Jordan Peterson on Human Nature

"There are only three options in dealing with people: it will either be slavery, tyranny, or negotiation."

"Pain is the only thing that people will never deny."

"We have been trying to address the issue that Nietszche brought up, which is something like the reunification of the spirit of mankind. It's something like that. Well, we're slogging through it. That's the aim."

"People tend to take pride in who they are. And that's a bad idea, because that stops you from becoming who you could be. Because, if you're proud of who you are, you won't let that go when it's necessary; you won't step away from it."

"Student: Drought, flooding and ocean recidification unanticipated for 65 million years all result from climate change according to over 700 of your fellow scientists so I was wondering whether you thought climate change could be an issue that would unite us all; left and right, moving us beyond debates, C-16 into discussions at the UN ??? meets here next month where perhaps humanity might finally discover its global map of meaning."

"Our ideas emerged out of the ground of our action over thousands and thousands of years. And when philosophers were putting forth those ideas, what they were doing wasn't generating creative ideas – they were just telling the story of humanity. It's already there. It's already in us. It's already in our patterns of behavior."

"When you educate someone, you teach them how to use language to arm them, straighten them out, organize them, elevate them and you ennoble them, and then they're not misshapen half-carved blocks of humanity – people that can stand up, stand around and manoeuvre through the world, contribute properly to the community and keep the world oriented between chaos and order."

"The motivation that drives the commission of the worst human atrocities is an inevitable social consequence of the refusal of the self-conscious individual to make the sacrifices appropriate to establishing a harmonious life, and their consequent degeneration into a kind of murderous and resentment-filled rage propagating endlessly through its variations in society until everything comes to an end."

"One thing that characterized the Communist state was that no one got to say anything they really believed, ever. That's because one in three people were informers. That was a lovely society, and it only killed about 30 million people between 1919 and 1959. That's what happens when the archetypal structure of society gets tilted badly, and when people forget that they have a responsibility to fulfill as citizens who are awake and capable of stating the truth. The archetype shifts so there's nothing left of the great father except for the tyrant."