The Herd Defense: Jordan Peterson tells you why zebras have stripes

I will tell you the Zebras story. Any of you know that story? Okay I'll tell you this zebras story tell.  This tells you everything you need to know about human beings so it's worth knowing. Zebras have stripes and people say well that's for camouflage and then you think about that for two seconds and you think that's a really stupid theory because lions are camouflaged and they're like golden like the grass.  Zebras are black and white so you can see a zebra five miles away.  It's like there's a zebra it's black and white so the whole camouflage thing that's just not working out so well as a hypothesis okay so by law biologists go and they decide to take a look at some zebras and so they're looking at a zebra on the herd because there's no zebra right just like there's no fish there are schools of fish and there are herds of zebras there isn't a fish this is why I think the cod aren't coming back there are no Cod there are massive hundred mile long schools of cod ten stories deep 20 million years old you wipe out the school you don't just get to throw a cod in the water and say well you know off you go it's like well where's my city it's like launching you in the middle of a field it's like well go out there and reproduce it's like no that's not gonna happen you know so without the school that there's no Cod and you can't just introduce a whole school of cod because you don't have a whole school of cod so you know maybe the cod are never coming back and zebras are the same thing there's not a zebra there's zebras and so you're looking at the Zebras trying to study a zebra and you look at the zebra and you make some notes and you look up and you think oh Christ which is Ebro was I looking at and the answer to that is you don't know because the the camouflage is against the herd and the black and white stripes there's a variety of reasons for the stripes the fly's off also seem not to like the stripes but you know usually people things evolve for multiple reasons but anyways it's very difficult to parse out a zebra against the herd you look down you look up it's like oh oh all those damn zebras look the same yes the camouflage is effective but it's against the herd alright so then you think well we better identify a zebra so we can see what he's up to so then you take your Jeep and a can of red paint and a stick with on the end of it you drive up to the zebras and you paint their haunts read a little bit put a nice red dot on their haunches or maybe clip their ear with a cattle clip and then you you know you stand back and you think hey I'm pretty smart now I'm gonna watch that zebra so what do you think happens to the zebra the Lions kill it right right right because Lions they're smart right hunter hunting animals are smart but they have to identify a zebra before they can organize their hunt they can't just hunt the whole herd they have to pick out a zebra and so maybe it's like a zebra that's got a sore hip or something and so you think well nature's kind it just takes the week it's though no zebra or Lions like really healthy delicious zebras but they look like all the other healthy delicious zebras so they can't get a bead on them but if they're small and just born or if they're limping or there's something that identifies them then the Lions can pick them out and then they do pick them out and so the rule for human beings is keep your damn stripes on so the Lions don't get you and I'm telling you man if you want to remember one thing from my class about human motivation that's a good thing to learn people camouflage themselves against the herd and they like to be in the middle of the herd which is what fish do by the way if you have a big school of fish the smart healthy large fish are in the middle of the school because you know what you call fish on the outside of the school bait right so that's what people are doing they're trying to move into the middle of the herd all the time and the herd moves around or the school moves around and people are going well I'm in the middle I'm staying in the middle here so I've got this protective ring of people around me so the Predators don't pick me out and do me in so okay so that's that's part of the reason why I said well you can't sell something to someone for success because you know you're thinking well people are aiming at success don't don't be thinking that it's not by any means necessarily true trade neuroticism is a potential power 'fl motivator and trait neuroticism is let's not be too threatened or hurt right that's the negative emotion system and the negative emotion system is a killer source of motivation you know you also see that there are scales of well-being that have been too designed mostly by social psychologists which means there are very bad scales most of the time because their psychometric capacity is absurdly low generally speaking so what you find with scales of well-being sometimes they're talked about as scales of happiness even is that people aren't after happiness they're after not hurting it's not so they don't want to be extroverted at enthusiastic right and bubbly and and full of smiles and laughter that isn't what they mean by I want to be happy what they mean is I don't want to be anxious or in pain and so well-being scales tend to be something like neuroticism sorry emotional stability plus extraversion but the big loading is on emotional stability the reverse of neuroticism you want to avoid suffering you don't want to be happy you want to avoid suffering and one way to avoid suffering is not to