Jordan Peterson: belief

Transcript context

…So it’s not power like you’re trying to destroy the other. It’s power, full flourishing of a human being, the creative force of a human being in that way. Yeah. Well, you could imagine that… and you should, you could imagine that you could segregate competence and ability. Imagine that you and I were going to work on a project, we could organize our project in relationship to the ambition that we wanted to attain, and we can organize an agreement so that you were committed to the project voluntarily and so that I was committed to the project voluntarily. So that means that we would actually be united in our perceptions and our actions by the motivation of something approximating voluntary play. Now, you could also imagine another situation where I said, here’s our goal and you better help me, or I’m going to kill your family. Well, the probability is that you would be quite motivated to undertake my bidding. And so then you might say, well, that’s how the world works. It’s power and compulsion. But the truth of the matter is that you can force people to see things your way, let’s say, but it’s nowhere near as good as strategy even practically than the strategy that would be associated with something like voluntary joint agreement of pattern of movement strategy towards a goal. See, this is such an important thing to understand because it helps you start to understand the distinction between a unifying force that’s based on power and compulsion, and one that is much more in keeping, I would say with the ethos that governs western societies, free western societies, there’s really a qualitative difference, and it’s not some morally relativistic illusion. If we just look at the nuance of Nietzsche’s thought, the idea he first introduced in Thus Spoke Zarathustra of the Übermensch. That’s another one that’s very easy to misinterpret because it sounds awfully a lot like it’s about power. For example, in the 20th century, it was misrepresented and co-opted by Hitler to advocate for the extermination of the inferior non-Aryan races.…

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