2016/11/08: My Message to Millennials: How to Change the World -- Properly

Hi there. This is my message to Millennials about how to change the world, and I would say how to change the world properly. Of course, the question, then, is well exactly what do you mean by properly? And, of course, that's the fundamental issue. So I'm going to walk through that a little bit.

So I'm gonna, and I've also got an offer to make to any millennials that are willing to watch this. This was triggered, in part, by something I read recently by Jonathan Haidt. Jonathan Haidt is the professor of ethical leadership at the NYU Stern School of Business, and he's been a very astute commentator recently on some of the political battles that have been going on in the social sciences, noting, for example, that there is very little political diversity in the views of social scientists and perhaps even less on the part of the people in the humanities.

Haidt recently wrote something which I'll link to in the description of this video, where he claimed that universities have to decide between social justice and truth. On the side of truth, he puts a philosopher called John Stuart Mill, an English philosopher, who said, "He who knows only his side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion."

And then he juxtaposes John Stuart Mill with Karl Marx, who said, "The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it." He considers Marx the patron saint of the social justice university, which is oriented around changing the world in part by overthrowing power structures and privilege. It sees political diversity as an obstacle to action; Mill, on the other hand, according to Haidt, is the patron saint of what he calls the truth university, which sees truth as a process in which flawed individuals challenge each other's biased and incomplete reasoning, and in the process, all become smarter.

Haidt points out the truth university dies when it becomes intellectually uniform or politically orthodox. So I guess this video is, in part, my call along with Jonathan Haidt for young people to join truth university. But there's a problem with that because the university is where the truth is being sought; that's the university. But there's a problem, and that is that young people want to change the world, and it's part of what Piaget, the developmental psychologist, called the messianic stage.

There's some real utility in that because we're social creatures, and as we construct ourselves and formulate ourselves and bring our own character into being, predicated on our biological platform, our biological being, we also simultaneously have to integrate, adjust to integrate with, and negotiate with society, which sometimes needs to be changed. The structure of society has to be preserved, but it has to be updated and improved as it moves forward.

So part of the problem is how to update and improve it without doing so rapidly that you destroy everything of any value. The problem I have with the Marxist perspective, and I've had this problem with it for a long time, is that I don't think that you should trust people whose primary goal, when they're attempting to change the world for the better, is to change other people.

You can tell who those people are because they're always blaming other people, and they're looking for victims. They're looking for perpetrators and victims, and then they're going off to stop the perpetrators. I think that's wrong because, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn said—he's a great Russian writer who helped bring down the Soviet Union—he said, "The line between good and evil runs down every human heart."

So, the real battle, as far as I'm concerned, and I think this goes along with the true tradition in which John Stuart Mill is firmly placed, is that to overcome tyranny, malevolence, chaos, and nihilism, and the desire to bring everything to a halt, you have to repair the fissures and the rift that's in your own soul.

Basically, that means that you have to confront the evil that lives in your own heart. There’s a statement from the New Testament that I think is very much apropos with regards to this particular idea, and this is part of the Sermon on the Mount, which is a central text in the Western tradition. I would say it's obviously central to Christianity, but central to everything that Western civilization has built.

So Christ says to his followers, "Why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, 'Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye,' and behold, a beam is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite! First cast out the beam out of thine own eye, and then shalt thou see clearly to cast the mote out of thy brother's eye."

Well, I like that quote because it places the responsibility for change at every level of being on the individual. Obviously, the individual interacts with society, but the idea here is that unless the individual straightens out his or her own soul, there's no possibility that the impact the individual can have on society can be anything but harmful in proportion to the harm that's still in the soul. These are important things to know; they're vitally important things to know.

So okay, but then we're faced with the conundrum that young people also want to change the world. That's no problem because I think you can bring truth university together with the desire to make real change, but change has to start at the right place. So I'm going to tell you how I think you should change yourself so that you can change the world and so that the world you bring into being will be a better world and not the worst one.

Remember, you need to know about this: the world that the followers of Marx brought into being in the 20th century killed more than a hundred million people, say in China and Russia, I mean the Soviet Union, and in places like Cambodia and Vietnam. The world certainly changed as a consequence of Marxist doctrine, but it didn't change in a good direction.

Of course, the Marxist doctrine is making itself heard in a massive way across the West again now. So, all right. So what should you do about that? Well, here's an idea: the first thing you have to do is orient yourself. Now, you probably have all watched Pinocchio, and Pinocchio is about how a marionette—someone whose strings are being pulled by forces beyond his comprehension—that's the situation of the undeveloped individual.

Geppetto, who's a benevolent father, a symbol of benevolent culture, makes a puppet his son and then wishes on a star. Now, a star is something that glitters up in the sky, and it's associated with the transcendent and beyond and the divine. You know, if you look up in the night sky, and it's very dark, you get a feeling of awe; it's because you're confronting your soul so to speak. Your individual soul is confronting the cosmos, and you can feel a relationship between you and the totality.

So looking up into the sky is like a religious experience if it's a starry sky, and to wish upon a star is to find in a light that orients you like the North Star—to pick the highest goal, to pick the highest goal you can conceive of. That’s what Geppetto does: he raises his eyes above his day-to-day concerns and tries to establish a relationship with the highest of all possible values.

He has the most profound of wishes, and the most profound of wishes is that the puppet that he's created could become a genuine individual—a genuinely fully developed human being. And that's what you can wish for yourself; you can wish and aim for that in yourself.

That's how you deal with the suffering that's attendant on life because life is suffering, and because life is very hard. People get sick, and they become mentally ill, and there's malevolence in the world, and there's tragedy, and so life is very hard. If you're not properly oriented with regards to life, the fact that it's hard and the fact that it's full of suffering can warp and twist and bend you until you become murderous and resentful.

And even go beyond murderous resentment to wish for genocide and evil—even to wish for the destruction of everything. You have to learn how to strengthen yourself as an individual so that you can bear the burden of being without becoming corrupt. You have to decide that that is what you're aiming for—that you want to become a fully developed human being and stop being a pathetic marionette whose strings are being pulled by horrible forces behind the scenes.

So, I would say to wish on a star is to aim at the highest good. In the question, then, is well what is the good? Well, we can answer that in two ways. We could say that the good is the opposite of evil. I can tell you what evil is: evil is the conscious desire to produce suffering where suffering is not necessary.

If you read about what happened in the Nazi concentration camps, for example, or in the Russian concentration camps during the Soviet time of the Soviet Union, you'll get a good flavor for what constitutes evil. Evil is the desire to exploit the vulnerability of other people—to self-consciously exploit the vulnerability of other people and to elevate their suffering beyond their or anyone else's ability to tolerate.

So the good is the opposite of that. Whatever the opposite of that is, the good is harder to get a handle on. But here's one hint, and I got this from reading Jean Piaget partly, who's a developmental psychologist. Piaget talked about the equilibrated state, and an equilibrated state is like a game that children play where every child wants to play the game.

You have a little social group, and that's the children's playgroup, and any of us—those are the individual children—and the structure is the game. It's a good game if everyone wants to play it. Piaget noted that a game like that will outperform a game that people have to be terrorized to play because it doesn't entail—it doesn't require any enforcement cost.

I've sort of developed the idea of an equilibrated state to think that if you're aiming at the good, then you want what's good for you. And I mean good for you as if you were taking care of yourself, and treating yourself like someone you loved—that was good for you in a way that would also be good for your family—and then it would be good for you and your family in a way that was also good for society—and then it would be good for you, and your family, and society in a way that would be good for the world.

And then it would be good now, and it would be good next week, and the week after, and a year from now, and as long into the future as you can see. So the good is something that's equilibrated across multiple levels of being and multiple time frames simultaneously. It isn’t necessarily that you know what that is going to be at any given moment, but you can orient yourself.

That's the state that you want to exist in, and I can tell you, as far as I can tell, when you exist in that state even moment by moment, your life is imbued with a sense of meaning, and that sense of meaning can help you transcend suffering. The philosopher Nietzsche said, "He who has a why can bear any how." He who has a why can bear any how.

Nietzsche's idea was that if there was purpose in your life of sufficient grandeur, not only could the suffering in life be borne, but it could even be appreciated. It could be that you're willing to bear the burden of being because of the exciting things that you can do with being—the things you can build and the things that you can bring about—and that might be the highest imaginable state of being.

That's a form of paradise, but it's not a paradise that you attain by transforming others; it's a paradise that you attain by transforming yourself. That's a very difficult thing to do, and it's a very frightening thing to do because it means that you're retooling your soul. That's a job for a real—they're the job for a forthright and honorable person, and it's an exciting enough task so that it will keep you occupied for the rest of your life, and then magical things will happen to you while you're doing it.

The world will arrange itself around you in the most wonderful way—in a musical way—so that every part of what you're experiencing plays off against every other part in a manner that has meaning embedded in every aspect of it. You experience that, by the way, when you listen to a piece of music that you love. Music represents that, and that's why music nourishes the soul, why it's the highest form of art, at least in my opinion.

So you have to live your life as if being is a symphony, and you're playing your instrumental part. Once you are it yourself, then you have an obligation, I would say an obligation to the development of your soul, to speak the truth. You have to be oriented properly, though, because the truth is something that exists in service to an ideal—a kind of ideal of sorts.

Then you can imagine that you could use your language two ways: you can use your language to manipulate the world and to extract from it what you want. For example, maybe you go out on a date with someone, and you decide that the end goal of the date is to have a sexual partner for the night. Then you can craft your language to manipulate the person into providing you with what you want, and that’s like an instrumental use of language.

But there are many problems with that; one of them is that what if your idea about what you should want is wrong? Like maybe that’s not the way to treat someone that you're on a date with. Maybe you're minimizing and reducing the interactions between you from what could be a healthy and elevated state of interaction and discourse to something that’s basically the pursuit of impulsive pleasure and not—maybe that’s not good for you next week and the week after and a month down the road.

Maybe orienting yourself towards impulsive pleasure is a very bad idea. Remember what happens in Pinocchio: Pinocchio goes to Pleasure Island, and Pleasure Island is a place where impulsive pleasures can be had at a moment’s notice. But what Pinocchio discovers, along with Jiminy Cricket, is that Pleasure Island is run by masked totalitarians—they're all dressed in black.

Remember, they're turning the children and adolescents who are on Pleasure Island: they're depriving them of their voice, turning them into brain jackasses, and preparing to sell them as slaves to the salt mines. There's an implication in that story that the pursuit of impulsive pleasure is one route to totalitarianism and slavery, and I believe that.

So perhaps orienting your language towards the gathering of impulsive pleasure is a misuse of your highest gift—your gift of logos, the gift of communication. The alternative is to orient yourself towards the highest good, as we already described, and then to speak the truth. You can tell when you're doing that because—or you can tell when you're not doing that—because if you're not telling the truth, if you're using someone else's words, you’re being led into sense by forces that are behind the scenes.

You're not using your own words; you’re the puppet of an ideology or another thinker or your own impulsive desires. You can tell when you're speaking like that because it makes you feel weak. It makes you feel weak and ashamed, and you can localize that feeling physiologically. If you listen to yourself talk, you can tell when you're speaking properly.

You will experience a feeling of integration and strength, and when you're speaking in a deceitful or manipulative manner, you'll feel that you're starting to come apart at the seams. What you need to do is practice only saying things that make you feel stronger. That’ll mean, to begin with, you’ll notice that almost everything you say is a lie. It's either a lie or someone else's words; it's very hard to find your own words.

But you don't actually exist until you have your own words. So, okay, then you try to teach yourself how to speak your own truth. You listen to other people while you're doing that because they can help you shape and correct your words. They’ll react to them badly if you formulate your ideas badly, and if you listen and pay attention, then you can learn to formulate your words more and more clearly and accurately, and that makes you more and more powerful.

It gives you more and more authority, which is the beneficial form of power, okay? So you do that, and then you have to make a decision of faith. That's basically, well, that you can either use your language to manipulate the world and make it do what you want, or you can use your language to try to articulate the truth as carefully as you possibly can.

Then you can see what happens. You have to let go of your desire for the consequences that you want; you have to assume that if you speak the truth, the results are the best that are possible under the circumstances. It's an exciting way of living in some sense; it’s like continually walking off a cliff because you don’t know what’s going to happen next.

If all you do is say what you think, you know, and maybe you're at work, and you say what you think and you get fired, you think, "Oh my God, that's a terrible catastrophe." But maybe it’s not, because maybe if you’re working somewhere and you have to lie to maintain your job, maybe you shouldn’t be there.

Maybe it's deadening your soul and damaging you in some permanent manner and making you corrupt. So you have to orient yourself; you have to speak the truth as carefully as you can. You have to listen to others so that you correct your speech, and then you have to allow the consequences that ensue to unfold as they will. That's the ultimate act of faith, I would say, and that's what you do if you belong to truth university.

All right, so more practically speaking, then you should educate yourself, and it's not that easy to do now because you have to find people who can actually tell you mostly what to read and maybe also how to write because writing is a way of formulating your thoughts ever more precisely. That's why you go to university—to learn how to write.

If you learn—if you know how to write, you can think. If you can think and speak and communicate in writing, you're unbelievably powerful in the authority manner because arguments move the world forward, and if your arguments are tight and well-constructed and lucid and well-edited, and carefully thought through, and you have five rationales for everything that you're doing—which is what happens if you learn to write properly—then you're like a force of nature.

Man, no one can take you down. That's one of the things that people aren't taught about why you go get educated, especially in the humanities. Humanities education, if it's real, organizes your psyche, grounds you, puts you on a rock, and makes you a force to contend with. But you have to read the right people, and those are the great—they're the great people of the past. In my list, they're the great men of the past, and that's just how it is.

Here's who I would recommend: I put reading lists up at Jordan B Peterson dot com. There are two of them, and the people that I recommend primarily are their books written by the following list of people: Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, who I think perhaps the greatest novelist the world has ever seen; Alexander Solzhenitsyn, another great Russian novelist. I don't know what it is about the Russians, but man, they produce writers that are incomparable.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote a book called The Gulag Archipelago, where he analyzed the Soviet prison camp system that arose after the Leninist revolution in the second decade of the 20th century and details absolutely precisely how the tenets of Marxism—the Marxist tenets that are supposed to free everyone and change the world—produce legislation that was absolutely murderous in its consequences.

Solzhenitsyn painstakingly traces the logical pathway from the original Marxist principles to the legislation to the genocides because you’ll hear people who are basically Marxist say things like, "Well, true Marxism never existed," and Solzhenitsyn took that bad argument apart in the mid-'70s, and The Gulag Archipelago was an intellectual bomb. It demolished any credibility that Marxism had to intellectual respectability.

You have to read the book. The book is about the central issue in our culture at the moment. If you don’t read it, you’re not informed. You can’t participate in the debate except as a puppet, and so I wouldn’t recommend participating in this debate as a puppet because you don’t know who’s behind the scenes pulling the strings. If you remember the Pinocchio story, the forces that were pulling the strings were not forces that were acting in Pinocchio’s best interest, that's for sure.

George Orwell, English essayist, incomparable commentator on socialist totalitarianism, even though he was a left winger and a brilliant one. Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World, had some very brilliant things to say about the potential demolition of sexual choice as part of a dystopian future. Friedrich Nietzsche, a philosopher who described himself as someone who thought with a hammer, and Nietzsche is a very, very dangerous person and an absolutely brilliant writer.

Carl Jung, who was a student of Nietzsche, and who Nietzsche was the philosopher who announced the death of God back in the late 1800s, and Jung spent his whole life attempting to revivify God—that's one way of thinking about it. So if you educate yourself—and this is a really good place to start—if you read these authors, then you’ll know what else to read.

If you read these authors, it'll take you a good long time, and it will be very, very hard on you. You won’t be the same person when you come out, and that’s very frightening because being torn down and rebuilt is no joke. But it beats the hell out of the alternative, which is just to stagnate and stay as stagnant infant, which is not something I recommend. There’s nothing uglier than a stagnant 40-year-old infant.

So that's equivalent. Just so you know—back to the Pinocchio story—rescuing Geppetto from the underworld. Remember, he had kind of turned into a half jackass after being at Pleasure Island, where he was enticed, by the way, from a couple of people that was the fox and the cat, who attempted to entice him into believing that he was a victim and needed a vacation.

So Pinocchio was enticed onto Pleasure Island by two figures that played on his sense of victimization and neuroses and suffering to convince him that he didn’t have to take any responsibility for his own existence, and he could just busy himself with impulsive pleasures, right? That’s how he fell into the hands of the totalitarians.

So on Pleasure Island, anyways, Pinocchio, after he left Pleasure Island, had to go into the ocean twice, and the second time he went into the ocean, he was looking for his father. Well, everyone’s father, from a mythological perspective, is dying in the underworld in the chaos because everyone inhabits a culture that’s sick and old, so to speak.

It’s sick and old because it was made by the dead, and the living have to revivify it continually in order for it to be a dynamic force. The living have to revivify their connection with the culture internally, too, because you're constructions of culture; they're not only constructions of culture. You have to understand history because otherwise, you can't understand yourself.

You're a historical creature, and so you have to rescue your dead father from the belly of the beast, from the dragon. Remember the whale in Pinocchio is also a fire-breathing dragon, and that means you have to face the thing that you most fear. When you do that, you’ll rescue your father from the underworld.

These are very complex ideas, and you can read about them in my book, Maps of Meaning, if you want; it’s on the reading list. I put a free copy of it on Jordan B Peterson dot com, so you can download it. I take apart these sorts of things in detail.

So anyways, you have to revivify your father before you can become real. That's part of the problem with the feminists and social justice warrior insistence on the existence of the patriarchy. It’s like everyone’s known since the beginning of time that culture is corrupt and tyrannical, but it’s also protective and benevolent.

Even the language used is a product of culture, and so you don’t overthrow the patriarchy; you revivify your culture, and you do that by adopting responsibility for your own being and then acting as a moral agent in the culture. That’s what you do to become educated, so read these books. Read these books—they'll change your life. I guarantee it. They’ll change your life; they’ll take you apart; they’ll devastate you, and then they’ll rebuild you into something far greater than you are now.

You’re hurt. Don’t worry, Jenny. You need to get yourself out. Follow the chamber, and you’ll find wrong. You were brilliant, folks. I just wasn’t quick enough. Of course, phoenix tears have healing powers. Thanks, it’s all right today, and that’s what to aim for.

So then, here’s something that will help you. My colleagues and I have developed a series of online writing programs called the self-authoring suite, and they help people write about their past and organize that, their present personality and organize and understand that, and then the future. The future authoring program asks you to write about six different dimensions of your life. So it asks you, first of all, treat yourself as if you're someone that you want to help, and someone that you love and take care of, and someone that you want to help.

Then it asks you, well, if you could organize your life in the best possible manner and in keeping with those principles we discussed earlier, what do you want? What do you want for your career? Like, what do you want? What would make your life meaningful? What do you want for your career? What do you want for your family and from your family? What do you want for an intimate relationship?

How are you going to handle—how are you going to take care of your mental and physical health? How are you going to handle drug and alcohol use? It asks you a series of fundamental questions like that to get your mind moving, and then it asks you to write for 15 minutes about what your life could be like 3 to 5 years in the future if it was laid out like you were laying out a life for someone you deeply cared about.

So you're asked to write for 15 minutes about that without worrying too much about structure—the structure of the argument or any grammatical niceties—that’s put off for later. So that gives you a little heaven to aim for, right? It’s like, “Well, if I could have this, my life would be clearly worthwhile even if I had to put up with a fair bit of suffering along the way.”

That’s what you’re trying to construct, and you can think about that as a heaven worth moving towards. And then the second part of the program asks you to write about what your life would be like 3 to 5 years down the road if all of your bad habits and nihilistic tendencies and proclivity towards resentment and lack of desire to shoulder responsibility—if all your weak points got the upper hand and just ordered you into the ground.

Everyone knows that you know what you’d be like if you just let everything slide, and you know what particular hell you would end up heading towards. So the second part of the program asks you to write about what your life would be like 3 to 5 years down the road if everything just went to hell around you.

That gives you a hell to avoid and a heaven to strive for. You need both of those because that’s what keeps you properly motivated in life. Then the second half of the program—the next part of the program—helps you turn your vision of the desirable future into an implementable reality, and to articulate it fully and to articulate the arguments for why you want that.

Those even help you overcome your own doubts, right? It’s not only to argue against other people; it's to argue against the chattering demons of nihilism and hopelessness and ideological possession that exist in your mind and in society simultaneously. You need powerful weapons to fight back against those.

So here’s an offer for you: we’ve made the future authoring program available free for the next while. I don’t know how long a while would be, but let’s assume a week or something like that. If you go to www.futureauthoring.com slash futureauthoring dot html, you can read about the program there.

Now, I’ve got to tell you, we've used this program on about 5,000 university students so far, mostly in Holland but some in Canada as well. What we've shown is that the program, if you complete this program—even if you do it badly—and I would recommend doing it badly, man. It doesn’t matter; you don't have to do it perfectly. Do it badly, and then maybe do it better as you move forward, but at least do it badly.

It increases the performance of university students; it increases their grades by between 20 and 25 percent and decreases their dropout by about the same percent. We have data on 5,000 people; one of those papers has been published, and I'll put that in the description of this video.

This program really works if you do it, and so I would highly recommend that you do it. Anyway, you can read about the program there, click purchase for $14.95, then enter this code, change yourself. That’ll give you a $14.95 discount, and that means you can have the program for free.

So here's what Millennials should do if they want to change the world: the first thing they should do is orient themselves to the good, and that's away from evil, away from malevolence, away from the manufacture of pointless suffering and pain—away from Auschwitz, let’s say—and away from the Gulag Archipelago and the terrible Soviet camps and the massive murders that occurred in China. You want to get as far away from that as you possibly can.

Whatever direction is away from that is a good direction, and then you also want to contemplate what the highest possible good could look like for you and your family and your society. We already discussed that. Then you need to speak the truth in relationship to that, and then you need to educate yourself, and then you need to shoulder your responsibility.

Responsibility is a good thing because it makes you strong to bear up under; it makes you strong. You can turn yourself into—you can free yourself from your strings and turn yourself into a genuine individual, and then you can shoulder the world, and then you're in a position to make change. As a person like that, your mere being will change the world in a positive direction, and that’s what you should be aiming for.

So read the books that I put up on my site and do the future authoring program, and that will improve your life dramatically. And that’s how you can change the world.