How could the world be freed from the terrible dilemma of conflict, on the one hand, and psychological and social dissolution, on the other? The answ… - Jordan Peterson

What happens in the story of Adam and Eve is that when people become self-conscious, they get thrown out of Paradise and then they're in history. And history is a place where there's pain in childbirth, and where you're dominated by your mate, and where you have to toil like mad like no other animal because you're aware of your future. You have to work, and sacrifice the joys of the present for the future, constantly, and you know that you're going to die. And you have all that weight on you. How could anything be more true than that? Unless you're naïve beyond comprehension. There's something that's echoed about your life in that representation. We're such strange creatures, because we don't really fit into Being in some sense, and that's what's expressed in the notion of The Fall.

Ambition is often—and often purposefully—misidentified with the desire for power, and damned with faint praise, and denigrated, and punished. And ambition is sometimes exactly that wish for undue influence on others. But there is a crucial difference between sometimes and always. Authority is not mere power, and it is extremely unhelpful, even dangerous, to confuse the two. When people exert power over others, they compel them, forcefully. They apply the threat of privation or punishment so their subordinates have little choice but to act in a manner contrary to their personal needs, desires, and values. When people wield authority, by contrast, they do so because of their competence—a competence that is spontaneously recognized and appreciated by others, and generally followed willingly, with a certain relief, and with the sense that justice is being served.

I will trust you — I will extend my hand to you — despite the risk of betrayal, because it is possible, through trust, to bring out the best in you, and perhaps in me. So,