foreign welcome to another episode of after skool I'm Dr Jordan B Peterson today we'll be summoning our inner monsters without further Ado let's Dive In you know someone who 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 and 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 because it's impossible to respect yourself until you grow teeth and if you grow teeth and you realize that you're somewhat dangerous and or maybe somewhat seriously dangerous and 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 then I guess the philosophy also is 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 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 and 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 the answer is they're just like you 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 and 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 the it's a matter of facing the thing you least want to face and everyone has that old there's this 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 it 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 it's basically a holy object like the Phoenix in some sense that's representation a representation of transformation so it's a it's an ideal and so 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 they 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 and 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 porthole portal that you do not want to climb through and the reason for that's actually quite technical this is a union presupposition too is 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 and there's parts of you you've avoided developing because it's hard for you to
develop those parts and so it's 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 and so when you see these stories of the hero you know journeying to unknown lands of Terror and danger that's that's what happens to you it happens to you all the time you know you're 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 and 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 same size threat then you you you 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 you make your choice 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
