You can't have a value structure without a hierarchy. They're the same thing because a value structure means one thing takes precedence over another.
Interpretation
Values are prioritized in a hierarchical structure, indicating that some values are more important than others.
In this quote, Jordan Peterson emphasizes that values are not merely a collection of ideas or beliefs; they are organized in a hierarchy. This hierarchy implies that certain values will take precedence over others, influencing decision-making and behavior. Recognizing this structure is crucial for understanding how individuals prioritize their goals and aspirations.
In practice
This quote can be used in a leadership workshop to discuss the importance of prioritizing values in decision-making.
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.
Crawling at your feet,' said the Gnat (Alice drew her feet back in some alarm), `you may observe a Bread-and-Butterfly. Its wings are thin slices of Bread-and-butter, its body is a crust, and its head is a lump of sugar.' And what does IT live on?' Weak tea with cream in it.' A new difficulty came into Alice's head. `Supposing it couldn't find any?' she suggested. Then it would die, of course.' But that must happen very often,' Alice remarked thoughtfully. It always happens,' said the Gnat.
It does me good to write a letter which is not a response to a demand, a gratuitous letter, so to speak, which has accumulated in me like the waters of a reservoir.
You wanted to kill your father in order to be your father yourself. Now you are your father, but a dead father.
I used to love to untangle chains when I was a child. I had thin, busy fingers, and I never gave up. Perhaps there was a psychiatric component to my concentration but like much of my psychic damage, this worked to everyone's advantage.
The relations between rhetoric and ethics are disturbing: the ease with which language can be twisted is worrisome, and the fact that our minds accept these perverse games so docilely is no less cause for concern.
I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for contradictions.
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