Name: A Harmless Man is NOT a Good Man - Jordan Peterson
Uploaded: 2023-10-30T01:45:13.000Z
Duration: 8 min 57 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Hello, welcome to another episode of After School.

Today, we'll be summoning our inner monsters.

You know, you might say that someone who is incapable of cruelty is a higher moral being than someone who is capable of cruelty 

And I would say, in this follows young 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.

Becuase it's impossible to respect yourself until you grow teeth.

And if you grow teeth and you realize that you're somewhat dangerous, and maybe somewhat seriously dangerous, 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 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. 
when you  

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 characterize, let's say, the 20th century.

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.'"

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.

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 a matter of facing the thing you least want to face.

And everyone has that old story in King Arthur where the knights go off to look for the Holy Grail, which is either the cup that Christ drank out of at the last supper or the cup into which the blood that gushed from his side was poured when he was crucified.

The stories vary, but it's basically a holy object, like the Phoenix in some sense, that's a representation, a representation of transformation.

So, it's an ideal. King Arthur's knights, who sit at a round table because they're all roughly equal, go off to find the most valuable thing.

And where do you look for the most valuable thing when you don't know where it is?

Well, each of the knights looks at the forests surrounding the castle and enters the forest at the point that looks darkest to him.

That's a good thing to understand because the gateway to wisdom and the gateway to the development of personality, which is exactly the same thing, is precisely through the portal that you do not want to climb through.

And the reason for that's actually quite technical.

This is a union presupposition too, that well, there's a bunch of things about you that are underdeveloped, and a lot of those things are because they're things you've avoided looking at because you don't want to look at them. There are parts of you you've avoided developing because it's hard for you to develop those parts. So, it's by virtual necessity that what you need is where you don't want to look because that's where you've kept it. When you see these stories of the hero journeying to unknown lands of terror and danger, that's what happens to you. It happens to you all the time. You're in this little safe space, like The Hobbit in the Shire, and then you know there's a great evil brewing somewhere, and you can no longer ignore it. So off you go into the land of terror and uncertainty, and better to go on purpose than accidentally, that's for sure, because at least you can be prepared. We also know that if you're going to face a threat, if you face it voluntarily, what happens is your body activates itself for exploration and mastery. But if you face it involuntarily, the same size threat, then you revert to prey mode and you're frozen, and that's way, way, way more stressful. It's way harder on your body."

and so it's better to keep your eye open and watch  for emergent threats because you all know you know  

what you're not doing quite right and where your  life is likely to unravel you all have a sense of  

that and the best thing to do is to not ignore  that to pay attention to it to watch it and to  

take corrective action early and then you know  you stay on top of things and things your little  

trip to the underworld might be a few minutes  long instead of a catastrophe that produces  

post-traumatic stress disorder knocks you out for  four or five years and maybe you never recover so  

one of the things you need to do if you're going  to be a human being is to prepare yourself to be  

useful in the face of death and so when you have a  parent that dies which you know shatters people's  

ideas often they can't even think about it if you  can't even think about that man you've got some  

thinking to do because you need to be able to at  least think about that because otherwise you're  

just going to be a wasteland when it happens  and you never know you could even have a higher  

ambition maybe you could even be useful when  it happens instead of being part of the Heap  

of destroyed people who also have to be taken  care of you know and that's brutal you have to  

be brutal to be useful in the aftermath of your  parents death you know you don't get to crumble  

and fall apart and no you have every reason to  so you got to be kind of some tough monster to  

manage that but you want to be useful in the face  of tragedy or do you want to be pathetic well

thanks for tuning in to this episode of  after skool I appreciate the work this  

creative animation team has done in bringing  my content focusing on psychological matters  

to Their audience and mine in such  a creative and Innovative manner  

good choice and combination of spoken word  and Rich evocative illustration thanks guys