Inspired motivation ( Jordan Peterson )

0:00Hey, this is Strong, everyone. Click, set, Marie Anderson. How y'all doing out there today? I hope everybody is doing well. If you're not doing well, let's find a way to get well. Look well. And of course you already know it be well. Right now we are going to listen to Jordan Peterson and he's going to talk about men and maybe possible women, but we're going to find out what it is that he wants to talk about or get us to understand today tomorrow and the next day. So to love yourself properly is not only to love what you are, who you are, whatever that means, but to love who you could become. Now one of the things I've observed is that it's very demoralizing for the typical young person who's miserable and maladjusted psychologically and socially if you just go to them and say, well you should feel good about yourself because they think you're good just the way you're doing it.

1:04You think you're good just the way you are. You're perfect just the way you are. You should accept yourself just the way you are. It's like, well, okay, so what does that say about who I should become? Is that just now off the table because I'm already good enough in every way? So am I done or something? What about who I should become? And then, well, how should I feel good about myself when I don't? Because I'm not getting along with myself. I'm anxious and hopeless and nihilistic and depressed and I'm not getting along with other people. So how is it that that's all somehow something I should feel good about without being deluded? And these are complicated questions because you don't want to beat yourself with a stick which might be the opposite of that. Well, feel bad about yourself. It's like, no, be judicious and merciful with yourself and think that you need to accept yourself in some way the way a mother accepts a child. But the maternal spirit is not the only spirit that governs the love that a child requires properly. You have the paternal spirit of encouragement as well, which is, well, we need to shelter and protect you and to provide for your security the way you are, but you can be a lot better and should be. And I have faith that you could be, which is the love that I'm delivering to what you're becoming rather than what you are.

2:24And so love that you direct towards yourself is partly directed towards that maternal care that's sort of the minimum precondition for basic flourishing combined with an attitude of encouragement towards the possibilities of your being. And so that's a much more sophisticated so-called self-love, partly because it's the kind of love that envisions you as something that unfolds across time. And it's a much richer conception because it also implies that there's a responsible adventure to your life. You're not all you could be and there's pain in that and there's the necessity for a certain amount of judgment about that and even a certain amount of exclusion because what you are that is insufficient in some sense should be not be allowed to propagate further. But if it's conjoined with encouragement, it's like, yeah, you're in a rough situation there, kiddo. But, you know, here's some things about you that are virtuous and good and they're pretty powerful actually.

3:24And if you just made those more manifest, you could dispense with the Lord of this immaturity and misery and you could expand yourself out into life physically and psychologically. And you could start walking this pathway that makes things better and the thing is that as soon as you start walking the pathway that makes things better, then things may become better because your whole orientation changes. And you know, if you're in a bad place but you're escaping, that's pretty positive. Even if it's a bad place and you might think, well, it's still bad but it's better. It's like, well, that's a lot better than a bad place that's getting worse. That's for sure because that's hell. Hell is a bad place that's getting worse. That's for sure. And so if you take the bad place and it's getting better, well, it's already not hell, that's a start. And so this notion of love, we've confused this with the maternal instinct for an infant. It's like, because an infant under six months is like, well, of course, your attitude towards an infant is you're exactly okay the way you are, but that's not what you do to any child that's older than six months.

4:26You start laying down some criteria for becoming for improvement and some of that improvement because we can define it. Well, there's nothing more perfect than a child than a baby. It's like, yeah, but that's not true if the baby's 14 years old. It's true if the baby's six months old and actually a baby, but by nine months, well, the child is going to be start to interact socially. And now there's some principles that the child has to learn to abide by so that social interaction is optimized. You want to take the infant who's entirely dependent and turn them into something that's autonomous and then socially integrated and then socially integrated in a matter that's moving them towards individual responsibility. And the love is not only love that's devoted to what they are at any point, which is that encompassing maternal love, say, but the love that says, yeah, kid, you know, we're pretty happy you're around, but the new you is going to even be better. And that's encouragement and that's part of love. It's half of love. That's for sure.

5:29And you want to direct that to yourself as well. It's like, you don't want to judge who you are so harshly that you just destroy yourself and everything is cast into the pit. You want to take a look at yourself and say, look, you're a person among persons and you have intrinsic worth and you have your flaws, your sins, your domain of ignorance and inadequacy. But that doesn't mean that you're entirely worthless because of that. You have a base level value. That's intrinsic worth, let's say, that's reflective of the fact that you're made in the divine image. In the most fundamental sense, you have intrinsic worth and that's due a certain degree of baseline love. But there's the becoming problem. It's like, well, especially when you're young, most of you is still in the becoming phase. And so why wouldn't encouragement be the hallmark of love? It's like, get the hell up. Get your act together, adopt some responsibility, put your life together, develop a vision, expand yourself beyond the narrow confines that are causing your misery.

6:33And we think you can do it. You could do it, you shouldn't do it. The world would be better off if you did it. You'd be doing better if you did it. Everything would work out better. Why wouldn't we not work to make everything work out better? And you're the person who could do it. And you tell young people that and they think, oh, they've never told me that before in that way. And they think, well, maybe I should get my act together and then they go out and try to get their act together. And they think, well, turned out that worked. And I'm less miserable. I could try doing it a little bit on a broader scale. And they tried that. And they think, wow, people seem a lot happier with me. I have more friends and I'm more popular. I'm a little more physically attractive because I'm standing up a little bit straighter. And then away they go. And I'm fold, man. Be a force for good in the world. I hold in the highest regard, whatever that might be, to aim high and to make that important above all else in your life, that that fortifies you against the vicissitudes of existence like nothing else can. And I truly believe that that's the most practical advice that you could possibly receive.

7:39The way that you fortify your faith in life is to assume the best, something like that, and then to act courageously in relationship to that. And that's tantamount to expressing your faith in the highest possible good. It's tantamount to expressing your faith in God. And it's not a matter of stating, well, I believe in the existence of a transcendent deity because in some sense, who cares what you believe? I mean, you might in all that, but that's not the issue. It's not the issue. The issue, it seems to me, is how you act. The issue is not what you believe as if it's a set of facts, but how you conduct yourself in the world. The purpose of thinking is to let your thoughts die instead of you. It's a brilliant notion. And so the idea is something like, you can conjure up a representation of yourself. You can conjure up a variety of potential representations of yourself in the future. You can lay out how those future representations of yourself are likely to prevail or fail. You can call the potential use in the future that will fail.

8:48And then you can embody the ones that will succeed. You do that well simultaneously, conjuring up a representation of your current state. And determining for yourself, because of your undue suffering, which elements of your pathetic being need to be given up so that you can move forward into that future. And the goal, what is it that you're aiming at with that work and that sacrifice? That's the ultimate quest to it. What is it that you're trying to do? Are you trying to improve the future? We believe that the future can be improved. We believe that it can be improved as a consequence of our sacrificial work. And so once again, what are the limitations? What are the limits to that? What are the necessary limits to that? I would say we don't know. You're in the present in order to maximize our probability of success in the future. How best to do that? Well, the idea is something like, don't hesitate to offer the ultimate sacrifice. If you want the future to turn out ultimately well, what is it that you could contract for, let's say?

10:00If you were willing to give up everything about you that's weak and unworthy, the proper sacrificial attitude produces a psychological state. And then a social state that's a manifestation of that attitude, that decreases the probability that the world will creen into hell, and increases the probability that people will live high quality, meaningful, private lives in a society that's balanced and capable of supporting that. And none of that seems to me to be questionable, really. I also don't think it's anything that people don't actually know. You know, people have told me many times that when they listen to me talk, they're hearing things that they already knew but didn't know how to say. It's something like that. And this is one of those things that I think is exactly like that.

11:02I mean, I think it's at the very core of our moral knowledge, which is our behavioral knowledge and our perceptual knowledge. I mean, let's get this straight. Moral knowledge is no trivial matter. It's knowledge about how it is that you orient yourself in the world. There's no more profoundly necessary form of knowledge. Well, it's predicated on something that's exactly like this. We know that we have to make sacrifices. We know that we have to aim at what's good. So then why isn't that we don't aim at what's best and make the sacrifices that are necessary in order to bring that into play? I think it seems to me that in some sense that's self-evident. The question is why we don't do it, but there's answers to that too. Life is hard and it hurts people. It's right with limitation. And some of it's arbitrary. And some of it's unjust. And some of it's worse. Some of it's malevolent, which is even worse. It's not surprising that that combination of vicissitude can turn people against being. But I think even when that happens, and even when people have the kind of history that if they reveal to you, you would say, well, it's no wonder you turned out that way.

12:08The people who turn out that way still know that it's wrong. They still know that, however deep their own suffering, however arbitrary their own suffering, however much that's caused by the malevolence of others, as well as the tragedy of existence. That does not, in any way, justify their turning away from the good. And I believe everyone knows that. I believe that they know it implicitly, even if they don't allow themselves to know it explicitly. And I believe that if they violate that idea, then they violate themselves, and that they end up in Cain's position, which is the position of the man who's been given a punishment that is too great to bear. Now we're capable of making sacrifices in abstraction, right? To conceptualize a future that we want, to let go of the things that are stopping us from moving forward, and to free ourselves from the chains of our original preconceptions.

13:08For soot pleasure, to follow your impulses, live for the moment, do what's expedient. The mountain is something you have to climb, and you have to climb to the pinnacle of the mountain, and the mountain is up, right? And the mountain stretches up to heaven, and it's a long journey to specify the right place on the highest pinnacle. And that's symbolic, because of course it's a pinnacle that you're always trying to reach, just like you're always trying to aim. You're always trying to climb upward, at least that's the theory, depends to some degree, of course, on your definition of upward. You're supposed to, again, to act out the highest good of which you're capable. Now that will transform your life to some degree into an archetypal adventure. There's no way around that, because as you attempt to climb a higher mountain, let's say, or to aim at a higher target, or something like that. Then the things around you will become increasingly dramatic and of import that happens by necessity, obviously, because if you're aiming at something difficult and profound, and you're really working at it, then your life is going to become perhaps increasingly difficult and profound, but that might be okay.

14:15That might be exactly what you need as an antidote to the implicit limitations that face you as a human being. The good father is precisely someone who is willing to sacrifice his child to the ultimate good. You have a moral obligation as a parent to encourage your child to go out into the world, right? And to be whoever they can be, to be the best they can possibly be. And in doing that, you're encouraging them to pursue the good, you're sacrificing them to the good. You're not keeping them for yourself selfishly. You're telling them that they can go out and live their life and live it properly. You don't want for your son what it is that you want for him. You want for your son what would be best for him and for the world.

15:15And you let go in precise proportion to your desire to have that happen. When you have an infant, do you do everything for the infant because the infant can do nothing for him or herself? But as the infant matures and is increasingly capable of doing things for him or herself, then you pull back, right? You pull back and every time the child develops the ability to do something, you allow them or encourage them to do it. And you don't interfere. You know, so if your child is struggling getting dressed, well, obviously there's sometimes that you help them, but mostly you let them learn so that they can know how to do it in the future. That's better for you and it's certainly better for them. There's a rule if you're working with the elderly and an old age home and the rule is something like, don't do anything for any of the guests, let's say, that they can do for themselves. Because you compromise their independence. And so as a mother, you pull back and you pull back and you let your child hit him or herself against the world and you fail to protect them.

16:17But by failing to protect them, you encourage and enable them to the point where you're no longer necessary. Now, they may still want to see you and it would be wonderful if that was the case, but the point is that you're supposed to remove yourself from the equation by encouraging your child to be the best possible person that person can be. And you sacrifice your desires, all of your desires to that, your personal desires, even your desires for your child in relationship to you.