Respect Yourself | Jordan Peterson

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 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. Well, 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 and 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 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 the 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 a 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 hole that it's in people's hearts essentially because Responsibility. Well, perhaps that's not more important than rights. Like I said, they're they're 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 truths 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 men. 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 their 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 sheathed 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 should 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 Jung 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, then 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 We're training you to be peaceful and awake and avoid fights but if you happen to have to get in one And 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 characterized 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 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