Antidote to Nihilism - Jordan Peterson

So, and i think this is modeled by music. This is really worth knowing this. This like almost took the top of my head off when i realized it and it took me about four months of thinking to figure this out. Show more

Because when, when i was in graduate school at mcgill, i was really interested. I became really interested in the reality of evil and i was very interested in the viability of nihilistic beliefs. You know what? Show more

Why bother if everything's going to disappear in 100 years, who cares life? You know it's meaningless. And the final analysis: life is meaningless, right? Okay, well, you know you can make a credible case for that. Now it's a upsetting case because once you accept that, first of all you're anxious and hurt by it, so that's not so good. Show more

And second, it kind of makes you aimless and that's part of nihilism. It's like you know you're anxious and upset but you're also aimless because why bother? And fair enough, but you can make a credible case for it. But then i thought, well, when that gets out of hand, maybe you're nihilistic because life, because you're mortal and life ends in death, so you're sort of nihilistic because of suffering, and so then you become nihilistic as a logical response to that. And then what happens? Show more

And then what you see is that nihilistic people definitely make suffering worse. Definitely they make it worse for themselves, for sure, but then they get better because their lives are so unbearable and then they start to take it out on other people. So if you are nihilistic, that's not neutral. It gets bad real fast. So then i thought, well, what are? Are there any antidotes to meaninglessness? And rational antidotes are hard to come by because you can just say: well, who cares if in a thousand years we're all going to be dead? Show more

What? Why get out of bed in the morning? You can't really make mount a rational case why that's not reasonable. Now i'm not saying it is reasonable, but i thought about music. Music is a very strange art form. I had a great journalist friend of mine. He said to me the other day: he said all art aspires to the condition of music, which i thought was great. But music it's. You think about the revitalizing effect music continues to have in our culture, especially among young people, and that's really really been the case since the beginning of the 60s. It's like we got more nihilistic and less religious, and all of that as our culture became more secular and more rational, more materialistic and, at the same time, the power of music as a cultural phenomenon just grew and grew and grew and grew. So music gives you the intimation of meaning right directly. So i used to watch punk rockers. I went to a ramones concert once, which was really fun. We were up in the second floor of this theater in montreal and the ramones were playing on stage like 100 feet away with their, with their, like their, their their huge stu, not their studio stadi equipment. It was so loud in there like i had to listen to the whole concert with my ears plugged and i was still like three quarters deaf for three days. And beneath us on the stage, sort of in front of the stage, there was a flat place and all these punks were down there smashing into each other and and and, doing this, this really rough dance, and i thought this is so cool. We got all these nihilistic punks in here like half beating themselves up, dancing and and and, being taken in by this rough music. That gave them, even in their aggressive nihilism, a sense of meaning. I thought that was so cool. So why does music do that? That's a good question. Because people think of music as a non-representational art. It doesn't represent anything. Show more

It's not like a drawing or a picture, or even dance where you can act something out, really non-representational. I don't agree with that. Like, what do you mean about music being non-representational? Well, it's not a picture of anything, right, but it represents the feeling of the person who puts out the, the lyrics, yeah, the feeling of the person. True music. True, it's got emotional content. That's, that's fair enough, because there's there's unhappy music and there's happy music: minor keys, major, and definitely it plays on emotions, for sure, but but it's still does. It doesn't represent anything like a picture represented or a sculpture, that's all i know. Show more

Okay, not that it's. I didn't say it was without content. I see what you're saying. We said representation, yeah, but well, you could say it represents emotions, and fair enough, fair enough, yeah, but i was thinking more like a picture of a serious thing. Show more

Okay so, but what? So let's think about what music is. First of all, it's, it's a pattern. So non-pattern music is noise, it's a pattern. But then it isn't one pattern, it's multiple patterns layered on top of one another in a harmonious manner and in a manner that indicates, in some sense, communication between all the patterned layers, because they have to go together. And so what's the world? Well, the world's made of objects, like. No, it's not, it's made of patterns. So music is just like the world, because the world's made of patterns. And then music has layered patterns that are all moving together in a harmonious manner. Show more

And so what do you do when you hear that, especially if it's got a beat? Well then you move your body and you want to right. The music calls to you to move your body. So now you're moving your body in sync with the patterned layers of the world. That's meaning. And then there's more to. So that's so cool is music is an analog of the structure of existence itself, and it calls to you to take part in that. And then, so maybe you dance by yourself, or maybe, even better, you dance with someone else. And so then you both bring your bodies into this patterned relationship, with this multi-layer harmony, together in a spontaneous way, indicating that you can both play and are there for potentially trustworthy future mates. That's unbelievably cool. And birds dance- it's not just human beings, you know. So this is a deep thing. And then music does something else to it. It puts you on the border between chaos and order, because a boring song does exactly what you expect it to do, and it gets dull very quickly. And an unlistenable song is so random you can't follow it, and so what you want is predictability with a leave-in of unpredictability, and then that puts you right on the edge. That's the zone of proximal development. Vygotsky discovered that like a hendrick song, yeah, yeah, like hendrix song. Show more

Well, any great music does that. But i mean, hendrix has so much creativity inside the structure of the song because his riffs right, right, right and everyone loves. Oh man. I went to this bar in nashville. This band was playing kelly's heroes- a great guitarist, best guitarist i've ever seen- and they were playing old country music with a heavy blues rock twist. So they do this great version of ghost riders in the sky. Show more

That's 15 minutes long and this brilliant guitarist just goes way out a limb and everybody in the crowd it's so it was so fun to be there. They're just thrilled to death because they're watching this man doing the same thing that surfers do. He's like dancing on the edge of chaos and order in this virtuosic manner, and everyone is so taken by that that it just lifts them out of the normality of their existence. You know, they see this joy, just transfuse them, and that's because they got an intimation of genuine meaning and it's and it's, it's, it's not amenable to rational criticism, which is the thing that i thought that struck me is so miraculous about music, and wise has this element of salvation. Show more

It's like it puts you directly in touch with the meaning that sustains you in life, directly, and it shows you what that would be, which is something like to observe the harmonious interplay of the patterns of being stacked on top of one another and then to bring yourself into alignment with that which is what yogis strive to do and what disciplined athletes strive to do and what we celebrate in athletics, and it's all a reflection of the same thing and that real, that meaning. Show more