"I realized that the proclivity of individuals to avoid responsibility and to lie, especially about their own lives and about their own experience, were really

"I realized that the proclivity of individuals to avoid responsibility and to lie, especially about their own lives and about their own experience, were really the reasons that those systems went so far astray." That connects so directly to social media and contemporary "fake" "news". Not just in the obvious ways, but in how people lie through Pinterest images to make their life look more glamorous, or lie on resumés, school applications, exams, dating sites, faked hate crimes, faked crime reports, faked police reports, faked government investigations, faked scientific studies, etc.... We interact with the internet through diverse environments that change so fast that humans can't keep up with an accurate way of figuring out what reality looks like, or, rather, the average difference between the images of reality held in the minds/brains of any two people is expanding. I think I might see 2 things Peterson didn't address in your quotes: 1. Deteriorating material / or otherwise not originally psychological conditions around a person could also independently increase the chance that they falsify their own experience. He may have cause and effect at least partially flipped. 2. Does telling the truth heal the psychological trauma? Is there an empirical basis for John's claim that "the truth will set you free"? In my memory of Man's Search for Meaning, I remember his theory was that finding a meaning to keep fighting to live often made the difference for survivors of the Holocaust. People who let the situation sink into them did better than those who held onto dreams that could hardly seem possible, given the circumstances. But that could indicate that "Hope", that thing with feathers, is only dashed when abashed by the most painful of truths - and is sometimes shielded from the storm by our so willing to "falsify" our own experience. Our family and friends used to be a local pocket with its own local social weather sheltered from the tumult of wider society. Social media tore down the ability to keep family and politics and religion as separate spheres woven together by individuals capable of different modes in different spaces in different times. But the internet in the pocket collapses spaces and times together. And so, our local social weather is no longer sheltered into a friendlier micro climate, but just one point in a massive cultural climate zone.