There is no evidence that the importance of friendship declines in any manner with age. - Jordan Peterson

The question is: In these societies, cross-culturally, who is elevated to the status of elder? And you might say 'Well, it's the roughest, toughest, most dominant chimp, oppressive, patriarchal male.' and that actually happens to not be the case at all. And so what you do see is that productive males who are older, they have to be productive, who are simultaneously generous and reciprocal, and are recognized as such in their communities, hold the status of authority and help govern properly. And so we could say that there's no evidence whatsoever on the scientific or anthropological front that the doctrine that the prime human motivation for the construction of social relations is power. And I would add to that further that if you think that power is the fundamental motivation of humankind, that is a confession not an observation. And so look out for people who make that claim because they're making that claim to justify to themselves their own use of psychopathic and narcissistic social mediation strategies. And so I don't see that the leftists who make the claim that power is the fundamental motivation have a shred of evidence on their side sociologically, scientifically, anthropologically, politically, economically, theologically or ethically.

We are always and simultaneously at point “a” (which is less desirable than it could be), moving towards point “b” (which we deem better, in accordance with our explicit and implicit values). We always encounter the world in a state of insufficiency and seek its correction. We can imagine new ways that things could be set right, and improved, even if we have everything we thought we needed. Even when satisfied, temporarily, we remain curious. We live within a framework that defines the present as eternally lacking and the future as eternally better. If we did not see things this way, we would not act at all. We wouldn’t even be able to see, because to see we must focus, and to focus we must pick one thing above all else on which to focus. But we can see. We can even see things that aren’t there. We can envision new ways that things could be better. We can construct new, hypothetical worlds, where problems we weren’t even aware of can now show themselves and be addressed. The advantages of this are obvious: we can change the world so that the intolerable state of the present can be rectified in the future. The disadvantage to all this foresight and creativity is chronic unease and discomfort. Because we always contrast what is with what could be, we have to aim at what could be. But we can aim too high. Or too low. Or too chaotically. So we fail and live in disappointment, even when we appear to others to be living well.

Perhaps Man is something that should never have been. Perhaps the world should even be cleansed of all human presence, so that Being and consciousness could return to the innocent brutality of the animal. I believe that the person who claims never to have wished for such a thing has neither consulted his memory nor confronted his darkest fantasies.