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2016/11/08: My Message to Millennials: How to Change the World -- Properly
Jordan B Peterson
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All the comments and stories posted to Hacker News that reference this video.I think he deliberately tries to appeal to the kind of disillusioned young white men who mostly make up the "alt right", but he tries to steer them away from the identity politics of "white nationalism" and towards personal responsibility and self-improvement.Check out this video for the best example: https://youtu.be/XbOeO_frzvg
I can strongly recommend consuming some of Jordan Peterson's material, particularly this video blog "My Message to Millenials: How to Change the World – Properly" [1]His central message: the key to changing or fixing the world is to understand and fix yourself, deeply and thoroughly.
It resonated with me as I've been on a similar quest to work out how to "save the world" since my early adulthood. It took me till a few years ago (15-20 years after I started trying to "save the world") to realise that this was what I really needed to do.
It's a hard journey but an incredibly important one, as it requires becoming fully honest with one's self and everyone else, and becoming humble and realistic about what is possible for one person to achieve.
But as Peterson says, once you do this, you'll notice your little corner of the world starting to change around you. You then realise that if enough people in the world did this, the major problems of the world would quickly sort themselves out, so the next step is to help and empower others to do the same thing - but only those who have chosen to do so (trying to help people who don't want to be helped is futile and destructive).
Another piece of advice: read (or read about) the classics - ancient philosophy (especially Seneca) and mythology, along with Enlightenment/post-Enlightenment philosophers like David Hume, Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill.
The most important thing to recognise is that at a fundamental level, the problems being faced by the world now are not altogether new, and for most of what we're struggling with now, people were struggling with different versions of the same things, hundreds or thousands of years ago.
Which is not to say we should despair and give up.
But we should understand the what's gone before us and what's deep inside of us before we start trying to prescribe solutions to today's global problems.