Shadowing Practice: Jordan Peterson: "Why Nothing Should Ever Bother You" - Learn English Speaking with Video

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This happens all the time in your life.

Imagine you're in a place and you're being asked to do things that you find

Unmotivating and repugnant perhaps and maybe that's not merely

because you're in Undisciplined and useless because that's the first question you ask yourself right am I

Objecting morally or am I just incapable of disciplining myself And

and you want to know the answer to that

because otherwise you're not going to be able to put your best foot forward in a complex situation

but let's say you are in a corrupt enterprise and you don't know what to do

and that's a very difficult problem to solve

and the first thing I would say is strive to put yourself in a position where you can actually make choices

and that's actually a good guiding principle throughout your life maybe you're being oppressed at work

certainly possible and I know that there are people who are in such dire situations

that in some sense they're trapped i've had lots of clients like

that right so i make allowances for the fact that now

and then you get into a situation you just can't get out of

and that's really that's real hell forget about that for the time being if someone is pushing you around

you need to be able to say no well so let's think that through

you need to know what no means and no means

if you keep doing this something you do not like will

certainly happen to you that's what no means now I'm not trying to make

that into a threat

but it is a threat no means no implies it implies

a border well in order to say no you have to be able to put up the border

and let's say you have a job and you need the money

and maybe you have a family

and you have no other options your no isn't very useful

because what have you got to back it up

and maybe you think well i'll stand on moral principles

and i'll quit my jobs well great

but what are you going to do for money

and how about your family right that's a big problem and

so when i had clients in that situation

that was usually a two -year campaign something like

that it's like well how's your resume look

and that's usually a dismal question for people because it's full of holes

and they haven't updated it for five years

and they're embarrassed about two -thirds of it it's badly written

and they've hidden it in some corner of their computer where they don't even want to look

and so haul it up let's go through it can you fill in the gaps is there some way

that you can make yourself more marketable so that you have options

and we could lay out a plan to see how

that might be possible maybe you're afraid of applying for a new job

because you have to send out 50 resumes to get one bloody interview

and that's annoying and time -consuming and then maybe you don't have any real

confidence in your interview abilities well time to fix all

that up or you stay under the thumb of the tyranny those are your options

and that's not a good option because if it's

if you are under the thumb of an emerging tyranny

and you don't set yourself up to withstand it and push back

or leave for somewhere better then it will definitely get bigger

and you will definitely get smaller

and no matter how bad it is now it's going to be way worse in five years

and that's also really useful to think through a

because imagine you have to something like make a lateral shift in your job

and that's not nothing you think well i'm afraid of doing

that no one wants me i can't get another job i'm

going to throw you know i'm going to throw my life up into chaos etc that's very frightening

and fair enough and no wonder that stops you

but you're probably not frightened enough about not doing it

and one of the things i did continually in my clinical

practice was fair enough i get why you're afraid let's figure out the cost of you just staying there

because things change and they degenerate right and so that's frightening

but let's think about who you're going to be in five years right you're ten times as bitter

and you're in an even worse situation economically you absolutely hate your job

and now instead of one manager who's ideologically corrupt

and tyrannical you have five

and all the good people have left your company it's like well how afraid are you of

that well then you once you have

that this is a really useful thing to do period you know

when you're trying to deal with your stupidities and your ignorance

and your malevolence you think well should i do something about this that's hard

what if I just let it play out

and then you need a fantasy that goes along with that

so you take all your bad habits and your failure to aim at the mark and you think

all right i'm going to wander down that road diligently what does it look like in five years

and that's usually that's hell man and there's motivation in that

because moving to somewhere good that's a good thing

but getting the hell away from something terrible that's also motivating

and so if you put that hell behind you

and you know the promised land in front of you You're kind of maximally motivated to move forward through obstacles And

so you know we can't do any of this casually It's

not easy to stand up for what you believe to be right in the marketplace

And the way to do that is to mold yourself into someone who can do that and

There's nothing but there's nothing but good in that it's difficult, but there's nothing but good in that and almost all my clients

When we went through that process it often took two years sometimes longer The invariable outcome was that they don't not invariable

There was a cut time or two it didn't work exactly

that well Most of the time people went on to far

better jobs at far better salaries in a much more motivating position And we're better for themselves and for their family,

but it takes work, you know like it's not just a matter of

a casual objection it's not good enough it's not sophisticated enough what are your thoughts about porn

and masturbation and how it affects men no one wears a t -shirt that says I masturbate to pornography regularly

it's a it's a second -rate solution to a complicated problem

and and if it wasn't that then it would be something

that people took pride in you know in a real sense as an accomplishment

and right and everyone laughs about that because it's so preposterous

and so you kind of know it's a second -rate solution

and I don't say that in a finger -wagging way

because the technology that enables it is unbelievably powerful and and

and that's put young men in particular who are very susceptible

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to visual to visual sexual imagery far more than young women by the way

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so the literature on this is quite clear men

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and women both use pornography but men use images

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and women use stories and the details of the classic female pornography story are very well understood

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if you're interested you can read a book called a billion

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wicked thoughts written by Google engineers who analyzed pornography use among women across millions of instances

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and so it's quite interesting it's the basic pornographic female story is something like Beauty

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and the Beast and protagonist is usually a vampire a pirate a surgeon a billionaire

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and there's one other character i can never remember

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but they're they're they're super stimuli in some sense right and

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but the problem is and there is an emerging literature on this is that it it it's a it's a suboptimal solution,

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let's put it that way.

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And I would say that anything that reduces motivation to establish a credible and intimate,

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productive, generous, and reciprocal long -term relationship, anything that interferes with that is to be viewed with extreme skepticism.

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And it's so difficult to do that

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that you don't want to deprive yourself of any of the deprivation that might motivate you to do it.

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And so that's what it looks like to me.

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Hello, Dr. Peterson.

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Why do people say, if you're really sorry, you wouldn't have done it or said it in the first place?

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That phrase has always irked me.

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The whole point of being sorry is that you recognize your mistakes and you repent of them.

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How can you be sorry for something you didn't even say or do?

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Yeah, well, that's that's a good question.

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You know, I mean what you're basically wondering about is why people might be skeptical of a apology.

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You know, you can understand now Maybe they shouldn't say if you're really sorry, you wouldn't have done it or said it in the first place Well,

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there's a certain amount of truth in that isn't there because obviously something motivated you to Say what you said now,

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maybe you were angry or hungover or overtired or hungry and you know a momentary

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motivational state of rage or neurotic resentment possessed you

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and you said something that you knew to be untrue

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and mean momentarily and you even knew that

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when it came out of your mouth i mean that happens

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but that little angry devil inside you still believed it enough to dare utter it you know

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so so there's some truth in it the problem is and

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and it's also an expression of the person's doubt and confusion about how to determine when a apology is really genuine, right?

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Because people can apologize shallowly just to escape from the trouble of the situation.

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So I think a deeper question related to your question is, what are the necessary steps that you must undertake

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if you are going to utter an apology that is going to be taken seriously?

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And I would say you have to give the devil his due.

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You know, you have to ask yourself what it was that motivated you to act inappropriately or to speak inappropriately.

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You have to admit that to yourself.

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That's hard, you know, because it might be reflective of a fairly major flaw in your character.

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Then you have to tell the other person really what you did wrong and why.

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And you have to do that in a way

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that indicates to them that you've grappled with the problem and

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that you now understand it

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and then you have to offer to them a plan for

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how you're going to change your conduct in the future that's detailed

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and specific and then you have to ask them

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if they're willing under those conditions to set the to reset the scorecard to zero

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and let you try again now obviously that's necessary because

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if we can't forgive each other we're all ruined because every single one of us makes stupid mistakes all the time.

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And if you can't recover from a mistake, well, every time you make a mistake, you're dead.

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That's a really bad option.

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And no relationships can sustain themselves because we're all going to, we all know that we hurt the people we love, you know, continually.

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And so if we don't have that capacity for repentance and forgiveness, we can't even maintain our relationships.

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But I would say, you know, give the devil his due.

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The people who might say that to you, well they're still expressing some anger obviously and they do have a point.

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It's like well what the hell was wrong with you to begin with?

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But I think the way you deal with

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that is you scour your conscience and you admit to yourself why you're such an idiot to begin with.

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You know and you want to do that anyways because

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if you were an idiot

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and you now realize it you probably want to figure out why

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so you could stop being such an idiot and then the same stupid thing won't keep happening to you.

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So, you know, I would also say that one of the pieces of evidence

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that you've grappled with an inadequacy sufficiently to actually change it is

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that you've been able to express that as an apology that the other person finds acceptable.

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On a practical note, one of the things you can do that's actually useful, let's say if you had a fight with your wife, we'll just use that as an example,

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you can ask her, look, what would I have to say in order for you to feel,

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what would you say, capable of forgiving me, willing to and capable of forgiving me?

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And she might say, well, you know, if I have to tell you what to say, then it doesn't really mean anything and it doesn't come from you.

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But the right rejoinder to that is look i'm kind of stupid

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and i i don't have a special insight into what you need

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and if you tell me what would satisfy you i can at least then think about whether or not i can

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i can put myself in accord with that demand and

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if i can offer that to you and

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if i can't at least i know what direction to aim in it's really helpful

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when you when someone's hurt you

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but you want to keep your relationship with them to ask them what their conditions for satisfaction are

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so those are some practical hints with regard to you know pouring oil on troubled waters

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what is your take on stoicism can this be used as a good foundation for building on

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yeah well i don't know that much about stoicism you know i mean i know that

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it's a it's an ethic of endurance and

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Willingness to bear responsibility and to make sacrifices

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and I think part of the reason that there's been somewhat of a movement online

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in the stoic direction and the

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Resurgence of interest in stoic philosophy is

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because it's pretty much exactly the opposite of every philosophy you ever hear about anywhere now and

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so you know when we move

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when we veer too far in one direction those things we forgot start to glimmer in the Darkness

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and they attract people that's compensatory so one of the things the psychoanalysts pointed out is that you know if you're

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Someone wrote me the other day.

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Oh no. I answered this question online It's a graduate student

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and he said he was still having murderous fantasies about people who had humiliated in high school

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and he asked me what he asked what he should do about

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that and I said well you should write out what happened in detail

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and you should write out your fantasies in detail

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which is quite frightening and then you should try to see if you can

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Give the devil is do like the fact that he's having murderous fantasies still Means that there were lessons

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To be learned embedded in that humiliation that he has not yet

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Integrated and the fantasies are manifesting themselves as a sign of

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that and if they're analyzed and then integrated the problem would be solved

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so in all likelihood well who knows

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because I don't know maybe he was smaller maybe he wasn't

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as physically intimidating as he needed to be maybe he was

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afraid maybe he couldn't defend himself verbally maybe he thought aggression

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was wrong I don't know something led up to these sequence of humiliations

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and if you're humiliated like that and despised

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and put down well then that's indicative of a flaw in

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your adaptive structure I'm not trying to lay all the blame on the victim here by the way

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but you're not going to fix the bullies

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so you can fix yourself maybe and the the fantasies come up as a compensation

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so they're very aggressive and violent it's because he's way too peaceful

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and meek and so you pull those together

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and then you're a little meaner than you were

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and a little more capable of saying no

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and less likely to open yourself up to the first forays of bullying

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so bullies in high schools for example they'll go pick on a variety of kids right just a little prod

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and some kids will react too much

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and then all the bullies just zero in on that kid well

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and then maybe the kid goes home

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and has fantasies about blowing up the school well the stoicism it's a compensatory fantasy in some sense you know

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because everyone's concerned about rights and everyone's concerned about not be about being a victim

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and and and about being merciful and all of that

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and that's not enough so a compensation emerges and attracts people to it and so

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so the question is what advice can i give to someone

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who's studying the humanities given the state of our higher education system.

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When I went to university as an undergraduate, the first place I went to was a small college in northern Alberta.

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And it was a feeder college to the University of Alberta.

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And I had very small classes and very good professors.

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I had like seven good professors the first two years I was there.

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And it was all small seminars.

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And that was unbelievably useful.

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But when I went to the bigger university, most of the professors taught courses that weren't very good.

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And so then you might ask, well, what do you do in a situation like that?

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And, well, you still have the time and you have the books.

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And I found people that I respected and asked them what they read.

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And then I went and read those books.

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That was extremely useful.

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And if you go to university to a large degree,

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you have to educate yourself like I mean there are resources there for you to Utilize including the professors and the lectures,

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but in some real sense especially in the humanities the onus is on yourself

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There's great books and most of them are free and so

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You can read them and I have a list of a hundred books on my website and

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There's some Literary works and some scientific works.

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There are books that had a huge impact on me, right?

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They produced a fundamental shift not only in the way I thought about the world

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but also very frequently the way I acted in the world and perceived the world and deep education does that.

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It's not, it's certainly not merely the acquisition of a set of facts about the material structure of the world.

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That's the sciences tilt more in that direction although even that's an oversimplification

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but the purpose of a humanities education is to teach you how to be

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well fundamentally to be a good person secondarily to be a

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good citizen you know tertiary i think that's right to be a good partner to your wife

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or husband and to be a good parent and all of

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that like that's the purpose of a liberal arts education right

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and people are often this is something I don't know all

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you people in here are interested at least to some degree

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and what I had to say or wrote and

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so most of you probably have a bit of a tilt

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in a literary direction one of the things you might ask yourself is why bother studying literature

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And I laid out some of the answer today is

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that literature abstracts out patterns of perception and behavior and so in some sense it's more real than reality itself and

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You kind of know that because

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when you go to a movie all you see is what's interesting

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and life isn't like that Right there's a fair bit of tedium in life and if you're a reasonable person

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To be around when someone asks you what you're up to you don't describe all the tedium

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and the repetition you hit the high points right and you're engaging in a literary exercise right there and

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So and then you still might think well Literature who cares

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and I would say you should care because it's literary critics that have torn your culture into shreds and

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That's really technically true because most of the ideas

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that are characterized by this excessive ideological possession and this insistence that nothing but power

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motivates people and groups in the final analysis that all comes out of schools of literary criticism and

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So you ignore that at your peril

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Partly because we think in stories and we perceive the world through a story

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and we act out stories It's like this isn't trivial It's the most fundamental thing

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and it's very important to get this story right And that's kind of what we were talking about today,

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you know how could you conceptualize right is there some fundamental ground upon

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which the notion of correct right true rests it's not mere

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accordance with a set of objective facts it's it's it's not

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that it's more like the specification of a pattern of behavior

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that guides all of us up it's something like that and

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so you need to know that

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when you go to study the humanities you're going to learn to write hypothetically gonna have to write essays

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and how should you do that and well answer is honestly

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and to the best of your ability and the reason for

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that is because that'll train you to think

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and one of the things I've tried to tell my audiences as an educator

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and my students is you know our whole culture

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insofar as our cultures nested inside of Christianity and Judaism in a wider context.

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So that's thousands and thousands of years of nesting.

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There's a fundamental presumption of that underlying tradition.

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And the fundamental presupposition is that the divine word creates what's good. And that's probably true.

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And if it is true, then you should be careful with your words because

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when you use them you're doing one of two things you're either creating what's good

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or you're doing the opposite and so part of what you do

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when you go to become educated is to learn to respect the word yours and others and

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to train yourself to use it properly and

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that would mean I would say honestly that's the first thing honestly

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and in the service of the highest ethic that you can conceive

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and that's the purpose of a humanities education

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and then you can think about that practically too

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because this is not impractical quite the contrary I know no

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one who hasn't been radically successful who isn't radically expert at communication

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and that also means they're radically expert at thought

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because mostly we think in words and so and

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when you write you're learning to think and when you're using the language

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that you strive to master you are literally generating the present

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and the past out of the future in the direction you're

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aiming at that's what you're doing that's what consciousness does and

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so you want to have respect for that i think it's

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so sad especially i think this is especially sad in relationship to young men who are bailing out of schools

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and the education system en masse is

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that people don't make this clear it's like you want to

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take your place in the world you better learn how to use your tongue

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so and to construe it in terms of radical competence productivity generosity all of

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that like nobility i can't understand why we've forgotten that maybe we never knew it explicitly right?

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But we shouldn't have forgotten it, because I know nothing that's more true than that.

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Well, look, it's pretty obvious

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that given the essentially equal distribution of talents in the world between men

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and women that society would be better off insofar as we were able to capitalize on the gifts that everybody bring.

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that everybody brings to the table.

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We know that one of the best predictors of economic development in countries

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that are moving towards higher standards of living is in fact the rights that they extend to women.

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The data on that are extraordinarily clear.

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It might also be a case

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that extending rights to women isn't much different than welcoming the foreign and the new in a way that's innovative and productive.

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That might be the same thing symbolically or psychologically.

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The problem is, and you allude to this in your question, the problem is when equality of opportunity is conflated with equality of outcome.

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And you're never going to get equality of outcome

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because there are an infinite number of dimensions across which inequality can be computed.

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You know, short people are less likely to be economically successful than tall people

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and attractive people are more likely to be economically successful than unattractive people

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and young people are healthier than old people

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and etc etc there's as many different shades of inequality as there are variants of individuality

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and so the idea

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that in some manner we can have equal outcomes is absolutely preposterous you might also point out

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and this is worth thinking about that there's actually no difference between inequality and ownership.

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And if you own something, that means that thing is unequally distributed, right?

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Because you have it and no one else does.

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And that means that you're oppressing and depriving all those who don't partake in your ownership.

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But the problem is if no one can own anything because that produces inequality of outcome, which it does by definition,

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then well, what's the state where no one can own anything?

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And the answer to that is it's a state of absolute abject poverty and privation.

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And so inequality and ownership are the same.

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Now inequality of ownership can become so exaggerated that it poses a danger to the state.

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And so one of the conundrums that is associated with the unequal distribution of talent

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and resources is the conundrum of how to deal with emergent extreme inequality.

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But I would also say, you know, and this is a bit of a side comment, that isn't a problem that's unique to capitalism in any manner.

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Any economic arrangement that's ever been made by human beings produces inequality.

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It also might be that inequality is the price we pay for wealth.

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And here's another way of looking at that.

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You know, when a new product enters the marketplace, it's often hyper expensive, right?

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And maybe using it is also associated with a certain degree of risk.

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And so you need an initial marketplace that's capable of paying the extremely high costs

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that are associated with the new technological artifact.

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Let's say, you know, remember how expensive, say, giant flat screen TVs were or cell phones earlier than that or computers or access to video.

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Of course, that only that was only used to be something that extremely deep pocketed networks could afford.

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So when some new product enters the market, you need the hyper -wealthy around to establish the initial market.

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Once enough of the new product has been distributed to the hyper -wealthy, then the merely exceedingly wealthy can afford it,

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and after that the wealthy, and after that the middle class, and eventually the poor.

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And in our society, the gap between when the hyper -wealthy have something and the poor have it is very, very short.

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But the poor have to put up with the fact

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that the hyper -wealthy get access first for them to get access ever.

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And that's another reason that we have to tolerate inequality. So yes,

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equality of opportunity is logical and rational from a social perspective because it allows everyone access to the maximum talent base.

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It's also necessary psychologically, because if people do have talent of one form or another, they pay a very desperate price for not utilizing it.

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So if women are somehow narrowed into a unidimensional fate,

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which I suppose would most likely be something like subjugation to marriage and child bearing and rearing, then they don't have that.

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They're constrained in their opportunity to let the talents that God has granted them, so to speak, make themselves manifest in the world.

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And that's very hard on people existentially, right?

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Because, you know, it's said that to whom much has been given, from them much will be required.

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Sorry, that's very awkward.

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From those to whom much has been given, much will be required.

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Right.

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And so you pay for your talents Bye.

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the additional responsibility that having that talent places on you.

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And then if you interfere with that as a consequence, say, of socially imposed prejudice, then you demoralize people psychologically.

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And that's a very, very bad idea.

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I mean, my sense, having counseled women, especially career -oriented women for decades,

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was that it's better for the child and the mother

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if the mother obviously focuses to the degree that it's possible on childcare, care, especially in the very early stages of child's life,

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especially in the early stages of infancy.

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But then as the child becomes more autonomous, and as the father's able to step in more on the child care side,

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it's very helpful for the woman to expand her domain of interest beyond the immediate family

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and to take advantage of her intellectual and creative conscientious gifts.

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And that's also good for the child, because then the child gets to see whether the child is a girl

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or a boy gets to see that the mother as an adult has important adult things to do.

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And man, you want to teach your kids that adults have important things to do because they're going to be adults.

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And if adults don't have anything important to do, then what the hell is the point growing up?

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You know, and it's also useful for the boys and the girls to see that the mother, the woman can be a mother and also have a life.

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And that's way better for the kids because it also stops the mother from being overwhelmingly obsessed with, let's say, the safety of her child and even the well -being of a child, right?

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I mean, you need a certain degree of benevolent detachment from your children

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so that they can have their own adventure and thrive and move forward.

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So those are some of the reasons why granting isn't granting.

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It's noting the inalienable rights of women as well as men

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to make their way forward in the world is a deep ethical necessity.

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And I would also say, you know, it's a necessity that has been made manifest in the Judeo -Christian tradition to a tremendous degree.

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Because one of the things that's true of the founding books of the Western tradition, derived even though as it was from a Middle Eastern tradition,

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is that women have the same existential value as men.

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And I mean, that's proclaimed in the opening documents of Genesis, that men and women are both made in the image of God

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and that they contribute equally to the unfolding revelation and maintenance of creation.

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And that's to be taken seriously.

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It's dead seriously, both on the right side, but also on the responsibility side.

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It's very difficult to have hope without a vision.

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And I mean that technically.

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So hope is a positive emotion.

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There's a neurobiological system that mediates positive emotion.

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And you feel positive emotion primarily when you're moving towards a goal.

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And so that means if you don't have a goal, you can't experience any positive emotion.

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And if you can't experience any positive emotion, you can't have any hope.

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So then the question is, well, how do you develop a positive vision so that hope can be restored again in your life?

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And I've put together something online that helps people with that, helps people step themselves through the process,

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let's say in the absence of professional therapeutic engagement.

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so the it's called a future authoring program and it's at self -authoring .com

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and the first thing it it asks you to do is

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to allow yourself to daydream essentially to to imagine to play

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a game in a way with with your own imagination the game is this is imagine that

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it would be okay existentially speaking if things worked out for you you have to allow yourself that privilege,

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the privilege to believe that any excess suffering on your part is unnecessary,

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that it would be acceptable for things to work out for you.

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Then you have to have the faith that that might be possible and that it would be a good thing.

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And then you have to ask yourself what it is that you would want if you could have what you wanted.

422

And so that's where the daydreaming comes in.

423

And you have to confer with yourself like you would confer with someone you don't know.

424

Because you don't know yourself that well.

425

So you might say, well, if I could have what I needed and wanted to put myself in a position that would be good for me,

426

good ethically in five years what would that look like and then you let your mind

427

envision that's the daydreaming to literally imagine allow yourself to imagine what it is that

428

you would want need if you could have what you wanted

429

and needed and so and then to write for 15 minutes about

430

that and then to write for 15 minutes about how miserable your life could be

431

if you let your bad habits take the upper hand then

432

that kind of gives you poles in your life right you

433

have something to aim at upward that's the hope inducing element of it you have something to avoid

434

that can help you get your anxiety

435

and even your anger on your side then

436

that program asks you to develop a more specified vision in seven different domains of your life like

437

if you could have a relationship what would it look like

438

if if your family was well constituted what would

439

that look like what friendships would you like to have what are your career goals and again you have to imagine that.

440

You have to imagine and write that down.

441

And you don't have to do it perfectly, and you don't have to be correct.

442

You just have to elucidate the vision.

443

And I would say in your situation too, you said you end an abusive relationship.

444

It was a very ugly breakup, and that you're in financial trouble.

445

It's also quite likely that there are memories pertaining to that breakup,

446

unresolved issues, and an unresolved issue is a problem you haven't solved, that are still plaguing you, and I would guess that partly because that's how you opened your question.

447

And so in the self -authoring suite, there's also a program called past authoring that helps you write out essentially an autobiography.

448

And often before you can move forward and envision what the future could be, you sort of have to know where you are, just like if you're trying to

449

navigate with a map you have to know where you're positioned

450

on the map before you can chart out your course to wherever you're going

451

and my suspicions are that your concept of your life also requires some updating

452

and you could do

453

that with the past authoring program now you don't have to

454

torture yourself with these programs you can hit at them 15 minutes a day

455

or 20 minutes a day

456

and as I said don't be afraid to do them badly

457

the important thing is to get a first draft down you're

458

not going to get a perfect you're not going to be able to write a perfect representation of your life

459

or your future in any case and

460

so there's no point getting perfectionistic about it

461

but you need a vision right and

462

that will give you something to work for and

463

that will restore hope technically speaking marx also assumes

464

that you can think about history as a binary class struggle with clear divisions between say the proletariat proletariat

465

and the bourgeoisie and that's actually a problem because it's not

466

so easy to make a firm division between who's exploiter and who's um exploitee let's say because it's not obvious

467

like in the case of small shareholders let's say whether

468

or not they happen to be part of the oppressed

469

or part of the oppressor this actually turned out to be a big problem in the russian revolution

470

and by big problem i mean tremendously big problem

471

because it turned out that you could fragment people into multiple identities

472

and that that's a fairly easy thing to do

473

and you could usually find some access along

474

which they were part of the oppressor class it might have been a consequence of their education

475

or it might have been a consequence of their of their of their uh of the wealth

476

that they strived to accumulate during their life

477

or it might have been a consequence of the fact

478

that they had parents or grandparents who were educated or rich

479

or that they were a member of the priesthood or

480

that they were socialists or anyways

481

that the listing of how it was possible for you to be bourgeois instead of proletariat grew immensely

482

and that was one of the reasons

483

that the red terror claimed all the victims that it claimed and so

484

that was a huge problem it was probably most exemplified by the demolition of the kulaks who were basically peasants Peasant farmers,

485

although effective ones in the Soviet Union who had managed to

486

raise themselves out of serfdom over a period of about 40 years and to gather some degree of material security about them.

487

And about 1 .8 million of them were exiled.

488

About 400 ,000 were killed and the net consequence of

489

that removal of their private property

490

because of their bourgeois status was arguably the death of 6 million Ukrainians in the famines of the 1930s.

491

And so the binary class struggle idea, that was a bad idea.

492

That was a very, very bad idea.

493

It's also bad in this way, and this is a real sleight of hand that Marx pulls off, is you have a binary class division,

494

proletariat and bourgeoisie, and you have an implicit idea

495

that all of the good is on the side of the proletariat

496

and all of the evil is on the side of the bourgeoisie.

497

And that's classic group identity thinking.

498

You know, it's one of the reasons I don't like identity politics is

499

because.. once you divide people into groups and pit them against one another, it's very easy to assume that all the evil in the world can be attributed to one group,

500

the hypothetical oppressors, and all the good to the other. And that...

501

Well, that's naive beyond comprehension,

502

because it's absolutely foolish to make the presumption that you can identify someone's moral worth with their economic standing.

503

And that actually turned out to be a real problem as well,

504

because Marx also came up with this idea,

505

which is a crazy idea as far as I can tell, that's a technical term, crazy idea, of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

506

And that's the next idea that I really stumbled across.

507

It was like, okay, so what's the problem?

508

The problem is the capitalists own everything, they own all the means of production, and they're oppressing everyone, and that would be all the workers.

509

And there's going to be a race to the bottom of

510

wages for the workers as the capitalists strive to extract more

511

and more value from the labor of the proletariat by competing with other capitalists to drive wages downward, which, by the way, didn't happen,

512

partly because wage earners can become scarce and

513

that actually drives the market value upward but the fact

514

that you assume a priori that all the evil can be attributed to the capitalists and all the good,

515

the bourgeoisie, and all the good could be attributed to the proletariat meant

516

that you could hypothesize that a dictatorship of the proletariat could come about

517

and that was the first stage in the communist revolution

518

and remember this is a call for revolution and not just revolution but bloody violent revolution and the overthrow of all,

519

overthrowing of all existent social structures.

520

Anyways, the problem with that, you see, is that because all the evil isn't divided

521

so easily up into oppressor and oppressed that

522

when you do establish a dictator of the proletariat to the degree

523

that you can do that which you actually can't

524

because it's technically impossible and an absurd thing to consider to begin with not least

525

because of the problem of centralization and you have to hypothesize

526

that you can take away all the property of the capitalists

527

you can replace the capitalist class with a minority of proletariats

528

how they're going to be chosen isn't exactly clear in the communist manifesto

529

that none of the people who are from the proletariat class are going to be corrupted by

530

that sudden access to power because they're well by definition good

531

so so then you have the good people who are running the world

532

and you also have them centralized so that they can make decision decisions

533

that are insanely complicated to make in fact impossibly complicated to make And so that's a failure conceptually on both dimensions,

534

because first of all, all the proletariat aren't going to be good, and when you put people in the same position as the evil capitalists,

535

especially if you believe that social pressure is one of the determining factors of human character, which the Marxists certainly believe,

536

then why wouldn't you assume that the proletariat would immediately become as or more corrupt than the capitalists?

537

Which is of course, I would say, exactly what happened every time this experiment was run

538

and then the next problem is well what makes you think

539

that you can take some system as complicated as like capitalist free market society

540

and centralize that and put decision -making power in the hands of a few people the mechanisms by

541

without specifying the mechanisms by

542

which you're going to choose them like What makes you think they're going to have the wisdom

543

or the ability to do what the capitalists were doing, unless you assume, as Marx did,

544

that all of the evil was with the capitalists and all the good was with the proletariats, and that nothing that capitalists did constituted valid labor, which is another thing that Marx assumed,

545

which is palpably absurd, because people who are, like maybe if you're a dissolute aristocrat from 1830 or earlier,

546

and you run a feudal estate and all you do is spend your time gambling and chasing prostitutes, well, then your labor value is zero.

547

But if you're running a business and it's a successful business, first of all, you're a bloody fool to exploit your workers because even if you're greedy as thin,

548

because you're not going to extract the maximum amount of labor out of them by doing that.

549

And the notion that you're adding no productive value as a manager rather than a capitalist, is it's absolutely absurd all it does is indicate

550

that you either know nothing whatsoever about how an actual business works

551

or you refuse to know anything about how an actual business works

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Why Practice Speaking with This Video?

Learning English with videos like this one offers a unique chance to practice real-world communication. Jordan Peterson’s dialogue is conversational yet complex, making it perfect for English speaking practice. The topics—like setting boundaries and navigating tough situations—are relatable, so you’ll learn to express ideas that matter. Plus, shadow speech (repeating lines aloud as you hear them) with this video helps you mimic natural rhythm and emphasis, a key part of sounding fluent. It’s a great way to move beyond memorization and into authentic interaction.

Grammar & Expressions in Context

Let’s break down useful structures from the video:

"maybe you're being oppressed at work": The passive voice ("being oppressed") highlights action over the doer, common in discussing difficult situations. Practice using it to describe experiences where the focus is on what’s happening to you.
"how's your resume look?": This casual question structure ("how's... look?") is everyday English. It’s shorter than "how does your resume look?" and sounds more natural in conversations. Try using it with other nouns: "how's the weather look today?"
"if it's if you are under the thumb of an emerging tyranny": The phrase "under the thumb of" is an idiom meaning "controlled by." Idioms add color to speech—learn this one to describe feeling powerless in a situation.

Common Pronunciation Traps

Improve English pronunciation by watching out for these tricky words:

"repugnant": The stress is on the second syllable: "re-PUG-nant." Many learners misplace stress on the first syllable, so listen closely to how it’s said in the video.
"dismal": The "s" sound is soft, like "z" ("DIZ-mal"), not a sharp "s." This is a common trap for words with "s" between vowels.
"tyranny": The final syllable is "nee," not "nee-ee." Say it as "TIR-uh-nee" to avoid over-pronouncing.

Practicing shadowing with this video helps you catch these nuances. A good shadowing site can even let you slow down the audio to master each sound.

Grammar in this video

The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:

Structure	In the video
Conditional sentences if + clause, will/would + verb — a condition and its result	if it wasn't that then it would be · if you tell me what would satisfy
Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now	i've had · haven't updated · they've hidden
Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it	being asked · being oppressed · be viewed
Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing	people who are · someone who can · people who might

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

Shadowing technique: read the full step-by-step guide →

Shadowing Practice: Jordan Peterson: "Why Nothing Should Ever Bother You" - Learn English Speaking with Video

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