Peterson Reveals Violent Impulses He Experienced While Studying Totalitarian Evil

What was said

"When I was sitting in class, I would sometimes get the impulse to stick the person in front of me with a pen. And I'd never done anything violent in my life. It was kind of an obsessive thought. And I had no idea what to make of that thought at all. And it was unsettling."

Peterson discloses disturbing intrusive thoughts of violence he experienced while researching Nazi Germany and Soviet atrocities in his youth. He connects these impulses to his realization that understanding human capacity for evil requires acknowledging one's own dark potential. The thoughts disappeared only after he accepted he was capable of the atrocities he was studying, making the problem of evil personal rather than abstract.