Atlas, who voluntarily takes the world on his shoulders. It’s like the idea of Christ taking the sins of the world on his shoulders. It’s exactly the same notion, which is that you should be able to recognize in yourself all the horror of humanity and take responsibility for it, because that’s what that means. And the thing that’s so interesting about it is that if you can recognize in yourself all the horror of humanity, you will instantly have a hell of a lot more respect for yourself than you did before.

There is real utility in knowing that you’re a monster. Now, just because you’re a monster doesn’t mean you have to be a monster, but it’s really useful to know that you can be one. One of the things that Jung said very clearly is that the first step to Enlightenment is the encounter with the Shadow. And what he meant by that was: everything horrible that human beings have done was done by human beings… and you’re one of them. And so, if you don’t understand that, and to understand that really means to know how it was that you could have done it —and that’s a shattering thing—, to try to imagine that, to try to imagine yourself as someone who’s engaged in medieval torture, to see how you could in fact do that; you’re never the same after you learn that. But being never the same after learning that is unbelievably useful because when you understand that that’s what you’re like, then you’re a whole different creature.

I think that you cannot be a good person until you know how much evil you contain within you, it is not possible. And it’s partly because you just don’t have any potency. If you’re just naive, if you’re just nice, if you’d never hurt anyone, you’ve never hurt a fly, you don’t have the capability for any of that… why would anyone ever take you seriously? You’re just a domestic animal at best, you know, and a rather contemptible one at that.

And it’s a very strange thing because you wouldn’t think that the revelation of the capacity for evil is a precondition for the realization of good. But I believe it! Why would you be serious enough to even attempt to pursue the good unless you had some sense of what the consequence was of not doing it?

You have to be serious about these sorts of things. It’s not the game of a child, right? It’s the game of a fully developed adult. You learn this in part when you have little kids. Never let your children do anything that makes you dislike them. I knew I was a monster and I thought “I’m going to make sure I like my kids. I’m going to make sure they behave around me so that I like them because I’m way bigger than them and I’m way more cruel than they are. I’ve got tricks up my sleeve that they cannot even possibly imagine and if they irritate me, I will absolutely take it out on them.”

And if you think that you’re the sort of person that wouldn’t do that, then you are the sort of person who is doing it.

Adaptation from “Biblical Series: God and the Hierarchy of Authority”, a podcast by Jordan B. Peterson

“It is better to be a warrior in a garden than a gardener in a war.”