By Jordan B. Peterson
From his book: "12 rules for life"
THE INTERNAL CRITIC
IT WAS EASIER FOR PEOPLE to be good at something when more of us lived in
small, rural communities. Someone could be homecoming queen. Someone else
could be spelling-bee champ, math whiz or basketball star. There were only one
or two mechanics and a couple of teachers. In each of their domains, these local
heroes had the opportunity to enjoy the serotonin-fuelled confidence of the
victor. It may be for that reason that people who were born in small towns are
statistically overrepresented among the eminent.68 If you’re one in a million
now, but originated in modern New York, there’s twenty of you—and most of us
now live in cities. What’s more, we have become digitally connected to the
entire seven billion. Our hierarchies of accomplishment are now dizzyingly
vertical.
No matter how good you are at something, or how you rank your
accomplishments, there is someone out there who makes you look incompetent.
You’re a decent guitar player, but you’re not Jimmy Page or Jack White. You’re
almost certainly not even going to rock your local pub. You’re a good cook, but
there are many great chefs. Your mother’s recipe for fish heads and rice, no
matter how celebrated in her village of origin, doesn’t cut it in these days of
grapefruit foam and Scotch/tobacco ice-cream. Some Mafia don has a tackier
yacht. Some obsessive CEO has a more complicated self-winding watch, kept in
his more valuable mechanical hardwood-and-steel automatic self-winding watch
case. Even the most stunning Hollywood actress eventually transforms into the
Evil Queen, on eternal, paranoid watch for the new Snow White. And you? Your
career is boring and pointless, your housekeeping skills are second-rate, your
taste is appalling, you’re fatter than your friends, and everyone dreads your
parties. Who cares if you are prime minister of Canada when someone else is the
president of the United States?
Inside us dwells a critical internal voice and spirit that knows all this. It’s
predisposed to make its noisy case. It condemns our mediocre efforts. It can be
very difficult to quell. Worse, critics of its sort are necessary. There is no
shortage of tasteless artists, tuneless musicians, poisonous cooks,
bureaucratically-personality-disordered middle managers, hack novelists and
tedious, ideology-ridden professors. Things and people differ importantly in
their qualities. Awful music torments listeners everywhere. Poorly designed
buildings crumble in earthquakes. Substandard automobiles kill their drivers
when they crash. Failure is the price we pay for standards and, because
mediocrity has consequences both real and harsh, standards are necessary.
We are not equal in ability or outcome, and never will be. A very small
number of people produce very much of everything. The winners don’t take all,
but they take most, and the bottom is not a good place to be. People are unhappy
at the bottom. They get sick there, and remain unknown and unloved. They
waste their lives there. They die there. In consequence, the self-denigrating voice
in the minds of people weaves a devastating tale. Life is a zero-sum game.
Worthlessness is the default condition. What but willful blindness could possibly
shelter people from such withering criticism? It is for such reasons that a whole
generation of social psychologists recommended “positive illusions” as the only
reliable route to mental health.69 Their credo? Let a lie be your umbrella. A more
dismal, wretched, pessimistic philosophy can hardly be imagined: things are so
terrible that only delusion can save you.
Here is an alternative approach (and one that requires no illusions). If the
cards are always stacked against you, perhaps the game you are playing is
somehow rigged (perhaps by you, unbeknownst to yourself). If the internal voice
makes you doubt the value of your endeavours or your life, or life itself—
perhaps you should stop listening. If the critical voice within says the same
denigrating things about everyone, no matter how successful, how reliable can it
be? Maybe its comments are chatter, not wisdom. There will always be people
better than you—that’s a cliché of nihilism, like the phrase, In a million years,
who’s going to know the difference? The proper response to that statement is not,
Well, then, everything is meaningless. It’s, Any idiot can choose a frame of time
within which nothing matters. Talking yourself into irrelevance is not a profound
critique of Being. It’s a cheap trick of the rational mind.