"You Should Be A Monster" | Jordan Peterson Motivation

"You don't become safe by being castrated."

➤➤Transcript (partial):
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 the—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 is 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—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 a 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 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 dialog about rights. Well, that leaves a hole on the other side of the story, and it's a hole that— that’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 in 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 truth 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...