The video explores the concept of a truly good person as someone who possesses great strength and power yet chooses to control it voluntarily. The discussion delves into how becoming articulate and having verbal competence can be a powerful tool for individuals, especially young men, who may feel disconnected from the societal structures around them. Articulation, verbal prowess, and the ability to marshal one's arguments are highlighted as essential skills for forming a formidable character.

The discussion further emphasizes the importance of understanding and integrating the 'shadow' self, the darker aspects of one's personality that the conscious self may reject. It suggests that by acknowledging these darker impulses and integrating them into one's personality, an individual can become stronger and more balanced. The video suggests using radical honesty and addressing one's resentment to cultivate these traits effectively.

Main takeaways from the video:

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Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. articulate [ɑːrˈtɪkjʊlət] - (adjective) - Able to express ideas clearly and effectively in speech or writing. - Synonyms: (eloquent, expressive, fluent)

Oh, becoming more articulate is definitely.

2. formidable [ˈfɔːrmɪdəbl] - (adjective) - Inspiring fear or respect through being impressively large, powerful, intense, or capable. - Synonyms: (imposing, intimidating, daunting)

There's nothing that makes you more formidable than verbal competence.

3. prowess [ˈpraʊɪs] - (noun) - Skill or expertise in a particular activity or field. - Synonyms: (ability, competence, talent)

They have this incredible verbal prowess.

4. erudite [ˈerjʊˌdaɪt] - (adjective) - Having or showing great knowledge or learning. - Synonyms: (scholarly, knowledgeable, learned)

You take the best of us, the one that has the most precise, most articulate, erudite language.

5. truism [ˈtruːɪzəm] - (noun) - A statement that is obviously true and says nothing new or interesting. - Synonyms: (platitude, cliché, commonplace)

That's an existential truism for everyone, particularly for every young man, because he is an outsider in many ways.

6. redemptive [rɪˈdɛmptɪv] - (adjective) - Acting to save someone from error or evil. - Synonyms: (saving, salvific, freeing)

They have this incredible verbal prowess. It's unbelievably attractive, you know, and it's associated with genuine artistic and redemptive activity.

7. persona [pərˈsoʊnə] - (noun) - The aspect of someone's character that is presented to or perceived by others. - Synonyms: (image, character, facade)

The persona is the mask that you wear.

8. enlightened [ɪnˈlaɪtənd] - (adjective) - Having an advanced understanding and awareness, often with insight and wisdom. - Synonyms: (aware, informed, wise)

And that's a very unpleasant revelation. And also one of the things that stops people from being enlightened.

9. forthright [fɔːrθˈraɪt] - (adjective) - Direct and outspoken; straightforward and honest. - Synonyms: (candid, direct, honest)

And so what you have to do is you have to put together your mind and your emotions so that they're working as a unit, by actually being forthright about what it is that you want for yourself.

10. radical honesty [ˈrædɪkəl ˈɒnɪsti] - (noun phrase) - The practice of being completely truthful and open, without any form of deception. - Synonyms: (frankness, bluntness, candor)

So practical approach for developing your shadow fundamentally is radical honesty.

A Complete Guide To Integrating Your Shadow - Jordan Peterson

You said that a harmless man is not a good man. A good man is a very dangerous man who has that under voluntary control. How should people become more dangerous? Oh, becoming more articulate is definitely. I would say that's the primary array of weapons. So, I mean, physical prowess is something, and it's not nothing that physical confidence that comes along with that as well, but the same thing replicated at the level of the ability to communicate and think. That's way broader field of battle and opportunity. So this is one thing that isn't taught well, especially to boys. It's more important to teach it to boys, I would say, because they're more skeptical of such, the educational enterprise in general, generally speaking. Partly because they're less obedient, partly because they're less agreeable.

That's particularly true for disagreeable boys. And agreeable boys get higher grades, independent of their iq and their academic achievement, because they're easier to deal with. So what do you tell disagreeable boys? There's nothing that makes you more formidable than verbal competence, than being able to articulate, be able to think, to marshal your arguments. Right? It's a battlefield metaphor. Get everything in order, get all your information straight, to marshal your forces. And so, I mean, that's part of the reason that rap artists are so popular, especially among disaffected young men, black and white alike, because they're unbelievably articulate. They have this incredible verbal prowess. It's unbelievably attractive, you know, and it's associated with genuine artistic and redemptive activity, often focusing on something that's approximately the voice of the underclass, let's say, but a powerful voice. Right.

And it's interesting to see how many young white guys identify with that. Was it Aldous Huxley that wrote doors of perception? Yeah. Yeah. So this is kind of an equivalent of that, right, that you have a experience which many people struggle to articulate. You take the best of us, the one that has the most precise, most articulate, erudite language. You drop them in and you say, okay, show us what you've learned. This is the equivalent, but for just a different community, a different sort of life, that maybe you don't have the ability to describe what it feels like to live on a council estate in Manchester or in, you know, one of the neighborhoods of Brooklyn or whatever it might be, and then this person can. And it feels like it's your voice. Yeah.

Well, you still. If you're a young man, you still feel alienated from your place as rightful heir of the property kingdom. I mean, that's an existential truism for everyone, particularly for every young man, because he is an outsider in many ways. He's young and juvenile and not very highly valued, and then is in some sense hurt by the inadequacies of the current king, the current culture, and is easily turned against it because of that. And that's the machinations of the evil uncle. That's the king Arthur story. That's the story of Horace, Horus and Osiris. It's an ancient, ancient story. It's the story of Sauron, and it's there all the time. And you see in that, in rap music, in hip hop, all of that alienation being given an articulated voice in an artistic sense. And that's a good example of the power of verbal facility. And that's the route to, let's say, marketing education to young men. It's like you want to take your rightful place in the kingdom. It's like, get your tongue straight, man. Get it under control in the highest possible sense.

The persona, you could say, is a good way of thinking about it. You know, you watch all those rom coms where there's always kind of a beta male guy who's being real friendly and always failing miserably with women because basically he's lying to himself and to them. He's a persona. And a persona is the face that you show to the world when you're trying to pretend and to convince yourself and others that you're, I would say, harmless, but we could say a good person. But a good person isn't harmless. A good person is capable of, well, maybe a good person is capable of anything, but is willing to hold that in abeyance. I read this interesting commentary a little while ago on a statement by Christ in the New Testament, and the statement generally interpreted is that the meek shall inherit the earth.

But I was looking up the multiple translations of the word meek, and meek is actually derived from a greek word, of course, because the Bible, least some of the original forms of the Bible, were in Greek. And that word didn't exactly mean meek. It meant something like, those who have weapons and the ability to use them, but determined to keep them sheathed, will inherit the world. And that means that people who are capable of force, let's say, but decide not to use it, are in the proper moral position. And Nietzsche commented on that a fair bit, too. You know, he, he thought of most moral morality as cowardice, not because morality itself was cowardice, but because most people who are cowards disguise their coward cowardice as morality, and they claim that their harmlessness, which is actually a consequence of their fear and inability to be harmful, say, or to be dangerous, is actually a sign of their moral integrity. And that's a really bad idea.

So, you know, if you're an axe murderer but you don't have an axe, that doesn't mean that you're moral. So now with regards to. So that's the persona. And the persona is the mask that you wear. And that's what persona means is the mask that you wear to convince yourself and the world that you're not a terrible monster. So that when you look at yourself in the mirror, you don't have to run away screaming, you know? And you might think, well, that's a bit of an overstatement, but Jung was very interested in phenomena such as, say, psychological, the psychological phenomena that would characterize the actions of someone who might be an Auschwitz camp guard, for example.

And, you know, that's a pretty monstrous form of behavior. And the thing about Auschwitz camp guards is that there's no reason to assume, really, that they were much different than normal people. Now, there would have been exceptions, obviously, but. And what that means is that perhaps you too could be an Auschwitz camp guard and perhaps you would even derive some enjoyment out of it. And you might think not, but you shouldn't think, not so quickly. And what that also implies is that if you could see what that meant when you looked in the mirror and looked at yourself, you might run away screaming because you'd have a revelation of just exactly what the human being is capable of. And that's a very unpleasant revelation.

And also one of the things that stops people from being enlightened, because that revelation of the evil of the self is part of the journey to enlightenment and an early part. Now, the shadow would be all the parts of the personality that the persona rejects. And that might be the aggressive element. Certainly that's the case with the. For people who are hyper agreeable. And now you can tell, I think, one of the best. There's two pathways to the development of the shadow, and they're tightly aligned with one another. The fundamental pathway is truth, and that's to face the bitter truth about yourself. But to break that down more particularly, you might think about that as the capacity to observe your own resentment.

You're going to be resentful and bitter in many situations because you don't get what you want. And if you watch that resentment bitterness, you'll see that it produces fantasies that can be unbelievably dark. And that can be very frightening. And you might not want to admit to yourself that you're actually capable of having fantasies like that or impulses like that, or aggressive feelings like that. But the thing is, is that if those aggressive feelings and impulses and fantasies are integrated into your character, it's like you're opening up a dialogue with a part of yourself that can. Can be very forceful and strong and dangerous. And it's really useful to be dangerous, because if you can be dangerous, you often don't have to be.

Men who've integrated their shadow often also develop a kind of peculiar grace that would be a consequence of not only allowing their aggressive side to step forward, but also their feminine and compassionate side that they may have kept squelched because of embarrassment about it or because they've been harassed for being weak or any number of things. But the practical approach for developing your shadow, I would say, is to contemplate and consider your resentment and notice what it says, because your resentment will also tell you what you have to say. If you're feeling oppressed at work or you're oppressed in your life or you're oppressing yourself, then you got to notice that you're feeling oppressed. Then you have to notice that you're feeling resentful and angry and bitter and maybe even like Cain in the story of Cain and Abel, because Cain is sort of the archetypal bitter man. And then you have to decide what it is that you need to do in order to remove from yourself that bitterness.

And that usually means that there's something that you have to say, and then you have to say it because your soul depends on it. And not only does your soul depend on it, I would say the fate of the world depends on it, because you know you might be wrong and then you should be straightened out. Maybe you're just being whiny and you have to talk to somebody about that. But it may be that you're actually detecting something wrong, some tyranny that's directed towards you and other people. And it's like your moral obligation to speak up about it. And so many workplaces become toxic to use a terrible cliche because the people in them won't speak up for what they actually want, or they speak up too late and then they're all twisted up about it and you know, they're torturing other people because they're so unhappy and so forth and so on. So practical approach for developing your shadow fundamentally is radical honesty.

And Jung said that a genuine moral effort was a good substitute for psychotherapy. One of the things I think this is the case anyways. I think people are always looking for an excuse to have their character corrupted. Because if your character is corrupted, then you get to lie and you get to cheat, and you get to steal, and you get to betray, and you get to act resentfully, and you get to do nothing. And that's all easy. It's easier to lie than to tell the truth. It's easier to do nothing than to do something.

So there's always part of you thinking, well, I need a justification for being useless and horrible because that'd be a lot less work. And so then if something terrible comes along, you think, aha, that's just exactly the excuse that I was waiting for. And then out all that comes. You know, Solzhenitsyn, when he was in the concentration camps in Russia, watching how people behaved, you know, he said that there were people that were put in the camps who immediately became trustees or guards, and they were even more vicious than the people who had been hired as guards. His idea was that they had collected all that. He called it foulness, if I remember correctly, around them in normal life, but they didn't have the opportunity to express it. But as soon as you gave them the opportunity, it was like, there it was right away.

And so, so one of the messages that seems to echo through these Old Testament stories is that just because something terrible happens to you doesn't mean that you get to be. That you get to wander off the path and make things worse. And maybe it doesn't matter how terrible it is that what happens to you. That's a tough call, you know, because you see people now and then in life who they've really got it rough, and like 50 bad things are happening to them at the same time. And you think, it's no wonder if you were bitter and resentful and hostile, it'd be like, yeah, no wonder. But then you meet people.

And Solzhenitsyn again talked about this in the Gulag archipelago. He said he met lots of people in the. Not lots. He met enough people to impress him in the concentration camp system who didn't allow their misfortunes to corrupt them. And that's something, man, because maybe the only real misfortune is to become corrupted. That's a really useful thing to think, you know, maybe the rest of it, maybe the rest of it is trivial in comparison. I know that's a rough thing because you can be in very harsh circumstances, but I do think there's something to that? And the Lord was with Joseph, and he was a prosperous man, and he was in the house of his master, the Egyptian.

And his master saw that the Lord was with him, and that Lord made all that he did to prosper in his hand. So that's an echo of the idea that we encountered earlier about walking with God. Right. So Adam walked with God before he ate the fruit with Eve, and then he wouldn't walk with God, and then Noah walked with God, and Abraham walked with God. And so the idea is, well, that's that alignment with the highest ideal. I think it's something like that. And, you know, we could think about that as a metaphysical claim as well, but I don't think it is. I mean, I've got thousands of letters now in the last year from people who have told me that they were in a pit.

That's exactly right. And that they decided that they were going to try to put their lives together and that it worked. And so that's really something, you know, and they write surprised. It's like, well, I decided that I was going to work hard at what I was doing, and I wasn't going to lie any more than absolutely necessary. I thought I'd give it a try for a few months, you know, and all sorts of good things started to happen to me. It's like, maybe that's how the world works now, obviously, it doesn't work like that all the time, right? Because you can get sliced off at the knees.

I mean, there's an arbitrary element to existence that you can't wish away, but that doesn't mean that there are. It doesn't mean that there aren't bad strategies and good strategies. I do think that one of the most fundamental existential questions is like, if things aren't going well for you in your life, is, are you absolutely certain that you're doing absolutely everything you can to put things in order? If you need something to grapple with, and you probably do, you can find that. You just look inside, you'll find something to grapple with, you know, inadequacy, weakness, susceptibility to temptation, narcissism, pride, envy, revenge, resentment, frustration, lack of faith, all of that. That'll keep you occupied if you really grapple with it.

And, yeah, I mean, that's an ancient theological question, you know, what's up with the devil? Why does the possibility of evil exist? Why is there an eternal adversary? You see that reflected in Cain and Abel right at the beginning of the genesis stories? Essentially, the first two humanity beings are good set against an adversary. And that's. That's what opens history, that story. You think, well, why would God construct such a thing? Why would God construct a reality where an adversary exists? And maybe it's because, all things considered, a world with an adversary is a better world.

Just like a garden with a snake in it is a better garden. These things aren't easy to understand. No. No snake, no necessity to contend with snakes. So why be awake at all? No adversary, no challenge. Why be challenged? Because maybe you're better for the challenge, and maybe that's the challenge to see if you can be better for the challenge. But that should be internal. Well, fundamentally.

Well, if it isn't, you'll find it externally because you'll demonize someone to turn them into Satan so that you can find an adversary. And then that's for unfortunate, for you and for them. That's the problem. It's not as big a battle. It's like you. You battle with someone external who's malevolent, let's say, or you think they are. And usually you've got that mostly wrong, but not always. But if the battle is inside, which is where it's supposed to be most fundamentally, then, well, then it's the ultimate. It is the ultimate challenge.

And that's the infinite game. The external one is battle between good and evil on a playing field of chaos and order. It's the eternal game. And, you know, you can play that out in the external world. But part of what the religious enterprise is about, and the christians have really contributed to this, is the notion that that sacred battle is fundamentally spiritual, which is to say, in some sense, fundamentally psychological. It's to be. It's to be fought on the battleground of the soul. Internally, it's a subjective issue. How do you defeat evil? You defeat the evil in your own heart. That is how you do it.

And so if that's all being acted out for you in the world, well, you've misplaced Satan. That's a good way of thinking about it. This is another weakness, I think, of the atheistic position, because you can. It's pretty hard. It's easy in some sense, to dispense with belief in the highest good, but it's not so easy to dispense with belief in evil. So that's a big problem. So then where do you localize it? And you can find evidence of it everywhere, certainly in institutions. I mean, that's the whole systemic racism, corrupt patriarchy narrative is that Satan is to be found at the core of our institutions.

And to some degree that's true, because everything we do is corrupt to some degree. And so then do you fight it sociologically, you're the good person, and the institution is Satan. You're so good. Are you? You're so sure of that, are you? You've got everything in order, do you? And you might say, well, do you have to have everything in order before you fight evil on the sociological? And the answer is, well, no, because you're never going to have everything in order, but you still shouldn't put the cart before the horse. It's really, it's a spiritual battle, and it's taken people thousands and thousands of years to figure this out.

Now, first of all, it was the snake. What's, what's evil? What's malevolent? The predatory reptile. Fair enough, man. I mean, we've been fighting with predatory reptiles for 60 million years as mammals, 60 million years. So it's a good first pass approximation. It's the snake, the poisonous snake, the external enemy, the predator. But what about the predator and other people? Oh, yeah, that's even worse, man. It's like how predator predators are one thing, but predatory people, other tribes, man, they're brutal.

They're brutal. Well, what about your predatory friend? Oh, that's pretty bad, too. The friend who stabs you in the back, the person who betrays you, Judas God, maybe that's the ultimate snake. It's like, well, how about when you betray yourself? Oh, yeah. So you want to see? There's this association that's very strange that occurred in the development of christian thought between the snake in the Garden of Eden and Satan. There's no indication in the original story that the snake has anything to do with the Lord of all evil. It's a very weird conclusion that's been drawn.

It's almost extra biblical because there's almost no mention of Satan in the Bible at all, much less any direct connection between the serpent and Satan. It's a very, very strange idea, but it's part of this psychologization of evil. Like, what's the ultimate predator? What's the ultimate predator? What's the enemy you harbor in your own heart who hates you? That's the ultimate predator. There's these images of Mary with her head in the stars and baby in her arms and her foot on a snake. It's like, well, that's the eternal feminine. Her head's in the stars because she's oriented towards the highest good and she's protecting her infant from predators. That could be an actual predator.

That be the case throughout not just human history, but mammalian history. Could be other people who are predators, could be men who are predators. Could be her. Who's a predator? The devouring mother. It's like, well, what's the ultimate locale of genuine evil? Highest religious answer is, that's in you. That's the proper place to battle it out. And I think that's true. I think that's lit.

It's literally and metaphorically true. And I was convinced of that in part because of Solzhenitsyn's writings, because Solzhenitsyn identified the totalitarian state with the willingness of the subjects of that state, the subjects and the perpetrators, at the same time, to live by lies. No totalitarian state. If people don't lie. And every time you lie in support of the totalitarian state, then you're the perpetrator. And that's a psychological issue. It's like you're going to lie to get along or not. Say, well, what does it matter?

I'll go along with it. It's okay, we'll see how it matters, because it matters. And that's all psychodrama as far as I'm concerned. Fundamentally, when it's properly placed, you've got plenty of problems to take care of on your own front. And that's where you should concentrate your efforts. If you look at the most archaic of archetypal heroes, those heroes confront something that represents chaos. It's usually a monster that bears a treasure of some sort. And that's a symbolic representation of the class of all unexplored things. Right? Because things that we have not yet explored are threatening and destructive, but also offer us infinite potential.

But more elaborated hero stories, let's say, also reverse that and say that, well, there are times when the order has become so corrupt and rigid that free speech fragments it into its parts so that it can rejuvenate itself. And so, I mean, actually, in the gospels, that's the hero that Christ is basically represented as. He's not so much the dragon confronting the dragon slayer who gathers the treasure, although that's implicit in the juxtaposition of Christ with the figure of, like, a serpentile Satan. But Christ is the thing that stands up against the corrupt state and rejuvenates it through speech. And so, technically speaking, free speech, the logos, is the thing that mediates between chaos and order.

And you can think about this is represented in many cultures. This idea, you can see it most specifically, I would say, in the taoist conceptualization. Because in the taoist world, being is made out of chaos and order, yin and yang, masculine and feminine. Fundamentally, it's chaos and order. And order is the fact that wherever you go, there are things you understand. And chaos is the fact that wherever you go, there are things you don't understand. And so the idea is that being is made out of the things that you understand and the things that you don't understand.

And it's always that way, which is why Tao is the symbol of being, per se. And it's the case your brain is adapted. In fact, it's partly why it has two hemispheres for the world that you understand and the world you don't understand. The world you understand, roughly speaking, being handled by the left and the world you don't understand, roughly speaking, being handled by the right, well, it's that line down the middle, that's dao, that's meaning. And if you have 1ft in chaos and 1ft in order, you're maximizing information flow and rejuvenating yourself at the same time that you're maintaining your structure.

And you will report on that internally as engagement in the world. It's the most fundamental orienting sense that you have, and it's deeply instantiated neurologically, unbelievably, deeply. And so it really is the case, from an evolutionary perspective, that reality is chaos and order. It's that to which you're adapted. You do in psychotherapy as well, in addition to helping people face the things that they're most afraid of so that they can overcome them, is to allow them to tell someone the truth. What happened to you? I'll listen. So they tell you, and they take themselves apart and put themselves together while they're speaking the truth about what happened.

And it puts them together. It's at the, you know, the two fundamentals elements of psychotherapy are, let's find what you're afraid of and avoiding, and help you confront it so that you can gather the information that's there. And let's allow you to lay your story out in all of its catastrophe and detail, so that you can straighten yourself out through speech. It's exactly what happens in psychotherapy, so it should happen in every real relationship. It's. It's the spiritual purpose of a marriage, fundamentally, right, because you face someone who's different than you, that you're tied to and cannot run from, and so you can reveal yourself.

Really, really. It's a critical. It's a critical part of marriage, because if you can run from someone, they will never show you their true face, because if someone shows you their true face, you will run. And so you say, in a marriage ceremony, I will allow you to show me your true face, and I will not run. And unless you mean that you'll never be married, you'll never understand what it means and you'll never reap the benefits of it, which are practical, obviously, but also spiritual and psychological. There's a reason for the vow, but it has to be a vow because otherwise you have a back door open and you'll never really tell the person what you're like. And no bloody wonder, because really, who wants to know? Know what you're like?

Not even you, that's for sure. Here's a primary religious injunction. Treat the other person like you would like to be treated yourself. That does not mean be nice to other people. It does not mean sacrifice yourself excessively for other people. It means think about the other person as if they were you and figure out how you can mutually interact to better both of you at the same time. You have to build yourself into the equation.

It's an equation. It's not that others are more valuable, it's that we're all valuable. We're equally valuable. And then you think, well, how do you remind yourself of that? And the answer to that is through terror, because terror is the genuine motivator. So they say fear of God is the beginning of all wisdom. Well, what does that mean? It means, first that you don't get away with anything. That's really useful to know that, because if you really know that you won't try to get away with, well, you still will, because people are stupid. But at least it will mitigate the possibility.

So here, I'll tell you something that Jung said. This is quite profound, and I think the right answer to this question. So Jung believed he was interested in the emergence of higher morality, something that the developmental psychologist Jean Piaget was also interested in. Piaget thought, we started out as individuals. Then we learned to play games with other people, kids. Children learned how to play games with other children, and that made them social. So our society is a game. It's a giant game that we're all playing together voluntarily. And so children were first learned how to play, play the game, and only later did they learn the rules of the game. They learned how to play the game first and then learned the rules, how to speak the rules.

And then at some point, they realized that they were also creators of the rules. And so that's moral development on a continual it's not a continuum. It's a fractured staircase upward. But Jung was interested in elements of moral action that were higher than that. He conceptualized it symbolically. So imagine this. He did this in the last book he wrote called Mysterium Conjunctionists. So imagine that you exist so that your conceptual structures and your emotions are in uneasy relationship with one another. So you're sort of a house divided amongst yourself. And so what you have to do is you have to put together your mind and your emotions so that they're working as a unit.

And you do that in part by actually being forthright about what it is that you want for yourself and to other people and to learn how to negotiate that, so that inner tension disappears. And so now you're a unified. You're a unified entity of emotion and thought. They're not conflicting with one another. And then what you do is you take that entity, which is still in some sense separate from your body because you're not acting these out, and you bring those two together. And he thought about that as the psychological equivalent of the incarnation. It's integrated spirit integrating with the body. And what that means is that you take your emotions and motivations and capacity for thinking that are now one thing, and you act out those things. So you embody them in the world. And that's another thing that brings integrity.

And then there was a step past that. And the step past that is to understand that there's no. So you have the integrated spirit, mind and body in opposition to the world. And the next thing you do is realize that there is no opposition with the world. Is that what you are is a. This is very, very complicated. You're walking down the street. Bloor street is a good example of this in Toronto. And they're decimated. Alcoholic schizophrenics littering the landscape, so to speak.

You walk around them, you say, well, that's not me. It's like, yes, it is, it's you. Insofar as your tendency is to react in a negative way and to skirt the territory, it's a disturbance in your field of being. It's you. Now, you don't know what to do about it. And I wouldn't recommend that you do anything because you probably just make it worse. It's a very big problem that's lying there on the sidewalk, and it may be well beyond your capacity to fix it. But insofar as it's a disturbance in your field of being, it's you. It's you and all the problems that are in the world that, that you experience. They're you. And so you stop thinking about things in terms of an opposition between what's good for you and what's good for the world, because there's no difference.

There's no difference between the two. And that doesn't mean that the pathway from what's good for you in your more limited domain to what's good for everyone is an easy one to compute. It's very, very difficult, but there is no technical difference between them. So if I'm engaged in a psychotherapeutic dialogue with my clients, when I'm doing it properly, it's not like they're learning from me. It's that we're learning together. And every time I solve one of their problems or help them solve one of their problems, I help myself solve one of my problems, you know, because people bring to me, bring into my sessions the terrible things that go wrong with people in life. Their partner has cancer, their father has Alzheimer's, they're suffering with alcoholism, their career is collapsing. Like, these aren't things that are happening to them. These are things that happen to everyone.

And to figure out how to solve that for someone is to figure out how to solve it for yourself. There's no difference whatsoever. So then the terror thing emerges when you start to realize that those problems that you don't address that are maybe magnified by your impulsive and foolishly self centered and instrumental behavior. You're manipulating the world on behalf of your own narrow interests. Those will come back to haunt you. And so it's a terrifying thing to think through. But once you think it through and understand it, then what happens is you're more afraid of acting selfishly than you are willing to do it. You think, no, I'm not doing that. Why? Because I know all hell will break loose if I do that, and I'm not going there.

And so the terror element is a huge one. It makes it. It fortifies your. Because you can't just act properly. You don't have the moral for that. You can aim at the good and run from what's terrible. Then you're. Then you're motivated. Were there any kind of. Any of your. Any of the chapters in your book that helped you get through that kind of traumatic.

Well, I wrote the last book almost entirely when I was. I was so ill, I could barely make it to the typewriter. Yeah. So the computer and so. But it was, look, man, when you're in the depths of catastrophe, you have the support and love of your family, if you're fortunate, and your friends. And I had no shortage of that, thank God. But I was writing this book and, you know, I wanted to write it. And as far as I was concerned, it was important that I do it. And that gave me something to live for continually. And you need something meaningful to set against suffering. That's what you have to set against suffering, not happiness.

Sometimes you don't have. That's not an option. Sometimes happiness is like. No, I. I don't think I had any happiness at all. For three years, pretty much. It was dire. Well, my wife, she, she spent a year hovering on the brink of death in a variety of different ways. Before that, my daughter had catastrophic health problems which have mostly resolved, and then I got extremely ill. So we've been in, and at the same time we were facing social pressure of like an unparalleled magnitude. People trying to, you know, bring this enterprise to a halt.

I suppose that's probably the right way to think about it. Most of that time, I was hoping that I would die. I've been grateful for the good things that have happened to me, but I don't think I was grateful enough before just for mundane normality, you know? And, you know, you think you don't have everything you could have, and perhaps that's true, but if you can sit down and breathe, there's lots of people who don't have that. Yeah. And I read somewhere that you, you couldn't even listen to music. Oh, no, no. And just. Why? Why? Well, no, I had no positive emotion at all. And, and it was too sensory. Like, I was very sensitive to anything that was any sensory input at all.

I mean, last year when I was in Florida, I would get up at about eight in the morning because I couldn't sleep anymore. And then I would, I'm pretty much on the couch till three, but I had to have earplugs in and like a covering over my eyes that, that point I could still lay down, so I could, I could. Well, I wasn't resting, but I at least wasn't moving. So I'm curious with you. Do you remember the first song that you were able to listen to when you came out of your illness? I think it was probably something by arcade fire. Right? So I really like arcade fire. I think they're great. Yeah. And what was that? That must have just been to be able to.

Oh, man, it was such a relief. And now I've been listening to music like my wife and I, we spend about 5 hours a week dancing upstairs in our. It's all right. Like, for a long time, two years every evening I spent with her, I thought would probably be the last one. Yeah. So the fact that that's not the case anymore and that we can listen to music. I have these long playlists that I've been curating for years, that we have all these romance playlists. That's jazz singers from pretty much the twenties through the fifties, some sixties stuff.

I'm curious as well. You know, when you're kind of curating these kind of, like, playlists, are you able to be in the zone or are you. Are you watching her reaction to the music? Because that's always the thing. I. Well, I tend to put the playlist together, and then our rule is she has veto power. And so, you know, if there's a song on there that she doesn't want to listen to repeatedly when we're driving in her car or whatever, then I'll take it off. Yeah. And she is very good at deciding when something shouldn't be around anymore and getting rid of it, which was always terrifying, by the way, to our children when they had friends come over, because when they first come over, we tell them, we're really happy that you're here, you know, and you're welcome.

And we meant it. I think teenagers are pretty funny with their caustic sense of humor and their proclivity to misbehave. But the second part of the message was. But. But if you do anything stupid and we never have to see you again, that actually isn't a problem for us. Hang on, hang on. Is that how you would rate them with that? Yes. That is fucking terrifying. Yeah. Well, it was so funny, though, because they were terrified of me when they first came over, which was a good thing. But after they'd been over five times, they weren't terrified of me, of course.

They were definitely terrified of Tammy. Right. Yeah. Because she. She has a stronger spine than me in many ways, because I'm a very. As it turns out, I'm a very agreeable person. I don't like conflict at all. Yeah. And she's. She's. She's a little more stiff, stiff spined in that regard. So I think I take very little for granted. And, I mean, I think I take even less for granted than you might think. I told you that. I don't take it for granted that you can all sit here peacefully, you know, and that is how I look at the world, is that if it isn't burning in rack and runes, then I think it's a bloody miracle.

And the fact that things have gone well for me and that I'm still standing, which is also a miracle of sorts, you know, I mean, there were probably 30 different scandalous episodes that had every. That anyone with any sense would have thought would finish me, and they've all backfired. And that's also. I also don't understand that. It's like, I don't understand that. I get attacked in the New York Times, and my friends call me, who are New York Times readers, and they say, you've had it this time because that was the New York Times, you know, you're not going to recover from that.

And I think, well, that's probably true. I mean, I was expecting it to happen all along, and then I wait, and then, you know, everybody clamors at me, and then I don't respond too much to that and it starts to die away, and then all the supporters come out, and then there's a hundred people who clamor and 10,000 supporters. And, you know, here's something I can tell you about my life that's really remarkable. So, you know, if you just read the press, well, you'd have all sorts of ideas about me. I mean, you know that I'm a bigot in the broadest possible sense. And so that's, you know, racist, sexist, homophobic, ethnocentric, white nationalist, alt right, islamophobic, homophobic, all of those things.

And you'd think that there was just nothing but hatred, although I have been treated well by many journalists. But you could easily get that sense that, like, I live in a world where I'm surrounded by hatred, and that is absolutely not true. It's so not true that it's, you know, there are lies and then there are, there are, there are anti truths, and an anti truth is even worse than a lie. It's like the ultimate form of lie. And that is what my life is like at all.

What my life is like is that I travel with my wife and wherever we go, and I mean that literally, wherever we go, we've been to I don't know how many countries in the last year. It's like, I don't know how many, 30, 40, many countries. If I go down the street or if I'm in an airport or if I'm in a cafe or if I'm in a movie theater or if I'm in a mechanics shop, some person comes up to me every ten minutes and says, I hope I'm not disturbing you. And they're very, very polite, and they say, I've been listening to your lectures, or I've been watching your YouTube videos, or I read your book, and I was in this dreadful place six months ago. And then they tell me a little bit about the particulars of that little corner of hell they were ensconced in. And then they say, well, I've been trying to develop a vision for my life, or I've been trying to take more responsibility, or been trying to be grateful for my job, mundane though it may be. Or I've decided that I'm going to try to put my family together and make peace.

And I've really been trying, and it's really working, and things are way better. And thank you. If you could imagine, if you could ask for what you want today, you could have anything you wanted. You might think it would be lovely if I could live my life in a manner so that wherever I went in the world, perfect strangers would come up to me, one after the other, and tell me that they're suffering much less, that their families are in better shape, and that their lives are on course because they took. They took to heart something that I was communicating. That's as good as it gets, as far as I can tell. Look for happiness.

And everyone thinks, well, I'd rather be happy than miserable. And, like, fair enough, you know, but there's nothing about that that has any nobility, and it's not believable. No one believes that, because everyone knows that life is bounded by tragedy and that malevolence abounds. Everyone knows that. And you say, you know, so there's that terrible, that terrible dark dyad of tragedy and evil, and you wave the little flag of happiness in front of it. It's like, you know, no one believes that that will work. But then when you tell people, look, you're dark, you're a monster. You really are. And. But that's actually useful because you cannot survive the world without being a monster. People think, oh, oh, well, that's interesting.

I kind of suspected that I was a monster. And everyone's always said that was bad. It is bad, obviously, but there's something that can be done about it, and there's something that can be transmuted into something good without being inhibited. So you're saying to be good, I don't have to be a neutered tomcat to be good. I can be a monster, but I can be like a civilized monster. It's like, yeah, that's what you should aim at you should be unbelievably dangerous. The more dangerous you are, the better. And then you should control that because that's your, your doctrine on what constitutes morality, right?

It's contained capacity from eleven for mayhem. Absolutely, absolutely. It's. Well, and I learned this partly from Jung, but also partly from Nietzsche. And of course, Jung learned it partly from Nietzsche because Nietzsche pointed out that most of what passes for morality is just obedient cowardice. So I'm an obedient coward. Well, no, wants to think that. So they say, well, no, I'm not an obedient coward. I'm a, oh, I'm a good person because I don't break any rules. It's like, no, you're not.

You're an obedient coward and you're too afraid to break the rules. That doesn't make you good. It also accounts for why the dark hero, you know, the antihero is so popular in cinematic representations in particular, because people go and watch the mafia, hitmen and guys like that, and they, you know, there's a dark part of them that thinks, wow, you know, those guys are really cool. You know, like movies like Quentin Tarantino's movies, you know, where the hitmen are wisecracking and, you know, they're tough and they can handle everything. And you think, well, these guys are psychopathic criminals. Why are people looking up to them?

It's because, well, you're not moral if you're just harmless. And the question is, well, what's the antidote to being harmless? And that's the antidote to that is to open up that doorway into the shadow, and then you could become that, right? There's that gleeful, predatory victory. That's part of that that would be associated with, let's say, the attitude that I could have had to, what happened with Channel four? It's like, I won, look the fuck out, right? But no, that's not right, because it's not good enough. Enough.

It's better than losing by a lot, because there's nothing in a loss. That's admirable, but it's not the highest form of victory, and there's no reason not to go for the highest form of victory. And that's peace, right? It's not predatory victory, it's peace, because anyone with any sense who has any wisdom regards peace as the goal. And that isn't the peace that means that I'm so afraid of you that I'm not going to say anything. It's the peace that is that like it's the peace of armed opponents who respect one another, right? That's real peace.

I guess I'll tell you, too, something about telling the truth. It's one thing I did. 19 8582-8382 I swore that I would stop lying. I said I'm going to try not to say anything I know to be untrue. You know, that doesn't mean I swore to tell the truth, because truth, that's hard. But you can consciously stop lying. When you know you're lying, you can stop doing that. And that has been revolutionary for me.

And one of the things I've really realized in recent years, and this is very much worth knowing, is that many times when I people speak to each other, they have an agenda in mind. You know, you want something from someone, maybe you want a job and you want to craft your image to get the job, right? So you say what you need to say to get what you think you need. The problem with that is, what do you know about what you need? You're so accurate about that, are you? And you think you know what you need. Exactly. And so you're going to falsify your utterances to bring about the desire end and you're going to use the other person as a target of your manipulation.

Well, that's like you write an essay because that's what the professor wants to hear. It's like you don't do that because you don't falsify your words because hypothetically, they're divine and the whole stability of the state rests on them, hypothetically, and maybe really too. And so you don't do that. And so instead you strive to tell the truth. And maybe that's an aim, too. And then it's an adventure. Because I'll tell you one thing, if you tell the truth, you have no idea what's going to happen to you because you have to let go of that. It's like I'm going to say what I think and then what?

I'm going to assume faith. I'm going to assume that whatever happens if I am telling the truth is the best thing that could happen. Because the truth brings about what is best. And even if it looks hard for me, because it might be, you know, because people take the easy way out often when they lie, even if it looks bad for me, that doesn't mean it's bad, it just means I don't see the whole. I don't see the whole picture. And, you know, if you believe that the truth will set you free and that there is such a thing as the truth, and that the truth is redemptive, then you're pretty much stuck with that conclusion. But one of the remarkable things about that, and this really is worth knowing, is that if you do that, you will have your adventure, right? That's the abrahamic adventure, you know, the call from God that justifies your life because of the excitement of what you're doing.

And the truth does that. And then if it's the truth, man, it's your adventure. Because what bloody adventure are you having? If you tell someone else's story, it's not yours. And maybe if it's not yours, it's not good enough for you. And then you suffer, and then you're bitter, and then you're cruel, and then you're resentful. That's not good. Or you get arrogant. So. So you break up your life, you know, into practicalities. Your career, your education, your intimate relationship, your marriage, your friendship. Hopefully your intimate relationship and your marriage are the same thing. Your use of time outside work, your civic duty, you know, and you develop an image for yourself, vision for yourself on all those fronts, and assume that you can have, with the proper sacrifices, what you need and want.

And then I'll say something interesting about that, because that's the pursuit of goods in a practical way, right? And what's valuable in a practical way, in an implementable way. And you pick those pathways and you dedicate yourself to their optimization along any of those axes. And then you learn to optimize an aim. And then you see, once you've learned to optimize and aim across a set of goods, you start to aim at what is what unites those goods, because that's what makes goods good. It's whatever is common across a set of goods, that's the highest good or a higher good. And so by practicing any good in any rigorous sense, and making the proper sacrifices in that direction, you simultaneously learn to approach the good that is the sum or the essence of all those proximal goods.

And I would say that the essential insistence in Christianity is that the good that unites all those goods is the same good that's reflected in the image of Christ, which is an image of acceptance, of the suffering of life, and the necessity of serving the lowest as the highest calling. And that's something. And it might be true, like really actually 100% true, more true than anything else. And I actually think it is. If it is true, and if that is real, then why in the world would you ever attempt to do anything else. And it's a kind of earth shattering in some sense, to take this with real seriousness, you know, it's all very frightening. If you're not afraid by. Of that, of that vision, you know, and what it implies for you and your soul, then you didn't understand it.

But it's also an unbelievably, what would you say, endlessly promising vision of what your life could be. And, you know, you might think, well, I need a life so rich that I can justify its suffering. And that's really asking for something, because there's no shortage of suffering in life. And it's. No one thinks their own suffering isn't real. And maybe there's a possibility that there's some aim that's so high that the attempt alone to move in that direction is of sufficient value to act as a panacea for the suffering. And so you could say at the end of your life, oh my God, that was so hard, it was worth it. So that's the choice you make at the crossroads, if you have any sense. Oh, thank you.

Inspiration, Philosophy, Education, Self-Awareness, Spirituality, Personal Development, Success Chasers