#67 — Meaning and Chaos
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Summary
Jordan Peterson is a clinical psychologist and professor at the University of Toronto. He formerly taught at Harvard University, and has published articles on drug abuse, alcoholism, and aggression. He has made a special focus on tyranny, and of late he has been fighting a pitched battle against political correctness up in Canada, and he has attracted a lot of support and criticism on that front. As I said last time around, Jordan is far and away the most requested guest I've ever had, and we did a podcast about four or so episodes back, entitled "What is True?" and that was a fairly brutal slog through differing conceptions of epistemology. If ever the phrase, "Bogled down," applied to a podcast, it applied there. Some people enjoyed it, but most of you didn't. But as I say, I did a poll online, and 30,000 of you responded, and 81% wanted us to try again, because there was much more to talk about. And as it turns out, there was a much better conversation this time around. And if you have anything to say about it, feel free to reach out to me on Twitter, or make noise wherever you want, and let me know what you think of it. I think this will be an exercise in seeing just how much can be said across differing epistemologies. And we'll just see how it goes, because I don't want us to fight the same battle all over again. But if it does, I think the best thing to do is to just move on and move on, right away. And I think it's still possible to talk past one another, right? but if it doesn't go well, then maybe we should just do our best to make sense of it on the fly, and see where it goes. Well, let's see where we end up, shall we? --Sam Harris -- Sam Harris -- What is True or False? -- -- Jordan Peterson -- Why do we live in a world where there's no such thing as "Truth or False"? -- What does it matter? -- What do we do with it? -- Is it a problem? -- Why is it important? -- How to live in the world we should we live it or not? -- and why is it so important to us? -- And how can we be better at making sense of something we can be better? -- Should it be understood? -- Does it matter, anyway? --
Transcript
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Today, back by popular demand, I have Jordan Peterson.
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Jordan is a clinical psychologist and professor at the University of Toronto.
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He formerly taught at Harvard University, and he has published articles on drug abuse and
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alcoholism and aggression, but he has made a special focus on tyranny, and of late he has
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been fighting a pitched battle against political correctness up in Canada, and he's attracted
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As I said last time around, he is far and away the most requested guest I've ever had.
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And we did a podcast about four or so episodes back, entitled What is True?
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And that, to the disappointment of everyone, was a fairly brutal slog through differing conceptions
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If ever the phrase, bogged down, applied to a podcast, it applied there.
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Some people enjoyed it, but most of you didn't.
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But as I say in the conversation today with Jordan, I did a poll online, and 30,000 of you
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And 81% wanted us to try again, because there was much more to talk about.
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We had a much better conversation this time around.
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It was very collegial, and if you have anything to say about it, feel free to reach out to
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Jordan and me on Twitter, or make noise wherever you want.
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Let's just take a moment to bring people up to speed.
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While we can assume many have heard our previous effort at this, all won't have.
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We intended to speak about many things, but got bogged down on the question of what it
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And I consider this actually a very interesting problem in philosophy, but it seemed to me that
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we got stuck at a point that wasn't very interesting, and many of our listeners felt the same.
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And at the time, I didn't let the conversation proceed to other topics because I felt that
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I knew you wanted to talk about things like the validity of religious faith and Jungian
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archetypes and many other controversial things.
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And I felt if we couldn't agree on what separates fact from fantasy, we would just be doomed to
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We are doomed to talk past one another, but we ran a Twitter poll after our first podcast.
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And despite all the complaints I received about our conversation, 81% of people wanted us
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I decided we should give our people what most of them claim to want.
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And we'll just see how it goes, because I don't want us to fight the same battle all
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I think listeners who are curious about how that last conversation went can listen to it.
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And I'm sure the topic of truth and falsity will come up.
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But if it does, I think the best thing to do is kind of flag it on the fly and move on.
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And I think this will be an exercise in seeing just how much can profitably be said across
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With that warning about the various road hazards, I think we should just see where we wind up.
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And I think it could be someplace interesting, because you and I appear to share many of the
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I think we both find the question of how to live in this world to be the most important
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And I think we're equally concerned about some of the very well-subscribed answers to that
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And so I think we should just do our best to make sense and see where it goes.
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I mean, you place a tremendous emphasis on the moral necessity of the spoken truth.
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And that's certainly something that I'm in accord with.
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And you're also concerned with ethics in relationship to the alleviation of suffering, from what I've
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been able to understand from what I've read of your writings.
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And you're also very much concerned with the relationship between scientific fact and value.
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And so we do share this intense concern about the same domain, and I think for many of the
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And I think that you're an outstanding exponent of your particular position.
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And that makes you an excellent person to talk about these things with.
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I was actually going to start with a bit of an apology, because I listened to our talk
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twice, trying to figure out where it went off the rails.
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It actually went okay for the first hour, and then we got bogged down in the truth issue.
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And I think I made a couple of strategic errors, which I hope not to repeat.
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The first one was that I started the conversation by more or less accusing you of being insufficiently
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And that was designed to be, I thought, playful and provocative.
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But when I listened to our conversation again, I thought that that wasn't a very wise, strategic
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And the second mistake I made was that I had just read a number of things that you had
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And I told you a lot about what you thought instead of letting you say it.
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And I was doing that partly, well, partly because there is an argument to be had here.
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And I suppose partly because I was nervous, but also partly to demonstrate that I had actually
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And I wanted to indicate, or what you had written, and I wanted to indicate to you that
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But I'm going to try to not be the least bit provocative in that manner during this conversation,
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because I really do think that we have something important to talk about.
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And I think that that's why so many people actually want to listen to us talk.
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Just in the interest of completing that bit of housekeeping, I don't think the first was
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I mean, to say that I'm insufficiently Darwinian is provocative, and I don't take it in the
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We just didn't find a path through that particular thesis that we could converge on.
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And as far as the second point, telling me what I think in advance of our actually hitting
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that topic, I think that is, that's almost certainly a mistake with me or anyone.
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And that's fine that you did that post-mortem, and I agree with that bit.
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And I think kind of a natural starting point would be to ask you, and again, I've heard a
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few of the things you've said on this topic, but I'll just let you invent yourself anew,
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What is the relationship in your view between science and religion?
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Well, I think that religious systems are descriptions of how people ought to act.
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And I think that the way that, I think that those arose in a quasi-evolutionary manner.
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And so imagine, imagine the dominance hierarchy structure of a chimpanzee troop or a wolf pack.
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Okay, so we'll use the wolf idea first and then switch if it's okay to the chimpanzee idea.
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So, as a consequence of the behavioral actions and interactions among social animals, you could
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think of something as a, something that might be described as a procedural covenant arising.
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And that would be the animal's knowledge of the structure of the dominance hierarchy, which
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is kind of ill-named, but we'll use that for now.
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Now, so that there's a hierarchy of rank, and every animal in the social community understands
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That's essentially the culture of the troop or the pack.
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And there's an implicit recognition of the value of each individual within that troop or
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pack, such that, for example, if two wolves square off in a dominance dispute, of course,
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they puff themselves up to make themselves look large, and they growl at each other, and
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they engage in ferociously threatening displays.
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And generally speaking, the wolf that has the lowest threshold for anxiety activation will
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capitulate first, generally without much more than the pose of a fight, and roll over and
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expose his neck, and then the dominant wolf will not deign to tear it out, basically.
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And you could think of the wolves acting out what you would describe propositionally as respect
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And then, in the chimp troops, Franz de Waal's research has indicated, for example, that if
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the dominance hierarchy is only based on brute force, and the chimp at the top, who's generally
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male, is there because he's a barbarian dictator, let's say, then he's very likely to be taken
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out by two male chimps, three-quarters his power, who are much better at social bonding, and
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who've made a very tight compact between one another.
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And so, the chimp troop that's based on a tyranny is unstable.
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What de Waal indicated was that the chimp troops that tend to be more stable are run by dominant
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males who actually are very good at social bonding and reciprocity, and who pay a fair bit of attention
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So, the dominance isn't power so much as you might think of as good politics.
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And so, there's an emergent ethic that, and I truly believe it's emergent ethic, that's
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very similar to what Piaget described as emerging among children when they play games, that not
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only specifies the nature of the social contract, let's say, but also is structured as if the
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individuals within the social contract have some implicit value.
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So, imagine that as human beings diverged away from their chimpanzee progenitors, the common
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ancestor we have with chimpanzees, we already started to act out this ethic.
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It was coded in our procedures, to speak technically, because we have a procedural memory.
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And then, as we developed cortically, we watched each other and ourselves very, very intently.
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And once we developed language, we were able to start encapsulating that procedural ethic
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And those stories were partly about what a very well-structured procedural ethic might
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be and how it might go wrong, but also about how an individual within that procedural ethic
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And the storytelling, which was the mapping of that procedure, was the birthplace of the
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image and story basis of religious ideation, as far as I can tell.
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It's like Piaget's notion that children, when they first come together to learn a game, if
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they're young enough, they can play the game when they're together.
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But if you take them out of the game and ask them individually about the rules, they give
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So, they've got the procedure in place, but they haven't got the episodic representation,
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It's only once they become more linguistically sophisticated that they can actually come up
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And then it's only later, when they start to construe themselves, not merely as followers
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of the rules, but also as originators of the rules.
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And that's akin to the recognition of, I would say, constructive individuality in relationship
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And so, I see these things as very, very, very deeply biologically predicated.
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Where's the concept of an archetype come into this picture?
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So, one time I was at the hockey rink with my son, and he was playing.
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And they were playing this championship game in this little league that they had.
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And my son was a pretty good hockey player, but there was a kid on the team who was better
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But he was a diva, you know, and even though he would score goals and all of that, he wouldn't
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pass, and he wasn't facilitating the development of any of the other team members.
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And so, anyways, we watched this game, and it was very close.
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And in the final few minutes of the last period, the other team scored, and my son's team and
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And so then the kids went off the ice, and the diva kid smashed his hockey stick on the
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cement and started to complain bitterly about how unfair the game is.
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And then his idiot father came running up to him and told him how unfair the reffing had
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been and how it was stolen from them and how catastrophic all of that was.
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And I thought it was one of the most heinous displays of poor parenting that I'd ever seen.
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So his kid was very good at playing hockey, but he wasn't very good at being a good player.
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And so, you know, you always tell your kids, it doesn't matter whether you win or lose.
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And of course, you don't know what that means, and neither does the kid.
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And it's often a mystery to the kid what that means, because obviously you're trying to
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Imagine that human beings, that the goal of human life isn't to win the game.
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The goal of human life, in some sense, is to win the set of all possible games.
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And in order to win the set of all possible games, you don't need to win any particular
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You have to play in a manner that ensures that you will be invited to play more and more
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And so when you tell your children to be good sports, to play properly, what you mean is
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play to win, but play to win in such a way that people on your team are happy to play
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with you and people on the other teams are happy to play with you.
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Now, if you think of each game as a small hierarchy of value or dominance, then obviously
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the appropriate thing is to move up the hierarchy.
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And that's what animals do, is they move up in their specific hierarchy.
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But because human beings are capable of abstraction, we've been able to conceptualize the hierarchy
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as such, rather than any specific one, and then also to characterize a mode of being that
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is most likely to move you up the hierarchy, no matter what that hierarchy is.
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And as far as I can tell, that's the archetype of the hero.
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The hero is the person who's most likely to move up any given dominance hierarchy at any
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And the hero is also, and then so that the nature of that archetypal hero first was acted
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out, it was laid out in procedure, and then it was acted out, and then it was described.
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It's not only he who plays to be invited to play again, but also he who goes out into the
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great unknown to face chaos and the dangers there, but to gather what's valuable as a
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consequence and to bring it back to the community.
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And that's the basis of the dragon myth archetype, which is, of course, plays out in art and literature
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The oldest story we have, which is the Enuma Elish from Mesopotamia, is a story about Marduk,
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who's the culture hero and also the highest god in the Mesopotamian pantheon.
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He confronts the dragon of chaos, cuts her into pieces, and makes the world.
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In fact, one of his names was Nam, I can't remember the name, unfortunately, but it meant
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he who creates ingenious things as a consequence of the combat with Tiamat, who's the dragon
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So he cuts off, he cuts up the unknown into pieces and makes ingenious things out of them.
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And it's a perfect description of the human archetype, the fact that we are hyper-exploratory
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and that we use our capacity to explore the dangerous unknown to gather the treasure that
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lies there and then to distribute it to the community.
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So, and that, in terms of the evolution of that archetype, Sam, think about it this way,
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And again, you can tell me what you think about this.
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So, we know that, roughly speaking, that human females mate across and up dominance
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hierarchies, whereas chimpanzee females are non-selective maters.
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The dominant chimps, males, will chase away the subordinate chimps from the females in estrus,
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But the females will mate with anyone, whereas human females are very selective and they have
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hidden ovulation, and they mate across and up dominance hierarchies.
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So imagine the woman wants the man who's most capable of rising up the set of all dominance
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So what happens is she outsources that problem to the computational capacity of the male hierarchy,
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and she lets the men fight it out among themselves, compete and cooperate to determine who the best
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man is, he's provided with the majority of the mating opportunities.
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And so, that's how the extended religious phenotype manifests itself in evolutionary space,
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which was something that you and Richard Dawkins were wondering about the last time that you talked.
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Like, it's not psychopathy, which was, in some sense, you know, you were thinking about
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the charismatic liar, but really what's being selected for is the consciousness, because
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that's the right way of thinking about it, that's best able to rise across the set of
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And females are selecting very hard for that, which is, at least in part, why we've had this
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Well, let me see if I can wade into this picture and find places of agreement and disagreement.
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For clarity's sake, I think it's useful to distinguish between two different intellectual projects
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here with respect to values and morality and the question of just how to live in this world,
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First, there's the description of how we got here, right?
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And this captures all of evolutionary psychology and much of what you just began to say about
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selection pressures with respect to dominance hierarchies and, you know, the kind of heroic
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male mate that female apes will find attractive and all that.
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Then you can add religion to that as perhaps an extended phenotype or the possibility of group
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More religious tribes have a way of organizing themselves in a more durable way than less religious
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tribes, and therefore we have, there's something in our evolutionary history that has selected
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for religiosity, say, an overarching story that unites non-kin in a way that is more energizing
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You know, I don't really have much of a dog in that fight.
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I think some of that is plausible, some of it isn't.
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I think group selection, though you haven't mentioned it, is working to some degree in
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the background of this way of talking about religion in evolutionary terms.
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And at the moment, I happen to be convinced that group selection is implausible and based
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But again, this is not, this doesn't strike me as important for this conversation or for
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really for anything that I've written about the relationship between morality and science
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or facts and values, because I view this problem of describing how we got here.
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I mean, how is it that apes like ourselves have the moral attitudes and concerns that
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That's a distinct project which is quite separate from the question of deciding how we should
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live now, given what we are and given the opportunities available to us and given the way in which we're
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continually flying the perch that has been prepared for us by evolution with our technology and with our
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institutions and with our new moral norms that have absolutely nothing to do with ancient selection
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So you have in many religions, perhaps even most, you have certain ideals that could never have been
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selected for because they are the antithesis of anything that would offer an adaptive advantage.
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Anyone who was committed to celibacy in our ancient past, by definition, didn't breed.
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You could say that they might have helped their kin, but still, celibacy is not an ideal that you can make
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much Darwinian sense of, and yet you can have the most committed adherence of any faith tending toward a life
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of celibacy. At the very least, promiscuity is taboo in most religious traditions. Now, I'm not taking a
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position that that's a good thing or a bad thing. I'm just saying that this is where evolution is no longer
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relevant to a discussion of how people should live. And as I think I said in a blog response to some of
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the things you said after our first podcast, if you wanted to just take a genes-eye view of how human beings
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should live, especially how men should live, well, then you would conclude that given current
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opportunities, every man should be passionately committed to doing more or less nothing but
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donate his sperm to a sperm bank, because then he could father possibly tens of thousands of offspring
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for whom he would have no financial or emotional responsibility. From a Darwinian perspective,
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that should be every guy's deepest dream. You should just get up in the morning with just a
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commitment to that project unlike any other that could be discovered in life. So we have motives and
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norms and concerns that don't narrowly track a gene-level analysis of what we should be doing.
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So I just put that out there. I think the more interesting conversation is not to talk about
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how apes like ourselves could have gotten religion, but to talk about what we should do given the way
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the world is now and what we seem to know about it through science.
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Well, that's fine. I just want to make a couple of comments about that. I mean,
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the hypotheses that I'm proposing is certainly not dependent on group selection. So we can leave that
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one aside as far as I know. I think the jury's out on the ultimate validity of the idea of group
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selection, but I'm not interested in going down that rabbit hole because it doesn't matter to me
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one way or another really how that's resolved. With regards to the potential validity of
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evolutionarily derived motivations to the present day, I think that's more complicated. So
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the first thing I would say is that I believe there has been a central march forward with a set of very
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productive ideas as human beings have evolved their morality, but those have spun off counterproductive
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evolutionary dead ends like everything does. And it's possible, for example, that celibacy is one of
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those. With regards to the donation to sperm bank idea, I mean, that's essentially the mosquito way of
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propagation, right? And that's, it's R versus K. Is that the correct terminology? I don't remember it
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correctly, but there's two fundamentally different strategies, extreme strategies for propagating
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yourself in the world. And one is to disseminate yourself as widely as possible, and let the
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offspring live or die as they may, which would be the sperm bank approach. And then there's the other
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one, which is high investment in children, which is maybe taken to its extreme in human beings. And so
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we're tilted a lot more towards that. And so you can't really imagine a human being being motivated
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to take the mosquito approach, because that's really not built into us. But that isn't to say
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that the sexual morality that's part and parcel of our being, which seems to tend relatively strongly
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towards monogamy, for example, as marriage is a human universal, although there are variations of it,
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we're still very much tilted towards the high investment in single offspring patterns.
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So let me just clarify one point. I certainly am not saying that you can't see the thumbprint of
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evolution in more or less everything we do. You obviously can. And as you point out, our sexual
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morality and our commitment to monogamy, all of that is amenable to being interpreted in evolutionary terms.
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No doubt those stories are valid and interesting to understand. My point is, is that we are in the
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process of repudiating and struggling to outgrow most of what evolution has prepared us to want and
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care about and fear. Tribalism, xenophobia, and the list is long, but we want to get out of our
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tribal violence program and all the rest. Let me address that, because you see, most of the
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evolutionary psychologists that I've encountered have what I consider the misbegotten notion that our
00:27:47.900
primary period of evolutionary determination was on the African belt. And my viewpoint, I would say,
00:27:57.040
spans broader time spans than that. So I'm starting from the presupposition that the most permanent
00:28:05.080
things are the most real, which I think is a reasonable starting point. But I have a reason for
00:28:11.820
saying that, because what I've been able to understand by delving deeply into the grammatical
00:28:18.460
structure underneath mythology is that the religious landscape actually describes that which is most
00:28:26.160
permanent in what shaped human evolutionary history. And I mean way back, I mean 350 million years back,
00:28:33.740
before trees, before flowers, back when we shared common ancestor with crustaceans. And so one of the
00:28:42.920
most permanent features of the biological landscape is the existence of the dominance hierarchy. And
00:28:49.720
that's roughly portrayed in religious mythology as culture or explored territory or the known. And it's
00:28:57.800
usually given the characterological representation of the great father. And there's a positive one and a
00:29:04.460
negative one, as the dominance hierarchy can support you in your development or crush you completely.
00:29:10.640
So the dominance hierarchy is one major selection mechanism, and it's known territory. There's another
00:29:16.460
major selection mechanism, which is roughly speaking, Mother Nature. And that's that which exists outside of
00:29:23.560
the explored territory. And it's generally being kept conceptualized as feminine, which, and I think the
00:29:30.320
reason for that is because the unknown, it's the unknown, cognitively speaking, or territorial speaking,
00:29:37.400
that gives rise to new forms. But it's also more importantly that female human beings, so the feminine,
00:29:45.360
plays a very vicious role in the selection process. You may know, and probably do, that you have twice as
00:29:52.940
many female ancestors as male ancestors. So as far as human beings are concerned, the feminine is a
00:30:00.020
bottleneck through which genes must pass, so to speak. And it's a very narrow and picky and choosy
00:30:05.880
bottleneck. So it has a positive element and a negative element. So roughly, it's the same thing,
00:30:11.660
Sam, that's represented in the Taoist yin yang symbol, because that yin yang symbol basically is predicated on
00:30:19.760
the idea that being is partly the known or the interpretive structure that's brought to bear on
00:30:26.160
the situation. And so that's the white paisley. It's a serpent, actually. And the unknown, which is
00:30:31.640
the black paisley or serpent. And the two are interchangeable, and out of them arises meaning.
00:30:37.620
So the idea behind the Taoist symbol is that you should have one foot in what you know,
00:30:41.980
and one foot in what you don't know. And that's the place where information flow is maximized.
00:30:48.780
And that's the same thing as occupying the position of the hero who confronts the unknown and generates
00:30:53.900
new information. And those evolutionary realities remain absolutely unchanged. The idea that every
00:31:02.860
place you go, there's something you know and an interpretive framework that you bring to bear.
00:31:07.840
So there's a cultural element. And everywhere you go or are, there's something that transcends that
00:31:13.660
knowledge that you have to deal with. And everywhere you go, you're there. And so the three basic
00:31:20.980
archetypal characters of mythology are the individual, positive and negative, culture, positive and
00:31:28.040
negative, and nature, positive and negative. And we haven't outgrown that in the least. It's exactly the
00:31:35.000
same problem it's always been. And as far as I can tell, it's exactly the same set of problems that
00:31:39.920
always will be. And that's partly why these archetypal stories cannot be transcended, and they
00:31:47.920
cannot be ignored. They pop up of their own accord. I mean, look, I'll give you an example.
00:31:54.600
One question, Jordan. How is any of that religious, though? I understand how, you know, thinking of the
00:32:01.640
individual versus the cosmos, gives us a kind of narrative structure, right? You have your
00:32:09.700
protagonist, and you have all of the things that can happen to him or not, and all the things that
00:32:15.700
he can want or not. And it's very easy to conceive of any human life or the life of a whole civilization
00:32:23.280
in terms of stories like that. But how does this bring religion into the picture?
00:32:28.740
Okay, well, I'm going to approach that from two perspectives. The first perspective, I presume,
00:32:35.540
is one that you might find interesting, given your interest in spirituality. So it's certainly capable
00:32:45.000
for people to experience deeply a sense of meaning. You know, Csikszentmihalyi talked about that as flow,
00:32:51.840
which I think is a rather trivial way of dealing with it, but at least it's one that people can
00:32:55.680
directly understand. But I would say you can understand when you're doing something meaningful
00:33:01.040
because you're deeply engaged in it, and you also have a sense, in some sense, of standing outside
00:33:06.640
of time because you don't notice time's flow. And it also feels worthwhile and that the sacrifices
00:33:13.580
that you have made to enable yourself to do that were justified. And so I would say because the
00:33:20.280
ultimate domains of reality are in fact chaos and order or known and unknown, that when you straddle
00:33:27.940
those two properly and maximize information flow, you feel a deep sense of intrinsic meaning. And that's
00:33:35.440
the output of the entire structure of your consciousness telling you that you're in the
00:33:40.740
right place at the right time with regards to furthering your capacity to thrive and move forward.
00:33:47.820
A question here, Jordan. Wouldn't you grant that there are pathological experiences of meaning,
00:33:55.520
meaning that is actually based on a misconception or divorced from the truth, which can be no less
00:34:02.840
intoxicating to the person who's finding something meaningful?
00:34:06.140
Sam, I think that's a great question. I mean, one of the things that really, really disturbed me when I was
00:34:11.660
first working out these ideas was exactly that question. Because, like, I've read an awful lot about
00:34:17.000
extraordinarily pathological people, you know, serial killers and people who were malevolent right to
00:34:22.320
their core. And that's exactly the question I asked. Because, you know, with serial killers,
00:34:27.460
for example, especially the sexual predator types, they seem to have to live on the edge of their
00:34:33.420
pathology in order to continue to be rewarded by it. You know, they have to keep extending their
00:34:39.760
pathology into the unknown to keep getting that rush. And then, of course, there's the situation with
00:34:45.320
schizophrenics, where the underlying mechanisms that produce the sense of meaning actually go astray.
00:34:51.840
And that's especially the case, say, with paranoid schizophrenia. But you see, that's partly
00:34:57.560
why I think I developed a viewpoint that's similar to yours with regards to the necessity of stating the
00:35:05.280
truth, or at least attempting very hard not to say what you believe to be false. Because,
00:35:11.920
as far as I can tell, at least under most circumstances, that meaning-orienting system,
00:35:19.300
which is actually the extended orienting reflex, technically speaking, neuropsychologically speaking,
00:35:26.160
I think that you pathologize the underlying mechanisms if you speak deceitfully. Because you build
00:35:33.400
pathological micromachines, so to speak, into the architecture of your physiology. And then
00:35:40.580
the underlying systems, much more fundamental, say, limbic systems, for the sake of, for lack of a
00:35:49.940
better term, they start producing pathological output and take you down extraordinarily dangerous
00:35:54.640
roads. So if you're going to let your intrinsic sense of meaning serve as a guide through life,
00:36:01.640
then you have to ally yourself with the commitment to speak the truth, or at least not to engage in
00:36:09.440
deceit. Because otherwise, you will do exactly what you said and pathologize yourself. And then,
00:36:16.080
well, and then all hell will break loose in your life and in the life of others.
00:36:20.000
And you could be rigorously honest, but still mistaken, right? I mean, you could have a belief
00:36:25.320
system or be raised in a culture that has a belief system that is completely illogical or out of touch
00:36:34.260
with reality. And you could not know it. The dishonesty doesn't have to be local to your own
00:36:40.180
brain. You could just be confused, right? Well, I think this is partly why I was more insistent than
00:36:47.040
I should have been in our last discussion about a particular idea about truth. I mean, because I would
00:36:52.720
say there's the truth that's associated with being in possession of a set of accurate facts,
00:37:00.080
but there's a more enacted truth or embodied truth, which is the consistent attempt to go beyond what
00:37:07.540
you know. And so that would be the necessity of living in humility or in ignorance. And so that what
00:37:16.080
you're doing when you're discussing with someone or when you're acting in the world is not so much
00:37:20.920
attempting to prove that what you already know is completely right and correct, but attempting to
00:37:28.300
understand very carefully where you're in error and learning everything you can to correct that.
00:37:34.600
And you see, that idea is also deeply rooted in religious mythology. So, for example, the figure
00:37:43.040
of Horus, who's the Egyptian eye and who's also a falcon. Now, Horus is an eye and a falcon because
00:37:50.720
falcons can see better than any other animal, including human beings, even though we can see very well.
00:37:55.880
And he's an eye because the eye with the open iris signifies paying attention. And Horus, who's a
00:38:03.380
messianic figure in some sense for the ancient Egyptians, had his eyes open to the corruption of
00:38:10.780
the state, which was symbolized by a deity named Seth, who later became Satan in the developmental
00:38:18.080
pathway of this set of ideas. And Horus, who lived in truth, so to speak, was able to keep his eyes open
00:38:25.500
and understand the corrupt nature of his society and his uncle, his uncle was Seth, and to put that
00:38:32.260
right again. And so there's the idea that lived truth can rescue you from pathological untruth,
00:38:41.180
and that might be moral or factual. If you're a scientist and operating in a truthful manner,
00:38:46.860
you update archaic empirical representations. If you're a, what would you call, more culture hero
00:38:55.500
type of person, then what you're doing is updating archaic and blind representations of the proper
00:39:01.580
moral pathway forward, which can never be encapsulated completely in a set of rules.
00:39:07.700
See, that's partly why, for example, in the line of Christian thought, Moses couldn't reach the
00:39:15.280
promised land because his morality was bounded by rules, and it's not possible to reach the proper
00:39:22.220
mode of being by only acting out rules, because rules, the same rules aren't applicable in every
00:39:28.720
situation. I mean, I could tell you the Christian story in a way that you might find interesting in
00:39:35.840
about 10 minutes if you would like me to do that. Let's hold off on Christianity. I want to get there
00:39:41.560
because I know that's the system of thinking you find most interesting in this area, and so I would
00:39:47.820
like to talk about that. My issue is that it seems to me that this kind of language game of, you know,
00:39:55.840
talking about ancient stories and the way in which they seem to cash out some of the pre-scientific
00:40:03.500
intuitions and moral norms of any group of people is though there's a validity to the whole picture
00:40:10.360
when you talk that way. That, I just see that that's kind of unconstrained by anything. I think
00:40:16.960
you can do that with anything, with any system of beliefs. You can find a people which, from my point
00:40:22.860
of view, are living in some form of radical error, which is to say that virtually everything they think
00:40:28.200
is true almost certainly isn't, and the way they're treating one another is terrible on the basis of
00:40:35.100
those misconceptions, and they're never going to get anywhere worth going, right? So a modern example
00:40:40.440
of that is something like ISIS or the Taliban, but there's some ancient examples or, you know,
00:40:45.800
older examples that are, in some cases, even easier to understand because we have no affinity for
00:40:51.860
them. So, do you know the Dobu people? The anthropologist Ruth Benedict wrote about them.
00:40:57.140
I wrote about them for a few pages in my book, The Moral Landscape.
00:41:00.820
Yeah, I write about them in your book, actually.
00:41:03.500
Yeah, so for listeners who didn't read the book or can't remember, I mean, the Dobu get my vote for
00:41:09.560
perhaps the most tragically confused people who have ever lived, and this is just kind of a hothouse
00:41:15.040
version of radical confusion, which you wouldn't believe would be possible, but for the fact that
00:41:20.440
some anthropologists wrote about it, but so this was a culture that was completely obsessed with
00:41:27.160
malicious sorcery, and their primary interest, every person's primary interest, was to cast spells
00:41:32.820
on other members of the tribe in an attempt to sicken or kill them in the hopes of magically stealing
00:41:40.280
their possessions, and especially their crops. It was like a continuous magical war of all against
00:41:46.900
all in this way, and they believed that magic had to be consciously applied to everything. They
00:41:53.160
literally thought that gravity had to be supplemented by magic so that if you didn't cast the
00:41:57.540
right spells, your vegetables would just rise out of the ground and disappear, and they thought every
00:42:03.560
interaction of this sort and every outcome for people was zero-sum, so that if one man succeeded in
00:42:10.420
growing more vegetables than his neighbor, his success, his surplus of vegetables must have been
00:42:16.340
stolen from one of his neighbors through sorcery. Even the farmer who got lucky in this way with a
00:42:22.640
surplus would have believed that he succeeded for this reason, that he actually magically stole his
00:42:27.780
neighbor's crops. So to have a good harvest was a crime by everyone's estimation, even the person who
00:42:33.540
was a lucky harvester. And it seems to me that you could play this same game with the Dobu. I mean,
00:42:41.520
you could talk about archetypes, you could talk about whatever stories, ancient or otherwise, that
00:42:46.080
they were using to justify this view of life. You could find some evolutionary way of kind of
00:42:53.120
threading the needle of how what they were doing was a response to the ancient imperative of
00:42:57.760
dominance hierarchies. You know, you could give some sympathetic construal of the whole enterprise.
00:43:03.540
In terms of myth and archetype and meaning. But clearly, this was like a kind of strange basin of
00:43:11.400
attraction that you'd be very lucky never to have found as a tribe or as a culture. And we're very lucky not
00:43:19.420
to be stuck in some similar place there. There's another detail here, which is especially horrible, because
00:43:25.000
the Dobu felt that magic became more powerful the closer you were to somebody, so that the people who were
00:43:32.240
closest to them in life, their spouses or their children, were the people who were most likely to
00:43:40.260
Well, that's actually true, Sam. If you've ever had a family, you know that.
00:43:43.820
But yeah, so again, you could connect it to some kind of story that makes sense. So you could go to
00:43:48.400
Greek mythology and Shakespeare and spin a yarn about it. But clearly, this underlying belief in magic
00:43:55.680
was, one, it's almost certainly not true. But two, it was creating a truly toxic moral environment for
00:44:04.560
these people. And so, again, I just put that out there as an example of something that one would
00:44:08.880
never want to spend a lot of time trying to justify this worldview by reference to stories, ancient or
00:44:18.720
Yeah, well, I mean, there's actually a technical solution to the problem that you're posing. I mean,
00:44:24.440
part of the problem is, how do you know if what you're looking at is a genuine thing or an artifact
00:44:32.600
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