Boys are suffering, in the modern world. They are more disobedient — negatively — or more independent — positively — than girls, and they suffer for … - 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.

If you want to do something that's difficult and that requires energy, a lot of different subsystems in your mind are going to throw up objections. It's why — well, maybe that isn't what you should be doing right now. Maybe you should be doing the dishes, or vacuuming, or watching TV, or looking at YouTube. Or if you're really sneaky: when you're trying to do something hard, what your brain does is give you something else hard to do that's not quite as hard, so that you can feel justified in not doing the thing you're supposed to, because you're doing something else useful. And if you give in to that temptation — which you often will — then it wins. And because it wins, it gets a little dopamine kick, and it grows stronger. Anything you let win the internal argument grows, and anything you let be defeated shrinks, because it's punished — it doesn't get to have its way.

So that's another thing really to remember: don't practise what you do not want to become. And because those are neurological circuits, you build those things in there, man. They're not going anywhere. You can build another little machine to inhibit them — that's the best you can do. Once they're in there, you can't get them out. And the ones you build to inhibit can be taken out by stress, and the old habits will come back up. So you've got to be careful what you say and what you do, because you build yourself that way.

The inability of a son to thrive independently is exploited by a mother bent on shielding her child from all disappointment and pain. He never leaves, and she is never lonely. It’s an evil conspiracy, forged slowly, as the pathology unfolds, by thousands of knowing winks and nods. She plays the martyr, doomed to support her son, and garners nourishing sympathy, like a vampire, from supporting friends. He broods in his basement, imagining himself oppressed. He fantasizes with delight about the havoc he might wreak on the world that rejected him for his cowardice, awkwardness and inability. And sometimes he wreaks precisely that havoc. And everyone asks, “Why?” They could know, but refuse to.