April 2019 Q and A - VoiceTube: Learn English through videos!

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Hi, everyone.
Thanks for tuning in to the April 2019.
Cuban A probably won't do another one till June.
I'm traveling almost completely through May, although it's getting easier to do these on the road.
Camera quality usually isn't as good, so we'll see what happens.
I, like do anything but be nice to do it with the right equipment.
So look, before we get started, I've got a bunch of things I'd like to tell you about.
I hope that you're interested in them.
The 1st 1 and the artist one, I suppose, is the fact that I'm going to do beat, be debating the renowned Marxist philosopher Slavoj Jack was a very well well known Continental academic tomorrow at the Sony Center in Toronto at 7 30 On the topic.
Happiness, Capitalism versus Marxism We've decided we'll live streaming this event for those who might be interested in watching the events as they unfold.
Tickets for the live stream are available on my website Jordan.
Be Peterson dot com, but I'll put all the proper links below, so if you pick up a live stream ticket, you convey you the debate at any time up to 30 days afterwards.
We're also going to put the debate eventually up on you two, probably within a month.
So if you don't want to watch it live, well then you can always wait.
Watch it later.
But if you want to participate in it in so far as you could do that electronically, then I guess the Livestream idea is the right one.
We thought we'd run it as an experiment.
Anyways, maybe you could have Ah Peterson vs Jee Jek party.
That's the sort of part of your interested in on a Friday night I'd also like to know let you know that season two of the Jordan be Peterson podcast has now started with the 1st 3 episodes up.
Two of them are 12 Rules for Life lectures taken from my tour last year, one of them from Seattle and one from Portland, as well as an interview with General Stanley McChrystal, retired four star general and former Commander U.
S Forces Afghanistan.
We partnered this year with Westwood one largest audio network in the U.
S.
And my daughter Michaela is going to serve his co host.
So hopefully that allowed a little bit of lightness and warmth and a little bit of humor to the part cast.
We're hoping as a consequence of partnering with Westwood one, which also means, by the way, that the podcast will now be ad supported.
Um, that that would help incentivize me to make sure that I got a part cast out every week.
It was a bit haphazard over the last year, the broadcast was generally a lower priority item, and we've decided this year to make it, well, a top priority, or perhaps at least in the top five.
Let's say so, and we hope we'll get higher production quality out of it and be able to find a larger audience.
And so I guess we'll see how that goes.
The initial feedback has been pretty good with a boat 600,000 or so views per episode, so that seems to be performing quite nicely.
So thank you all for that Jordan be Peterson Videos on YouTube, which will also feature most of the podcast content like it has in the past, will remain unmonitored ized as previously.
No.
Next we will get to the questions, I promise.
I'm going to London in May to celebrate and promote the release of the May 2nd standard paperback of 12 Rules for Life Into the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Indian and other international English markets, not including U.
S.
And Canada, yet preorders of that paper back and be obtained at the penguin website.
I'll leave the links below.
I'm extremely excited.
One of the things I was really excited about this year, you know, I wrote the forward to Alexander soldier in it since abridged Good, I got a cappella go.
So that was That was I was a pretty good honor that waas last week, By the way, in New York, I talked to his son Ignite and we we spent about an hour discussing historical material related to the gulag and that will be released with the audio version, which I've read the forward Asai said.
I wrote the forward and ignite, I believe, read the rest of the audio, but that will be released in audio book form fairly soon.
Along with that interview that was extremely interesting.
He's a very accomplished man in his own right as a pianist and and conductor, and has a very successful international career.
So he has his father's intellect, that's for sure.
So it's really exciting for me, was very exciting for me to do that forward.
But it's, I would say, equally exciting, to have a paper back in the great tradition of Penguin paperbacks, which I've loved ever since I was old enough to know the difference between Let's not let's rephrase that old enough to start to read serious literature.
And so to have, Ah, paperback come out on the Penguin label is Well, I just saw the first copy of it this week.
They send it to me.
It's, um, hard to believe, man.
It's ah, it's Ah, I think I don't even have you think I haven't had that as a dream?
You know, I didn't I didn't think that was.
Was there ever any likelihood of that?
So it's better than a dream come true in some sense, because it's a dream that I never even suspected might occur.
That came true.
So that's good.
Anyways, you can pre order that if you're inclined to, uh, it's discounted price, of course, to the in comparison to the hardcover.
Maybe it bank a good gift for someone you like, assuming you like the book.
So finally, most of the time when I do a Q and A, I want to talk a little bit about two programs that my colleagues and I have developed.
One called self authoring dot com and the other called Understand myself dot com.
And the 1st 1 is a set of writing programs that help you write an autobiography and a description of your present personality and a plan for the future.
And they're all laid out so that doing that is what guided and Scout fooled and simplified so that you don't have to answer the terribly difficult question.
Who was I when I grow up till now?
All as one question anyway.
A lot of people have used the programs.
There's tens of thousands of them now, and we have good evidence for the for future offering program in particular, which helps people make a plan and develop a vision and make a plan for the future that, for example, among college students it decreases their dropout rate by about 25%.
It seems to have, um, aboutthe same effect on their grade point average.
So anyways, these writing exercises, if there's anything bothering you about your past.
You know, you can tell that because you have negative memories.
Let's say of anything that happened to you 18 months or previous shouldn't really mess around with traumatic memories before they're about 18 months old.
But if your past still haunts you, you know if you can't stop thinking about it, then there's there's things that have happened to you that you don't understand.
You don't understand the causal pathways that lead you down, the path that you are now afraid of or regret, and the alarm systems that make up your the the parts of your brain that control anxiety will never let you free of that, because their job is to alert you to danger at past or present.
Perhaps in case you encountered the same situation again, and unless you've come up with an elaborated causal account of what put you at risk, then you're likely to suffer from those anxiety related or trauma related memories for your whole life.
So you can write the autobiography part of self authoring dot com.
It asked you to break your life into 70 parks and write about the important positive and negative experiences in each and analyze them.
I've had plenty of people.
I'm not making a formal scientific claim here, by the way.
But there is good evidence that this kind of writing does help People, uh, come to terms with their past and increase their psychological health.
We haven't done those studies specifically on our program, so I don't want to claim that we have.
But I have had many people mentioned that after completing the past authoring program, AA lot of the things that they had bothered them chronically had begin to recede into the past where they belonged.
So anyways, we're offering those programs the self authoring program you could buy two.
For one, there's a special on It's rather permanent special because it seems to be very popular Anyways.
That means you can buy one for you and a friend, and it's 20% off, and so is understand myself dot com.
That's a personality test that I developed with my colleagues.
That gives you a big five readout, extra version, neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness and openness.
I think I got old fart there and 10 of the aspects that make them up, so it's very high resolution personality test and it's been on the harsh side.
It's not designed to make you feel good.
It's designed to actually tell you about your strengths and weaknesses.
And look, man, everybody has strengths and weaknesses.
So you know, if there's a bit that's harsh in the in, the test results don't feel too bad.
It's not like you're alone in that.
Anyways.
The code for the 20% discount is May, and it's valid until the end of May.
And so look these these programs, you know, let's to think about the future offering program.
It's It's really a good thing to have a plan for your life, you know, you're not gonna get what you need.
You want less game addict, and you know that game out, unless you know what it is.
And you're not gonna know what it is unless you think about what it is that you need and you want.
And it's hard for people to do that and we're not trained to do that Doesn't happen to us in school.
Doesn't happen to us and university.
We like the future authoring program and just in the past authoring program and the president of the program they all the clinical evidence about programs like this suggests that they work very well and they're there and you can do them badly.
That's the other thing.
That's kind of cool is you don't have to get all perfectionistic about.
You don't have to write a perfect account of your past.
You don't have to come up with the right plan for the future because you're not gonna anyways, because what do you know about what the future is going to bring?
It's still worthwhile to chart a course, though, you know, because it increases the probability that you'll get what you want.
So you know my my colleagues, Daniel Higgins.
He's at Harvard and or was it Harvard?
He's a Pete, as a PhD from Harvard and Bob Bob Peel, who just resigned or just retired from McGill.
We built these programs over a couple of years along with some of my graduate students, particularly Raymond Mar, and, uh, we think they've been really useful for people.
So, um, and you know what?
We were trying to figure out low cost psychological interventions that could be scaled that would not do people any harm that they could do on their own with minimal administrative overhead and cost.
And so, like that's the philosophy that underlies them so well, that's enough of that.
I should also mention finally, for those of you who might be interested, I was in New York this week.
On Monday, for example, I taped 16 interviews with Dr Oz.
Now there's a man with energy.
I'll tell you, we did that.
I was pretty much fried by the end of that.
His wife, Lisa, who's very bright person and who knows my work very well, asked wrote out all the questions that Dr Oz used to interview me, and they were killer questions.
I had to think about every one of them.
And so we seem to have a good time.
There was a bit of a studio audience there.
They seemed to like the discussion.
And so these will appear as 10 to 15 minute video clips.
Either on Dr Oz is broadcast show or on YouTube or both, and you know it.
Never know they might show up on my channel a swell, but, um, before warned, they're coming and hopefully what did he call them?
He thought it would be useful if there were good 10 minute clips of some of the things that I've talked about for people to access.
And so he's got a nice professional studio, and I like working with him so well, that was New York House didn't talk last night.
Beacon Theatre, um, which was sold out.
So not the third time.
The beacon is sold out.
So I don't know what it is about New Yorkers, but they seem to like to talk about sorrow and suffering and malevolence and Russian Communist camps.
And, well, maybe also the possibility of having a reasonable and productive and meaningful life.
That's really why people are there.
So it was a good a good event, and my daughter, Mikayla, um, opened the show.
That was kind of fun.
And she also did the Q and A because there's a Q and a portion of its that was different.
And it was cute warm as far as I was concerned, and she's kind of funny, and so that was helpful.
A swell.
So anyways, um, uh has a lot of news.
Hopefully, it wasn't too much.
And so now I'll do my best to answer your questions.
I'm out.
No, I guess I'm not quite ready here.
A little nervous about the debate with Jack tomorrow.
I'm not a political philosopher.
You know, It's been a long time since I read Marx reread the Communist Manifesto over the last couple of weeks and tried to think it through.
And so I'm gonna talk to more about the essence of the capitalist floor or the Communist philosophy.
Um, I don't think I've read a book.
Well, we'll leave it at that.
I'm gonna take it apart tomorrow at the lecture, and, uh, I hope I'm ready.
I've got 25 minutes to make my case pretty short.
Shouldn't take a lot of prep time if I'm careful, but I can't waste any of the time.
And and, uh, I really like to do a good job because I think it's an important debate.
No, it's an important subject.
I don't know if it's gonna be an important debate.
I know a lot of people in Europe will be watching it, so All right, everyone, let's see what we've got here to to address have you and being allotted the opportunity asked Michael Mix, what would you have discussed with nature.
Well, I think I would have discussed with them what the psychoanalysts discovered in the 20th century or what they claim to have discovered, which which I believe, was a genuine discovery.
See when nature announced the death of God, which, by the way, as you may know from listening to my lectures, was not precisely a trunkful, it was an announcement of triumph.
It was announced.
It was a warning and the tolling of bells of sorrow.
That's a that's a good way of thinking about it.
Even though Nietzsche was a it's styled himself as a vicious, an intellectually vicious critic of institutionalized Christianity, which he certainly waas.
He was also a strange friend to the faith.
I think in the most fundamental sense, that's the truth.
He wrote some things about Christ, for example, which were very positive, and I think the reason he and he understood as well how important the narrative sub structure of the Judeo Christian tradition was to the maintenance of Western civilization.
Hey, Anders.
He's one of the people I learned that from, You know.
Um so see?
So we need you announced the death of God.
He did it, sir.
flea.
And and then he tried to think about what we might be able to do about that, because it was going to lead us down to bad pathways.
You there towards nihilism, you know, and and the belief.
Or what would you call the direct experience that because God was dead, everything might be permitted, as as Dostoyevsky pointed out, or totalitarian ism, which would arise as a rational substitute for them dogmas of religion.
And he knew that that both of those would be catastrophic occurrences.
And so I was trying to figure out what we could do to to heal ourselves.
I suppose, as a consequence of this great loss because needs you also believed what I mentioned this, that you know the belief in God, just not something so simple as belief.
And, you know, a bearded man in the sky.
It's sad to even have to say that maybe it's not necessary, but but at least you know more, more profoundly that the death of the idea of a on a universe ordered by something that's akin to the living and conscience and conscious Onda wear and intelligent uh, it's rough to replace that with pure random meaninglessness and course.
That's the pathway denialism anyways needs.
You thought we would have to concretely our own values to replace those that would fall because of the death of Christianity and the psychoanalysts, Freud and you particularly young.
But Freud began it, I think and and you made this explicit, I think, found a fatal flaw in Nietzsche's theorizing.
Maybe it's a fatal flaw in relationship to modernism, per se, even to the idea of rational thought itself as master of its own house.
He you know you can't make your own values, Thank you can name.
You could direct your life.
You can.
You can cooperate in determining the values that you pursue, but you cooperate with forces in yourself that aren't you and can't be made you not not in any straightforward way.
And it's easy to understand this.
If you think about, for example, the fact that if you do something that you shouldn't do, or if you don't do something that you should do that you'll lay awake in bed at night and torment yourself about it and worry about it and consider yourself an unworthy person, you know, as if you believed in the idea of sin.
It's a very strange thing that there's an ethic that calls to you from within, that you can't control that that holds you responsible for your actions.
That's just one of many sub personalities in some sense that our operative within people.
It depends, I suppose, on how integrated their personality is.
The less integrated people are more different, depending on what emotional state they're in.
But you know, the BU that's overwhelmed with grief, or the U that's overwhelmed with with love or lust or the U that's overwhelmed with anger.
Possessed by those things is really often by no means the same you that you like to think of yourself as when you're under full conscious control, spend and in your normal state of mind.
I mean, even the idea of drunkenness, intoxication that's possession by a spirit, right?
That's why whiskey is a spirit.
It's the spirit of Dionysius, and you drink and you become something that you normally aren't, you know, they say in vino Veritas, but it's not necessarily reasonable to believe that everything you do and say, well, you're intoxicated by alcohol is true.
The point is that there are multiple personalities at work within you, and they have a fair bit of autonomy, like a strange autonomy.
If you could just create your own values, you could imagine in some sense you'd be doing what Raskolnikov tried to do in crime and punishment, which is a book I'd really recommend.
He believed that Nietzschean idea that you could create your own values.
As a consequence, he decided to murder a terrible old woman, um, who was oppressing many of the people in her neighborhood and seemed loved by no one and hated by everyone and who was a vicious slave master to her, not very bright niece.
And Raskolnikov thought that he could do away with her that would that would get him out of some financial trouble.
And then he would do good things with the money and that if he was a real Superman, in some sense, in the Nietzschean manner of thinking that he could just dispense with all the guilt that might logically be associated with murder.
Because after all, if there's no God, everything is permitted and we can create our own values.
And crime.
And punishment is an unbelievably deep study off what happens when you cross a line that you shouldn't have crossed because of your own arrogance.
And so, Raskolnikov, this is a thriller.
This this book, you know, a real detective story.
Well, he, uh hey, I'm not gonna blow the plot, but, hey, he's sort of successful in the murderer, gets away with it, although it doesn't exactly turn out the way he expects even the act itself.
And But what he discovers in the aftermath of what he did is that he was no where near as in control of himself and his personality and his emotional reactions.
And he's as he thought, and he tortures himself for a very long time, with very interesting psychological and social consequences.
It's, well, it's driving.
The plot had very rapidly with what what he's done.
Absolute start, traumatized disbelief what he's done.
So what?
I'd like to ask Nietzsche because that's the question that I'm supposed to be answering is given the mutability of man the fact that we are composed of multiple some personalities, which, by the way, was something that Nietzsche actually mentioned, and that I believe that both Freud and you relied on when they were formulating their psychoanalytic theories.
Given the fact that we aren't masters of our own houses, have given the fact that we're divided amongst ourselves.
Um, how in the world is it possible for us to develop our own values when when were a massive internal contradictions and were and each of those contradictions is a consequence of something live trying to make its case made?
You know, like if you were your own creation, whatever that might mean if you're in full control of your own consciousness and emotions and motivations, well, then you certainly wouldn't be guilty about things you didn't do or didn't do, because you could just revamp your value structure at will to optimize that, say, your emotional state.
And you know, it's good to some degree to be able to do that, to cheer yourself up, to dampen your grief.
But, man, you know it is in control of yourself, as you'd like to think, and you're haunted by many things that you could be in many things that you are one of the things that really terrified me.
I think enough to change when I was to change the way I was living when when I was studying psychology was that encounter with that psycho analytic idea that you're not alone in your psyche?
You know, you could even tell that if you're a student, if you're trying to read something that you have to read, you know there's a difference between reading something you have to read and something that you want to read.
If you want to read it, you can just read it.
If you have to read it, you might not read it at all.
You might just procrastinate endlessly, even even if there's an important don't come like an exam.
Even if the consequence of that exam might be failing, of course, and destroying your academic record, you'll still find yourself very resistant to read the paper unless you happen to be personally interested in it.
And that's so interesting, too, because even at that level, you're not the sort of person that can create their own values, Man, you can't even convince yourself to read a piece of complex writing if you're a university student enrolled in a course that you chose that that assignment is part of, and so that's a pretty good indication of just how many directions.
You're pulled in simultaneously.
So I would really like to discuss that with nature.
I would like to know what he thinks.
Thought about that.
You know, Maybe he thought that despite our dissociate ability and the multiplicity of our personality, that the possibility or the necessity of creating our own values was the only chance we have.
But but But what?
See what I learned from young and this is probably the most profound thing I learned.
I think of all the things that I know perhaps is that values aren't created, they're discovered and they're discovered through a consultation with the parts of yourself that you're not conscious of.
That you're not fully conscious of that aren't articulated that aren't fully articulated elements of your primary personality.
You have to discover what your values are, and you're informed about that well partly by other people who will object if your values aren't appropriate.
But certainly by a dialogue with yourself and with your conscience, that's that's a very important thing to know.
It's part of the reason why I think that you need to tell the truth because you're forced to negotiate with yourself to operate properly in the world.
And if you've worked yourself, let's say, or some elements of yourself by engaging in self deception and lies and and you're not.
Now because of that, you're not who you could be, and you don't live in the world as you should live in it.
Then when you discuss with yourself what your value should be, it will be as if you're discussing it with someone that you can't trust and that's that's not good, like you can't afford that life is difficult and it contains many pitfalls.
And unless you're careful and you sort yourself out properly and you aim high and walk on the straight narrow path, you don't have a hope of understanding where you should be and what time when the crisis hits and the crisis will hit.
So you want to get all those little sub personalities in line if you can't.
It's part of the reason, for example, why you thought you hadn't integrate your shadow, which is the dark part of your character.
I thought that was necessary, or where would go and have a little autonomous life of its own, maybe manifesting itself, for example, when you're angry or drunk instead of integrated into the rest of your personality like a properly disciplined player in a complex and sophisticated game.
So food.
How?
Lots of tough questions Today, here's one from Basil.
I live in constant worry.
My Children are going to be hit by a car kidnapped, murdered, beaten up.
It's a torture.
How can I stop?
Well, I guess the first thing I would say is that you should reassure yourself, and I know that's a paradoxical waited Think about it that these things could happen.
You know, Look, I've never been surprised as a clinician that people were anxious.
So what you say doesn't surprise me, except that the constancy part of it perhaps, is surprising because Children can get hit by cars kidnapped, murdered and beaten up.
And it is a torture to contemplate that.
And so you might ask yourself, Not basil.
Not why so much you're living in constant worry that that could happen to your Children.
But why everyone else isn't always living in constant worried.
That could happen, you know, because tragedy can strike and it strikes Children.
And apparently you're quite attached to your Children.
And so aren't very What would you say?
Sues by the realization that something terrible could happen to them.
Now, you know, first of all, I might say you might want to go talk to somebody professional about this because maybe you're depressed more than you should be.
And maybe you have an anxiety disorder.
I'm not saying that that is not a diagnosis, and I certainly couldn't drive that from what you said.
But it's one of the possible things that could contribute to this constant worry, you know, or or maybe you're physiologically ill and less resilient than you should be.
Maybe you're not eating enough.
One thing I would recommend to begin with is to make sure that you just try this.
I know it's surprising advice, but try to eat a big breakfast for, like, two weeks, see what happens.
See if that drives the worry down now, then the next thing I would ask is, When does it happen?
Like, are these dreams?
Are these thoughts before you go to bed?
Do you wake up in the middle of the night with these visions running through your head?
Um, and again, this has to do with food, isn't more likely to happen if you're hungry.
That's what something worth checking out, because the next time you get worried in the middle of the day, you might try eating something.
I would recommend something high protein, high fat rather than high carbohydrate.
And just see if that helps, because that might indicate that some of your worry is the consequence of hyperglycemia.
And that's a lot more common than people think.
So if it's dreams and visions at night, you know one of the things you can do that's counterproductive is take one of those fantasies that's torturing you, you know, and that your approach you're suppressing because you will be suppressing it and let it play itself out.
You see what's happening is that the parts of you mind the parts of your brain, the parts of your psyche, that our alarm system So that's the anxiety systems are there trying to think something through, and they're using fantasy to think it through, right, and so this is actually a form of thought that's torturing you because it's reasonable for the parts of your brain.
They're on the outlook for negative occurrences to think.
But what if what If What if that's what thinking is.
And sometimes you think positively.
What if and sometimes you think negatively?
Well, you're in all likelihood, doing everything you can to escape from these thoughts when they make themselves manifest.
But all that does is make the systems that are producing those thoughts even more likely to produce them.
Because now they think the alarm system thinks, Oh, well, here's a danger, which is basically the vulnerability of Children.
And I'm trying to present theat active agent the person who I inhabit with evidence of this potential threat as a good alarm system should.
And it turns out that they're so afraid of the message that I'm delivering that they won't even listen to it.
Therefore, the situation must be much more dire than I supposed.
And I'm going to have the abs I'm going to have to amplify and increase the emotion of my statement and the repetitive nous of the thought.
And so that's just not helpful at all, right, because what you've done is you've taken a worry, and you've now re categorize it as a worry, that so terrible that you won't even think about it.
And so Now the alarm systems think that you're being chased by he who can't be named.
That's a good way of thinking about it and a good illusion to something popular and culture.
And so they're just gonna be screaming nonstop.
So what do you have to do?
Well, ma'am, this is counterproductive.
But I'll tell you, it works.
Next time you have a couple of weight things you could do.
You could start by bringing to mind those fantasies.
Sit down somewhere, take some deep breaths, try to calm yourself down a little bit and let those thoughts come forward.
You know what they are and then watch them like you're watching a movie.
Even if it's a horror movie, watch them.
Let the whole fantasy play out and see what what comes out at the end.
Now that even if it's, it's gonna be frightening to do this.
Now, look, even if the vision is quite horrific, right, the entire thought is quite horrific.
You have now indicated to your anxiety systems that you have enough courage to face the worrisome event, and just that alone should be helpful.
Now you may have to do this multiple times and you might have to do it with all the thoughts, and you'll know that you're you know, that you'll have done it.
You'll know that you've done it enough when doing, it starts to become mundane when all the emotion goes out of it.
And if you're particularly frightened, that might take a long time.
Now.
The other thing that you might really consider this is something you could do is an adjunct is you should think about what you would do if this would happen if this happened, you know, as if it happened in real life and and to take even the worst case situation, you know.
So let's say Let's say that you received the news that your child would was hit by a car.
Well, you know, you could receive news like that, and then the question is, what?
What would you do and what you, What should you do?
And the answer is, you don't know.
You think that that would kill you?
You think that that would be unbearable and the end of the world, and it's not surprising that you think that.
But it's not helpful, you know, because people have to live through catastrophe.
And you have more than one child, apparently.
And I would presume as well that you have exposed and other people that love you and need you.
And so it isn't good that you would fall apart and die like an apocalyptic dread if something happened to one of the people that you love, because then you would leave all the other people bereft of you as well.
And that's not helpful.
And so if your child was hit by a car, well, what would you do?
We have to think it through, you know, you grieve, you go to the hospital, you have a terrible time.
You have a terrible year, you know, And that would be that.
And you'd have the funeral and you'd have the loss of the child, and all of that would be awful.
But people live through that, you know, And maybe you could have a name.
A name would be that if that happened, your determination would be to live through it so that you could be there for the rest of your people and so that you wouldn't fall apart and collapse because the death of someone and the subsequent utter collapse of a person closely associated with him that that second event does not improve the 1st 1 It makes it worse.
And it's incumbent upon you to develop the psychological strength to be able to tolerate what it is that you're anxiety alarm systems are tormenting you with, and, you know, you might think, Well, that's impossible.
But you know, it's not impossible because people live through catastrophe and they do that in large part, due in no small part by by discovering that there are darker and stronger forces within them, then they might be willing to appreciate and that one of the consequences of integrating those forces is that you have the strength and the cruelty in some strange sense to endure right to dare continue to live, even if the unthinkable happens.
And it's no simple matter to think of that as a moral step forward.
But you know, people are called upon to be strong and strong in the face of the worst catastrophe, and your psyche is tormenting you with precisely that you know it won't let you go.
It will shake you like a dog shakes a rap.
It won't let you go until you deal with it.
You deal with mortality, even the mortality of your Children, and you find within you what would allow you to withstand that damaged or not to withstand that.
And you do that by letting yourself go where your thoughts take you, even though you don't want to How it's a trip into the abyss.
You know that's a trip into the underworld, and those are best taken voluntarily.
You're being dragged down there by forces that are beyond your control, and the mythological motif is that those who are pulled into the underworld by forces beyond their control do not come out, not come out easily.
It can be the end, you know, So you go there courageously.
And so if your apparent one of the places you have to go courageously is to that place where your Children are ill or dying or deceased, you have to do that.
You haven't grown up until you have done that, even though it's a terrible thing.
So that's how you could deal with out.
It's rough, man, but I'll tell you, it's a lot better than living in constant worry that your Children are going to be hit by a car kidnapped, murdered or beaten up.
So, you know, you're like you're in a situation that characterizes the situation of many people in life.
You don't have a good choice.
You've got too rough choices, you could go left, and that's rough and you can go right, and that's rough.
And that's all you've got.
And I would say you have the freedom to choose which of the two difficult paths you're going to choose and the one that involves voluntary confrontation with what tortures and torments you with the terrible predator of death.
That's the pathway that's going to lead back to the stability that not only you need but that your family requires you to have.
So that's that.
And you guys, you're asking tough questions tonight.
News of real atrocities committed by humans, especially torture.
Leave me physically shell shocked and paralyzed as if I had PTSD.
Is there something wrong with me?
Well, here's your more sensitive than the typical person.
Perhaps you're more imaginative, you know, Maybe you're more open.
You could take a personality test and find out what your personality traits are.
That probably be the best that really be the best way of figuring it out.
My guess is that you're extremely high and compassion, which is a an aspect of agreeableness, and it's the maternal aspect fundamentally, and so you're probably very high and compassion.
Um, I have a personality test at a site called Understand Myself.
You could go there, understand myself dot com, you could go there and you could do the personality test.
And that would help tell you I would say that you're very high and compassion and I would guess.
They're also very high in trade neuroticism, which is the trade that measures sensitivity to negative emotion.
Anxieties say an emotional pain and the combination of high compassion and high negative emotion sensitivity would produce what would increase the probability of someone suffering from the consequences that you describe.
If that was also allied by HYO with high openness, which is created creativity to mention, it would mean that you're someone who can get really lost in the stories of other people so high people are high in openness like fiction, for example, and the reason for that is that they they they're imitative in some sense cognitively.
They can really take on another character, and they can't take that on to the exclusion of everything else so that they're deeply engrossed in the in this story, you know, someone who is high in openness.
You can kind of tell a person like that because if they're reading a book fiction book and you call their name even multiple times, they may not respond because they're so deeply embedded in the narrative and have become the characters to such a degree that it shut off the outside world and they're living in there.
Mediated imagination, you know, And so I'd be my guest with regards to your personality traits, Um, if it's really affecting you like your statement is quite extreme, as if I had ptsd, um, to develop PTSD.
Generally, exposure to malevolence is necessary, and so that element of your experience is in keeping with that statement.
But PTSD is is relatively rare and generally requires a very intensely traumatic personal experience.
No one of the predictors of the development of PTSD after exposure to trauma is something called depersonalization, and some of you may have experienced this depersonalization tends to occur when something happens to you that so far outside the manner that you conceptualize reality, that you cannot believe that it's happening.
And so the D realization is that all of a sudden you're in a world that doesn't seem rial because something that isn't possible by your as a consequence of your philosophy, let's say your perceptual structure, your value structure has just occurred and posed a unspecified threat to the integrity of your entire belief system, which is really what What happens when you develop post traumatic stress disorder is the value hierarchy that regulates your neck.
Negative emotion gets destroyed at some fundamental level by your encounter with something that you didn't believe could possibly exist.
Um, I doubt that your response is sufficient to produce PTSD.
If that is the case, then you're sensitive to anxiety at a level that far exceeds the normal.
And it might be worth going to talk to someone about that.
It's possible that, like, I don't know because you haven't provided me with any information.
I don't know what your mood is like like, are you?
Are you Are you depressed?
Well, are you anxious all the time?
Right.
You wake up in the middle of the night and worry about things, you know, because maybe there's something that's broader that characterizes dysfunctions in your negative emotion systems that might be addressed.
Maybe you're going through a particularly rough time in your life, and so you're hypersensitive.
It's impossible to tell from the context, but at least now you know a little bit more about what might be what might be a resulting in your responses.
God, Boone him.
Dr.
Peterson, I recently found out that my father was a former Camaro Rouge.
Now the Camaro Rouge exiled and killed millions of people in Cambodia.
So this is a rough discovery.
I feel hurt that he was part of the horror in Cambodia.
How do I deal with this?
Well, you know, the first thing I'd recommend is that you read a book, and the book is called Ordinary Men.
And it's a story about how ordinary men in Germany policemen were trained and encouraged to become cold blooded murderers of naked pregnant women in Poland during World War Two.
And it's ah, it's a horrifying book.
Um, and so you might think Well, why in the world would you read?
Ah, horrifying book of that nature and I would say, because it will help you understand that people who did such things were, in Nietzsche's phrase, human all too human and might help you reached the gap between the father that you thought you knew and the father that once waas and to bridge the gap between you and those two.
If you understand that the sorts of things that your father may have been involved in or or the organization at least that he was involved with, if you understand that people including yourself, have the propensity to behave in that manner, and it's not something unique to your father, terrible, though it maybe if it's part of the what would you say?
The eternal proclivity for malevolence and evil.
That's part and parcel of the human spirit, you know, as the Catholics have always insisted with their doctrine of original sin, then that may allow you.
I understand the situation of your father better.
That's the first thing said.
You have to learn something about evil, and you have to learn something about how it possesses people, and you have to learn something about how it possesses ordinary people, and that will mean you'll have to learn something about how it might possess you, and that's rough learning.
So you've got rough learning to do.
Then the next thing I would say is, Look, it was a long time ago, Um and what's your father being like for you?
You know, like maybe he's changed.
You know, people can repent and and rejoin the world.
That the Christian idea, which is a remarkable one, is that there's no sin that you can commit that so terrible that you can't be redeemed.
Now People laugh at that idea because they think, well, that means that you can.
They think cynically, that that means that you can be the worst and most impulsive senator possible throughout your entire life.
And then conveniently in the moments before death, repent and, you know, enter the everlasting kingdom of God.
And unfortunately, it's not that simple, because to repent and to be redeemed is to truly understand what you did to allow the parts of yourself that did that to wither away and die or burn away, which I think is a better metaphor because there's plenty of pain involved.
Two.
Chart a new course and to swear by everything that's holy, that you're going to stay on it.
And maybe your dad did that.
And so in which case, your job is to find out how even now, knowing something about the evil that can possess people, even people that you love even yourself, you'll have to find it within you two.
Forgive if you determine that this man with all the hidden complexity that you have now discovered is someone you love.
And so good luck, because that's Ah, that's a tough road.
You've got to walk there.
So But like I said, I would say Read ordinary man, That'll teach you something that you need to know.
The Greeks.
This by anonymous.
The Greeks had the maxim know thy self.
How did we come to know ourselves in terms of our personalities and, more importantly, potential?
Well, you know, one of the things often told my students my clinical clients as well, I guess I probably told my family members this as well some of the many ways that one of the first ways to come to know yourself is to understand that you don't and that you'll still know the people you love very well But we'll get to that.
You know, you can learn to kind of watch yourself like you're watching a stranger, but you have to adopt.
The position is a position of radical humility.
I would say both.
Both humility in two cents is so one sense would be the humility of recognizing your ignorance.
So you have to understand that you don't know who you are, and that's not easy to understand because you think you know.
But then, you know you remember.
You can't control yourself very well.
You're not very disciplined.
You're full of flaws.
Maybe you don't know yourself as well as you think, but it's hard to get low enough to understand how deeply it is the case that you are ignorant about who you are.
Now there's an upside to that to which also is that you're also ignorant about who you could be.
And so the discovery of that, you know, is some reward for the horror of determining who you actually are.
Then I would say, Well, then you watch yourself, you know, and and you tend to your conscience and you see you watch yourself like you're watching a stranger.
You watch what you're saying.
You listen, you think what sort of person would say that?
And how am I reacting emotionally when I'm communicating in that manner?
No.
Is that making me feel stronger?
Weaker is it is it is filling me with shame.
Is it helping my confidence?
My, my laying out a lie?
Am I deceiving myself and other people?
And my adopting this personality at parties that is designed to impress into amusing it comes across is nothing but like self centered narcissism.
What are my dark fantasies?
What are my aggressive fantasies?
What is it that I'm willing to do?
What am I interested in so that I'll spontaneously pursue it?
What do I procrastinate about and why?
What am I unwilling to do?
What do I think is good?
What do I congratulate myself for accomplishing, and what do I be rate myself for failing to confront and two implement?
Those are all incredibly complicated questions, and you don't know the answers to them.
So that's that's a start.
And then, in terms of potential, well, you'll discover a little bit more about your potential as you discover who you are, especially the darker parts of yourself because then you discover your potential for mayhem.
There's some real utility in that, you know, discovery that you're dangerous.
It's such a useful discovery.
It's actually something that strengthens you, because the first thing that a realization like that can in fact produce, is the the ambition to incorporate that danger into a higher order personality that dangerousness into a higher order personality.
And that can make you implacable.
I could make you someone who can say no when you need to say no.
You know, that could make you someone who won't avoid unnecessary conflict.
And so that's us unbelievably useful.
And so that's one of the potentials that you might discover.
Um, the other thing you do to discover your potential is too well, you challenge yourself.
You know, it's like rule.
For in my book, 12 Rules for Life is Compare yourself to who you were yesterday and not just who someone else's today, and that's kind of a good way to start this.
It's like, Well, take a bit of a look at yourself and think about what's not so good that you could improve that you should improve by your own standards and that you would improve, you know, and save yourself a little goal.
Um, you know, maybe you're not studying at all at your university.
Or maybe you're maybe Europe work, and you've got this stack of paper there, you know?
And you haven't looked at that damn stack for, like a month, and you know that you should be and you're bought bothering yourself a night because you're avoiding that.
It's like maybe they go.
I've avoided that stack of paper completely for one month.
I'm quite a coward when it comes to whatever snakes might be hidden in that stack of paper.
How about tomorrow?
I just like, put that stack of paper in front of me on my desk and I like a glance through it for 15 seconds.
See if I could do that.
It's like, Well, you set yourself a goal of improvement.
You know, it's a humble goal, because, really, are you such a coward that the best that you can bloody well manage after a month of avoidance is 15 seconds of exposure to a stack of paper?
You know, it could easily be you've been avoiding its You're obviously afraid of it.
And so the situation could be that dismal and dire.
And you might think, Well, jeez, it's no bombed my ego.
It's No, it's no, It's not fostering the strength of my ego to recognize myself, someone who could only withstand 15 seconds of exposure to that thing I'm afraid of.
And so that's a form of humility to it's like there's things you could do to improve and you know what they are.
And they're small steps that you could take that you might take that would put you in that direction.
And then the question is, are you big enough to take those small steps?
You know, Are you capable of grappling with the fact that you're fundamentally flawed to the point where you have to break things down and almost childlike steps in order to manage them?
Announces, that is, yeah, you are, and that's the lot of I don't know if it's a lot of everyone.
M