Jordan B. Peterson

But today’s beginner is tomorrow’s master

I did not know then that an irrefutable argument is not necessarily true, nor that the right to identify with certain ideas had to be earned.

I read something by Carl Jung, at about this time, that helped me understand what I was experiencing. It was Jung who formulated the concept of persona: the mask that “feigned individuality.”3 Adoption of such a mask, according to Jung, allowed each of us—and those around us—to believe that we were authentic. Jung said:

When we analyse the persona we strip off the mask, and discover that what seemed to be individual is at bottom collective; in other words, that the persona was only a mask of the collective psyche. Fundamentally the persona is nothing real: it is a compromise between individual and society as to what a man should appear to be. He takes a name, earns a title, exercises a function, he is this or that. In a certain sense all this is real, yet in relation to the essential individuality of the person concerned it is only a secondary reality, a compromise formation, in making which others often have a greater share than he. The persona is a semblance, a two-dimensional reality, to give it a nickname.4