You Need To Know Where You Are
You Need To Know Where You Are
by Jordan Peterson
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRMsMM4Clro
It’s a barebone story. It’s a barebone conceptual framework. It’s a barebone “Dasein,” to speak in Heideggerian terms. It’s the barebones world that you live in. You’re always in one of these worlds. There’s no getting out of them. You can move from one to another, but you’re always in a world like this.
And so, this is the world that you’re in. You’re somewhere, ‘cause you have to be somewhere. Now, you might not know where that is. Which means that the somewhere that you are is chaotic. In which case, you need to go over your past, in great detail, and figure out where you are. It’s like you’re lost. You’re lost, and the problem with being lost is: when you’re lost, you don’t know where to go, and the problem with not knowing where to go, is: there’s a million places that you could go, and a million places is too many places for you to go, without dying. So, being lost is not good. So you need to know where you are.
One of the things that we built online, my partners and I, is this program called “Past Authoring”, that helps people lay out, the—the narrative of their past, to break their life down into six stages—“epochs”, we call them, and then to identify the emotionally significant moments in each epoch, and to write them out: what happened negatively, what happened positively. What the consequences were, what you derived from it, perhaps what you could have done differently, perhaps what you learned from it, all of that. So that you can narrow in, zero in, on determining precisely where it is that you are right now.
And people are often loathed to do that, ‘cause they actually don’t wanna know. ‘Cause they’d rather be spread out, in a sort of half-blind manner, in the fog, hoping that the place that they’re at is better than it really is, and deluding themselves by remaining vague, than to figure out: “I’m right here, right now, with these specific problems”.
But it’s actually better to do that! Because if you have a set of specific problems, and you’ve really narrowed them down, and really specified them—then you can probably start fixing them. And you can start fixing them in micro-ways, bit by bit. But, there’s no way you can do that without knowing where you are, it’s impossible.
And you can kinda tell if you don’t know where you are. It’s quite straightforward. If you are haunted by reveries of the past, for events that are older than approximately 18 months, if they continue to come up in your mind, over and over, in your dreams, over and over, you haven’t extracted the world out from your past experiences. The potential is still trapped in the past. And to confront the potential means to confront the Dragon of the Past, and of course, that’s terrifying.
So for example, maybe you’re vague, and ill-informed, and ill-defined, because you were abused very badly, when you were a child, 4 years old, something like that. And maybe you were abused by a family member—’cause that’s generally who does the abusing. And so, that just makes it worse. And then, what that means is that you have an implicit hypothesis of malevolent evil that’s plaguing you. It’s still there—it’s trapped in the memories. It’s trapped in the representational structure. And as an adult, you’re now faced with the necessity of articulating that fully, before you have any chance whatsoever of freeing yourself from it. And so, that’s no joke. Lots of times people have to go into the past, that’s what the psychoanalysts do, and say: look, here, something came along, just bloody well knocked me over, and it isn’t even that I repressed it. But sometimes it’s not repression. Its just that terrible things happen to people at such a young age that there isn’t a chance in hell that they can figure out why they happened, or what to do with them. Or what they mean. And then you carry that with you. And when you carry that with you, it’s like, your body encouters the world in stages, and it happens very rapidly. Well, it can extend over years, but the initial stages happen very rapidly. So for example, if you are walking down the road, and you hear a loud noise behind you, you go like this! That is a predator defense response. You crouch down. And that is to stop something from jumping on your back, and getting at your neck too easily. That happens in a few hundred milliseconds. It is really fast, or even faster than that. It better be. Because it is not, something like a poisonous creature can nail you down right now. So you better be fast. But it is lower resolution. It is like, danger predatory cat. It is that fast. You can unravel that, and categorize it. But that takes time. You do that with emotion and then you do it with cognition, and you can do that with long-term thinking. Maybe you’ve encountered someone specifically malevolent and predatory at work. It happens to people a lot. They come across someone operating as a destructive bully, who seems to have no positive function whatsoever, and is only living that out. And then, you don’t know what to do about it. So you are in prey mode. You are acting like a prey animal. And then you have this terribly complex thing to decompose, which is, what the hell is up with this person? Why are they making my life miserable? What is it about me that allows them to make my life miserable? That is a nasty little road to walk down. And you are stuck with having to decompose it. Maybe you cannot. Maybe, formulating an explicit philosophy of good and evil, do deal with something malevolent in your environment, actually just happens to be beyond you. And that can easily be the case. It is certainly the case for people who are young. And it is the case for plenty of adults as well. It is no simple thing to manage. It is something that soldiers who have PTSD have to do. Because they have encountered terrible things. They have either done them or ran into them. They need to update their moral model of the world. Or they end up in something closely approximating Hell. So you need to know where you are.
You are navigating. You are a navigator. You are a sailor on an ocean. You are a mobile creature. You are going from point A to point B all the time. You are not sitting there glued to a rock like some brainless sea creature. There is a funny little creature called hydra. In its juvenile stage, it has a brain, because it swims around. But then, when it turns into a adult, it latches itself to a rock and promptly digests its brain. If you are just sitting on a rock and not moving, you don’t need a brain. But that is not our issue. We are zipping around in the world. We are navigating agents. To navigate, there is two things we need to know. The first is, where the hell are you? Exactly. Precisely. Razor sharp. What is good about you and what is bad about you - by your own reckoning. You can ask other people. But this is a game you play yourself. You are taking stock. What is it thats ok about me and what needs some work? You have to watch to not be too self-critical when you are doing that - because that can just be another kind of flaw. And the next thing is, okay, well, where are you going?