https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=0KEVjXTJjrM
You have to be tough as a damn boot to be good. Because you have to stand your ground when you need to stand your ground. And you have to be able to say no when it’s time to say no. And you have to mean it. And so then you have to think and plan strategically so that when you’re going to say no, you can mean it and it will stick. You know, and that takes a certain amount of integrated malevolence, I would say. And once it’s integrated, it’s not malevolence, it’s strength. It’s strength of character. It’s the ability to stand your ground. And you have to cultivate that. And you cultivate that at least in part by telling the truth. And so you take your place in the world as a decent person and as a decent citizen. And then you play the hierarchical game properly. And that is to stand up straight with your shoulders back. It’s like the world’s an onslaught. You’ve got the tyranny of culture to deal with. You’ve got the catastrophe of nature. You’ve got your own damn malevolence and ignorance, right? All coming at you. Plus the incredible, complicated, indeterminate potential of the future. That’s all coming at you. And it’s all your responsibility. And you can cringe away from it and be afraid of it and be victimized by it and be bitter and cynical about it. And no wonder, because it can be painful. Or you can turn around and you can say, man, bring it on, because there’s more to me than there is to the catastrophe. And this is what I discovered from looking at what I looked at. I looked at the darkest things I could look at. Really, for 30 years. I was really a lot of fun to be around, I can tell you. I looked at the darkest things that I could think of, right? Not only what happened in Auschwitz and what happened in the Gulag, but personal issues. You know, it’s like I wasn’t so much interested in the totalitarians as a group. I was interested in the people who undertook the terrible acts that the totalitarians required. You know, the people who I was just rereading Ordinary Men. And it was a story about a police battalion in Poland that trained ordinary policemen to take naked pregnant women out into the fields and shoot them in the back of the head. It takes a lot of training, by the way, before you can bring yourself to do that. And you aren’t the same person by the end of it. It’s pretty goddamn horrific. You know, when I was trying to figure out what would it be like to be that person. Because we are that person. And then what would it be like to not be that person, right? To refuse to do that, to not participate in that. You know, and what I discovered by making that totalitarian proclivity personal was that there’s more to us than there is to the horror. As nature is, bent on our destruction, bad as culture is, tyrannical and bloody, back as far as you can look, as malevolent as you are in the darkest part of your heart. And that’s plenty malevolent. The possibility that’s within you that can well up the courage and the truth and the ability and the skill and the willingness to set things right, if you are willing to set them right, is more powerful than all of that. And so it’s so interesting. It was it was proof for me of an old saying I read from Carl Jung. It’s an alchemical motif in stir, cooliness, invent and tour, which is what you most want to be found will be found where you least want to look, essentially. And it’s so interesting because it means that if you’re willing to turn around and to stand up, say, and stand up straight and face the darkness like fully what you discover at the darkest part is the brightest light. And that’s something that’s so much worth discovering because there’s going to be terrible darkness in your life and it’s going to make you cynical and bitter. And it could easily be that you’re just not looking at it enough because if you looked at it enough and you didn’t shy away and you brought everything you had to bear on it, you’d find that there was more to you than there was to the horror. You know, I watched my father-in-law. I’ll end with this. And, you know, you don’t know, because you’re not bringing your A game to the table with all that cynicism and bitterness and resentment, willful blindness and avoidance. Maybe you’re playing at 60 percent. It’s not good enough because there’s too much of what’s bad for 60 percent to be good enough. It’s like you need 90 percent or 95 percent or 100 percent. My when when when about 15, 20 years ago, my mother-in-law developed prefrontal temporal dementia, which I wouldn’t recommend. You know, it’s one of those degenerative neurological diseases like Alzheimer’s and those bloody things are like they’re in the top echelon of awful. You know, you watch a person deteriorate before your eyes. It’s a lengthy, lengthy death. And and it was slow. And her husband, he was he lived in this little town that I grew up in, about 3000 people. He was quite a character, man. Everybody knew him. I bought him a foghorn, leghorn t-shirt once because that’s kind of what he was like. He’s loud and sort of bombastic. But he stood up straight, I can tell you. And he played the fool a little bit, mostly for the amusement of people. But he was no damn fool. And and I always admired him and liked him. And the feeling was was mutual. Thank God, since I married his daughter. And, you know, he drank a lot with his crazy friends up in northern Alberta. And he wasn’t at home a lot because he was working a lot. And and, you know, he was kind of a party animal about town, but a good businessman and a good man. And and then his wife got sick and they moved to another town. And, you know, he took care of her for like 15 years. It was unbelievable as she deteriorated, you know, and she got more desperate to have him around. Her love for him never, never went away. Even even as she lost herself almost completely, she would always light up when. When he came into the room, you know, and he took care of her right till within weeks of her death. He had to finally put her in an old folks home because he was no longer strong enough to lift her up from the chair. And we interacted with him a lot, you know, because we were trying to help him figure out how to cope. And we had signs put up in the house, electronic signs that would tell her when she when he was leaving so that she would know where he went. And we had recordings in the bathroom so that she knew what to do when she went into the bathroom. And we tried to do everything we could to not make this absolutely bloody, atrocious experience complete hell. And he participated the whole way. You know, and it was really something to see. It was really left with tremendous sense of admiration for him, but not just for him, but for people who can do that. You know, and if there was a new decline, he took it on and he didn’t complain about it. He tried to do what he could, you know, and like it was no picnic. Don’t get me wrong, but it wasn’t hell. And then we were all gathered around the death bed. Her mother’s my wife’s mother’s death bed. And the family was there. And they got along pretty well, you know. Her sister’s a palliative care nurse and the other one’s a pharmacy pharmacist. And none of them are particularly afraid of of illness and death. You know, they’re a pretty tough group. And so, you know, they made sure their mother’s lips were wet while she was no longer eating or drinking and and tried to make her comfortable. And they’re around the death bed and they were kind of getting along. You know, it wasn’t family feud at mother’s death time. And that was kind of nice. And and she died. And that was that. But it wasn’t just that, because the fact that the family had coped with it well and nobly and honorably, I would say, brought them together. They were closer afterwards than they were before. And they all had more respect for their father. And then in the old folks home, he met another woman who had a husband there who had Alzheimer’s. And they got to know each other, you know, and he died after a while and she died after a while. And then a few months later, they started going out and then eventually they had a relationship and now they live together. And so he gained something like it wasn’t that he replaced what he lost. You know what I mean? Because he still has pictures of his of his wife up in his house and she was the love of his life. And that’s not going away. But, you know, his family respected him more and everybody pulled together more. And it wasn’t hell at the death bed. It was just tragedy. And the family pulled together more. And that was a good example of how you can extract at least a certain amount of light out of what out of out of what’s dark, even at a personal level. And it’s worth asking yourself. It’s like drop what you’re doing that’s foolish, that you know is foolish and pick a name that’s worthwhile, you know, to make things better for yourself, like you’re worth taking care of, like you’re worth something, you know, and to surround yourself with people who who believe the same and who are what rejoicing in your accomplishments and unhappy when you fail. Right. And you’re comparing yourself to your accomplishments of yesterday and not to someone else’s today so that you’re not jealous and bitter. And you put your own house in order so that you’re not cursing the world when some of its disarray might be your fault. And you’re trying to pursue something meaningful and you’re doing your best to tell the truth and all of that. And then you see what happens. Who the hell are you? You know, you think you’re a miracle of some bloody bizarre sort. We’ve been around for three and a half billion years. You know, every single one of your relatives propagated successfully. And here you are against all possible odds in this in this world of hell in some sense and and bitterness and and and and and and tyranny and malevolence. And yet God only knows what’s inside you. This capacity for consciousness, the capacity to confront potential and to turn it into something good. That’s us, man. That’s the Western story. That’s the individual as the cornerstone of the state. That’s our responsibility. And it really is who we are.