The Psychology of Identity

The Psychology of Identity

Jordan B. Peterson — 1 recording in the archive.

The book: Maps of Meaning by Jordan B. Peterson.

So I'm gonna talk to you about identity whenever I talked to my son about what I should talk about whatever I'm nervous about giving a presentation and I was definitely nervous about this one I can tell you he always says just make sure you talk about what you know and that's great advice you know like everyone should follow that so I'm gonna try to talk about what I know and I know something about identity anyways and I'm very interested in helping people understand what identity means and then also maybe strengthening their identity because I can't really think of anything better than you could that you can possibly do than that and I think in some sense it's the answer to all the problems that plague us let's say so I'm gonna tell you a story about how I came to view the things that how I came to understand the things that I have come to understand back in the late mid to late 1970s when the Cold War was raging and when the nuclear arsenal of the Soviet Union was arrayed in its full force against the equally dangerous nuclear arsenal of the West I had a series of very apocalyptic nightmares and I don't really know why it was so obsessed with the Cold War I mean it's not like I was alone everybody was this obsessed with it to some degree it was a cold war after all and I couldn't understand when we would arm ourselves to the teeth and risk the destruction of everything just to buttress what we believed in it didn't seem that the potential sacrifice was worth the gain so I started to study belief systems from a psychological perspective I was curious about what function they played what role they served and I was also interested in something else which I didn't realize at the time was at the core of what I later understood as the postmodern conundrum the postmodern conundrum is roughly the fact that the world is a very complicated place and there are a very large number of ways to interpret it and the postmodern conclusion is because there are an indefinitely large number of ways to interpret the world that no one solution is in any real sense preferable to any other and that solutions are imposed by power when I…