I've studied authoritarianism for a very long time - for 40 years - and they're started by people's attempts to control the ideological and linguistic territory.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes how authoritarian regimes often originate from efforts to dominate thoughts and language.
Jordan Peterson's quote highlights the foundational role that control over ideology and language plays in the rise of authoritarianism. By asserting dominance in these spheres, individuals or groups can manipulate perceptions and enforce conformity, paving the way for more oppressive governance. The quote serves as a warning that such control over discourse can undermine democratic values and individual freedoms.
In practice
In a speech addressing the importance of free speech, one might use this quote to highlight the dangers of authoritarianism.
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.
Lord, grant that anger or other bitterness does not reign over us, but that your grace, genuine kindness, loyalty, and every kind of friendliness, generosity, and gentleness may reign in us. Amen
The principle of tolerance and respect for freedom promoted by the reforms of the Second Vatican Council are today being manipulated and erroneously taken too far.
Sin can bring pleasure, but never happiness.
Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and a machinery of violence; thanks to its peculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in this apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within.
When childhood dies, its corpses are called adults and they enter society, one of the politer names of hell. That is why we dread children, even if we love them, they show us the state of our decay.
The profound thinker always suspects that he is superficial.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.