Individual Quotes - page 97
The proper functioning of the state is dependent on the proper functioning of the individual, rather than the reverse. And the proper mode of individual Being that's redemptive is Truth. Truth is the antidote to the suffering that emerges with the fall of man in the story of Adam and Eve.
Jordan Peterson
The logical conclusion of intersectionality is individuality. There's so many different ways of categorizing people's advantages and disadvantages, that if you take that all the way out to the end you say 'Well, the individual is the ultimate minority' – and that's exactly right. And that's exactly what the West discovered. The intersectionalists will get there if they don't kill everyone first.
Jordan Peterson
Ideology is a parasite on religious substructures. A religious narrative has a particular set of characteristics. It's very balanced. So for example there's the feminist idea of the patriarchy. Well the religious idea of society has a patriarchal notion built into it. That would be the dying king. The once great dying king. In a religious story, there's the natural world, the chaotic world - there's a positive element and a negative element. Then there's the social world - there's the wise king and the tyrannical king. Then there's the individual world - that's the adversary and the hero. There's always a positive and a negative at each level. And it stops it from being an over simplification.
Jordan Peterson
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.
Jordan Peterson
Your values have to be hierarchically organized with something absolute at the top, because otherwise they do nothing but war. You have to organize your values hierarchically or else you stay confused. This is true if you're an individual and it's true if you're a state. If you don't know what the next thing you should do is, then there are fifty things you should do. Then, how are you doing to do any of them. You can't. You have to prioritize. Something has to be above something else. It has to be arranged in a hierarchy for it not to be chaotic. So there is some principle at the top of the hierarchy.
Jordan Peterson
The potential sacrifices itself if you don't utilize it as you mature, and you just end up a 40 year old lost boy, which is a horrifying thing to behold. It's almost as if you're the living corpse of a child, because who wants a six year old 40-year-old? You're a little on the stale side by that point, and you're not the world's happiest individual. Your potential is going to disappear because you age anyways, so you might as well shape that potential in a particular direction and at least become something, no matter how limited, rather than nothing.
Jordan Peterson
I think that truth is the highest value, although it has to be embedded in love. What I mean by that is that truth should serve the highest good imaginable. For me, that is what is best for each individual, in the manner that is simultaneously best for the family, and the state, and nature itself. But you can only want that good if you love Being.
Jordan Peterson
In our time it has been seen, as I hope to show quite shortly, that simple children, roughly brought up in the wilderness, have begun to draw by themselves, impelled by their own natural genius, instructed solely by the example of these beautiful paintings and sculptures of Nature. Much more then it is probable that the first men, being less removed from their divine origin, were more perfect, possessing a brighter intelligence, and that with Nature as a guide, a pure intellect for master, and the lovely world as a model, they originated these noble arts, and by gradually improving them brought them at length, from small beginnings, to perfection. I do not deny that there must have been an originator, since I know quite well that there must have been a beginning at some time, due to some individual.
Giorgio Vasari
I observe that there are two entirely different theories according to which individual men seek to get on in the world. One theory leads a man to pull down everybody around him in order to climb up on them to a higher place. The other leads a man to help everybody around him in order that he may go up with them.
Elihu Root
For example, how great the difference was between our days. While my days were jam-packed with meaning, when each step opened a new opportunity, and when every opportunity filled me to the brim, in a way which now is actually incomprehensible, the meaning of his days was not concentrated in individual events but spread over such large areas that it was not possible to comprehend them in anything other than abstract terms.
Karl Ove Knausgard
I think the arc of history is long, and it bends toward justice. And I think that's what the 'Star Wars' message is. You know, the dark side is in the human heart. And chaos is very troubling for an individual or for a culture, which can lead you to authoritarian leaders. But the arc of history is on the right side. I believe that.
Cass Sunstein
