In order to be able to think, you have to risk being offensive. - Jordan Peterson

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In order to be able to think, you have to risk being offensive.

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About Jordan Peterson

Jordan Bernt Peterson (born June 12, 1962) is a Canadian clinical psychologist at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief (1999), 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (2017), Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life (2021) and We Who Wrestle With God (2024)

Biography information from Wikiquote

Also Known As

Alternative Names: Dr Jordan B Peterson Jordan B Peterson Jordan Bernt Peterson Jordan B. Peterson Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
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Additional quotes by Jordan Peterson

You may find that if you attend to these moral obligations, once you have placed “make the world better” at the top of your value hierarchy, you experience ever-deepening meaning. It’s not bliss. It’s not happiness. It is something more like atonement for the criminal fact of your fractured and damaged Being. It’s payment of the debt you owe for the insane and horrible miracle of your existence. It’s how you remember the Holocaust. It’s how you make amends for the pathology of history. It’s adoption of the responsibility for being a potential denizen of Hell. It is willingness to serve as an angel of Paradise.

There's an insistence that the Being that's spoken into being through truth is good. This is the most profound idea ever. It is also the most believable idea ever. What cures in therapy is truth. Of course, you must encounter the things that you're afraid of, but this is enacted truth, because if you know that there's something you need to do by your own set of rules and you're avoiding it, then you're enacting a lie. You're not speaking the lie, but you're enacting it, and that's the same thing: untruth.
If I can get you to face what it is that you know you shouldn't be avoiding, then what's happening is that we're both partaking in the process of you attempting to act out your deepest truth. That improves people's lives radically. The clinical evidence for that is overwhelming. We know that if you expose people to the things that they're afraid of and are avoiding, they get better. You have to do it carefully, cautiously, and with their approval and participation. Of all the things that clinicians have established that's credible, that's #1. It's redemptive insofar as both people are telling the truth.
The difference between deception and repression is very small. People can handle earthquakes and cancer and even death, but they can't handle deception. They can't handle the rug being pulled out from underneath them by people who they love and trust. This does them in. It makes them ill, it hurts them psycho-physiologically, and worse than that it makes them cynical, bitter, vicious, and resentful. And then they also start to act all that out in the world, and that makes it worse.

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