Here are highlights on several lectures of Peterson.

We begin with highlights from the following compilation video:

Jordan Peterson 5hr Compilation Notes

Link https://youtu.be/W8e_dvbXoCQ

(A guide to the video in the description gives a good preview to types of information presented: Video Guide: 00:08 Sacrifice Current Impulses For Future Gratification 05:37 Don’t Strive For Happiness 09:56 King Of The Losers 12:06 Start Your Day By Cleaning Up Your Room 17:44 Your Story Means Something 29:33 Meaningful Experiences Matter 36:30 What To Aim For In Life? 59:12 The Danger in College 1:15:09 Dealing With Chaos 1:22:36 How To Interpret Dreams 1:30:13 Your Untapped Potential 1:39:41 The Buddha 1:52:12 Responsibility 2:03:37 Creative People 2:15:00 How To Listen To People 2:24:57 Relationship Advice 2:32:37 Potential Mate Traits 2:42:42 The Hero Myth 3:18:27 How To Motivate Yourself 3:26:14 Food Of The Gods 3:31:52 Religious Experience 3:38:10 Psilocybin 3:42:40 Mystical Experiences Through Psychedelics 4:09:39 Psilocybin and DMT 4:17:27 Nietzsche’s Beyond Good And Evil)

 

Attention is looking beyond what you know and is greater than rationality. Rationality just makes a box and says this is the way it is, there’s nothing else. The Egyptian eye of Horus is about attention being paramount.

If you are socially anxious, pay really close attention to who you’re talking to. The thoughts that make you anxious will be suppressed. If you want to help your children, they want attention.

The speaker must pay attention to the audience and make a dynamic conversation. A speaker shouldn’t be fidgeting with notes. The hearer and the speaker need to do the dance together, including similar body language.

Jung said beware of wisdom you did not earn.

Jung said we are always in a state of dreaming but when we are conscious the pressure of reality phases out the dream. Jung trained himself to daydream and he would interview characters of his daydreaming and attributed that to a lot of his genius.

Emotions track progress toward goals.

Note: When you aren’t making progress toward your goals, you will become frustrated. Don’t overly focus on what others are doing, focus on doing your part, then you’ll have the peace to govern with sensibility. And don’t think you can totally control others, that better not be your goal, or you’ll always be frustrated that you aren’t reaching that goal.

A huge part of how we regulate our emotions is simply by not going where we shouldn’t go.

Note: The Holy Ghost will not support you in sin. Don’t expect good mental health if you’re living a sinful life.

Religion isn’t about the fear of death, it’s about being able to move forward despite death, enabling us to decrease the chaos.

The Knights looking for the Holy Grail needed it but had no clue where to look for it so they went to what they feared most. Indeed, the gateway to what we need to discover is in what we most fear.

Note: This theme is in the Star Wars movie, Luke feels a pressing need to confront Vader, little does he know it’s where he will learn something that’ll matter to him greatly, the identity of his father, and that will helpl unfold his destiny before his eyes. The theme continues in many stories. Batman’s cave. Don Quijote’s cave of Montesinos.

A game is fun when you’re a player, not knowing all that’ll happen. Dreams are a game between your conscious and unconscious.

What you dream about is influenced by smells in your room.

You don’t go fighting dragons that aren’t in your way.

Jung brilliantly answering questions most can’t even understand. He was trained in several classical languages and was familiar with much more than what our current educations teach us.

Artists and entrepreneurs are the same people.

Liberals start communities. Conservatives run them. (Note: Here Peterson is referring to the creative side, and the structure side.)

The reason that someone else has a different political view than you is not because they’re stupid and uninformed, it’s because they are a different type of person.

Note: This is true, but ultimately there can be unity among different types of people, finding a similar vision, embracing a similar code. And we must admit that some things are simply wrong, like abortion and sodomy.

Lawyers tend to not be creative; they are bound by precedent and rules.

Creative people get really bored when you tell them to just run something that someone else created.

You can’t really evaluate a creative person because they either stand outside the structure or just create their own structure.

The exchange of truth is curative and civilizations are built on this idea.

Every relationship is therapeutic. If it’s not therapeutic, then it’s not a relationship; It’s some kind of twisted dominance hierarchy, a tyrant slave relationship where you’re trying to kill each other.

When you have a conversation with someone, if you really listen, they’ll tell you all kinds of bizarre things.

Marriage is about handcuffing yourself to someone then telling them the truth about yourself so they can’t run away. Then you deal with that truth and make something out of it. Carl Jung therefore says that marriage should be an unbreakable oath.

The ruler of your marriage is your vow to truth, your vow to logos, to ‘the word’ to tell each other the truth.

Note: The symbol of covenant with Christ comes in here, Christ is the word, the truth, the light. To covenant with truth is to give your all, with no deception, and that’s the only kind of relationship that will last.

Marriage is about a third of your life. Children are about a third of your life. Everything else is about a third. To miss out on marriage and children is a massive mistake.

Who you choose to marry is about finding someone you can trust.

If there’s a woman in her mid-20s who’s not willing to admit that she wants to have children, there’s something seriously psychologically wrong with her, unless there’s some serious reason why she shouldn’t.

70% of divorces are initiated by women. This is because men are impossible to get along with. It’s also because women are too sensitive.

The negative emotionality of women causes them to consistently rate their performance lower than their boss would rate their performance. But men rate their performance at the same level or higher than what their boss would rate their performance.

The sleeping beauty story is about being trapped by the dark side of the female, and let free by the light side of the female. The man wakes the slumbering feminine to activate the light side. The evil feminine turns into a dragon.

Freud thought that man was the failed hero story. Jung thought that man was the successful hero story. Freud was therefore anti-religious, and Jung very religious.

See the book The Origins and History of Consciousness, it’s the best intro to the Jung world.

Kids pay parents by bringing magic and wonder into life. Adults have seen it already but the child reminds them of it.

The parent should make a kid confident and creative so that when the kid makes mistakes he is not paralyzed by it.

People too obsessed with order and stability won’t be creative, they won’t take risks.

Responsibility is the counterculture. When men learn that they can actually become responsible they’re thrilled by the idea.

Note: Boys really do want to grow up, not to be forever coddled. They want to be heroes, not victims. They want the respect that comes from true manhood.

Intellect and aesthetics is where the artists come out. These are the people who are an open-type personality; they’re interested in ideas.

A parent should raise a kid to be curious enough to want to go and break the rules. Teenagers who never break any rules whatsoever don’t do very well. You don’t want them so timid that they never make a move and never make a mistake.

Note: We want kids to be adventurous and brave. It’s not that we want them to go sin, we want them to go try their best and not be overly concerned when that doesn’t look perfect, because it won’t. We want them to solve puzzles without being afraid of putting a piece in the wrong place now and then. In the course of doing ones best, mistakes will be made, that’s part of the learning process everyone goes through.

Note: Religion is very helpful in that it gives away some of the biggest secrets to live – there are some basic rules that really should be followed along the way. There are some things in which you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Some paths are better left untrod. So we teach them correct principles, and they grow up to govern themselves.

Note: This doesn’t mean a hands-off approach to parenting; it is in adulthood that full agency comes into play. Parents are responsible for their children, a most solemn duty. Then when the training from the parents is complete, the child is of age, and goes out to apply what he was taught, and has experiences that teach him the wisdom of his parents, which wisdom he will now own for himself, and pass on to his children in turn.

Note: See The Collapse of Parenting by Dr. Leonard Sax to expel the myth that responsible adults come from permissive households.

If you give someone everything they want, a pure utopia, the first thing they do is try to get away from it. You make garden of Eden but a little of the world gets in like a snake and corrupts things.

We are oriented toward the future. We always keep going even if we already have what we want.

Buddha’s father was visited by an Angel who said he will either become a great king or a great spiritual leader. His father wanted him to be the great king. He exposed him to everything that’s good in the world, then Buddha wanted out. So, his father, knowing that his son would need to get out either by permission or by climbing over the wall, prepared a nice little route for a chariot to take him around where everything was prepared nicely. All the beautiful women were brought out; all the old men were told to go away. It’s similar to how when the Olympics were in China they spray painted the grass green and told all the homeless people to go away. But while Buddha was out, an old man came along, and Buddha was exposed. He had this encounter with death similar to Adam and Eve.

Identifying with the spirit rather than the body generates order out of chaos.

Often women succeed in college because they’re more agreeable when someone sets out a path to success for them. They do it rather than rebelling against it. All of the really agreeable people are women, and all of the really disagreeable people are men.

You can’t have a conversation about rights without having a conversation about responsibility because your rights are my responsibility. Responsibility is what makes life meaningful and tolerable. We don’t want to be useless.

The purpose of mythological stories is to help people understand life, to make a connection to what was formerly not understandable.

Note: This is why Tolkien and others have insisted on the importance of fairy stories. They aren’t just for brainless amusement – at least the good ones aren’t. One must seek learning from the best books, even in the field of fiction. There are great writers of fiction who teach true principles, and poor writers of fiction who merely entertain with nonsense. No, it isn’t enough to just ‘get the kid to read,’ unless you think he might as well be reading Mein Kampf or Mao’s little red book. And of course, if all a person gets is fiction, he will have no basis to judge that fiction on or to apply it to, and will always be lost.

The alternative to responsibility is impulsive low-class pleasure.

Women know their responsibility; it’s to have children and raise them to maturity. But men have to figure out what their responsibility is. It’s to provide, but then they need to figure out how.

The soul of The Simpsons is that even though Homer is a bumbling idiot, he is committed to taking care of his family, to being the provider, and is devastated by his inabilities to do this. (Note: That’s right, Homer as father figure is why the story is relatable, but it’s still a trashy show to be avoided.)

People will carry a heavy load if they get to choose what the load is. (Note: Freedom works better than anything!)

All you do is terrifying because of all the people you know it impacts. So all that you aren’t and all that you are is much more important than you would realize at first.

Note: I remember a girl whose brother commit suicide. She said she too had thought of doing this, but decided against it after seeing all the hurt that ensued after her brother’s death upon those that loved him.

Some people chose to be a nihilist because there’s no responsibility, and they think that makes it worth it despite the constant suffering.

Psychoanalysts like Jung have said when you dream you’re thinking automatically. There’s something inside you that is thinking. The dream is in narrative form, similar to myth.

The dream is the birthplace of thought, just like how the artist is the birthplace of culture. Freud said the dream is repression trying to sneak its way into your consciousness. Jung said no, the dream is doing the best it can to tell you something obvious.

A thought is a fantasy about what might be.

Since the year 2000 we have been lifting people out of poverty and hooking them up to the electric grid faster than at any period of time in the history of the world. (Note: Capitalism has brought more people out of poverty than any other system.)

What if you did everything you knew you should do for 10 years. People report around 4 to 6 hours of wasted time a day, around 25 hours a week. When you get really efficient, your productivity goes off the charts.

Note: People say ‘where do you get the time?’ the answer is in developing a taste for useful hobbies and decreasing the less useful ones. Every person ever (especially in America) has free time. Some seasons have more of it than others, and there are ways to use your time now to free up time later by various investments, be that educational, financial, etc. Look at the things you spend your time doing and ask if you really have to do those things. Edison famously said that his success is in focusing on one thing, not being split between doing many things. A big part of the test of life is to see what we will do with limited time and resources – what we want most will shine through and rise above the rest. Fortunately life is full of opportunities to turn the corner and improve in ways that are meaningful to us.

See Carl Jung’s book Symbols of Transformation. It’s similar to Peterson’s book of Maps for Meaning.

Whatever dreams are, they are obviously not random.

Freud says dreams are basically fulfillments of wishes. Jung says otherwise.

When you lose a job or something else that resets you, it’s like going back to the beginning of the cosmos and it’s really hard to handle. Sometimes getting fired is a big relief because you hated that job in the first place. If you’re doing something for a job that you didn’t really want to do, it’s not really your thing, it’s your fault because you didn’t stand up for yourself and do what you wanted. Sometimes being fired is the best thing that can happen to a person. Sometimes you just have to accept your failure and go try something new. Getting fired can be better than a slow torturous death (in a job you hate).

The purpose of a nation is not just to have a nation; the purpose is to make the people transcendent. Thus we see that government belongs to the people. (Note: Not people belonging to the government as Obama said.)

Sacrificing animals seems crazy but it was evidence that they were seriously committed to something. We don’t have that type of commitment anymore. Abraham was always close to God because he was always sacrificing for God.

The dragon is the symbol of trials in life, and all we can handle now is little dragons. Slay them, then maybe you’ll be ready for something bigger. The nature of life is that when you chop one head off of a dragon, two more grow. Life’s challenges are never-ending. We learn to live in a state of constant trials. Life is (inherently) tragic.

Stop being evil. That’s a good contribution to the world

Pinocchio’s father wants him to have a voice and be a good son. He wishes on a star, which is light in face of darkness. Son goes out and (literally) becomes a jackass, is taught at a carnival by goons, and finally comes home to see his father isn’t there. You can’t go back to childhood. It’s gone. You must stand on your own now.

Note: It’s a little different than the message of the prodigal son, but similar. At some point you have to wake up to the fact that your life isn’t going the way it should and walk away from a broken lifestyle. But that doesn’t mean that the path forward will be easy. There’s a party for the returning prodigal, but a kingdom for the faithful son. The prodigal has lost out on valuable training and experience, and he isn’t ready for what the faithful brother is. Thankfully, the plan of God is such that a savior (as in the older faithful brother) is provided, and whenever we wish, we can snap out of our careless ways, and begin the path toward the glory of responsible living. Our part is to heed the warnings of prophets and sages, to not procrastinate the day of our repentance, lest the time come when we no longer believe in or desire the path of duty and all the blessings it brings.

Colleges are the circus where they teach students to be jackasses who brey and chant soulless things at protests. Protesting is usually bogus. It’s you saying you’re better than others, but really you’re a huge part of the problem. Professors should stop telling kids that protesting is how they change the world.

Peter Pan doesn’t want to grow up. Hook is his role model adult. Croc, with time, got his hand. Time gets us all. It’s already got part of him. Peter can’t have real relationship with a real girl, Wendy, so he has a fake fairy relationship which is basically porn. True wisdom is leaving childhood, then returning with maturity.

Sacrifice and conviction are the same thing.

Peterson advocates having ‘a clean room.’ A clean room means you need order for what you do in life. There’s clothes for your job, you need a place to put that.

Quit listening to people who are telling you about all the rights you have. You need to learn about the responsibilities you have.

If you live in a peaceful place you should thank your lucky stars every minute of every day, because human nature and the nature of societies is to be in utter chaos.

Reading great books is the way to become great and make the change you want in the world.

Note: Clearly action is more important than belief, but you won’t act if you don’t first believe. Faith, hope, and charity. Discover you can, believe you can, then go make it happen. So no, life isn’t just about reading the Bible 7 hours a day (though that can be a good thing sometimes), it’s about living the kind of life that scriptures endorse.

It’s nonsense to come to a university for a degree. You go there to improve yourself. You must pursue your highest skill, and articulate speech is one of those skills.

Everyone’s bailing out of the humanities because they’ve become so corrupt.

Most of the people rebelling against the ruling class are really just babies. The reason they’re not rich yet is because they’re young. It takes time to accumulate wealth. The top 10% that everybody hates are all old people because it takes time.

Note: The scam is when we think we can get something for nothing. The quick fix. The instant upload of character as happens in the fictional story of the Matrix. One could say that Lucifer became the Devil because he wanted the shortcut to power, rather than gaining power the right way, namely by service and obedience to eternal laws.

There’s nothing better for an individual and for a society than to learn how to be educated – to learn to be articulate. But parents these days may as well send their kid to a trade school because they’re not teaching that at the University, they’re just teaching oppression and helplessness. If you make yourself articulate at school you won’t have to worry about what you do after school because you’ll be so gifted that everyone will be coming to you with promising opportunities. Because successful people who aren’t greedy, they want nothing more to find than to find young people who have the capacity to be great and to give them opportunities to master over and over. Articulated speech is the highest faculty of the human being.

Note: Think of the My Fair Lady movie, where the impoverished scruffy street lady is taken in by a professor who teaches her proper English, and how that one skill opens her life up to endless possibilities. It’s true that an articulate person shows that they are capable of learning and mastering any task. The employer doesn’t look for someone who is a copy of himself, he looks for someone who can grow, and the best sign of that is articulation, being able to order one’s ideas and communicate them effectively. Articulation doesn’t come by accident, but by careful training.

Burdening yourself with great responsibility that you can barely stand will make you stronger. It’ll make it so you don’t have to ask ‘what should I do’ – the path will become self-evident.

Note: Those who have worked the hardest have the clearest sight about which direction to go.

Activists externalize the blame. They say the evil is always elsewhere. It’s too easy. If they really wanted to change the world, they should work on those private victories. Activists are often too public and self-congratulatory.

Note: Don’t wait for the system, take personal action. And that usually doesn’t mean protesting.

He is not against video games, but he does say you’re a loser, if you’re just sitting around playing video games, that’s not really living life and winning at life.

Before you think that you’re fit to change the world you should have some credentials, some success. Otherwise, people come up with non-working idiotic interventions.

Note: Karl Marx was a loser who never worked and who neglected his family. His ideas have brought extreme suffering on a large scale.

If your significant other is malicious and selfish, you were probably attracted them to you because you’re the same way.

 

Jordan Peterson – best comebacks:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZ0ln8gKvDI

The politically correct left brings race into everything.

When people call you names, don’t be hurt like a victim, be appalled.

The left occupies (controls) the social sciences.

 

7 times Jordan Peterson went unhinged genius:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JE5hXeJNRV4

The demonized ‘Kulaks’ in Soviet Union were productive farmers. They were virtually all killed raped and robbed by the collectivists who said the farmers were evil because they had success.

The idea of collectively held guilt is very dangerous. People really looking for trouble push that idea.

Humanities in colleges today are Marxist; they write papers and sell them to publishers and the publishers sell to the universities who are forced to buy them.

Women’s studies, ethnics studies, sociology, social work, education, anthropology, these are all Marxist in today’s universities. They’re not interested in education but indoctrination.

Human beings are hard on the earth, but the earth is hard on us too; don’t say having children is bad on the earth. People call us raping patriarchal destroyers of the world, this is ridiculous.

‘Human Rights Tribunals’ don’t assume individual innocence. They change the rules as they see fit. They are Marxist. They set up a parallel law system. They force new definitions of sexual harassment, making all awkward interactions into violence, leading to more accusations of rape. We have a legal system already. The Human Rights Tribunals are unacceptable.

Post-modernists want to stop you from becoming a hero, from making things better.

Note: They don’t believe the hero can exist because they themselves aren’t one. They spend their time pointing out the errors in others rather than doing great things themselves. The strange anti-hero movement is all at once anti-freedom and anti-Christ. Remember, the spirit of freedom is the spirit of Christ (2 Cor. 3:17, James 1:25, Rom. 8:21, Alma 61:15, 3 Ne. 21:4).

Why aren’t feminists constantly protesting Saudi Arabia where women are treated so bad? They must be thinking ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend.’ They must be longing for masculinity. The more you scream for equality, the more your conscious is going to admire dominance.

 

Marxism is ignorant of the Pareto principle | Jordan Peterson & Bret Weinstein:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0iL0ixoZYo

This lecture speaks of economic physicists who use the same math models to predict molecule disbursement as to predict money disbursement in a society.

Note: Wealth redistribution is against the laws of nature. Redistribute the wealth, and the wealth dies. Don’t kill the tide that lifts all boats! Don’t slay the goose that lays the golden eggs, even if that goose wants to keep a few eggs for itself!

A small handful are successful. Socialism won’t change that. Of 100 musicians, 10 will have success, and of their 1000 songs each, 30 of all of them will be heard often. This is a natural principle. Some call it the Matthew principle – that to those who have, more will be given, and to who don’t have, it will be taken away.

Note: This is why we don’t fret about who has what. Rather, we get active in making the most of ourselves. The victim mentality is the ultimate loser mentality. So your life is hard – what are you going to do about it?

 

Jordan Peterson debate on the gender pay gap, campus protests and postmodernism:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMcjxSThD54

Women who have been hurt will settle for a weak man because the woman can dominate in that relationship. This is the making of a bad relationship.

Young men are desperate for the message that they should be strong and dominant.

Multivariate analysis shows that the pay gap is not due to male vs female. The pay gap is not because of gender.

Note: Warren Farrel and Phyllis Schlafly have great work on the supposed pay gap.

Agreeable people get paid less for the same job that unagreeable people work for. Women are more agreeable than men. Give women assertiveness training on pushing and competing for higher wages, this will lead to 3x wage increase in a year’s time.

If you leave people alone to make their own choices, women usually chose nursing, and men usually chose engineering.

If women are going to compete against men in the workplace, they must take upon them masculine traits, like negotiating, not being easily pushed around, tough, conscientious, agreeableness.

Women make 80% of consumer decisions, they control the market.

Feminine traits don’t predict success in the workplace, intelligence does. This doesn’t mean women are less intelligent, the intelligence of men and women are identical. It’s just that men are more industrious and women are more organized. There is no evidence that caring and compassion predict success in the workplace.

To be able to think you have to risk being offensive. Freedom of speech is more important than not offending people.

Radical left idioms are authoritarian; the philosophies guiding the utterances of trans activists is the same philosophy that led the Soviet Union and Mou’s China; it’s about identity politics, belonging to a group being more important than individual identity.

It is inevitable that humans will organize their societies like animals. Our biological nature is like a game of chess – we can’t break the rules of the game, but there’s a lot we can do within the parameters of the game.

In the past year, Peterson received 25,000 letters from people who say he has brought them out of despair.

 

Additional Resources:

Jordan Peterson: Why not just be childless and happy? (Link)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Z6k81PNySM

Note: Peterson shows that the idea of being ‘childless and happy’ is fake.