And this is an amazing thing: the answer is already implicit in Genesis 1: to embody the Image of God – to speak out of chaos the Being that is Good – but to do so consciously, of our own free choice.
You may come to ask yourself, “What should I do today?” in a manner that means “How could I use my time to make things better, instead of worse?
You are not simply your own possession to torture and mistreat.
Taking the easy way out or telling the truth – those are not merely two different choices. They are different pathways through life. They are utterly different ways of existing.
I do not understand why our society is providing public funding to institutions and educators whose stated, conscious and explicit aim is the demolition of the culture that supports them. Such people have a perfect right to their opinions and actions, if they remain lawful. But they have no reasonable claim to public funding.
Marijuana isn’t bad for everyone any more than alcohol is bad for everyone. Sometimes it even appears to improve people.
It is the primary duty of parents to make their children socially desirable. That will provide the child with opportunity, self-regard, and security. It’s more important even than fostering individual identity.
To stand up straight with your shoulders back is to accept the terrible responsibility of life, with eyes wide open. It means deciding to voluntarily transform the chaos of potential into the realities of habitable order.
The idea that you can target an ethnic group with a collective crime, regardless of the specific innocence or guilt of the constituent elements of that group – there is absolutely nothing that’s more racist than that.
Don’t blame capitalism, the radical left, or the iniquity of your enemies. Don’t reorganize the state until you have ordered your own experience. Have some humility. If you cannot bring peace to your household, how dare you try to rule a city?
But this Peterson, though erudite, didn’t come across as a pedant.
What if there are hundreds of lobsters, all trying to make a living and raise a family, in the same crowded patch of sand and refuse? Other creatures have this problem, too. When songbirds come north in the spring, for example, they engage in ferocious territorial disputes. The songs they sing, so peaceful and beautiful to human ears, are siren calls and cries of domination. A brilliantly musical bird is a small warrior proclaiming his sovereignty.
Every game has rules... The first of these rules is that the game is important. If it wasn’t important, you wouldn’t be playing it.
To suffer terribly and to know yourself as the cause? That is hell. And once in hell it is very easy to curse being itself and no wonder. But it’s not justifiable and that’s why the king of the damned is a poor judge of being.
When existence reveals itself as existentially intolerable, thinking collapses in on itself. In such situations – in the depths – it’s noticing, not thinking, that does the trick.
Don’t reorganize the state until you have ordered your own experience.
When you have something to say, silence is a lie – and tyranny feeds on lies.
Hating life, despising life – even for the genuine pain that life inflicts – merely serves to make life itself worse, unbearably worse. There is no genuine protest in that. There is no goodness in that, only the desire to produce suffering, for the sake of suffering. That is the very essence of evil. People who come to that kind of thinking are one step from total mayhem.
Ideologies are substitutes for true knowledge, and ideologues are always dangerous when they come to power, because a simple-minded I-know-it-all approach is no match for the complexity of existence. Furthermore, when their social contraptions fail to fly, ideologues blame not themselves but all who see through the simplifications.
Are you so sure the person crying out to be saved has not decided a thousand times to accept his lot of pointless and worsening suffering, simply because it is easier than shouldering any true responsibility? Are you enabling a delusion? Is it possible that your contempt would be more salutary than your pity?