How to be Fearless & Courageous - Jordan Peterson

It's like I decided a long time ago, partly from reading Solzhenitsyn, that I was going to try to be very careful with my words and I was only going to say things that I thought, well, to begin with, weren't lies. I was going to try to formulate my thoughts truthfully. And the reason I decided that was because I thought that the opposite was hellishly dangerous. And I really, I really, believe that. I truly believe that. And so if I say things and I think they're true and they get me in trouble, then I think, well, that's not as much trouble as I would have got into if I would have said something that wasn't true. Like it might be more trouble right now. Who knows, right? Because, and you don't know how these things are going to turn out. Do what is meaningful, not what is expedient. Okay. So I come to an event like this and I have an opportunity to say things and I don't come in here and think, okay, here's a bunch of things I want to convince you of. You know, I don't care if you're convinced. It's not like I don't care about you, you know, in the sense that you care for people and hope the best for them, but I don't care if you're convinced. That's not what I'm here for. What I'm here for is to hear the questions and try to figure out what I think about them and then to say that, and then to see what happens. Like who the hell knows what's going to happen? But there's, here's, if the world is properly constituted through truth, then faith is the willingness to have faith in truth. And so then you say what you believe to be true. And then some things happen and sometimes they're not so good, which is why people often lie. You know, you tell the truth, you get in trouble for it. Every kid knows that. It's like, well, why did you lie? Because I thought I'd get in trouble. Well, obviously. It's like, well, that's not a good long-term strategy. It's like, so you say what you believe to be the truth. And then you have the faith that no matter what happens, if you've said what you believe to be true, whatever happens is the best thing that could have happened. And I believe that. I think that's how the world's constituted. And so it's not bravery, exactly. I would say it's more like faith. It's like, I'm going to say what I think. I'm going to try to do that as carefully as I possibly can. And I'm going to detach myself from the outcome. Because sometimes the outcome's terrible. I'm at McMaster University or Queen's, and there's like a bloody mob of zombies pounding on the window. You know, it's a little slice of hell. You think, this doesn't seem to be a very good idea. But, you know, the tide turns two or three times in the next three weeks, and something comes out of it. And so if you're going to have faith in truth, it can't just be, well, did I get what I want in the next second? That's not faith. It's like, no, I'm going to... This is the other thing, too, that you've got to understand, I think, is that without truth, you don't have the adventure of your life. You see, because if you tell the truth, that means you're revealing your being. That's what you're doing when you're telling the truth. And when you reveal your being, then you're living in the world. You're there. You're present, right? That's being there, let's say. That's you. That's your destiny. That's your journey. That's your adventure. That's what's going to justify your life, the adventure. It's not going to be easy. And if you hide from your truth, well, then you hide from yourself. And then you're not even there. And then who the hell are you? What are you? The puppet. You're the puppet of some coward. You're the puppet of some dictator, or some second-rate philosopher, some idiotic idea, or a bully you were afraid of in grade six. God only knows. But it's not you living your life. And then you lose your life. And you lose your soul too. So that's what I'm afraid of. And so, you know, journalists, well, they try to take me down. It's like, yeah, well, that's annoying. And it usually takes me three days to recover. But compared to not having my life and not saying what I have to say, that's nothing. It's nothing. It's minor inconvenience. And then generally, if you can just withstand it, you know, two weeks, you get mobbed. You guys might all need to know this. You're going to get mobbed on social media. Okay, so what do you do? Unless you did something wrong. Don't apologize. That's the first thing, because then no one can come to your defense. So don't apologize. Maybe you even double down carefully, carefully, not vengefully, right, carefully. You say, no, that's what I meant. And if you don't like it, too bad. And you get mobbed. Then you apologize. A different mob comes after you. That's not helpful. And no one can defend you. If you can hold out for two weeks, you'll win. Now, it's a pretty brutal two weeks, because, you know, if you're a reasonable person and a hundred angry neighbors show up at your door with pitchforks, you might be thinking there's something wrong with you, you know, like you think that unless you're psychopathic. And you think, well, maybe I made a mistake. And it's easy to waver and to and to back down. And maybe you're also afraid. But, you know, if you scoured your conscience, and you're careful, and you said what you had to say, then leave it lie. And if and they'll throw the people who are playing this game will throw everything they can at you for two weeks. And if it doesn't stick, you're done. And then the next time they try it, it doesn't work as well as it did the first time. And by the 50th time they try it, like as far as I can tell, carefully, the people who have enmity for me are out of ammunition. They're done. But it's not bravery, man. It's faith in the in the redeeming power of truth. And that's different. You know, if you have a memory older than about 18 months, that still bothers you, right? It's still got emotional resonance. Older than 18 months ago, or? Yeah, no older than 18 months ago or more. Otherwise, it's not really in the past, right? It's still happening. That whether you should delve into something, how you should delve into something traumatic that's currently happening is a whole different issue. But if it's old memory and it still bothers you, it means that you haven't decomposed that experience sufficiently to detach it from the emotion. So imagine when something terrible happens to you, you don't understand it. So then you might say, well, if you don't understand something that's happening to you, how can it be terrible? Because doesn't terrible mean that you understand it? And the answer is, well, you understand things in stages. And the first way you understand a terrible thing is by freezing in terror or running. That's the understanding. It's not conceptual. It's embodied and emotional. And so the next question is, how do you get it out? How do you get out of the terror? Well, you realize that nothing truly dangerous is happening. Well, what if something truly dangerous did happen? Then you elaborate your view of the world to the point where you're no longer vulnerable to that terrible thing. And that's extremely difficult. So the memory of something terrible stays terrible until you effortfully process it and decompose it into, well, often into a much more sophisticated map of the world. And it's really hard to do that. If you're afraid of spiders, but you're wearing one, you're now bigger than your fear. And so even though you still might be afraid, you're also allowing that part of you that can transcend the fear to become the part that you're identifying with. And you do that constantly in psychotherapy. And one of the constant findings with regard to exposure therapy is it's not so much that people get less afraid. It's that they get braver. And the distinction there is really important because it turns out that if you expose a person voluntarily to one thing they're afraid of, they become less afraid of classes of things. You know, the psychoanalysts, when they went after the behaviorists for exposure therapy, they said, you'll get symptom substitution. You know, you train someone who's agoraphobic to get in an elevator, they'll still be afraid of death. But it turns out that if you train them to expose themselves to the elevator, they are simultaneously exposing themselves to the fear of death. And they actually become braver across contexts as a consequence of the single exposures. And there is something in that that's play. You know, with my clients, I always used to play with them. It's like, okay, there's the elevator, you don't want to look at it. Can you look at it from 30 feet away? No. Well, how about 40 feet? How about 200 feet? Like, you'd find a place where they could play. It was right on the edge of their fear, right? And then, and so there was play right on the edge of fear. And then maybe you could get the person 40 feet away, say, well, will you look at the elevator for like, just glance at it? Will you look at it for 10 seconds? No. Will you glance at it? Yes. Can you glance at it for two seconds? Yes. You just push that horizon of play. And you do that sequentially across sessions. And that seems to work. Well, it's sort of like how people learn everything, right? Because you learn on the edge. And the edge is where the play, the edge is where the serious play takes place.