The following is a transcribed excerpt from one of Dr. Jordan Peterson’s 2020 lectures. In this segment, he discusses how we perceive the world, what causes our emotions to be destabilized, why we experience negative emotion when our plans change, and how our nervous system assess situations. You can listen to or watch more from Dr. Peterson on DailyWire+.
We do not see objects, think about them, evaluate them, and then decide how to act on them — or, if we do, we do it rarely, slowly, and with a lot of thought. What we see, instead, are obstacles or pathways with tools that will move us forward. When there are no obstacles in front of you — when there is a nice flat road — you experience positive emotion. You think, “This is a task I can undertake. The sailing is clear. It is a good day.” When there is an obstacle in front of you, you experience a little pang of disappointment and anxiety. You think, “Can I make it around that obstacle?” If you have done so before, you will think, fairly confidently, “I can walk forward, and then circumvent the obstacle.” It is a minor disruption to the perceptual set of skills you use to organize the world. It is a minor bit of chaos. If, however, you do not know how to engage in circumvention, then you would be unable to get from point A to point B; that would be a problem for your plan. When your perceptual set — the structure you are using to organize the world; the plan through which you are viewing the complexity of the world — reveals an inadequacy, then that destabilizes your emotions.
.png)
.png)
