I'm interested in what motivates individuals to participate in atrocious acts to support their ideological identification.
Interpretation
This quote explores the factors that lead people to commit extreme actions based on their beliefs.
Jordan Peterson's quote delves into the complex motivations that drive individuals to engage in harmful or violent acts in the name of their ideologies. It suggests a need to understand the psychological and social influences that can transform ordinary people into participants of extreme behavior, raising important questions about morality, identity, and the impact of belief systems on human actions.
In practice
During a philosophical discussion on the ethics of activism.
Part of the reason there's an injunction to the truth, for example, is that if you're in a circumstance of extreme uncertainty, your best weapon, let's say, or your best tool or your best defense is the truth, because it keeps things simpler.
I don't tell people, 'You're okay the way that you are.' That's not the right story. The right story is, 'You're way less than you could be.'
Once someone has spent enough time cultivating bad habits and biding their time, they are much diminished. Much of what they could have been has dissipated.
If you learn a martial art, you learn to be dangerous, but simultaneously, you learn to control it.
Life is tragic. You are tiny and flawed and ignorant and weak, and everything else is huge, complex, and overwhelming.
Music has an intrinsic meaning, which has always been mysterious to me.
The mere suggestion that not speaking for a day can give you an appreciation of the social isolation that comes with the experience of disability, particularly those whose impairments prohibit them from communicating verbally, is insensitive at best.
We have to ask ourselves, 'What kind of world is it where a baby-food executive substitutes artificial flavoring and sugar for apple juice? What kind of businesses have we created when we even lie to infants?'
[L]iberty must at all hazards be supported. We have a right to it, derived from our Maker. But if we had not, our fathers have earned and bought it for us, at the expense of their ease, their estates, their pleasure, and their blood.
I have suffered from being misunderstood, but I would have suffered a hell of a lot more if I had been understood.
Circumstances do not make the man, they reveal him.
I don't want other people to decide who I am. I want to decide that for myself. I want to avoid becoming too styled and too 'done' and too generic. You see people as they go through their career, and they just become more and more like everyone else.
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