The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

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00:00:51.040 Welcome to Season 3, Episode 16 of the Jordan B. Peterson Podcast.

00:01:02.380 I'm Westwood One Podcast Network's Joey Salvia, and we thank you for listening to our most recent series on Jordan's Biblical Lectures.

00:01:10.420 While we eagerly await the return of Dr. Peterson, we've planned a special 12-part series that until now could only be found on YouTube.

00:01:18.300 Westwood One Podcast Network is proud to present the audio version of Jordan B. Peterson's 2017 lectures based on his book, Maps of Meaning, The Architecture of Belief.

00:01:31.240 We begin with the title, Jordan Calls, Context and Background.

00:01:36.820 But first, a word from Michaela Peterson.

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00:02:51.200 Maps of Meaning, the Architecture of Belief, with Jordan B. Peterson Lecture, Episode 16, Context and Background.

00:03:05.240 I should tell you first about the genesis of this theory, I suppose is the right way of putting it.

00:03:13.460 When I was about your age, that was back in the early 80s or thereabouts, and this was particularly true around 1984, but it was true before that too.

00:03:27.300 You know, every generation has its worries, real or imagined, and the primary worry for people of my generation was the nuclear war.

00:03:40.340 And, you know, it was a genuine worry.

00:03:46.680 At one point, many years later, I went down to Arizona to visit an ICBM, a decommissioned ICBM nuclear missile silo.

00:03:58.140 And the ICBMs, Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles, were very large rockets, right?

00:04:03.780 They flew, they could fly halfway around the world.

00:04:06.660 And it was deep underground and behind very, very thick steel doors.

00:04:12.560 It was light green.

00:04:13.500 You know that pastel green that everyone seemed to like in the 1950s?

00:04:18.480 It was like pastel green Star Trek console.

00:04:22.100 That's what it looked like.

00:04:23.200 And so we went down, out in the yard, it was in the desert, out in the yard, there was a very, I would say, magical object, for lack of a better word.

00:04:35.860 And that was the nose cone for the ICBM.

00:04:43.260 And it was quite big, about that big, about that high, pointed like the point of a bullet, about three quarters of an inch thick plastic, you know, a kind of a resin.

00:04:52.980 And it was designed to melt on re-entry.

00:04:56.060 So that was just sitting there.

00:04:58.000 So that was fairly thought-provoking, let's put it that way.

00:05:02.960 And then we went into the missile silo.

00:05:07.100 Interestingly enough, appended to the front of it, it had been decommissioned under Reagan, by the way.

00:05:11.760 In the front of it, there was a, like a museum, with artifacts from the 1980s, featuring Reagan and Gorbachev, meeting multiple times.

00:05:25.640 And it was staffed by these southern, these Americans from the south, who were grandparent age.

00:05:33.100 And they were, they were just super friendly.

00:05:35.660 And, you know, they were happy to be in the museum.

00:05:37.540 It was like going to visit your grandma's nuclear missile silo.

00:05:41.760 And so it was jarring, you know, because it's obviously a portentous place.

00:05:50.600 And yet, it was conjoined with hospitality and welcoming.

00:05:55.440 It was surreal in that manner.

00:05:58.320 Anyways, we went into the, into the silo.

00:06:02.900 And they ran us through a simulated launch.

00:06:07.560 So imagine a panel like this, made out of metal, except twice as long, with another one of these things at the other end, 16 feet across or so.

00:06:17.140 Basically, 1950s technology, but updated.

00:06:24.660 And then imagine that what you had to do to launch it, was that there was a guy with a key, and there was another guy with a key.

00:06:30.740 And if I remember correctly, the keys were around their necks.

00:06:33.680 Although I don't think they were stored around their necks permanently.

00:06:35.960 But, and so to launch the missile, you had to put the key in the lock, both of you.

00:06:42.400 That was the safety precaution.

00:06:44.880 It had to be two of you.

00:06:46.760 You put the key in the lock and hold it for 10 seconds.

00:06:48.920 And then, away the missile goes.

00:06:51.620 And it wasn't as big, the missile wasn't as big as the rockets that went to the moon.

00:06:56.480 But, it was plenty big.

00:06:58.880 You know, the silo itself would have easily been as wide as this room is.

00:07:04.420 And perhaps larger, and many, many stories tall.

00:07:07.280 You know, because it was nested underground.

00:07:08.520 So, they ran us through a simulated launch, which was surreal, I would say.

00:07:17.340 And then, they told us that someone asked, and they said, the keys were in once.

00:07:23.160 Now, they wouldn't tell us when, but, you know, that would have been during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

00:07:29.640 Because, we were that close.

00:07:33.640 And, we were close again at other times, although perhaps not that close.

00:07:37.620 And, there seemed to be another peak of conflict in 1984, when there was a movie showed at that time, called The Day After.

00:07:50.040 Which, at that time, garnered more views than any movie ever had on TV.

00:07:55.560 And, it was a story about the aftermath of a nuclear war, and the people who were left.

00:08:01.840 And, it was pretty realistic, and pretty frightening.

00:08:06.500 And, it turned out, as I found out later, that, that movie actually was one of the things that influenced Ronald Reagan to put pressure on, or negotiate with the Soviets, depending on how you look at it.

00:08:20.840 And, so, and so, well, and then, you know, five years later, the Soviet Union collapsed, no one saw that coming.

00:08:29.740 And, and it really didn't collapse in 1989, in some sense, you know, like, a huge machine like that, doesn't fall apart all at once.

00:08:42.140 It falls apart over time, and then, at some point, it just becomes unsustainable, and topples.

00:08:46.960 And, you know, it's like, they lost faith in their doctrine, and, and, and for good reason.

00:08:54.860 You know, that, the system in Russia, the Soviet Union, which was a collection of states, an empire, and the system that Mao established in China,

00:09:11.520 and the system that still exists in Korea, as a remnant of the Cold War, and systems in Southeast Asia, and in Africa, were all predicated on Marxist presuppositions.

00:09:26.520 Presuppositions that were utopian in nature, and that posited a utopian future, where property was held in common, and everyone had enough,

00:09:42.080 and everyone was called upon to do what they could, right, from each according to his ability, to each according to his need,

00:09:50.080 which is a lovely sentiment, and you can imagine how it would be attractive, even intellectually,

00:09:56.520 because, of course, other systems, all other systems, produce vast disparities in income.

00:10:04.180 It's like a natural law.

00:10:06.300 It's actually governed by, you can model it with a distribution called the Pareto distribution,

00:10:15.740 and the Pareto distribution looks like this.

00:10:18.780 It doesn't look like a normal distribution.

00:10:20.760 A lot of you guys have been told about normal distributions, and how many things follow up,

00:10:26.520 on normal distribution, most things, but, that's really a limited case.

00:10:32.980 You can understand a Pareto distribution, if you, you've all played Monopoly, I presume.

00:10:38.880 At the beginning, everyone has the same amount of money, will include property, the same amount of wealth.

00:10:45.920 Then what happens as the game progresses, and really as a function of chance, I mean, I know you have to use your head a little bit in Monopoly,

00:10:52.880 but the basic rule is just buy everything you can get your hands on, and then trade meanly, something like that.

00:11:00.220 So, at the beginning, everybody has the same amount, and then, as you begin to play,

00:11:06.680 if you had enough players, you would develop a normal distribution,

00:11:10.260 because some people would win relatively consistently, and some people would lose relatively consistently,

00:11:16.220 and so, the money starts to be distributed in a normal distribution, but the thing about money and the thing about lots of things is that

00:11:25.540 zero is involved, and zero is a weird place because if you're playing a trading game, and you hit zero, then you're done.

00:11:37.500 And so, and it's very hard to recover from zero, and, you know, it's really hard to recover, you know when you're doomed in Monopoly,

00:11:45.380 you know, you can tell, you've got some resources, but there's going to be some crisis when you land on some hotel,

00:11:52.820 and you're going to get wiped out, you know it, so, there's a point at which you're headed for zero, even if you have something,

00:12:00.740 you know, and you might be rescued by luck, but, you know, when you're doomed.

00:12:11.860 So, what happens is that as you continue to play Monopoly, more and more people stack up as zero,

00:12:19.140 and fewer and fewer people have more and more money, and when the game is over,

00:12:25.780 everyone has nothing except one person, and they have all of it.

00:12:28.740 Now, the funny thing about that is that, in some sense, that's how trading games work, you know,

00:12:34.980 you might wonder why there is inequality in a society, and it's easy to consider that it's because the society is corrupt,

00:12:42.500 and perhaps, you know, societies are somewhat or horribly corrupt.

00:12:48.260 That's the variation, there's no society that's without its criminal element and fixed element.

00:12:55.300 Anyways, trading games tend to produce a Pareto distribution so that very many people have very little,

00:13:03.540 and a tiny minority have a tremendous amount, that's the 1% that you hear about, right?

00:13:09.540 And, you know, the thing about that 1% is that that's happened in every society that's ever been studied.

00:13:17.220 It doesn't really matter what the governmental system is, and it certainly happened under the Soviets,

00:13:22.260 that's for sure, and there was a lot of people who had enough zero, so they just died.

00:13:28.180 So, you know, the utopian dream was completely unimplementable for a variety of very complex reasons.

00:13:39.460 One is that it's very hard to fight against that distribution pattern when people are trading,

00:13:45.300 because mere statistics will do that.

00:13:48.340 And then there's other things that, and I should tell you as well that the Pareto distribution governs a lot of things.

00:13:54.020 So, if you look at books, if I remember properly,

00:13:59.300 last year there was something like a million English language books published,

00:14:03.220 and I think 500 of them sold more than 100,000 copies, which is none, right? That's none,

00:14:10.100 and of that 500, you can be sure that one of them was by Stephen King, and he took half the money,

00:14:16.100 because there's like five authors in the English language who are on every airport paperback stand,

00:14:25.140 occupying the top rung, and that's massive real estate, right? Because it's replicated everywhere,

00:14:30.820 and because they're so prominent, and because there are known names,

00:14:35.860 when people are in a hurry, and they just want something to read, they just grab that,

00:14:39.700 and then more money goes to those people, and so, you know, success breeds success,

00:14:44.500 and failure breeds failure, and it's not necessarily linear, and that's a really difficult thing to deal with,

00:14:51.060 and it's hard on societies, because one of the things we do know is that,

00:14:56.340 you know, as you stretch out the inequality, you make men particularly, on the lower end of the distribution,

00:15:05.860 more and more likely to be aggressive, it's sort of like, you imagine every man has a threshold for violence,

00:15:11.780 and status is important to men, not that it's not important to women, but it's different,

00:15:18.340 it's a different kind of status, its status is important to men, because it's one of the things that makes them marketable as partners to women,

00:15:26.100 so it actually turns out to be quite important to men, men tend to compete with one another for status, hierarchy position,

00:15:33.940 and in a really unequal society, if you're like a low rung guy, then, and you don't have any opportunity to rise,

00:15:42.740 because the society isn't structured so that there's mobility, then the more aggressive guys tend to turn to criminality,

00:15:53.140 and you know, and so you could say, there's a threshold for criminality, and the more inequality pressure you put on

00:16:01.380 a particular area, geographic or political area, the more inequality pressure you put on it,

00:16:07.060 the more men slip past that threshold and into criminality, and you know, there's been pretty good studies done of

00:16:15.860 drug gang in Chicago, that was the best one, a sociologist actually went and hung out with the drug gang for, he got into it,

00:16:23.300 I guess the drug gang leader was, you know, I wouldn't say necessarily narcissistic, but that might be a reasonable way of thinking about it,

00:16:33.300 and he was kind of happy with the idea of maybe being the subject of a book, and so this guy was able to associate with them, got to know them quite well,

00:16:46.420 and then the housing project in which the gang was housed was slated for demolition, and the gang broke up, and he got the books,

00:16:55.300 because they kept books, and what he found was the average street drug dealer, first of all, was employed in another job, as well,

00:17:04.020 and was making far less than minimum wage, now, but the guys, you know, further up the chain, of course,

00:17:12.980 followed the Pareto distribution, and so there was a tiny minority of them who were raking in a tremendous amount of loot,

00:17:18.020 and the guys at the bottom were just waiting around for the possibility that they could rise up the hierarchy,

00:17:25.700 and you know, it's a pretty violent game, so the chances that someone's going to be taken out is pretty high,

00:17:34.100 and then a little slot opens up for some opportunistic second rater, and perhaps he can move up the hierarchy.

00:17:41.860 So, the Pareto distribution governs all sorts of other things too, I mentioned,

00:17:50.260 it governs the popularity of books, the sales of books, but it also, it also characterizes the distribution of everything that people produce,

00:18:02.420 so if you think of creative production of any sort, artistic production, industrial production, it doesn't matter,

00:18:08.100 almost everything fails, and a few things succeed beyond anyone's wildest imagination,

00:18:18.740 Apple's a good example of that, you know, I mean, the iPhone, they have their competitors, but it's an extraordinarily dominant product,

00:18:26.980 and they rake in billions of dollars, I think, I don't know if Apple is valued at a trillion dollars, but it's close to that,

00:18:34.660 and that's a lot of money, and I think, if I remember correctly, it's something like this, I probably have the figures wrong,

00:18:41.620 but like the top 40 people, the richest 40 people in the world have as much money as the bottom 2 billion,

00:18:48.100 right, now, you know, it's not like they're stuffing their mattresses with that money,

00:18:52.020 or they have a skyscraper full of cash, that money is out in the economy doing whatever money does,

00:18:58.660 so, you know, you can't spend 28 billion dollars, so, and sometimes you can even do some good with it,

00:19:06.900 you know, Bill Gates seems to be doing something reasonable with his money,

00:19:11.780 but the reason I'm telling you this is because it's one of the things you should know,

00:19:16.420 is that this proclivity for inequality is pervasive among the creative products of human beings,

00:19:24.580 it's the case with goals scored in hockey, my son told me, and he's a reliable source on hockey statistics, that

00:19:33.700 if Wayne Gretzky, if you don't count any of the points that Wayne Gretzky managed with scoring,

00:19:39.620 he still had enough points just with assists to have more points than any hockey player that ever played,

00:19:44.420 so, you know, even at the upper end of the distribution, there's some person who's,

00:19:52.500 ah, they're so good at what they do, and then there's another person that's so much better than them,

00:19:57.300 that it's not even comparable, and so, and the benefits flow to people who are in that position,

00:20:04.420 and you can understand why, I would say, because, you know, let's say you start writing,

00:20:09.540 and you get a book, and, ah, rare things, very rare things to have happen, and then some people read it,

00:20:16.180 and they like it, and then, of course, it's much more likely that you'll get a next book,

00:20:19.620 and if people like that, well, it's even more likely that you'll get a third book,

00:20:23.540 and then people start to know who you are, and then, because they know who you are,

00:20:26.740 they phone you up and offer you opportunities, and your network grows, and it's like this exponential

00:20:32.260 increase in your reach, and your capacity for production, and more and more flows to you,

00:20:39.460 and, and then on the other hand, if you start to fail, and, you know, why would someone fail?

00:20:47.300 Well, God, you know, one idea that's very common in our culture is that poverty is caused by lack of money,

00:20:55.060 and that's a really stupid idea, because money is very difficult to handle, I had clients who were,

00:21:01.380 you know, drug addicts, and the worst possible thing that could happen to them was that they got some money,

00:21:08.340 they're just done, first of all, you know, they were hanging around with people who were little on the sociopathic side,

00:21:14.900 and so, especially if they weren't that bright, and couldn't defend themselves very well,

00:21:20.340 as soon as they got money, well, it was off to the bar with all the friends, and, you know,

00:21:25.940 one guy I remember in particular, you know, every time he got his, his disability check,

00:21:33.060 he was gone for five days, he usually found him in a ditch, you know, because he would just go to the bar,

00:21:38.980 spend every cent he had on alcohol and cocaine, and wake up in a ditch, three quarters dead,

00:21:46.340 eventually, completely dead, and, you know, then he was ashamed, and horrified, and repentant, and

00:21:56.340 he'd straighten himself out again, and then that was all well and good, until, as long as he was broke,

00:22:02.260 until the next check showed up, and then bang, the same thing, so, you know, it's not like money is

00:22:07.140 necessarily a good for everyone, it's hard to manage money, it's really easy for it to disappear,

00:22:13.540 I mean, elderly people have a hell of a time now, because, you know, crooks are contacting them on the internet, non-stop,

00:22:20.260 and so, just giving people money, money is like, it's like pouring water in their hands,

00:22:27.140 it's not that helpful, not necessarily that helpful, and then, of course, contributors to poverty are,

00:22:32.820 well, it's not so good to have a low IQ, you know, people don't like the idea of IQ,

00:22:37.620 because it seems so arbitrary, you know, you have a high IQ, well, it's not like you deserve it exactly,

00:22:45.380 it's, you're set up that way, pretty much right from the beginning, it's very, very, very, very stable,

00:22:52.340 you can make a high IQ person stupider, by, you know, not educating them up to the level of their possibility,

00:22:58.420 but taking someone who has a low IQ and trying to raise that, it's like, if you can figure out how to do that,

00:23:04.180 well, you know, it's Nobel Prize time for you, because people have tried that a lot,

00:23:09.460 and most recently with those, you know, Lumosity games and that sort of thing, and the evidence that those produce

00:23:16.660 anything other than brilliant performances on the Lumosity game itself is basically zero,

00:23:23.860 we haven't been able to figure out how to see, because intelligence is a cross-domain phenomena,

00:23:30.740 and you can get really good in a single domain by practicing like mad, and what you want is

00:23:35.700 to practice like mad in a single domain and hope that it generalize to other domains,

00:23:40.580 that's the holy grail of intelligence increase, it's like, no, no one's done it, people claim it,

00:23:47.300 but the claims never hold up, and people have been trying for a long time to do it, and they haven't been able to do it,

00:23:53.620 and differences in IQ really make a difference, you know, I mean,

00:24:03.220 you guys, average IQ is probably 125, 130, at 115, you're at the 85th percentile,

00:24:12.500 and 115 would barely get you going for a hard university, 130, you're probably graduate school material,

00:24:22.260 you know, 145, you're up there, at the range where you can probably do pretty much whatever you want,

00:24:29.940 although, as you get smarter, the scatter between your abilities increases, so you might have a very

00:24:35.060 high verbal IQ, but not be so good at mathematics, or the other way around, but it's a massive contributor

00:24:40.820 to lifetime success, and I don't know what to do about that, I mean, why do smart people make more money,

00:24:49.860 well, they get to where the edge of production is faster, so if you have a thousand people and you

00:24:58.340 rank order them by IQ, the smart people are going to come up with the new ideas first,

00:25:01.940 and they're going to have more ideas, and they're going to strategize better, and, you know, with an IQ of 90,

00:25:09.620 which is, 15 percent of the population, you think about that, 15 percent of the population,

00:25:18.340 that's pretty much the threshold for reading instructions, and being able to follow them,

00:25:25.780 so, you know, and our society is increasingly sophisticated, so, it's by no means obvious,

00:25:33.860 you know, the liberals think, well, this society is unfair, because there's unemployment, and the

00:25:39.940 conservatives think, well, there's a job for everyone, but none of them think, well, there are massive,

00:25:45.700 massive, massive differences in people's ability, far greater than anyone realizes, and that poses

00:25:52.500 a structural problem, I had a client, and I got him a volunteer job, which is way harder than you

00:26:00.020 think, you need a police check, for example, like, it's harder to get a volunteer job than a real job,

00:26:05.540 but I, we got him in a volunteer job, and he had to fold pieces of paper, letters, it was, he worked

00:26:11.700 at a charity, he had to fold pieces of paper in three, so that he could put them inside envelopes,

00:26:19.300 and then the letters, which were in a pile, had to be matched with the proper envelopes, which were

00:26:24.500 also in a pile, but some of them were French, and some of them were English, so the French ones had to

00:26:28.420 be matched carefully to the French envelopes, and then if, you know, if there was one envelope out of

00:26:35.460 order, well then, he had to figure out whether it was the papers that were out of order, or the letters

00:26:41.700 that were out of order, and then some of the letters had photographs attached to them, and you weren't

00:26:48.740 supposed to bend the photographs, but they weren't always in the same place, so that meant you had to

00:26:53.140 figure out how to fold the paper in three, a bunch of different ways, without creasing the photograph,

00:27:00.260 and then the other thing is, and I never realized how difficult it is to put a piece of paper in an

00:27:07.300 envelope, until I watched someone who couldn't do it, and he probably had an IQ of about 80, you know,

00:27:13.460 if you met him on the street, you wouldn't think anything different of him, he was a normal looking

00:27:18.260 guy, had some other problems, I trained him to fold those damn papers for like 30 hours, and he got

00:27:27.060 reasonably good at it, but, you know, if you're good at it, and you probably all are, you fold it,

00:27:35.860 and the edges line up exactly, like really exactly, the tolerance is probably half a millimeter,

00:27:41.060 something like that, then you do the second fold, and the tolerance is the same, but let's imagine that

00:27:47.860 the first fold, you're out by an eighth of an inch, and the second fold, you're out by an eighth of an inch,

00:27:52.340 so it's a little crooked, and that means, in total you're out by a quarter of an inch, and then it won't

00:27:57.940 fit in the damn envelope, so then you kind of crumple the envelope when you put it in there, and then

00:28:02.100 it gets stuck in the sorting machine, and so, he sweated blood trying to do that job, and he eventually,

00:28:11.140 they eventually planned to fire him, so, imagine what that's like, eh, you know, you can't get a job,

00:28:19.380 and then so you get a job at a charity, as a volunteer, and a charity decides to fire you,

00:28:26.580 you know, I mean really, that's just, so I talked to the woman who was running it, and suggested that

00:28:34.500 that might be a little on the devastating side, I mean she had her reasons, you know, he was always

00:28:45.220 asking people questions about how to do his job, and you know, so that meant he was interfering with

00:28:50.500 the productivity of other people, and it was genuine interference, I mean she wasn't being mean,

00:28:56.180 and it was her job to make sure the place did what it was supposed to, so, you know, she was between a

00:29:02.740 rock and a hard place, he eventually decided that the job wasn't for him, and relatively soon after that,

00:29:11.700 I think it was too stressful, and he quit, so that solved that problem, except then, he didn't have a job,

00:29:19.300 which of course is a problem, it has a happy ending, this story, as far as I know, he got a dog,

00:29:29.220 because he was very lonesome, and that dog, man, having that guy train that dog, that was something

00:29:33.780 else, that dog just, I think he lost 30 pounds while he was training that dog, because dogs, they're,

00:29:38.180 you know, dominant, and he had to have a tussle with the dog to figure out who was in charge,

00:29:43.460 and it's a lot of responsibility to have a dog, but he was pretty damn committed to that dog,

00:29:48.260 and he managed it, and the things he went through to keep that dog, you just cannot possibly imagine,

00:29:53.460 it's like a, it's like a, it's like a, it was surreal, just like the nuclear missile silo,

00:30:01.140 I mean, he had people following him around, informing on him, because they thought he was abusing the dog,

00:30:06.820 when in fact, because I watched, the dog was clearly abusing him,

00:30:09.860 so, he got a job helping a woman who trained dogs, and then he had a job, so hooray, you know, but

00:30:22.900 it was like a miracle, fundamentally, so, anyways, the reason I'm telling you all this is because

00:30:28.820 there was a reason for the cold war, and the reason was that there's inequality,

00:30:35.780 and there's different theories about how to address that inequality, and different theories

00:30:39.780 about why it exists, and there was a Marxist theory about why it exists, which was roughly

00:30:46.020 something like property equals theft, and those who have more have taken it from those who have less,

00:30:52.100 which, you know, seems to me to eliminate any conceptualization that there isn't a fixed pot of money,

00:30:59.700 you know, money expands, actually, as we become more technologically proficient, and

00:31:06.660 lots of people who have money have it because they've generated a lot of wealth, I mean,

00:31:11.620 Bill Gates is a great example of that, right, he popularized computing, he made it possible for

00:31:16.100 everybody to, to have access to computing, it's like, seems like a good, good for him, you know,

00:31:22.900 and you could say the same thing about Steve Jobs, and maybe you'll be able to say the same thing

00:31:26.660 about Elon Musk, and, you know, these guys have tremendous resources at their disposal, but,

00:31:33.380 you know, they're not like, they're not bathing in banknotes, you know, they're trying to

00:31:40.740 continue to do things, and they use their money to do things, and, anyways,

00:31:47.620 the Russians set themselves up under Marxist presuppositions, and tried to equalize the

00:31:56.820 distribution of property, and to call that catastrophic, barely scratches the surface,

00:32:03.780 and I know that you guys probably don't learn much about this, because for some reason,

00:32:08.580 people aren't taught about it, but, you know, the good estimates are that the Russians killed

00:32:16.740 about 30 million of their own people between 1919 and 1959, you know, and it's, it's brutal,

00:32:24.660 it's brutal, a lot of that was through starvation, you know, I saw a photograph the other day,

00:32:30.020 which I tweeted, which is the worst photograph I've ever seen in my life, and that's actually saying

00:32:34.180 a lot, because I've seen a lot of really terrible photographs, because I've done so much

00:32:39.060 investigation into totalitarianism, this was a photograph that was taken during one of the early

00:32:45.300 starvation periods in the Soviet Union, where about three million peasants died, it was a picture of

00:32:51.380 a peasant couple standing behind a table at a market selling human body parts for food, it's like,

00:32:58.180 and you know, I have this weird quirk, which I don't think does me much good, but

00:33:04.180 maybe helps me understand things better, when I see that someone has done something extreme,

00:33:12.260 I learned to do this a long time ago, when I worked briefly in a maximum security prison,

00:33:16.980 I try to imagine what I would have to be like, what kind of situation I would have to find myself in

00:33:24.180 to do that, and believe me, man, that's a horrifying enter, that's a horrifying enterprise, because

00:33:30.180 it is actually possible, no matter what it is that you read about someone doing, and no matter how

00:33:36.420 unlikely it is that you think you would do that, it's possible to imagine yourself in that situation, and that

00:33:48.340 well, that's enlightening, that's what I would say, that's enlightening, you know, because one of the things

00:33:52.820 about enlightenment, is that you get enlightened by doing things that are necessary, that you really,

00:34:01.620 really, really do not want to know, don't want to do, and imagine, imagining yourself as a perpetrator

00:34:09.060 of that sort is, that tells you something about the world, and it tells you something about human beings, but

00:34:15.220 it's a hell of a thing to swallow, you know, in a very well-structured society like ours,

00:34:24.580 where we're so peaceful, well, because we have the heat, and it always works, and we have electricity, and it always works,

00:34:32.100 and we have plumbing, which is a bloody miracle, and it always works, you know, it's just

00:34:38.900 one of the things that this imagination process has done for me, is keep me alert

00:34:45.940 to the absolute miracle that my life is every day, it's horribly cold out there, you can't grow any food,

00:34:55.380 you die if you're out there for 24 hours, if any of this infrastructure was unreliable for any length

00:35:02.260 of time, we would be in serious trouble, and it's never unreliable, it's so unlikely, and so here we are,

00:35:10.740 with all this reliable infrastructure, and because of that, we don't really have to compete with each

00:35:16.580 other much, I mean some, you don't compete for food, you don't compete for shelter, or some people do,

00:35:22.900 but not very many, so it's really easy to think of yourself as good, because, well, you're not

00:35:30.660 doing anything nasty to anyone, but, you know, a cynic might say, well, that's just because you don't

00:35:36.260 have any reason to, but those reasons have arisen many times in the past, and

00:35:44.260 in fact, they're the norm, not the exception, we're the exception, this insanely functional society that

00:35:52.660 we've somehow managed to generate is, it's incomprehensible to me that it exists, so

00:36:03.780 anyways, back in the industrial, at the end of the industrial revolution, you know, the conditions of

00:36:10.740 the worker were pretty brutal, I mean, George Orwell wrote a book called Road to Wigan Pier, which I would

00:36:16.900 highly recommend, it's a great book, and he went up in the 30s, I think it was the 30s, to work, to live

00:36:25.380 with the coal miners up in northern UK, and those poor guys, you know, they had to crawl to work for

00:36:32.820 two miles down a tunnel that they couldn't stand up in, just to start their shift, and then after their

00:36:39.700 eight hours of, you know, hacking away at the coal walls, which is rather difficult, and dirty, and

00:36:45.620 dangerous, and of course, you get black lung from it, so it's also fatal, and of course, they didn't get

00:36:50.900 paid very much, so after doing that for eight hours, then you crawled back your two miles, and you

00:36:57.220 didn't get paid for that, that was just, that was just the commute, and the housing for those people was

00:37:03.460 not good, the food wasn't good, most of them had no teeth by the time they were 30, you know, I mean,

00:37:08.500 being poor was no joke, even in a place like the UK, which was relatively well off, and so there was every

00:37:14.100 reason to be concerned about the disparity between rich and poor, and poor is the natural state

00:37:20.740 you know, that in the western world, in 1895, the typical person lived on a dollar a day, in today's dollars,

00:37:28.820 and you know, that's not uncommon in many places in the world now, so there were reasons to be

00:37:37.220 concerned with inequality, and you know, the Russians took one pathway inspired by Marx, and we took another

00:37:42.900 pathway inspired by John Stuart Mill, and John Locke, and the English tradition I would say of democracy,

00:37:52.740 and competed for 70 years, and things seemed to have worked out better here, but it was a hell of a

00:38:04.660 competition, and there were real differences in opinion at the bottom of it, and those two systems

00:38:10.900 turned into armed camps, and that's not over exactly, you know, I mean, there's the Chinese, although

00:38:18.180 they're a hybrid now between communism and capitalism, and hopefully they're more interested in getting

00:38:23.860 rich than they are in, you know, having a war, greed is a good motivator, surprisingly enough, it's kind of reliable,

00:38:33.220 possible, but anyways, by 1989, the jig was up, it was obvious that the Soviet system could not,

00:38:44.980 was not functional, there was no, there were no consumer goods, that's for sure, even in the main

00:38:51.300 department stores in Moscow, and people just kind of lost faith in the whole project, you know, it became,

00:38:59.140 for a while, I don't know if you know about the show Dallas, Dallas was a soap opera that ran at night,

00:39:06.420 a serial, and it was about these rich Texans, who lived, you know, a 1% lifestyle, and it was the most popular show

00:39:18.100 in East Germany, the streets would empty so that people could watch Dallas, well, when you're sitting in your horrible

00:39:25.140 Soviet architecture flat, that, you know, you had to struggle to get with your informing relatives,

00:39:33.220 because one out of three people in East Germany was an informer, a government informer,

00:39:38.500 and you watch Dallas, you know, there's a little cognitive dissonance occurring, and so,

00:39:46.660 it fell apart, and quite peacefully actually, you know, there was a war, there was a bit of war in Eastern Europe,

00:39:54.340 but, it fell apart remarkably peacefully, and so here we are, and we don't know what to do with the pesky Russians,

00:40:03.780 but, at least, there's no evidence that there are mortal enemies for fundamental reasons of axiomatic presupposition.

00:40:13.860 And things are a lot better in the world, despite what everyone tells you, than they were 40 years ago,

00:40:24.020 and they're so much better than they were 50 years ago that it's absolutely staggering.

00:40:28.740 We've lifted more people out of poverty in the last 15 years that have been lifted out of poverty in the entire history of the world before then.

00:40:35.300 People are gathering economic resources at a rate that even the wildest optimist really couldn't dream of speeding up.

00:40:45.620 So, it's not like we're without our problems, but, so during that period of time,

00:40:55.220 I was obsessed, this is a good word, with a question, and the question was,

00:41:06.180 Why would human beings produce two camps, and then produce a massive arsenal of hydrogen bombs?

00:41:21.780 And I don't know what you know about hydrogen bombs, but, they have atom bombs for triggers.

00:41:27.380 You know, that's worth thinking about, because an atom bomb, you know, hey, that's, that's something,

00:41:33.140 but a hydrogen bomb, that's the sun, that's really something.

00:41:38.100 So, and you know, there's 20, they're at the peak of the Cold War, and there's, this is still true to some degree,

00:41:44.420 there were literally tens of thousands of these weapons aimed at the Soviet Union and at the West, and

00:41:50.100 that was enough to pretty much put an end to everything, and that's a dangerous game, man, you know,

00:41:58.900 and not only because of intent, but also because of the possibility of accidental, just an accident, you know,

00:42:07.060 just, just a mistake, or just someone who's a little crazier than you might want them to be,

00:42:12.500 you know, and you might think, well, no one would want to bring about the destruction of the world, but

00:42:16.420 that just means you don't know very much about Stalin, because of all the people who lived in the 20th century,

00:42:24.260 who had power, Stalin was the most motivated to bring everything to an end.

00:42:32.660 There's some evidence that he was murdered by Khrushchev and his crew, and Khrushchev was the next leader,

00:42:40.420 and if he wasn't murdered, he was at least not provided with medical attention when he was dying,

00:42:48.580 and there is reasonable evidence that he was gearing up to invade Western Europe,

00:42:54.260 and he didn't really care how much destruction would go along with that, I mean, he'd already killed tens of millions of people,

00:43:00.900 he had a lot of practice, he was good at it, it didn't really bother him, maybe even enjoyed it.

00:43:10.500 So, what the hell, that's what I thought, how can it be that we are doing this, it's so insane.

00:43:18.820 So then I started to think about belief systems, you know, because you could say that each camp had its own belief system,

00:43:26.020 the one in the West was derived, it had a very lengthy history, derived from the Greeks, and the Romans, and Jews, and the Christians,

00:43:36.500 and from various schools of philosophy, and from the Enlightenment, and all of that, and then

00:43:41.300 the Soviet Union was basically predicated on a rational philosophy, that opposed the axioms that the West had evolved,

00:43:50.500 and each group organized their societies around that, and, you know, I took political science for quite a long time,

00:44:02.900 and the political scientists and the economists, they basically thought that people competed over resources,

00:44:11.220 but that wasn't a very good answer as far as I was concerned, because it wasn't obvious to me why people valued the resources they valued,

00:44:17.220 there was, the economists just assumed that there's resources that you value, but, you know, people can value a lot of different things,

00:44:24.260 it's not exactly fixed, I mean, you tend to value food very highly if you're hungry, obviously, but,

00:44:30.180 you know, there's lots of things that we value, and that we want, that seem somewhat arbitrary, somewhat like a decision,

00:44:38.020 so I got more interested in why people valued things, and what it meant to value something,

00:44:43.220 and then what it meant to believe something, and then how it could be that someone could believe something so deeply,

00:44:52.740 that they would risk their own death to protect it, or at least risk the death of other people,

00:44:59.140 and maybe on a massive scale, like, man, people are committed to their system.

00:45:04.820 Now, you know, a system of belief is not just a system of belief, that's one of the things that I came to understand,

00:45:11.780 is that it's not appropriate to make this too psychological, people defend their belief systems,

00:45:17.940 but that's not exactly right, you know, we have a shared belief system,

00:45:21.460 well, it's sufficiently shared so that here we are, we don't know each other, we're a bunch of primates,

00:45:30.740 we're in this room, and it's peaceful, and no one's scared, and that's pretty amazing,

00:45:35.380 and that means that we're all acting out our roles, so we're acting out our roles,

00:45:40.340 and we have an expectation with regards to those roles, and those two things match,

00:45:46.500 and that's the important thing, and we'll talk about that a lot.

00:45:50.580 It isn't the belief system, or the integrity of the belief system even,

00:45:53.780 it's the match between the belief system and the actions of the other people within the belief system.

00:45:59.460 What you want to maintain is that match, you want to act out your beliefs in the world,

00:46:05.460 and you want what you want to happen, that's a good thing, you get what you want,

00:46:09.540 and you validate your belief system, great, perfect security, but a lot of that is,

00:46:15.780 if we're interacting, even right now, there's a whole set of expectations that are governing what we're doing,

00:46:21.620 like you don't want me to take your little tablet there and smash it, that would be shocking, right?

00:46:27.140 You wouldn't know what the hell to do, right? You'd be somewhere different if I did that,

00:46:32.340 and you wouldn't know where you were, and that's another thing to know, because

00:46:38.420 that's a fundamental difference, there's a fundamental difference between knowing where you are,

00:46:44.740 and not knowing where you are. I think it's, in some sense, the fundamental difference,

00:46:50.100 you can think about it as the distinction between explored and unexplored territory, but you have to.

00:46:57.140 I don't know if you've ever taken a cat to a new house, cats hate that, and because in their old

00:47:04.820 house, and maybe in their old neighborhood, they've slunk around, you know, at the edges,

00:47:10.980 checking everything out, they start out afraid, they check everything out, they know where to hide,

00:47:16.820 they know what's safe, and they know that because they go somewhere, and nothing happens,

00:47:22.500 and so then they assume that it's safe, and they slowly build up a neighborhood that they're comfortable

00:47:28.500 with. My dad used to take the dog for a walk, and then the cat got lonesome, and so it started to

00:47:33.300 follow him, and first of all, it would just go along the buildings, the houses on their route,

00:47:38.260 you know, hiding really from predators, and after a while, I got kind of comfortable with that,

00:47:44.260 and then it would follow right behind the dog, but it had a border, and if my dad took the dog over one

00:47:52.820 street too many for the cat, the cat would just sit on the corner and, and, you know, cry like a cat cries,

00:47:59.780 it was like, that's it for me man, I'm not going any farther out into the unknown,

00:48:05.140 and so, the distinction between the territory that you have mastered, and the territory that you

00:48:14.500 haven't mastered is a fundamental distinction, it's the distinction between home and the strange land,

00:48:20.980 and the thing about familiar territory for people is that most of the familiar territory that we inhabit

00:48:27.700 is other people, because we're so social, so you can't really think, it's a weird way of thinking about

00:48:33.380 territory, it's not exactly geographical, objective territory, it's territory with a dominance hierarchy

00:48:40.900 in it, and the dominance hierarchy has a predictable structure, and you know where you fit in it

00:48:45.540 most of the time, and so that when you act out in that territory, surrounded by your people,

00:48:50.420 then often you get what you want, and you're so thrilled about that, because you just don't

00:48:56.180 want someone acting erratically around you, like, and you know that, so you walk down Bloor

00:49:01.300 there, and there's people there that should really be institutionalized, but we deinstitutionalized

00:49:07.620 them all, so they could be free, and free to be, you know, suffering and malfunctioning out on the street,

00:49:15.460 that's what the freedom ended up being, but you know, you'll walk by someone like that, who's

00:49:21.540 muttering away to the voices in his head, and you know, maybe striking out against whatever it is

00:49:29.300 that's plaguing him, and you won't make eye contact, you might even go across the street,

00:49:36.020 you're certainly going to give him a wide berth, you're going to keep a distance between

00:49:41.060 him and you, and you're going to hope that you don't attract his attention, because he's not in the

00:49:46.740 dominance hierarchy, and you don't know what the hell he might do, and that's unexplored territory too,

00:49:53.700 that's another way of thinking about it, like, we inhabit time and space, not just space, and not

00:50:00.580 just time, we inhabit time and space, and our territories are spatial temporal, we're here now,

00:50:07.780 and this is safe now, and it's safe partly because of the physical structure, and it's working, but it's

00:50:13.940 also safe because none of you are manifesting peculiar behavior, but if you started to manifest

00:50:21.060 peculiar behavior, if you stood up and started muttering or yelling, or maybe attacking someone next to you,

00:50:28.820 all the rest of you would freeze first, because then all of a sudden this would be unexplored territory

00:50:35.300 the match between what you want, which is a peaceful lecture that you hope has some content

00:50:42.660 the match between what you want and what's happening has vanished, and so then you're not,

00:50:49.140 you don't know where you are, and so then what do you do when you don't know where you are?

00:50:54.580 what do you do when you don't know what to do?

00:50:56.900 well, if you're a computer, you just crash, but, you know, what good is that to you?

00:51:03.060 you're just going to die? that isn't helpful

00:51:07.460 you freeze, first, and then maybe you cautiously attend, or maybe you don't, maybe you just keep your

00:51:14.100 damn eyes averted, and you sit there and you hope that no one notices you, that's a prey response, right?

00:51:20.260 that's like a rabbit frozen when it thinks a fox is looking at it, and we were prey animals for a long time

00:51:26.020 there was a cat that they recently discovered, a prehistoric cat that had this bottom single tooth

00:51:33.380 and they found out that a human skull fit right inside its mouth, and so it could grab you here

00:51:38.740 and pierce the back of your skull with its single tooth, and that's what it was evolved for

00:51:45.060 so, you know, it's under such conditions we evolved, and we're predators obviously, but we're tasty predators

00:51:54.500 and so other things were perfectly happy to eat us

00:52:00.580 and so when you're aware you don't know what to do, you act like a prey animal

00:52:04.820 and that's probably what you should do, because maybe if you keep your head down and shut the hell up

00:52:11.060 there won't be any attention attracted to you, and maybe you'll get through it, you know

00:52:15.620 you might decide unlikely to intervene and take the guy down, but but you would be the exception rather

00:52:27.220 than the norm, and it's unsurprising

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00:55:19.700 What I came to understand was that belief systems regulated emotions,

00:55:27.780 but not exactly psychologically, like it isn't exactly,

00:55:32.900 it isn't exactly, and this is sort of like the terror management theories, it's not exactly like

00:55:36.820 you have a theory in your head and the theory explains the world, and because the theory explains

00:55:40.580 the world, the theory is what's making you secure. It's kind of like that. It's like you have a theory

00:55:46.580 in your head, and the theory makes you feel secure because it explains the world, but the reason it

00:55:51.300 explains the world is because other people have the same theory in their head, and then when you

00:55:55.380 both act out the theory, you both get what you want, and it's the coming together of the theory

00:56:02.580 and the outcome that makes you, it's life. Not only does it stop you from being anxious and often

00:56:12.420 make you happy because you get what you want, but it's not just psychological, you know, the fact

00:56:17.540 that we do this, that we cooperate within our societies, we match our belief systems and then

00:56:22.820 act them out, that's the predicate for a productive society. So it's actually, it isn't just that it

00:56:30.420 saves you from death anxiety like the terror management theorists have it, it saves you from death,

00:56:36.580 death, and that's good. I mean, being protected from death anxiety, yeah, good. That's great too,

00:56:42.980 man. But actually not dying, that's sort of the fundamental thing that you're after.

00:56:48.260 And so people have reason to defend their territory. If you think of territory that way,

00:56:53.060 as you think about it as a domain where the fundamental presuppositions of each citizen

00:56:59.220 are matched by the behavior of their co-citizens, they have every reason to defend that.

00:57:04.500 And if it falls apart, it can have mortally serious consequences. It's chaos, you know,

00:57:12.660 and that chaos doesn't just destabilize everybody psychologically, it destabilizes everything.

00:57:18.500 It can destabilize the currency, it can destabilize the industrial economy, it can,

00:57:23.060 the lights can go off, it's like, it's not good. So, hey, no wonder people protect it.

00:57:30.420 So then I started thinking about what a belief system was.

00:57:37.780 And

00:57:41.380 I realized that a belief system was actually a set of moral guidelines.

00:57:46.980 And moral guidelines are guidelines about how you should behave, also how you should perceive.

00:57:52.420 And the reason that a moral guideline is necessary for you to perceive is that

00:57:58.900 you can't look at anything without a hierarchy of value.

00:58:02.820 Right?

00:58:03.780 Think about it. Like, how many things in this room could you look at?

00:58:06.740 There's innumerable things in this room to look at.

00:58:10.820 There's just all these squares, the little tiny squares in this fabric.

00:58:14.580 You could look at those things for, till the end of time, one at a time.

00:58:18.500 But you don't do that.

00:58:20.420 In fact, if I took most of you out of this room,

00:58:23.620 there's a very low probability that you'd be able to tell me what color the walls were, or

00:58:28.660 even if those things were on the walls.

00:58:31.220 And the reason for that is that, who cares?

00:58:35.700 As long as the walls don't move, color is irrelevant.

00:58:39.220 And there's no reason for you to remember it.

00:58:41.220 It has no emotional significance. It has no value.

00:58:45.540 And so what you do instead is, well, this is what you're doing.

00:58:49.540 So, why are you here?

00:58:52.260 I don't mean in the broad metaphysical sense.

00:58:55.220 I mean, specifically, why are you here right now?

00:58:58.420 And I would say, well, you're students, obviously, and you're trying to get a degree.

00:59:02.900 And, you know, you believe that that will have some functional utility.

00:59:06.740 Maybe you'll be a little wiser and a little more literate and a little,

00:59:10.340 and be able to think a little better and be able to write a little better.

00:59:13.060 And so you'll actually be more functional in the world.

00:59:16.020 That would be good.

00:59:17.460 You know, and maybe you're interested and, but anyways, it's

00:59:21.380 you're in this particular lecture, so that you can take this particular class,

00:59:26.820 so that you can get a particular kind of degree, so that you can launch your life.

00:59:31.060 And then in your life, you're probably going to meet someone that you

00:59:34.260 have a long-term relationship with, and you're going to have children,

00:59:37.220 and you're going to partake in this society, and that's why you're here.

00:59:40.980 All of those reasons, simultaneously, is why you're here.

00:59:45.540 And so then, that helps you decide what to look at.

00:59:48.420 And so what you look at is, at the moment, or listen to is me, because in principle,

00:59:57.220 I'm the gateway to that set of accomplishments, at this moment.

01:00:02.020 And so, you focus on me.

01:00:05.540 And that's because you value that.

01:00:08.420 And so what that means is you can't even look at the world without a value structure.

01:00:12.740 You know, it's chaos, if everything is equally unimportant, or if everything is equally important.

01:00:18.820 It's chaos, and so a value system structures the very way that you perceive the world.

01:00:26.100 And I don't mean that metaphysically, there's plenty of experiments that have demonstrated that,

01:00:29.940 like the invisible gorilla experiment, which, how many of you know about the invisible gorilla experiment?

01:00:35.060 How many don't?

01:00:35.780 Well, roughly speaking, what happens is that there are two teams.

01:00:44.900 A white team dressed in white, and a team dressed in black.

01:00:48.340 And there's a video of them, and the black team is passing a basketball back and forth,

01:00:51.780 and the white team is passing a basketball back and forth.

01:00:54.580 And you're supposed to count the times the basketball gets passed back and forth.

01:00:58.660 There's only one basketball.

01:01:00.260 And so, you know, you're diligent, for whatever reason.

01:01:04.500 You do what the experimenter asks you.

01:01:07.620 And you count the basketball tosses, and you think, well, that's not so hard.

01:01:11.220 It's like 16.

01:01:12.900 So you tell them 16, and they say, did you see the gorilla?

01:01:17.700 And half of you say, what are you talking about?

01:01:21.780 And the experimenter says, well, let's watch again, but this time don't count.

01:01:26.500 Well, sure enough, like 30 seconds into the video, and you know, the players fill the video screen.

01:01:31.780 It's not like they're 300 yards in the distance, you know, like little ants playing basketball.

01:01:36.180 They're right filling the screen.

01:01:38.180 You can see their faces.

01:01:40.660 Sure enough, a minute into the video, this guy in a gorilla suit, and he's not little, and neither is the gorilla suit.

01:01:47.540 He comes out, bangs his chest right in the middle of the screen for five seconds, and then disappears.

01:01:53.460 And half, more than half, actually, of people don't see that.

01:01:57.540 And it's even worse.

01:01:58.580 Dan Simon did another experiment where you're at a counter, you know, at a store, and there's a clerk there,

01:02:06.260 and you're talking to the clerk, and the clerk goes down, hypothetically, to get something,

01:02:12.820 and the different clerk pops up.

01:02:14.180 And you'd think, hey, I'd notice that, but you don't.

01:02:19.300 And you can even vary the clerk quite a bit, and people don't notice.

01:02:25.460 So, we focus on very particular things, and the reason we don't notice is because it actually doesn't matter.

01:02:31.460 In terms of our ongoing action at that point, the clerk is interchangeable.

01:02:37.860 As long as the entity there acts like a clerk, that's sufficient.

01:02:44.900 So, belief systems structure your perceptions, value systems, we're going to call them value systems.

01:02:51.540 They structure your perceptions, and they also guide your actions, because you act in accordance with your values.

01:02:59.860 Conscious or unconscious, you have values that you don't know about, because you just don't know yourself very well.

01:03:07.940 You can tell that, that you have values that you don't know very well, because sometimes you get attracted to people that,

01:03:14.980 you know, you know perfectly well, that's a mistake.

01:03:18.100 Or, you know, you're trying to tell yourself to study, and you don't, and, you know, so there's,

01:03:23.620 you're not really in control of yourself to any great degree, some, and the more integrated you are,

01:03:28.500 the more control you have, but, you know, you're kind of a loose collection of arguing sub-personalities,

01:03:34.500 and they're more or less directed towards a single goal, but it depends on how committed you are to that goal,

01:03:39.700 how much you've thought it through, how much you buy into it, how many of the contradictions in your world representation

01:03:46.900 you've managed to iron out, and all of that.

01:03:50.340 So, but in any case, it's value systems that govern action and perception, and so we're going to take an existential

01:04:02.420 perspective, a phenomenological and an existential perspective in this course.

01:04:06.500 Phenomenological means that we're going to, we're going to base our presuppositions on

01:04:12.340 the idea that what you experience is real, all of it.

01:04:16.980 We're not really dividing the world into object and subject, that isn't how this particular approach works,

01:04:22.580 it's more like you have a field of experience, it includes things like pain, which is not really

01:04:28.020 something objective, I mean, but it's real, I mean, one of the things I've come to understand is you, and don't,

01:04:36.340 you are not required to believe what I'm telling you, by the way.

01:04:40.420 If you have an argument about why some of this doesn't make sense, then, you know, follow that sucker,

01:04:50.580 because I'm trying to tell you what I've reached with regards to bedrock presuppositions,

01:04:55.780 and I haven't been able to put pry bars underneath them, but that doesn't mean you won't,

01:05:03.140 and, you know, you should try. Anyways, moral system tells you how to act and what to see,

01:05:12.820 and a shared moral system keeps your emotions under control and fulfills your motivational needs.

01:05:18.980 Now, there's this old idea of David Hume's, and David Hume famously posited that you cannot derive an ought from an is,

01:05:35.780 and what he meant by that was that merely knowing the objective facts about something

01:05:43.140 does not tell you how to implement those facts in your life, and that that's actually a gap.

01:05:50.260 Now, you could say, and I think this is the case, that that's actually a necessary consequence of the scientific endeavor,

01:05:57.140 because one of the things that you're trying to do as a scientist is to strip away the value

01:06:02.660 of the object, right? Because I don't care what your idiosyncratic notion of the object is.

01:06:09.140 I want to know how you perceive the object such that everyone else will perceive it at least that way,

01:06:16.020 and so that takes the subjectivity completely out of it, and so it might just be a necessary consequence

01:06:21.460 of the scientific method, that it doesn't have a morality implicit in it. People argue about that,

01:06:28.260 Sam Harris, for example, argues he believes that we can come up with a scientific morality,

01:06:34.420 I don't believe that, because I don't think that you can make rational judgments about value,

01:06:41.780 it's too complicated, it's far too complicated, it's something that has to emerge, it can't be.

01:06:47.060 I mean, Marxism was supposed to be a scientific utopia, predicated on scientific principles,

01:06:53.860 and all of that, you know, it just didn't work. Anyways, so I kind of buy Hume's argument,

01:07:03.860 that you can't derive an ought from an is. Now, that's a problem. First of all, it's a problem because

01:07:11.460 you have factual knowledge, but you don't know how to implement it. You know, it's like,

01:07:15.060 should you spend money on AIDS, or should you spend money on cancer, or should you spend money on higher

01:07:20.260 education? How the hell are you going to calculate that rationally? You can't, because you just don't

01:07:26.020 have the information at hand. It's not possible to, you know, I worked for a UN committee at one point,

01:07:32.180 and the UN committee had like a hundred proposals for how the world could be improved, but there was

01:07:37.940 no order to them. It's like, it wasn't, you know, this was more important than this. It's like, well,

01:07:43.940 that's the end of that. You know, you ought to start with something, and so that means you have to make

01:07:47.860 something more important than other things, obviously in your life. If everything's of equal importance,

01:07:53.220 then you're paralyzed. Now, you know, it's a truism, and probably an oversimplified one, that since the

01:08:04.420 dawn of the scientific revolution, a wedge has been driven through the heart of our society, such that

01:08:14.420 the moral systems that we use to unite us, so those would be religious systems, fundamentally,

01:08:24.180 have been subject to an intense critique from the scientists, and you know, it's a pretty effective critique.

01:08:31.620 Even if you have, even if you've maintained a traditional faith, it's like, you know,

01:08:36.980 the scientific onslaught is no joke, and that's a problem, as far as I can tell, because,

01:08:47.700 and the problem is, is that you're still left with the problem of how you should act, and Nietzsche,

01:08:53.380 the philosopher Nietzsche, he would say that we're running on the fumes of Christianity in the West,

01:09:00.420 because over its thousand years of domination, let's say 1500 years of absolute domination,

01:09:07.300 it produced a consensus of morality that was predicated on metaphysical presuppositions,

01:09:13.380 and that organized societies, and those societies are predicated on certain beliefs, like the belief in,

01:09:20.740 really, I would say that something divine inhabits each individual, you know, that's sort of the

01:09:25.860 presumption that's embedded in law, it's sort of the idea that underlies the idea of natural right,

01:09:30.180 right, there's something about you that's so valuable, that even the law has to bow to it,

01:09:36.020 even if you're reprehensible, even if you're convicted and reprehensible.

01:09:41.060 Now that's, man, the idea that people came up with that idea, that's a bloody miracle, it's, you know,

01:09:46.660 because, generally speaking, your proclivity is, if someone's been even accused of doing something,

01:09:53.060 the general human proclivity is, that even if someone's just been accused of doing something

01:09:57.460 terrible, that's enough so that you can stone them to death, or do whatever you're going to do with

01:10:01.380 them. Presumption of innocence before guilt, good God, of all the things that aren't automatic,

01:10:08.020 that's got to top the list, you know, it's unbelievable that that occurs, and it's interesting to me,

01:10:14.020 because it seems to me that that presupposition that there's something valuable, transcendent

01:10:21.540 about each individual, I wouldn't call that a scientific presupposition, but it seems to be a

01:10:28.180 highly functional presupposition, right, I think, in that it isn't unreasonable to notice that societies

01:10:35.940 that have valued the individual, and made the law subject to the individual, even with regards to voting,

01:10:45.300 because that's basically what voting does, it puts sovereignty in the hands of the people,

01:10:49.700 those societies actually seem to work. Now, whether they'll work for the next 300 years,

01:10:56.260 who the hell knows, I don't know, but they've worked pretty well for the last 500 years, let's say, and

01:11:02.580 we've got it pretty good right now, and, you know, I suspect most of you are rather pleased that the law

01:11:09.780 recognizes your value as individuals, and you take that for granted, right, you think you have rights,

01:11:16.340 and, of course, the rights that you have, natural rights, are logical consequence of your

01:11:24.420 transcendent value, and that's nested in, this is Nietzsche's observation, that's nested in a set of

01:11:30.180 metaphysical beliefs, and his idea was that if you wipe out, sorry, if you wipe out the metaphysical beliefs,

01:11:36.420 eventually you wipe out the whole system, because you've knocked out the cornerstone,

01:11:40.420 and it might take a long time for the thing to shake and fall, but, but it will.

01:11:48.020 Now, whether he was right or not is hard to say, it looks to me like what's happened since

01:11:55.380 Nietzsche announced the death of God in, say, the late 1800s, is that Western society has oscillated

01:12:02.260 between extremes, you know, extremes on the right, Germany, extremes on the left, and, you know,

01:12:10.020 with the democracies, at least the other democracies, the democracies managing to stay the course

01:12:18.580 somewhere down the middle, but, but it's not obvious to me that that can be maintained without

01:12:28.980 the underlying metaphysics, and that's a problem, because whatever you might say about the underlying

01:12:36.500 metaphysics, it's not true the way science is true, and that could be okay, because there might be

01:12:44.020 more than one form of truth, in fact, I think there is, I think there's pragmatic truth, and

01:12:50.420 I think pragmatic truth is actually deeper than scientific truth, and pragmatic truth is

01:12:56.020 the truths that enable you to act in a manner that best, that improves the probability, roughly

01:13:04.740 speaking, of your existence and your reproduction maximally, that's a Darwinian idea, and one of the

01:13:11.140 things about the Darwinian theory, this kind of puts it in opposition to scientific materialism,

01:13:16.980 I would say, is that the Darwinian theory is that you don't have privileged knowledge of the world,

01:13:25.220 and you can actually tell that because you die, right, if you knew enough about the world,

01:13:29.540 you wouldn't die, and you do die, and so you're an embodied theory of sorts, and that theory is good

01:13:34.820 enough to get you along about 80 years, and produce some reasonable probability that you'll

01:13:41.780 have children and that they'll survive, that's it man, that's what you've managed after

01:13:49.940 three billion years of evolution, it's a good enough solution, it's a good enough way of acting,

01:13:54.980 and we don't know a better way of acting, and our world conceptions are actually nested inside

01:14:01.220 the Darwinian system, and they might be predicated on pragmatic truths, rather than objective truths,

01:14:09.300 pragmatic truths are truths that have functional utility, and we're alive, we care about being alive,

01:14:17.380 we tend to use our theories as tools, it's possible that our theories are tools,

01:14:21.780 and that they're tools to help us stay alive,

01:14:30.260 now, I was reading a bit about Camille Paglia the other day, and I've noticed some similarities

01:14:37.860 between, she's a famous gadfly, I would say, of feminists, of classic modern feminists, although

01:14:46.660 she would regard herself as a feminist, she's unbelievably smart, like if you want to watch

01:14:51.300 someone who has verbal mastery beyond belief, you can watch Camille Paglia, she seems a little

01:15:01.780 manic to me, she can wrap off an argument at a rate that's just mind-boggling, and it's very coherent,

01:15:08.260 and she tends to shred her opponents in arguments, she's so brilliant,

01:15:11.780 she said something interesting, and she's been influenced by some of the same people that I've been influenced by,

01:15:20.260 she liked this book by Eric Neumann called The Origins and History of Consciousness, which

01:15:25.860 I would recommend if you're interested in Jungian theory, Carl Jung, it's a good introduction to Jungian theory,

01:15:31.940 and it's about the development of consciousness, and it's predicated like Jung's work, and Joseph Campbell's work,

01:15:42.420 and Mircea Eliade's work, all of which has been criticized or ignored by the post-modernists,

01:15:49.460 predicated on the idea that human beings have a central narrative,

01:15:52.900 a central narrative, and that that central narrative is the dramatic expression of the necessary human system of values,

01:16:08.420 and that that's built into us, it's part of our nature, we have a nature as human beings,

01:16:15.540 we're not infinitely malleable by culture, which is a post-modernist claim, and a dangerous one,

01:16:28.020 it's dangerous if we have a nature. Paglia has this idea that the reason that you come to university,

01:16:38.580 and you study the humanities, or the proper reason if you do that, is not to engage in premature and destructive criticism

01:16:49.060 of something that you don't even yet understand, but to learn as much as you can about art and literature and poetry

01:17:00.100 and drama, and fiction, and religious thinking, and this is all a kind of a, you think about it as a, what is that?

01:17:12.100 What is all that? It's art, you know, it's culture, music belongs in that category, like what the hell, what about music?

01:17:21.060 It's like everyone loves it, or almost everyone, it's a mystery, you listen to music and it's very meaningful,

01:17:27.860 I mean, music gets people through some pretty dark times, why?

01:17:32.740 It's not obvious, that's for sure, you know, and in most cultures music plays a very central role in identity formation,

01:17:38.820 and you guys, I think you'll probably find as you age, that your favorite music will be the music that you listen to

01:17:45.220 between the ages of 16 and 20, it's kind of like it imprints on you, and it defines a, maybe that defines a generation,

01:17:52.980 and maybe, you know, in our tribal past, and this is highly likely,

01:17:56.340 when you were being inculcated into the tribal culture,

01:18:02.260 that was inculcated with dance, and with masks, and with music, all at the same time,

01:18:08.820 so you're invited to participate in this drama, and to take your place in this drama,

01:18:13.780 and to think of that as a representation of the objective world is just not right, that isn't what it is,

01:18:18.980 it's an invitation to a drama,

01:18:23.860 now then the question might be, well, is the drama real?

01:18:27.780 and the answer to that is,

01:18:28.900 it depends on what you mean by real,

01:18:31.460 I think that great dramas are more real than real, they're hyper-real

01:18:37.380 they're

01:18:43.380 they're hyper-real because they provide guidelines about how to act that are abstract and even perhaps generic

01:18:49.380 but applicable across an extraordinary broad range of situations

01:18:53.700 so imagine this

01:18:55.300 you know, you get up in the morning

01:18:57.140 you do a bunch of things

01:18:58.900 and someone asks you what you're doing, what you did, and you

01:19:02.660 you know, you tell them, well, the first thing I did this morning was open my eyes

01:19:08.100 and the second thing was, think about whether I wanted to go back to sleep

01:19:11.780 and then, you know, I took off my blankets, and then I put my feet on the floor, and then I stood up

01:19:17.060 and I was blinking while I was doing all this, and I was also breathing

01:19:20.580 and then, you know, I looked for my clothes

01:19:22.900 and you really want to listen to that guy?

01:19:24.740 you don't want to listen to that guy

01:19:26.260 it's like, why do you want, why are you telling me that?

01:19:29.380 I want you to tell me something interesting

01:19:32.260 well, what is it that's interesting?

01:19:34.100 and why isn't that interesting?

01:19:36.260 it's not obvious

01:19:38.100 so, so then imagine the guy actually tells you a pretty good story

01:19:41.300 a little adventure

01:19:43.700 probably

01:19:45.220 he was doing something normal, something unexpected happened

01:19:48.180 he had to conjure up some new responses, and he either settled the problem or didn't settle the problem

01:19:53.060 yeah, you're interested in that

01:19:55.860 especially if he settled the problem, because if he can tell you how

01:19:59.940 when he encountered some unexplored territory

01:20:02.900 he was able to sew it back together

01:20:05.380 then maybe you can do that when that thing happens

01:20:07.780 and that's pretty cheap wisdom for you

01:20:09.780 he had to go through all the aggravation of figuring it out

01:20:12.660 and all you have to do is listen

01:20:14.740 you know, and that's kind of a classic story

01:20:17.060 classic story, roughly speaking is

01:20:20.820 there's a guy, woman, doesn't matter

01:20:23.940 going about their life

01:20:25.540 relatively normally

01:20:26.900 something blindsides them

01:20:28.820 and they're in a state of

01:20:31.620 chaos

01:20:33.300 chaos is a place

01:20:35.220 chaos is the place that you end up

01:20:37.940 when what you're doing

01:20:40.660 and the world stop matching

01:20:43.460 and the chaos can be of different degrees

01:20:45.860 you know, you could wake up and find that

01:20:47.860 your house was burgled

01:20:48.980 you could wake up and find that

01:20:50.100 that your parent has Alzheimer's or some fatal disease

01:20:53.940 or that you do

01:20:54.980 or that your whole family was murdered

01:20:56.900 or that there's a war starting

01:20:58.340 you know

01:21:00.100 there's different degrees of chaos

01:21:02.420 and

01:21:03.140 I think

01:21:04.100 you can

01:21:05.460 quantify the chaos

01:21:06.980 process by calculating

01:21:09.060 how much of

01:21:10.740 what you do and expect

01:21:12.740 is likely to be disrupted by the event

01:21:16.100 now

01:21:16.660 because that

01:21:17.940 the more

01:21:19.140 disruption

01:21:19.700 the more destabilized you're going to be

01:21:21.620 which is why

01:21:23.300 if someone tells you that you're going to perish

01:21:25.620 painfully in three months

01:21:26.900 it's like

01:21:30.100 that's a bad one

01:21:32.660 you're really in an unexpected territory

01:21:34.580 there's nothing that you assumed

01:21:36.500 that was real

01:21:37.700 roughly speaking

01:21:38.820 in the world

01:21:39.860 is real anymore

01:21:43.140 we like to watch people

01:21:44.900 in their normal life

01:21:46.900 blindsided by something

01:21:50.340 experiencing this

01:21:51.860 interregnum of chaos

01:21:53.860 where they explore

01:21:55.540 and gather new information

01:21:57.300 and retool their character

01:21:59.220 or retool the world

01:22:00.500 because you

01:22:01.060 either of those would work as a solution

01:22:03.220 and then come out the other side

01:22:06.020 and things are better than they were to begin with

01:22:08.340 or at least as good

01:22:09.380 but better is better

01:22:10.660 that's a happy ending

01:22:11.700 right

01:22:12.260 that's a happy ending

01:22:13.220 that's a comedy technically speaking

01:22:15.620 and so

01:22:18.020 what you want

01:22:18.580 you want your life to be a comedy

01:22:20.900 not that it's supposed to be funny

01:22:22.580 because

01:22:23.620 comedy doesn't have to be funny technically speaking

01:22:26.340 it's just the opposite of tragedy

01:22:28.100 tragedy is when

01:22:29.140 you're going along pretty well

01:22:30.420 and you get blindsided

01:22:31.540 and that's that

01:22:33.140 and you know that can certainly happen

01:22:34.820 it happens to people all the time

01:22:36.260 but it's a comedy you want

01:22:43.860 now

01:22:45.700 what I hope to provide you with

01:22:48.740 is a magic code

01:22:50.580 you know

01:22:53.860 there was a book published a while back

01:22:58.500 Tom Hanks was in the movie

01:23:00.820 he was a Harvard professor

01:23:02.100 who went around solving symbolic mysteries

01:23:04.980 do you remember what was it called

01:23:06.500 the Da Vinci Code

01:23:07.940 everyone liked that

01:23:09.780 it sold a lot

01:23:12.100 and you know it was full of little mysteries

01:23:13.700 and it was full of hints that there was more to the world than

01:23:17.140 you think

01:23:18.740 which is definitely true

01:23:20.900 and that you know

01:23:22.100 there was a way of getting access to that knowledge

01:23:24.260 and that it would really be worthwhile

01:23:26.420 and people like that

01:23:27.220 they like that idea

01:23:28.420 and the reason for that

01:23:29.620 is because it's actually

01:23:30.740 it's true

01:23:33.220 it's true

01:23:35.860 it's true like

01:23:37.700 like fiction is true

01:23:38.660 so okay let's go back to the guy who's telling you about his morning

01:23:42.260 well he tells you something exciting

01:23:43.940 well then imagine that 10 people tell you something exciting

01:23:48.900 and then you extract out

01:23:51.700 the pattern of them dealing with this problem

01:23:55.220 from that

01:23:55.860 and so then you have a

01:23:57.140 that's what you do if you're an author

01:23:59.540 right because in a book

01:24:01.780 you don't want the book exactly to be about

01:24:04.180 what ordinary people do

01:24:05.940 in ordinary times in their life

01:24:07.620 it's like

01:24:08.500 you already know how to be ordinary during ordinary times of your life

01:24:11.540 what that's not useful

01:24:13.940 you know you wouldn't watch a videotape of yourself

01:24:17.700 imagine you videotaped yourself during a day

01:24:20.020 and then the next day you watched that

01:24:22.180 it's like god

01:24:23.380 who would want to do that

01:24:25.300 so what seems to happen in stories is that they distill

01:24:28.980 they distill

01:24:30.500 so they they watch people

01:24:32.100 people watch people

01:24:33.300 and then they tell stories about what they see

01:24:35.460 but they leave a lot out of those stories

01:24:37.540 everything that's boring

01:24:38.900 hopefully

01:24:40.340 and then

01:24:41.940 more and more stories about exciting things get

01:24:44.100 sort of aggregated

01:24:45.380 and then maybe a great writer comes along and writes something really really interesting

01:24:50.180 profound character transformations

01:24:52.740 and then you say well that's fiction

01:24:54.500 and then you say well that's not true

01:24:55.860 because it's fiction

01:24:57.380 but then

01:24:58.420 then maybe that's not right

01:25:00.340 maybe it's more than true

01:25:04.180 because who wants the truth

01:25:06.180 the truth is mundane reality

01:25:08.180 and you've already got that mastered

01:25:10.180 what you want is the distillation

01:25:12.900 of interesting experience

01:25:15.780 and you might think well why is it interesting

01:25:17.860 well that's a really good question

01:25:19.060 because you don't actually know

01:25:20.820 and believe me you really don't know

01:25:22.580 because you'll be interested in things that just don't make any sense at all

01:25:25.540 I'm going to walk you a bit today through Pinocchio

01:25:28.580 and we'll do that more the next time too

01:25:31.540 you know but I want to tell you a little bit about that movie to begin with

01:25:34.420 just so you know how crazy you are

01:25:36.660 so

01:25:37.940 you know the plot

01:25:38.740 how many people have seen the disney movie Pinocchio

01:25:41.940 okay so lots of people

01:25:43.220 so that's strange enough

01:25:45.700 in itself that so many people have seen it

01:25:47.780 and it's worth thinking about

01:25:48.980 you know you tend to show your kids that movie

01:25:51.780 and but you think about the movie it's

01:25:55.220 you're doing some pretty weird things when you're sitting there watching that movie man

01:25:58.660 first of all

01:25:59.780 it's drawings

01:26:01.220 right and they're low resolution

01:26:03.140 drawings

01:26:03.700 you don't care

01:26:04.660 and you watch the simpsons or maybe

01:26:07.140 what's that called

01:26:08.740 the one that's been concentrating on political correctness so much

01:26:13.220 South Park

01:26:14.340 god that animation man

01:26:15.700 it's just awful

01:26:17.140 right it's just horrible

01:26:18.420 it couldn't be worse

01:26:20.180 you don't care

01:26:21.460 like round heads

01:26:23.620 smile

01:26:24.740 a little bit of shuffling

01:26:25.940 that's a person as far as you're concerned

01:26:28.260 it's just irrelevant

01:26:29.380 and if it was higher resolution

01:26:31.220 it wouldn't help

01:26:32.580 you just need the bare bones right

01:26:34.660 to hang your perceptions on

01:26:36.420 so

01:26:37.700 so you watch this drawing

01:26:40.740 that's Pinocchio

01:26:41.540 beautiful drawings

01:26:43.380 animated in a sequence

01:26:44.820 you're not watching something real

01:26:46.740 you're watching a pure construction

01:26:48.740 and then you think about the plot

01:26:50.420 it's like

01:26:50.900 it's completely absurd

01:26:53.380 everything about it is absurd

01:26:54.980 it's like

01:26:55.380 well one of the characters is a bug

01:26:57.380 and he turns out to be like the conscience

01:27:00.660 and so what the hell

01:27:01.860 is with that

01:27:02.980 with that

01:27:03.540 and then

01:27:04.580 another character is this puppet

01:27:06.900 marionette

01:27:07.860 and

01:27:08.580 you know

01:27:09.700 somehow

01:27:10.500 he gets free of his strings

01:27:12.340 and then goes on this adventure

01:27:13.860 and then

01:27:14.260 which is

01:27:15.060 and then you know

01:27:16.180 he gets enticed into

01:27:17.300 various

01:27:18.260 nefarious

01:27:19.300 places

01:27:20.260 by a fox

01:27:21.300 and a cat

01:27:22.100 and then

01:27:23.380 he rescues his father from a whale

01:27:25.700 and you don't even know how his father got in the whale

01:27:28.660 it's like the last time you see his father he was in a rainstorm

01:27:31.300 and the next thing that happens is

01:27:32.500 he's in a whale

01:27:33.380 and you're sitting there thinking

01:27:35.380 hey no problem

01:27:36.100 this all makes sense

01:27:37.380 it's like

01:27:37.860 what

01:27:38.180 really

01:27:38.740 why

01:27:40.340 how does that make sense

01:27:42.220 well the answer is

01:27:43.900 you don't know

01:27:44.820 that's the thing that's so cool

01:27:47.380 you don't know

01:27:48.380 you don't even know what you're watching

01:27:49.700 but it doesn't matter

01:27:51.380 you watch it

01:27:52.840 and you're interested in it

01:27:53.780 you want to see what the hell happens to this puppet

01:27:55.600 you want to see if he ends up becoming a real boy

01:27:58.580 because there's

01:27:59.700 it seems important

01:28:01.620 well you say

01:28:05.400 well is Pinocchio true

01:28:06.700 well that's a stupid question

01:28:12.240 it's partly a stupid question

01:28:17.640 because the answer is

01:28:18.640 it depends on what you mean by true

01:28:20.020 and

01:28:22.520 it isn't obvious to me

01:28:26.300 what you should mean

01:28:28.680 when you

01:28:30.680 say that something's true

01:28:33.120 and the reason it's not obvious

01:28:36.180 is because

01:28:36.740 we have this idea

01:28:39.220 in our society

01:28:40.120 and it's a very profound idea

01:28:41.980 and that idea is that

01:28:43.340 the ultimate truth is scientific truth

01:28:45.520 that that tells us

01:28:47.560 about the nature of the world

01:28:49.260 and it does that

01:28:50.700 in a final way

01:28:52.560 in some sense

01:28:53.300 there's no brooking any arguments about it

01:28:55.380 and the physicists have got it right

01:28:57.480 and that's why they can make hydrogen bombs

01:28:59.220 and that's a pretty good demonstration of their being right

01:29:02.080 but you don't act

01:29:08.040 as if that's true

01:29:09.660 and you don't

01:29:12.100 and you watch things

01:29:15.760 and pay attention to things

01:29:16.960 and are captivated by things

01:29:18.520 that aren't predicated on those assumptions

01:29:20.860 and

01:29:23.200 it seems

01:29:24.540 to me

01:29:25.900 that

01:29:27.200 there is a problem

01:29:30.760 of what the world is made out of

01:29:32.000 but there's a bigger problem

01:29:33.080 and that's the problem

01:29:34.920 of how you should conduct yourself

01:29:36.520 in the world

01:29:37.080 and that's really what you want to know

01:29:39.360 people want to know that more than anything

01:29:41.060 because you need to know

01:29:43.520 it's like

01:29:44.000 here you guys are in university

01:29:45.320 it's like

01:29:45.800 you don't know what you're doing

01:29:46.640 I mean some of you know more than others

01:29:48.480 but you're at the beginning of your life

01:29:50.420 and

01:29:50.620 life is very complex and chaotic

01:29:52.860 and

01:29:53.200 it isn't exactly obvious

01:29:54.800 you know

01:29:55.200 what kind of relationship you should form

01:29:57.300 or what sort of character you should develop

01:29:58.960 or

01:29:59.180 what you're going to do for a job

01:30:00.820 or

01:30:01.060 what's the meaning of life

01:30:03.460 that's a good one

01:30:04.260 what's the meaning of life

01:30:05.520 well

01:30:07.240 and you know

01:30:07.700 people come to university

01:30:08.880 at least many of them

01:30:10.160 and that's kind of what they want to find out

01:30:11.900 now

01:30:12.580 Paglia

01:30:13.060 her notion is that

01:30:15.180 you can think about it this way

01:30:17.860 is that articulated knowledge

01:30:19.760 is embedded in

01:30:22.240 inarticulate knowledge

01:30:24.760 and inarticulate knowledge is

01:30:28.020 the domain of

01:30:30.980 literature and art

01:30:32.620 and

01:30:32.900 and high culture

01:30:35.080 let's say

01:30:35.600 and it's

01:30:37.260 we sort of know what it means

01:30:39.820 but we don't exactly know what it means

01:30:42.300 it means more than we know

01:30:43.820 and then outside of that

01:30:46.100 is what we don't know at all

01:30:47.220 and that's an idea that Jung

01:30:48.820 developed as well

01:30:49.820 and maybe Paglia

01:30:50.600 picked it up from Jung

01:30:51.740 because Jung believed

01:30:52.680 that

01:30:53.360 you know

01:30:55.500 there was this domain

01:30:56.320 that we had mastered

01:30:57.380 in every domain

01:30:58.700 and then

01:30:59.040 there were

01:30:59.800 there was a domain outside of that

01:31:01.560 which you could think of as

01:31:02.660 unexplored territory

01:31:03.560 and

01:31:03.840 what we met

01:31:04.900 unexplored territory with

01:31:06.420 was

01:31:06.740 our creative imagination

01:31:08.280 and that what we were trying to do

01:31:10.040 with our creative imagination

01:31:11.100 is to figure out how to

01:31:13.380 deal with that unexplored territory

01:31:15.540 we were producing dramas

01:31:16.880 that we could act out

01:31:18.960 that would help us

01:31:19.860 deal with

01:31:20.760 what we still hadn't mastered

01:31:22.860 and then outside of that

01:31:24.400 there's just what we don't know at all

01:31:26.380 and Paglia's idea

01:31:28.920 and this was Jung's idea

01:31:30.340 was that

01:31:31.700 without

01:31:37.060 understanding

01:31:38.400 that

01:31:39.240 surround

01:31:40.700 you're too atomized

01:31:45.400 you're not part of your historical tradition

01:31:49.280 you haven't incorporated

01:31:51.680 the spirit of your ancestors

01:31:53.160 who built all this

01:31:55.200 you're

01:31:56.400 you're just here now

01:31:58.020 and

01:31:59.520 and you don't know what to do either

01:32:01.740 and you don't know how to maintain your culture

01:32:03.500 and you don't know how to serve it

01:32:04.840 and

01:32:05.720 you know

01:32:06.940 you might say

01:32:07.440 well why should you serve your culture

01:32:08.920 and

01:32:09.220 well I have a

01:32:10.540 hypothesis about that

01:32:12.140 you know

01:32:13.000 you can think about this

01:32:15.240 I don't know if it's true

01:32:16.140 but

01:32:16.400 people ask what the meaning of life is

01:32:19.160 and

01:32:19.620 it seems to me that

01:32:21.040 meaning is

01:32:23.800 proportionate to the adoption of responsibility

01:32:26.600 you know

01:32:28.260 like

01:32:28.500 let's say you have

01:32:29.480 a little sister

01:32:31.940 who's like three

01:32:32.820 you're going to take care of her

01:32:37.020 like

01:32:37.480 questioning whether that's a good idea

01:32:40.360 just seems stupid

01:32:41.360 you know what I mean

01:32:43.240 it just doesn't seem like the right kind of question

01:32:45.020 it's like well

01:32:45.780 obviously

01:32:47.460 self-evidently

01:32:49.280 let's say

01:32:50.000 that's what you do

01:32:51.480 and

01:32:52.160 do you find it meaningful

01:32:53.600 it's like probably

01:32:54.720 you know

01:32:55.820 interacting with a little kid

01:32:57.380 when we

01:32:58.500 when I had little kids

01:33:00.440 you know

01:33:00.720 when they were like two

01:33:01.500 or under

01:33:02.160 we took them out to see their

01:33:04.080 relatives

01:33:05.200 and

01:33:05.520 they were older people

01:33:06.560 and

01:33:06.820 you know

01:33:07.780 they watched that two-year-old

01:33:08.900 like

01:33:09.140 like it was a fire

01:33:10.500 you know

01:33:11.740 every second

01:33:12.740 that that

01:33:13.720 little kid was in the room

01:33:15.520 every single adult

01:33:17.040 was

01:33:17.420 focused on

01:33:19.060 focused on

01:33:20.460 on him

01:33:21.620 or her

01:33:22.340 that's something that people attend to

01:33:26.520 and

01:33:27.360 that's the source of meaning

01:33:28.940 and what else is meaningful

01:33:30.240 well

01:33:30.580 your family relationships are meaningful

01:33:32.440 to you

01:33:33.760 and

01:33:33.980 maybe the responsibility that you adopt as

01:33:37.520 as a friend

01:33:38.160 that

01:33:38.480 that seems meaningful

01:33:39.380 maybe

01:33:40.180 your decision to pursue a particular career

01:33:42.260 and be

01:33:42.760 of some utility

01:33:43.880 in society

01:33:45.220 you know

01:33:46.060 part of that's

01:33:46.840 governed by your desire to

01:33:48.520 establish some security

01:33:50.180 and get ahead

01:33:50.880 it's fine

01:33:51.540 but

01:33:51.780 you're also

01:33:53.760 playing an integral role

01:33:57.340 in the maintenance of the structure

01:33:59.400 that supports you

01:34:00.280 and

01:34:00.400 my observation has been that

01:34:02.280 in my clinical practice

01:34:04.460 is that people just have a hell of a time

01:34:06.540 if they don't have

01:34:07.440 if they don't slot in somewhere

01:34:09.660 you know

01:34:10.100 you know

01:34:10.820 you think I got to go to work

01:34:11.920 at nine in the morning

01:34:12.660 and you know

01:34:13.100 I've got this rigid schedule

01:34:14.300 it's like

01:34:14.760 it's probably a good idea to be grateful for that

01:34:18.800 because what I've noticed

01:34:19.860 is that if people

01:34:20.700 pull out

01:34:21.520 from those externally

01:34:22.960 scaffolded systems

01:34:24.900 they drift

01:34:27.000 they get depressed

01:34:28.760 they get anxious

01:34:29.520 they don't know what to do with themselves

01:34:31.360 you know

01:34:31.980 they're kind of like sled dogs

01:34:33.180 with no sled

01:34:33.960 and we're kind of like sled dogs

01:34:35.900 as far as I can tell

01:34:36.780 beasts of burden

01:34:37.720 like we need a load

01:34:38.880 man

01:34:39.240 we need a load

01:34:40.500 and

01:34:41.840 the question is

01:34:44.640 what sort of load

01:34:45.580 do you need

01:34:46.180 and here's why

01:34:47.660 I think we need

01:34:48.400 we need that

01:34:49.700 you know

01:34:52.320 there's

01:34:52.700 I've been thinking about

01:34:54.240 how to figure out

01:34:54.900 what's real

01:34:55.440 for a long time

01:34:56.280 and

01:34:56.820 because I'm an existentialist

01:34:58.680 I'm operating under the presupposition

01:35:01.420 that you can tell what people believe

01:35:02.940 by watching what they

01:35:03.980 how they act

01:35:05.140 I don't care what they say

01:35:06.660 I don't care what their statements are about

01:35:10.240 their view of reality

01:35:12.520 because the correlation

01:35:14.780 the relationship between that

01:35:16.100 and their actual actions

01:35:17.120 is

01:35:17.420 not

01:35:18.640 certainly not perfect

01:35:21.020 and sometimes doesn't even exist

01:35:22.740 one thing I've noticed

01:35:26.000 is that people

01:35:26.820 no one argues with their own pain

01:35:29.500 everyone who hurts

01:35:34.020 acts as if they believe

01:35:37.020 that pain is real

01:35:38.080 so we could say

01:35:42.800 the ultimate reality is pain

01:35:45.600 that's how people act

01:35:48.320 it's in keeping with

01:35:50.460 the claims of many religious traditions

01:35:52.660 you know

01:35:53.540 the Jews are always

01:35:55.180 recollecting past pain

01:35:57.900 I mean the Christian

01:35:59.380 God is a crucified person

01:36:01.760 I mean

01:36:02.140 there's a fair bit of pain there

01:36:03.820 for the Buddhists

01:36:04.680 the fundamental maxim

01:36:05.820 is that life is suffering

01:36:07.100 and it seems to me

01:36:08.780 that there's a metaphysical claim there

01:36:10.460 the metaphysical claim is that

01:36:12.680 pain is real

01:36:15.540 now of course it depends on what you mean by real

01:36:20.360 but people act as if their pain is real

01:36:24.760 so that's a good place to start

01:36:26.280 now

01:36:29.660 that

01:36:30.760 poses a problem

01:36:33.120 life is a pain

01:36:39.540 life is suffering

01:36:41.880 let's say

01:36:42.640 and why is that

01:36:43.780 well

01:36:45.460 it's because

01:36:46.340 you can be broken

01:36:47.860 hurt

01:36:49.540 and destroyed

01:36:50.500 and so

01:36:52.100 that seems pretty self-evident

01:36:54.820 and worse

01:36:56.020 you know it

01:36:56.700 and that makes people

01:36:58.420 unique

01:36:59.440 like

01:36:59.820 that's our self-consciousness

01:37:01.380 right

01:37:01.880 that's really what separates us in some sense from other creatures

01:37:05.380 I mean other creatures have some self-consciousness

01:37:08.380 like

01:37:08.960 a chimp can learn to recognize itself in a mirror

01:37:11.820 and so can a dolphin

01:37:12.740 but

01:37:13.020 you know that's pretty

01:37:14.480 that's pretty bare-bones self-consciousness

01:37:17.120 you know

01:37:17.520 real self-consciousness is the knowledge of your borders

01:37:21.600 and not only in space

01:37:24.040 but in time

01:37:25.820 and as far as I can tell

01:37:28.440 human beings are the only creatures that have discovered the future

01:37:31.220 and that's really good

01:37:32.700 because we can plan for the future

01:37:33.960 but it's really bad

01:37:34.960 because

01:37:35.340 you know

01:37:36.040 the future is finite

01:37:38.920 and that's

01:37:39.540 like that's a big shock to the old system

01:37:41.760 and it's the existential burden that everyone bears

01:37:46.720 and it's associated integrally with suffering

01:37:48.960 and so

01:37:50.160 then you think

01:37:50.840 well life is suffering

01:37:51.840 and it's finite

01:37:52.840 and that's part of the suffering

01:37:54.320 that's part of what makes you question the value of

01:37:57.480 existing

01:37:58.780 and maybe the value of existence itself

01:38:01.140 so then what do you have to use as a weapon against that?

01:38:07.020 well you know

01:38:07.600 we talked a little bit about responsibility

01:38:09.360 that seems to work

01:38:10.980 you know

01:38:11.740 the amount of responsibility that you adopt

01:38:18.280 in relationship to things

01:38:21.820 seems to increase your meaningful engagement

01:38:26.440 and you might say

01:38:27.160 well what's the most meaningfully engaged activity?

01:38:31.940 and you might say

01:38:32.560 well

01:38:32.860 how about a little reduction in the old suffering?

01:38:37.980 you know

01:38:38.260 so you live your life so that

01:38:40.340 you're not causing undue pain

01:38:43.340 especially pointless pain

01:38:45.100 that would be good

01:38:46.080 and maybe you could even be more useful than that

01:38:48.540 and you could figure out some ways that

01:38:49.860 some suffering

01:38:51.160 yours

01:38:52.360 other people's

01:38:53.300 both

01:38:54.280 if you're really

01:38:55.080 you know

01:38:56.720 hitting a home run

01:38:58.260 maybe you can

01:38:59.160 figure out some way

01:39:00.100 that some of that could be rectified

01:39:01.560 and that seems to be

01:39:03.080 meaningful in and of itself

01:39:05.820 I mean if it's pain that makes you doubt the meaning of life

01:39:08.940 which is perfectly reasonable

01:39:10.680 then the cessation of pain

01:39:14.740 the cessation of suffering

01:39:17.220 the minimization of suffering

01:39:18.740 as a logical corollary

01:39:21.440 should be the proper medication

01:39:24.100 and so I would say that means that

01:39:26.800 there's some mode

01:39:28.920 that you can conduct yourself in

01:39:32.380 that makes you a good person

01:39:34.740 and

01:39:36.360 part of being a good person is

01:39:39.300 to alleviate suffering

01:39:42.040 and

01:39:43.660 I don't think you get to question that actually

01:39:48.540 if the suffering itself is what's making you question the validity of your life

01:39:52.720 then you can't also say that the cessation of that is not useful

01:39:57.700 I mean you can but it's completely incoherent

01:40:00.700 you can claim incoherent things if you want

01:40:03.500 so then I would say

01:40:06.700 these distilled stories that I'm talking about

01:40:12.740 the stories that are written say by great authors

01:40:16.020 I'm particularly fond of Dostoevsky

01:40:19.840 whose works are

01:40:23.880 he's head and shoulders above anyone I've ever read

01:40:28.340 in terms of

01:40:29.620 writers of fiction

01:40:31.600 he deals with the hardest questions

01:40:34.040 that human beings face

01:40:36.040 and

01:40:37.160 he

01:40:38.300 he has characters on both sides of the argument

01:40:41.380 and

01:40:41.700 they really lay out the arguments

01:40:44.440 it's not like Dostoevsky

01:40:45.640 you know he's got a belief

01:40:46.660 and so he has a character and that character has his beliefs

01:40:50.420 and that character always wins the arguments

01:40:52.640 that doesn't happen in the Dostoevsky novel at all

01:40:55.040 he sets up a character and then he sets up like three or four antagonists

01:40:58.740 and those antagonists they're not straw men

01:41:00.880 they're like iron giants

01:41:02.700 they just stomp his

01:41:04.640 his protagonist you know and the whole thing is a war between

01:41:08.320 these different conceptions of being

01:41:10.860 it's amazing to see, it's amazing to read

01:41:16.400 so you distill these stories

01:41:18.700 great authors distill stories

01:41:21.200 great storytellers distill stories

01:41:23.900 and we have stories that are very, very, very, very old

01:41:26.940 those are usually religious stories of one form or another

01:41:30.240 but they can be fairytales

01:41:31.640 because fairytales, some people have traced fairytales back

01:41:34.780 you know, more than 10,000 years

01:41:36.780 and so they're part of an oral tradition

01:41:38.780 and

01:41:39.720 oral traditions can last for

01:41:41.720 tens of thousands of years and

01:41:43.720 you know, it's a story that's been told for 10,000 years

01:41:47.260 it's a funny kind of story, it's like

01:41:48.860 people have remembered it

01:41:50.300 and obviously modified it, it's like

01:41:53.100 the game of telephone, you know, where

01:41:55.100 I tell you something and you whisper it to the person next to you and so on

01:41:58.400 it's like a game of telephone that's gone on for

01:42:01.180 you know, 1,000 generations and

01:42:03.980 all that's left is what people remember

01:42:07.340 and maybe they remember what's important

01:42:09.180 because you tend to remember what's important

01:42:11.180 it isn't necessarily the case that you know what the hell it means

01:42:14.380 you don't know what music means

01:42:16.060 but, you know, that doesn't stop you from listening to it

01:42:20.060 you don't know, generally speaking

01:42:22.620 what a movie that you see or a book that you read means

01:42:25.660 not if it's profound

01:42:27.020 it means more than you can understand

01:42:29.420 because otherwise, why read it?

01:42:31.500 well, so the idea is this, is that

01:42:35.100 we're necessarily nested inside moral systems

01:42:39.740 the moral systems are predicated on

01:42:42.540 narratives, narrative dramas of sorts

01:42:45.740 and the moral systems are what orient us in life

01:42:50.620 and the reason to understand them

01:42:52.620 to the degree that you can

01:42:54.140 is because you need to know how to live

01:42:56.780 Nietzsche said that if you had a why

01:43:01.420 you could bear any how

01:43:04.060 and that's good

01:43:06.860 one of the things that the Auschwitz guards used to do to the prisoners

01:43:10.300 and this is very telling

01:43:12.300 so at Auschwitz there was a sign that said

01:43:14.780 work will make you free

01:43:16.780 it was a little joke

01:43:18.780 not really a very funny joke

01:43:21.740 you know, it's the kind of joke that you have to be

01:43:26.220 satanic is the appropriate term to conceptualize

01:43:33.020 and to dare to state

01:43:39.020 so when the Auschwitz prisoners came to Auschwitz

01:43:41.820 you know, they're already pretty rough shape

01:43:44.300 they were in cattle cars

01:43:45.980 they'd been separated from their families

01:43:47.660 everything had been taken from them

01:43:49.100 they were transported for a long time

01:43:50.780 they were standing up

01:43:52.060 the kids were suffocating because there was no room

01:43:54.060 in the, you know, it was so packed in there

01:43:55.820 they didn't have anything to eat

01:43:57.020 there weren't any toilet facilities of any sort

01:43:59.660 it was like, you got rid of 20% of the people just transporting them

01:44:04.140 you know, the ones on the outside of the cars

01:44:06.060 they froze to death

01:44:07.020 because of course it was cold

01:44:08.860 and pretty nasty

01:44:11.500 and then when they got to Auschwitz

01:44:13.180 the guards used to have this game that they would play

01:44:16.860 and this is part of the work will set you free thing

01:44:20.300 they would get a prisoner

01:44:21.260 they'd take a prisoner

01:44:23.420 who's already in pretty, you know, pretty rough shape

01:44:26.780 and then have them carry a sack of wet salt, 100 pounds

01:44:30.380 from one side of the camp

01:44:32.220 to the other

01:44:33.020 and you know, when you think of a camp

01:44:34.860 you think of something like a football field

01:44:36.620 you know, maybe something that big fences around

01:44:38.780 it's like, no way man

01:44:39.820 these were cities

01:44:40.620 these were

01:44:41.260 there were tens of thousands of people in these places

01:44:44.140 so from one side of the camp compound to the other

01:44:46.220 that was a good hike

01:44:47.740 and that wasn't bad enough

01:44:48.780 they had to get them to

01:44:50.940 carry it back and put it in the same place

01:44:52.860 Now

01:44:57.100 that's poetic in its malevolence

01:45:00.940 you know, what you're doing is

01:45:03.260 you're harnessing

01:45:05.420 the human

01:45:07.980 compulsion to engage in useful activity

01:45:11.980 and demonstrating

01:45:14.140 how absolutely futile that is

01:45:17.340 despite its difficulty

01:45:23.660 seems like a bad thing to do

01:45:29.340 people need

01:45:31.500 it's a parody of meaninglessness

01:45:33.340 that's what that is

01:45:35.020 and you know, people need meaning in their lives

01:45:36.940 because their lives are difficult

01:45:38.940 and so

01:45:39.900 the question is

01:45:41.820 to what end should you devote your life?

01:45:43.500 and another question might be

01:45:45.980 well, does it matter?

01:45:47.900 Matter is an interesting word

01:45:49.180 eh?

01:45:49.420 because matter is matter

01:45:52.060 but matter is also what matters

01:45:55.420 and I would say that what matters is more real than matter

01:45:59.900 at least that's how you act

01:46:01.340 and then the question is

01:46:02.140 well, is there something you should be aiming at?

01:46:07.100 it's a good question

01:46:08.380 that's the question of the meaning of life

01:46:10.220 and you know, one of the things that's supposed to happen when you come to university

01:46:15.180 is that that's the sort of question that should be addressed

01:46:18.220 and as far as I can tell

01:46:20.460 and this might just be my more cynical side

01:46:22.780 what I see happening to university students, generally speaking, is that they come in

01:46:27.740 clinging to the wreckage of their culture

01:46:31.420 and floating

01:46:34.060 with the pieces and

01:46:36.460 those pieces are taken away by

01:46:40.700 professors who tell them that

01:46:43.420 everything can be

01:46:44.860 deconstructed

01:46:45.740 and no

01:46:46.620 nothing has any real meaning

01:46:48.140 and it's like

01:46:49.100 when you're finally educated

01:46:50.300 it's when you're floating out on the ocean

01:46:51.980 and you've got nothing to

01:46:53.500 stay afloat with

01:46:54.300 it's like well then you're done

01:46:55.740 and you can graduate

01:46:56.700 and it's like

01:46:58.380 I don't see that as useful

01:47:01.740 quite the contrary

01:47:04.700 so let me tell you a story

01:47:07.580 the first thing I'm going to propose to you

01:47:09.180 and we'll talk about this a lot

01:47:10.300 is that

01:47:10.780 you inhabit a story

01:47:12.060 that the framework

01:47:13.900 through which you look at the world is actually a story

01:47:16.380 and here's the story

01:47:18.220 the story is

01:47:19.180 you're somewhere

01:47:20.940 and you're going somewhere

01:47:22.860 that can be conceptual or whatever

01:47:24.300 it's that

01:47:24.940 but there's a gradient between where you are

01:47:26.860 and where you're aiming at

01:47:27.980 which means no more really

01:47:29.340 than you're doing something while you're sitting there

01:47:32.300 and hypothetically you're aiming for something better

01:47:35.900 and so you're in a state of insufficiency

01:47:38.780 always

01:47:40.220 the insufficiencies change

01:47:42.860 and then you're trying to rectify the insufficiency

01:47:45.260 and you presume that your current state is less preferable to the state that you're aiming at

01:47:50.380 and then

01:47:51.420 the way that you

01:47:53.740 bring those two together is

01:47:55.500 sometimes you can do it through thinking

01:47:57.660 but fundamentally you do it through action

01:47:59.740 you do it through acting in the world

01:48:01.100 and so that's sort of

01:48:02.940 that's sort of the answer in some sense to the mind-body problem

01:48:06.300 you have a conceptual structure

01:48:08.140 but when you implement it

01:48:09.660 you're implementing it not abstractly

01:48:12.220 you're implementing it through action

01:48:13.660 and so

01:48:14.780 that's the basic story

01:48:16.860 it's not a very interesting story

01:48:18.700 but it's the framework through which you view the world

01:48:21.020 so it's a value-laden framework

01:48:24.060 otherwise you wouldn't be able to act

01:48:25.260 and you wouldn't know what to look at

01:48:26.700 so

01:48:27.420 it's a value-laden framework

01:48:29.020 you look at the world through a value-laden framework

01:48:31.100 so then we might say

01:48:31.900 well what is the optimal value-laden framework?

01:48:34.620 that's what we're going to try to figure out

01:48:38.380 now

01:48:39.020 I told you about the war that went on between

01:48:41.340 the communists and the west

01:48:44.540 and how that obsessed me

01:48:46.460 and so

01:48:47.420 one of the things that

01:48:48.700 I really wondered about was

01:48:50.380 well was this just an arbitrary thing

01:48:52.540 you know like did the communists

01:48:54.140 they had some axioms

01:48:55.100 and we had some axioms

01:48:56.220 and if you're a moral relativist

01:48:57.580 you might say

01:48:58.060 well

01:48:58.380 who's to say which set of axioms are better

01:49:01.420 or even

01:49:02.140 who's to claim that

01:49:03.660 you could say that a set of axioms

01:49:05.900 one set is better than another

01:49:07.420 that's a moral relativist claim

01:49:10.060 and

01:49:10.460 you know fair enough

01:49:18.380 so I thought well maybe this is just an arbitrary thing

01:49:20.620 and it's going to be settled by force

01:49:22.220 because that's how you settle an arbitrary claim

01:49:24.620 between two competing systems

01:49:26.620 where there's no room for negotiation

01:49:28.220 so I thought about that for a long time

01:49:30.620 I wanted to know

01:49:31.420 what the roots were of the marxist system

01:49:35.100 and what the roots were of the western system

01:49:37.340 and what I surmised was that

01:49:40.220 the western system was actually something that evolved

01:49:44.540 whereas the communist system was a rationalist construction

01:49:48.140 that was imposed

01:49:49.660 and they weren't the same thing

01:49:51.020 and so then I wondered

01:49:52.300 well

01:49:53.340 what's western culture grounded in

01:49:55.260 and is there any reason to assume that that's real in any sense

01:49:59.660 and so

01:50:01.500 that's what took me into the study of

01:50:03.580 the underlying stories

01:50:05.820 the fundamental stories upon which our culture

01:50:08.540 I believe is based

01:50:09.500 and some of those are very old

01:50:11.580 I'm going to tell you a Mesopotamian story

01:50:13.420 it's one of the oldest stories we know

01:50:14.700 I'm going to tell you an Egyptian story

01:50:17.820 those are sources of our culture

01:50:20.300 and I think those stories are grounded in much older traditions

01:50:23.900 and I think they refer to something real

01:50:26.860 actually real

01:50:27.820 now

01:50:29.420 I already told you that

01:50:32.380 there are different ways of conceptualizing real

01:50:36.060 and that my initial hypothesis

01:50:38.540 presumption

01:50:39.260 axiom

01:50:39.980 you might say

01:50:40.620 is that

01:50:43.100 pain is the most real

01:50:44.620 and the reason I believe that

01:50:45.980 is because that's how people act

01:50:48.220 now

01:50:48.780 you can criticize that

01:50:51.180 you can certainly come up with an

01:50:52.700 alternative conceptual framework

01:50:54.300 which the scientists have

01:50:55.500 because they believe that the most real thing is matter

01:51:00.460 maybe we need more than one set of tools to operate in the world

01:51:03.340 it's possible

01:51:05.020 so now I want to tell you what I think the fundamental

01:51:14.780 constituent elements are of stories

01:51:19.500 and one of the things that I hope is that

01:51:23.420 this

01:51:25.020 this

01:51:25.580 knowing this will make you

01:51:27.340 this will make you

01:51:28.620 immunize

01:51:29.500 immunize you

01:51:30.380 against ideology

01:51:32.060 and the reason

01:51:33.900 because I believe that ideologies are fragmentary

01:51:37.660 meta narratives

01:51:38.780 and they have their power

01:51:39.980 because

01:51:40.620 they're grounded in the meta-narrative

01:51:42.220 but they only tell part of the story

01:51:44.300 but they have power

01:51:45.260 because they're grounded in the fundamental narrative

01:51:47.980 and so

01:51:48.940 here's the fundamental narrative

01:51:50.300 as far

01:51:50.940 the characters let's say

01:51:52.940 we're going to say that

01:51:54.700 people are prone to characterize the world

01:51:57.660 we're social primates

01:51:59.260 we're social cognitive primates

01:52:00.780 so we tend to

01:52:02.060 see the world through the lens of a social creature

01:52:05.180 and so

01:52:05.820 and partly because we're

01:52:07.180 concerned with acting in the world

01:52:08.540 and the world is mostly other people

01:52:10.380 then we conceptualize the ground of that

01:52:13.660 structure for action

01:52:15.580 in characterological terms

01:52:16.940 so the

01:52:22.620 the most fundamental reality is

01:52:25.420 chaos

01:52:26.860 and chaos is

01:52:28.220 what you don't understand at all

01:52:31.180 you can't even conceptualize it

01:52:33.900 you come into contact with it

01:52:36.860 in bits and pieces

01:52:38.620 when the towers fell

01:52:40.460 when the twin towers fell

01:52:42.380 chaos reigned for a few days

01:52:44.380 everyone was shell-shocked

01:52:46.540 and that was chaos

01:52:47.820 and chaos is what you experience when

01:52:51.020 your story falls apart

01:52:53.500 and that's a descent to the underworld

01:52:55.980 that's chaos

01:52:57.100 and basically you live in order and chaos

01:52:59.180 and order is where

01:53:00.380 when you do

01:53:01.260 what you think you should do

01:53:02.620 what you want to have happen

01:53:04.460 happens

01:53:05.420 that's order

01:53:06.220 that's explored territory

01:53:07.660 and chaos is when

01:53:09.260 you do what you're supposed to do

01:53:11.420 to get what you want

01:53:12.380 and it doesn't happen

01:53:14.300 and then that place that you're magically in

01:53:16.300 when that happens

01:53:17.020 that's chaos

01:53:18.300 and it has different depths

01:53:19.740 you could say

01:53:20.540 it reaches all the way to hell

01:53:22.460 and that usually happens when

01:53:24.300 your life falls apart

01:53:25.660 very badly

01:53:26.860 and you're down in that chaos

01:53:28.380 and you realize that it was your fault

01:53:30.780 and that you did something wrong

01:53:32.380 and that you knew it

01:53:34.060 and you ignored it

01:53:36.540 that's the worst form of chaos

01:53:40.940 so there's chaos itself

01:53:42.300 and then

01:53:43.980 then the next thing is fairly straightforward

01:53:46.220 you could think

01:53:47.340 there's the individual

01:53:48.300 the individual exists in culture

01:53:50.940 and culture is embedded in nature

01:53:53.180 pretty straightforward

01:53:54.780 nature is mother nature

01:53:56.300 for reasons we'll get into

01:53:57.580 and culture is father culture

01:53:59.660 and I think that's because

01:54:01.340 the fundamental dominance hierarchies

01:54:03.180 in human primates are masculine

01:54:06.060 and that nature is assimilated to the feminine

01:54:09.740 because it's

01:54:11.340 well for two reasons

01:54:12.300 first of all females do the sexual selection

01:54:14.460 among human beings

01:54:15.340 so they actually are nature

01:54:17.020 from the darwinian perspective

01:54:18.460 and second

01:54:19.340 nature is

01:54:20.460 the productive biological force

01:54:23.580 and so we've always conceptualized

01:54:25.420 males and females

01:54:26.460 and we've used that conceptualization

01:54:28.540 to sort out

01:54:29.500 the world

01:54:31.900 at large

01:54:33.340 it's a metaphor

01:54:35.020 but it's not just a metaphor

01:54:36.460 you know

01:54:37.020 it's reasonable to consider

01:54:39.340 culture as a judgmental father

01:54:41.260 it's really reasonable

01:54:42.300 because

01:54:42.620 you know

01:54:45.740 you're

01:54:46.220 you have a group of people around you

01:54:48.140 some friends

01:54:48.860 some people that watch you work

01:54:50.300 some judges

01:54:51.740 and that stretches across a very long expanse of time

01:54:54.700 and

01:54:55.740 those people

01:54:56.700 as an aggregate

01:54:57.900 make an entity

01:54:59.260 that

01:54:59.980 is judging your reputation

01:55:01.580 constantly

01:55:03.100 and it's perfectly reasonable to personify that

01:55:05.580 because

01:55:06.380 it's like a meta person that's watching you

01:55:09.660 and so

01:55:10.620 it's a useful metaphor

01:55:12.140 there's a meta person that's watching you

01:55:14.460 well yeah there is

01:55:15.980 obviously

01:55:17.340 so

01:55:17.820 now you could say

01:55:18.700 well that's not real

01:55:19.660 it's like

01:55:23.580 it's not real the way a scientific truth is real

01:55:26.460 it's a different kind of real

01:55:28.460 it's a different kind of real

01:55:32.780 well nature has two elements

01:55:33.820 it's destructive and creative

01:55:35.980 obviously

01:55:37.100 there's the beauty of nature

01:55:38.300 and it's bountiful

01:55:39.900 element

01:55:40.300 and then there's

01:55:41.020 you know

01:55:42.780 anopheles mosquitoes

01:55:44.140 and elephantiasis

01:55:45.500 and

01:55:45.660 cancer

01:55:46.860 and

01:55:47.100 starvation

01:55:49.180 and all the terrible elements of nature

01:55:51.740 and then there's culture

01:55:52.700 and culture

01:55:53.420 is tyrannical

01:55:54.620 because

01:55:55.260 you have to shape yourself

01:55:57.420 involuntarily even

01:55:58.940 to get along with other people

01:56:00.540 you sacrifice a lot of yourself

01:56:02.140 and develop yourself

01:56:03.180 but you sacrifice a lot of yourself

01:56:04.700 in that endeavor

01:56:05.980 right

01:56:06.460 we have to kind of average ourselves out

01:56:08.780 in order to

01:56:10.380 to live together

01:56:11.500 and

01:56:11.980 some societies are more tyrannical than others

01:56:14.460 but there's always a tyrannical element

01:56:16.220 you see that at university

01:56:17.420 you know

01:56:17.660 you guys know that

01:56:18.780 to some degree

01:56:19.420 this is such a big place

01:56:20.940 it's easy to feel like a number here

01:56:22.460 and that

01:56:23.100 whether or not you're here or not

01:56:24.220 doesn't matter

01:56:25.180 the institution doesn't care

01:56:27.340 well that's the tyrannical element of it

01:56:29.180 now it does care

01:56:30.140 because here you are

01:56:30.940 and you're getting educated

01:56:31.980 and all that

01:56:32.940 and so maybe that's positive

01:56:35.260 but it's got both

01:56:37.260 these characters always have two sides

01:56:40.300 you know

01:56:40.700 there's the negative side

01:56:42.140 and the positive side of nature

01:56:46.140 and there's the negative side

01:56:47.260 and the positive side of culture

01:56:48.540 and then there's the individual

01:56:49.660 so the individual is like

01:56:50.780 standing on an island

01:56:52.220 in the midst of an ocean

01:56:54.060 that's a good

01:56:56.700 imagistic conceptualization of your position

01:57:00.060 there's solid ground

01:57:01.420 it has a limited expanse

01:57:03.340 and outside of that

01:57:04.380 is everything you don't understand

01:57:06.540 and you as an individual

01:57:07.820 have a positive and negative element as well

01:57:10.460 and that's the hero and the villain

01:57:12.460 and of course

01:57:13.020 what good is a story without a hero and a villain

01:57:15.900 and the villain is

01:57:16.860 the person who isn't acting like a person should act

01:57:19.100 and the hero is the person who's acting like a person should act

01:57:22.220 and so you go to movies and you read books

01:57:24.220 and there's heroes and there's villains

01:57:25.900 and to some degree what you're doing is

01:57:28.220 you're fleshing out your notion of a villain

01:57:30.860 you know you read about 30 villains

01:57:32.220 and you think

01:57:32.620 well there's something villainous about the villains

01:57:35.020 that's the central element of villainy

01:57:37.420 whatever that is

01:57:38.620 and you could imagine you construct out a meta villain

01:57:43.100 and a meta hero

01:57:45.020 and those are the characters in

01:57:48.220 religious stories

01:57:50.060 generally speaking

01:57:51.740 you know

01:57:52.060 in the marvel movies

01:57:56.220 there's odin

01:57:57.100 and odin has two sons

01:57:59.580 right?

01:58:00.140 Thor and Loki

01:58:01.340 Thor is like

01:58:08.060 Thor is the world-redeeming hero

01:58:10.460 and Loki is the trickster who wants to bring everything down

01:58:13.900 and

01:58:15.420 you have to recognize that in yourself

01:58:18.300 or it's useful to

01:58:19.340 because otherwise you underestimate

01:58:24.860 no

01:58:25.820 it's maps of meaning

01:58:30.860 positive psych

01:58:36.460 it's definitely not that

01:58:45.020 why might you be villainous?

01:58:48.620 well first of all because you can be

01:58:51.340 that's a big deal

01:58:53.100 you can be

01:58:54.220 it's actually an offshoot of empathy

01:58:57.180 this is something that took me decades to figure out

01:59:00.140 I figured it out when I was studying the

01:59:02.220 book of genesis

01:59:03.740 because in the book of genesis

01:59:05.500 people become self-conscious

01:59:07.020 and they immediately have the knowledge of good and evil

01:59:10.060 I just couldn't figure that out

01:59:11.420 it's like what the hell is the relationship between that

01:59:14.140 and then really

01:59:14.860 I tell you I thought about that like for 30 years

01:59:17.900 trying to puzzle that out

01:59:19.340 and then I realized what it was

01:59:22.620 if you're self-conscious

01:59:24.460 you can

01:59:25.740 you can conceptualize yourself as a being

01:59:28.700 you know that you are

01:59:30.940 and you know what you're like

01:59:33.500 and you know what hurts you and what doesn't

01:59:37.100 and as soon as you know what hurts you

01:59:40.380 you know what hurts her

01:59:43.020 and so that's the knowledge of good and evil that comes along with being self-conscious

01:59:46.540 as this is something that distinguishes human beings from every other animal

01:59:50.380 you know a lion will eat you

01:59:52.380 but it doesn't really want to tear you apart slowly

01:59:55.820 just for the fun of it

01:59:57.500 well it eats you

01:59:58.460 it just wants to eat you

01:59:59.500 and you know you could call that evil

02:00:01.260 it sucks that's for sure

02:00:03.260 but

02:00:04.380 animals are beyond good and evil in that sense

02:00:06.380 but human beings man

02:00:07.740 we can aim our malevolence and we're really good at it

02:00:10.380 because we can imagine

02:00:11.420 god this would hurt and if it hurts me man it's really going to hurt you

02:00:15.980 so and you need to know that you're like that because you are like that

02:00:19.660 and if you don't know you're like that or if you don't think you're like that

02:00:22.620 you're even more like that than you think

02:00:25.500 because the people who are most like that are people who don't think they're like that at all

02:00:30.940 and you have to contend with that

02:00:33.340 and that's why in many

02:00:35.180 systems of thinking the world is conceptualized as a battle between good and evil

02:00:39.900 and it's an appropriate conceptualization

02:00:43.500 it's a meta conceptualization and

02:00:47.100 the culture is the wise king and the tyrant and that's always the case

02:00:50.220 and you're always stuck with that because as an individual

02:00:53.500 with your negative side and your positive side

02:00:55.420 your negative side is the resentful side that is irritated at the limited conditions of being

02:01:01.900 and the suffering that entails and it's arbitrary and unfair nature

02:01:06.140 and no wonder like you've got that side has a case to make it's not trivial

02:01:13.820 in in the brothers Karamazov that argument is laid out beautifully there's a character

02:01:19.340 Alyosha who's a monk monastery novitiate and not really a

02:01:22.780 a sparkling intellect but a very good person

02:01:25.740 and he has a brother Ivan and Ivan's a vicious genius

02:01:35.180 and Ivan just takes Alyosha apart and partly he does that by telling a story about

02:01:39.740 that Dostoevsky took this from a news story

02:01:41.740 the news story the news story was that this mother and father had taken their young daughter

02:01:47.740 and locked her in the outhouse overnight

02:01:49.820 when it was like 30 below and you know she stayed out there crying and screaming and froze to death

02:01:54.700 and Ivan basically said to Alyosha you know

02:02:02.300 a world in which that could happen should not be

02:02:08.700 it's a good argument

02:02:10.460 you know and you can multiply that by millions of examples

02:02:13.180 so the part of us that is opposed to being and resentful

02:02:19.900 it's got a point man

02:02:22.300 the problem as far as I can tell is that if you act that out

02:02:27.500 then it makes what you're objecting to worse

02:02:30.780 now you might be happy about that and you might think well people couldn't be consciously pursuing that

02:02:36.940 but yes they can

02:02:39.100 I would recommend a book called Pan's Ram

02:02:41.660 if you're interested in that sort of thing

02:02:43.260 it's a book written by a man who raped 1200 men

02:02:47.020 and killed dozens and burned things down to the ground

02:02:50.220 every chance he got and tried to start a war between England and the US

02:02:54.140 who was aimed at nothing but mayhem

02:02:56.860 and he wrote an autobiography

02:02:58.860 at the request of a doctor who had befriended him

02:03:01.180 and he tells you exactly what he did and why

02:03:06.940 the story

02:03:15.900 hero and adversary

02:03:17.500 adversary

02:03:19.980 order and tyranny

02:03:21.660 destruction and creation

02:03:25.020 that's the basic landscape and outside of that chaos

02:03:27.740 and so let's take a break

02:03:30.540 here's another way of

02:03:33.020 looking at this

02:03:34.780 idea

02:03:36.940 the individual is the person who

02:03:42.700 pays attention

02:03:44.940 and explores

02:03:45.900 and masters

02:03:46.940 or who looks away

02:03:51.340 and the

02:03:53.020 person inhabits an explored territory

02:03:57.580 and this is unexplored territory

02:03:59.340 and so wherever you go there's you

02:04:04.060 and to have two halves of you

02:04:06.460 that you have to contend with

02:04:08.540 and

02:04:10.220 wherever you are with people there's

02:04:13.020 the society with its tyrannical and beneficial nature

02:04:17.980 and the society in some sense is that match between what you're doing and what's happening

02:04:22.860 it's really important to get that right

02:04:24.860 and then unexplored territory that's wherever

02:04:27.580 and whenever

02:04:29.180 what you're doing

02:04:30.460 stops working

02:04:32.380 and so it's not exactly a geographical idea

02:04:35.660 you know because when you think of explored territory you think of geographic landscape

02:04:39.340 like that like the domain of an animal you know or like your house

02:04:42.140 and you know that's

02:04:47.900 that's definitely an element of it

02:04:50.220 but you know

02:04:51.660 if you're in your house and a snake comes into your living room and you're in there

02:04:55.260 it's like well

02:04:57.260 that's an important difference between your house one second ago and your house now

02:05:00.780 and so your house can turn into unexplored territory at the drop of a hat

02:05:05.900 and that's because we live in space and time

02:05:09.020 and so the unexplored territory is conceptual

02:05:11.500 it's a conceptual territory and it's just wherever you are

02:05:16.860 when things aren't working for you the way they're supposed to be

02:05:22.300 and so

02:05:23.500 and these are permanent parts of the human experience

02:05:27.180 which is why I think they are fundamental characters in our narratives

02:05:30.380 there's always you

02:05:32.220 there's some subject of the story

02:05:34.540 and that subject is an ambivalent person with many different potentials

02:05:38.060 you're always somewhere and it's with other people because that's our territory right

02:05:42.460 I mean we're social beyond comprehension

02:05:45.660 and you know even our primate ancestors most of their territory was other primates

02:05:50.860 and their brains and our brains are specialized to view the world as an aggregation of personalities

02:05:58.060 it's really important to us

02:05:59.500 and so we tend to view the whole world that way

02:06:03.100 and then unexplored territory well

02:06:07.260 that's where

02:06:08.700 you don't know what to do

02:06:10.700 and but you know you do know what to do when you don't know what to do

02:06:14.220 peculiarly enough

02:06:15.340 it's rather non-specific

02:06:17.180 it's this generalized stress response and so what happens is

02:06:20.780 you freeze roughly speaking if the threat is enough

02:06:24.300 then you produce a lot of cortisol and a lot of adrenaline so that you're

02:06:29.500 bloody well ready to move quick in whatever direction you have to

02:06:32.940 and then maybe you pay more attention

02:06:35.820 and that's what you do when you don't know what to do

02:06:38.140 and the problem with that is you can stay in that state forever man

02:06:41.740 that's kind of what post-traumatic stress disorder is

02:06:43.980 it's like you're just like that all the time

02:06:47.020 and the problem with that is it's very uncomfortable

02:06:49.900 i mean you stay like that for any length of time

02:06:52.140 you're going to get depressed

02:06:53.020 you're going to develop an anxiety disorder

02:06:54.780 you're going to get old

02:06:56.540 because you're burning up resources like mad

02:06:59.660 you know your system is shunting everything to maintain that state of emergency preparation

02:07:06.140 and it's exhausting

02:07:08.060 it's not where you want to be

02:07:11.260 so that's partly why people are so prone to

02:07:14.780 defend their territories their familiar territory

02:07:17.420 because if their familiar territory is invaded or disrupted

02:07:21.820 then they default back to the state of emergency preparation

02:07:25.180 and that's like

02:07:26.780 that can unglue you if it's profound enough

02:07:30.220 you know and you guys know this already

02:07:31.980 i mean i think people experience this most particularly

02:07:35.660 when they're betrayed by someone they have an intimate relationship with

02:07:39.340 you know when they're lied to

02:07:41.020 there's other ways

02:07:42.380 the collapse of a dream or a vision that you've been pursuing or

02:07:45.900 an illness or the death in a family

02:07:47.900 there's lots of other ways but betrayal is a really good one

02:07:50.700 because if you're with someone for a long time you trust them

02:07:54.220 you have a representation of your past

02:07:56.220 you have a representation of you in the relationship

02:07:59.100 you have a representation of them

02:08:00.540 you have a representation of relationships

02:08:03.020 you have a representation of the future

02:08:05.420 you get betrayed it's like poof

02:08:07.740 even the past isn't what you thought it was

02:08:10.620 and what about you

02:08:12.380 you know

02:08:13.340 how clueless are you

02:08:15.020 and maybe not at all

02:08:16.060 or maybe ultimately gullible

02:08:17.580 you don't know

02:08:18.460 is it your fault

02:08:20.220 you know are you so clueless that you just can't protect yourself

02:08:23.020 or was the person malevolent in some subtle way that you failed to detect

02:08:27.580 everything's up in the air

02:08:29.740 not good

02:08:31.100 and this idea that human beings

02:08:34.220 travel to the underworld and come back

02:08:36.140 is like it's a really useful thing to understand

02:08:38.140 because

02:08:39.100 we do that all the time

02:08:41.020 whenever we fail it's like whoop down into the underworld for a while

02:08:44.780 where everything's in chaos

02:08:47.020 and then maybe we sort ourselves out

02:08:48.940 bang we're back up

02:08:50.300 and so one way of conceptualizing yourself is not

02:08:54.220 as order

02:08:55.420 and as not as chaos

02:08:57.580 but as the thing that traverses between the two domains

02:09:01.980 and that i would say is the mythological hero

02:09:04.140 so

02:09:07.660 i'm going to start talking to you about pinocchio a little bit

02:09:11.100 weirdly enough

02:09:12.780 i hope you enjoy this

02:09:17.100 and the reason i want to do it is because i want to put some

02:09:22.620 i want to bring what i told you abstractly

02:09:25.660 down to earth

02:09:26.700 and then you can start thinking

02:09:28.380 well do the conceptions that i've introduced to you

02:09:30.700 are they

02:09:31.340 are they good for anything

02:09:32.540 do they help

02:09:34.700 that's the

02:09:36.460 order

02:09:38.620 descent into chaos

02:09:40.940 re-establishment of order

02:09:42.540 that's paradise lost

02:09:44.460 profane history

02:09:45.660 paradise regained

02:09:47.100 it's the classic comedy

02:09:48.860 and that's the story of life

02:09:51.500 and so

02:09:52.700 the question is how do you manage it

02:09:55.340 and so

02:09:56.860 that's a question you really want to know the answer to

02:09:59.580 so you'll go

02:10:00.460 you'll pay money

02:10:01.500 weirdly

02:10:01.980 you'll line up and pay money

02:10:04.140 to see a story about that

02:10:06.060 even if you don't even know that that's what the story is about

02:10:08.380 and the reason

02:10:09.340 for that is that actually part of you does know what the story is about

02:10:12.860 you know your cognition has multiple layers

02:10:16.460 you understand things

02:10:19.660 that you don't know you understand

02:10:22.060 in ways that you don't understand

02:10:24.060 and you can tell that because you know we talked about pinocchio a little bit

02:10:27.740 how absurd it is

02:10:28.700 and that it doesn't matter

02:10:30.940 well

02:10:31.900 so we've been talking

02:10:37.180 chaos is when people don't do what they expect to do in the negative sense

02:10:41.260 something bad happens to you

02:10:42.700 what if the reaction is extremely positive

02:10:45.420 like something that you don't expect like winning a lottery

02:10:48.300 is that do you also go into the stress response or

02:10:53.100 so it would be the same thing

02:10:54.220 no it's not quite the same thing it's a good question and we will address that

02:10:58.300 we will address that

02:10:59.900 i mean winning the lottery is generally not a good idea for people

02:11:04.460 you know because it's just too much

02:11:06.780 it's too much for them

02:11:08.060 flips their lives upside down

02:11:10.380 so

02:11:11.340 and they tend at best to return to their original baseline level of emotion

02:11:16.060 but yes something

02:11:17.580 remarkably good

02:11:19.900 i mean it's a lot better than something remarkably bad obviously

02:11:23.340 but it still can have that destabilizing effect

02:11:27.660 so it depends on what elements of your life it disrupts

02:11:32.140 like in some sense you have a map that you're operating within in the world

02:11:38.940 and that map is predicated on assumptions of different sorts

02:11:42.540 some shallow some profound

02:11:45.020 when the profound assumptions are

02:11:47.260 devastated huge chunks of the map are invalidated

02:11:50.620 and that can happen

02:11:52.380 sometimes when dramatically positive things happen as well

02:11:56.460 so but the fundamental rule is

02:11:58.780 the more of your

02:12:01.500 axiomatic presuppositions

02:12:05.260 are disrupted the harder it is on you

02:12:08.220 you know like maybe you quit your job because you won the lottery

02:12:10.540 it's like hey i'm off to the beach i'm going to drink margaritas

02:12:13.500 it's like that'll work for about four days

02:12:15.820 you know you do that for three months you're a beach alcoholic

02:12:19.100 it's like that's a real improvement

02:12:20.940 you know so it's not that easy and

02:12:22.940 often too if you take people out of their routine

02:12:25.260 you know they just flounder

02:12:28.220 their circadian rhythms go they don't eat properly

02:12:32.220 they don't know what the hell to do

02:12:34.140 you know so

02:12:34.780 so this is often why people have such a hard time when they retire

02:12:40.060 i'm going to retire and relax

02:12:41.500 it's like

02:12:45.100 if i relaxed for two weeks i would die

02:12:47.900 you know i need something to do

02:12:49.100 i need to be engaged in something

02:12:52.540 so okay

02:12:55.260 pinocchio

02:12:56.700 disney movie

02:12:57.740 an early one

02:12:58.620 a masterpiece

02:12:59.980 and so i'm going to walk you through it

02:13:01.820 and i'm going to tell you

02:13:04.140 what i think it means

02:13:05.260 and you can tell me if you think that that's useful

02:13:08.220 and i'm only going to do that for about 10 minutes today

02:13:10.220 because i do want to cover some of the details of the class

02:13:13.020 and then next class will continue with this

02:13:16.860 so

02:13:19.580 so the movie opens

02:13:21.660 with the opening credits

02:13:23.500 which are carved wooden signs

02:13:25.980 which is like a hint

02:13:27.020 you know because geppetto is a carver

02:13:29.180 and it starts with this song

02:13:31.340 which was actually quite a popular song

02:13:33.340 and it's a bit of a

02:13:35.980 what would you call it

02:13:38.220 i don't think it's

02:13:39.740 the poetry is particularly profound

02:13:41.660 but it was a song that people liked

02:13:44.300 and people still listen to

02:13:45.660 and

02:13:47.420 it sets the tone for the movie

02:13:49.260 which is what music does

02:13:50.380 one of the things that's really interesting about movies

02:13:53.100 that's really mysterious is that

02:13:55.500 you know

02:13:56.780 if you go to a movie there's almost always a soundtrack

02:13:59.980 right

02:14:00.220 if you go to a movie and there isn't a soundtrack

02:14:02.140 it kind of feels empty

02:14:03.580 it feels like there's something missing

02:14:04.940 and you know it's as if the music

02:14:07.100 you know when you go to a movie there's lots of things you can't see

02:14:09.980 the characters are only partial

02:14:11.500 and you don't know anything about their background

02:14:13.420 so it's like a low resolution thing

02:14:15.420 and what seems to happen with the music is that it provides the emotional background

02:14:19.900 the complex context let's say

02:14:22.620 it's like a substitute for the context

02:14:25.500 and it guides you in your perceptions of the movie

02:14:29.260 it gives you hints about what's going to happen

02:14:32.060 and the funny thing about that is that we just don't have any problem with that

02:14:36.860 you know it's like

02:14:38.060 yeah of course movie has a soundtrack

02:14:40.460 and of course when there's a dramatic scene the music gets dramatic

02:14:43.900 but that doesn't happen in real life

02:14:45.900 so you'd wonder why we would accept it in a movie

02:14:48.620 and I think it's partly because we're willing to accept the amplification of reality

02:14:54.380 that constitutes a movie

02:14:55.900 and in fact we find that compelling

02:14:58.060 and music is one of the things that does that amplification

02:15:00.860 the dramatization

02:15:02.300 and that's acceptable to us

02:15:04.300 this song I find quite interesting

02:15:07.180 so I'm going to take it apart quite a bit

02:15:08.940 in some sense I feel foolish doing it

02:15:15.420 because it's you know it's a childish

02:15:18.620 it's a childish song in some ways

02:15:21.820 but but that's okay

02:15:24.780 when you wish upon a star makes no difference who you are

02:15:29.100 well okay there's some mysteries there

02:15:35.260 people wish upon stars that's like a little ritual right

02:15:38.940 why do they do that?

02:15:45.500 well

02:15:48.700 and what exactly is a star?

02:15:51.020 that's another question

02:15:52.140 because

02:15:53.980 there are stars that shine in the heavens

02:15:56.460 and there are people who are stars

02:15:59.740 and so

02:16:02.140 why are people stars?

02:16:04.540 well they're usually famous people right

02:16:06.220 they're people who attract a lot of attention

02:16:08.860 and maybe they're people who have a lot of talent

02:16:11.500 that's another possibility

02:16:13.980 maybe they're models

02:16:14.940 I don't mean you know clothing models

02:16:16.940 although sometimes they are

02:16:17.980 but they're models for emulation

02:16:19.900 that's what being a star means

02:16:21.660 that's why people magazine is full of stars

02:16:23.980 they're like heroes brought to earth

02:16:28.060 and of course you know nothing about them

02:16:29.740 all you know is their public persona

02:16:32.540 and of course they're usually very attractive

02:16:34.540 and so that allows you to project upon them

02:16:37.900 all the things that would go along with ideal humanity

02:16:41.980 and so they're stars

02:16:43.900 and but still why stars?

02:16:45.900 well stars beckon in the darkness

02:16:49.100 and they're otherworldly

02:16:51.660 that's the thing that's cool

02:16:52.700 they're not of this earth

02:16:54.780 and I mean that

02:16:56.540 technically

02:16:57.500 because obviously

02:16:58.780 they're not of this earth

02:16:59.740 but I also mean it

02:17:01.020 I mean it

02:17:02.620 phenomenologically

02:17:03.580 I mean it as an element of human experience

02:17:05.580 so most of you are urban

02:17:09.340 and so you've not had the experience of

02:17:12.540 perhaps of the full night sky

02:17:14.780 you know and that's really too bad

02:17:16.060 because

02:17:17.180 the full night sky is one of those experiences

02:17:19.740 that actually induces awe

02:17:22.220 naturally you know

02:17:23.580 and no wonder

02:17:24.380 you look up there

02:17:25.180 and there's just stars everywhere

02:17:27.500 right

02:17:27.740 you're looking at the edge of the galaxy

02:17:29.740 that's actually

02:17:30.620 that's the milky way right

02:17:31.740 it's the edge of the galaxy

02:17:32.860 it's like

02:17:34.060 wow

02:17:34.700 there's the edge of the galaxy

02:17:36.540 and there's just so many of them

02:17:38.540 and it's such an expanse

02:17:39.900 you're looking into infinity

02:17:41.580 you're looking into the unknown

02:17:43.340 you're looking beyond yourself

02:17:45.340 that's for sure

02:17:46.700 and you know that produces a sense of awe in people

02:17:49.420 like looking at the grand canyon or something like that

02:17:52.140 and it's

02:17:52.780 you're looking at something that transcends yourself

02:17:54.940 but that feeling of awe

02:17:56.140 that seems to be something that's

02:17:58.860 that's a natural part of our response

02:18:01.900 you know

02:18:02.780 you might feel awe when you meet someone that you regard as particularly admirable as well

02:18:07.420 because you feel that there's something transcendent about them

02:18:09.660 so here's an interesting thing to think about

02:18:13.900 there are people you admire

02:18:16.700 and there are people that you don't admire

02:18:19.100 and that's a clue right

02:18:20.140 that's a clue as to your value system

02:18:21.980 and it might be

02:18:23.340 not really something you can even put your finger on

02:18:25.260 it's like you find this person captivating

02:18:27.260 you find this person admirable

02:18:29.420 and it's as if there's something inside of you

02:18:31.820 that's looking for what's admirable

02:18:33.580 you know assuming that you are

02:18:35.020 and that person who's admirable has a faculty

02:18:38.780 some faculty

02:18:39.740 that you would like to have for yourself

02:18:41.740 and so they're a model for emulation

02:18:43.740 and that's part of how people develop

02:18:45.900 you know like little kids often

02:18:47.420 develop little hero crushes on older kids

02:18:50.860 you know not that much older

02:18:52.380 but sort of the

02:18:53.260 the person that's sort of just within their grasp

02:18:55.740 and then they follow them around and imitate them

02:18:57.660 and you know

02:18:58.540 so they're imitating what they find admirable

02:19:01.340 well

02:19:01.500 the fact that you find something admirable

02:19:04.460 is a hint

02:19:05.260 as to the structure of your unconscious value system

02:19:08.940 and so

02:19:09.660 you could think even

02:19:11.260 as an exercise

02:19:12.060 you could think

02:19:12.540 well

02:19:13.500 what qualities of a human being do I find admirable

02:19:16.220 you have to ask yourself that in a sense

02:19:18.380 you can't really think about it

02:19:20.300 there is a difference between asking yourself a question and thinking about it

02:19:24.620 you know because

02:19:25.580 it's more like

02:19:26.460 when you're asking yourself a question

02:19:27.980 it's contemplative

02:19:29.100 it's like

02:19:29.740 well

02:19:30.300 what do I find admirable

02:19:32.060 it's a question

02:19:32.940 you don't know

02:19:33.660 and

02:19:34.060 if you're fortunate

02:19:35.180 and this happens quite regularly

02:19:36.620 an answer will float up

02:19:37.980 from wherever the hell answers float up

02:19:40.140 and

02:19:40.540 oh yeah that's one

02:19:41.980 you can write that down

02:19:43.580 you get some

02:19:44.620 idea of what your ideal is

02:19:46.380 you know

02:19:46.700 and you have one likely

02:19:48.380 and what your counter ideal is

02:19:54.140 Star

02:19:55.580 well

02:19:56.140 to wish upon a star

02:19:57.100 is to raise your eyes above the horizon

02:19:59.500 and to focus on something transcendent

02:20:01.420 that's beyond you

02:20:02.860 to focus on the absolute

02:20:04.140 we could say

02:20:04.780 to focus on the light that shines in the darkness

02:20:07.740 now a star is

02:20:10.140 people wear diamonds because they're like stars

02:20:12.620 or they're like the sun

02:20:14.140 and they're pure and perfect

02:20:15.420 and they glitter

02:20:16.300 and so there's something about the light too

02:20:17.980 there's something about

02:20:18.860 a source of light

02:20:20.460 it's a source of illumination and enlightenment

02:20:22.780 and the light that shines in the darkness is a

02:20:25.100 deep metaphor

02:20:26.380 right

02:20:26.700 it's

02:20:27.820 it's what you want

02:20:28.860 you want a light to shine in the darkness

02:20:30.620 and so

02:20:31.420 the star has all that

02:20:32.780 and so

02:20:33.180 people wish upon a star

02:20:35.500 because they have some intuition

02:20:37.100 that aiming above the mundane

02:20:40.140 has the potential to transform themselves

02:20:43.100 they make a wish

02:20:43.980 well

02:20:44.380 if you're going to

02:20:48.220 make a wish

02:20:48.860 you should aim at something

02:20:50.700 high

02:20:51.740 and even just aiming at that

02:20:53.500 is more likely to make the wish come true

02:20:55.500 and this is not

02:20:57.900 metaphor

02:20:59.100 you know

02:20:59.420 I have this program

02:21:00.540 which you guys are going to do

02:21:02.460 called the future authoring program

02:21:04.300 it's one of two assignments

02:21:05.580 one is that you write an autobiography

02:21:07.820 that's the past authoring

02:21:09.100 the other is that you write

02:21:10.700 a plan for the future

02:21:11.580 that's the future authoring

02:21:12.620 I would recommend that you get started on those right now

02:21:15.340 like not right now

02:21:16.300 but like really soon

02:21:17.820 because they're harder than you think

02:21:20.460 and some of you are going to write like 15,000 words

02:21:23.820 you're going to get sucked right in

02:21:25.500 this happens all the time

02:21:26.620 you're going to get sucked right into it

02:21:28.780 and so

02:21:29.660 you write an autobiography

02:21:30.860 because you need to know

02:21:32.220 where you are

02:21:33.100 and who you are

02:21:34.140 right now

02:21:35.020 because how the hell are you going to plot a pathway to the future

02:21:37.580 unless you know where you are

02:21:39.580 and then you need to write about the future

02:21:41.100 because

02:21:41.740 you aren't going to hit something unless you aim at it

02:21:45.500 that's for sure

02:21:47.260 and lots of times people won't aim at what they want

02:21:49.260 because they're afraid

02:21:50.620 the reason they're afraid is because if you specify what you want

02:21:53.660 you've specified your conditions of failure

02:21:56.460 you know when you fail

02:21:58.220 and it's better just to keep it foggy

02:21:59.900 it's like

02:22:00.300 well I don't know if I'm succeeding or failing

02:22:01.980 but

02:22:02.700 you know

02:22:03.020 I can't really tell

02:22:04.300 well great

02:22:05.580 except

02:22:06.620 you can't hit anything you don't aim at

02:22:08.540 and so

02:22:09.180 the future authoring problem

02:22:10.620 program is like

02:22:12.460 it's an attempt to have you articulate your character

02:22:15.660 and so is the past authoring program

02:22:17.900 who are you

02:22:20.460 and you know

02:22:21.660 the past authoring program

02:22:22.860 it asks you to break your life into epochs

02:22:25.180 and then to write about the emotional

02:22:27.900 you know the things that you regard as important

02:22:31.900 important events that have shaped who you are

02:22:33.900 and

02:22:34.380 you know you may find that some of those

02:22:36.300 some of that writing makes you emotional

02:22:38.460 I would say

02:22:39.740 if you have a memory that's more than 18 months old

02:22:41.980 roughly speaking

02:22:42.780 and when you bring it to mind

02:22:44.700 it has an emotional impact

02:22:46.460 especially a negative emotional impact

02:22:48.700 it's like part of your soul is stuck back there

02:22:52.220 and I know that's a metaphorical way of thinking about it

02:22:55.100 but what I mean is that

02:22:57.900 the reason that you still experience the emotion

02:23:00.300 is because you have not solved the problem that that situation

02:23:06.220 faced you with

02:23:06.940 it might be a real problem

02:23:08.060 like maybe you got tangled up with someone who was really bad

02:23:10.780 and that's rough man

02:23:11.820 because you've got to come up with a theory of malevolence

02:23:13.980 to deal with something like that

02:23:15.100 and that's no joke

02:23:16.700 but

02:23:17.500 if it still

02:23:18.780 produces emotion

02:23:19.660 it means you haven't solved the problem

02:23:21.340 and

02:23:22.460 your brain is still tagging it as threat

02:23:24.860 it's a part of your territory that you did not master

02:23:28.060 threat threat threat threat threat

02:23:30.220 and until you take it apart

02:23:31.660 and articulation really helps that

02:23:33.420 writing really helps that

02:23:35.180 then you're not going to free yourself from its grip

02:23:38.300 and that might not be that pleasant

02:23:40.620 I mean

02:23:41.020 this is one of those situations where

02:23:43.020 doing it

02:23:44.220 tends to produce a decrement in people's mood

02:23:47.260 in the short term

02:23:48.060 but

02:23:48.940 quite radical improvements

02:23:50.380 three to six months down the road

02:23:52.380 you know

02:23:52.700 and it's often the case that you unfortunately have to do something you don't want to do

02:23:56.220 in order to

02:23:57.340 progress

02:23:57.900 it's very

02:23:59.180 very common

02:24:00.700 so

02:24:01.020 and the future authoring program

02:24:02.940 asks you about different dimensions of your life

02:24:06.780 like

02:24:07.260 because you're

02:24:08.140 you know

02:24:08.380 you can think of yourself as a personality inside your head but

02:24:11.740 you're nested in systems that transcend you

02:24:14.780 and they're just as real as whatever is in your head

02:24:17.020 it's like

02:24:17.820 well

02:24:18.940 what do you need

02:24:20.220 for life?

02:24:20.860 well

02:24:21.900 that's pretty easy actually

02:24:24.140 some friends

02:24:25.500 that's a good thing

02:24:26.940 intimate relationship

02:24:28.300 that's a good thing

02:24:29.180 a family

02:24:30.700 you know

02:24:31.820 either the one you're going to produce

02:24:33.260 or the one that you come from

02:24:34.380 where people

02:24:35.740 to some degree

02:24:37.020 love and care for one another

02:24:38.540 that's a good thing to work on

02:24:39.900 you need

02:24:40.860 you need some plan for your career

02:24:42.540 you've got to fit in

02:24:43.980 somewhere

02:24:44.700 that people regard as

02:24:46.380 important

02:24:46.860 and that they'll trade with you

02:24:48.220 so that you can live

02:24:49.660 you need something

02:24:50.780 worthwhile to do

02:24:51.740 with the time that you're not at work

02:24:54.060 and you need to

02:24:55.340 pay attention to your mental and physical health

02:24:57.900 and you need to regulate your use of substances

02:25:01.180 which is a strange one

02:25:02.140 but alcohol does lots of people in

02:25:03.900 so it's worth

02:25:04.700 it's worth thinking about

02:25:05.660 that's why we put it in there

02:25:06.860 so then it's like

02:25:07.580 okay what the hell do you want?

02:25:09.740 what do you want from your friends?

02:25:11.100 what do you want from your family?

02:25:12.620 what do you want from your career?

02:25:14.140 if you could have what you wanted

02:25:15.340 and that's what the program asks you

02:25:16.620 three to five years down the road

02:25:18.140 you get to have what you want

02:25:21.260 now I'm assuming that you're going to

02:25:22.860 approach this like

02:25:23.740 you know

02:25:25.340 reasonable adults

02:25:26.300 and not like 13 year old dreamers

02:25:28.060 I think

02:25:28.460 I want the most expensive yacht in the world

02:25:32.380 it's like fine

02:25:33.180 but you know

02:25:35.340 that isn't really what

02:25:36.300 it's supposed to be more

02:25:37.580 concentrating on your character

02:25:40.700 and so

02:25:41.740 then it asks you to write for 15 minutes

02:25:43.500 without thinking too much about grammar

02:25:47.500 or sentence structure

02:25:48.460 any of that

02:25:49.020 about what your life could be like

02:25:51.740 three to five years down the road

02:25:53.740 if you were treating yourself

02:25:55.180 like someone you cared for

02:25:57.420 and you were helping them

02:25:59.020 figure out what they wanted

02:26:01.180 and then it asks you to do the same thing in reverse

02:26:04.220 which is to think about

02:26:07.020 the ways that you're

02:26:09.260 radically insufficient and your faults

02:26:12.060 and everyone knows this I think

02:26:13.740 you know

02:26:14.380 maybe not

02:26:15.580 but everyone has a sense of

02:26:17.420 if they were going to degenerate

02:26:19.340 how they would do it

02:26:20.460 you know

02:26:20.940 some people would be an alcoholic

02:26:22.220 some people would be a street person

02:26:23.660 it's like

02:26:24.220 there's some doom thing out there

02:26:26.060 that's

02:26:26.860 got your name on it

02:26:28.060 if you're particularly incautious

02:26:29.820 and

02:26:30.700 you know

02:26:31.260 don't

02:26:33.500 and let things fall apart

02:26:35.100 so

02:26:35.900 I want you to write about that

02:26:37.900 what do you not want to have happen

02:26:39.580 in three to five years

02:26:41.100 and there's psychological reasons for this

02:26:42.940 say one is

02:26:45.100 if you have something to aim for

02:26:46.300 that's a source of positive emotion

02:26:48.540 because

02:26:49.100 your positive emotion is mostly generated by evidence

02:26:52.060 that you're moving towards something that you value

02:26:54.540 it's not generated so much by accomplishing something

02:26:57.340 because when you accomplish something

02:26:58.700 you're just left with the problem of whatever you're going to do next

02:27:00.940 so you graduate from university

02:27:02.700 it's like

02:27:03.100 you know

02:27:04.300 hooray

02:27:05.020 one day

02:27:05.820 you're at the peak of

02:27:07.580 your undergraduate university career

02:27:09.500 the next day

02:27:10.220 you're unemployed and looking for

02:27:12.140 a bad job at Starbucks

02:27:14.140 so you know

02:27:15.660 well you see what I mean

02:27:17.420 it's you know

02:27:17.980 it's that

02:27:18.540 you know

02:27:19.460 one problem that you solve

02:27:20.860 is replaced by another problem

02:27:22.300 and so the idea that you're going to be happy when you solve all your problems

02:27:25.340 it's like

02:27:25.900 ha ha ha

02:27:26.860 good luck with that theory

02:27:28.300 but

02:27:29.180 but

02:27:29.900 you know if you're aiming at something worthwhile

02:27:32.460 and you really believe it's worthwhile

02:27:33.980 and you've thought it through

02:27:35.260 you know

02:27:35.660 so that you're not weak

02:27:36.860 you're not weak

02:27:37.660 you've got your damn arguments mustered

02:27:39.580 then when you make progress

02:27:41.020 even a little bit

02:27:41.780 you think hey that's alright

02:27:42.780 and you get a little kick

02:27:43.900 you get a little dopamine kick

02:27:45.580 and that's what you want

02:27:46.940 because that's where your positive emotion comes from

02:27:48.940 you can use cocaine if you want

02:27:50.700 but

02:27:50.940 but you know that tends to have

02:27:53.640 relatively

02:27:54.980 detrimental

02:27:56.020 medium to long term consequences

02:27:58.080 but it activates the same system

02:28:00.020 so you have to be aiming at something

02:28:01.680 and you should be aiming at something that's

02:28:03.220 realistic

02:28:04.360 that you want

02:28:06.180 that you could get

02:28:08.080 you know

02:28:08.580 like not easily

02:28:09.680 because if it's easy

02:28:10.900 in some sense you've already got it

02:28:12.600 it's got to push you

02:28:13.680 and that's part of the pleasure actually

02:28:15.880 because

02:28:16.220 there's two things that you want to do

02:28:18.420 when you're pursuing something that's important

02:28:20.040 and one of them is to get the thing that's important

02:28:22.320 but the other is

02:28:23.360 is to make yourself better at pursuing things

02:28:26.560 right

02:28:27.560 so

02:28:27.880 so you can get both of those at the same time

02:28:30.660 you

02:28:30.880 you're aiming at something

02:28:32.460 and you're increasing your competence

02:28:33.980 it's like that's a good deal

02:28:35.620 that's a good deal

02:28:36.520 and

02:28:36.780 there's a lot of

02:28:37.720 intrinsic meaning to be

02:28:39.400 felt in that

02:28:40.240 and then the second half of the program

02:28:41.600 you

02:28:42.980 you write out a plan

02:28:45.380 for

02:28:45.940 for how you're going to do it

02:28:47.040 and how you're going to keep yourself on track

02:28:48.580 and you're going to write about

02:28:49.360 why it would be good for you

02:28:50.680 if you did this

02:28:51.400 and why it would be good for your family

02:28:52.760 and what possible benefits it would have to the community

02:28:55.320 you know

02:28:56.140 because you want to nail this thing down

02:28:57.960 and then you want to

02:28:58.840 figure out

02:28:59.700 what kind of obstacles are going to come up

02:29:01.740 and how you might overcome them

02:29:02.900 and how you might keep yourself on track

02:29:04.740 and all of that

02:29:05.760 and we know

02:29:06.680 because we've actually done a lot of research on this particular program

02:29:10.200 that

02:29:11.200 if university students do this

02:29:14.020 and this is more true if they're

02:29:15.640 not

02:29:16.280 too well oriented to begin with

02:29:18.360 if university students do this

02:29:20.400 they're

02:29:20.780 about 25% less likely to drop out

02:29:23.900 which is a lot

02:29:24.640 and about

02:29:25.740 their grade point average increases about 20%

02:29:28.180 so

02:29:29.340 hooray for that

02:29:31.060 you know

02:29:31.400 because

02:29:31.760 you never know

02:29:32.960 when you develop an intervention

02:29:33.980 if it's going to work

02:29:34.760 there's also evidence

02:29:35.840 but not from my lab

02:29:37.240 that doing such things

02:29:39.360 improves your physical health

02:29:40.800 and I think the reason for that is

02:29:42.540 is that

02:29:42.840 you know

02:29:43.040 when you go over your autobiography

02:29:44.360 and you scour out

02:29:45.780 those negative places

02:29:46.880 that you're sort of dragging along with you

02:29:48.740 it lowers your overall stress load

02:29:50.980 because your brain is kind of

02:29:52.860 I think it's calculating

02:29:53.920 how dangerous the world is

02:29:56.120 by attending to the ratio of

02:29:58.940 successes to failures

02:30:00.800 that you've had in your life

02:30:02.120 something like that

02:30:03.000 and so

02:30:03.340 you know

02:30:04.260 if there are holes in your map

02:30:05.920 that you could still fall through

02:30:07.300 then your brain regards

02:30:08.600 the territory still

02:30:09.840 as a bit

02:30:10.320 on the dangerous side

02:30:11.540 and then

02:30:12.360 you're more prepared

02:30:13.680 for emergency action

02:30:14.880 and that's hard on you

02:30:15.860 so

02:30:16.240 you want to go back there

02:30:17.500 and fix up those

02:30:18.740 experiences

02:30:21.400 to the degree that you can

02:30:22.860 now

02:30:23.440 those are going to be

02:30:25.680 peer rated

02:30:26.780 now that's complicated

02:30:28.800 but here's how you do it

02:30:30.320 write the thing

02:30:31.660 so that you

02:30:32.700 have written it for you

02:30:35.340 and then take everything out

02:30:37.660 that you're not

02:30:38.540 comfortable sharing with other people

02:30:40.920 and so

02:30:42.160 there's a couple of reasons

02:30:43.200 I do it that way

02:30:44.120 one is just that

02:30:45.100 there's just no other way to do it

02:30:46.400 because

02:30:47.060 if I want to do this with you

02:30:49.800 the grading load is too high

02:30:51.820 to do it

02:30:52.560 so

02:30:53.540 I thought

02:30:54.440 well it's still worth doing

02:30:55.620 and because this is a class

02:30:57.080 about narrative

02:30:57.740 and about self-narrative

02:30:58.720 it's the right thing to do

02:30:59.760 and

02:31:00.660 most of you are graduating soon

02:31:02.120 and it's like

02:31:02.660 it's helpful

02:31:03.740 I think you'll find it very helpful

02:31:05.260 that's what students report

02:31:06.460 and so

02:31:07.640 you'll each read

02:31:09.680 three people will read

02:31:13.140 each of your

02:31:14.520 offerings

02:31:17.680 and give you a grade

02:31:18.780 and then you get the average

02:31:20.320 of the best two grades

02:31:21.420 and they're supposed to provide you

02:31:23.060 with constructive feedback

02:31:24.120 and constructive feedback

02:31:25.540 is sort of

02:31:26.220 mostly

02:31:27.020 what did you do right

02:31:28.100 you know

02:31:29.180 and maybe some hints

02:31:30.300 about where you can flesh it out

02:31:31.440 and all that

02:31:32.000 but

02:31:32.840 so that's that

02:31:34.320 and you need to write an essay

02:31:35.520 this is all detailed

02:31:37.460 on the

02:31:37.960 on the website

02:31:38.940 and

02:31:40.940 that's the website

02:31:42.380 if you go to

02:31:43.160 jordanbpeterson.com

02:31:44.620 on the left

02:31:45.440 there's classes

02:31:46.320 if you click classes

02:31:47.240 you get a bunch of tabs

02:31:48.560 and one of the tabs

02:31:49.300 is psych 434

02:31:50.240 and that's

02:31:51.000 obviously this class

02:31:52.260 and so

02:31:52.600 there's some extra readings

02:31:54.560 on there

02:31:55.060 and

02:31:56.040 a list of

02:31:57.220 how we're going to go through

02:31:58.020 the course

02:31:58.540 the dates aren't right

02:32:00.040 I got to update it

02:32:01.260 and I haven't

02:32:02.220 finished that yet

02:32:03.020 but

02:32:03.300 the rest of it's pretty much

02:32:04.700 the way it is

02:32:05.380 this writing program

02:32:06.760 is an online program

02:32:07.900 and it

02:32:08.300 it guides you through

02:32:09.360 the process of doing it

02:32:10.420 but really

02:32:11.100 I would really recommend

02:32:13.020 that you start

02:32:13.980 like this week

02:32:15.620 because

02:32:16.620 it also works better

02:32:18.360 if you do it over time

02:32:19.560 and it seems

02:32:20.300 like in bursts of writing

02:32:21.960 you know

02:32:22.320 and to sleep

02:32:23.440 in between episodes

02:32:24.380 because that's when

02:32:25.140 your brain consolidates

02:32:26.440 its new information

02:32:27.420 and I would say

02:32:29.400 do it meditatively

02:32:31.000 you know

02:32:32.540 ask yourself

02:32:33.720 ask yourself

02:32:35.060 it's a different way of

02:32:36.460 it's really funny

02:32:37.580 what happens

02:32:38.140 when you ask yourself

02:32:39.080 questions

02:32:39.520 because part of you

02:32:40.380 will answer

02:32:40.960 and you don't know

02:32:41.740 what the answer will be

02:32:42.660 but

02:32:43.340 an answer comes

02:32:44.720 almost always

02:32:45.580 and

02:32:45.840 you know

02:32:46.920 like you think

02:32:47.460 well what happened to me

02:32:48.800 when I was six

02:32:49.600 around six

02:32:50.340 that was important

02:32:51.160 and

02:32:52.400 through some mysterious process

02:32:55.400 perhaps a memory

02:32:56.400 will come to mind

02:32:57.580 so

02:32:59.100 there's a test

02:33:01.040 so there's these two

02:33:02.780 assignments

02:33:04.400 plus the essay

02:33:05.540 the essay

02:33:06.860 can be in anything you want

02:33:09.100 that's related to the class

02:33:11.740 you have to make the case

02:33:13.320 that it's related to the class

02:33:14.600 so

02:33:15.560 it's an opportunity to

02:33:17.500 you know

02:33:19.760 to

02:33:20.080 write about something

02:33:22.100 you want to write about

02:33:22.920 and

02:33:26.140 there's a final exam

02:33:27.220 and the final exam

02:33:28.600 if you read the book

02:33:29.740 and you come to the classes

02:33:30.600 you won't have any problem

02:33:31.520 with the final exam

02:33:32.300 because it's not

02:33:33.060 it's not tricky

02:33:34.640 it's just

02:33:35.620 survey of what we've gone through

02:33:38.980 and so

02:33:40.140 I did that

02:33:41.220 I didn't

02:33:41.920 have that to begin with

02:33:42.980 but

02:33:43.180 you know

02:33:44.000 you need a carrot

02:33:44.680 and a stick

02:33:45.460 because you guys are busy

02:33:46.560 and

02:33:46.820 you know

02:33:47.460 you're going to triage

02:33:48.460 and do the things

02:33:49.900 that are crucial

02:33:50.600 and perhaps not the things

02:33:52.060 that aren't

02:33:52.540 and no wonder

02:33:53.200 so

02:33:53.520 I had to make this

02:33:54.700 crucial

02:33:55.240 because otherwise

02:33:55.900 you won't

02:33:56.460 read it

02:33:57.340 and that's partly

02:33:57.940 because it's hard

02:33:58.740 and so

02:33:59.820 but hopefully

02:34:00.520 the course

02:34:01.220 lectures will help

02:34:02.580 guide you through it

02:34:03.540 and

02:34:04.460 that's about that

02:34:09.440 so I'm going to tell you

02:34:12.680 a bunch of stories

02:34:13.620 and I'm going to try to explain what they mean

02:34:16.160 and what I hope will happen

02:34:17.980 is that

02:34:18.480 the world of narrative will open up for you

02:34:22.420 and that

02:34:23.340 and like I found that incredibly useful

02:34:26.940 it's incredibly useful

02:34:28.200 to understand

02:34:29.480 these things

02:34:30.820 it situates you better

02:34:32.300 and

02:34:32.640 it also helps you

02:34:34.080 see what people tell me about this course frequently

02:34:36.680 is that

02:34:37.160 it's something like

02:34:42.780 that they already knew what I'm telling them

02:34:46.720 but they didn't know that they knew it

02:34:50.040 so it makes sense

02:34:51.360 it clicks

02:34:52.040 it clicks

02:34:52.820 and you know

02:34:53.980 to me

02:34:54.360 what that means is that

02:34:55.420 you have the information

02:34:56.660 represented in you

02:34:59.340 in action

02:35:00.720 in your procedures

02:35:02.580 in your habits

02:35:03.480 and in your perceptual structures

02:35:05.560 it's implicit

02:35:06.320 it's the implicit you

02:35:07.900 and then

02:35:09.520 I can articulate in part

02:35:13.100 what that

02:35:13.600 implicit you is

02:35:15.300 and it fits

02:35:16.100 click

02:35:16.420 oh yeah

02:35:17.040 that's what I'm like

02:35:17.700 that's what people are like

02:35:18.520 that's what people are like

02:35:19.460 and so

02:35:20.360 well

02:35:21.820 if any of that happened today

02:35:23.560 during this lecture

02:35:24.500 to you

02:35:25.220 well then that's a good sign

02:35:26.300 that you might

02:35:27.200 you know

02:35:28.040 benefit from the course

02:35:29.200 and if it didn't

02:35:31.320 well you could try

02:35:32.200 one more lecture

02:35:32.920 and see what happens

02:35:33.880 but you know

02:35:35.640 this is sort of

02:35:36.280 what the course is like

02:35:37.280 and

02:35:38.960 if that's what you want

02:35:42.540 then

02:35:42.800 this is where you get it

02:35:44.220 good to see all of you

02:35:47.000 and I guess we're done

02:35:48.120 right

02:35:48.400 we appreciate you

02:35:50.480 listening to this lecture

02:35:51.600 next week

02:35:52.460 we continue

02:35:53.200 with Marriott's

02:35:54.340 and Individuals

02:35:55.480 part one

02:35:56.260 Michaela

02:35:57.240 if you found this

02:35:58.480 conversation meaningful

02:35:59.520 you might consider

02:36:00.540 picking up Dad's books

02:36:01.700 Maps of Meaning

02:36:02.480 The Architecture of Belief

02:36:03.820 or his newer bestseller

02:36:04.980 Twelve Rules for Life

02:36:06.080 An Antidote to Chaos

02:36:07.260 both of these works

02:36:08.280 delve much deeper

02:36:09.080 into the topics

02:36:09.780 covered in the

02:36:10.600 Jordan B. Peterson podcast

02:36:11.780 see JordanBPeterson.com

02:36:13.740 for audio ebook

02:36:14.660 and text links

02:36:15.400 or pick up the books

02:36:16.640 at your favorite bookseller

02:36:17.580 remember to check out

02:36:18.840 JordanBPeterson.com

02:36:20.060 slash personality

02:36:20.940 for information

02:36:21.840 on his new course

02:36:22.820 I hope you enjoyed

02:36:24.120 this podcast

02:36:24.680 if you did

02:36:25.920 please let a friend know

02:36:27.180 or leave a review

02:36:27.980 follow me on my

02:36:29.560 YouTube channel

02:36:30.520 JordanBPeterson

02:36:31.720 on Twitter

02:36:32.680 at JordanBPeterson

02:36:34.300 on Facebook

02:36:35.440 at DrJordanBPeterson

02:36:37.620 and at Instagram

02:36:38.680 at Jordan.B.Peterson

02:36:40.980 details on this show

02:36:42.860 access to my blog

02:36:44.520 information about

02:36:45.760 my tour dates

02:36:46.620 and other events

02:36:47.440 and my list of

02:36:48.440 recommended books

02:36:49.480 can be found

02:36:50.340 on my website

02:36:51.200 JordanBPeterson.com

02:36:53.320 my online writing programs

02:36:55.420 designed to help

02:36:56.300 people straighten out

02:36:57.280 their pasts

02:36:58.220 understand themselves

02:36:59.400 in the present

02:37:00.120 and develop a

02:37:01.060 sophisticated vision

02:37:02.080 and strategy

02:37:02.720 for the future

02:37:03.500 can be found

02:37:04.300 at SelfAuthoring.com

02:37:06.260 that's SelfAuthoring.com

02:37:08.760 from the

02:37:10.420 Westwood One

02:37:11.260 Podcast Network

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129. Maps of Meaning 1： Context and Background

Summary

Transcript