Jordan Peterson talks to a psychopath

I worked with a crazy psychologist. He used to put jokes in his multiple choice exams. He was a very eccentric guy, but I really liked his courses. He and he taught a course on creativity and he was also a prison psychologist. He was an eccentric guy and for some reason he liked me and maybe because I was eccentric too and he invited me to go with him to the maximum security prison in Edmonton a couple of times, which I did and it was a very interesting experience because I was trying. to find out what role each individual's behavior had in the pathology of the group, it was something like that and I went out and met a guy smaller than me, I was a little bigger by then and he was a pretty harmless guy and eh.

What happened was I was in a gym that looks like a high school, a prison, which is pretty telling in my opinion, but there were all these monsters there lifting weights and like they were monsters. I remember one guy was tattooed all over and he had like a huge scar that ran down half his chest, it looked like someone had to hit him with an ax and you know, and I was there and he had this weird cape that he used to wear. and that I bought in Portugal and some boots that went with it and yes, it was like a Sherlock Holmes cape from 1890 and it really was like it was 1890 because this little town was on top of a hill, it was a walled city on a hill and they were selling these things and I don't think they'd changed the style since 1890, so I thought they were really cool, so I was wearing what was maybe not the most conservative outfit in the world if you're going to wear if I was going to go to a prison maximum security, so anyway I was at the gym and the psycho, the psychologist, left and God only knows, I mean, that's what he was like and all these guys came, all these guys came around me, you know, and They offered to trade their prison clothes for my cape and it was like they were making me an offer I couldn't refuse, you know, so I didn't, I didn't really know what to do and then this little guy said something like that.

The psychologist sent me to come and take you or something, so I thought this little guy was better than all these monsters, so we left the gym through some doors, like the school doors, we left the gym to the courtyard of exercises. I guess we were wandering around and he was talking to me and he seemed like a kind of harmless guy and then the psychologist appeared at the door and motioned for us to back off, which was kind of a relief, so I went into his office. and he said, do you know that guy you went out in the yard with and I said yes, he said that one night he took two police officers and made them kneel and while they were begging for their lives he shot them both in the back. off the top of my head and I thought what was so interesting was that it was so harmless, because what you would expect is that someone like that would be very different from you, let's say, and it certainly wouldn't be like someone harmless. what you'd want is for the guy to be half werewolf and half vampire so you could immediately tell he was a cold-blooded killer, but no, he was some kind of ineffective little guy who was certainly not ineffective if you gave him a revolver. in the upper hand and that made me think that made me think a lot about the relationship between being harmless and being dangerous and then something else happened, I met another guy out there and then a week or two later I heard that he and a friend of his They had grabbed another guy and pulverized his left leg with a lead pipe like they had just pulverized it and the reason for that was because they thought I was a snitch and maybe I was and that time I did something different instead of shocked and horrified by that, although I certainly was, I thought how in the world could you do that because I didn't think I could do that I didn't think I thought there was a qualitative distinction between those people and me, so I spent about two weeks trying to see If I could figure out under what conditions I could do that, what kind of psychological transformation I would have to undergo to be able to do that and to do that.

It was a meditation exercise, let's say, and it only took me about 10 days to realize that not only could I do that, but it would be a hell of a lot easier than I thought it would be and that's where that wall between me and what Jung described as the shadow started to crumble and that was also very helpful because I started to tear myself apart. I started treating myself as a slightly different entity because I hadn't been aware until that point, you know, because I thought he was a good person. guy and there's no reason for me to think that because you're not a good guy, unless you've tried really hard to be a good guy, you're just not, it's not easy, so you're probably a moderately bad guy. and that's a long way from being an absolutely horrible guy, but it's also a long way from being a good guy, but after that I had a little more respect for myself because I also understood that there was a monstrous element to the human psyche that you needed to respect and that it was part of you that you should consider yourself in some sense as a loaded weapon.

It is very useful with children to think of yourself as a loaded gun because with children you are a loaded gun and the terrible experiences that many children have with their parents are testament to that.