Talk:Jordan Peterson

Unsourced quotes

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• People generally don't change unless a traumatic event occurs in their life which triggers the brain into new action.

• Love is something like the notion that, despite its suffering, Being is good and you should serve Being.

• You can't make rules for the exceptional.

• The human capacity for eternal transformation is the antidote to unbearable suffering and tragedy.

• History is the biography of the human race.

• Ruling hell might be better than being a subject in hell, but not by much.

• Pain is the only thing that people will never deny.

• Evil is the force that believes its knowledge is complete.

• If you tell enough lies, often enough, the truth will become entirely hidden from you—and then you are in hell.

• Morality, like politics, is the alternative to chaos and war.

• Ideologues assume the problems of the world are someone else's fault. Or they assume that broad-scale systemic change—according to their dictates—is a prerequisite to Utopia. A truly religious person tries to change him or herself, which is a more difficult and less grand task.

• Why is ideological thought pushed so heavily at the universities? 1/3 laziness, 1/3 ignorance and 1/3 malevolence. Laziness: it's easier to apply a doctrine to everything at once than to think through complex issues. Ignorance: the less you know about a problem, the easier you think it is to solve. Malevolence: it's great to find the enemy in others so that you have someone against who to direct your resentment.

• It's not the state that's the place of salvation, it's the individual psyche. There's an ethic that goes along with that: it's within the individual that redemption is manifested.

• There are only three options in dealing with people: it will either be slavery, tyranny, or negotiation.

• The worship of the rational mind makes you prone to totalitarian ideology. The Catholic Church always warned against this. The warning was that the rational mind always falls in love with its own creations. The intellect is raised to the status of highest god. The highest ideal that a person holds—consciously or unconsciously—that's their god. It functions precisely in that manner. It exists forever, it exists in all people, it takes them over and exists in their behavior. That's a god. We have to think about that idea functionally.

• The frontier is the edge between what you know and what you don't know. You want to put yourself on that edge.

• When you know that the snake is in you—that's wisdom.

• When someone is drowning, you have to approach them extremely carefully. This is because, if they are panicking and they grab you, then you both drown. And that's stupid, because you both drown. That's a really good metaphor for trying to help someone. When people are in real trouble, some of it is that they're confused, some of it is that their life has collapsed around them, and there's some malevolence there and some desire for vengeance (it's one dangerous mess).

If you're going to wade in there unprepared, the possibility that they're going to take you down compared with you elevating them is very high, because you don't even know what your damn psychological stability rests on. You might be sane just because you're lucky and surrounded by good people. That doesn't mean that you have the psychological wherewithal to pull someone up from the depths of the underworld, especially if they have one foot in hell. You should bloody well be careful about doing that kind of thing. It's hubristic to attempt it, and I would definitely caution people to be very careful about rescuing people who don't want to be rescued. It's very dangerous activity, and it can easily be counterproductive.

• You can't keep kids safe. The best thing that you can do is make them able and courageous. It's absolutely crucial.

• Evil—to exploit the knowledge of your own vulnerability by turning it on others' vulnerability in order to bring more pain into the world.

• Human beings have this peculiar capacity that no other creatures have: I know how I can be hurt, because I am aware of my own limitations—painfully aware—and now, because I know how I can be hurt, I know how you can be hurt, and I can take advantage of that. And that's how evil enters the world.

• The basic totalitarian claim: What I know is everything that needs to be known, and if only it were only manifest in the world, the world would become a utopia. I also think that that's the core idea behind the Tower of Babel. It's the idea that we can build a structure that makes the transcendent unnecessary.

• Some things are obvious. Well, why?

• You meet the unknown with fantasy. That's what dreams do.

• A little gratitude is in order, and that makes you appreciative of the wise king while being smart enough to know that he's also an evil tyrant. That's a total conception of the world. It's balanced. Yah, we should preserve nature, but it is trying to kill us. Yes, our culture is tyrannical and oppresses people, but it is protecting us from dying. And yes, we're reasonably good people, but don't take that theory too far until you've tested yourself. That's wisdom.

• The temptations of resentment and hatred are what people have to fight with all the time.

• Cosmogony—the mythological understanding of the emergence of order. There's a chaos out of which order emerges.

• Interestingly enough, what you do in a relationship that works is that you actually fall in love with what they could be. They could be the person that you project onto them and fall in love with, but it's going to take a hell of a lot of work. Both parties have no shortage of flaws, so you're bringing your flaws together, and that's going to produce a lot of friction, and you are going to have to engage in a lot of dialogue before you reach that level of perfection that you originally had in the other person's eyes. But maybe you can do it. Maybe you can do it. And then you would live happily ever after.

• Known, culture, order, explored territory, or the dominance hierarchy, are all interchangeable from a representational perspective.

• The dominance hierarchy is a mechanism that selects heroes and breeds them. And so then we watch that for six million years. We start to understand what it means to be the hero. We start to tell stories about that, and so then not only are we genetically aiming at that with the dominance hierarchies—the selection mechanism mediated by female choice—but our stories are trying to push us in that direction. And so then we say, "Well, look, that person is admirable." We tell a story about him. And then we say, "This person is admirable," and we tell a story about him. And at the same time we talk about the people who aren't admirable. And then we start having admirable and non-admirable as categories. And out of that you get something like good and evil.

And then you can start to imagine the perfect person. You take 10 admirable people and you pull out someone who is meta-admirable. And that's a hero. That becomes a religious figure across time. That becomes a savior or a messiah across time as we conceptualize what the ideal person is. In the West here's how we figured it out: We said that the ideal man is the person that tells the truth. And what that means is that it's the best way of climbing up any possible dominance hierarchy in the way that's most stable and most lasting. That's the conclusion of Western culture.

• What scientific truth tells you is what things are. Genuine religious truth tells you how you should act. These are not the same.

• Imagine that each of these layers of existence are like patterns. They're patterns within patterns within patterns within patterns, and there's a way of making all that harmonious. That's what music models. That's why music is so meaningful. You take a beautiful orchestral composition, and they're doing different things are different levels. But they all flow together harmoniously, and you're right in the middle of that as a listener. And it fills you almost with a sense of religious awe, even if you're a punk rock nihilist. The reason for that is because the music is modeling the manner of Being that's harmonious. It's the proper way to exist.

Religious writings, in the deepest sense, are guidelines to that mode of Being. They're not true like scientific knowledge is true. They're hyper-true, or meta-true. It's like this: If you take the most true things about your life, and then you take the most true things about 10 other people's lives, and then we amalgamate them into a single figure—that would be like a literary hero. And then we take a thousands literary heroes and we extract out from them what makes the most heroic person—that's a religious deity. That's what Christ is. He's a meta-hero. And that sits at the bottom of Western Civilization. Christ's archetypal mode of Being is true speech. That's the fundamental idea of Western civilization—and it's right.

• There's a transformation to some degree in the prophetic tradition, where there is a spirit that rises above the law, but this transformation really takes place in the New Testament. The Old Testament is prohibition, and the New Testament is, "Here's the good things you do once you're more than merely prohibiting yourself from impulsive sin." There's a positive good to be accomplished, not just a negative to be avoided.

You have to look around you within your direct sphere of influence, and you fix the things that announce themselves to be in direct need of repair. And those are often small things. They can start with things as simple as your room. Put it in order. It's not important that you put your room in order necessarily, what is important is that you learn to distinguish between chaos and order, and that you learn to be able to act in a manner that produces order. In most households there's a 100 things that could be done to make it less hideous and horrible. So practicing that is not only a useful form of meditation, it's also a divine act. Trakking (talk) 19:17, 18 June 2022 (UTC)