[b]Jordan B. Peterson
I don’t think that you have any insight whatsoever into your capacity for good until you have some well-developed insight into your capacity for evil.[/b]
How about the other way around? And whose rendition of one or the other?
What is your friend: the things you know, or the things you don’t know. First of all, there’s a lot more things you don’t know. And second, the things you don’t know is the birthplace of all your new knowledge! So if you make the things you don’t know your friend, rather than the things you know, well then you’re always on a quest in a sense. You’re always looking for new information in the off chance that somebody who doesn’t agree with you will tell you something you couldn’t have figured out on your own! It’s a completely different way of looking at the world. It’s the antithesis of opinionated.
In, for example, the either/or world.
[b]If you can’t understand why someone is doing something, look at the consequences of their actions, whatever they might be, and then infer the motivations from their consequences.
For example if someone is making everyone around them miserable and you’d like to know why, their motive may simply be to make everyone around them miserable including themselves.[/b]
Or even not including themselves.
If you fulfill your obligations everyday you don’t need to worry about the future.
Let’s just say this sounds more profound than it probably is.
Women select men. That makes them nature, because nature is what selects. And you can say “Well it’s only symbolic that women are nature”, it’s like no, it’s not just symbolic. The woman is the gatekeeper to reproductive success. And you can’t get more like nature than that, in fact it’s the very definition of nature.
I know: Let’s reconcile this with the way the world actually is.
You cannot be protected from the things that frighten you and hurt you, but if you identify with the part of your being that is responsible for transformation, then you are always the equal, or more than the equal of the things that frighten you.
Let’s file this one under, “things that shrinks say”.