Jordan Peterson | Constrained Potential

“I’m going to make a small detour and talk to you about potential, again. I really thought about it a lot. I think music speaks of potential. I think music speaks of potential bursting forward, and that’s why it’s so deeply meaningful. It’s this continual pattern revelation of the next wonderful thing that might happen. It’s something like that. So there’s that, and people find that deeply meaningful. And then there’s the idea that we all have potential that isn’t realized, but that we regard that potential, even though it’s not realized, as real, which I can’t get my head around, at all. It just doesn’t make sense, although everyone acts that way, and everyone believes it. What you act reflects what you believe, and you make judgements about yourself and others based on those beliefs. They’re deep judgements. I think it’s undeniable that you believe that there is such a thing as human potential. If you act at all, if you expect things of people at all, then you’re demonstrating your commitment to the ideal of potential. But I wonder if there’s something even deeper going on, because we, modern people, are very materialistic. There’s great power in that, obviously. For better or for worse, we’ve obtained great control over the material world. But we do have a tendency to think of the world purely as a material structure. It isn’t really obvious to me that the world is exactly a material structure. It seems to be something more like constrained potential.

Everything is a certain way, but everything that is a certain way could be a multitude of other ways, in almost an infinite multitude of other ways. The degree to which something that is could be a multitude of other ways is dependent in large part on how you interact with it. Even with materials that we’re very familiar with, we continue to discover new properties and put them to use. Things are compacted into their material form, but that doesn’t exhaust what they are, especially not in relationship to other things. It seems to me, even if you can’t replace the materialist perspective with the perspective that it’s better to construe being as if it’s made of possibility, rather than the world as if it’s made of matter, it’s at least useful to have that as an additional viewpoint. You could say, ‘well, the material philosophy is very useful as a tool for obtaining certain sorts of benefits,’ which it clearly is. But then this more metaphysical perspective, which I think is more accurate in some ways, that the world is a place of potential, is also an extraordinary useful way to approach the world. It’s practically useful.

We talked last week a little bit about doing something as simple as trying to organize a room. It’s by no means obvious how much potential there is in a room. There’s a very large amount of potential in any given room—a tremendous amount of potential, especially if it’s connected with people…Maybe an inexhaustible amount of potential, and maybe there’s an inexhaustible amount of potential, everywhere, that we just don’t know to get access to. It’s certainly true, to some degree: we don’t know how to get access to all the potential of our children, for example, or ourselves, or our loved ones, or the people that we know. So I think this story is trying to hammer that idea home, too: don’t be so sure that it’s impossible, or, maybe, don’t let the assumption that it’s impossible stop you from going forth into the world. That’s like an inoculation against nihilism.

For a long time, I understood nihilism very well. I could understand its rationale, associated with the tragedy of life, associated with suffering and evil, associated with an observation of finitude and the arbitrary and unjust nature of the world. But the more I’ve thought about it, the less I’ve come to believe that there’s any excuse for it, whatsoever. I think the reason for that is that it forestalls effort. It forestalls the ability to discover for yourself. Maybe there’s no reason to be so goddamn hopeless, except that it’s easier to be useless. Now, believe me, I’m not saying that’s what’s besetting people who are clinically depressed, for example. That’s not my point. Clinical depression is a terrible thing. There’s lots of reasons to be tossed into a catastrophic condition. That isn’t what I mean. I mean that kind of cynical, arrogant, rational, hyper-intelligent nihilism that throws the world away as if it’s of little use before it’s been properly engaged with. Better to engage with it and see what happens—and better to make the assumption that, if the world isn’t returning to you what it is that you need, then either you’re not doing it right or you’ve conceptualized what you need badly. Why not at least open yourself up to that possibility? Because you could be wrong.” — Jordan Peterson


Edited by Bearsella

Music in this video
Song: Identity
Artist: Helen Jane Long

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