https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=xWSdbDTNZGg
The thing that I’ve been thinking about lately is the use of the word opponent. And I’d like to suggest that we just do away with this word entirely and start talking about being cooperative rather than oppositional. It’s been sort of a sore spot with me, with people talking about opponent processing and other ways of, you know, describing the world as we’re in battle or we’re in competition or we’re in opposition to other people. And I think it’s important for us to sort of dispel this entirely. The battle here is between ironically cooperation or being cooperative and opposition, right? Or opposing. And what I want to propose is that we stop using this opposition language because the world isn’t about opposition. That’s not to say that there isn’t opposition in the world. It’s just to say that opposition is the primary mode of the world. Primary mode of the world, the primary mode of construction, the primary mode of manifesting meaning or trying to participate in meaning is fundamentally about cooperation. And I’ve talked about the three frames before. I’ll link that video here. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a wonderful video. My videos are wonderful, at least according to me. You with yourself, you with nature, you with others. You are not in opposition with yourself. That’s crazy. If you become in opposition with yourself, you’re in a lot of trouble. You’re going to have a bad time at life. You are not in opposition with nature. If you’re in opposition with nature, you’re in a lot of trouble. You’re going to have a bad life. It’s going to be tough. You with others, if you’re in opposition with others, you’re going to have a bad life. It’s going to be tough for you. I hate to break it to you. And you’re going to be trapped. You’re going to be trapped with what you have. You can never get better than you are because you’re constantly fighting. You’re constantly in opposition. There’s constantly an oppositional agent. You’re opposing something or many things, probably lots of things. When people talk about say, opponent processing. And so one of the examples that was brought up to me is, you know, where you’ve got your autonomic nervous system. And there’s a lot of competition within that. There actually there isn’t. I don’t know where people get that from. They either misread some Popsci thing or they were lied to or something. No. And a lot of people will talk about, say, you’ve got a parasympathetic nervous system and a sympathetic. Those aren’t in opposition. They cooperate to find balance. When they are out of balance, they’re still not in opposition. They’re out of balance. That’s a different thing entirely. If you’re on a seesaw with somebody and they are opposing you, then there will be an imbalance for sure. But there are lots of other imbalances that can occur that are not opposition. It’s an asymmetrical relationship. The fundamental ethos of opposition and opponent is imbalance. The fundamental ethos of cooperation or the cooperative frame is balance, right? To find something that is a compromise or a trade off. Another video I have that both parties can benefit from. Now, the argument is often made foolishly by foolish people who are either not very bright and a lot of people are like half the populations below the bell curve. Right. Or they’re malicious. There are a lot of malicious people in the world. Far too many more lately than there have been in recent times. That’s for sure. Or, you know, these people just don’t understand what they’re talking about. A lot of people are greedy. A lot of people are greedy. You can always make the argument that, well, if that person would just do what I wanted, I’d have more. Sure. They can make an unreasonable sacrifice for your benefit. And if they weren’t in your way, perhaps you would have more. Those cases exist. They’re rare, by the way. Mostly you need other people to have anything. And so it’s a blessing when they cooperate with you so that you have something like electricity or computers or all this technology. And I do mean all of it, by the way. There’s no piece of technology that wasn’t born of cooperation. And you can look at any situation as an opposition, right? Because there’s always a loss from an ideal. You can always say, well, this person didn’t get what that person got. There’s always an inequality. That’s true. There’s always an asymmetry. That’s true. In fact, the statement that the world exists is an acknowledgement of an asymmetrical relationship. If the world were symmetrical, it wouldn’t actually be. Mathematically speaking, I mean, technically too, right? The physicists, very oddly to me, got very puzzled when they started to do the math and figured out that there’s no mathematical reason why there shouldn’t be an equal amount of matter and antimatter. And thus our universe shouldn’t exist because it should all cancel out. Which, you know, that’s backwards reasoning, right? That’s middle out thinking. And these are physicists, apparently. A little puzzling how they got that title without understanding something very basic. When you start making your functions equal, you should expect that they will devolve back into equality. That’s how math works. Just saying. But apparently I didn’t see that coming for whatever reason. And here we are. This goes for a lot of things. Like you can say that, well, you know, Elon Musk stepped in all these people. Stepped in all these people to get up to the top. Or did they boost him up? Right? Because they weren’t going to be able to do it by themselves anyway. And somebody should succeed. And it’s weird. Cause you see that theme all over the place, especially in science fiction and fantasy. The theme of people making a sacrifice because they want somebody to do better. And one of my favorite movies, excellent movie, Good Will Hunting. Totally accurate for Boston. Oh my goodness. Oh, the Harvard stuff in particular. A hundred percent. I don’t, I don’t think he had to write that. I think it just jot it down while witnessing it one evening. Happens often enough. You know, at the end, you know, his friend, his best friend says, no, we want you out of here. We don’t want you here doing these terrible jobs. We want to see you succeed because we can’t. It’s a, it’s a very common storytelling theme where people are hopeful and sacrificial to have somebody else manifest something that they know they can’t manifest. It’s a beautiful thing. And it’s a cooperation, right? It’s a cooperative frame. Not oppositional. It’s not, oh, if it weren’t for you, I could have, they knew they couldn’t have that. I mean, in that case, right, you’ve got this super genius, which is a ridiculous memory and this amazing mind. And the other people don’t have that. They don’t have it. They’re not going to obtain it. It’s, they weren’t born that way. They can’t or don’t want to get that way in many cases. And they, and, and they, they’re like, look, you have that, you have that gift. You should take advantage of it. And you see this all the time in sci-fi, right? You see it in, in a lot of the sort of popular movies, right? The superhero movies, right? They’ll sacrifice themselves to have one of the heroes hopefully save the day. Right. And of course he’s essentially sacrificing here. She is sacrificing their selves, right? You see this motif, a sacrificial motif is not oppositional. It’s cooperative. And the key of cooperative framing is to notice the sacrifice and make that primary. Rather, because any, any sacrifice can look this way rather than looking at it as a defeat through an oppositional frame. Our systems do not oppose one another to make us better. That, that is not what happens. They cooperate to make us better. And what do we consider good sportsmanship? Just pay attention to instances of what we call good sportsmanship. It’s cooperation. It’s the lack of opposition. It’s the lack of carrying the idea of the conflict within the game outside of the game. The game is done. You’ve both been made better by learning lessons, by seeing things, by participating together. Right. Now look, you can participate by being in opposition. That is a thing you can do. You can rebel against the thing that you could cooperate with. You can always do that. That is up to you, but it’s also your fault and your responsibility. Does that mean you cooperate with everybody and everything? No, but then sometimes you can’t be a good person because why should you be a good person to bad people? That makes no sense. Sometimes you have to oppose, but those are rare times. And when you’re doing that, it’s not that you’re coming out the same way. You’re not doing it the same way. You’re not doing it the same way. You’re not doing it the same way. You’re not doing it the same way. You’re not doing it the same way. You’re not doing that. It’s not that you’re coming out the same or better. You’re definitely losing something. If you want to sacrifice yourself to be defeated, that’s up to you. If you want to sacrifice yourself to improve somebody else, that’s also up to you. But it’s up to you. And you can always get defeated in your cooperation due to bad actors or misunderstanding or out of your own ignorance. That’s going to happen. I don’t know what to tell you about how life unfolds. A lot of things are going to happen and there’s nothing you can do about them. Except change your attitude. And if opposition is the frame you want to use, you’re just going to hurt yourself more than others. You’re just going to hurt yourself more than others, but you’re also going to hurt others. And I’d prefer you not. It’d be great if people stopped doing that and started finding ways to cooperate. So we’re in the game, on different teams. There’s a limit to how much we can cooperate. But in a way, we’ve already cooperated. Because we’re cooperating, and Jordan Peterson points this out, at a higher level. We’ve agreed to play the game and to be on different teams. We’ve agreed to the rules of the game. And we’ve agreed that we’re going to try as hard as we can to beat one another. Sure. Sure. So that opposition is couching cooperation. There is a conflict, there is some friction, and how you play the game matters. People who play dirty games, so hockey’s a great example. There’s always one of those dirty players that nobody likes. It’s happened in football too, sometimes, but hockey’s a good one. The original Karate Kid movie. It’s always that guy who will take advantage of a weakness. And not give the other person a chance. And they’ve agreed to a cooperation, and they’re violating the rules of cooperation, by taking advantage of an easy win for them. The problem is, they’re robbing themselves of getting better. So, and they’re robbing their reputation at the same time. I mean, look, it’s your life. You can do that if you want. I just prefer you not. So, that’s why I think, you know, a lot of this is important to recognize in the moment, and keep in mind. Because having a cooperative attitude, finding a way to cooperate, can be done. And when it’s done, it’s better for everybody. Even if you don’t get what you want, or entirely what you want, or whatever. Somebody else got something, and they hopefully will use that to improve the world. And like, if they don’t, well, you weren’t in control anyway. And if they do, then it’s better for everybody. And your sacrifice, even if you had a voluntary and an involuntary component to it, because that’s probably inevitable, was worth it. And you don’t know that ahead of time, which really sucks. I mean, everybody, they could see the future. But being cooperative is positive. You can always find a way to cooperate with people. Even people you don’t like, even people you hate, or your enemies. That’s another common motif in science fiction. Look around, you’ll see it. You’ll see it. There’s always a way to cooperate. And you have to cooperate. One of Peterson’s brilliant sort of expressions is the work with the chimpanzees. And a tyrannical chimp doesn’t last very long, because two trims can take him out. And they do. So that tyrannical oppositional, I’m just going to oppose you attitude, which is fundamentally tyranny, and can express as rebellion, by the way, is not helpful. And it won’t last. And the thing is, when you’re busy managing opposition all the time, you just wear yourself out. You can’t maintain that for very long. You can’t maintain it very long. And so what happens is, it wears you down. And then those two chimps come along when you’re having a bad day, and that’s the end of you. So I don’t recommend it. It’s not on my list of things to try. Be cooperative. Find some commonality. Right? If you can’t find commonality, you can’t find commonality. You can’t find commonality. You can’t find commonality. You can’t find commonality. You can’t find commonality. You can’t find commonality. You can’t find commonality. If you can’t find commonality over something, maybe you have to walk away. That’s possible. But maybe you just have to look up and realize, oh, they don’t do that the way I do that. But the way they do it works, and they’re more comfortable with their way. What do I care? I can do something else while they’re doing that. And then those two things can combine to form something that neither of us could have done alone. That’s a better way to think about the world. Don’t think about opposition. You’ll manifest it in the world more often. Think about cooperation. See things as cooperations. The king isn’t just ruling over his subjects and being tyrannical towards them 24-7. He has to get fed, and they still make the food, ultimately. You can see it as a cooperation. The government just doesn’t come in and take your tax money. You may feel like you’re not getting what you should get out of your tax money, and fair enough. But it is a cooperation. And good things can manifest from good cooperation. And when we’re busy looking at everything as opposition, we’re not looking at how it can be cooperative, generative. Livestream, ungenerative, good stuff. We’re not looking at how cooperation can make things better, how we can make things better. And that’s a problem. And just to exemplify cooperation, and we’ll call it positive participation, you can watch the live streams. You can see people being generative and cooperating. Or you can realize that just by watching my video, you’re cooperating. You’re not opposing. You can oppose me in the comments, I guess, but you’ve already cooperated by watching the video. And to that end, I’d like to thank you for your time and attention.