a psychological phenomena i was curious about how you could be in auschwitz guard many people did many terrible things during the 20th century and the idea that i was somehow better than them or that i should assume a priori that i was better than them and that i wouldn't have made the same choices or worse had i been in the same situation was a very very very dangerous supposition and in fact a sufficiently dangerous supposition to bring about the very danger that i assumed was worth avoiding i i had this idea you know that what had happened especially in nazi germany but also in in the soviet union shouldn't happen again that what we needed to do because of what happened in the 20th century especially because we also managed to create hydrogen bombs that it was in that and that we had become so technologically powerful that there wasn't time for that anymore the time for that was over and that we really needed to understand why it happened and that perhaps we could go deep enough in that understanding so that you could stop it because if you if you understand the problem maybe you can solve it and at least in part i came to believe that the problem was as solzhenitsyn said that the problem is is that the line between good and evil runs down every human heart and i was reading jung at the same time you know and he believed that the human soul was a tree whose roots grew all the way to hell and believed also that in the full investigation of the shadow which was the dark side of the human psyche was that it was bottomless essentially that that that it was like an experience of hell and that also struck me as true the way to stop those sorts of things from happening was to stop yourself from being the sort of person who would do it who would even start to do it for me it was a matter of understanding that if we want this sort of thing to not happen anymore then we have to start to become the sort of people who wouldn't do it which seems rather self-evident all things considered unless you know you believe that we're the pawns of social forces for example like the marxists do and i don't believe that because we're also the creator of social forces um and we're also capable of standing up to social forces because i would say the individual is more powerful than the social force all things considered interestingly enough that the way to stop such things to from happening the way to remember properly is to understand that that you could do it that you could do those terrible things because the people who did them were like you and that the way out of that is to stop being like that and the way you stop being like that is well at least in part by ceasing to tell yourself lies that you don't believe in and that you know you shouldn't act out and you know and that's made a huge difference in my life for better for worse i mean it it was very uncanny experience i would say because it's very dis combobulating to experience yourself as fragmented enough so that much of what you do and say is actually false it's a lot of work to clean that up a lot the consequences are in principle worthwhile understanding that was part of what drove me towards clinical psychology saying away from political science and law and from politics in general because i started to believe that and i think this is the great western idea which people were quite irritated about by the way on q a last night as well that the proper route forward for the redemption of the individual and for mankind as a whole is as a consequence of the redemption of each individual and i truly believe that and i believe that that occurs as a consequence of adherence to the truth and courage in the face of being that's rule one right to stand up straight with your shoulders back is to take on the onslaught and to enter the contentious ring and to do your to do and to do more than your best because your best isn't enough because your best isn't as good as you could be you have to push yourself past that and and that's as far as i can tell where you find what you need in life you find the meaning that sustains you in life and you find the patterns of action that redeem the world both at the same time i mean life is a very difficult business you know it's it's fatal and it's full of suffering and it's and it's full of betrayal and malevolence there's nothing about it that's trivial it's all profound and in order to find your way through all of that that that capacity for hellish experience let's say you need to develop a relationship with something that's profound and you can you have that capacity and what could be more profound than the truth and what would you rather have on your side and you might say well that's obvious and of course everyone should do that and then you need to know why you don't and the answer is well the burns are still healing it's like well you know there's no shortage of dead wood to burn off and and there's no shortage of pain when the dead wood burns off and that's what makes people afraid of the truth you know maybe that's why moses encountered god in a burning bush who the hell knows but there's something about that idea that seems to me to be the case and so what's the decision that you make you know you decide to believe you know it's a risk an existential risk it's an act of faith you believe that the truth can set you free you believe that people have an intrinsic divinity about their soul you decide that you're going to live in that manner and that you're going to let everything about yourself that isn't worthy of that goal die and that might be almost everything that you are and that's a terrible thing to contemplate the only thing that's worse i would say is the alternative because the alternative is the sorts of hells that we managed to produce around us and that we produced with particular expertise during the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century and it would be a good thing if we decided collectively and individually not to go back there again

Channel: Pursuit of Meaning

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Id: js4g4fJ4ZGw

Length: 11min 40sec (700 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 03 2022