Lesson 5: You Don’t Lose Fear, You Become more Courageous

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A Dialogue

Unless you are terribly honest with yourself, you will not question the real reasons why you are avoiding something.

But assuming you are someone who is honest, and there is something that you want to do, for example, starting a business or ending a relationship or making a lifestyle change but don’t, then there are only two possibilities: you are either succumbing to your own fear (willful blindness) or you are listening to your conscience.

How do you know which one it is? It’s by having a conversation with yourself. You need to, as accurately as you can, represent your ideas to yourself and you need to consult your conscience by having an honest dialogue with it.

After enough back and forth, you will get to a point of greater clarity, where your intentions have been made clearer to you.

But there is a caveat. This doesn’t always work. In fact, depending on the decisions you have made in the past, this dialogue may not work at all. It is one of the more interesting insights I have gotten from Peterson.

True Speech

You have many systems that guide you (intuition, senses, unconscious etc…) and these operate implicitly. But still, you feed them content. and a lot of that content pertains to your voluntary thought and actions. So, if you pathologize them, if you are dishonest and act reprehensibly, then you program a bad AI system inside yourself. The output won’t guide you properly.

Your negative conscious behaviors can affect your unconscious influences.

That’s why speaking the truth clearly is so important.

If you have been dishonest with yourself for long enough, then consulting your conscience may not be as effective, because it is essentially not programmed for truth.

Your conscience is like Jiminy Cricket in Pinocchio, it is dogmatic and inexperienced. Only time and honest dialogue can give it experience.

The way to have a dialogue, is to do so without any dogmatism. This applies whether that conversation is with your own conscience or with your partner.

The Danger of Willful Blindness

This is related to the first lesson: To be able to burn your deadwood, you need to develop courage through honesty.

If someone is naïve and overprotected and something traumatic happens such as a mugging or sexual abuse, then they are thrown into chaos and may never recover.

They were protected by their contextual knowledge before, and then a foreign invader shocks their sense of belonging, they don’t know where they are anymore. What happens? Suddenly, everything in their environment becomes relevant, and they can no longer trust anything or anyone.

You can be within your group of friends, all in agreement about most things, and blocking out the rest of the world. This may be comfortable for a while, but when chaos hits, you have no idea what to do or who to turn to.

That is why part of growing up is facing the things in your imagination that scare and upset you.

The Shadow

For Jung, the hero’s journey took place inside the unconscious. The first part of individuation is to identify your shadow , and it is terrifying, because you realize that you are inextricably tied to evil.

And we have knowledge of good and evil because are self-conscious – we know what hurts us. If you know what hurts you, then you know what can hurt others.

This confrontation with the shadow is terrifying, and most people want to avoid It, but it’s necessary for the development of your conscience.

In the same way, you don’t want to only protect what you know. You already know what you know. You want to talk people who disagree with you so that they can show you what you are ignorant about, and that would be good for you. If you only talk to people who agree with you, then you will remain stupid and vulnerable.

If you are not wise, the world will trample on you. And that will make you resentful.

You must voluntarily confront the chaos – whether this means speaking the truth to others who are subjugating you, or to yourself.

Confront Chaos Voluntarily

Anxiety is natural, and there are plenty of reasons to use alcohol and drugs. It is a mystery is that people can be normal at all, despite knowing about uncertainty and their vulnerability.

To be naive and to move into the unknown is not impressive because you are ignorant of what you are getting yourself into, but to know that the world is dangerous and to voluntarily confront it is impressive and worthy of respect.

An easy way to avoid the dangers of the world is to avoid all confrontation, to shield yourself away from it, but humans are not just prey animals, we are also predators. It is part of our nature to hunt, and to go out into the unknown, to confront the dragons of our imagination.

There was a movie in the late 90’s called The Blair Witch Project that Peterson recalls in lecture. In this movie, nothing happens. The whole movie is just the anticipation of danger, the camera follows a group of people who are scared, running around in a forest, but nothing gory or shocking unfolds on the screen. The fear these people feel, and then you as the audience member feels as a consequence, is from the anticipation of the dangerous threat.

What people are usually afraid of is what is in their imagination, it may relate to something that happened in the past, or something they fear will happen in the future. The point of psychoanalysis is to help the patient discover the source of their fear, and to confront it voluntarily. And the way you should live, is by confronting chaos out of your own will, and not to allow it to manifest itself first. Of course, it is a fool’s errand to try to get rid of all chaos – that is neither beneficial or even desirable. But it is true that the more chaos you face voluntarily, the better.

When chaos hits you involuntarily, it triggers defensive aggression, but when you confront it, the system within you is associated with challenge and adventure is activated, and that is very different physiologically. In the first case, you will deplete your resources and act badly. In the second case, you are using up your current resources so that you can better deal with threats in the future, but while doing so, you will feel enlivened and excited by the adventure . And you should think about life as an adventure, if you don’t, if you are unwilling to contend with the dangers of life, then you might as well not live.

A practical way to think about it, is that if you avoid doing this, you will stay stuck where you are, you won’t develop. You already know what you know, the only way to make progress, is by tackling what you don’t know. In fact, if you are anxious about doing something that will help you reach your goal, that is a great indicator that you should be doing it.

Let’s say that you are trying to graduate from college, and you have a final exam coming up in two weeks. If you don’t make an effort to discover what you don’t know, to study what you have not yet understood, then you will likely fail the exam. But after you fail, you will not have avoided the initial chaos, you will now be faced with more chaos, in the form of repeating the course, failing to graduate on time, changing your plans about the future, etc…

The same lesson can apply to entrepreneurs, where the prerogative of confronting chaos is crucial, or to politicians, who can avert future mass social unrest by taking the time to address social issues preemptively.

You should keep taking smart risks, it earns you self-esteem, This is different from saying that you can just give yourself self-esteem whenever you choose – it is saying that you need to earn it through the voluntary confrontation of chaos.

You can only earn it when you view yourself as a being who is capable of confronting what is dangerous, despite knowing about the risks. And that does not come through a slight of hand, but by tangible effort.

The fear of the unknown never goes away, and nor should it, but what you can do, is become more courageous. And if you succeed in conquering chaos, you will have a way of justifying your existence to yourself, you will be proud for having unlocked your genetic potential.

"A gilded No is more satisfactory than a dry yes" - Gracian