Jordan Peterson citations

Page 2

“…to be redeemed to aim at the highest value, to sacrifice what's no longer useful and valid in yourself, and to tell the truth. And the consequence of that is, existence on a deep state of meaning that justifies the tragedy of being and the possibility of transforming your own life, in the most beneficial positive direction, while simultaneously doing that for the people around you. And that's Redemption.”

“The potential sacrifices itself if you don't utilize it as you mature, and you just end up a 40 year old lost boy, which is a horrifying thing to behold. It's almost as if you're the living corpse of a child, because who wants a six year old 40-year-old? You're a little on the stale side by that point, and you're not the world's happiest individual. Your potential is going to disappear because you age anyways, so you might as well shape that potential in a particular direction and at least become something, no matter how limited, rather than nothing.”

“He found that if people wrote about uncertain things - past, present, or future - they could be traumatic things, they could be uncertain things, that their physical health improved. He did a lot of detailed research to find out why this is. He basically figured out that it is an uncertainty reduction mechanism at work, because your brain is always figuring out how well situated you are in the world. How much do you not know compared to how much have you mastered. You can tell that you've mastered things because when you go somewhere and you act, things turn out the way you want them to. That's an indication of mastery. And your brain is keeping track of your whole life, recording information about how many places you have been where things haven't worked out compared to how many places you have been where things have worked out. And if all those places in your past where things haven't worked out, you need to map and master. And that decreases the existential load on you, but that actually decreases your psych-physiological load. It makes you healthier. It makes you less stressed. And so we have put all that together in this Self-Authoring Suite to help people write about their past and to sort it out in a detailed auto-biography.”

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

“There is an idea of free will associated with it too. In order for there to be being, there has to be limitation. In order for there to be good, there has to be the possibility of evil. I think the right path is to exist such that the possibility of evil remains open, but that you choose the good. And I don't think that evil perse is built into the structure of the world. But I do think that it's human. I think that evil is human. And I think it's understandable. There is a difference between evil and tragedy. Tragedy does seem to be built into the structure of the world. But human beings seem to be equipped to deal with tragedy, but we are not equipped to deal with malevolence. That destroys people. I think that, metaphysically thinking, the world is structured such that humans have a choice between good and evil. Why do we have a choice? We don't know.”

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

“The distinction between being a fool and developing yourself is not as clear a distinction as people might like to imagine. They're practicing what they need to practice in order to cope with the world.”

“The way that we behave contains way more information than we know. And part of the dream that surrounds our articulated knowledge has been extracted as a consequence of us watching each other behave, and telling stories about it over thousands and thousands and thousands of years, extracting out patterns of behavior that characterize humanity, and trying to represent them party through imitations but also through drama, mythology, and literature, and art, and all of that – to represent what we're like so we can understand what we're like. That process of understanding is what we see unfolding at least in part in the Biblical stories. It's halting and partial and awkward and contradictory and all of that, which is one of the things that makes it so complex, but I see in it the struggle of humanity to rise above its animal forebears and to become conscious of what it means to be human, and that's a very difficult thing.”

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

“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.”

“Life is suffering.
Love is the desire to see unnecessary suffering ameliorated.
Truth is the handmaiden of love.
Dialogue is the pathway to truth.
Humility is recognition of personal insufficiency and the willingness to learn.
To learn is to die voluntarily and be born again, in great ways and small.
So speech must be untrammeled, so that dialogue can take place,
so that we can all humbly learn,
so that truth can serve love,
so that suffering can be ameliorated,
so that we can all stumble forward to the Kingdom of God.”

“The proper path of life is to take the tradition and spirit that is associated with consciousness as such, and to act it out in your own personal life in a way that is analogous with the way Christ acted it out in his life. What that means, in part, is the acceptance of the tragic preconditions of existence. That's partly betrayal by friends and by family and by the state, it's partly punishment for sins that you did not commit (the arbitrary nature of justice), and the fact of finitude. Your duty, and the way to set things right in the cosmos, is to accept all those details as necessary preconditions for being and to act virtuously despite all that. That's a very, very powerful idea.”

“The eternal dragon is always giving our fallen down castles a rough time – always.”

“The logical conclusion of intersectionality is individuality. There's so many different ways of categorizing people's advantages and disadvantages, that if you take that all the way out to the end you say 'Well, the individual is the ultimate minority' – and that's exactly right. And that's exactly what the West discovered. The intersectionalists will get there if they don't kill everyone first.”

“Human beings are made in God's image – that's actually the cornerstone of our legal system. Our body of laws has that metaphysical presupposition, without which the laws fall apart. And that's starting to happen. It really is. It's the postmodern critique of law. The law schools are overrun by postmodernists who are undermining the structure of Western law as fast as they possibly can. They don't buy any of this. So they're much more likely to think of the law as a casual, pragmatic tool that is to be manipulated for the purposes of bringing forth the Utopia. It's a really, really, really bad idea. It's very strange to me that we go off track when that metaphysical foundation starts to get rattled.”

“Without that forward-going, courageous consciousness, a woman herself will drift into unconsciousness and terror. It's the sleep of the naive and damned. She needs to wake herself up and bring her own masculine consciousness into the forefront so she can survive in the world. Unless woman is taken out of man, then she isn't a human being – she's just a creature.”

“And then she (Snow White) has to wait for the Prince to come rescue her, and you think: 'How sexist can you get, that story?' Well, seriously, because that's the way that that would be read in the modern world, like, 'She doesn't need a prince to come rescue her.' That's why Disney made Frozen, that absolutely appalling piece of rubbish.”

“Pain is the only thing that people will never deny.”

“The proper functioning of the state is dependent on the proper functioning of the individual, rather than the reverse. And the proper mode of individual Being that's redemptive is Truth. Truth is the antidote to the suffering that emerges with the fall of man in the story of Adam and Eve.”

“Our ideas emerged out of the ground of our action over thousands and thousands of years. And when philosophers were putting forth those ideas, what they were doing wasn't generating creative ideas – they were just telling the story of humanity. It's already there. It's already in us. It's already in our patterns of behavior.”

“The Word is the equivalent to the spoken Truth. If things are spoken into Being through Truth, then they are good. Then what you have to decide is: if you speak the Truth, then what happens is Good, regardless of what happens. And that's faith.”

“Dragon is the category of primate predator. Predator is a weird category, right? Because there's crocodiles in it, and then there's lions. And they don't have much in common except that they eat you. So it's a functional category. So the dragon is the imagistic representation of the functional category of predator. It's like this: If you're a monkey, then a bird will pick you off, like an eagle. That's the wings. If it wasn't an eagle, then it was a cat (dragon claws), because they climb trees and give you a good chomping. And if it wasn't a cat, then you go down to the ground and a snake would get you, or maybe the snake would climb up the tree. So a dragon is a cat-snake-bird. And that's the thing that you really want to avoid. An the other thing is that it breathes fire, which is interesting because fire was both greatest friend and greatest enemy of humanity.”

“People get annoyed with you if you treat them like they're automatons that lack free will. It's something that people find very constraining. There's something slave-like about that even. The demand that you don't have actual autonomy and, even worse, that you're not responsible for your choices – it's an insult to someone to suggest to them that they're not responsible for their decisions. To do that to someone, from a legal perspective, you have to argue something like diminished capacity. You are mentally ill, or you don't have the intellectual capacity, or you were under some substance, or you had a brain injury, and that's why you're not responsible for your actions. Part of the respect that you give other human beings is that you acknowledge that they are responsible for their actions. Part of that, too, is that if you do something good, you're also responsible for that. It's got to be more annoying than anything else to strive virtuously, to produce something of extreme value, and then to be treated as if it is a mere deterministic outcome, and that your actual choices had nothing to do with that. It can be extraordinarily punishing.”

“One of the things that struck me as near miraculous about music, especially in a rather nihilistic and atheistic society, is that it really does fill the void which was left by the death of God. And it's because you cannot rationally critique music. It speaks to you, it speaks of meaning, and no matter what you say about it, no matter how cynical you are, you cannot put a crowbar underneath that and toss it aside.”

“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.”

“The idea that paradise, the proper habitat of a human being, is a walled garden – is a good one. It's an echo back to the chaos/order idea. Walls: culture. Garden: nature. The proper human habitat is a properly tended garden.”

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

“The story of Adam and Eve represents the fruit as producing a psychological transformation. So the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is an abstraction across trees, and it's trying to say: 'Here's something that's common across trees, it's a fruit that's common across trees.' The fruit that's common across trees is something that you might call food, fair enough. But here's something that's even more cool: food that's stable across the entire domain of food, isn't food – it's information. We use the same bloody circuits in our brain to forage for information, that animals use to forage for information. Why is that? Because we figured out knowing where the food is, is more important than having the food… That's why we're information foragers.”

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