How to Avoid Victimhood When Life Gets Difficult | Jordan Peterson at Cambridge

First of all, I'd like to say thank you for having the courage to pursue the truth. I'm very proud that you're Canadian, especially since truth has been so fraught lately in Fabian politics. My question is, what would you say to someone who has been through a traumatic experience and wants to avoid the culture of victimhood that encourages people to identify with their trauma and capitalize off of being the most victimized person?

Okay, well, there's two things that I address there. People say this courage; they talk to me about my courage fairly frequently, and that's not right exactly. I just learned to be afraid of the right thing, and I really mean that. I mean, I saw an endless repetition in my clinical practice and in my own private life when my eyes were open: the consequences of not saying what was true. It's like whatever hell you might fall into by opening your mouth when you have something to say that isn't popular, it's nothing like the hell that you're going to envelop yourself in if you lose control of your own tongue and mind.

And, like I said, in my clinical practice, I never saw anyone get away with anything, even once. So all you have in a situation like that is, what is the truth? Now, you know, of course, you only have your approximations to the truth, but that's better than nothing. So you need to be afraid of the right thing, and you should be afraid of contaminating your soul with deceit. That's what you should be afraid of; that will definitely do you in. I know exactly how what happens is—you know, garbage in, garbage out, the old programmer's saying goes—and so you'll fill your head with nonsense, and no one will call you on it except you. But you can steal that voice if you try hard enough.

You just wait until you get in real trouble. You know, one day there'll come a point where you have to make a decision, and the decision is the difference between life and death, or worse, between someone else's life and death, or worse, between health and the suffering that's worse than death. And because you've compromised yourself to such a degree, you will not be able to rely on your judgment, and you will make the mistake you shouldn't make, and then you're done. That will absolutely happen.

So you tell mistruths voluntarily at your exceptional peril, and you avoid the unpleasant truths that you might have to delve into in all their messiness at your absolute peril and the peril of everyone around you. So if you see that, you become afraid of that—that's hell, and hell is worse than death. I mean that most sincerely.

So, okay, and so that's the courage issue. Then you asked about—sorry, I'm sorry, I obliterated the last part of your question. Traumatic experience and wanting to avoid the culture of victimhood. The first thing is, well, if you want to avoid that, you're sort of on the right path already, right? Because you have some vision of what it might be like not to be traumatized, to not be a victim.

Well, first of all, I mean in some sense, there's no shortage of victimhood. I mean, you know, the existential psychotherapist in the '50s taking a page from Heidegger talked about thrown-ness, right? The arbitrary nature of our existence. I mean, here you are; you have the ethnicity and race that was bestowed upon you—you had no choice in that. You're the victim and the beneficiary of this particular historical moment. You know, you're the victim and beneficiary of all the atrocity and wonders of the past. You deal with your own emotions; you deal with the fact of this specific time and place—all of that.

And there is a sense of—well, there's a sense of mortality certainly that's associated with finitude and mortality, and you can easily say in some sense that we're all victimized deeply by our own susceptibility to vulnerability and tragedy. I think that's true. But then the question is, what's the best way of dealing with that and falling prey to it?

When my daughter was young, she was very ill, and one of the things we told her repeatedly, which I think she did very well, to her credit, was often she was too ill, really, to be able to go to school because she couldn't wake up in the morning, and she was in pain. But she needed to go to school.

One of the things we told her was, "Don't use your illness as an excuse," right? Because you're already in trouble, kid. You know, you've got your problems, and they're serious. But if you can hold on to the distinction between the part of you that can in spite of this and the part that can't because of it, and not blur that distinction, then that's one more thing you have on your side while you're attempting to struggle through this.

To her credit, she managed that quite pristinely, and that was extraordinarily helpful. It was very difficult at times. After she had her hip replaced, she couldn't get around that well, and so we decided to put her in a motorcycle course, which was a rather terrifying thing to do since she just had a hip replacement. But she needed to have a scooter to get around, and so she went with her mother to this motorcycle course. They were driving motorcycles, not scooters.

At one point, one of the people who was being trained wiped out on the motorcycle, and you know, it was rather traumatic, let's say. She woke up the next day and was too afraid to go to the course. So we said, "Well, you know, it's understandable. Why don't you just get in the car and go to the course, and see when you get there if you can manage it?"

She got herself out of bed and went and managed it, and then she passed the course. Then she had a scooter and could zoom around the city for the next couple of years, and so that was really good. But it was very hard to draw that line, right? Because in some sense she'd been victimized by this arbitrary illness.

You know, you tend as a parent to have an outpouring of empathy—the empathy that can destroy under those circumstances because you cuddle the person more than is absolutely necessary, right? And you have every reason to because they're suffering like mad. But you want to be a victim and be a tragic figure. You know, you might say, "Yes, but you wouldn't if you thought it through."

So, if someone asked me that question, say in a clinical setting, I would do a little analysis of—it's like, "Okay, well, you're suffering from this traumatic experience; you want to get over it. We'd have to figure out what the practical steps might be." That might be finding somebody to talk to, or there's other ways of dealing with it. But you delve into the practical realm to sort of address that.

So thank you so much for your talk. On a couple of occasions, you mentioned Judeo-Christian values during the talking. In the recent question, you talked of the English common law, which sort of alludes to the divine. One in six people in the world live in India today. India has a democratic secular constitution, and yet the culture is Vedic, and caste is central to society.

How would you speak about the freedom of speech into a culture that has that in its faith and beliefs? At the same time, in certain fringes of the political movement, certain radical ideological movements, there's a belief that these freedoms are a western import. So how would you healthily speak into that culture about upholding the freedoms?

Well, the first thing I would want to do if I was doing that practically speaking is I would like to talk to as many people who hold those particular views as I possibly could to find out why they think the way they think. You know, when they say that it's a western import, well, what do they mean? Because in some sense, it is a western import. I mean, India has a body of laws that at least in part is derived from the English common law tradition, and so it was imposed upon or introduced into that culture.

Now, it took to a large degree, and I don't believe that you can import a propositional structure without the underlying imagistic ethos and behavioral proclivity. It just won't work, right? Because the infrastructure, so to speak, isn't there. So the fact that it has worked, at least to some, well, I would say some remarkable degree—because India is really a remarkable success story—indicates that there is some correspondence between the English common law tradition, which emerged gradually and, in some sense, incrementally and organically out of the will of the English population, and it matches the same strivings and proclivities that you might find elsewhere.

I would also say that the relatively radical comparative economic success of states settled by England in its history of colonization, let's say, also points to a decent fit between the English common law tradition and a whole variety of other cultures. Now, that doesn’t mean the match is perfect. To some degree, the argument is correct; it’s imposed at least as a set of propositions. But it's incorrect because I think it reflects something that's fundamental at the level we've been discussing today.

But if I was trying to mediate those disputes—and I've been having increasing numbers of conversations with people on the Islamic side of the world trying to do exactly that—the first thing I want to do is listen a lot because I don't know what I'm so ignorant about such things. I just don't know what people actually think. You can't begin to address a question like that until you find out why those who stand in opposition to your claims, let's say, think the way they think.

Now, the probability that there's no tradition, say within Indian families, that approximates free speech and flourishing families is like— that's zero because it's not possible. You know, and if it's just a tyranny—well, tyrannies aren't sustainable. Chimps can't even sustain tyrannies, you know, and I'm saying that for technical reasons.

You know—because there is this idea that's quite promoted that complex animals like chimpanzees live in dominance hierarchies, and it's the meanest, toughest male chimp that rules the hierarchy, right? And he's like Stalin, except in chimp form, which actually places them somewhat higher on the evolutionary scale than Stalin. But Frans de Waal has investigated the structure of those societies in great detail, and it's simply not the case that the most tyrannical chimp is on top.

In fact, the chimp males who sustain leadership across reasonable amounts of time are unbelievably reciprocal in their interactions, especially with other males. But they're also particularly attentive to the females and the infants. And part of the reason for that is—well, let's say you're, you know, Joe Brute Chimp, and you're strutting around like a fullback and in Georgia, constantly showing off your physical prowess. It's like, well, one day you're a little sick or a little tired, and two chimps that you've tyrannized will tear you into pieces, and that happens quite frequently in chimpanzee disputes, where a two-tyrannical male will be literally torn to pieces because chimps are very brutal when they get their mind to it, and they're just taken out.

So there's this principle of reciprocal altruism, let's say, that's associated with the free exchange of ideas and something like mutual valuation—that's recognition of the soul, I would say on a metaphysical level—that's a precondition for peace everywhere, not just in the West. And that's been propositionalized and formalized into law in different ways in different cultures, and sometimes not formalized so much yet, let's say, because many cultures are governed primarily by ritual and custom rather than, you know, a fully articulated body of laws.

But the fact that that does not mean by any stretch of the imagination that English common law is somehow purely arbitrary social construction. It's like—that's such a—it's a preposterous claim. So I would start by listening and find out exactly what the issues are, and then, well, then proceed from there.