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| Atrocity's opposite points to a solution |
That student, and fellow listeners, got an answer worthy of a lifetime of reflection.
Two years ago Cambridge blocked a proposed visit in an outburst of wokeness because he had been photographed standing next to someone wearing a t-shirt with an anti-Islamic slogan. After a campaign to restore free speech to the university by admirers and academics Peterson was able to return and made a deep impression. An academic has reported:
I saw Peterson speak twice on his Cambridge visit. He spoke passionately, at length and without notes, to rapt audiences. He engaged the crowd with care and warmth. His seminars were a model of academic engagement. There was a lively, disputatious and often rigorous battle of ideas that ranged from the neuroscience of perception via William Empson and 17th-century counterpoint to Mesopotamian creation myths.
To answer the student's question, Peterson took a typically complex route to what is a profound answer. He began by recalling that he had spent many years pondering what it was that divided human from human, and, indeed, what compelled a human to commit an atrocity on another human. For this reason he had studied the “Auschwitz phenomenon”, which hangs on this question: What makes an otherwise trusty Auschwitz guard commit atrocities on the arriving prisoners?
Peterson starts to untie the knot:
There's one famous story - I think it was in Man's Search for Meaning [by Viktor Frankl, a survivor of Auschwitz]. The people who came to the concentration camps were transported in [train] cattle cars, and many of them in the winter froze to death if they were on the outside of the cattle car and or were suffocated if in the middle.
They were separated from their families and there were people of different nationalities and different languages, families all crammed together, so they're as alienated and broken as people could possibly be.
You'd think that'd be enough wouldn't you, but no. You come to the camp and the people in the cars would cheer if they came to a camp that had no chimney [for burning bodies], and so that shows you what joy is like under those conditions.
One of the tricks that the guards used to play in Auschwitz was they get these people after this brutal transport to pick up like a hundred pound [45kg] sack of wet salt and carry it from one side of the compound to the other and back. Those places were small cities; they had 50 000 people in some of the camps, so it was a walk across town after you'd been separated from your family and just about froze to death and were three-quarters dead and had everything stripped away.
Just who the hell did you have to be to then subject that person to work for no other reason than to prolong their suffering? Solzhenitsyn said that when he was in [Russian gulags], at least if he was laying bricks in a wall, at least he had the satisfaction of building something. There was some tiny iota of meaning in the work, something redemptive in that a crumb that you could feast on in the midst of your starvation.
But whoever came up with this Auschwitz torment figured out how to make work itself counterproductive. Work itself becomes nothing but a means to more suffering, and remember the joke on the outside of the Auschwitz camp - “Arbeit Macht Frei” (work makes you free).
What would I have to be like to do that?
I wanted to think about just what exactly would you have to be like to make that joke, and part of the reason I wanted to figure that out is because I'm a human being and a human being made that joke, and a human being forced that [salt sack] punishment onto someone who was already suffering.
I wanted to figure out what I would have to be like to do that. I thought if I could figure that out then I could figure out what the opposite of that was because maybe such things should be brought to a halt.
That's what we were supposed to remember from the concentration camps which we're continually reminded never to forget.
Well, you do not remember what you cannot understand, and so we think [we] know evil.
People did this. But don't be so sure that those people aren't you.
That's a horrible thing to contemplate but a necessary thing to contemplate, and I would say, also, that if you don't contemplate it you end up placing that great evil somewhere else - in some other person, in some other race, in some other political party.
If it's not part of your own heart, and the fight isn't there, well, you're going to have the fight somewhere.
I thought about that for a long time and what I concluded was that the way out of that is to make better people at the individual level. It's a psychological issue fundamentally, not a sociological issue, not an economic issue - certainly not an economic issue - not a political issue. It is all those things to some degree, but not fundamentally.There's no political reason to have some suffering person under your dominion carry a sack of wet salt that weighs a hundred pounds from one side of a compound to another.
No, that's you man, corrupt right to hell! And so you think that's pretty terrible - and it is pretty terrible - but there is one advantage to specifying evil in a very distinctive and precise manner is that when you specify something that precisely you also specify its opposite.
So, if there's evil of that depth, then, at least in principle, there might be the opposite of that, which would be the force that might resist it.
While I was looking into the heart of darkness, the light started to shine through, and I started to understand that you should not lie. That’s a big mistake.
First of all, I’ll tell you one thing - I never saw any of my clinical clients ever get away with anything, ever!
We'd track their misery back to its origination point, and sometimes it was a mistake on their part, often a moral error which they knew was a moral error when they were committing it but may have forgotten about afterwards. So it became unconscious in some sense, or habitual, or it was a moral error by someone else that they were beholden to: a lie on the part of their mother, father, someone they were tangled up with, someone malevolent.
But, yeah, the pigeons come home to roost, man. How could it be otherwise? You really think you have the capacity to bend the structure of reality without it eventually snapping back and hitting you in the face. How arrogant can you possibly be to think that?
So I came to believe that truth in particular, spoken truth but not only spoken truth, was the antidote to that evil and to that suffering.
It's more complex than that, but that's something.
I also came to believe that each of us have far more under our dominion in terms of the destiny of the world than we would ever care, to dare, to dread.
I don't know how it works but each of us [makes] decisions between heaven and hell all the time. With every decision. In fact, with every decision, that's a decision up or down, and in some manner the whole collective enterprise is guided by those individual decisions, and it's not washed away in the mix.
Somehow it’s not just your trivial action in the sea of seven billion random actions. We're networked, and our actions echo, and what we do or don't do, or what we do deceitfully has ramifications far beyond what we can immediately see or often are willing to see.
The only more frightening realization than nothing you do matters is the realization that everything you do matters.
[If] you think meaninglessness is terrifying, you try its opposite and you see how terrifying that is. But [that opposite state] is a holy terror, right, it's a terror that sustains and ennobles, and every single person knows that that is true, knows that you're fleeing from your destiny by avoidance of the necessary responsibility that your conscience calls you towards.
Everyone knows that and we toy with it because we can and we try to avoid it because we test, we're immature and we're bitter often, and it's not surprising because people suffer dreadfully and it's very difficult to suffer dreadfully without becoming bitter but it doesn't help, and all it does is make suffering worse, and it spreads it.
If the suffering is morally objectionable spreading it is hardly going to rectify that.
So I'm optimistic about our possibilities because I think we can do anything we set our minds to. Hopefully, we'll set our minds to the proper things and every single one of you have to make that decision.
Therefore, as Peterson concludes, it's up to each person to create unity when the alternative is division, peace when strife threatens. We can set our hopes on the willingness of each individual person to polish their conscience to be shining bright so as be firm against any temptation to set person against person, group against group. In good faith, we should be looking for the ways and means to unite and resolve conflict ourselves, not blaming the other as the sole cause or seeing that other as the only source of resolution.
A kindred sentiment has been expressed by Russian writer and prisoner of conscience Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who wrote in his The Gulag Archipelago, the account of his time in brutal Siberian prison camps:
If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
Watch Peterson's talk to the Cambridge Union in full here:
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