The Truth

In order to find your way through all of that, you need to develop a relationship with something that's profound, and you can have that capacity. And what could be more profound than the truth? And what would you rather have on your side? Αnd to do more than your best. Βecause your best isn't enough. Βecause your best isn't as good as you could be. You have to push yourself past that. And that's, as far as I can tell, where you find what you need in life, you find the meaning that sustains you in life, and you find the patterns of action that redeem the world.

Nietzsche said that you could tell much about a man's character by how much truth he could tolerate, which is very interesting. You know, there's an idea in the great Western tradition that the truth is the way in the path of life and that no one comes to the father except through the truth. And I believe that to be the case because I don't think that you can manifest who you are without the truth. And so I think it's literally and metaphorically truth that the pathway to who you could be if you were completely who you were is through the truth.

And the truth does set you free.

But the problem is that it destroys everything that isn't worthy in you as it sets you free. And that's that's a process of burning. And it's painful because you cling to what you shouldn't be, partly out of pride and partly out of ignorance and partly out of laziness. And so then you encounter something true, and you all know this. You all know this perfectly well because when was the last time that you learned something important that wasn't a blow of some sort?

And it's often you look back at your life and you think, Oh, God, I really learned something there. I wouldn't want to do that again. But it really changed my life. I mean, sometimes it can really destroy you and encounter with the truth and you never really recover. But now and then something comes along and straightens you out, and a lot of you has to go.

A lot of you has to burn away, you know. And I suppose in some sense, the idea is that everything about you that isn't worthy is to be put into the flames. And that's that's another reason to be not so casual about claiming what you believe because it isn't something that you undertake without do caution. You know, I learned, when I was a kid about 25 or so, a little older than a kid, that almost everything that I said was one form of lie or another. And I wasn't any worse, I would say than the people that I was associating with or any better. And the lies were manifold, you know, they were attempts to win arguments for the sake of winning the argument that might be one attempts to indicate my intellectual process when there were competitions of that sort, maybe just the sheer pleasure of engaging in an intellectual argument and winning my inability to distinguish between ideas that I had read and and incorporated because I had read but hadn't realized that I hadn't yet earned the right to use all of that.

And, you know, I had this experience that lasted a long time. Well, I would say it's really never gone away. That and I think this was the awakening of my conscience. Essentially, this voice, for lack of a better word, made itself manifest inside me. And it said every time I said something that wasn't true, and that's usually what it said, that's not true.

You don't believe that? Or there was a sensation that was associated with it. I don't think this is that uncommon. You know, I asked my psychology classes for many years in a row if they had an experience, this experience that they had a voice in their head, Let's say it's a metaphor or a feeling that communicated to them when they were about to do something wrong. And it was universally the case that people agreed with one of those statements or another.

And the other thing I would ask is, well, do you always listen to it? And, of course, the answer to that was definitely no. Well, you know, I learned that so much of what I was doing was false, and I think I learned this. There's a reason that this came to me so clearly. I was trying to understand why people did terrible things, and I was really concentrating on the terrible, terrible things that people do.

And I was interested in Auschwitz, for example, and not as a political phenomenon, but as a psychological phenomenon. I was curious about how you could be in Auschwitz guard. And I wasn't really curious about how you could be one, because, well, you could be one, of course. I was more curious about how I could be one being such a good person as I thought I was. But I also knew that people, many people did many terrible things during the 20th century, and the idea that I was somehow better than them, or that I should assume a priori, that I was better than them, and that I wouldn't have made the same choice as or worse had I been in the same situation, was a very, very, very dangerous supposition, and that we really needed to understand why it happened, and that perhaps we could go deep enough in that understanding, which is, I think, what happens when you go deep and understanding so that you could stop it, because if you understand the problem, maybe you can solve it.

You know, and at least in part, I came to believe that the problem was, as Solzhenitsyn said, that the problem is, is that the line between good and evil runs down every human heart. And I was reading Jung at the same time, and he believed that the human soul was a tree whose roots grew all the way to hell. And believed also that in the full investigation of the shadow, which was the dark side of the human psyche, was that it was bottomless, essentially, that it was like an experience of hell.

And that also struck me as true.

And that the way to stop those sorts of things from happening was to stop yourself from being the sort of person who would do it, who would even start to do it, because the other thing you learn when you learn about atrocities, that ... for me, it was a matter of understanding that the way to stop such things from happening, the way to remember properly, is to understand that you could do it, that you could do those terrible things because the people who did them were like you.

And that the way out of that is to stop being like that. And the way you stop being like that is by stop..., by ceasing to tell yourself lies that you don't believe in and that, you know you shouldn't act out. And that made a huge difference in my life. For better, for worse. It was very uncanny experience, I would say, because it's very dis confabulating to experience yourself as fragmented enough, so that much of what you do and say is actually false. It's a lot of work to clean that up a lot, but the consequences are, in principle, worthwhile. And so that was part of what drove me towards clinical psychology, saying away from political science and law and from politics in general, because I started to believe that. And I think this is the great Western idea.
The proper route forward for the redemption of the individual and for mankind as a whole is as a consequence of the redemption of each individual. And I truly believe that. And I believe that that occurs as a consequence of adherence to the truth and courage in the face of being. That's rule one, right? Stand up straight with your shoulders back is to take on the onslaught and to enter the contentious ring and to do your be[st]..., to do and to do more than your best, because your best isn't enough, because your best isn't as good as you could be.

You have to push yourself past that. And that's as far as I can tell, where you find what you need in life, you find the meaning that sustains you in life, and you find the patterns of action that redeem the world both at the same time.

Life is a very difficult business, you know?
It's fatal and it's full of suffering and it's full of betrayal and malevolence. There's nothing about it that's trivial. It's all profound. And in order to find your way through all of that, that capacity for hellish
experience, let's say, you need to develop a relationship with something that's profound.

And you can, you have that capacity, and what could be more profound than the truth?
And what would you rather have on your side?
And you might day, well, that's obvious.

And of course, everyone should do that.

And then you need to know why you don't, and the answer is, well, the burns are still healing.

It's like, well, you know, there's no shortage of deadwood to burn off, and there's no shortage of pain, when the deadwood burns off.

And that's what makes people afraid of the truth, and so what's the decision that you make?

You decide to believe, you know?

It's a risk, an existential risk.

It's an act of faith.

You believe that the truth can set you free.

You believe that people have an intrinsic divinity about their soul.

You decide that you're going to live in that manner and that you're going to let everything about yourself that isn't worthy of that goal die, and that might be almost everything that you are.

And that's a terrible thing to contemplate.

The only thing that's worse, I would say, is the alternative, because the alternative is the sorts of hells that we managed to produce around us and that we produced with particular expertise during the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century.

And it would be a good thing if we decided, collectively and individually, not to go back there, again.


Thank you!

(Jordan Peterson)

The Night

...

There is in God, some say,

A deep but dazzling darkness, as men here

Say it is late and dusky, because they

       See not all clear.

    O for that night! where I in Him

    Might live invisible and dim!

Henry  Vaughan