First thing I want to say
thank you so much, that was an amazing talk
and I was wondering if you could elaborate
What I noticed a lot
I go here to ebc
is that a lot of students and young people
They're often desensitized to, for example,
the atrocities that communism or ideologies that forced terrorism
And maybe it's some sort of Stockholm syndrome that I'm seeing where it's like
people are just-
they're like trapped and they can't-
they feel in a way they can't do anything about it and then they start to like
Like, like communism or they start to see more socialists or adopt socialist policy
that in the end will get them killed
will get them hurt
I was wondering if you could kind of like elaborate that on what you think can be done about that
or even if something can be done in that respect.
PETERSON: Well I think something can be done, I mean,
I've been trying to educate people about the horrors of
the nazi regime and the soviet regime in particular
I've concentrated mostly on those two but that's good enough
And trying to let people know that
it was through the fault of people much like them that those systems arose and
and that there are steps you can take to limit the probability that you would participate in such a thing
and that those steps are associated with trying to be truthful in your speech and actions
because the stability of those systems depends on the willingness of individuals to lie
and also on your willingness to take responsibility for the malevolence in your own heart
that manifests itself in those social movements
and so that
when I
when I do my lectures, when I do talks like this
when I put them on YouTube, what I'm trying to do is exactly that because
that was the best pathway forward through such things that I could think up over 20 years of thinking about it
No one is so
habituated to suffering
that they can read the Gulag Archipelago,
which is actually quite hard to read,
without having it affect-
like your psychopathic if that book doesn't affect you, you know
it should
if you read it properly
it affects you deeply
and it's not the only example of that kind of literature
So the people who are "habituated", aren't
They've just been shown low resolution representations of things they don't understand
that look vaguely bad
You don't know a damn thing about them
And our education system has done a tremendously
appalling job of educating young people about the absolute catastrophe of radical leftism
Now, it's not much better with regards to, say,
the actions of the nazis
Although I would say on average, people are more aware of that
but they don't-
but it's shallow, shallow knowledge
so you make the knowledge deep
and deep knowledge changes people and wakes them up you know I mean
The only reason that I ever got convinced that good and evil were real,
more real than anything else,
wasn't because I learned that good was real
That's hard
That's- that's hard
It's hard to learn that
You have to find examples of transcendent good, you know
They're rare
Evil?
All you have to do is look
You read history a bit
And read it like it's about you
And there's no way that you can do that without a transformation
But people won't do it
It's like, you want to imagine yourself as an Auschwitz guard?
That's a rough thing, you see, because you have to figure out-
See, Jung said if you confronted the shadow,
which is the dark side of people, the aggressive side, the malevolent side,
that it it really reaches all the way down to hell, and
Dante sort of was trying to put forward the same thing when he wrote the Inferno
Right, with the levels of evil, right, because it was a voyage through the levels of evil right to the bottom
He thought the bottom was betrayal
It's pretty good
The most- the center of malevolence is betrayal
I like that because to betray someone you have to get them to trust you
and trust is a moral virtue, right,
especially if it's courageous trust because it
it puts you in alignment with other people and allows you to move forward into life
and if you betray that, you really, it's like a knife in the
It's like a knife in the heart through the back
Especially if it's someone who loves you betrays you
And especially if they betray you for your virtues
That's a really nice twist
So
I believe
because I think that people are capable of good
That if they know enough about evil that that will straighten them out
So
But who wants that?
You know, this is one of the things I really like about Jung
He's often regarded as a new-age thinker
That's wrong
He's no new-age thinker
He knew that the the pathway to enlightenment
was barred by the necessity of a passage through hell
And that no one was going to do that
That's why there isn't a world full of enlightened people, you might say
Like if it was just a matter of doing nice things, following your bliss, let's say
However you might put it
Then why wouldn't everyone walk up the stairway to heaven?
That isn't how it works
That's not how it works at all
I don't think you can be convinced of the necessity for moral action until you
understand exactly how dark and terrible things can get
and that it's your fault that they're getting that way
Who wants to think that?
So
You can think it though
But not
not without it burning you
