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.
Thus so wretched is man that he would weary even without any cause for weariness... and so frivolous is he that, though full of a thousand reasons for weariness, the least thing, such as playing billiards or hitting a ball, is sufficient enough to amuse him.
Most gods throw dice, but Fate plays chess, and you don't find out til too late that he's been playing with two queens all along.
The fact of the matter is that the 'real world' is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group.
I am often mad, but I would hate to be nothing but mad: and I think I would lose what little value I may have as a writer if I were to refuse, as a matter of principle, to accept the warming rays of the sun, and to report them, whenever, and if ever, they
People who are lying are, understandably, more worried about being believed, so they work harder - too hard, as it were - at being believable.
Each generation has its own rendezvous with the land, for despite our fee titles and claims of ownership, we are all brief tenants on this planet. By choice, or by default, we will carve out a land legacy for our heirs.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.