Video summary
Jordan Peterson introduces a central concept derived from Isaiah Berlin's idea of the inner Citadel, suggesting that when external paths to human fulfillment are blocked by an evil fate or adverse circumstances, individuals often retreat inwardly. This internal withdrawal can manifest as two distinct pathways: one leading toward madness through compensatory fantasies where people dwell in delusional worlds seeking revenge on those who wronged them, and another leading toward spiritual growth through confession and atonement. Peterson illustrates the latter by explaining that when a plan fails due to external impediments or bad luck, rather than blaming the cosmos entirely, one must investigate their own contributions to the failure. This process requires humility and the painful willingness to strip away defenses to discover where one's strategy or goals were insufficient, thereby transforming bitterness into an opportunity for revelation and rectification of errors. The speaker emphasizes that seeking truth is a deliberate act akin to knocking on a door; it demands a genuine desire to know even if the answer reveals personal inadequacies. He argues against avoiding difficult questions out of shame, noting that revealing one's ignorance allows others to help correct blind spots, which accelerates learning and success over time. Peterson recounts his own experience starting at age 23 as an overweight smoker with poor coordination, describing the humiliation he felt in swim classes and weightlifting sessions where beginners were corrected by more experienced individuals. Despite these painful moments of embarrassment, he persisted for three years to stop smoking and drinking while gaining forty pounds of muscle, demonstrating that accepting one's weakness is a necessary precursor to improvement. Peterson addresses how high-achieving individuals can avoid despondency when falling short of their ideals without becoming paralyzed by the gap between reality and perfection. He proposes scaling down large, overwhelming goals into manageable increments rather than attempting to leap from current limitations directly to an ultimate ideal in one fell swoop. This approach prevents paralysis while allowing for exponential progress once small steps are taken consistently. The speaker references the Matthew Principle, which suggests that those who have little will lose everything while those with something gain more, creating a scenario where falling down feels like sliding off a cliff but climbing up follows an accelerating geometric curve rather than a linear one. Ultimately, Peterson concludes that happiness resides in the gap between expectations and reality, urging individuals to maintain high standards without being crushed by them. By admitting insufficiency and taking small, sometimes shameful steps toward improvement, people can harness the power of incremental growth where initial efforts yield disproportionately large results over time. The narrative reinforces that while the world is random and unfortunate events happen regardless of merit, the disciplined acceptance of one's current state provides a pathway to rectify weaknesses and move forward with greater strength and confidence.
Read the full video transcript
one of my favorite ideas I learned over
the last couple of years is the inner
Citadel from Isaiah Belin do you know
this mhm so Isaiah Belin says when the
natural Road toward human fulfillment is
blocked human beings Retreat into
themselves become involved in themselves
and try to create inwardly that world
which some evil Fate has denied them
externally that's a delusion often if
you cannot obtain from the world that
which you really desire you must teach
yourself not to want it if you cannot
get what you want you must teach
yourself to want what you can get this
is a very frequent form of spiritual
retreat in depth into a kind of inner
Citadel in which you lock yourself up
against all of the fearful ills of the
world mutual friend Rob Henderson
explained it in a simpler way if your
leg is wounded you can try to treat the
leg and if you can't then you cut the
leg off and announce that the desire for
legs is misguided and must be subdued
and I think that we see this everywhere
well okay so you so imagine that you lay
out a plan and it meets with an
impediment and it knocks the slats out
from underneath the plan okay now you
Retreat okay now you have an option when
you're retreating and one option is to
construct a world in fantasy where
you're taking revenge on those who
wronged you and getting what you want
that's that's a pathway to Madness so
often people who develop serious
delusions do develop um what would you
so call them their their compensatory
fantasies and then they start to dwell
in them and often for hundreds of hours
so the kids again who shot up the Coline
high school they dwelt in a fantasy
world for hundreds of hours before they
undertook their Dreadful actions right
but you can also flip back into yourself
let's say and you can this is like this
is like confession and atonement it's
the proper way to think about it is you
can think about what it is that you did
wrong or insufficiently that led to the
collapse of your plan right so that's
the first investigation I made made some
sacrifices I attempted to bring about a
particular form of the future it didn't
happen okay why well the world is set
against me and the cosmos is evil and
there's no God and I'm bitter and
cynical that's one potential explanation
right poor me right and and I'm not
trying to be flippant about this because
sometimes people's dreams are quite
realistic and they still fail
catastrophically you know it can be
brutal you know maybe you did make a lot
of good decisions and you suddenly got
ill or someone in your family did and
everything went to hell on you it
doesn't have to be because you've done
something cardinally foolish that you
fail you know it's built into the
structure of the world but doesn't
matter you can also Retreat into
yourself and you can say something like
all right I need to retool my conception
of strategy but also potentially my
conception of goal you know maybe I'm
looking in the wrong place maybe I have
to look somewhere else and you can open
yourself up to a revelation so there's a
gospel statement that's very relevant to
this so Christ tells us followers that
if they knock the door will open if they
ask they'll receive and if they seek
they'll find and so it sounds like it
sounds magical it sounds like the sort
of thing that the new atheists would
have a field day with but that isn't
that's not an wise interpretation of
that saying the proper interpretation is
something more like a recognition of the
way thought works so imagine your plans
didn't work out okay now you sit down
and you say to yourself
I'd like to
know even if the world was conspiring
against me and my failure was 95% the
fault of external occurrences and other
people what did I do that wasn't as good
as it could have been and where did I
fail to look so that the probability of
my failure was higher now now to ask
that question you have to want the
answer that's that's what it means to
knock or to ask or to seek this this is
no joke it's like you have to want to
know and it's a very painful thing to do
because especially if you had given it
you're all to the degree you were
able and you have reason to be
bitter you're going to be searching for
the errors that you still made and
discovering your own errors is always
extremely painful right especially if
they're errors that you're in love with
and so you have to be willing to strip
yourself down that's what humility means
fundamentally and then but the advantage
is this is why it's so useful to listen
to people you might find out where
you're
stupid and then you could stop being
stupid and so one of the reasons you
confess your sins let's say is because
you want to discover where you're
insufficient now it's painful you know
it's painful to encounter an impediment
in the form of someone else's opinion
that might show you where you're blind
and ignorant or willfully blind even but
the advantage to that is you can rectify
the error and then as you move forward
you're stronger you know one of the
things I taught my kids and I hope Le at
least somewhat successfully was
that you should always ask a stupid
question and and that doesn't mean the
sort of question that someone who wasn't
paying attention would
ask if you're listening to
someone and you don't understand what
they're saying and you reveal that
you're revealing your ignorance you know
and maybe you're in a room full of
people and you think you're the only
person stupid enough to not get it which
is very rarely the case by the way the
thing is though if you if you reveal
that ignorance to yourself and to the
other person they can Rectify it and if
you do that a thousand times you're not
ignorant anymore and and this is a real
Pathway to success too you see it you do
this because you ask real questions in
your podcast and Rogan does this kogan's
always trying to be a little smarter
than he already is and then that works
iterated like if you ask a thousand dumb
questions and you listen to the answer
then you know a thousand things some of
them deep that you didn't know before so
that's the that's the advantage to
searching your soul let's say for the
for unrequited sins and attempting to
atone that's not a delusion right it's
an attempt to set yourself right it's
the opposite of a delusion even though
there can be a Fantastical element to it
yeah the uh conversation around people
who try their best do as many things
right as they could and yet still fall
short because the world is random and
unfortunate things happen happiness as
far as I can see it sits in the gap
between your expectations and
reality but the problem here is that
people who have high standards often end
up feeling a lack right how can people
who strive like this avoid feeling
despondent at falling short of their own
high standards I've heard you talk about
the Statue of David saying something
like you are not all that you could be
yeah and as soon as you posit an ideal
you begin to compare yourself to that
ideal so well part that's a good
question I mean um the ultimate ideal is
also the ultimate judge because the
ultimate ideal is is something against
which you fall far short and that might
be so painful that you can barely stand
it but then what you do is you you you
two things I suppose is you lower the
ideal and you raise your estimation of
your Poss of your potential and what do
I mean by lower the ideal well if you're
comparing yourself to someone or even to
a future self and the Gap is so painful
that it paralyzes you then you've
created a dragon that you don't have the
tools to master and so what you have to
do is you have to scale the dragon down
to size and you want to scale the dragon
down to size until it's a size that you
are willing to move toward however small
that is now you know if you're here and
your ideal is here and that Gap is
unbearable then you reduce the Gap and
you reduce the Gap and you're going to
have to do that anyways because you're
not going to move from where you are to
perfect in one Fell Swoop right there's
going to be incremental steps so you
have to fill in that that hierarchy of
progression
with with a high enough resolution
representation so that you can start to
move forward and and then you should be
butress there's another gospel comment
that's very interesting it has to do
it's called the Matthew principle and
the Matthew principle is to those who
have everything more will be given and
from those who have nothing everything
will be taken now it's brutal because it
implies that reality works like this
when you're moving up you go like this
right and that's pretty nice that's a
lot better than this but when you're
going down you go like that right it's
like downhill downhill Cliff okay so you
want to avoid the downhill path well if
the uphill path is like this which is
like exponential let's say or geometric
then what that means is
that it doesn't matter how big the first
steps you take uphill are even if
they're trivial even if they're shameful
in their in their size because you're so
useless that if you're if you're
disciplined in that you'll speed up
extraordinarily rapidly and so that's
the good news you might say is that you
can take very small steps even ones that
might be shameful in their size and you
have to admit that to yourself but once
you get the ball rolling it doesn't roll
in a linear fashion it rolls in a
geometric fashion and this is a really
good thing to know because it can take
the sting out of the realization of your
own stupidity it's like yeah you know
every everybody has their weak sides
let's say things they're embarrassed
about when I first started going to the
gym I was like how old was I 1985 23 and
I think I weighed 135 PBS and I was F 6
foot one very very thin a TW I WR 27
inch waist something like that I smoked
like mad and I drank too much like I
wasn't in good shape the
first the first attempts forward I took
in the I went to this swim sze class
Jesus it was me and this like really fat
guy young guy probably not any worse
shape than me and like seven old women
over 70 and they could outswim me like
it was pretty damn humiliating and so I
did a semester of that and got myself in
somewhat better shape and then I started
to go to the gym to work out to lift
weights and that was also rough because
you know I'd be underneath the bloody
bench press trying to lift 75 lbs off
the off the rests and you know some
muscle-headed bastard would come over
and tell me how to do it and it's like
yeah thank you but you know it's
embarrassing and lots of times people
won't do things like go to the gym
because they're so embarrassed about how
they look or what sort of shape they're
in and it's a pain to start at the
bottom
but you start at the bottom where you're
weak and if you want to rectify what's
weak you have to accept the fact that
you're at the bottom and that the first
steps are going to be painful you know I
it took me about 3 years but I stopped
smoking and then I stopped drinking and
I gained 40 lbs of muscle in like three
and a half years something like that I
basically had to stop doing that because
I had to eat like six times a day it was
crazy but I got a lot more physically
confident and a lot
more coordinated cuz working out with
dumbbells makes you coordinated right
because it it exercises all the small
ligaments and the tendons and so my
lower body in particular got a lot more
coordinated then I could dance so that
was better when I was going out dancing
because I did a lot of that in graduate
school and but the point of all this is
if you're going to rectify your
weaknesses you have to admit your
insufficiency to your own shame now if
the gap between you and your ideal is so
great that it paralyzes you you shrink
that right we'll get back to talking to
Jordan in one minute but first I need to
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