Is My Inner Voice Healthy? | Jordan Peterson Life Advice

"You can't find your authentic self merely as a consequence of a journey within, I would say. There's just not enough of you. You have to be informed by the broader social world."
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➤➤Speaker:
Jordan B. Peterson
   / jordanpetersonvideos  
https://jordanbpeterson.com/

➤➤Video Sources:
Q&A 05-01-2021 - Jordan B. Peterson
   • Q&A 05-01-2021 | Jordan B. Peterson  

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➤➤Editor:
WordToTheWise
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➤➤Transcript (Partial):
How can one tell if one's inner voice, judgment or conscience is a healthy one and not a voice that is the result of an unhealthy mind due to past experiences? How do I decide if my inner voice is healthy or not? And how do I maintain it healthily?

Now that's a really interesting question—question of conscience. I frequently, let's say—or yearly—ask my personality class attendees if they heard the voice of conscience—if they had a feeling—an emotion—emotional state, let's say—or a voice that informed them when they had done something ethically wrong and that perhaps made them guilty as a consequence. And it was essentially a universal experience. That's the voice of society within, I suppose. That's one way of thinking about it. The Freudians would think about that as the voice of the superego. Jung—Carl Jung would take that conceptualization somewhat farther. He would have considered it the voice of the self, which is in part, the voice of the ethic that's derived from the broader community, insofar as that ethic is valid, let's say—but also in part, the voice of the more thoroughly developed self that's still striving to be born. One thing you could say is that you experience violations of your conscience when you're not acting like the better person that you could possibly become. And so, to some degree, that's your higher self upbraiding you for failure to develop in the appropriate direction. That seems to me to be a reasonable way of conceptualizing it. Now, one question might be: how error prone is your conscience given that you're not omniscient? I have an endless fascination with the movie Pinocchio. And part of that is because it taught me something very sophisticated about conscience. In that movie, Jiminy Cricket is given divine attributes. He has the same initials as Jesus Christ, for example, and he is deemed the voice of conscience itself by the magical properties of—of Mother Nature, essentially. But in the movie, it's necessary for the puppet who's still wooden-headed and still a marionette whose strings are being pulled by others—it's necessary for the puppet to engage in a dialogue with his conscience because both of them have to inform the other. And that seems to me approximately right, because I certainly saw people in my clinical practice and know people in my private life who seemed to labor under the dictates of a too authoritarian conscience. Maybe that's the internalized voice of a relatively tyrannical father, for example, or exaggerated sensitivity to the moral pressure exerted by the broader social world. You have to attend to your guilt and your self-disgust in your self-contempt and your self-consciousness. You have to understand that the manifestation of those emotions might well indicate a moral failing on your part or a—a lack that needs to be addressed. Well, at the same time, considering that it is not a straightforward matter to deal fairly with yourself and you can be too tormented by your conscience, too rigid, too responsible, take on too much weight onto yourself, deny yourself in a manner that isn't sustainable and so forth, that a moral code, a moral way of being, can become too rigid and—and inflexible, and despite its putative aim upward be something counterproductive. I think most of the way out of that, if there is one, is, well, careful thinking. You have to see what your conscience says. You have to see how you respond. You have to capture that voice and your responses and—and you have to think it through, but most of that is done in dialogue with other people rather than as the...

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