I'm interested in what motivates individuals to participate in atrocious acts to support their ideological identification.
Interpretation
This quote explores the factors that lead people to commit extreme actions based on their beliefs.
Jordan Peterson's quote delves into the complex motivations that drive individuals to engage in harmful or violent acts in the name of their ideologies. It suggests a need to understand the psychological and social influences that can transform ordinary people into participants of extreme behavior, raising important questions about morality, identity, and the impact of belief systems on human actions.
In practice
During a philosophical discussion on the ethics of activism.
Part of the reason there's an injunction to the truth, for example, is that if you're in a circumstance of extreme uncertainty, your best weapon, let's say, or your best tool or your best defense is the truth, because it keeps things simpler.
I don't tell people, 'You're okay the way that you are.' That's not the right story. The right story is, 'You're way less than you could be.'
Once someone has spent enough time cultivating bad habits and biding their time, they are much diminished. Much of what they could have been has dissipated.
If you learn a martial art, you learn to be dangerous, but simultaneously, you learn to control it.
Life is tragic. You are tiny and flawed and ignorant and weak, and everything else is huge, complex, and overwhelming.
Music has an intrinsic meaning, which has always been mysterious to me.
The greatest myth about mass incarceration is that it has been driven by crime and crime rates. It's just not true.
It was not the visible sun, but its invisible Creator who consecrated this day for us, when the Virgin Mother, fertile of womb and integral in her virginity, brought him forth, made visible for us, by whom, when he was invisible, she too was created. A Virgin conceiving, a Virgin bearing, a Virgin pregnant, a Virgin bringing forth, a Virgin perpetual. Why do you wonder at this, O man?
To tax the community for the advantage of a class is not protection: it is plunder.
Not one of them who took up in his youth with this opinion that there are no gods ever continued until old age faithful to his conviction.
It's personal freedom, not hundred dollar bills that lights the soul's cigar.
In view of the tide of religiosity engulfing a once secular republic it is refreshing to be reminded by Freethinkers that free thought and skepticism are robustly in the American tradition. After all the Founding Fathers began by omitting God from the American Constitution.
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