Dr. Jordan Peterson: How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path

You can punish psychopaths by putting them in isolation. That's how social human beings are in. You take the most antisocial human beings there are, and you can punish them by making them be alone.

The more alert we are, the less we are able to take ourselves into notions of 'This, too, shall pass' — the past, the present, the future. Autonomic activation, stress, panic, fear, anger tend to make us lose sight. We get blinders on, lose sight of the fact that there was a past, there's a present, and there's a future.

Inhibition is unsophisticated socialization. Integration is sophisticated socialization.

It's much better to think of a motivated state—this is what helped me integrate behavioral theory with psychoanalytic theory, especially the psychoanalytic theory of religious endeavor—it's much better to think of those lower-order motivational states as personalities. They're sub-personalities.

You can take a female cat and take out its whole brain, except for the hypothalamus. So it's like 95% of its brain is gone, and in a relatively controlled environment, it's indistinguishable from a normal cat.

Much of what we see as pathology—and I would say the same thing about narcissism and certain forms of hedonism—essentially, what it is is failure of socialization.

Psychopaths in particular are notorious for their inability to learn from experience.