A Harmless Man is NOT a Good Man - Jordan Peterson

foreign welcome to another episode of after  skool I'm Dr Jordan B Peterson today we'll be summoning our inner monsters  without further Ado let's Dive In you know someone who you might say that 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 and  or maybe somewhat seriously dangerous and then you might be more willing to demand that you  treat yourself with respect and other people do th

e 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 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 and everyone has that old there's this old story in King Arthur where  the knights go off to look for the Holy Grail which is either the cup that Christ drank out  of it the last supper or the cup into which the blood that gushed from his side was poured when  he was crucified the stories vary but it's it's basically a holy object like the Phoenix in some  sense that's representation a representation of t

ransformation so it's a it's an ideal and so  King Arthur's knights who sit at a round table because they're all roughly equal go off to find  the most valuable thing and they and where do you look for the most valuable thing when you don't  know where it is well each of the knights looks at the forests surrounding the castle and enters  the forest at the point that looks darkest to him and that's a good thing to understand because  the gateway to wisdom and the gateway to the development of Per

sonality which is exactly the  same thing is precisely through the porthole portal that you do not want to climb through and  the reason for that's actually quite technical this is a union presupposition too is that well  there's a bunch of things about you that are underdeveloped and a lot of those things are  because they're things you've avoided looking at because you don't want to look at them and  there's parts of you you've avoided developing because it's hard for you to develop those  par

ts and so it's it's by virtual necessity that what you need is where you don't want to  look because that's where you've kept it and so when you see these stories of the hero you know  journeying to unknown lands of Terror and danger that's that's what happens to you it happens to  you all the time you know you're you're in this little safe space like The Hobbit in the Shire  and then you know there's a great evil Brewing somewhere and you can no longer ignore it  so off you go into the land of

Terror and uncertainty and better to go on purpose  than accidentally that's for sure because at least you can be prepared and we also  know that if you're going to face a threat if you face it voluntarily what happens is  your body activates itself for exploration and Mastery but if you face it involuntarily  same size threat then you you you you revert to prey mode and you're Frozen and that's way way  way more stressful it's way harder on your body and so it's better to keep your eye open and

watch  for emergent threats because you all know you know what you're not doing quite right and where your  life is likely to unravel you all have a sense of that and the best thing to do is to not ignore  that to pay attention to it to watch it and to take corrective action early and then you know  you stay on top of things and things your little trip to the underworld might be a few minutes  long instead of a catastrophe that produces post-traumatic stress disorder knocks you out for  four or

five years and maybe you never recover so one of the things you need to do if you're going  to be a human being is to prepare yourself to be useful in the face of death and so when you have a  parent that dies which you know shatters people's ideas often they can't even think about it if you  can't even think about that man you've got some thinking to do because you need to be able to at  least think about that because otherwise you're just going to be a wasteland when it happens  and you never

know you could even have a higher ambition maybe you could even be useful when  it happens instead of being part of the Heap of destroyed people who also have to be taken  care of you know and that's brutal you have to be brutal to be useful in the aftermath of your  parents death you know you don't get to crumble and fall apart and no you have every reason to  so you got to be kind of some tough monster to manage that but you want to be useful in the face  of tragedy or do you want to be pathe

tic well you make your choice thanks for tuning in to this episode of  after skool I appreciate the work this creative animation team has done in bringing  my content focusing on psychological matters to Their audience and mine in such  a creative and Innovative manner good choice and combination of spoken word  and Rich evocative illustration thanks guys