hello dr. Peterson I've been trying to listen to my conscience but I can't tell the difference between fear willful blindness or genuine conscience well the first thing I would say about that is it is quite clear that you are in fact trying to listen to your conscience because that's probably the first thing that you discover so that's a really good question okay fear well here's a test and you don't want to do this stupidly if you think that you should do something and you think that the reason you might not be doing it is because
you're afraid then you should do it so that way you can find out if it's fear you know I think your question is will hi do I know my conscience isn't just masquerading as fear saying well you shouldn't do that but it's rationalizing the real issue which is you're afraid of doing that yeah see here's a reason that you want to tell the truth and I part I kind of figured this out when I was looking deeply into the Pinocchio story you know in Pinocchio as Pinocchio strives to become real he he has a conscience
to guide him but it's Jiminy Cricket this insect but jiminy isn't really a very good conscience he's a bit dogmatic to begin with dogmatic and inexperienced and so it's it's not like the conscience is an unerring guide it's like a partner in discovery and as you move forward in your life and you consult your conscience and you listen to it then it gets smarter and so do you but there's a coda there and this is why I've suggested part of the reason why I've suggested so frequently in my lectures and in my book that people
try not to lie you see there are many systems you have many systems within let's say that guide you and what one of those is your capacity for rational thought and then you have a variety of emotional systems and motivational systems and internal dramas and intuitions and bodily sensations like lots and lots of and senses lots of systems that are guiding you and many of them operate you might say unconsciously autonomously instinctively implicitly all of that now you nonetheless you program them like you feed them content let's say just like you feed your body nourishment
you feed them content and a lot of the content that you feed them pertains directly to your voluntary thoughts and speech and your actions and then if you pathologies those by lying so if you say things that you know not to be true or you don't say things that you know to be true when you need to which is more common and if you act in ways that you consider that in fact act in ways you consider reprehensible then you pathologize all of those autonomous systems that guide you it's like you're programming them badly you're
building an AI system inside yourself really and in some sense that is what you're doing that has very bad it's very bad training data and so the output it produces will be will won't guide you properly and so you don't want to pathologies your guidance systems it's a really bad idea so that's why you have to not lie and maybe that's also why you have to say what you have to say and you have to say it clearly as well and you have to learn how to do that so that's one of the ways of
getting your conscience straightened out and then you have to have a dialogue with your conscience and you might ask it's like okay well what should I do or what should should I do this or should I not do this so let's say you're thinking should I not do this in the case of a temptation maybe you have a chance to develop a new relationship you know and you're you're excited about it and apprehensive about it and afraid of it and you don't know how to sort out all those feelings and the first thing is you
really have to want to sort them out that's why you have to orient yourself to something that's a genuine up you know that the star above the horizon you have to really want things to be straight and you have to have thought that through and you have to know what it means for things not to be straight and really what it means is that you're headed for hell in one way or another and if you underst it's enough maybe it's enough to scare you straight you really got to think that through then you got to
think about how much better it would be if you aimed up and that really has to kind of permeate your whole being and so then you're oriented that way you're oriented up and you're deciding that it's okay to try to tell the truth and then you can start to rely on this dialogue with your conscience but both of you have to learn and you're gonna make mistakes along the way you know that's okay you can say well I'm gonna try this without being certain that it's right you can even say I'm going to say this
without being certain that it's correct like if you're arguing with your wife or your husband or your or your sister your father and you have an idea about what might be going on you can say look here's my idea about what's going on who knows what that idea might be contaminated with like maybe I'm putting it forward just because I'm too proud or arrogant or angry or fearful or whatever that's possible let's see if we can figure that out but you can offer tentatively and both have at it that's what you do if it's a
hypothesis right you both have at it and see if it's an idea that's worthy of of keeping can you do that with your conscience and then you work move forward there's a technique in behavioral psychology called psychotherapy called collaborative empiricism so let's say that we you and I have been sitting down and we decide that you're gonna try something new this week like maybe your Agra phobic and you're having a hard time in a parking lot and so getting out of the car and going to the grocery store so maybe we say well you know
drive to the grocery store and you're just gonna walk halfway to the halfway from your car to the door that's good enough for like do that every second day for a week and then come back and let's talk about it so that's collaborative empiricism you're running a little experiments you think well your conscience is guiding you towards something you take a tentative step in that direction and then you check and see well you know did what I wanted to have happen occur as an outcome that's the crucial question that's the crucial question for behavioural truth
right that's the pragmatic perspective did what I want to have happened happen as a consequence of my framework of interpretation and my action if the answer is yes then I have not invalidate it right that's that's the pragmatic philosophy in a nutshell and it's it's very very smart so you have a dialogue with your conscience that never ends and hopefully it gets wiser and you get wiser and that's the dialogue that young talked about between the conscious and the unconscious between your your fantasy life say the life that's sort of underneath you is a conscious
being like you the life that's part of your biological platform the biological platform that somehow miraculously gives rise to your consciousness if a dialogue with that we're always in dialogue we're always in dialogue right with everything so pursue that
