“You can critique marriage. Fine. But what game are you going to play? Try coming up with one on your own. Maybe you can. Maybe you’re like avant-garde Picasso, maybe you are, and maybe you have a right to make your own arrangement. Maybe you have the psychological fortitude to craft your own social institution, but I bloody well wouldn’t count on it. You’re lucky that there’s such a thing as a job, or better yet, a career. You’re lucky that there’s such a thing as friendship, as marriage, all of these social institutions. And when you criticize them, Nietzsche put it as one question of conscience, and I think it’s in Twilight of the Idols: Whether you’re a leader, or whether you’re running away, you’re outside the pack and moving in a different direction. In either case, you know, are you a rebel because you can’t fit in? Or are you a rebel because you could fit in, but you see a better way? People in that category are not that common. And the first question of conscience should be, well, ‘Which of those two are you?’ It’s highly probable that you’re the first one, and not the second, because that would mean that you would be intensely disciplined, plus creative on that dimension. Maybe that is you, and God, then we need you. You know, like, you’re an avatar of the savior under those circumstances, and maybe everyone has some of that in them.”
Jordan Peterson in a video clip from “The JBP Show” on Instagram January 18, 2022