“The
hierarchical attitude they generally run on the principle that being
higher up in the hierarchy is better! And there is something wrong with
you from a moral perspective if you happen to be among the failures.
One
possibility is conscientious people and industrious people judge
themselves that way is because they judge themselves quite harshly and
they really do not want to fail. But its not because they're anxious,
its because they are disgusted, self-disgusted by the possibility that
they might count among the failures. So that grounds it into an entirely
different motivational system.
As
soon as you produce a value structure, you produce a hierarchy because
people compete toward the end game and that will immediately produce a
hierarchy of accomplishment. Why would men be particularly motivated to
do that? And the answer seems to be because of Hypergamy.
Hypergamy
is the tendency of women to mate across or up dominance hierarchies. So
males compete with each other and they want to because they want to
win. Part of the consequence of winning is they have much more success
with women and that's a primary motivator. It provides a rationale for
supporting a relatively structured hierarchy that has nothing to do with
having to deal with the negative consequences of not having a stable
world view.” Jordan Peterson
“Another
thing to think about with regards to hierarchy is that if you have an
ideal, you immediately have a hierarchy. And so if you wanted to get rid
of hierarchy you have to get rid of values. That seems like a really
stupid thing to do because without values you have no positive
motivation. Because you feel almost all of your positive motivation in
relationship to a goal. Its not attainment of a goal that makes people
happy, generally speaking. Its observation of the fact that their
efforts are moving toward a valued goal.
Of
course if you are conscientious, over time your field of opportunities
opens up from an employment perspective plus your income increases and
you’ve stabilized the environment around you. So there’s less
uncertainty in it and more security. It could easily be that
conscientiousness has its effect on neuroticism by stabilizing the
environment, taking the uncertainty out of it and making people, not so
much lower in neuroticism but less likely to be anxious and in emotional
pain in general.
If
you have a client who is unconscientious you have got a real problem
because the person won’t do anything they say they are going to do. If
the person doesn’t get around to doing things that will help, how can
you get them to get around to doing anything that’ll help? Its one of
those flaws that seems to interfere with the process itself.
Maybe
you could make the person enthusiastic about it and they’d be driven by
enthusiasm which is more of a positive emotion or maybe you could
terrify them half to death about the consequences of not doing it which
is also useful or maybe they’re agreeable so they’d be willing to do it
for someone else or if they’re open you can think of a creative way of
doing it; there’s other places you can get leverage. But without the
conscientiousness there’s a real problem, it's really difficult.
Conscientiousness
is a good predictor of long-term life success. It's a good predictor
negatively of divorce. More conscientious people are less likely to get
divorced. It's a really good predictor of grades, its a decent predictor
of income, its a good predictor of social status, eventual social
status. It seems to be particularly good at predicting outcomes of
people who are engaged in managerial, administrative and process
management occupations. And so all of those occupations are
characterized by the necessity of reliability, integrity and attention
to detail.
So
overall if you’re conscientious you are going to be satisfied with your
life especially as you progress through time, and you are going to be
happier. Which is funny because happiness is basically extroversion so
you might ask what does it have to do with conscientiousness? Your life
actually stabilizes and gets better so even though you might not be more
happy, you’ll be less miserable. Its really painful to be miserable but
its only moderately good to be happy. We have a much bigger capacity
for negative emotion than positive emotion.” Jordan Peterson
CLOSING 2017
a short series of inter-related blogs
with no specific order
Hypergamy 2
Meritocracy
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