"Integrating the Monster Within You" Jordan Peterson Motivation (FEB21)

Nietzsche's most trenchant critiques of traditional morality is that most of what passes for morality, isn't morality - it’s just cowardice. It's not that I'm a good person and I don't hurt you. It's that I'm afraid to hurt you. And because ‘I don't want to admit that I'm afraid to hurt you’, then I say ‘I'm moral’, because then I can mask my essential fear and cowardice in a guise of morality. And that happens for more often than you would think because harmless and moral are by no means the same thing.

The hyper-simplified morality stops you from tapping into deeper recesses of your psyche and it's partly [due to] primal forces. It's not surprising that you don't want to have anything to do with that; that you stay away from situations where they might make themselves manifest. But the problem is, by denying the worst in yourself in that manner, by suppressing it, you preclude the possibility of the best, because no one can be a good person without integrating their capacity for aggression. Because without that capacity for aggression, you cannot say no. Because saying no means, if you really say it, there isn't anything that you can do to make me change my mind or conversely it means I will play for higher stakes than you will. And unless you've got your aggression integrated there isn't a chance you can say that. And if you did, not one would take you seriously, because they'd know it was just a show.

One of the most useful things that Jung did was to work on this idea of the integration of the shadow, because he was really interested in the idea of evil. Especially trying to parcel out what happened in Nazi Germany and during WWII.  What do you do with the part of you that's aggressive and potentially malevolent? Do you just crush it? That’s the superego response in some sense. Do you just put it behind you, so to speak? Is that a possibility, or do you admit to its existence and bring it into the game?  For Freud, in some sense, morality was the superego clamping down on the Id and they were fundamentally opposed.

Both Jung and Piaget had a different idea - you invite the bad guys out to play to learn discipline aggression which gives you access to all sorts of energy you wouldn't otherwise have.

And then with regards to sexuality, it's like well, untrammeled promiscuity doesn't constitute a virtue, but neither does unavoidable virginity.  I think that's worst because it also masks itself with virtue. You should be able to do things that you wouldn't do. That's the definition of a genuinely moral person. They could do it, but they don't.

Part of the reason that people go watch antiheroes and villains is because there's a part of them crying out for the incorporation of the monster within them which gives them strength of character and self-respect because it's impossible to respect yourself until you grow teeth. And if you grow teeth, you realize that you're somewhat dangerous 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. 

Like in martial arts - they teach you not to be a fighter but to be peaceful and awake to avoid fights. But if you have to fight and you're a competent fighter that actually decreases the chance 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 a reasonable show of confidence, which is 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 means 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 a matter of facing the thing you least want to face.

So, you have to decide, are your order, are you chaos, are you the process that mediates between them? If you're the process that mediates between them, you are the thing that transforms. And that's the right attitude for a human being because that's what we are. We're the thing that voluntarily confronts chaos and transforms. That's what we are.

And so, for better or worse, you know that’s our deepest biological essence you might say. And so, you can let things go if you know that there's more growth to come.