Jordan Peterson Relationships Quotes

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Have they been educated to the level of their intellectual ability or ambition? Is their use of free time engaging, meaningful, and productive? Have they formulated solid and well-articulated plans for the future? Are they (and those they are close to) free of any serious physical health or economic problems? Do they have friends and a social life? A stable and satisfying intimate partnership? Close and functional familial relationships? A career—or, at least, a job—that is financially sufficient, stable and, if possible, a source of satisfaction and opportunity? If the answer to any three or more of these questions is no, I consider that my new client is insufficiently embedded in the interpersonal world and is in danger of spiraling downward psychologically because of that.
Jordan B. Peterson (Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life)
I learned two very important lessons from Carl Jung, the famous Swiss depth psychologist, about “doing unto others as you would have them do unto you” or “loving your neighbour as yourself.” The first lesson was that neither of these statements has anything to do with being nice. The second was that both are equations, rather than injunctions. If I am someone’s friend, family member, or lover, then I am morally obliged to bargain as hard on my own behalf as they are on theirs. If I fail to do so, I will end up a slave, and the other person a tyrant. What good is that? It is much better for any relationship when both partners are strong. Furthermore, there is little difference between standing up and speaking for yourself, when you are being bullied or otherwise tormented and enslaved, and standing up and speaking for someone else. As Jung points out, this means embracing and loving the sinner who is yourself, as much as forgiving and aiding someone else who is stumbling and imperfect.
Jordan B. Peterson (12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos)
There's a class of things to be afraid of: it's "those things that you should be afraid of". Those are the things that go bump in the night, right? You're always exposed to them when you go to horror movies, especially if they're not the gore type of horror movie. They're always hinting at something that's going on outside of your perceptual sphere, and they frighten you because you don't know what's out there. For that the Blair Witch Project was a really good example, because nothing ever happens in that movie but it's frightenting and not gory. It plays on the fact tht you do have a category of Those Things Of Which You Should Be Afraid. So it's a category, frightening things. And only things capable of abstraction can come up with something like the caregory of frightenting things. And so Kali is like an embodied representation of the category of frightening things. And then you might ask yourself, well once you come up with the concept of the category of frightening things, maybe you can come up with the concept of what to do in the face of frightening things. Which is not the same as "what do you do when you encounter a lion", or "what do you do when you encounter someone angry". It's a meta question, right? But then you could say, at a philosophical level: "You will encounter elements of the category of all those things which can frighten and undermine you during your life. Is there something that you can do *as a category* that would help you deal with that." And the answer is yeah, there is in fact. And that's what a lot of religious stories and symbolic stories are trying to propose to you, is the solution to that. One is, approach it voluntarily. Carefully, but voluntarily. Don't freeze and run away. Explore, instead. You expose yourself to risk but you gain knowledge. And you wouldn't have a cortex which, you know, is ridiculously disproportionate, if as a species we hadn't decided that exploration trumps escape or freezing. We explore. That can make you the master of a situation, so you can be the master of something like fire without being terrified of it. One of the things that the Hindus do in relationship to Kali, is offer sacrifices. So you can say, well why would you offer sacrifices to something you're afraid of. And it's because that is what you do, that's always what you do. You offer up sacrifices to the unknown in the hope that good things will happen to you. One example is that you're worried about your future. Maybe you're worried about your job, or who you're going to marry, or your family, there's a whole category of things to be worried about, so you're worried about your future. SO what're you doing in university? And the answer is you're sacrificing your free time in the present, to the cosmos so to speak, in the hope that if you offer up that sacrifice properly, the future will smile upon you. And that's one of the fundamental discoveries of the human race. And it's a big deal, that discovery: by changing what you cling to in the present, you can alter the future.
Jordan B. Peterson
If existence is good, then the clearest and cleanest and most correct relationship with it is also good.
Jordan B. Peterson (12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos)
Who is subordinate to whom in a marriage?” After all, each might reason, as people commonly do, that such an arrangement is a zero-sum game, with one winner and one loser. But a relationship does not have to be and should not be a question of one or the other as winner, or even each alternating in that status, in an approximation of fairness. Instead, the couple can decide that each and both are subordinate to a principle, a higher-order principle, which constitutes their union in the spirit of illumination and truth. That ghostly figure, the ideal union of what is best in both personalities, should be constantly regarded as the ruler of the marriage—and, indeed, as something as close to divine as might be practically approached by fallible individuals
Jordan B. Peterson (Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life)
If existence is good, then the clearest and cleanest and most correct relationship with it is also good. If existence is not good, by contrast, you’re lost. Nothing will save you—certainly not the petty rebellions, murky thinking and obscurantist blindness that constitute deceit. Is existence good? You have to take a terrible risk to find out. Live in truth, or live in deceit, face the consequences, and draw your conclusions.
Jordan B. Peterson (12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos)
If I stay in an unhealthy relationship with you, perhaps it’s because I’m too weak-willed and indecisive to leave, but I don’t want to know it. Thus, I continue helping you, and console myself with my pointless martyrdom. Maybe I can then conclude, about myself, “Someone that self-sacrificing, that willing to help someone—that has to be a good person.” Not so. It might be just a person trying to look good pretending to solve what appears to be a difficult problem instead of actually being good and addressing something real. Maybe instead of continuing our friendship I should just go off somewhere, get my act together, and lead by example.
Jordan B. Peterson (12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos)
If I am someone’s friend, family member, or lover, then I am morally obliged to bargain as hard on my own behalf as they are on theirs. If I fail to do so, I will end up a slave, and the other person a tyrant. What good is that? It is much better for any relationship when both partners are strong. Furthermore, there is little difference between standing up and speaking for yourself, when you are being bullied or otherwise tormented and enslaved, and standing up and speaking for someone else. As Jung points out, this means embracing and loving the sinner who is yourself, as much as forgiving and aiding someone else who is stumbling and imperfect.
Jordan B. Peterson (12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos)
Hell comes when lies have destroyed the relationship between individual or state and reality itself. Things fall apart. Life degenerates. Everything becomes frustration and disappointment. Hope consistently betrays. The deceitful individual desperately gestures at sacrifice, like Cain, but fails to please God. Then the drama enters its final act. Tortured by constant failure, the individual becomes bitter. Disappointment and failure amalgamate, and produce a fantasy: the world is bent on my personal suffering, my particular undoing, my destruction. I need, I deserve, I must have—my revenge. That’s the gateway to Hell. That’s when the underworld, a terrifying and unfamiliar place, becomes misery itself.
Jordan B. Peterson (12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos)
Maybe I should at least wait, to help you, until it’s clear that you want to be helped. Carl Rogers, the famous humanistic psychologist, believed it was impossible to start a therapeutic relationship if the person seeking help did not want to improve.67 Rogers believed it was impossible to convince someone to change for the better. The desire to improve was, instead, the precondition for progress. I’ve had court-mandated psychotherapy clients. They did not want my help. They were forced to seek it. It did not work. It was a travesty.
Jordan B. Peterson (12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos)
Why avoid, when avoidance necessarily and inevitably poisons the future? Because the possibility of a monster lurks underneath all disagreements and errors. Maybe the fight you are having (or not having) with your wife or your husband signifies the beginning of the end of your relationship. Maybe your relationship is ending because you are a bad person.
Jordan B. Peterson (12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos)
Something similar often happens to people who develop an anxiety disorder, such as agoraphobia. People with agoraphobia can become so overwhelmed with fear that they will no longer leave their homes. Agoraphobia is the consequence of a positive feedback loop. The first event that precipitates the disorder is often a panic attack. The sufferer is typically a middle-aged woman who has been too dependent on other people. Perhaps she went immediately from over-reliance on her father to a relationship with an older and comparatively dominant boyfriend or husband, with little or no break for independent existence. In the weeks leading up to the emergence of her agoraphobia, such a woman typically experiences something unexpected and anomalous.
Jordan B. Peterson (12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos)
we are born human that we are guaranteed a good dose of suffering. And chances are, if you or someone you love is not suffering now, they will be within five years, unless you are freakishly lucky. Rearing kids is hard, work is hard, aging, sickness and death are hard, and Jordan emphasized that doing all that totally on your own, without the benefit of a loving relationship, or wisdom, or the psychological insights of the greatest psychologists, only makes it harder. He wasn’t scaring the students; in fact, they found this frank talk reassuring, because in the depths of their psyches, most of them knew what he said was true, even if there was never a forum to discuss it—perhaps because the adults in their lives had become so naively overprotective that they deluded themselves into thinking that not talking about suffering would in some way magically protect their children from it.
Jordan B. Peterson (12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos)
Imagine for a moment you have been given all you need. There is possibility within you, waiting for the proper demand to release itself. There is all that is outside of you, waiting to inform and teach you. But all of it is necessary—the good, bad, and unbearable. You know that when something does not go well, you should analyze the problem, resolve it, apologize, repent, and transform. An unsolved problem seldom sits there, in stasis. It grows new heads, like a hydra. One lie—one act of avoidance—breeds the necessity for more. One act of self-deception generates the requirement to buttress that self-deceptive belief with new delusions. One devastated relationship, unaddressed, damages your reputation—damages your faith in yourself, equally—and decreases the probability of a new and better relationship. Thus, your refusal or even inability to come to terms with the errors of the past expands the source of such error—expands the unknown that surrounds you, transforms that unknown into something increasingly predatory.
Jordan B. Peterson (Beyond Order: 12 More Rules For Life)
Believing is not to be reduced to thinking that such-and-such might be the case. It is not a weaker form of thinking, laced with doubt. Sometimes we speak like this: ‘I believe that the train leaves at 6:13', where ‘I believe that’ simply means that ‘I think (but am not certain) that’. Since the left hemisphere is concerned with what is certain, with knowledge of the facts, its version of belief is that it is just absence of certainty. If the facts were certain, according to its view, I should be able to say ‘I know that’ instead. This view of belief comes from the left hemisphere's disposition towards the world: interest in what is useful, therefore fixed and certain (the train timetable is no good if one can't rely on it). So belief is just a feeble form of knowing, as far as it is concerned. But belief in terms of the right hemisphere is different, because its disposition towards the world is different. The right hemisphere does not ‘know’ anything, in the sense of certain knowledge. For it, belief is a matter of care: it describes a relationship, where there is a calling and an answering, the root concept of ‘responsibility’. Thus if I say that ‘I believe in you’, it does not mean that I think that such-and-such things are the case about you, but can't be certain that I am right. It means that I stand in a certain sort of relation of care towards you, that entails me in certain kinds of ways of behaving (acting and being) towards you, and entails on you the responsibility of certain ways of acting and being as well. It is an acting ‘as if’ certain things were true about you that in the nature of things cannot be certain. It has the characteristic right-hemisphere qualities of being a betweenness: a reverberative, ‘re-sonant’, ‘respons-ible’ relationship, in which each party is altered by the other and by the relationship between the two, whereas the relationship of the believer to the believed in the left-hemisphere sense is inert, unidirectional, and centres on control rather than care. I think this is what Wittgenstein was trying to express when he wrote that ‘my’ attitude towards the other is an ‘attitude towards a soul. I am not of the opinion that he has a soul.’ An ‘opinion’ would be a weak form of knowledge: that is not what is meant by a belief, a disposition or an ‘attitude’. This helps illuminate belief in God. This is not reducible to a question of a factual answer to the question ‘does God exist?’, assuming for the moment that the expression ‘a factual answer’ has a meaning. It is having an attitude, holding a disposition towards the world, whereby that world, as it comes into being for me, is one in which God belongs. The belief alters the world, but also alters me. Is it true that God exists? Truth is a disposition, one of being true to someone or something. One cannot believe in nothing and thus avoid belief altogether, simply because one cannot have no disposition towards the world, that being in itself a disposition. Some people choose to believe in materialism; they act ‘as if’ such a philosophy were true. An answer to the question whether God exists could only come from my acting ‘as if’ God is, and in this way being true to God, and experiencing God (or not, as the case might be) as true to me. If I am a believer, I have to believe in God, and God, if he exists, has to believe in me. Rather like Escher's hands, the belief must arise reciprocally, not by a linear process of reasoning. This acting ‘as if’ is not a sort of cop-out, an admission that ‘really’ one does not believe what one pretends to believe. Quite the opposite: as Hans Vaihinger understood, all knowledge, particularly scientific knowledge, is no more than an acting ‘as if’ certain models were, for the time being, true. Truth and belief, once more, as in their etymology, are profoundly connected. It is only the left hemisphere that thinks there is certainty to be found anywhere.
Iain McGilchrist (The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World)
Your life becomes meaningful in precise proportion to the depths of the responsibility you are willing to shoulder. That is because you are now genuinely involved in making things better. You are minimizing the unnecessary suffering. You are encouraging those around you, by example and word. You are constraining the malevolence in your own heart and the hearts of others. A bricklayer may question the utility of laying his bricks, monotonously, one after another. But perhaps he is not merely laying bricks. Maybe he is building a wall. And the wall is part of a building. And the building is a cathedral. And the purpose of the cathedral is the glorification of the Highest Good. And under such circumstances, every brick laid is an act that partakes of the divine. And if what you are doing in your day-to-day activity is not enough, then you are not aiming at the construction of a proper cathedral. And that is because you are not aiming high enough. Because if you were, then you would experience the sense of meaning in relationship to your sufficiently high goal, and it would justify the misery and limitations of your life. If you have something meaningful to pursue, then you are engrossed in life. You are on a meaningful path. The most profound and reliable instinct for meaning—if not perverted by self-deceit and sin (there is no other way to state it)—manifests itself when you are on the path of maximum virtue.
Jordan B. Peterson (Beyond Order: 12 More Rules For Life)
what happens if you're in a relationship with someone and you trust them, then you make certain assumptions about the past, and you make certain assumptions about the present, and you make certain assumptions about the future. And everything's stable, so you're standing on solid ground. And the chaos, it's like you're standing on thin ice. The chaos is hidden. The shark beneath the waves isn't there. You're safe, you're in the lifeboat. But then if the person betrays you — like if you're in an intimate relationship and the person has an affair and you find out about it — then you think, one moment you're one in one place, right? You're where everything is secure because you've predicated your perception of the world on the axiom of trust, and the next second — really, the next second — you're in a completely different place. And not only is that place different right now, the place you were years ago is different, and the place you're going to be in the future years hence is different. And so, all of that certainty that strange certainty that you inhabit can collapse into incredible complexity. And you say, well if someone betrays you, you think: "Okay, who were you? Because you weren't who I thought you were. And I thought I knew you. But I didn't know you at all. And I never knew you, and so all the things we did together, those weren't the things that I thought were happening. Something else was happening! And you're someone else. That means I'm someone else because I thought I knew what was going on, and clearly I don't. I'm some sort of blind sucker, or the victim of a psychopath or someone who's so naive that they can barely live. And I don't understand anything about human beings, and I don't understand anything about myself, and I have no idea where I am now. I thought I was at home, but I'm not. I'm in a house and it's full of strangers. I don't know what I'm going to do tomorrow, or next week, or next year.
Jordan B. Peterson
Many of the female clients (perhaps even a majority) that I see in my clinical practice have trouble in their jobs and family lives not because they are too aggressive, but because they are not aggressive enough. Cognitive-behavioural therapists call the treatment of such people, generally characterized by the more feminine traits of agreeableness (politeness and compassion) and neuroticism (anxiety and emotional pain), “assertiveness training.”197 Insufficiently aggressive women—and men, although more rarely—do too much for others. They tend to treat those around them as if they were distressed children. They tend to be naïve. They assume that cooperation should be the basis of all social transactions, and they avoid conflict (which means they avoid confronting problems in their relationships as well as at work). They continually sacrifice for others. This may sound virtuous—and it is definitely an attitude that has certain social advantages—but it can and often does become counterproductively one-sided. Because too-agreeable people bend over backwards for other people, they do not stand up properly for themselves. Assuming that others think as they do, they expect—instead of ensuring—reciprocity for their thoughtful actions. When this does not happen, they don’t speak up. They do not or cannot straightforwardly demand recognition. The dark side of their characters emerges, because of their subjugation, and they become resentful.
Jordan B. Peterson (12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos)
Cognitive-behavioural therapists call the treatment of such people, generally characterized by the more feminine traits of agreeableness (politeness and compassion) and neuroticism (anxiety and emotional pain), “assertiveness training.”197 Insufficiently aggressive women—and men, although more rarely—do too much for others. They tend to treat those around them as if they were distressed children. They tend to be naïve. They assume that cooperation should be the basis of all social transactions, and they avoid conflict (which means they avoid confronting problems in their relationships as well as at work). They continually sacrifice for others. This may sound virtuous—and it is definitely an attitude that has certain social advantages—but it can and often does become counterproductively one-sided. Because too-agreeable people bend over backwards for other people, they do not stand up properly for themselves. Assuming that others think as they do, they expect—instead of ensuring—reciprocity for their thoughtful actions. When this does not happen, they don’t speak up. They do not or cannot straightforwardly demand recognition. The dark side of their characters emerges, because of their subjugation, and they become resentful.
Jordan B. Peterson
The central contradiction in Peterson’s message is that he both uncritically celebrates capitalist “free markets” and sounds the alarm at the destructive toll those markets inevitably take on relationships and communities. Our message, however, must reject Peterson’s traditionalist and pseudo-libertarian worldview in favor of a vision in which everyone has the economic freedom—as in, freedom from economics—to pursue their own preferred vision of the good life. Want to have a traditional family and take your seven kids to a traditional church? Go for it. Want to live in a tri-sexual compound and practice Wiccanism? Do that. Where Peterson wants to “enforce” monogamy, socialists like me want to give everyone the freedom to make more meaningful choices in their lives by creating a world in which financial stress doesn’t make it difficult to maintain relationships, people who want to start families can, and we aren’t all too overworked, overstressed, and socially atomized to go out and meet people in the first place (or too afraid of indigency that we stay in toxic relationships).
Michael Brooks
They tend to be naïve. They assume that cooperation should be the basis of all social transactions, and they avoid conflict (which means they avoid confronting problems in their relationships as well as at work). They continually sacrifice for others. This may sound virtuous—and it is definitely an attitude that has certain social advantages—but it can and often does become counterproductively one-sided. Because too-agreeable people bend over backwards for other people, they do not stand up properly for themselves. Assuming that others think as they do, they expect—instead of ensuring—reciprocity for their thoughtful actions. When this does not happen, they don’t speak up. They do not or cannot straightforwardly demand recognition. The dark side of their characters emerges, because of their subjugation, and they become resentful.
Jordan B. Peterson (12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos)
Through friendship and collegial relationships we modify our selfish proclivities, learning not to always put ourselves first. Less obviously, but just as importantly, we may also learn to overcome our naive and too empathic proclivities (our tendency to sacrifice ourselves unsuitably and unjustly to predatory others) when our peers advise and encourage us to stand up for ourselves.
Jordan B. Peterson (Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life)
To use the dramatic conceptualization of our ancestors: It is the most fundamental convictions that must die—must be sacrificed—when the relationship with God has been disrupted (when the presence of undue and often intolerable suffering, for example, indicates that something has to change). This is to say nothing other than that the future can be made better if the proper sacrifices take place in the present. No other animal has ever figured this out, and it took us untold hundreds of thousands of years to do it. It took further eons of observation and hero-worship, and then millennia of study, to distill that idea into a story. It then took additional vast stretches of time to assess that story, to incorporate it, so that we now can simply say, “If you are disciplined and privilege the future over the present you can change the structure of reality in your favour.
Jordan B. Peterson (12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos)
One of the major contributions of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s masterwork, The Gulag Archipelago, was his analysis of the direct causal relationship between the pathology of the Soviet prison-work-camp dependent state (where millions suffered and died) and the almost universal proclivity of the Soviet citizen to falsify his own day-to-day personal experience, deny his own state-induced suffering, and thereby prop up the dictates of the rational, ideology-possessed communist system. It was this bad faith, this denial, that in Solzhenitsyn’s opinion aided and abetted that great paranoid mass-murderer, Joseph Stalin, in his crimes. Solzhenitsyn wrote the truth, his truth, hard-learned through his own experiences in the camps, exposing the lies of the Soviet state. No educated person dared defend that ideology again after Solzhenitsyn published The Gulag Archipelago. No one could ever say again, “What Stalin did, that was not true communism.
Jordan B. Peterson (12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos)
Freud had a point. He was, after all, a genius. You can tell that because people still hate him. But there are disadvantages to the detached and somewhat distant approach recommended by Freud. Many of those who seek therapy desire and need a closer, more personal relationship (although that also has its dangers). This is in part why I have opted in my practice for the conversation, instead of the Freudian method—as have most clinical psychologists.
Jordan B. Peterson (12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos)
That edge, where artists are always transforming chaos into order, can be a very rough and dangerous place. Living there, an artist constantly risks falling fully into the chaos, instead of transforming it. But artists have always lived there, on the border of human understanding. Art bears the same relationship to society that the dream bears to mental life. You are very creative when you are dreaming. That is why, when you remember a dream, you think, “Where in the world did that come from?” It is very strange and incomprehensible that something can happen in your head, and you have no idea how it got there or what it means. It is a miracle: nature’s voice manifesting itself in your psyche. And it happens every night. Like art, the dream mediates between order and chaos. So, it is half chaos. That is why it is not comprehensible. It is a vision, not a fully fledged articulated production. Those who actualize those half-born visions into artistic productions are those who begin to transform what we do not understand into what we can at least start to see. That is the role of the artist, occupying the vanguard. That is their biological niche. They are the initial civilizing agents.
Jordan B. Peterson (Beyond Order: 12 More Rules For Life)
If we fail to hold ourselves to that standard of responsibility, then other people regard us as lacking in ethics and integrity. And it does not end there. Just as we hold people (including ourselves) accountable for the wrongs they have done, or the good they have failed to do, we also believe (or at least act out the proposition) that someone who has made a good decision freely, deserves whatever benefit might come of that decision. It is for that reason that we believe each person should justly receive the fruit of their honest and voluntary labor. There seems something natural and inevitable about such judgments; something at work within them that is universal and inescapable, psychologically and socially. What all this means is that everyone—child, adult, self, others—will rebel against being treated as a cog in a wheel, incapable of choice and devoid of freedom, and (similarly) that it is practically impossible to establish a positive relationship with any other (or even our private selves) without that attribution of personal agency, free will, and responsibility.
Jordan B. Peterson (Beyond Order: 12 More Rules For Life)
Rule I DO NOT CARELESSLY DENIGRATE SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS OR CREATIVE ACHIEVEMENT Loneliness and Confusion For years, I saw a client who lived by himself.* He was isolated in many other ways in addition to his living situation. He had extremely limited family ties. Both of his daughters had moved out of the country, and did not maintain much contact, and he had no other relatives except a father and sister from whom he was estranged. His wife and the mother of his children had passed away years ago, and the sole relationship he endeavored to establish while he saw me over the course of more than a decade and a half terminated
Jordan B. Peterson (Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life)
Art bears the same relationship to society that the dream bears to mental life.
Jordan B. Peterson (Beyond Order: 12 More Rules For Life)
To stand behind my daughter? That’s to encourage her, in everything she wants courageously to do, but to include in that genuine appreciation the fact of her femininity: to recognize the importance of having a family and children and to forego the temptation to denigrate or devalue that in comparison to accomplishment of personal ambition or career. It’s not for nothing that the Holy Mother and Infant is a divine image—as we just discussed. Societies that cease to honour that image—that cease to see that relationship as of transcendent and fundamental importance—also cease to be.
Jordan B. Peterson (12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos)
The meaning of what someone’s wife says to him today is dependent on everything both have ever said to each other, everything they have ever done together, and the contents of their mutual imaginations—and that does not exhaust the complexity. Such meaning may even be importantly dependent on how, for example, the wife’s mother treated her father (or her grandmother treated her grandfather), as well as the relationship between men and women in the broader culture. That is why domestic arguments so often spiral out of control, particularly when a pattern of continual and effective communication has never been established. One thing leads to a deeper thing, and that leads deeper yet, until an argument that started over what size plates are best used at lunchtime turns into a no-holds-barred war about whether the marriage in question would be better dissolved.
Jordan B. Peterson (Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life)
The meaning of what someone’s wife says to him today is dependent on everything both have ever said to each other, everything they have ever done together, and the contents of their mutual imaginations—and that does not exhaust the complexity. Such meaning may even be importantly dependent on how, for example, the wife’s mother treated her father (or her grandmother treated her grandfather), as well as the relationship between men and women in the broader culture. That is why domestic arguments so often spiral out of control, particularly when a pattern of continual and effective communication has never been established. One thing leads to a deeper thing, and that leads deeper yet, until an argument that started over what size plates are best used at lunchtime turns into a no-holds-barred war about whether the marriage in question would be better dissolved. And there is certainly fear of falling down a hole of that size (again, particularly when much has remained unspoken) that motivates the proclivity to keep things to yourself when they would be better, but dangerously, said.
Jordan B. Peterson (Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life)
Making something beautiful is difficult, but it is amazingly worthwhile. If you learn to make something in your life truly beautiful—even one thing—then you have established a relationship with beauty. From there you can begin to expand that relationship out into other elements of your life and the world. That is an invitation to the divine. That is the reconnection with the immortality of childhood, and the true beauty and majesty of the Being you can no longer see. You must be daring to try that.
Jordan B. Peterson (Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life)
What is a truly reliable source of positive emotion?” The answer is that people experience positive emotion in relationship to the pursuit of a valuable goal.
Jordan B. Peterson (Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life)
Such children are chronically ignored by their peers. This is because they are not fun to play with. Adults tend to manifest the same attitude (although they will deny it desperately when pressed). When I worked in daycare centres, early in my career, the comparatively neglected children would come to me desperately, in their fumbling, half-formed manner, with no sense of proper distance and no attentive playfulness. They would flop, nearby—or directly on my lap, no matter what I was doing—driven inexorably by the powerful desire for adult attention, the necessary catalyst for further development. It was very difficult not to react with annoyance, even disgust, to such children and their too-prolonged infantilism—difficult not to literally push them aside—even though I felt very badly for them, and understood their predicament well. I believe that response, harsh and terrible though it may be, was an almost universally-experienced internal warning signal indicating the comparative danger of establishing a relationship with a poorly socialized child: the likelihood of immediate and inappropriate dependence (which should have been the responsibility of the parent) and the tremendous demand of time and resources that accepting such dependence would necessitate. Confronted with such a situation, potentially friendly peers and interested adults are much more likely to turn their attention to interacting with other children whose cost/benefit ratio, to speak bluntly, would be much lower.
Jordan B. Peterson (12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos)
Excuse the cliché, but it is necessary to walk before you can run. You may even have to crawl before you can walk. This is part of accepting your position as a beginner, at the bottom of the hierarchy you so casually, arrogantly, and self-servingly despise. Furthermore, the deeply antihuman attitude that often accompanies tears shed for environmental degradation and man’s inhumanity to man cannot but help but have a marked effect on the psychological attitude that defines a person’s relationship to him or herself. It has taken since time immemorial for us to organize ourselves, biologically and socially, into the functional hierarchies that both specify our perceptions and actions, and define our interactions with the natural and social world. Profound gratitude for that gift is the only proper response. The structure that encompasses us all has its dark side—just as nature does, just as each individual does—but that does not mean careless, generic, and self-serving criticism of the status quo is appropriate (any more than knee-jerk objection to what might be necessary change).
Jordan B. Peterson (Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life)
It’s not for nothing that the Holy Mother and Infant is a divine image—as we just discussed. Societies that cease to honour that image—that cease to see that relationship as of transcendent and fundamental importance—also cease to be.
Jordan B. Peterson (12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos)
Making something beautiful is difficult but it is amazingly worthwhile. If you learn to make something in your life truly beautiful - even one thing then you have established a relationship with beauty. From there you can begin to expand that relationship out into other elements of your life and the world.
Jordan B. Peterson
Možete riječima nastojati izmanipulirati svijet tako da dobijete od njega ono što želite. To nazivamo ''političkim djelovanjem''. To je spin. To je specijalnost beskrupuloznih marketinških stručnjaka, trgovaca, oglašivača, opsjenara, utopista opsjednutih sloganima i psihopata. Kada pokušavaju utjecati na druge i manipulirati njima, ljudi se koriste govorom. To rade studenti kada pišu esej kojim želje udovoljiti profesoru, umjesto da artikuliraju i iznađu vlastite ideje. To je ono što svi rade kada nešto žele i odluče se pretvarati i lagati da bi udovoljili i laskali. To je spletkarenje, izmišljanje parola i propaganda.
Jordan B. Peterson (12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos)
Hell comes later. Hell comes when lies have destroyed the relationship between individual or state and reality itself. Things fall apart. Life degenerates. Everything becomes frustration and disappointment. Hope consistently betrays. The deceitful individual desperately gestures at sacrifice, like Cain, but fails to please God. Then the drama enters its final act. Tortured by constant failure, the individual becomes bitter. Disappointment and failure amalgamate, and produce a fantasy: the world is bent on my personal suffering, my particular undoing, my destruction. I need, I deserve, I must have—my revenge. That’s the gateway to Hell. That’s when the underworld, a terrifying and unfamiliar place, becomes misery itself.
Jordan B. Peterson (12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos)
Have they been educated to the level of their intellectual ability or ambition? Is their use of free time engaging, meaningful, and productive? Have they formulated solid and well-articulated plans for the future? Are they (and those they are close to) free of any serious physical health or economic problems? Do they have friends and a social life? A stable and satisfying intimate partnership? Close and functional familial relationships? A career—or, at least, a job—that is financially sufficient, stable and, if possible, a source of satisfaction and opportunity? If
Jordan B. Peterson (Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life)
Despite the fact that the world is a very dark place, and that each of us has our black elements of soul, we see in each other a unique blend of actuality and possibility that is a kind of miracle: one that can manifest itself, truly, in the world, in the relationships we have that are grounded in trust and love.
Jordan B. Peterson (Beyond Order: 12 More Rules For Life)
Other people keep you sane. That is part of why it is a good idea to get married. Why? Well, you are half insane. And so is your spouse. Well, maybe not half; but plenty. Hopefully, however, it is not generally the same half. Now and then you meet couples who have the same weakness, and then they compound that failing in each other. ... It is a fortunate happenstance, generally speaking, that your idiosyncrasies are likely to be somewhat randomly distributed, and that if you unite with someone else, you are likely to find some strength where you are weak, and vice versa. When you unite the two of you to create that original 'divine being' (that is the symbolic idea), then you have a chance of producing one reasonable, sane being. That is good for you both, even better for your children, who now have a fighting chance of adapting to what constitutes generally sane behavior; and it is good for friendship and the broader world, too.
Jordan B. Peterson (Beyond Order: 12 More Rules For Life)
From these assumptions [that there is someone out there who is perfect, and that there is someone out there who is perfect for me], you are deriving at least three errors, which is quite an accomplishment given that you have made only two assumptions. To begin with, there is not anyone out there who is perfect. There are just people out there who are damaged, quite severely, although not always irreparably, and with a fair bit of individual idiosyncrasy. Apart from that, if there was someone out there who was perfect, they would take one look at you and run away screaming! Unless you are deceiving someone, why would you end up with anyone better than you? You should be truly terrified if you have been accepted as a date. A sensible person would think of their new potential romantic partner, 'Oh my God! You are either blind, desperate, or as damaged as me!' That is a horrifying idea- signing up with someone who is at least as much trouble as you. It is by no means as bad as being along with yourself, but it is still out of the frying pan and into the fire, although at least the fire might transform you. Thus, you get married, if you have any courage, if you have any longterm vision and to vow and adopt responsibility, if you have any maturity; and you start to transform the two of you into one reasonable person. And it is even the case that participating in such a dubious process makes the two of you into one reasonable person with the possibility of some growth. So, you talk. About everything. No matter how painful. And you make peace. And you thank Providence if you manage it, because strife is the default condition.
Jordan B. Peterson (Beyond Order: 12 More Rules For Life)
If I stay in an unhealthy relationship with you, perhaps it’s because I’m too weak-willed and indecisive to leave, but I don’t want to know it. Thus, I continue helping you, and console myself with my pointless martyrdom. Maybe I can then conclude, about myself, “Someone that self-sacrificing, that willing to help someone—that has to be a good person.” Not so. It might be just a person trying to look good pretending to solve what appears to be a difficult problem instead of actually being good and addressing something real.
Jordan B. Peterson (12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos)
You can keep the possibility of escape in the back of your mind. You can avoid the commitment of permanence. But then you cannot achieve the transformation, which might well demand everything you can possibly muster. The difficulty, however, that is implicit in the negotiation carries with it a tremendous promise, which is part of a radically successful life: You could have a marriage that works. You could make it work. That is an achievement—a tangible, challenging, exceptional, and unlikely achievement. There are not many genuine achievements of that magnitude in life; a number as small as four is a reasonable estimate. Maybe, if you strive for it, you have established a solid marriage. That is achievement one. Because of that, you have founded a solid and reliable, honest and playful home into which you could dare bring children. Then you can have kids, and with a solid marriage that can work out for you. That is achievement two. Then you have brought upon yourself more of the responsibility that will demand the best from you. Then you will have new relationships of the highest quality, if you are fortunate and careful. Then you will have grandchildren so that you are surrounded by new life when yours begins to slip away. In our culture, we live as if we are going to die at thirty. But we do not. We live a very long time, but it is also all over in a flash, and it should be that you have accomplished what human beings accomplish when they live a full life, and marriage and children and grandchildren and all the trouble and heartbreak that accompanies all of that is far more than half of life. Miss it at your great peril.
Jordan B. Peterson (Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life)
I, like almost everyone else, can legitimately describe ourselves, in some way, as a victim of something or someone. It is because we are born human that we are guaranteed a good dose of suffering. And chances are, if you or someone you love is not suffering now, they will be within five years, unless you are freakishly lucky. Rearing kids is hard, work is hard, aging, sickness and death are hard, and Jordan emphasized that doing all that totally on your own, without the benefit of a loving relationship, or wisdom, or the psychological insights of the greatest psychologists, only makes it harder.
Jordan B. Peterson (12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos)
He said he had parents who were desperate anti-social alcoholic addicted friendless and that they didn't want him to leave their home. He was the only relationship they had and he asked what he should do and I told him that he should leave.
Jordan B. Peterson
That’s to encourage her, in everything she wants courageously to do, but to include in that genuine appreciation the fact of her femininity: to recognize the importance of having a family and children and to forego the temptation to denigrate or devalue that in comparison to accomplishment of personal ambition or career. It’s not for nothing that the Holy Mother and Infant is a divine image—as we just discussed. Societies that cease to honour that image—that cease to see that relationship as of transcendent and fundamental importance—also cease to be.
Jordan B. Peterson (12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos)
Above all, he alerted his students to topics rarely discussed in university, such as the simple fact that all the ancients, from Buddha to the biblical authors, knew what every slightly worn-out adult knows, that life is suffering. If you are suffering, or someone close to you is, that’s sad. But alas, it’s not particularly special. We don’t suffer only because “politicians are dimwitted,” or “the system is corrupt,” or because you and I, like almost everyone else, can legitimately describe ourselves, in some way, as a victim of something or someone. It is because we are born human that we are guaranteed a good dose of suffering. And chances are, if you or someone you love is not suffering now, they will be within five years, unless you are freakishly lucky. Rearing kids is hard, work is hard, aging, sickness and death are hard, and Jordan emphasized that doing all that totally on your own, without the benefit of a loving relationship, or wisdom, or the psychological insights of the greatest psychologists, only makes it harder.
Jordan B. Peterson (12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos)
She looks in the mirror. Who is she? What’s going on? Are any of her relationships real? Have any of them ever been? What has happened to the future? Everything is up for grabs, when the deeper realities of the world unexpectedly manifest themselves. Everything is intricate beyond imagining. Everything is affected by everything else. We perceive a very narrow slice of a causally interconnected matrix, although we strive with all our might to avoid being confronted by knowledge of that narrowness. The thin veneer of perceptual sufficiency cracks, however, when something fundamental goes wrong. The dreadful inadequacy of our senses reveals itself.
Jordan B. Peterson (12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos)
It is because we are born human that we are guaranteed a good dose of suffering. And chances are, if you or someone you love is not suffering now, they will be within five years, unless you are freakishly lucky. Rearing kids is hard, work is hard, aging, sickness and death are hard, and Jordan emphasized that doing all that totally on your own, without the benefit of a loving relationship, or wisdom, or the psychological insights of the greatest psychologists, only makes it harder.
Jordan B. Peterson (12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos)
If existence is good, then the clearest and cleanest and most correct relationship with it is also good. If existence is not good, by contrast, you’re lost. Nothing will save you
Jordan B. Peterson (12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos)
One of the major contributions of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s masterwork, The Gulag Archipelago, was his analysis of the direct causal relationship between the pathology of the Soviet prison-work-camp dependent state (where millions suffered and died) and the almost universal proclivity of the Soviet citizen to falsify his own day-to-day personal experience, deny his own state-induced suffering, and thereby prop up the dictates of the rational, ideology-possessed communist system.
Jordan B. Peterson (12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos)
It much better for any relationship when both partners are strong.
Jordan B. Peterson (12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos)