[August 2, 2026] I found Prof. Jordan Peterson’s advice to be insightful in a snippet of a lecture he gave called “You Betrayed the Grandfather You Were Going to Be.” In his video, he begins with discussing the pattern of attitudes toward women and sex.
One of these patterns is characterized by preference for so-called short-term mating opportunities; the eternal one-night stand. This is where conquest of the opposite sex is unlikely to be successful or lasting, but it still beckons attractively. And, there are men who prefer this short-term mating strategy.
There are also men who prefer the opportunity in the context of a long-term relationship and commitment. That is clear, and we do not need studies to show it, although psychologists have done so anyway.
Those two patterns also mirror two different forms of reproduction in the biological world at large. There are some creatures that have no investment in their offspring, mosquitoes and fish, for example. Reproduction is nothing but sex. The only contribution is sperm and egg. This is where there are many offspring but with only a few survivors.
Then there are investment reproducers, and human beings who are the ultimate examples of that. Very few offspring, very long investment period, multi-generational even. And there’s no creature that exemplifies that pattern more than human beings.
That distinction between short-term, low investment, and long-term, high investment is echoed in human personality.
What’s the personality of the men who favor short-term mating strategies? They’re Machiavellian, which means they use their language to manipulate. They’re psychopathic, which means they’re predatory parasites. They’re narcissistic, which means they want unearned social status. And to capital it all off, they’re sadistic, which means they take positive delight in the unnecessary suffering of others.
So, that’s a good example of how aim determines character, attention, action, and speech.
Prof. Peterson proposes the situation where maybe you are slightly tilted in the direction of those characteristics. Maybe you are intermingling of the short-term (the opportunist) and long-term (the good, reliable man) like many are the latter.
Let’s say that you are “drunkenly” tilted in the sexual exploitation direction. And maybe you have a willing partner who’s tempted for the same reasons. And, so you take the intensely pleasurable, advantageous in the short-term path. And then your conscience tortures you.
Why? If part of you is aiming at love, and if part of you is aiming at responsibility, and if part of you is aiming at children, the children who would love you and that you will be committed to. If part of you has the spirit of someone who will become a grandfather, then that’s part of the implicit structure of aim that’s shaping your attention and actions.
Insofar as you are acting out the pattern of manhood, valid manhood that characterizes your society, that ethos of long-term commitment and abundance is going to be operating unconsciously regulating your conscience. And, when you act in the moment in a manner that violates that longer-term covenant or contract, your conscience is going to let you know that you’ve deviated from the proper path.
Prof. Peterson notes that we know enough about the way the brain is structured neuro-psychologically, we know enough about how vision and aim and emotion and motivation and thought are associated to make this all an incontrovertible empirical fact.
We all know that when we do something pleasurable and useless that compromises you in the moment, that it compromises you in the long run. Or that puts other people at risk. It’s a form of betrayal. You can betray yourself and your deeper self, your true self. And, there’s a mechanism that operates within you that lets you know. This is how you know how to orient yourself.
You will want to be as far away as possible from someone who uses the short-term strategy. We know that as you mature, your capability to govern your action by a longer and longer span, vision increases. And, that’s the difference between a 2-year-old and a 10-year-old. By the time you’re an adult, maybe you can think about something as long as multiple decades of a marriage.
No mature adult is going to think that the short-term orientation should trump the longer-term orientation. If you’re with your value, then you’re worth it over the longest possible period of time. And if you acted in your own best interest over multiple decades, there’d be no difference between that and acting in the best interests of other people, especially your wife or husband, your family members because they are you.
When you have long-term commitments, then there isn’t any difference between your long-term emotional stability, the hope the future offers, and the manner in which you treat the people around you. It’s the same thing. That is part of that upward aim. And, it’s the violation of that principle that your conscience speaks to you of.
Prof. Peterson gives us some sound advice. Pay close attention.
————
Please read my books:
A masterpiece of introspection, as Prof Peterson outlines how we can betray ourselves, our future selves, much as Dante discussed in his poem. Read what Gen. Satterfield has often written about betrayal and you will see. https://www.theleadermaker.com/?s=Betrayal Of course, there will be people – mostly women – who disagree, and they disagree because they cannot come to admit that betrrayal is actually a horrible personal defect. They, instead call it being free to seek their true selves. How crazy can they be? Pretty crazy.
INSIGHTFUL
Sweeney, I agree. The article captures a profound truth: the most intimate betrayal is often the one we commit against the man we are meant to become. Peterson is right that short-term mating strategies are not merely opportunistic; they are the behavioral signature of a character that is already beginning to rot. When a man chooses the fleeting conquest over the long arc of responsibility, he is not simply failing a partner—he is actively discarding the grandfather his better self was preparing to be. That discarded future self is the quietest and most permanent casualty, because no one else can fully see what was lost. Marriage is the primary arena where this choice is tested daily, and walking away from it while forbidding all connection is a particularly cold form of the same self-betrayal. It treats the sworn bond as disposable and the potential lineage as irrelevant. Conscience speaks precisely because some part of us still remembers the longer covenant we once aimed toward. The men who ignore that voice do not merely damage others; they hollow out their own capacity for legacy. Dante placed the betrayal of the nearest human ties in the outer ring of the lowest circle for good reason—the closer the bond, the deeper the freeze. True leadership begins with refusing to become the man who would shame the grandfather he might have been. Anything less is a quiet surrender of the future that only disciplined fidelity can still deliver.