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‘You’re an entity that both is and is transforming.’" cover: image: "" alt: “LLM & Foundation Models News” hidden: true
Based on Jordan Peterson’s lecture on personality, clinical psychology, and personal transformation.
Core Principle: Being and Becoming
“You’re an entity that both is and is transforming.”
The fundamental rule: Don’t sacrifice who you could be for who you are.
- If you have to choose between transforming in a positive direction or maintaining your current position, transform.
- You are not just who you are - you are the thing that transforms who you are.
- This is a Piagetian idea, also found in Jungian psychology.
The Phoenix Metaphor
The phoenix symbolizes transformation:
- Old self deteriorates, bursts into flame, is reborn
- The question isn’t “do you want to be reborn?” - it’s “do you want to burst into flame?”
- The answer is generally no, but that’s the wrong answer
- You must let the old nonsense burn away
Key insight: You already know what you should leave behind. Ask yourself - you’ll come up with a list instantly of a hundred stupid things you’re doing that you could stop doing.
The Problem with Relativism
Modern universities teach that value structures are relative. This is a mistake for several reasons:
Why Relativism Fails
- It ignores the being/becoming distinction - The rule “transform positively” is not arbitrary
- It ignores social constraint - You can’t adopt just any value structure because you’re stuck with other people
- It ignores natural constraint - Your interpretive framework must work in the actual world
The Piagetian Game Proposition
“If you want to be a popular kid on the playground, you better play games that other people want to play.”
Moral judgments emerge from consensus in a bounded domain:
- Same space
- Long time
- Iterative games that don’t spiral downward
If your value structure only works for you, it fails when you have to deal with others.
The Pragmatist Perspective
William James and the American pragmatists asked: How do you decide if something’s true?
Answer: You don’t know anything with certainty. But you lay out a mode of interpretation with an endpoint, run it embodied, and see if it produces the outcome.
- If your theory works, it’s “true enough”
- If it doesn’t work, the claims within it aren’t true by the definition of the game itself
- Social proof isn’t enough - it also has to work in the natural world
Example: You have an illness and a hypothesis about treatment. You take the actions. If the illness gets worse, your framework is wrong.
Personality as Hierarchical Structure
The Internal Society
You are a collection of sub-personalities or sub-routines:
- A unity that brings together a plurality of subcomponents
- Like a captain of a ship full of people rowing - you’ve got to keep them rowing
- You’re not omnipotent tyrant of your own destiny
Internal constraints:
- Food, shelter, water - biological demands
- Touch, attention, play - not optional for children (Romanian orphan studies)
- These aggregate into temperament (the Big Five)
Building from Micro-Routines
You develop routines from the bottom up (Piaget):
- Micro-routines - Pick up teddy bear, put in box
- Aggregation - 20 micro-routines = “clean your room”
- Higher-order abstractions - Tag the aggregated behavior with concepts
Clinical application:
- Some people have all the micro-routines but they’re dormant (depression)
- Others were neglected and never developed them - you work at the bottom, building up
Expanding Your Personality
You can consciously develop micro-routines on the other side of your personality distribution:
| If you are… | Practice… |
|---|---|
| Disagreeable | Doing nice things for people |
| Agreeable | Standing your ground |
| Extroverted | Spending time alone |
| Low openness | Reading outside your sphere |
| Hyper-conscientious | Learning to relax |
| Hyper-orderly | Getting a dog (embrace mess) |
Goal: Not moving the mean, but extending the standard deviation - becoming a bigger bag of tricks.
The Dragon of Chaos
When Things Object
You’re moving from point A to point B in your circumscribed world. Everything is invisible. Then something objects.
Example: You get a C-minus on a paper.
What is this object? It’s not just paper with a curve on it. It’s an entity in a web of connections. Your limbic system knows this - that’s why you get a paralyzed sinking feeling.
The Dragon Contains Everything
“Error messages contain within them the implicit world.”
When something objects, it’s not just that thing - it’s everything you’re ignoring, tangled up inside it:
- Maybe you’re not as smart as you thought
- Maybe you’re lazy
- Maybe you’re in the wrong field
- Maybe you’re living your parents’ destiny, not yours
- Maybe you resent the $25K/year they’re spending to force you to do what they want
The dragon is everything outside your conceptual structure - the entire unrealized world lurks beneath the surface.
Two Responses to the Dragon
Avoid it - Put the paper away, play video games. Collect more failures. Stop showering. Eventually jump off a bridge. The dragon eats you.
Confront it - Take it apart. Discover you’re working at 2% efficiency. The C-minus becomes the best gift you ever got - that’s the gold the dragon hoards.
“The C-minus can be the best gift you ever had.”
Tragedy vs. Hell
The Pessimistic Proposition
Life may be mostly a rat’s nest of misery. But that leaves a question open:
“If you didn’t do everything you could to make it worse, how good could you make it be?”
The answer: The worst case is tragedy, not hell. And tragedy is a lot better than hell.
The Difference
| Tragedy | Hell |
|---|---|
| Your mother’s deathbed | Your mother’s deathbed + siblings arguing |
| Inescapable misery | Unnecessary, self-imposed misery |
| Can bring people together | No one can bear it |
Test for your relationships: If you were gathered around the bed of someone close who is dying, could you manage it? If not, put your life together - it’s going to happen.
Who Are You?
Three Wrong Answers
- Chaos - No plan, nihilistic, in the belly of the beast. Dreadful.
- The Plan - Your identity is your little stick of wood floating in the ocean. You cling to it desperately. If something confronts it, you can’t let go or you drown. This makes you a totalitarian - you can’t learn anything.
- The New Order - The regenerated solution after transformation.
The Right Answer
“You’re the thing that can confront the obstacle to the plan.”
More than that:
- You’re the thing that decides to make the journey voluntarily
- You’re the thing that decides to make the journey voluntarily for as long as it takes
That’s where your strength lies.
The Lesson of Psychotherapy
Every form of psychotherapy teaches the same thing:
You’re not the plan. You’re the thing that can confront the obstacle to the plan. And when you learn that the obstacle is not only an obstacle but opportunity itself, your whole view of the world changes.
Becoming a Monster
The Necessity of Monstrosity
“The only thing that a monster won’t mess with is another monster.”
You have two options:
- Be a pathetic monster (weak)
- Be a monster with some power (strong)
There is no non-monster alternative.
What This Means
Not dominating tyrant strength. But “functioning at a funeral” strength.
The harsh truth: If you love someone so much you “couldn’t survive” if anything happened to them - you’re cursing them with a terrible burden. That’s the devouring force of love (the witch in Hansel and Gretel).
The proper stance: “I’m glad you’re here. But when tragedy strikes, I hope one of us is standing when it blows past.”
The Parent-Child Relationship
By your mid-20s, you should have a relationship with your parents that’s approximately one of peers.
Test: Do you care what your parents’ friends think of you? Not nearly as much as what your parents think. But your parents are just people - same as their friends. If you still care more about your parents’ judgment, you’ve still got them confused with God.
The goal: Be independent and detached enough that when the power dynamic shifts (and it will), you’ll be the person who can carry things forward. That’s the best outcome for your parents.
Order and Chaos: The Eternal Domains
The Structure of Reality
- Order: Your orderly little plan, the walled city, the garden
- Chaos: Everything that disrupts your plan, the underworld, what lurks beneath
Both are eternal. Both are traps if you’re stuck in either one.
The Right Place
You should be in the middle - the maximally meaningful place:
- Where chaos and order are properly balanced
- Unstable, but you can practice bringing things together continually
- A meta-place you can be in all places
- Your nervous system is always orienting you there
The Eternal Story
The hero who:
- Leaves the city (order)
- Confronts what lies outside (chaos)
- Comes back with something valuable (gold)
This appears across all cultures:
- Jonah and the whale
- St. George and the dragon
- Hercules and the hydra
- Buddha emerging from the lotus
- Horus with the sun
Evolutionary basis: Lynn Isbel’s theory - the arms race between snakes and primates triggered the development of improved vision and large brains. The snake is literally encoded in our visual processing.
The Antidote to Death
The Christian Symbol
Eve hands out skulls (self-consciousness, discovery of death). Mary as the church hands out hosts (pieces of Christ’s body). Christ on the tree offers the antidote.
The antidote: The voluntary acceptance of suffering as the cure for death.
This is what all the symbols mean:
- St. George with the halo (the sun, consciousness, gold)
- Buddha in the lotus (emerging from murk into light)
- The yoni and lingam (union of masculine and feminine, chaos and order)
- The world tree (Pride Rock, the tree of life)
The Same Idea Everywhere
“How can you not read that as a history of the evolution of mankind?”
All these symbols point to the same truth:
- Suffering individual transcends by accepting
- Nested inside society and patriarchal structure
- Nested inside the natural world and feminine
- The union of chaos and order produces power
Practical Applications
For Yourself
- Identify what to burn away - Ask what stupid things you’re doing that you could stop
- Start with micro-routines - Don’t try to transform everything at once
- Minimal necessary intervention - When something goes wrong, find the smallest fix
- Don’t beat yourself to death - Mistakes are for learning, not self-destruction
- Aim for the least amount of harshness possible - With yourself and others
For Relationships
- Notice when people do good things - Watch like a hawk
- Tell them - “I saw you do this. That was actually pretty good.”
- Don’t make unnecessary enemies - Shut up most of the time
- Specify minimal requests - What’s the smallest thing they could do that would satisfy you?
- Give them an escape route - Don’t corner people into collapse or punching
For Confronting Obstacles
- Assume innocence before guilt - You’re the least amount of reprehensible possible
- Look at micro-routines first - “Maybe I should study 15 minutes more every second day”
- Ask: Which part of this structure needs attention? - Not “all of it”
- Recognize the opportunity - The obstacle may have something to teach you
- Persist - Bad is fine. Persistence is what matters.
Key Quotes
“Don’t sacrifice who you could be for who you are.”
“You are the thing that transforms who you are.”
“If you want to be a popular kid on the playground, you better play games that other people want to play.”
“The facts do not tell you what to do with the facts.”
“Error messages contain within them the implicit world.”
“The C-minus can be the best gift you ever had - that’s the gold the dragon hoards.”
“The worst case outcome in the worst of all possible worlds is that your life could be tragic, but not hell.”
“You’re not the plan. You’re the thing that can confront the obstacle to the plan.”
“The only thing that a monster won’t mess with is another monster.”
“You don’t want safety. You want to be able to cope with danger.”
“When you treat someone for anxiety disorder, you do not get rid of their anxiety. You make them braver. That’s way better.”
“Be what you can be. God, you let the world dissolve around you otherwise.”
Summary: The Path of Transformation
- Recognize you are both being and becoming
- Identify what needs to burn away - you already know
- Build micro-routines that expand your capacity
- Confront obstacles as opportunities, not just problems
- Accept that you must become strong enough to stand at funerals
- Mediate between order and chaos - that’s where meaning lives
- Voluntarily make the journey, for as long as it takes
- Help others do the same - that’s what everyone needs
Based on Jordan Peterson’s “Personality and Its Transformations” lecture series. Integrates Piagetian developmental psychology, Jungian analytical psychology, pragmatist philosophy, and mythological symbolism.
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