On the blurb of 12 Rules for Life Camille Paglia says you are “the most important and influential Canadian thinker” and you were upgraded at your London lectures to “one of the world’s foremost intellectuals”. How do you keep humility active?
The first thing is, I have lots of people advising me and watching me. Tammy is one of them, and my children and my parents. Her [Tammy’s] feet are firmly on the ground.
I’m also pretty old. I’m fifty-five. [*Interviewer looks quizzically*] Yeah, but I’m not twenty. The fact is that this acclaim, let’s say, has a different effect on you when you’re older than when you are young. The temptation to take it egotistically is stronger when you’re young than it is when you are old. Partly because you have been bashed around by the time you are old. You have some sense of what life is really like and what’s really important, and all of those things.
Part of the humility that’s necessary to make this sort of thing work is the proper terror of making a mistake. I have been far more terrified of making a fatal error in the last eighteen months than I have been thrilled about my newfound notoriety. I have been walking a very thin tightrope. I only have to say one thing, in all the things that I have said since September, and I have come close!
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Outside of my immediate family, I have a circle of advisers who are not the sort of people who are swayed by fame. Not because they don’t understand its utility, not because they are contemptuous of it, none of that, but because some of them have had their fame, and some of them have had the kind of power in the world that is sufficient so they are no longer star-struck by that sort of thing, and they can see the dangers. I talk to them and I say, “OK, here is what I said. What did I do wrong? Where did I go overboard? Where wasn’t I clear? Where did I wander into egotism?” And they are brutal. They tell me, “Here is what you did wrong; don’t do this again.” There are five of them. And, plus, I pay attention to the social media comments. Not obsessively, but if I have made a video that doesn’t get fifty-to-one likes to dislikes, I have made a mistake, because that seems to be about the [right] ratio.
This isn’t a moral virtue on my part. This is desperate instinct for self-preservation. It’s like if you’re in a piranha tank, you don’t want to get a speck of something delicious on you. How would that be?
- Walking the Tightrope Between Chaos and Order—An Interview with Jordan B Peterson
The first thing is, I have lots of people advising me and watching me. Tammy is one of them, and my children and my parents. Her [Tammy’s] feet are firmly on the ground.
I’m also pretty old. I’m fifty-five. [*Interviewer looks quizzically*] Yeah, but I’m not twenty. The fact is that this acclaim, let’s say, has a different effect on you when you’re older than when you are young. The temptation to take it egotistically is stronger when you’re young than it is when you are old. Partly because you have been bashed around by the time you are old. You have some sense of what life is really like and what’s really important, and all of those things.
Part of the humility that’s necessary to make this sort of thing work is the proper terror of making a mistake. I have been far more terrified of making a fatal error in the last eighteen months than I have been thrilled about my newfound notoriety. I have been walking a very thin tightrope. I only have to say one thing, in all the things that I have said since September, and I have come close!
[---]
Outside of my immediate family, I have a circle of advisers who are not the sort of people who are swayed by fame. Not because they don’t understand its utility, not because they are contemptuous of it, none of that, but because some of them have had their fame, and some of them have had the kind of power in the world that is sufficient so they are no longer star-struck by that sort of thing, and they can see the dangers. I talk to them and I say, “OK, here is what I said. What did I do wrong? Where did I go overboard? Where wasn’t I clear? Where did I wander into egotism?” And they are brutal. They tell me, “Here is what you did wrong; don’t do this again.” There are five of them. And, plus, I pay attention to the social media comments. Not obsessively, but if I have made a video that doesn’t get fifty-to-one likes to dislikes, I have made a mistake, because that seems to be about the [right] ratio.
This isn’t a moral virtue on my part. This is desperate instinct for self-preservation. It’s like if you’re in a piranha tank, you don’t want to get a speck of something delicious on you. How would that be?
- Walking the Tightrope Between Chaos and Order—An Interview with Jordan B Peterson
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