“Be Precise in Your Speech”

In the Bible (which I am citing for metaphorical purposes), God spoke the world into existence. He took potential and turned it into fact with his words. This is parallel to the idea that we need speech in order to be able to understand things in our minds. It is the way that we turn things from the unknown into the known. Dr. Peterson gives a good example of this: When your significant other is angry at you for an unknown reason, it manifests as physiological discomfort because the problem is so vague that our minds cannot put it into a box. It only becomes known when you bring the problem up with your significant other. After making it known, we can take what our partner says and turn it into something that we can then digest and figure out a plan to solve it. In other words, we cannot completely comprehend what is not spoken, and we cannot fix what we cannot comprehend. This means that it is important to speak, but not only to speak but to speak clearly and precisely. If our partner does not give a complete answer, or beats around the bush when you ask them what is wrong, then there is no way to fix the problem.

There is a reason that our country gives us the right to free speech. It is because we need to be able to speak about our problems in order to fix them, if our country does not allow us to speak in a way that is truthful and precise, we can fall into macro-deception and despair.

I believe that this is something that most of us already know, but we have not talked about so precisely it yet so we weren’t able to understand how important that it can be (the irony in this is wonderful). It is important for us to understand how important our speech is because then we can know to improve it, and protect it.