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15 Terrifying Books Jordan Peterson Urges All Smart People to Read | High Existence
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Many people have written to me asking what they should read to properly educate
themselves. Here is a list of books that I found particularly influential in my intellectual
development. I wrote number thirteen, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief
(http://amzn.to/2GWUSqu). It was published in 1999. It was heavily influenced by the authors
of all the books listed below.
Martijn Schirp, the co-founder of HighExistence, had this to say about the book:
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09. 03. 2018. 15 Terrifying Books Jordan Peterson Urges All Smart People to Read | High Existence
— Jordan Peterson
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09. 03. 2018. 15 Terrifying Books Jordan Peterson Urges All Smart People to Read | High Existence
“’What I mean is that if you were successful in persuading a man that there was nothing for
him to cry about, he’d stop crying, wouldn’t he? That’s obvious. You think he wouldn’t?’
This review was taken Jordan Bates’ article 12 Life Changing Books that Destroyed and Rebuilt My
Mind (http://highexistence.com/12-life-changing-books-that-destroyed-and-rebuilt-my-mind/).
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09. 03. 2018. 15 Terrifying Books Jordan Peterson Urges All Smart People to Read | High Existence
Dostoyevsky… his novels just absolutely flatten me. He’s so brilliant, and I’ve never read
anyone who takes moral questions so seriously.
— Jordan Peterson
“Beyond Good and Evil—to think of it as a book is a really foolish framework. Because this is
what a book is when people think about a book:”
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09. 03. 2018. 15 Terrifying Books Jordan Peterson Urges All Smart People to Read | High Existence
“It’s like a material entity. It’s eight inches high and six inches wide and two inches thick and
weighs a pound, and it’s made out of paper and its between two covers. And that’s the
materialist’s a priori sort of axiomatic view of a book. But Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil
isn’t a book at all. It’s a series of bombs, and each sentence is a bomb. And each sentence
blows things up that people didn’t even know exist.”
Watch Jordan Peterson talk for 45 minutes on a single paragraph of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and
Evil here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCOw0eJ84d8&t=).
“Ordinary Men is the best book of its type—maybe it’s the only book of its type.”
— Jordan Peterson
Ordinary Men in a nutshell is a a historical document showing how ordinary men ended up
becoming murderers under the nazi regime.
His answer:
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09. 03. 2018. 15 Terrifying Books Jordan Peterson Urges All Smart People to Read | High Existence
This book provides only the barest summary of the cruel and barbaric acts committed by the
Japanese in the city, for its aim is not to establish a quantitative record to qualify the event as
one of the great evil deeds of history, but to understand the event so that lessons can be
learned and warnings sounded. Differences in degree, however, often reflect differences in
kind, and so a few statistics must be used to give the reader an idea of the scale of the
massacre that took place sixty years ago in a city named Nanking. One historian has
estimated that if the dead from Nanking were to link hands, they would stretch from Nanking
to the city of Hangchow, spanning a distance of some two hundred miles. Their blood would
weigh twelve hundred tons, and their bodies would fill twenty-five hundred railroad cars.
Stacked on top of each other, these bodies would reach the height of a seventy-four-story
building.
Naturally, the thing that remains the most memorable about the
book was the horror. The Rape of Nanking (http://amzn.to/2Ho6f bK)
is not for the weak stomached. You will read in all-too-graphic detail
about how tens of thousands of women were raped, often while tied
to chairs or in-front of their family, then murdered afterwards; how Japanese soldiers enjoyed
removing fetuses from the bellies of fully conscious pregnant women with bayonets and inging
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09. 03. 2018. 15 Terrifying Books Jordan Peterson Urges All Smart People to Read | High Existence
them into heaps; and how young men were lined up in the hundreds and decaptitated for fun in
killing contests. Peterson encourages people to read this book so that you can see the shadow
present in human beings, and then to realize how each of us has within us the capacity of great
evil.
As I read this book, I sincerely tried to imagine myself as a Japanese soldier carrying out the
atrocities to Chinese innocents. What were they thinking? What were their rationalizations? This
thought exercise deepened my understanding of evil and expanded my wisdom about the human
condition. I could not recommend The Rape of Nanking (http://amzn.to/2Ho6f bK) enough.
But the great writer, the profound, spirited defender of truth, did not allow his mind to turn
wrote The Gulag Archipelago, a history of the Soviet prison camp system. 115 It’s a forceful,
terrible book, written with the overwhelming moral force of unvarnished truth. Its sheer
outrage screamed unbearably across hundreds of pages. Banned (and for good reason) in the
USSR, it was smuggled to the West in the 1970s, and burst upon the world. Solzhenitsyn’s
writing utterly and finally demolished the intellectual credibility of communism, as ideology or
society. He took an axe to the trunk of the tree whose bitter fruits had nourished him so
poorly— and whose planting he had witnessed and supported.
One man’s decision to change his life, instead of cursing fate, shook the whole pathological
system of communist tyranny to its core. It crumbled entirely, not so many years later, and
Solzhenitsyn’s courage was not the least of the reasons why.
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09. 03. 2018. 15 Terrifying Books Jordan Peterson Urges All Smart People to Read | High Existence
Just want the insights? Read Man’s Search for Meaning in 15 minutes on Blinklist
(http://jump.blinkist.com/aff_c?
offer_id=2&aff_id=1715&source=25sel mprov&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.blinkist.com%2Fen%2Fbooks%2F
search-for-meaning-
en.html%3Faff_id%3D{af liate_id}%26offer_id%3D{offer_id}%26transaction_id%3D{transaction_id}).
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09. 03. 2018. 15 Terrifying Books Jordan Peterson Urges All Smart People to Read | High Existence
Jung was a tremendously insightful clinician and he was a strange person: introverted
visionary. High introversion, very, very, very, very, very high in openness, like off the charts.
And god only knows what his IQ was. Every time I read Jung, it’s like reading Nietzsche. It’s
terrifying because he’s so damn smart that he can think up answers to questions that—it’s not
like you don’t understand the answers, it’s that you’ve never conceptualized the damn
questions. It’s really something to read someone like that, right, who says, “Well here’s a
mystery.” And you’re like, “Wow, I never thought of that as a mystery.” Now, “Here’s the
solution.” It’s like okay… that’s something.
— Jordan Peterson
Jordan Peterson is a huge Carl Jung fan, and this is the only Jung
book of his on this list. That should point you toward the
signi cance of this particular book on Peterson’s views.
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09. 03. 2018. 15 Terrifying Books Jordan Peterson Urges All Smart People to Read | High Existence
deeper appreciation for religion, myth, and I know how my own mind works to a far greater
degree. If you are not too well acquainted with dif cult texts, perhaps it is also best you start with
the lectures before moving onto the book.
If you’d like to learn more about this book speci cally, you can listen to Jordan Peterson talk about
it in the following video:
Mircea Eliade wrote a book called A History of Religious Ideas (http://amzn.to/2tbuqr2), which
I would strongly recommend. It’s a three-volume set. It’s quite readable, and it’s brilliant. It’s
brilliant. I really like it.
— Jordan Peterson
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09. 03. 2018. 15 Terrifying Books Jordan Peterson Urges All Smart People to Read | High Existence
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09. 03. 2018. 15 Terrifying Books Jordan Peterson Urges All Smart People to Read | High Existence
I ended up listening to the audiobook within a few days (Peterson narrates it), and my god it’s
great. It’s probably the best self-improvement book I’ve ever read. The word that best describes
this book for me is “epic” because it ties together religion, myth, neuroscience, and psychoanalysis
and combines those elds with Peterson’s deep experience as a father, husband, and clinical
psychologist into something that anyone who can read can bene t from reading.
Jordan Peterson wrote 12 Rules for Life (http://amzn.to/2GUMLL3) over a 5-year period and to
give the respect it deserves I plan on listening to it many more times over the coming years.
Follow Jon Brooks on here on Facebook (http://facebook.com/jonbrooksx) for more posts like this.
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09. 03. 2018. 15 Terrifying Books Jordan Peterson Urges All Smart People to Read | High Existence
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