jordan peterson explains why you shouldn't engage in deceit and lies in the video for more insightful videos make sure to subscribe to the channel you you make your decisions in life and i decided when i was very young i'm in my mid-20s that i was going to say what i believed and see what happened whatever happens as a consequence of telling the truth is the best thing that can happen it doesn't really matter how it looks to you at the moment or maybe even across the years because you have to it's it's a it's a
it's an article of faith in some sense do you believe that reality is better constituted as a consequence of truth or falsity if you believe that reality is best constituted as a consequence of truth then you have a responsibility to speak the truth and you can't assess the consequences and say well that was a mistake because part of the decision that reality is best constituted as a consequence of the truth is the decision that no matter what happens is the best if it's a consequence of telling the truth and so that's what i conclude you
know a thousand people you're gonna know more than that over the course of your life but let's say a thousand for the sake of argument for now they know a thousand people that means that you're one person away from a million people and two persons away from a billion people and you're the center of that network and now the way networks work is that information propagates in a networked manner so don't underestimate the power of your speech now you know western culture is foul logo centric let's say it okay so we'll say yeah that's just
fine that's exactly what it is it's predicated on the idea of the logos that the logos is the sacred element of western culture and what does that mean it means that your capacity for speech is divine it's the thing that generates order from chaos and then sometimes turns pathological order into chaos when it has to don't underestimate the power of truth there's nothing more powerful now in order to speak what you might regard as the truth you have to let go of the outcome you have to think all right i'm going to say what i
think stupid as i am biased as i am ignorant as i am i'm going to state what i think as clearly as i can and i'm going to live with the consequences no matter what they are now the reason you think that that's an element of faith the idea is that nothing brings a better world into being than the stated truth our culture is predicated on the idea that truth in speech is of divine significance it's the fundamental presupposition of our culture well [Music] if you believe that then you act it out and you take
the consequences you're going to take the consequences one way or another you know so you want the truth on your side or do you want to hide behind falsehoods your your best bet the best bet you have virtually all the time is to try not to lie to yourself in in my first book um 12 rules for life i said the rule was tell the truth or at least do not lie because you know you might i mean can you tell the truth you'd have to know the truth you know you might be able to
tell some partial truths but you can't tell the truth but you can not say things that you know to be false and in the second book the new one rule five is do not do things that you hate which is also a kind of lie and um i'm thinking more that you might observe yourself engaging in activities that you find despicable even right then but certainly later when your conscience dwells on them and that you should stop doing that because that's a form of behavioral lie i think the only thing we have to orient ourselves
is as individuals is our willingness to to live to live a life that's relatively free of of unnecessary deceit or of deceit at all the 11th rule is do not allow yourself to become deceitful resentful or arrogant i might have those out of order but it's concentrating on the same sort of idea you know it's partly here's another way of looking at it your your attention moves around for reasons that you don't quite understand those reasons are unconscious you can tell that to some degree because you can't make yourself pay attention to something that you
aren't interested in well you can but you really have to work at it you know it's really easy to pay attention to something you're interested in that's not difficult at all in fact it's enjoyable whereas paying attention to something that you're not interested in requires will and effort and and so you can see that there's unconscious mechanisms at work there because you can't control them now the danger to deceit is that you'll pathologize those unconscious mechanisms because as you practice something imagine you practice a particular form of untruth you tell yourself a story that you
know to be false and that becomes your habitual way of looking at the world well what that means is that you're forming habits that are unconscious because habits become unconscious and then they skew the way the world appears to you they'll it'll pull your interest in places that that aren't good for you to go that aren't associated with the real world and so that's not to be wished for that's because you you don't want to be out of sync with your automatic self that's that's bad news and lying definitely does that especially if it's habitual
so because it creates whatever is truth well it creates a false truth and a false you right you know because there's different kinds of memory there's the memory that's associated with the way the world is and that's called episodic memory and then there's another or declare declarative memory there's another kind of memory that's memory for action and so that's what you use when you play tennis or ride a bike or play the piano you know how to move your hands and you move your body and that's a kind of a kind of memory as well
and you don't want to pathologize either of those because then you become you see once once the deceit has become habitual then you're its victim you're its pawn because it's automatic and that's a that's a terrible fate you don't want that you don't you really don't want that i think your best defense against anything that's trying to hijack your attention is is something like honesty it's also very useful and i stress this quite a bit in this second book to surround yourself with people who want the best for you and who care for you because
they can also help keep you on the straight and narrow path and you know that's not a matter of some trivial moral injunction it's there's terrible places you can end up you
