Don’t Confuse Weakness With Moral Virtue – Jordan Peterson | Life Advice

it's very helpful for people to hear that they should make themselves competent and dangerous and take the proper place in the world competent and dangerous why dangerous because it's the alternative to being weak and weak is not good the people who shoot up the high schools they're weak they're weak how is it good to be dangerous because it makes you formidable and life is a very difficult process and it's not for you're not prepared for it unless unless you have the capacity for to be dangerous that doesn't mean that you should be cruel it doesn't mean any of that there's a statement in the New Testament the meek shall inherit the Earth but the meek isn't well translated it means something more like those who have swords and know how to use them but keep them sheathed will inherit the world that's a way better way of thinking about it you have to be powerful and formidable and then peaceful in that order and that's not the same as being naive and weak and harmless which is what young men are being encouraged to be it's like that's a very bad idea it's a very bad idea because naive weak and harmless means that you can't withstand the tragedies of life you can't bear any responsibility you'll end up bitter and when you get bitter then you get dangerous but one thing I'm not getting there's a big difference between letting people do something for themselves and saying men should be dangerous by dangerous that implies I should be ready to threaten someone to hurt somebody no you should be capable of it but that doesn't mean you should use it there's nothing to you otherwise like if you're not a formidable Force there's not there's no morality in your self-control if you're incapable of violence not being violent isn't a virtue people who teach martial arts know this full well right if you learn a martial art you learn to be dangerous but simultaneously you learn to control it both of those come together and the combination of that capacity for danger and the capacity for control is what brings about the virtue otherwise you confuse weakness with with moral virtue I'm harmless therefore I'm good it's like no that isn't how it works that isn't how it works at all if you're harmless you're just weak and if you're weak you're not going to be good you can't be because it takes strength to be good it's very difficult to be good you might be some 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 then 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 part 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 characterized 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 the 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 is 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 l