Telling the Truth:

Jordan Peterson:

"If you tell the truth and nothing else, you will have an immense adventure. You will not know what is going to happen to you, but you have to let go of clinging to the outcome. The truth will reveal the world the way it is intended to be revealed. The consequence for you will be that you will have the adventure of your life. The other part of that ethos—which makes perfect sense to me, and I cannot see how it can be any other way—is that whatever makes itself manifest as a consequence of the truth is the best possible reality that could be manifest, even if you cannot see it."

"If you practice violating your own conscience with a performative contradiction — a willingness to act out what runs contrary to your own sense of morality — then you become the embodiment of a lie. There is endless metaphorical speculation of the spirit of the lie, and if you allow it to take up residence with you, then you do that at your peril. The danger of being an actor is that you become the actor and then you lose you. You replace you with that falsehood, and that will make you bitter, which only leads to becoming vengeful — and worse. Therefore, you do not want to practice that."

"Lying is very powerful because you can manipulate the world with your language. And you can get what you want often; or escape from things you don't want. So, why not lie all the time? Well, there are many reasons, but one of them is that you can't trust yourself if you lie. And there will be times in your life when you have no one to turn to except yourself. So, if you've stuffed yourself full of lies, you're going to be in a crisis one day, and you're going to have to make a decision, and you're going to decide wrong. You won't have the clarity of mind necessary to make the proper judgment because you have filled your imagination and perception with rubbish. Then, you're in real trouble."

"Those who lie do not live or even truly have their life. They substitute for that life the life of the lie and, in doing so, turn their eternal souls (and that is the right level of symbolic analysis) over to the king of the damned. Those who lie miss the adventure of their life. So what? If the use of deception enhances power—if it brings about hedonic delight—if it allows for the avoidance of responsibility, the quelling (however false in some absolute sense) of anxiety, or the circumvention of pain, why not indulge? The world is meaningless anyway, and the liar who wins may lie, but still wins. Why is this quite rational rationalization unreliable? First, perhaps, because it is naught but a manifestation of the spirit of the lie, attempting in its characteristic way to justify its default to deception. Second, however, for a deeper reason: the meaning of life is in adventure, and the adventure that is true is literally to be found in the truth."