This Is What Happens When You Tell the Truth

once you Orient yourself then you have an obligation I would say an obligation to the development of your soul to speak the truth you have to be oriented properly though because the truth is is something that exists in service to an ideal an ideal of sorts then you can imagine that you could use your language two ways you can use your language to manipulate the world and to extract from it what you want so for example maybe you go out on a date with someone and you decide that the end goal of the date is

to have a sexual partner for the night and then you can craft your language to manipulate the person and to providing you with you with what you want and that's like an instrumental use of language but the problem with that there's many problems with that but one of them is is that what if your idea about what you should want is wrong like maybe that's not the way to treat someone that you're on a date with out on a date with maybe maybe you're minimizing and reducing the interactions between you from what could be um

a healthy and elevated state of interaction and discourse to something that's that basically the pur of impulsive pleasure and not maybe that's not good for you next week and the week after and a month down the road maybe orienting yourself towards impulsive pleasure is a very bad idea remember what happens in Pinocchio Pinocchio goes to Pleasure Island and Pleasure Island is a place where impulsive Pleasures can be had at at a moment's notice but what Pinocchio discovers along with Jiminy Cricket that Pleasure Island is run by masked to totalitarians they're they're all dressed in black

you remember and they're they're turning the children children and Adolescence who are on Pleasure Island they're depriving them of their voice turning them into braing jackasses and preparing to sell them as slaves to the salt mines and so there's an implication in that story that the pursuit of impulsive pleasure is one roote to totalitarianism and slavery and and I believe that so perhaps orienting your language towards the Gathering of impulsive pleasure is a Mis is a Mis use of of your highest gift your the gift of logos the gift of communication the alternative is to

Orient yourself towards the highest good as we already described and then speak the truth which and you can you can tell when you're doing that because or you can tell when you're not doing that because if you're if you're not telling the truth if you're using someone else's words you're being manipulated in a sense by forces that are behind the scenes you're not using your own words you're the puppet of an ideology or another thinker or your own impulsive desires and you can tell when you're speaking like that because it makes you feel weak it

makes you feel weak and ashamed and you can localize that feeling physiologic Al if you listen to yourself talk you can tell when when you're speaking properly you will experience a feeling of integration and strength and when you're speaking in a deceitful or manipulative manner you'll feel that you're starting to come acart at the seams and what you need to do is practice only saying things that make you feel stronger and that'll mean to begin with that you'll notice that almost everything you say is a lie it's either a lie or someone else's words it's

very hard to find your own words but you don't actually exist until you have your own words words so okay so then you you try to teach yourself how to speak your own truth and you listen to other people while you're doing that because they can help you shape and correct your words they'll react to them badly if you formulate your ideas badly and if you listen and pay attention then you can learn to formulate your words more and more clearly and accurately and that makes you more and more powerful it makes you it gives

you more and more Authority which is the which is the beneficial form of power okay so you do that and then you have to make a decision of faith and that's basically well that you can e either use your language to manipulate the world and make it do what you want or you can use your language to try to articulate the truth as carefully as you possibly can and then you can see what happens you have to let go of your desire for the for the consequences that you want you have to assume that if

you speak the truth the results are the best that is possible under the circumstances and so it's a it's a it's an exciting way of living in some sense some sense it's like continually walking off a cliff because you don't know what's going to happen next if all you do is say what you think you know and maybe you're at work and you say what you think and you get fired and you think oh my God that's a terrible catastrophe but maybe it's not because maybe if you're working somewhere and you have to lie to

maintain your job maybe you shouldn't be there maybe it's deadening your soul and damaging you in some permanent Manner and making you corrupt and so you have to orient yourself you have to speak the truth as carefully as you can you have to listen to others so that you correct your speech and then you have to allow the consequences that ensue to unfold as they will that's the ultimate Act of Faith I would say and that's what you do if you belong to truth University all right so more practically speaking then you should educate yourself

and it's not that easy to do now because you have to find people who can actually tell you mostly what to read and and maybe also how to write because writing is a way of of formulating your thoughts ever more precisely that's why you go to university to learn how to write if you learn if you know how to write you can think if you can think and speak and communicate in writing you're you're unbelievably powerful in the authority manner because arguments move the world forward and if your arguments are tight and well constructed and

lucid and well edited and carefully thought through and you have five rationals for everything that you're doing which is what happens if you learn to write properly then you're like a force of nature man no one can take you down and that's one of the things that people aren't taught about why you go get educated especially in the humanities Humanity's education if it's real organizes your psyche grounds you puts you on a a rock and makes you a force to contend with but you have to read the right people and so and those are the

great they're the great people of the past in my list they're the Great Men of the past and that's just how it is and so here's who I would recommend I put reading lists up at jordanbpeterson.com there's two of them and the people that I recommend primarily are their books written by the following list of people people Fodor dovi Leo tuloy who I think perhaps the greatest novelist of the world has ever seen Alexander solanet and another great Russian novelist I don't know what it is about the Russians but man they produce they produce writers

that are in incomparable Alexander solj niten wrote a book called the gulag archipelago where he analyzed the Soviet prison camp system that arose After the leninist revolution in the second decade of the 20th century and details in AB absolutely precisely how the tenants of Marxism the Marxist tenants that are supposed to free everyone and Change the World produced legislation that was that was absolutely murderous in its consequences and Sol niton painstakingly traces The Logical pathway from the original Marxist principles to the legislation to the to the genocides because you'll hear people who are basically marxists

say things like well true Marxism never existed and soliton took that that argument apart in the in the mid '70s and and the gulag archipelago was an intellectual bomb it it it demolished any credibility that Marxism had to intellectual respectability you have to read the book the book is about the central issue in our culture at the moment if you don't read it you're not informed you can't participate in the debate except as a puppet and so I wouldn't recommend participating in this debate as a puppet because you don't know who's behind the scenes pulling

the strings if you remember the Pinocchio story the forces that were pulling the strings were not uh they were not forces that were acting in Pinocchio's best best interest that's for sure George Orwell English essayist incomparable commentator on socialist totalitarianism even though he was a left Wier and a brilliant one eldis Huxley who wrote Brave New World uh had some very brilliant things to say about the potential demolition of sexual choice of choice of sexual partner as a part of part of a dystopian future Friedrich nii u a philosopher who described himself as as someone

who thought with a hammer and N is a very very dangerous person and absolutely brilliant writer and Carl Yung who was a student of N and who n was the philosopher who announced the death of God back in the late 1800s and Yung spent his whole life attempting to revivify God that's one way of thinking about it and so if you or educate yourself and this is a really good place to start if you read these authors then you'll know what else to read if you read these authors it it'll take you a good long

time and it will be very very hard on you and and you won't be the same person when you come out and that's very frightening and because being torn down and rebuilt is no is no joke but it beats the hell out of the alternative which is just to stagnate and stay a stagnant infant which is which is not something I recommend there's nothing uglier than a a stagnant 40-year-old infant [Music]