"You Should Be A Monster" | Jordan Peterson Motivation

foreign [Music] part of Spiritual Development is to recognize the satanic tendencies that characterize you and to fully wrestle with them and to and to integrate them that's the thing it's it's not so much to cast them away it's to transmute them you know and you can see the difference between people who've done that and people who haven't at least to some degree because people who haven't integrated the shadow at all are naive and you can tell that when you look at them and you can tell that when you talk to them and because they're naive

they're often resentful as well because they get taken advantage of it and someone who's integrated that more they're dangerous in in the martial arts sort of way which is they're dangerous but they don't have to be they don't have to use it because their presence radiates implicit potential for havoc and that's really necessary it's one of the things that gives people self-respect if you're harmless you're not virtuous you're just harmless you're like a rabbit a rabbit isn't virtuous it's just it just can't do anything except get eaten it's not virtuous if you're a monster and

you don't act monstrously then you're virtuous but you also have to be a monster while you see this all the time Harry Potter's like that too it's like he's he's flawed he's hurt he's got evil in him he can talk to snakes man he breaks rules all the time all the time he's not obedient at all but you know he has a good reason for breaking the rules if he couldn't break the rules him and his little Clique of rule-breaking you know troublemakers if they didn't break the rules they wouldn't attain the highest goal so

it's very peculiar but it's a very very very very very common mythological notion you know the hero has to be the hero has to be a monster but a controlled monster Batman is like that you know I mean it's it's everywhere it's a story you always hear if you're going to be a fighter you have to want to win and you have to want to hurt people I mean not for the sake of hurting them that's what makes you different than an evil person but you have to have that capacity you have to develop that

and you know that's the step on the way to Enlightenment weirdly enough because that isn't what people think people have been fed this diet of pablum rights and impulsive freedom for so long there's just an absolute starvation for the other side of the story there are no rights technically speaking without responsibilities and all we've had for 60 years is a dialogue about rights well that leaves a hole on the other side of the story and it's a whole that it's in people's hearts essentially because responsibility well perhaps that's not more important than rights like I

said their their part and parcel of the same formula but it's in responsibility that most people find the meaning that sustains them through life it's not in happiness it's not an impulsive pleasure those things blow away at the first ill wind but to adopt the responsibility for your own well-being and to try to put your family together and to try to serve your community and to try to seek for Eternal truth and to live them that's the sort of thing that can ground you in in your life enough so that you can withstand the difficulty

of life and when you tell people that especially when you include yourself in the audience let's say and you're not finger waving from above then everyone knows that it's true there's been this attempt to identify masculine competence and and power let's say but mostly competence with tyranny and that's very very hard on on young man it's also hard on young women for that matter but it's very helpful for people to hear that they should make themselves competent and dangerous and take the proper place in the world because it's the alternative to being weak and weak

is not good the people who shoot up the high schools they're weak they're weak and life is a very difficult process and you're not prepared for it unless unless you have the capacity to be dangerous that doesn't mean that you should be cruel it doesn't mean any of that there's a statement in the New Testament the meek shall inherit the Earth but the meek isn't well translated it means something more like those who have swords and know how to use them but keep them sheast will inherit the world that's a way better way of thinking

about it you have to be powerful and formidable and then peaceful in that order right and that's not the same as being naive and weak and harmless which is what young men are being encouraged to be it's like that's a very bad idea it's a very bad idea because naive weak and harmless means that you can't withstand the tragedies of life you can't bear any responsibility you'll end up bitter and when you get bitter then you get dangerous you don't treat adult men as if they're infants but the young men really need to hear this

more I think is that you 'd be a monster you know because everyone says well you should be harmless virtuous you shouldn't do anyone any harm you should sheath your competitive Instinct you shouldn't try to win you know you you don't want to be too aggressive you don't want to be too assertive you want to take a back seat and all of that it's like no wrong you should be a monster an absolute monster and then you should learn how to control it someone who is incapable of Cruelty is a higher moral being than someone

who is capable of Cruelty and I would say and this follows young as well that that's incorrect and it's dangerously incorrect because if you are not capable of Cruelty you are absolutely a victim to anyone who is and so part of the reason that people go watch anti-heroes and villains is because there's a part of them crying out for the incorporation of the monster within them which is what gives them strength of character and self-respect because it's impossible to respect yourself until you grow teeth and if you grow teeth and you realize that you're somewhat

dangerous or maybe somewhat seriously dangerous and then you might be more willing to demand that you treat yourself with respect and other people do the same thing and so that doesn't mean that being cruel is better than not being cruel what it means is that being able to be cruel and then not being cruel is better than not being able to be cruel because in the first case you're nothing but weak and naive and in the second case you're dangerous but you have it under control and you know a lot of martial arts concentrate on

exactly that as part of their philosophy of training it's like we're not training you to fight right we're training you to be peaceful and awake and avoid fights but if you happen to have to get in one and then I guess the philosophy also is is that if you're competent at fighting that actually decreases the probability that you're going to have to fight because when someone pushes you you'll be able to respond with confidence and with any luck and this is certainly the case with bullies with any luck a reasonable show of confidence which is

very much equivalent to a show of dominance is going to be enough to make the bully back off and so the strength that you develop in your monstrousness is actually the best guarantee of peace and that's partly why Jung believed that it was necessary for people to integrate their Shadow and he said that was a terrible thing for people to attempt because the human Shadow which is all those things about yourself that you don't want to realize reaches all the way to hell and what he meant by that was it's through an analysis of your

own shadow that you can come to understand why other people are capable and you as well of the sorts of terrible atrocities that characterize let's say the 20th century and without that understanding there's no possibility of bringing it under control when you study Nazi Germany for example or you study the Soviet Union particularly under Stalin and you're asking yourself well what are these perpetrators like forget about the victims let's talk about the perpetrators the answer is they're just like you and if you don't know that that just means that you don't know anything about people

including yourself and then it also means that you have to discover why they're just like you and believe me that's no picnic so that's enough to traumatize people and that's partly why they don't do it and it's also partly why the path to Enlightenment and wisdom is seldom trod upon because if it was all a matter of following your bliss and doing what made you happy then everyone in the world would be a paragon of wisdom but it's not that at all it's the it's a matter of facing the thing you least want to face

this is an interesting thing about the integration of the Shadow because recognizing yourself as the locus of evil let's say actually in some sense gives you far more respect for yourself strangely enough because the same respect that you might have for a wild animal or even a monster so then maybe you learn to treat yourself differently like I I think this is particularly true with regards to the discipline of children you know if you know that you're a monster and that that will manifest itself in your life consciously or unconsciously and if it's unconsciously it's

it's not good then you become better at disciplining children and the reason for that is that you don't want to expose them to your dark side and so if they behave and don't provoke you which means they'll also behave for other people then the Monstrous part can stay in abeyance and then that's great but if you don't understand yourself as capable of wreaking havoc and that can be the kind of Havoc that unfolds over decades right because if you're going to abuse a child it's the Primitive form of abuse is the physical abuse the sophisticated

form of abuse is the continual undermining of the child's courage across perhaps their entire life and that there's a terribly monstrous element to that and if you're not respected properly by the child say you will absolutely take revenge on them and you know in some sense that's the whole Freudian psychoanalytic story it's it's not all of it but you either have that or it has you those are the options and you don't become safe by being castrated [Music] foreign