The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 137. Maps of Meaning 09： Patterns of Symbolic Representation

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00:00:55.520 So today we're going to delve a little bit more deeply into the realm of symbolic representation,

00:01:15.600 and I'll tell you what I think I'm doing, and then I'll show you a bunch of examples of it,

00:01:22.340 then I want to tell you a couple more stories, and so I'll tell you the stories in the second half

00:01:26.420 of the class. So, you know, it was Carl Jung who popularized and differentiated the idea of

00:01:34.360 archetypes. They weren't his idea. Platonic forms are archetypes, essentially. Ideals are an archetype,

00:01:42.440 and so, but Jung, the thing that I think he did that hadn't been done before was to suggest that,

00:01:50.780 as well as suggesting, as Freud did, that human beings are composed of sub-personalities.

00:01:57.780 Jung pointed out, as Freud did to some degree, that some of those personalities have a universal

00:02:04.320 character, and so that they can be thought about as transcendent entities. And you could think about

00:02:10.200 those, while they have been thought about, and even put forward as gods of one form or another.

00:02:17.680 Now, when Jung talked about archetypes, it was never clear what he meant, and I think the reason for

00:02:22.460 that was because the archetype is a very complicated idea, and a very complicated phenomena, and you can

00:02:28.120 think about it biologically, and you can think about it socially, and you can think about it as something

00:02:32.080 that the individual participates in creating. So it's not that easy to localize it. And as well,

00:02:47.820 Jung was never clear about what the universe of archetypes looked like. At some times, he spoke as if they were

00:02:54.500 a relatively small number, and then at other times, he spoke as if they were innumerable.

00:02:58.460 And I think the reason for that is, in part, it depends on the level of analysis, right? The more

00:03:05.060 transcendent the archetype, the fewer they are, but they differentiate, because you might say, well,

00:03:09.560 how many hero archetypes are there? And one answer could be one, but they differentiate all the way

00:03:15.440 out into the diverse range of works of fiction that we have. So you could say there's as many variants of

00:03:20.820 the hero archetype, roughly speaking, as there are works of fiction. So you think about it as a hierarchy

00:03:25.960 with the ultimate archetype at the top. So then another question might be, what does the landscape

00:03:31.540 of ultimate archetypes look like? And I think that that's, well, that's what I tried to lay out, and that's

00:03:37.060 what I'm trying to lay out in this diagram. So now, why do you want to know that? There's a practical reason,

00:03:44.160 there's a number of practical reasons, as well as intellectual reasons. One of the most relevant

00:03:49.880 practical reasons, as far as I'm concerned, is that integrating narratives, and so those would

00:03:56.520 include political narratives, integrating narratives have their force because they draw on universal

00:04:02.520 archetypes. Otherwise, they wouldn't have any power, right? Because they're basically stories,

00:04:07.020 an integrating archetype, like the story that people, that Hitler sold the Germans, or that the Germans and

00:04:13.340 Hitler co-created, which is a much more accurate way of thinking about it. That had motive force,

00:04:18.240 because it had an archetypal essence. And so, political stories derive their power from the

00:04:24.380 underlying archetypal representations. Obviously, because they have to be concerned with the things

00:04:29.340 that people find important, right? How can you sell a political message to someone if it isn't about

00:04:34.120 something they find important? And if it's important to them, it's going to be grounded, at least to

00:04:38.560 some degree, in their biological substructure. I mean, if you're talking to hungry people about food,

00:04:45.160 it's a story that you can tell, right? Because it hooks them deeply. It hooks deep into their

00:04:51.440 motivational systems. To use a narrative of utopia, which is the land of milk and honey,

00:04:56.980 roughly speaking, a very, very old idea, you're also tapping deeply into intrinsic human longings.

00:05:03.860 And so, the idea that political narratives incorporate archetypal themes is not really,

00:05:11.840 it's not an idea that I would consider particularly controversial. Putting it that way might be.

00:05:19.300 Okay, so, the problem with political narratives, in my estimation, is that they can rapidly transform

00:05:27.160 themselves into ideologies. And ideologies are dangerous for a variety of reasons, but the primary

00:05:31.760 reason for their danger, I think, this is a hypothesis, is because of their one-sided nature.

00:05:37.660 What happens is that they capitalize, parasitize, I think is even a better way of thinking about it,

00:05:44.260 a profound underlying narrative, but they don't tell the entire story.

00:05:48.780 And so then, if you're looking for orientation in the world because you're fragmented and chaotic,

00:05:53.920 and somebody provides you with a partial story, that's going to serve an integrating function.

00:05:59.180 And it's very... one of the things you see in psychotherapy is that if you're chaotic and confused,

00:06:03.980 and you go see a therapist who has a particular kind of practice, Freudian, behavioral, cognitive,

00:06:09.460 Rogerian, whatever, there's a high probability that undergoing that course of therapy is going

00:06:14.240 to be good for you, and that you might even come to view your life in the terms of that

00:06:22.080 therapeutic practice. And you might say, well, you... why is that therapeutic practice right for you?

00:06:27.880 Maybe it could have been Rogerian instead of Freudian, say. And the answer to that is, yeah, well,

00:06:32.460 it probably could be... could have been, because, roughly speaking, any coherent ordering principle

00:06:38.780 is better than none. And so that's also a good way to think about human development from an intellectual

00:06:45.420 perspective, is that partly what has to be provided to individuals as they mature into adults

00:06:53.840 is some kind of ordering structure. And this is one of the facts that people who criticize

00:07:02.260 the dogmatic element of religious belief don't really understand. They don't understand that

00:07:07.200 you can't... you have to provide people with a determinate structure of some type,

00:07:14.020 even if it's constricting and restricting and crushing, for that matter.

00:07:18.540 You have to pass through a disciplinary structure before... and even in principle, you could be free.

00:07:24.800 Before you're disciplined, you're not free. You're just chaotic. And so you have to practice some set

00:07:30.600 of routines and rituals. Now, you could say, well, they don't necessarily have to be religious, and

00:07:35.180 they could be secular. You could become a lawyer. You could become a plumber. You could become a

00:07:39.140 carpenter. And I would say, yes, that's far better than not becoming anything. But the problem with

00:07:47.020 an identity that isn't rooted into the archetypes is it leaves you incomplete. Because the archetypal

00:07:52.360 rooting of the identity is what helps you grapple with the fundamental existential problems of life.

00:07:58.900 And whether you're a carpenter or a plumber or a lawyer, they're still going to... your soul is still

00:08:04.120 going to hunger for some deeper form of identity. And you're not going to get that without being...

00:08:09.920 without having your practical identity encapsulated in something that's... that's greater from a

00:08:15.320 philosophical perspective. And perhaps even deeper than philosophy, which I think the archetypal

00:08:19.700 stories are... they're the... they're the structure within which philosophy itself is embedded.

00:08:25.280 And outside of that is a behavioral structure. We've talked about how those evolve. You know,

00:08:28.960 there's... there's a behavioral evolution of something approximating a consensual morality,

00:08:33.800 and then stories about that consensual morality emerge. And then inside that, the... the structures

00:08:39.760 of philosophy nest. And all of those things have to be addressed by your identity to some degree,

00:08:44.380 or you're weak. That's the problem. You're beset by doubts. You're beset by anxiety.

00:08:49.260 You're easy to stop. And you don't have much motivation. And none of that's good. It's not good

00:08:53.860 at all. Because life presents you with enough real obstacles in the for... in the face of genuine

00:08:59.520 suffering. So that unless you're strongly grounded and have a real reason for moving forward,

00:09:05.760 you're going to get stopped. And as soon as you're stopped, you are one miserable thing.

00:09:09.340 Because it's... it's almost like the definition of human misery is to be paralyzed by anxiety and

00:09:15.340 emotional pain, and also have no motive force forward. It's a terrible state. And so you don't

00:09:22.100 want to be in that state, and you have to have an identity that's powerful enough and deeply rooted

00:09:26.620 enough so the most profound doubts that might emerge about your life are met by something of

00:09:31.540 equivalent force. Okay, so we're going to review the symbolic domain, and briefly, and then I'm going to show

00:09:37.280 you a bunch of different examples of how it plays itself out, partly archetypally and symbolically,

00:09:43.280 but also partly politically. Because I want to show you how both of those things... how those things

00:09:47.100 parallel one another. And partly what I'm hoping is that understanding the full domain of archetypal

00:09:55.840 symbolic representation will also inoculate you against ideological possession. Because you'll know

00:10:03.060 when you're told a half-sided, one-sided ideological story, you'll know that there's something missing

00:10:09.700 in the story. There's... there's... there's pieces that aren't being told, or there's part of the story

00:10:14.000 that isn't being revealed. So if it's a story about how tyrannical modern culture is, and how oppressive,

00:10:19.900 you think, well, yes, obviously, but what about the beneficial aspect of it, and how is that being

00:10:25.760 represented and dealt with? And so... and it's the same story about the negative element of the human

00:10:30.920 being, which you hear stories like that all the time, because I think perhaps more intensely since

00:10:36.480 the 1960s, but... but... but because I wasn't around before then, I don't know what it was like

00:10:41.780 previous to that. There is this idea that people hold, and that's promoted, that there's something

00:10:46.420 fundamentally, you know, cancerous about human beings. It was the Club of Rome, I think, when they

00:10:52.200 pronounced that everyone on the planet was going to die of starvation by the year 2000,

00:10:56.740 that human beings were no better than a cancer on the planet. It's like, well, yeah, you know,

00:11:02.540 there's lots of things about us that could be improved, but when you... when you portray the

00:11:07.600 human only as negative, the question should arise, it's like, fair enough, but what about the positive

00:11:12.700 part? Why aren't you telling that story? And it doesn't take you... you know, all you have to do is be

00:11:19.280 sick once and go to a hospital where you get competent care to understand that, you know,

00:11:23.940 and you can get incompetent care too, but sometimes you get really competent care, you think, yes,

00:11:28.300 it's really good that there's some people out there who have their act together and are trying

00:11:31.780 to put things together, you know, and you can't forget that in your story, and you don't want to

00:11:36.000 forget that in your story about yourself either. So what is the fundamental landscape? Well, the basic

00:11:41.740 idea is that it's... it's... it's predicated... you can look at it multiple different ways. It's

00:11:49.340 predicated on the contrast between explored and unexplored territory, or the contrast between

00:11:54.100 the interpretive structure that philosophers like Kant talked about and the real-world manifestation

00:12:00.560 that underlies... whose existence underlies the validity of empirical thinking, right? There's you

00:12:07.540 and your structure, you interpret the world, but there's also the world informing you. And so

00:12:11.640 that's the explored territory versus unexplored territory, something like that, or it's order

00:12:16.400 versus chaos, or it's... or it's... another variant of that would be it's the hero going out into the

00:12:22.300 unknown to... to encounter the dragon of chaos and to gather the information that... that's out there

00:12:29.320 in the unknown. And... and... and I tried to make the case to you, because I'm often accused,

00:12:34.580 most recently on Sam Harris's podcast, of making up post-hoc stories. You know, you have a set of

00:12:42.040 stories, you can interpret them any way you want. Of course, that is a danger, because you bring an

00:12:46.180 interpretive structure to bear on every set of facts. How do I know that this isn't just an arbitrary

00:12:50.980 post-hoc analysis? And my answer to that, it's a technical answer, is it manifests itself at

00:12:57.660 multiple layers of analysis simultaneously. And the probability that it's merely an imposition of an

00:13:03.980 a priori interpretive structure is decreased by the number of different levels of manifestation

00:13:08.940 that you can detect the phenomena. It's... it's an... it's... it's axiomatic. That's why you have

00:13:13.480 five senses. That's why... because they each report a different level. That's why in science,

00:13:18.340 use multiple methods to detect the same thing. So one of the things I tried to point out is that

00:13:23.120 you can map this archetypal structure onto brain structure quite nicely, even onto hemispheric

00:13:29.980 structure and the function of the subcortical systems. But even more particularly, you can map

00:13:34.880 it onto the function of specific neuropsychological systems within the... within the neuro... within

00:13:40.940 the biological neurology. We do have an interpretive structure, right? That's your map, so to speak,

00:13:47.340 of... of expectation and desire in the world. That's your model. There's a brain area, roughly

00:13:52.980 the hippocampus, although this is an oversimplification. It compares that with incoming sense data,

00:13:58.400 which is also a model, but we won't get into that for the sake of argument. So that's explored

00:14:03.260 territory. Unexplored territory. And the thing in the center doing the comparison, that's the

00:14:08.740 knower. And so... so it strikes me as highly unlikely, although you're welcome to criticize

00:14:15.240 away, that you'll see that kind of stacking of evidence across multiple domains of inquiry

00:14:20.500 without there actually being a pattern there. So it's not merely post hoc analysis. And even the

00:14:26.340 people who derived these patterns, like Jung to begin with, let's say, looked cross-culturally

00:14:31.200 at least to say, well, here's... here's a manifestation of a pattern, and here's a separate culture,

00:14:36.040 and you can see the same pattern. So there's some attempt there to be methodologically rigorous.

00:14:40.320 He did the same thing with people's fantasies and dreams. And then again, by mapping those

00:14:45.000 onto people's behavior and therapy, also had them test out the ideas in the world. So these

00:14:49.920 aren't as trivial methodologically as people make them out to be. And especially that's the case

00:14:54.520 when you can put a biological underpinning underneath them. So the proposition is explored

00:14:59.340 territory, unexplored territory, and the explorer, roughly speaking. And then a differentiation

00:15:05.180 of those two things into positive and negative. Why? Because everything complex has a positive

00:15:11.400 and negative element. And so explored territory can become stultifying and crushing. That's tyranny.

00:15:18.780 But it also provides the structure that informs and protects you. And unexplored territory, well,

00:15:25.160 that can kill you, obviously. But it's also the place that you need to go when you're static and

00:15:32.040 dead, and you need new water, and you need new life, and you need new information. So it's a

00:15:37.380 constant movement out into the unknown and back, and out into the unknown and back. And that's what

00:15:42.340 human beings are like, right? We're information foragers. And then the individual is both positive

00:15:49.140 and negative. And you know that. Because you know yourself, and you know other people. And you know

00:15:55.080 yourself, you can be... There's parts of you there that are good, classically speaking, or good even by

00:16:00.120 your own definition. And other parts that really could use, to say the minimum, a tremendous amount

00:16:06.920 of work. And you also know that about other people. And if you get truly unlucky with yourself

00:16:11.460 or other people, it won't merely be that you're not trying hard enough. You'll encounter something

00:16:16.840 in you, or someone who's absolutely malevolent and bent on destruction. And that's also not a

00:16:23.240 hypothesis. You know, the literature on post-traumatic stress disorder reveals quite clearly that people

00:16:30.600 typically develop post-traumatic stress disorder because they encounter some form of malevolence.

00:16:36.320 And if it's ever happened to you, you know that it's no joke. It's not some figment of your

00:16:41.480 imagination. Quite the contrary. So... And then that entire world, that's sort of the world that can

00:16:48.500 be comprehended, is nested inside a broader symbolic network. And that seems to be the symbolic network

00:16:56.280 that's made up of the dragon of chaos, which is something like our representation of the set of

00:17:01.480 unknow... the set of all currently unknowable things. It's a very strange category, right? It's

00:17:07.760 like the category of zero or the category of infinity. And the reason that we formulated that

00:17:12.300 category is because we don't only want to know how to solve a problem. Just like we don't only want to

00:17:18.500 know how to win a game. We want to know how to win the set of all possible games. And we want to solve

00:17:23.860 the set of all possible problems. And so what human beings have been trying to do for the last

00:17:29.080 forever is trying to figure out how to solve the problem of the set of all problems. And we actually

00:17:35.580 have some ideas. One is play to win the metagame and not the game. That's one solution. Another

00:17:41.920 solution is go out into the unknown voluntarily and gather the information that lies there because

00:17:47.380 that continually updates you. The other one is to make sacrifices. And that was discovered in an

00:17:56.460 articulate form not very long ago. And the idea of sacrifice is something like, well, you don't just

00:18:01.760 have to solve the problem of how do you survive in the present, which is roughly the problem that

00:18:06.920 animals are always trying to solve. You have to solve the problem of how you survive in the present,

00:18:12.140 given that you also have to survive next week, next month, next year, and among other people.

00:18:16.900 And the answer to that, in part, is the answer of sacrifice, which is to give up something that

00:18:21.540 you desperately want now, that would even be useful right now, so that you accrue more benefit across

00:18:27.900 a broader span of time. A very, very difficult lesson for animals to learn. Animals have a terrible

00:18:33.320 time learning that. But even human beings have a terrible time doing it because there's some real

00:18:39.000 intelligence in getting while the getting is good. But it's a suboptimal strategy,

00:18:46.500 if you can stabilize the environment and spread out your adaptive capability over wider spans of

00:18:51.760 time, well, so much the better. You get what you need now, and you get what you need later, and

00:18:56.800 you get what you want, and so does your family and other people. A much better solution. But that

00:19:01.700 requires, it requires precisely sacrifice, because it requires sacrificing the present for the future.

00:19:08.160 And that idea of sacrifice emerged, like all of our ideas, first in action,

00:19:13.500 in acting these things out, and then conceptualizing them with our bodies, like in drama,

00:19:18.640 just the way that Piaget described children first assimilating the structure of their parents' actions

00:19:26.760 by imitating them, rather than by breaking them down into systems of rules, understanding the rules,

00:19:32.120 and incorporating the rules. That isn't how we work. We act and figure things out in action,

00:19:37.760 and then we imitate our own actions. And to imitate your own actions is to act yourself out,

00:19:43.060 or to act other people out. You can do that without having explicit, articulated knowledge.

00:19:48.460 And that's, it's so crucial to understand that, because it explains a great mystery,

00:19:54.780 which is how can we tell stories that have meanings that are deeper than we know?

00:19:58.300 And the answer to that is, we have information encoded in our behavior that transcends our

00:20:03.120 understanding. Well, how? Well, we're constantly modifying each other. Constantly. And the world's

00:20:09.520 constantly modifying us. And there's no reason that while being modified, we should also be able

00:20:14.840 to track how it is that we're being modified. We have to figure that out afterwards. And it's

00:20:19.640 extraordinarily difficult to look at a whole culture, or even a single individual, and to say,

00:20:24.560 well, what is that person? Or what is that societal structure? It supersedes our conscious

00:20:31.260 capacity for representations. We're always playing catch-up. That doesn't mean that we don't act out

00:20:36.200 things we think sometimes. You know, that the causal pathway can't go the other way, because it can.

00:20:41.920 But more frequently, it's bottom-up rather than top-down, which is how everything works in the

00:20:47.000 biological world. Animals do and have wisdom, but they don't know what they do, and they can't

00:20:53.300 articulate their wisdom. So it's self-evident that a process like this must have occurred.

00:20:58.120 I mean, I was talking about wolf dominance behaviors online the other day, and somebody

00:21:04.780 tweeted and said, it's only captive wolves that dominate each other through aggression.

00:21:12.140 It isn't necessarily the most aggressive males that are dominant in the wild. And I thought, well,

00:21:17.520 yes, I know that. That's what De Waal has already documented among chimpanzees. The thing that emerges

00:21:26.380 as appropriate to lead and then to be imitated as leader isn't untrammeled aggression. It's some process

00:21:36.040 that is akin to my interests and your interests matching over some period of time with all of us

00:21:43.340 considered simultaneously, right? That's some equilibrated state of social behavior embodied

00:21:49.860 even in the behavior of wolves, the behavior of rats who know how to play fairly, the behavior of

00:21:54.400 chimpanzees, and certainly in our own behavior, much more complexly, in no small part because our social

00:22:01.420 structures are much bigger than those of animals. So therefore, much more complex. Robin Dunbar has

00:22:06.240 indicated, for example, that one of the best predictors of brain size, predictors or correlates

00:22:11.600 more likely. One of the highest correlates of brain size, especially, I think he only looked within

00:22:18.120 primates, is group size. And that makes sense, right? Because the complexity of the social organization

00:22:23.560 increases dramatically as the number of individuals involved increases. And I wouldn't say it's group

00:22:28.920 size, brain size that determines group size. It's brain size determines group size determines brain size

00:22:35.140 determines group size in a loop. And many other factors are involved in expanding cortical

00:22:40.460 representation as well. So as far as I can tell, there isn't anything contentious in those claims.

00:22:47.100 And it gives us a basis out of which the archetypal stories can emerge. And it explains why we can

00:22:54.640 see revealed truth in them, so to speak. Because the truth was instantiated in the behavioral realm,

00:23:00.360 not in the conceptual realm. And through the... You know, you see this in your own life. You watch

00:23:05.020 yourself. And one day you go, aha! That's what I've been up to this whole time. That happens to

00:23:10.400 people in therapy all the time. Or you're dealing with some other person, and they tell you something,

00:23:14.500 it's like the last piece fell into place. It's like, oh, I had you completely wrong. Now I get what

00:23:19.700 you're up to. And what's happened is, my representation has become more complete, but also matches your

00:23:25.940 behavior better. There's a concordance between what I've observed and what actually manifests

00:23:30.680 itself. And so, well, so for the derivation of wisdom from the observation of behavior.

00:23:38.260 You do the same thing when you analyze a Shakespeare play, you know? A Shakespeare play never happened.

00:23:45.180 But Shakespeare extracted out patterns that happen all the time. And if he hadn't extracted them out,

00:23:50.620 no one would watch the plays, right? The plays are interesting precisely to the degree

00:23:54.640 that the play is about something that's about you and something that's about you and something

00:23:59.840 that's about you. It has to be something that's common to everyone. And you watch the play, and

00:24:04.440 you partake in it through imitation. Even though you're sitting down, you partake in it through

00:24:08.840 imitation. And then maybe later you go for coffee with your friends and say, well, what was that all

00:24:13.180 about? And that's your attempt to take the behavioral wisdom that's coded in the story and make it

00:24:19.060 articulate. And we're doing that all the time. Whenever you discuss a movie, you do that.

00:24:23.300 And that's how educated people actually interact with literature, right? Because if you're

00:24:27.440 uneducated, roughly speaking, you go see a movie and you just go see it. You never think about it

00:24:33.740 as something that was produced. You never think about it as a cultural entity. And you never do

00:24:39.040 that higher order analysis. And when you first encounter the idea of even doing that, you might

00:24:43.880 be resistant to it. Because it seems in some sense to destroy some of the magic of that pure

00:24:49.600 immersion in the form. But that doesn't mean that people who go to movies and don't talk

00:24:54.460 about them afterwards aren't learning anything. Quite the contrary. They're just learning using

00:24:59.760 a very abstracted form of imitation. And then you might imagine, you don't go to a movie.

00:25:05.820 You go to a hundred movies. And you imitate something that's in common across all the movies.

00:25:12.220 Well, what's that? Well, that's an archetype. The archetype is what's common across stories.

00:25:17.960 And so we're trying to get to the bottom of what's common across stories. And this is the best I've

00:25:22.580 been able to do. It also maps quite nicely onto Heidegger's representation of the world, which is

00:25:27.820 something I only found out later. He has three domains of reality that correspond to this very,

00:25:32.520 very precisely. And then Freud's conception is also very similar. Id, ego, superego, right? The id is the

00:25:40.040 natural force within you, positive and negative, because Freud was smart. He knew there was always

00:25:44.640 that dichotomy. Then the ego, that's you, the individual, positive element, negative element.

00:25:49.660 And the superego, which controls you, represses you, inhibits you, and civilizes you, but is also,

00:25:55.640 can also be a complete tyrant. And so part of the reason Freud's theory obtained such purchase so

00:26:02.800 rapidly was because it filled a, it filled a hole, an archetypal hole that needed to be filled

00:26:08.700 for psychotherapeutic practitioners who, in some sense, had taken the place of priests and ministers

00:26:14.700 and, and that sort of, and rabbis and that sort of person. So, okay. So that's the, the representation.

00:26:24.180 And then, well, we've talked about the representation of chaos, and I would think about that. And this is

00:26:29.460 a radical thing to think. It's sort of predicated on the idea that what you confront

00:26:33.780 in your, in your experience is not so much the material world, but potential. As such, it's the

00:26:41.860 potential that you're constantly contending with, that can destroy you and bring you down, but also

00:26:46.780 has, has, as part of its nature, that which you can extract and use to build and grow. And, and we don't

00:26:55.600 think of ourselves as interacting with potential. We think of ourselves as determined by a material

00:27:02.680 substrate. But I don't think the idea that we're determined by a material substrate is as powerful

00:27:08.900 an idea as the idea that we interact with potential. And I also don't think that the idea that we're

00:27:14.240 determined by a material substrate is a more scientific idea than the idea that we're interacting

00:27:19.200 with potential. Because I think that, and I do this with hesitancy, because any time you delve into the

00:27:24.680 quantum realm, the hypothetical quantum realm to ground your arguments, you're doing something very

00:27:30.640 dangerous. But the quantum view of the world seems to be something like being is a field of potential

00:27:38.340 from which forms emerge. It's something like that. And some of the physicists, like Wheeler,

00:27:43.440 for example, believe that consciousness plays a key determining role in that, whatever that role

00:27:48.720 might be. So it's not reasonable to think of these ideas as somehow outside of the realm of scientific

00:27:55.800 conjecture. Not in the least. Especially because they can also be given a deep evolutionary grounding.

00:28:03.500 And that is, why do we represent potential with a symbol like this? Well, it's because that's a

00:28:09.660 great symbol for what lies outside our field of competence. What is that? Predators. Dangerous predators.

00:28:17.100 Snakes, raptors, carnivores. All amalgamated together in a monster. And it's the monster that, well, it's also

00:28:26.580 the monster that even offers fruit. That's the story in the story of good and evil. Well, or in the story of

00:28:33.060 Adam and Eve. Well, obviously. Because you always hunt for nourishment in the face of predation.

00:28:38.660 Obviously. Always. And that's a paradox. But it's a paradox that's embedded in everything that you do.

00:28:49.380 The strange thing about these categories is they're not exactly logical categories. They're

00:28:53.400 paradoxical categories. And those sorts of things aren't supposed to exist, because generally the

00:28:57.960 rule for a category is it can't contain itself and its opposite at the same time. But if you've ever

00:29:03.360 dealt with a person on an intimate basis, you know perfectly well that the category indicated by

00:29:09.260 their name contains many paradoxical elements. And they might be paradoxical enough so you can't even

00:29:16.160 live with the person. Right? They're not homogenous enough so that you can plot a path forward with that

00:29:22.360 entity. Too many things pulling both you and them apart. So some things are A and only A and not B,

00:29:30.660 but some things are A and B at the same time. And complex categories have that nature.

00:29:38.180 I showed you some of the representations of Osiris and Isis emerging from the conjoined serpent.

00:29:47.500 And that's what this diagram represents to some degree. It's, well, what does the chaos of potential

00:29:55.160 first differentiate itself into? You could say, well, it differentiates itself into yin and yang.

00:30:00.680 That's the right way of thinking about it. It differentiates itself into chaos and order.

00:30:05.000 And those are the father and the mother of everything that comes after them. That's one way of thinking

00:30:10.020 about it. And they each have their symbolic realms. And so I've listed some of the common symbols that

00:30:15.300 are associated with these two realms. Now, it's a difficult thing to pin down, because what one of the

00:30:23.220 symbols mean has to be defined in relationship to the other. So, for example, if you think about

00:30:28.900 the sky, the earth in relationship to the sky, it's easy to make the earth feminine and the sky

00:30:35.540 masculine. That's a common symbolic representation. But if you contrast the earth with the water,

00:30:40.940 then the water tends to be represented as feminine and the earth as masculine. And so the symbolic

00:30:47.140 representations can shift depending on the literary context, let's say, the broader literary context.

00:30:53.160 And that means you can't just do a one-to-one mapping of the symbolic entity onto the underlying

00:30:59.500 archetypal structure. You have to be attentive to context and nuance, of course, because we're

00:31:07.140 talking about literature. You know, it's not like you can use a dictionary of symbols to get your way

00:31:12.180 through something as complex as Shakespeare. But you can see the underlying patterns and use them,

00:31:19.200 especially, I think, if you know the fundamental map. But anyway, so here are the more common

00:31:23.020 symbolic representations. Chaos transforms itself into the great mother. That's the queen. It can be

00:31:31.180 the evil queen or the good queen. It can be the fairy godmother or the queen that provides the poisoned

00:31:36.160 apple to Snow White or the queen that locks the prince. What's his name? I don't remember. The prince

00:31:44.200 in Sleeping Beauty in the dungeon and tries to destroy him. The queen, Tiamat. We've talked about Tiamat.

00:31:51.460 The material world. Material. Matter. Mother. Right? So the material world is the mother of all things,

00:31:59.500 and matter is mother. The land of the dead. Dark water. Unexplored territory. Nature. Mother nature,

00:32:06.720 obviously. The night sky. Contrasted against the day sky. Isis. Queen of the underworld. The womb. The

00:32:12.640 forest. Barbarian lands. Anomalous occurrences in the grave. And the great father. The king.

00:32:20.260 The emperor. Apsu. And Tiamat. Locked together, as we discussed in the Mesopotamian creation myth.

00:32:26.180 The ancestral spirits. The family. The city. Explored territory. Culture. The day sky. Osiris.

00:32:32.880 God the father. The village. The nation. The predictable. The monument. Stone. Anything

00:32:39.140 that's built in stone to last is a representation of the great father. That's why there were monolithic

00:32:45.840 religions spread across the northern hemisphere for thousands and thousands of years. Those people

00:32:51.860 were building things and carving things in stone to make memories. That's what their monuments were

00:32:56.500 for. To bring the past into the present and future on a permanent basis. And to try to instantiate

00:33:03.100 something solid that everyone could stand upon. Well, sometimes solid isn't what you need. Sometimes

00:33:08.740 what you need is fluid and liquid. But the solidity is there to give you something to stand on.

00:33:14.320 Even though it can become something arid and dry. You see in the story of Exodus, Moses is a master

00:33:20.760 of water. And the pharaoh is the king of desert stone, roughly speaking. And the pharaonic Egypt

00:33:27.640 is portrayed as a tyranny because it's nothing but dry stone. And Moses brings water to that.

00:33:34.780 That's chaos. That's partly the Red Sea story. And partly Moses' ability to get water out of rocks.

00:33:40.720 And when that's necessary. And part of the reason that he's found to begin with floating on water

00:33:45.940 when he's an infant. Which is also something that almost killed him, right? Because, well,

00:33:50.240 you don't want to put your infant in a basket of rushes and put him to float on the water.

00:33:54.500 So that's a brief overview of the manner in which images and stories can be used to represent

00:34:02.220 the first division of this underlying reality. You know nothing. What do you do? You establish a

00:34:08.980 center. You explore from the center. It's a domain of safety. And that's surrounded by

00:34:15.740 the unknown. So, and that's what children do. We already know this. If you watch how children

00:34:20.180 explore, it's more evident if you look at children who are somewhat inhibited. Because really extroverted

00:34:26.660 and emotionally stable children, they'll just explore. They won't recede. But children that

00:34:31.560 are sort of balanced in their emotional response. Imagine you bring an 18-month-old to a new

00:34:39.280 playground. A mother's standing there. She's the pillar at the center of the world. Around

00:34:44.480 her is explored territory. And the reason it's explored is because the child knows how to interact

00:34:49.700 with the mother. And so one thing you want to know about kids is you can have multiple caregivers

00:34:54.240 for your kids. You can have a nanny. You can put them in daycare. But they do not like having their

00:34:59.700 primary caregiver switched. It's like everything transforms when that happens. And it destabilizes

00:35:06.160 them badly. So if you're going to have other people take care of your kids, it's better that

00:35:10.420 it's the same other person. Well, obviously. I mean, they're going to form an intimate and loving

00:35:16.400 relationship with them with any luck. And if that disappears, it's like a death. But it's worse than

00:35:22.260 that in some sense. Or the reason that the death is bad because the child's conceptual world,

00:35:27.720 their familiar world, familiar family, their familiar world collapses. So children hate that.

00:35:34.140 Now, they can bond to multiple people. That's not a problem. But they do not like having their

00:35:38.340 caregiver shifted because that defines their territory. So the child is adapted to the mother's

00:35:44.680 presence and has been ever since birth if everything's gone well. So it's a place of security

00:35:49.100 and stability. Partly because the child knows how to act around the mother. But also partly

00:35:53.560 because if the child encounters anything that he or she doesn't understand well in the presence

00:35:59.020 of mother, the mother will instantly intervene to provide the knowledge necessary to encapsulate

00:36:04.100 the unexpected occurrence. Okay, so the child's by the mother. And maybe he's holding on. And

00:36:10.680 that gives him ventral contact. It's comforting. It's comforting. It produces opiates. It decreases

00:36:17.280 pain. It's directly comforting. And so then the child is maybe they're shy. They're going

00:36:22.400 to take a few looks at what's around first and start to... They're frozen, clinging to

00:36:27.820 something secure. And then if nothing negative happens, they start to relax. Just like a rat

00:36:33.840 that's been put into a new cage, they start to relax. And they'll start to look. And that's

00:36:38.300 the first manifestations of voluntary exploratory behavior. And maybe if there's other people

00:36:43.300 around, they'll look and smile. And then they'll hide. Right? And the smile is an invitation to play

00:36:47.960 or interact. But so it's a foray out into the world. Smile, eye contact, then hide. Maybe they'll do

00:36:53.900 that multiple times and get a game going. And that establishes something stable going on between them

00:36:59.120 and the stranger. Does the stranger know how to play? And then maybe they'll loosen up. And they'll

00:37:04.140 start to explore. And then they go out away from the mother and start interacting with the world

00:37:08.580 until something happens that overwhelms them. Then they'll run back. Get a hug. Maybe have a

00:37:14.980 sleep. Because maybe they've processed enough. And then you can encourage them to go back. And so

00:37:19.320 what they're doing is they have the flag planted on an unknown territory. That's mum. The flag.

00:37:26.080 Right? They circulate around there. Because it's secure. Make forays outwards where the dragons are.

00:37:33.020 Gather what's of interest. And if it's too much, they run back. And the mum says, it's okay. No

00:37:39.240 problem. Or gives them a little rock. Or maybe feeds them something. And lets them have a little

00:37:45.600 rest. And then off you go. Play again. Out they go again. And so what the child is doing is continually

00:37:51.020 moving out. Extending its explored territory into the unknown. Just like the Star Trek voyagers.

00:37:57.200 And then moving back to security. And then moving out farther. And then moving back to security.

00:38:02.620 And hopefully at some point, they carry with them their own security. Once they become competent.

00:38:07.980 Once you've incorporated all the competence of your parents, you don't need to go back. Well,

00:38:13.940 and even if you do, it isn't going to help. You've transcended this security. And that's

00:38:19.640 what makes you an adult. Hopefully that happens. So that's why the hero architecture,

00:38:27.200 is the central human story. It's because that's how we learn. It's an imagistic representation

00:38:32.240 of the process by which we make sense out of the world. So of course it's redemptive. Because

00:38:37.940 by definition, that's the pattern we use to expand our competence in the world. How could

00:38:42.880 it be anything other than redemptive? And it's tied in with the... Here's how it's tied

00:38:47.140 in with the idea of sacrifice. Every time you learn something, especially painfully, which

00:38:52.280 really means you learned it, there's a bunch of things that you already knew that you had to

00:38:55.840 let go of. Because they're wrong. And so there's no learning without sacrifice. And

00:39:00.600 now that means is that there's no learning without the retooling of structures that you've

00:39:04.300 already been using. And that's because you actually have a complete map of the world,

00:39:09.820 always. But it's low resolution. It's low resolution. And then if you go out there and

00:39:16.840 into a particular area that you've only mapped in a low resolution way, you'll learn details

00:39:22.260 that force you to update the low resolution representation. And sometimes that can mean

00:39:27.020 abandoning whole pieces of it. Because they're just wrong. You think this is like this. You

00:39:31.980 think your girlfriend is like your mother. Well, you may find out that that's absolutely

00:39:36.780 wrong. And the degree to which you use this low resolution map to map her, you're going

00:39:41.800 to experience nothing but trouble. So in fact, in all likelihood, that's what you'll experience.

00:39:46.760 Because your girlfriend is not your mother. Or at least she shouldn't be.

00:39:55.220 So when you go out and you encounter something new, it always means the demolition of parts

00:39:59.640 of you that are still unformed and incomplete. And so there's a sacrificial element to exploration.

00:40:06.140 And that's partly why people don't like to talk to people who have ideas that are different

00:40:09.280 than theirs. Because you might think, well, sure, we differ. Why can't we just talk? If you

00:40:14.480 know things I don't, all the better. But no, if you know something I really don't know,

00:40:18.760 it's going to challenge something I already presume. And if it really challenges, it will

00:40:23.460 disintegrate. And I'll do a little trip into the underworld before I can restructure myself.

00:40:29.820 And if you really challenge me, it might be an almost complete dissolution.

00:40:34.300 So who wants that? Well, here's how you want that.

00:40:38.700 The only circumstance under which you will want that is if you know that the alternative

00:40:43.880 is worse. Continual small updates

00:40:47.940 differentiate you and make you strong. You shy away from that, your map stays low resolution,

00:40:54.640 and you make yourself weak. Because you're not practicing that process of letting go and

00:41:01.120 transforming. And letting go and transforming. Because you want to become a master at that.

00:41:04.980 You don't want to be a master at darting your territory, even though that's extraordinarily

00:41:10.260 useful. You want to become a master of taking the walls apart and extending them and building

00:41:16.240 them up. And taking the walls apart and extending them and building them up. And that, because

00:41:20.420 you'll never run out of utility for that. And that can mean that unknown becomes something

00:41:25.180 that's your friend instead of your enemy. And that would be a wonderful thing. Because,

00:41:29.320 of course, people respond to the unknown as if it's their terrible enemy. It's like, don't

00:41:33.080 be so sure about that. What you know might be your enemy. What you don't yet know might

00:41:38.460 be the best friend you have. And it's highly probable. Because what do you know? And there's

00:41:43.260 an infinite number of things you don't know. So you might as well make friends with them.

00:41:47.600 And then you also start to understand that you are precisely the thing that can move into

00:41:53.160 the unknown as if it's welcoming. And grow and develop as a consequence. And that makes

00:41:59.860 you a much different thing than the thing that has to be terrified of everything it doesn't

00:42:03.920 understand. You're just in a permanent state of existential horror under those conditions.

00:42:09.080 And you're dangerous to other people, too. Especially if they don't agree with you.

00:42:12.700 There's another way of representing it. The dragon of chaos stands for the potential that

00:42:18.340 surrounds us. Inside of that, there's the unknown. The unknown that you actually come into

00:42:23.520 contact with, right? That's the unknown as it actually manifests itself in your world as

00:42:28.240 something you don't understand. Instead of just the potential for that. Because we say,

00:42:32.200 look, you know perfectly well that as you're sitting here, there's all sorts of things you

00:42:36.740 don't know everywhere. But where are they? Well, they're not manifesting themselves at the

00:42:43.160 moment. They're only in potential. But we could have a discussion that became argumentative.

00:42:49.120 And then all of a sudden, it would be as if emissaries of that unknown had entered the

00:42:53.460 space. And that's the unknown that's defined in relationship to what you know. That's what

00:42:57.840 you actually experience, instead of it only being potential. It's a tough thing to get,

00:43:01.900 because they're both unknown, right? You think, well, how can there be two different categories

00:43:05.680 of unknown? Well, latent and manifest. That's a good way of thinking about it.

00:43:10.120 No, in a relationship, it's going stably. But you know that sooner or later, something will

00:43:15.760 come up. Okay, up. From where? Why up? Well, from beneath. Well, what do you mean beneath?

00:43:23.840 Well, it's from your complex. The person you're in a relationship with, in with, is complicated

00:43:30.620 and complex. That's implicit in you. It's inside your conceptual structure. That's a way of looking

00:43:37.400 at it. Now and then, when there's a disagreement, it will manifest itself. And you know that.

00:43:42.380 You know that there's still trouble brewing ahead in a relationship. Always. And that's

00:43:47.260 part of what keeps them alive. There's an interesting piece of empirical work done on

00:43:53.180 this a while back. So you might think, well, what does the optimal relationship look like

00:43:57.320 in terms of positive and negative emotion? You might say, well, utopia. Nothing but positive

00:44:03.120 interactions. It's like, no. Imagine you get people to code the interactions they have with

00:44:09.700 their partner during the day. You know, you sample it. You say, was that interaction

00:44:13.580 positive or negative? And then what you're trying to do is predict the longevity of the

00:44:17.640 relationship. Okay, so here's the data. If it falls under five positive interactions to

00:44:23.840 one negative interaction, the relationship doesn't continue. Fair enough. Too much negative.

00:44:29.220 That's easy to understand. If it exceeds 11 positive to one negative, the relationship doesn't

00:44:34.160 last. Why? No challenge. Right? What do you want from your partner? Bliss? No. No, no,

00:44:42.900 you don't. You want periods of peace punctuated by a good fight. And that, because that means

00:44:48.460 you respect them. It means you have something to offer each other. And it means that you're

00:44:52.100 both growing. And so you don't want the fight to be too dramatic, because, well, then you

00:44:56.820 retreat. You can't settle it. But the person that you can completely map and who only does

00:45:01.420 positive things for you, it's like, A, you don't know that person. B, they're not communicating

00:45:06.020 with you, nor you with them. Maybe they're just subordinating themselves to you or you

00:45:10.300 to them. And you're not growing. You want someone who can... It's... A real relationship

00:45:15.820 is a wrestling match. It's a grappling... It's a grappling phenomena that you both emerge

00:45:21.020 transformed from. And that's what people want. They don't want to push over. Not unless there's

00:45:25.940 something wrong with them. A narcissistic person who never wants to be challenged will

00:45:31.340 want a partner who does nothing but deliver exactly what they're told to deliver. But

00:45:34.900 they will mistreat them beyond belief, and perhaps deservedly so.

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00:48:29.300 All right, so here's some symbolic representations. The two on the left are Jonah.

00:48:35.400 Jonah and the whale. So the story of Jonah is an interesting one. I'll just go over it very briefly.

00:48:45.900 There's a city, and the city is full of people who are sinful. What does that mean? Well, to sin is an

00:48:52.580 archery term. It means to miss the mark. So these are people who aren't oriented properly. And so the

00:48:57.180 city is in a chaotic state. And God tells Jonah that he's going to go to that city and tell them

00:49:01.780 just exactly what's up with them. And Jonah thinks, no, I'm not going to do that. And why?

00:49:07.760 Well, that doesn't require much explanation. It's like, how popular are you going to be

00:49:12.260 if you go to a city full of chaotic people and tell them why they're stupid and wrong?

00:49:18.180 Jonah thinks, no, I'm not going to do that. I don't care if God's telling me to do it. So his

00:49:22.420 conscience is telling him to do it, or his destiny is telling him to do it, or his orientation with

00:49:27.580 higher morality is telling him to do it. You can read it any way you want. And so he

00:49:31.900 thinks, no, I'm hopping on this boat, and I'm getting as far away from that city as I possibly

00:49:35.520 can. And so he does that, and then the storm comes up, because God thinks, no, you're not

00:49:40.960 getting away. If I told you to do something, you're not getting away from it. A storm comes

00:49:45.300 up. Well, what does that mean? Well, it's easy.

00:49:47.980 Betray your destiny. And see how long it takes you to be drowning in a storm. It'll happen

00:50:00.440 immediately. And of course it will, because what's calling you to be your best is exactly

00:50:06.500 the thing that's pushing you forward to manifest yourself most fully in the world. It's what

00:50:11.000 you need. You run away from that, the boat's going to start to rock very, very quickly.

00:50:16.040 Well, you all know that. You know that perfectly well. It's, hell, all you have to do is not

00:50:22.180 study for an exam that you know that's coming up to see everything start to, the storm waters

00:50:27.220 start to rise and everything start to rock. It's pretty bloody obvious. So anyways, he's

00:50:31.800 on this boat, and there's a storm. And all of the people on the boat, who can't quite discriminate

00:50:38.580 chaos from weather, because they haven't differentiated the world to that degree, think, oh, the boat

00:50:44.740 wouldn't be about to be swamped if we hadn't, some of us hadn't done something stupid and

00:50:49.900 wrong. And there's logic in that. You know, you might think, well, God has nothing personal

00:50:55.280 against you because of the storm, so you're confusing levels of analysis. But you've got

00:50:59.400 to give these people some credit. It's like, maybe they did do something stupid. Maybe they

00:51:03.600 didn't cock the damn boat properly. Maybe the ropes aren't in as good a shape as they might

00:51:08.120 be. Maybe they weren't paying attention to the weather when they went out on the ocean.

00:51:11.560 You know? Or maybe they haven't made peace with their brother, and so their hearts are

00:51:16.180 bent and twisted out of shape, so they don't make particularly good sailors. It's like the

00:51:20.560 idea that you encounter a storm because you're stupid and wrong is a really good idea, even

00:51:25.120 though it's not of infinite applicability. Anyways, they draw lots. It's a primitive thing

00:51:31.060 to do. It's like, well, it's someone's fault. We don't know who. We're going to throw someone

00:51:36.240 overboard, the worst sinner. Obviously, that's what God wants, some kind of sacrifice. So they

00:51:41.360 all draw lots, and someone loses. And then Jonah stands up and says, well, sorry, guys.

00:51:46.060 Like, I know that I've got a problem with God at the moment, so it's probably me. You

00:51:49.940 better throw me over. And they don't really want to, but he finally convinces them. Over

00:51:54.080 he goes. And the storm settles. Well, you know, sometimes if you're in a group of people

00:52:03.500 in an organization, there is someone in the organization whose head isn't screwed on exactly

00:52:08.280 straight. And they know exactly why it is and what they've done wrong and what puts

00:52:12.420 them in that position. And they are poisoning the entire enterprise. And if you throw them

00:52:16.900 overboard, or better, if they agree voluntarily to leave, then the storm will abate and everything

00:52:22.440 will be okay. So anyways, they throw Jonah overboard and a whale comes up and swallows

00:52:28.540 him and takes him down to the bottom of the ocean. Well, we already know what that means because

00:52:31.920 we watched Pinocchio. It's like when God abandons you because you've abandoned your destiny and

00:52:38.720 the storms come up, the probability that you're going to be taken down to the depths is

00:52:44.420 extraordinarily high. And that happens in people's lives all the time. Well, so down there, Jonah

00:52:49.180 repents. Well, what do you do when you're in the underworld? Well, you've been there before when

00:52:54.200 things fall apart on you. Your friends have abandoned you. You're not as popular as you could be.

00:52:57.760 You can't stand to look at yourself in the mirror. Into the underworld you go and you think,

00:53:01.940 geez, I've done a lot of things wrong. You know, maybe I should reconcile myself with the world and

00:53:06.620 I could get out of this. Well, so that's what Jonah does. He thinks, all right, I've got this

00:53:10.440 destiny. I better go do what God says. So the whale spits him out onto the beach and off he goes to the

00:53:17.280 city to tell them what's wrong. Well, that's what that represents. That's these symbols. You know,

00:53:23.600 it's so cool. This second one, I really like. It's so interesting because you see Jonah re-emerging

00:53:29.580 from the whale and he's got a halo around his head. You say, well, what's a halo? Well, have you

00:53:34.240 ever looked at a quarter? Well, think about a quarter. A quarter is the moon. And who's on the

00:53:41.600 quarter? The queen. The queen is surrounded by the halo of the moon. The queen is queen of the night.

00:53:48.400 Gold coin. That's the king's head on the sun. That's the halo. Well, what comes out of the

00:53:54.380 belly of the fish? It's the illuminated human being. It's the spirit of the illuminated human

00:54:00.540 being. Well, that's what that means. Well, what does that mean? Well, what else would come out of

00:54:05.700 chaos? You know, if you fall apart and then you put yourself back together, what is it that comes back

00:54:11.040 out? Well, at least you're in better shape than you were before, you know? And then maybe you do that

00:54:16.260 20 times in your life or 50 times and you do it voluntarily. Every time you do it, you're more

00:54:21.700 like the thing with the halo and less like the thing that's, you know, being thrown overboard by

00:54:27.140 your friends. And then you see this representation on the right. This is a very complicated

00:54:32.080 representation. So in this one, you see Christ who's carrying his cross with the sun behind him.

00:54:37.520 That's the halo that I was talking about. He's the person who's voluntarily accepted the necessity of

00:54:43.720 death and renewal. That's what the cross represents. And so it's a, it's an, it's a,

00:54:49.160 what would you call it? An abstracted representation of this, a further developed idea of this.

00:54:54.660 And then you see in the back, this is a feminine symbol, right? It's a, it's a symbol of birth.

00:55:01.240 And you'll see, you'll understand more when I, when I show you the symbols later, this is the eternal

00:55:05.680 opening in the world from which new forms emerge. It's the place from which babies emerge. And you can

00:55:11.480 tell that if you look carefully, because you see all these little heads there with wings on them,

00:55:15.860 those are all spirits waiting to be born. And so the hero emerges from the, from the eternal feminine,

00:55:22.600 willing to die and suffer. And in doing so, just defeating the snake, the snakes down there and

00:55:30.600 the adversary at the same time. Well, it's no wonder we don't understand those images. I mean,

00:55:35.640 they're so unbelievably rich that how could you possibly articulate them? That's why they emerged in

00:55:41.260 imagistic form to begin with. The artists get there before the philosophers, long before the

00:55:47.280 philosophers. The dramatists get there way before the artists even. And so we figured it out. We

00:55:53.840 represented it in art and literature and music and drama. And then we're on the cusp, so to speak,

00:55:59.460 of understanding it in a fully articulated manner and not a moment too soon.

00:56:04.180 So what does it mean for this symbol to emerge from, the feminine symbol, let's say, to emerge

00:56:12.060 from chaos? Well, this picture, this is a picture of Venus, the goddess of love, right? And so I cut

00:56:19.280 this picture out of a larger picture and it's Venus manifesting herself in a transcendent space in the

00:56:24.400 sky in the same way that Christ did in the previous representation. And she has rays coming off her and

00:56:30.620 there's all these men who are knights kneeling in front of the image. Well, what does that mean?

00:56:37.140 Well, it means that men use the image of female perfection to motivate themselves.

00:56:42.120 And that's exactly right. That's precisely what they do. You see that in the Tom Sawyer story.

00:56:46.720 So Tom Sawyer is about 12 years old and he's still hanging around with his friends like Huck Finn.

00:56:51.800 And this girl moves across the street, Becky, and she comes out and he's struck by her for the first time

00:56:56.620 in his life. Something's changed. And the first thing he does is hop up on a picket fence and show

00:57:02.100 off and balance in front of her. And he's saying, well, look at me, look at me. He's like the male

00:57:06.640 bower bird building something beautiful so the female will approve of it. And it's motivation.

00:57:12.860 You know, and that's something that I think modern women don't really understand about men.

00:57:17.140 They don't understand that, at least to the degree that males are uncorrupted and not bitter because of

00:57:24.040 being rejected. They're doing everything they can to kneel before the eternal image of the feminine

00:57:28.780 and try to make themselves worthy. That's the chivalry story, right? That's what you should

00:57:36.060 encourage in your partner. And so out of chaos emerges this first form. It's the feminine form.

00:57:42.980 It's partly the form that represents novelty as such. And on one hand, it's promise. On the other

00:57:50.220 hand, it's threat that you wouldn't believe. And I don't know, because I don't know, I don't

00:57:54.800 understand the situation with women as well as I understand the situation with men, obviously,

00:57:59.160 being a man. But I don't know if women have any idea how paralyzing they are to especially young men.

00:58:08.960 A very large number of my clinical clients, but also young men I've talked to in general,

00:58:15.040 are absolutely terrified of women because they're terrified of being rejected.

00:58:19.160 And the terror exists in precise proportion to their attraction to the woman, which is a horrible

00:58:25.260 paradoxical situation to be in. It's often why men make such fools of themselves in front of women

00:58:31.700 that they're attracted to. It's because, first of all, they don't see the woman that they're attracted

00:58:35.400 to. Because what the hell do they know about her? They don't see her as an individual. They see her as

00:58:40.080 the manifestation of a judgmental ideal. And then it's only in establishing the relationship with the

00:58:46.480 actual woman that they can start differentiating between the judgmental ideal and the actual

00:58:51.660 individual woman. And that also requires a sacrifice. And the sacrifice is, you never can

00:58:58.580 have an ideal woman. So to have a relationship with any woman, you have to sacrifice the relationship

00:59:05.380 with the ideal woman. And you have to see the individual woman and separate her from the ideal.

00:59:12.100 And that's the same thing that happens to the hero in Sleeping Beauty, right? He sees the evil queen

00:59:17.380 who actually turns into the dragon of chaos. And it's not until he can defeat her that he can

00:59:24.580 establish a relationship with the actual princess. And that's exactly the case. I had one of my clients

00:59:31.020 who ran this men's group, which was quite interesting. One of the things they had the initiates

00:59:36.280 do, which was very intelligent, was to go out and ask 50 women in one day for their phone

00:59:42.720 numbers. Why? Politely, properly, you know, it wasn't, it wasn't, it was a game, but it wasn't

00:59:49.160 a stupid game. And the idea was, get over your fear of rejection. And how do you do that? By

00:59:56.040 encountering it continually and continually and continually, so that you're no longer paralyzed

01:00:01.800 by this. Here's, I love this cartoon. This is from a underground comic for people who smoke way too

01:00:13.720 much marijuana. And it's called, these people are the fabulous furry freak brothers. And they were

01:00:19.580 created by Gilbert Shelton, who was one of the first underground cartoonists, and one of the least

01:00:24.500 pathological ones with the best sense of humor. And he writes these stories about these stupid hippies,

01:00:29.420 three of them, the fabulous furry freak brothers. You see two of them there. And all they do is smoke

01:00:34.920 pot and avoid responsibility, and run away from the police. But it's a nice satire. And so,

01:00:42.000 and they have this cat. And the fat one, Fat Freddy, has the cat. And they're too lazy to even give the

01:00:48.740 cat a name. So it's Fat Freddy's cat. And it has its own adventures, mostly with, like, an army of

01:00:54.560 cockroaches that lives inside their, like, horrible, slummy, hellhole of a living place. And so,

01:01:00.540 anyways, it's quite comical. And so, the hippies have stumbled across a small fortune and stoned out

01:01:07.260 of their minds on cocaine. They go out to set up utopia in the countryside. They buy this terrible

01:01:11.980 piece of property, but they're so deluded that they think it's like a mansion. And they bring their

01:01:16.380 cat. And I don't know if you've ever had a cat, but cats don't like to move. It really bugs them.

01:01:21.340 And so, they're not comfortable when you bring them to a new place. They're like the rat that's

01:01:25.920 been taken out of its comfortable cage and put into a new cage. And the cat, you put a cat in a

01:01:29.980 new room, and it, depending on the cat, obviously, but generally, they'll retreat into a corner and

01:01:34.640 meow piteously and be very unhappy for quite a substantial amount of time. And so, the cartoonist

01:01:41.460 actually mapped this out quite nicely. So, the hippie takes the cat out of the box and says,

01:01:46.360 our new home. They're out in the forest. This is an urban cat. It's never been in the forest.

01:01:51.260 It doesn't know what the hell's up in the forest. And the cat's looking rather dubiously

01:01:55.040 and thinks, so this is the country. And then, it's put on the ground, and it starts to slink,

01:02:00.080 as he says, slink, slink, out into the forest. And that's actually what animals do. It's a

01:02:04.920 predator evasion crouch. And so, if they're put in a new territory, they'll hunker down and freeze

01:02:10.980 first. And then, they'll slowly unfreeze and start to explore. They sniff first, and then they'll

01:02:17.160 start to move. But they do it, like, with trepidation and slowly and try to hide. And

01:02:22.300 so, that's what the cat's doing. And the cat goes out into the unknown far enough, sniffing,

01:02:27.160 and all of a sudden, POW! It goes underneath the house. Just like the toddler running back

01:02:32.520 to the mother. And the other, another hippie there, I think that's Phineas, says, where'd

01:02:38.960 the cat disappear too now? And the Fat Freddy character says, under the house. And then

01:02:43.420 the cat's under there in the dark, with big eyes, looking terrified, saying, you'd hide

01:02:47.820 too if you'd smelled what I did. And so, what it smelled was this thing that has, like, the

01:02:53.180 head of a wolf, and antlers like a deer, and the tail of a skunk, and the feet of, like,

01:02:59.240 a chicken, and horrible claws. It's like, well, what is that? Well, it's a monstrous amalgam

01:03:05.080 of that which lurks in the unknown. And so, the cartoonist, the comedian, got it

01:03:10.040 perfect. Said, well, what is there? What is out in the unknown? Well, you need one

01:03:15.020 representation, not a thousand. And so, you take pieces of what's out there that are

01:03:21.440 relevant, and you create a single image out of that, and you say, well, this is what's

01:03:26.380 out there. And you might say, well, no such animal as that exists. And that's actually

01:03:32.200 incorrect. An animal very much like that exists. It's just a superordinate, low-resolution

01:03:40.240 category. It includes all those weird animals that might hurt you that are out in the forest.

01:03:45.720 That's a useful category. Weird animals that might hurt you. And that's a real category.

01:03:51.700 You know, you might say, well, there's differentiated things within that category. It's like, yeah,

01:03:56.380 every category has that nature. It can still be further differentiated. Maybe not protons.

01:04:03.380 You know, they can even be differentiated with regards to location, at least. So, every category

01:04:08.020 can be further differentiated. The question is whether the category has some functional utility,

01:04:13.440 or at least that's one of its questions. It's like, that's the thing to be afraid of.

01:04:17.800 Okay, good. Now you got it. This is the category of all things to be afraid of.

01:04:21.740 What do you do in response to that category? All right. So, then we go to the next representation.

01:04:28.580 This is Kali. A-A-L-I. Hindu goddess of destruction.

01:04:35.240 She's the thing that you encounter. She's the thing that makes things go bump in the night.

01:04:40.440 What is that thing? Well, let's take it apart a little bit.

01:04:43.200 Because you can't see this image until you understand it. You would be able to if you were Hindu,

01:04:50.820 because you'd be in the culture, and you'd know what the image represented. But some people in here

01:04:55.240 might be Hindu, but not very many people. So, okay. So, let's talk about this image.

01:05:00.480 It's a horrifying image. And so, here's how this image emerged. It emerged in the imagination of people

01:05:05.700 who were tormented for millennia about just what the hell lurked out there in the unknown.

01:05:11.240 And some artist was seized by a revelation, a horrifying revelation of just what that was.

01:05:16.880 Okay, so what is it? Well, first of all, she's in a container of fire.

01:05:23.780 Why fire? Well, fire is useful and destructive. Right? And you also cannot look away from fire.

01:05:30.620 And so, it's a really good symbol of that which you cannot look away from. It's eternally meaningful.

01:05:36.660 Fire is eternally meaningful. Why? We can't keep our hands off fire, right? We're descendants

01:05:41.240 of the first insane ape who was so obsessed by fire that he couldn't stay away from a burning

01:05:48.340 landscape and learned how to master it. He's our forefather, that person. We're obsessed by fire.

01:05:55.400 It's magical to us. And it transforms. It burns and transforms. So, from a symbolic perspective,

01:06:00.160 it's a very useful source of imagistic representation. Okay, the fire is there.

01:06:07.420 And then inside the fire, these are skulls. You see them? All lined up there. So, it's not just fire.

01:06:13.360 It's the fire of death that consumes. So, that's where Kelly lives. So, that's fun to start with.

01:06:20.260 And then, there she is with her hair on fire, because her hair's on fire in case she isn't

01:06:27.520 frightening enough just because of where she lives. Her hair's on fire. And her headdress is made out of

01:06:31.820 skulls. So, that's nice. And then she's like an insect, like a spider. See, she has all these legs.

01:06:37.780 And why is that? It's because we don't really like insects. And, you know, they set off our bug

01:06:41.960 detectors, and they can bite us. And they're quite horrifying. And many people have spider phobias,

01:06:47.200 particularly. And no wonder. And then, she's got a weapon in one hand here. And then, you see,

01:06:56.360 she's eating something. And you see here, her belly is concave. Well, why? Well, she's in a birth

01:07:03.200 position. She's just given birth to this unfortunate character who she happens to be standing upon.

01:07:09.380 And he's disemboweled. And she's eating him intestines first. And that's Kelly. It's like,

01:07:15.920 that's horror. It's a representation of horror and death and destruction and transformation. It's

01:07:23.140 feminine as well. What do you do in the face of his mother nature? That's another negative element

01:07:28.440 of mother nature. What do you do with something like this? Well, that's the eternal question. And

01:07:33.700 the answer is quite straightforward. You make sacrifices to her. And if you make the proper

01:07:38.940 sacrifices, then she turns into her beneficial counterpart. And that's exactly what you do

01:07:44.080 do in life. If in the face of horror and death, you make sacrifices, so you transform the terrible

01:07:50.960 destructive element of nature into that thing that continually offers you what you need.

01:07:56.420 It's, it's, it's, of, that discovery is one of unparalleled brilliance. And, you know,

01:08:03.360 we don't get it. We think it's primitive. It's, and no wonder, you know, you can understand

01:08:07.660 human sacrifice. That sounds pretty primitive, man. It's terrifying. But the idea of sacrifice,

01:08:14.140 it's an act of, the, the idea itself is a conceptualization of utter genius. And why do

01:08:19.800 you expect it to come forward first in its perfect form? It's not going to do that. It's going to come

01:08:24.380 forward imperfectly and roughly and brutally, and then hopefully be refined across time, which is

01:08:30.580 exactly what has happened. You see, even in the biblical stories, the transition from human sacrifice to

01:08:35.520 animal sacrifice. And then with us now, it's a transition from animal sacrifice to psychological

01:08:40.800 sacrifice, because we're sophisticated enough to do that. We can let go of concepts and abstractions

01:08:46.520 and things that we're holding on to that we should no longer hold on to and progress in that manner.

01:08:52.140 It's, it's increasing articulated psychological sophistication. But we still make sacrifices,

01:08:58.500 and we hope that they'll be accepted, and we hope that they're of high enough quality so that they work.

01:09:05.520 Well, that's a representation of Diana. You could think of Diana, there's an opposite,

01:09:11.060 Durga, in Hinduism. And she comes forth if you make the proper sacrifices to Kelly. But I wanted to

01:09:18.340 show you alternative representations from different cultures of these archetypal forms. This is Diana,

01:09:24.900 positive feminine, whoop, multi-breasted, right? She's the thing that nourishes the world. And so that

01:09:30.440 would be, on one hand, your mother, who obviously protects you from the terrible aspects of fire and

01:09:36.880 danger. But also, nature conceptualized as the positive feminine in general.

01:09:44.480 The source of all fertility, and all food, and all beings, and all good things. Something that you want

01:09:50.400 to have on your side. That's for sure. And you might say, if you acted heroically, properly, and you played

01:09:57.060 the metagame and not the game, and you made the proper sacrifices, then you'd never encounter Kelly.

01:10:01.900 You'd only encounter her benevolent counterpart. And so then you might say, well, does she even exist

01:10:06.420 then? That's something that's very interesting, is because the degree to which the terrible part of

01:10:11.720 the world manifests itself in your life is proportionate to how insufficient you are.

01:10:17.880 And we don't know the full extent of that. If you got your act together completely,

01:10:21.460 maybe all the suffering would disappear from your life. Or at least maybe all the unbearable

01:10:26.540 suffering. And maybe all the suffering, or the unbearable suffering, from the lives of people

01:10:31.760 around you, too. And you already know that, because there are people that you'll go to in a crisis

01:10:36.280 that you can rely on, and you know they'll help you. And you wonder what the world would be like

01:10:41.160 if you were like that, and everyone else was like that, too. We'd have a lot fewer crises.

01:10:45.880 And the ones that we do have would be a lot more manageable. And so when people say, well,

01:10:51.180 why is the world so rife with suffering? One answer to that is because we're not yet what

01:10:56.600 we could be. And at least that's an answer that we have some control over, right? You're not going

01:11:01.260 to talk God out of making the world suffer, that's for sure. And you're not going to negotiate directly

01:11:05.940 with Mother Nature. But you might be able to put yourself together a little bit and see if that

01:11:09.960 works. At least it's under your control. And God only knows what the upper limit of that might be.

01:11:15.880 Well, here's the decomposition of the fundamental archetype. The dragon of chaos differentiates,

01:11:23.940 on the one hand, into the feminine. That's the unknown. And the feminine differentiates further

01:11:28.220 into the negative feminine than the positive feminine. The negative feminine is the reason

01:11:34.200 for witch hunts. It's the reason for, you know, there's a whole group online called Men Going

01:11:43.160 Their Own Way. M-G-T-O-W. That's a very interesting group to go study. There's lots of them. I don't

01:11:49.660 know how many of them there are. And most of them are older. Many of them are men who've

01:11:53.380 been through a particularly horrifying divorce for one reason or another. And they've had

01:11:58.300 enough of women. So they tell the young men that they're teaching, never have a permanent

01:12:03.560 relationship. Never share your territory with a woman. Never share your possessions.

01:12:07.800 Make sure you never live together. And don't stay with one long enough to enter a common

01:12:13.260 law relationship. Because you'll be stripped of everything that you have.

01:12:16.880 Well, that's a hell of a thing to be telling people. But what's happened is that the female

01:12:20.920 has been manifested in their life only as the negative archetype. And they've got that confused

01:12:25.720 with all women. And that's partly, you know, you've got to ask yourself, if you know the

01:12:30.560 mythological stories, maybe if you made the right sacrifices, you wouldn't have so much

01:12:33.980 trouble with women. It's a good question to ask yourself first. And I would also say,

01:12:40.080 you know, if you're a woman who has trouble with men, or you're a man who has trouble with

01:12:44.640 women, it's not the women and it's not the men. It's you. Because the women are telling

01:12:50.180 you what's wrong with you. And the men are telling you what's wrong with you. And if you

01:12:54.300 don't listen, then it's you. It's either you or all men. Well, that's easy. It's all men.

01:12:59.640 Well, that's certainly how it's played out in the world right now. It's like, no, it's

01:13:03.780 not all men. You can be, by definition, by definition. And it's not all women. That's

01:13:10.120 for sure. I don't want to have anything to do with women. It's like, you're a pathetic

01:13:13.820 weasel. That's the same statement. Here's some lovely representations. This is Mary, represented

01:13:23.280 in very different eras. This is a very old one. This is about 12th century. I absolutely

01:13:27.720 love this image. It's so profound. So what you see here is Mary as eternal mother of

01:13:33.260 the infant, okay? She's sitting on the crescent moon here. She's tween of the night. And

01:13:37.760 underneath, you can't see this very well, but underneath the moon, there's a reptile. And

01:13:41.780 she's got it crunched nicely underneath her feet. And that's Satan, in part, which means

01:13:46.420 protect your children from malevolence. And it's the predator. And so what's the proper

01:13:53.440 orientation for her mother? Protect your infant from malevolent predators. Obviously, right?

01:13:59.420 That's the holy image of the mother. So she's holding the infant safely in her arms. She's

01:14:04.240 queen of the universe. And she's coming out of this strange tunnel. It's the same. These

01:14:08.220 are called a mandorla, by the way, this tunnel. And it's actually... This is going to be very

01:14:13.840 strange, but I'm going to tell you what it is anyways. It's like a hole into the fabric

01:14:17.800 of time and space. And it's revealing an image that's eternal, that's outside of time

01:14:23.340 and space. And it's outside of time and space because it recurs all the time. It never ages.

01:14:29.880 It's an image that transcends temporality. Now, you might say, well, is it real? And the answer

01:14:35.400 to that is, well, it depends on what you mean by real. Something that transcends temporality

01:14:39.660 is pretty damn real. And so that's what that hole in the sky represents. It also represents

01:14:46.380 the place from which all forms emerge. So there's a biological component to it, too.

01:14:51.220 Right? So it's as if these divine figures are standing in front. Well, I'll show you

01:14:56.560 in a minute of what they're standing in front of. And you see here the same thing with these

01:15:00.220 little putti. That's what they're called. Sort of embedded in the flesh-like folds

01:15:04.320 around here. And you see Mary here holding the infant again away from the terrible predator.

01:15:10.660 That's the serpent of chaos down there in the ocean.

01:15:14.140 And that's, again, what does that mean? Why would the serpent of chaos be in the ocean?

01:15:18.500 Well, how many of our ancestral infants do you suppose were eaten by crocodiles at the

01:15:23.220 waterhole? Plenty. Plenty of them. And so that's something to be terrified of and to

01:15:28.500 take precautions against. And so, and then this image here, the older one, see all these weird

01:15:34.680 little figures in the background here? You can't see them, but they're musical instruments.

01:15:38.660 They're all sorts of archaic musical instruments. And so here's what the image means. It means

01:15:44.880 the potential from which this figure is emerging is like a musical construction. So it's like a

01:15:52.280 symphony. It's this patterned layer. It's patterns, layer upon layers of harmonious patterns that make

01:15:59.420 up being. And out of that emerges this image. And that's what that image represents.

01:16:03.600 And that's what music represents. It represents this patterned potential that we're constantly

01:16:08.740 interacting with. It's deeply, deeply meaningful. That's why we love music so much.

01:16:13.600 But that's an absolute work of genius to put those two things together. It's remarkable.

01:16:19.500 Remarkable image.

01:16:20.400 So, well, let's stop there. And we'll meet again in 15 minutes. And then this, so that's

01:16:33.680 the positive feminine on the left. And then on the right, that's the gorgon. And that's

01:16:38.500 the thing that fills you with terror when you look at it. There's another representation of

01:16:43.500 the positive feminine. It's another representation of Mary. There are representations very much like

01:16:47.400 this of Isis with Horus on her lap. And people often consider those precursors,

01:16:52.160 their Egyptian statues, precursors to the Christian iconography. And, well, I suppose in some sense

01:16:59.320 they are insofar as they predated them in time. But the fundamental issue is that, well, that

01:17:05.900 this image has to be held up as transcendent. And by that I mean it's got to be, it's an image that's

01:17:12.520 got to be at the basis of a value structure that actually works insofar as there's going to be

01:17:17.000 human beings. Because there aren't any human beings without the infant and the mother. And so if

01:17:21.340 that's not held up as an image of ultimate value, then everything falls apart. And it's something our

01:17:27.340 culture does extraordinarily badly. I had a client recently admit to me in ashamed tones that she

01:17:34.160 wanted to have children. I thought, I said, well, you don't have to be ashamed of that, especially not

01:17:38.300 if you're talking to me. And she said, oh, that's such a relief because I can't talk to anyone about it

01:17:42.180 at work. They seem to think that it's, you know, degrading. That you can hardly diagnose a culture

01:17:48.180 as more pathological than that. That's so appalling. And it's so hard. It's one of the

01:17:53.420 things I really feel badly for young women, because they're not guided through this with any sense

01:17:57.760 whatsoever. And I'll tell you what my experience has been working with women. And you can take this

01:18:02.400 for what it's worth. And I've worked with women who've achieved the highest levels of their

01:18:07.640 profession. I don't mean just in academia, but in a number of different fields. This is what happens.

01:18:12.860 We'll take the typical woman, conservative woman, because they're more typical, conscientious,

01:18:17.600 not particularly open. So they're dutiful people. You know, they're existing within the structures of

01:18:22.720 their society. So I'll take female lawyers as a classic example. So they're very good at high school,

01:18:27.960 very hardworking, very intelligent, but very dutiful and often rather agreeable. And that's important

01:18:34.200 because it means, to some degree, that they want to please and they'll do what they're told. And so

01:18:38.240 part of the reason I think that women are outperforming men in elementary, junior high school,

01:18:42.840 high school and university is because they're more likely to be obedient. And I know that to some degree

01:18:47.360 because we did analysis of students in Quebec and found out that one thing that predicted grades over

01:18:52.800 and above intelligence and conscientiousness was agreeableness. And agreeable people got better grades

01:18:58.540 than their IQ and conscientiousness would predict. And that's particularly negative for men. So imagine

01:19:03.540 this is what's happening. So you're a borderline student and you're also a bit rebellious and

01:19:10.940 antisocial. I'm going to fail you. Like you're right on the cusp. Don't like you much. You fail.

01:19:16.960 You have exactly the same grade profile, but I like you. Tick. You move ahead. You don't.

01:19:23.060 And so one of the things that's dividing men from women as they progress through school is the degree to

01:19:28.560 which they're agreeable. Now, that works out to some degree for women insofar as the agreeableness

01:19:33.900 moves them forward. But they encounter the negative elements of being agreeable later in their careers.

01:19:38.520 Anyways, the women are very good in high school. Then they go to college. They're very good in college.

01:19:44.700 They nail their damn grades. They do their studying. They get their A's and they, and they ace their LSATs.

01:19:50.680 So they're smart too. Then they go off to do their articling and they're really, really good at it.

01:19:54.800 And then they get offered an associate position and they're really, really good at it. And then by the

01:19:58.900 time they're 30, they make partner. And let's say they're in high pressure, high paying jobs.

01:20:04.240 $250,000 a year. $300,000 a year. $500 an hour. Okay. What's your life like? You work all the time.

01:20:13.760 Period. 70 hours a week. 75 hours a week. Flat out. And you don't get to make any mistakes.

01:20:20.940 And if your client calls you at three in the morning on Sunday, you say, I'm really glad to

01:20:26.000 hear you, hear from you. Because if you don't, there's some hot law firm in New York that'll

01:20:30.340 take your client from you at a moment's notice. And the client is paying you, whatever, the firm,

01:20:35.900 $750 an hour, of which maybe you get $350. And what they want is an answer about something really

01:20:41.220 complicated. Right bloody now. And you can say all you want about the fact that women have a difficult

01:20:46.800 time with that because it's a male-dominated patriarchy. Any female lawyer who's hit 30 and

01:20:52.660 is a partner that has any sense at all knows that's complete bloody rubbish. It's market determined right

01:20:57.400 to the core. What happens to the women when they're in their 30s? They all leave the high-end law firms.

01:21:04.480 Why? Because who in their right mind would want to live like that? That's the issue, right? Once you

01:21:11.300 make about $60,000 a year for your family, but let's say for you personally, additional income

01:21:17.080 makes zero, has zero impact on your quality of life. Zero. So why work 80 hours a week? Well, men

01:21:24.880 will do it. Some men, very few. A handful of hyper-competitive men who are obsessed with hitting

01:21:30.840 the pinnacle of the given dominance hierarchy they're in will happily work 80 hours a week and

01:21:36.100 they'll forego everything else. Relationships, family, children, way in the second category.

01:21:42.840 And so those men are often very difficult to live with too because they're so obsessed with

01:21:46.460 their career. It's hard to have a relationship with them. And maybe they don't have much of a

01:21:50.100 relationship with their kids, but they're damn good at what they do. And part of that is, is they're

01:21:54.200 smart and disciplined and they'll work non-stop all the time. It's like an obsession. And that's the

01:22:01.040 sort of people who run things. Those are the people who run things. Well, they're often also

01:22:05.900 disagreeable too, because you want to, you want to manage people? Really? They're not going to like

01:22:10.240 you. You know, and it's not an easy thing to not be liked. And actually, if you're an agreeable

01:22:14.640 person, and women are more agreeable than men, it's quite painful to be disliked. But if you're

01:22:19.460 in a managerial and executive position, the probability that people are going to like you

01:22:23.720 is quite low. Now, if you're a real son of a bitch, then they're going to dislike you more.

01:22:28.040 But it's, it's, those, those positions are very stressful, partly because of the interpersonal

01:22:32.480 dynamics. And they're also incredibly, incredibly competitive. So the women hit that at 30, and

01:22:38.900 they're completely qualified. And the law firms are bloody desperate to keep them, because it's

01:22:43.380 really hard to find highly qualified people, especially once you've put all that time into

01:22:47.260 training them, especially if they're also good at bringing in business. The law firms trip over

01:22:51.600 themselves to try to keep them. They can't. The women think, why in the world am I doing this? Why in the

01:22:57.400 world would anyone in their right mind do this? Especially because they're often married by that

01:23:02.120 point, too. And generally, they've married a husband who makes as much money or more than them.

01:23:07.180 So they don't need the damn money. And so they think, well, there's more to life than this, which

01:23:11.760 is exactly the right thing to think. And so then they go and find a job that's nine to five and

01:23:16.760 controllable, so that they can hire a nanny and have some kids and have a life. And it's like, yes,

01:23:22.220 that's the intelligent thing to do. So we've got things backwards in our culture. We're thinking,

01:23:27.840 at least in part, why aren't there more women in positions of power? Wrong question. The right

01:23:33.600 question is, why are there any men at all who want those positions of power? Because it's not just

01:23:39.300 positions of power. You have to be such a knothead to think that. Oh, it's a position of power. It's

01:23:44.440 like, sure. But it's a position of overwhelming responsibility. And if you make mistakes, you're done.

01:23:50.880 Right? It's not like you occupy that position of power, and everyone does what they're told all

01:23:55.380 the time, and your life is easy. It's like, forget about that. People are on your case to do exactly

01:24:00.380 the right thing all the time, 100% of the time. And maybe you want that, and maybe you don't. So

01:24:06.160 the, what, I don't know what people think. If these people are all sitting in their offices with their,

01:24:10.420 like, feet up on the desk, smoking cigars and oppressing the world. It's like, that isn't how it

01:24:15.000 works. Those people, they work flat out all the time. So, and it's fine if that's what you want.

01:24:22.020 And some people are like that. They're hyper-industrious people, right? From a trade

01:24:25.160 perspective. No matter where you put them. If you put them in a forest with an axe, they just wander

01:24:29.900 around chopping down trees nonstop, right? Because they're, it's built into them. But if you want to

01:24:35.520 have a balanced life, and you should want that, you know, because the other thing you'll find,

01:24:40.000 this is God's gospel truth, is that the older you get, if you have any sense at all, the more

01:24:45.920 important your family is to you. Like, the utility of your career, maybe that peaks around 35 or 40,

01:24:52.540 and it starts to decline pretty rapidly after that. And what happens, if you're fortunate,

01:24:57.860 you have someone in your life that you love, that you've woven yourself together with, and you have

01:25:02.020 some kids, so that you have something to do from the time you're 50 till the time you're 80.

01:25:06.700 And so, it's a real mistake. It's a barren future without children, man. I can tell you that. It's

01:25:11.820 a real mistake. And so, we do a terrible job of, say, putting that image forward and saying, well,

01:25:17.720 yeah. Now, you know, because women have access to the birth control pill now, and can compete in the

01:25:23.540 same domains as men, roughly speaking, there is a real practical problem here. It's partly an economic

01:25:29.440 problem now, because when I was roughly your age, it was still possible for a one-income family

01:25:35.000 to exist. Well, you know that wages have been flat, except in the upper 1%, since 1973. Why?

01:25:45.560 Well, it's easy. What happens when you double the labor force? What happens? You have the value of labor.

01:25:52.500 So, now we're in a situation where it takes two people to make as much as one did before. So, we went from a

01:25:57.460 situation where women's career opportunities were relatively limited, to where they were relatively

01:26:03.080 unlimited, and there were two incomes, to where, and so women could work, to a situation where women

01:26:09.160 have to work, and they only make half as much as they would have otherwise. And now we're going to

01:26:13.960 go into a situation, this is the next step, whereas women will work because men won't.

01:26:20.040 And that's what's coming now. So, there was an economics, economist article showing that 50% now of

01:26:26.800 boys in school are having trouble with their basic subjects. And you look around you in universities,

01:26:31.980 you can see this happening. I've watched it over decades. I would say 90% of the people in my

01:26:37.200 personality class are now women. There won't be a damn man left in university in 10 years,

01:26:41.800 except in the STEM fields. And it's a complete, bloody catastrophe. And it's a catastrophe for

01:26:47.620 women, because I don't know where the hell you're going to find someone to have a, you know, to marry

01:26:51.920 and have a family with, if this keeps happening. So, and you think, when you're 19, because you're so

01:26:57.060 clueless when you're 19, you don't know a bloody thing. You think, well, I'm not really sure I want

01:27:01.220 children anyways. It's like, oh yeah, you tell how well you've been educated. Jesus, dismal.

01:27:07.500 Dismal. Without fail, I got to tell you, without fail, I've watched women go through their

01:27:13.200 professional careers. Many, many of them. It's a very rare woman who, at the age of 30,

01:27:18.340 doesn't consider having a child her primary desire. And the ones that don't consider that,

01:27:24.100 generally, in my observation, there's something that isn't quite right in the way that they're

01:27:28.160 constituted or looking at the world. Sometimes you get women who are truly non-maternal, you know,

01:27:32.800 by temperament. They have a masculine temperament. Disagreeable. They're not particularly

01:27:37.340 compassionate. They're not maternal. They don't really, they're not that interested in kids.

01:27:41.440 Fair enough, man. But there aren't that many of them. And there's plenty who will not admit to

01:27:47.340 themselves that that's what they most desperately want.

01:27:49.500 Do you think women would be better off if they had kids earlier, focused on career, say, in their 30s?

01:27:55.960 Ah, who knows? Like, it's like, it really is a problem.

01:28:01.760 Yeah, it's a really tough one. I don't think anybody knows the answer to that, because...

01:28:05.500 If you're 35 and your kids are, say, 10, 11, then you can go get a bachelor's degree, get your master's.

01:28:11.320 Well, it seems to be more easy that way than having the career first and then trying to raise young kids.

01:28:19.460 Yeah, I can't answer that, because I've seen women do a good job of it both ways. And you do get the

01:28:26.100 odd woman who manages a high-powered career and kids, but Jesus, those women, man. Like, they buy more

01:28:32.960 powerful microwaves because it'll take 45 seconds to cook the food instead of a minute. And I'm not

01:28:38.380 kidding. It's like they're up at 5, they exercise for half an hour, they make breakfast, they get

01:28:43.120 their kids ready to work, they go to work, they work 14 hours at 14-hour days, flat bloody out. They

01:28:48.000 come home and work for another two hours to get their kids organized. They have a nanny to help

01:28:52.800 them out, and then they work for two more hours before they go to bed at, like, 1. And then they're

01:28:56.280 up at 5, and they do that again. And I'll tell you, you better be tough if you're going to do that

01:29:00.240 physically, too, because you'll just burn yourself to a crisp. I've seen some women manage it, you know,

01:29:05.520 but they're, like, they're tough, and they're rare, because that's a hell of a, a hell of a

01:29:11.520 regimen. And then if anything goes wrong, you know, you have a sick kid or something like that,

01:29:15.520 or there's any sort of crisis in your family, it's just, you know, it's, then it becomes too much.

01:29:22.240 And I don't know the answer to that, you know. I mean, the advantage women have is they live about

01:29:26.220 eight years longer than men, because testosterone kills men. So...

01:29:30.800 Well, that, that, that's right. They pay up front and, and gain on the, on the, on the,

01:29:37.600 in the long run. But how, it isn't clear how our society should sort this out. We don't know,

01:29:43.120 and it's partly, we don't know what to do now that women have control of their reproductive

01:29:46.500 function. It's a big mystery. Yep.

01:29:48.640 Yep. Yes. Well, and the thing is, young, stupid people have the advantage of being young.

01:30:15.200 Middle-aged, stupid people have the disadvantage of being middle-aged. And so if you're going to

01:30:20.160 hire a young, stupid person, or a middle-aged, stupid person, you'll go for the young, stupid

01:30:24.400 person. And I'm, by stupid, I mean, you know, not, not, I'm being sarcastic, obviously, but I,

01:30:29.540 I mean, without, without experience, and just getting started in the world, you're much more likely to

01:30:34.140 favor someone young, because there's an instant explanation for their relative cluelessness.

01:30:39.200 And it's a problem, you know. So, so I don't know what the answer is. But one, one answer certainly

01:30:46.260 is, at least in part, is to start letting young women know what being 30 and being female is like,

01:30:53.160 because, and also to disbuse them of the notion that there's something magical about a career.

01:30:57.660 First of all, most people don't have careers, man. They have jobs. And the reason you get paid for a job

01:31:02.880 is because you're being asked to do things you wouldn't do unless you were being paid.

01:31:06.420 And so, it's not, it's not some, it's not some utopia of cigar smoking with your boots up on your

01:31:12.680 desk. That's for sure. Not, not that that would be such a utopia to begin with. But, all right. So,

01:31:19.520 so anyways. So this is more differentiation of the archetype, fundamentally. So you see the dragon of

01:31:27.400 chaos here, that potential manifesting itself into this ambivalent feminine figure, both, both promise

01:31:33.140 and threat. And then I've, I've mapped this one out. So the ambivalent feminine figure,

01:31:38.480 so sort of multivalent, gives rise to the positive mother. And then the positive mother gives birth

01:31:42.960 to the hero. And that's Hercules there. And this, I like this image a lot. So Hercules is in this

01:31:48.600 container. So that's, you can interpret that both as something feminine, the container, but also as a

01:31:53.680 representative of culture, because it's a boat that's floating on the chaotic ocean here. So that's

01:31:58.240 Hercules. He has to be in a container that sustains him in the murky water of chaos.

01:32:03.580 And you see, he's going out into the unknown, and he's got a lion's skin on. And that's partly

01:32:09.420 because one of the initiation rituals for, for young men, when there were lions, say, in the Middle East,

01:32:15.940 and that wasn't very long ago, was that you had to go out and kill a lion with a spear, or with a bow

01:32:19.740 and arrow, or something like that. It's like, that's, you know, impressive, all things considered.

01:32:25.680 I mean, you really think about that for a minute. You really want to go out and try to kill a lion

01:32:29.400 with a stick? It's like, it probably, you probably wouldn't be quite the same after you did that.

01:32:34.580 That would be my guess. And so anyway, so there's Hercules. He's got his lion's skin on, and that

01:32:39.160 shows that he's assimilated to the lion, the dominant sort of animal, and that he's also mastered it.

01:32:44.000 And he's got his bow and arrow. So he's, he's going to hit the target properly. He's not, he's someone

01:32:48.800 who doesn't sin, because he can hit the center of the target. And he's got this club, which I really like,

01:32:53.520 because it's covered with eyes, just like Marduk, the Mesopotamian hero. Well, what do you want to do

01:32:58.260 when you go out into the unknown? It's like, arm yourself and pay attention. And so that's what you're

01:33:03.640 trying to produce, if you're a good mother, is this figure that can go out into the unknown, armed,

01:33:09.440 accurate, and able to pay attention. And that's a hell of a thing to participate in. It's really fun.

01:33:16.240 I found having children incredibly entertaining. It's a ridiculously entertaining thing to do,

01:33:20.840 because for a bunch of reasons. One is that it's the only relationship you'll ever have in your life

01:33:26.440 where you, where you actually have a chance of establishing something that's close to perfect

01:33:30.320 is with your kids. Because when they're delivered to you, so to speak, they're, they're, in some sense,

01:33:35.880 they're perfect. And your job is to maintain that perfection, if you can. And you do that by being

01:33:41.260 a good parent, by being encouraging, by being on their side, by taking care of them. And you can have a

01:33:46.480 absolutely pristine relationship with the child. That doesn't mean it's not full of trouble, because it is.

01:33:52.340 But it's, it can easily be the best relationship you'll ever have in your life. And in fact, I think that's,

01:33:58.200 it can be the worst, too. And, you know, sometimes you get unlucky, and your child is sick, mentally or physically,

01:34:03.300 and things fall apart, and it's not your fault. But, and sometimes it is your fault. But it's a real gift.

01:34:09.940 And you, you have to play this game of protection and encouragement, right? Protection and encouragement.

01:34:15.880 And get that dynamic right. And then you build, you help someone develop into something that's,

01:34:21.780 well, exactly this, that can take on the trouble of the world forthrightly. And, man, that's what you want.

01:34:28.920 That'll make it worthwhile, that's for sure. Now, let's see. I've got to figure out where I want to go next.

01:34:34.700 Well, I've talked about the dragon fight, so I won't do that. Oh, yes, we might as well look at some of the,

01:34:38.500 the, we'll look at the same thing on the patriarchal side of the equation. So,

01:34:42.900 the, it's the great father and the great mother that emerge out of chaos, let's say that.

01:34:48.520 You, you can think about that over the evolutionary time span, too, because it's the fundamental

01:34:53.100 differentiation of life into one, into two sexes. You know, the fundamental differentiation of being

01:34:59.540 into two sexes that interact creatively to produce, to produce new being. It's a very, very deep motif.

01:35:06.140 And so, the dragon of chaos differentiates itself into the great father. And that's God,

01:35:11.860 the father. That's an image there. And you see, he's sitting in front of the sun. And the sun is

01:35:16.620 behind him. And the sun is the thing that comes up out of the darkness in the morning, and then

01:35:21.440 shines the light on everything with which we can see, and then collapses again into the darkness

01:35:27.280 at night, right? And so, at night, it fights its battle with the forces of darkness and chaos,

01:35:32.600 and emerges triumphant in the morning. And that's why we have solar gods, because the highest deity

01:35:38.900 is assimilated to the dominant, the dominant phenomena in the sky. And, well, and no wonder,

01:35:45.500 because the sun is also what gives life, and that provides light, and that does send the darkness

01:35:51.020 away. And to notice that there's something symbolically useful in that, that you can also

01:35:56.400 apply to the ideal person, is another act of conceptual metaphoric genius. And so, behind

01:36:02.420 God the Father is the sun. S-O-N, sun. And you see, he's ruling over a walled city here. And you

01:36:10.420 can think about God the Father here as the spirit of the walled city. That's a good way of thinking

01:36:15.480 about it. And so, and why, what does that spirit mean? Well, forget about the supernatural element

01:36:21.300 of this, or the transcendent element of it, even. How do you represent society? Okay, you've got

01:36:30.540 your walled city. Okay, why is it walled? That's the fundamental structure of a city. Why is it walled?

01:36:37.300 Well, because you have to have a border between what's yours and what isn't yours, or a border

01:36:41.000 between your territory and the outside world, right? Otherwise, it's not delineated and defined.

01:36:45.860 So, the first thing is, it's something that's walled off. It's a defined space. Inside that,

01:36:51.700 there's a dominance hierarchy. It's a masculine dominance hierarchy, because like chimps, our

01:36:56.460 fundamental dominance hierarchy is masculine. Okay, so the dominance hierarchy is, what's the

01:37:01.860 same across all the men? And then it's more than that. It's, it's what's, it's what's the same across

01:37:09.660 all men, insofar as they found their position in the dominance hierarchy, insofar as they're

01:37:14.560 supporting it, insofar as they're expanding it, and insofar as they're trying to strive

01:37:19.420 up it. So it's averaged across that. But then it's more than that, because it's not just the

01:37:24.080 men that live now. It's also the men that used to live, and the men that will live. And you

01:37:29.800 think, what are you relating to when you relate to other people? Well, in part, you're relating

01:37:34.800 to the spirit of the men that will soon live. And that's what a contract is, right? You make

01:37:40.600 a contract with the potential society of the future. It's embodied as a spirit. And so you act

01:37:46.460 appropriately in relationship to the patriarchal spirit, because if you act in accordance with that

01:37:52.500 structure, then you can extend your contractual relationship with other people across time.

01:37:59.180 It's brilliant. It's a brilliant conceptualization. That's independent of any supernatural or

01:38:04.600 transcendent reality. I'm not saying it exists in necessary opposition to such things. I'm just

01:38:11.180 saying that you don't have to introduce the idea of such things into the conceptualization

01:38:16.280 in order to understand the symbolism. Now, I think it's more complicated than that, because

01:38:22.760 if you think about this thing as a spirit, a spirit is an essential pattern of personality. Let's call

01:38:30.640 it that. To the degree that you're a well-civilized representative of the social world, you are

01:38:37.120 actually inhabited by that spirit. And so what should happen as you mature is that as you become

01:38:43.200 older, you should become God the Father. That's what you're aiming at. You want to embody that central

01:38:49.200 spirit that characterizes the civilization. And that spirit's very complex. And that's why you

01:38:55.060 often see it in relationship with the representation of God the Son, because the masculine spirit

01:39:00.620 isn't, the spirit in general, the spirit of civilization, isn't exhausted by its patriarchal

01:39:05.720 representation. That's the dogmatic form, like Osiris, right? It's only the structure. That has

01:39:11.700 to be allied with the thing that keeps the structure alive. So you want to be both of those things at

01:39:16.320 the same time. The embodiment of the civilization and the force that transforms it and moves it

01:39:22.380 forward. And that's what you're supposed to be being taught. That's what university is for. Well,

01:39:27.900 that's what it used to be for. Now it's mostly there to produce politically obsessed idiots.

01:39:33.000 Oh, anyways. Sorry about that. But it gets very frustrating. So, all right. So then you get

01:39:39.360 the picture. That's what that represents. That's what it's trying... That's an idea that's been

01:39:44.020 trying to emerge in the human imagination since the beginning of time. And it's not a trivial idea.

01:39:49.340 It's an unbelievably profound idea. And it differentiates, too. And this is what makes

01:39:54.460 it complicated. What kind of relationship do you have with your father? Your real father.

01:40:00.060 It's often ambivalent, right? Because there's an element of him that encouraged you, hopefully,

01:40:05.360 because without the encouragement of your father, man, the world is a dismal place.

01:40:09.840 It's very difficult to be a courageous person unless you have your father in body and spirit

01:40:15.820 behind you. It's very demoralizing. Like, it really kills people not to have their mother.

01:40:21.100 They just don't recover from that. But... And I think people can recover from a fragmented

01:40:26.840 father relationship. But it's the next worst thing. You know, because if your father rejects

01:40:33.880 you or doesn't form a relationship with you, it's as if the spirit of civilization has left

01:40:38.780 you outside the walls as of little worth. It's very difficult for people to recover from

01:40:44.360 that. So the father should be an encouraging force, but can be a tyrannical and crushing force.

01:40:49.360 And so that's very... That's a very difficult thing to get right. Partly because

01:40:53.680 if you're my son, then I should impose the highest standards of behavior on you.

01:41:01.360 And I should always be judging what you're doing. I should be judging it with the aim of making

01:41:07.740 the best in you come forward. But getting that balance exactly right is very difficult.

01:41:13.900 And so it's easy for a father to swing too much into judgment, let's say. And of course,

01:41:19.960 mothers can play this role too. To swing too far into the domain of judgment and to be too

01:41:24.160 harsh. And to the degree that the father has his own pathologies, he's going to do that

01:41:28.960 imperfectly. You know, he might be someone who's the father who devours his son because

01:41:34.920 he's jealous of the new possibility, the new potential, the struggle for attention and love

01:41:42.400 from the mother or from the other children in the family. There's all sorts of things

01:41:45.500 that can go terribly wrong.

01:41:48.660 So that's the father as wise king. And that's another symbol that's been lost, I would say,

01:41:53.960 to a massive degree in modern universities. Because all we're taught is to tear that down.

01:42:00.160 And to not even notice that it manifests itself everywhere, especially in the universities,

01:42:04.480 which are... Like, they're as close to an ideal environment as you could... As human beings

01:42:08.580 have ever been able to create. It's as simple as that. And if you can't be grateful for the

01:42:13.960 structure of the university with all its imperfections, then you're completely blind to this element

01:42:19.140 of the archetype. And that's the opposite of it. That's the son that devours, the king

01:42:25.040 that devours his own son. That's a tyrant. You know, that's like the mother who's too

01:42:29.940 overprotective. It's the male version of that. And the mother that's too overprotective says,

01:42:34.520 I'll never let anything happen to you. It's like, well, maybe you actually want to have

01:42:38.740 something happen to you. You know, it's a bit of an all-inclusive statement.

01:42:43.000 It's like, no, I'm going to make you strong. So any number of things can happen to you.

01:42:47.460 And when you're... When you need some care, I'll be there. But otherwise, like out into the world

01:42:52.260 with you, that's the right attitude. And for the father, it's like, get your bloody act together.

01:42:57.140 But I'm on your side. It's because... Not because I want to destroy you or demean you or push you down

01:43:02.420 in the dominance hierarchy, but because I want the best in you to emerge.

01:43:06.180 And so you need standards. It's like, what are you doing wasting your life?

01:43:09.900 There's way more than that to you. Get your act together and bring it out.

01:43:14.480 And that's a message that people really want to hear if they have any sense at all.

01:43:17.860 And generally, they do want to hear it. So, you know, I was talking...

01:43:24.080 I've been talking to a lot of people recently, as perhaps you know.

01:43:27.380 And I was talking to one of the leaders of the Conservatives this morning.

01:43:30.920 And they're asking me about... The person was asking me about Bill C-16.

01:43:34.900 But more specifically about talking to young people.

01:43:39.240 Because the Conservative leadership struggle is going on right now.

01:43:43.420 I've been talking to a bunch of them.

01:43:44.580 And I said, well, look, one of the things you could do for young people

01:43:47.040 that no one's doing is to talk to them about responsibility.

01:43:50.700 Because everyone talks to young people about rights.

01:43:53.960 It's like, we need our rights.

01:43:55.660 It's like, oh, God, how many rights do you need?

01:43:58.860 You know, really?

01:43:59.660 Like, you have more privileges than any people who've ever lived anywhere.

01:44:04.040 Well, it's so dull to hear.

01:44:05.580 It's so dull.

01:44:06.460 It's so pathetic.

01:44:08.160 And what would you call it?

01:44:10.080 It's so demeaning that you have to be protected and have your rights.

01:44:14.120 It's like I said, there's a huge marketplace for responsibility.

01:44:17.580 That's what you want to talk to young people about.

01:44:19.380 It's like, get your act together and do something worthwhile with your life.

01:44:23.100 For the first time in my entire adult life,

01:44:25.880 the Conservatives actually have something to sell young people, right?

01:44:28.980 They could sell them responsibility.

01:44:31.620 It's like, well, why?

01:44:32.660 Because that's where life has meaning with responsibility.

01:44:36.200 The more responsibility you take on, the more meaning your life has.

01:44:39.580 And the higher degree of responsibility that you agree voluntarily to try to bear,

01:44:46.700 the richer your life will be.

01:44:48.960 And no one's ever told that.

01:44:50.380 And it's the case.

01:44:52.000 You know, it's like you have four kids say, well, that's plenty of responsibility.

01:44:56.740 You're going to have meaning.

01:44:58.180 It's going to be rough, you know, because it's complicated.

01:45:00.680 You have a complicated job and you try to help the careers of the people around you.

01:45:05.820 You try to solve tough problems and aid suffering and do all of that.

01:45:09.740 It's like, it's weight.

01:45:11.380 It's responsibility.

01:45:12.700 But it's, there's glory in it.

01:45:14.480 There's real glory in it.

01:45:15.620 There's deep meaning in it.

01:45:17.340 And young people are starving for that because no one ever tells them that.

01:45:22.080 It's like, you're way more than you think.

01:45:24.420 Man, stand up.

01:45:25.520 Do something difficult.

01:45:27.320 Do something difficult and heroic, right?

01:45:29.700 You burst out of your bonds.

01:45:32.240 It's like, that's a good message.

01:45:35.800 That's a necessary message.

01:45:37.880 Because we have to be more than we are.

01:45:39.800 Because if we aren't, we're not going to survive.

01:45:43.900 Well, that's the sun devouring father.

01:45:48.100 That's a painting by Medina of Satan.

01:45:50.700 Pretty horrifying one.

01:45:53.520 And that's Captain Hook.

01:45:55.240 I really like the figure of Captain Hook.

01:45:57.140 Some of these popular mythological stories, myth-based fairy tales, modern fairy tales, have got things really right.

01:46:04.700 Captain Hook.

01:46:05.980 Well, he's a pirate.

01:46:07.500 So, I think I told you that in the Google engineers' investigations of female sexual fantasies, the pirate played a large role.

01:46:18.200 Werewolf, vampire, pirate, surgeon, billionaire.

01:46:21.280 Incredibly comical.

01:46:23.140 Well, pirate, you know, captain of the high seas and someone willing to break rules.

01:46:27.200 There's a romance in that figure.

01:46:28.480 Well, so the idea of the great father as the pirate is a good one.

01:46:33.060 Well, Hook is kind of a pathetic pirate.

01:46:35.660 And, of course, pirates are precisely that.

01:46:37.600 Because they're also crooked.

01:46:38.960 And so, what makes him pathetic?

01:46:41.280 Well, it isn't because he's got a hook, precisely.

01:46:44.240 Because maybe that's just a sign of adventure.

01:46:46.600 It's because he's being chased by a crocodile with a clock in its stomach.

01:46:50.360 Well, that's the dragon of chaos, right?

01:46:52.480 That's time.

01:46:53.720 Tick, tick, tick.

01:46:55.100 Your life is going to end.

01:46:56.540 It's already got a piece of you.

01:46:58.220 And it's coming for the rest.

01:46:59.860 And so, Hook is terrified of that.

01:47:01.680 He's terrified into resentment and evil, roughly speaking.

01:47:06.040 It's why he could prey on other people.

01:47:07.640 And so, that's the father in the Peter Pan story out in Neverland, which is the archetypal domain.

01:47:13.540 Captain Hook's the father.

01:47:15.100 Well, why would Peter Pan want to grow up to be Captain Hook?

01:47:18.140 Well, he doesn't.

01:47:19.120 And so, he stays pan.

01:47:21.500 Pan means everything, right?

01:47:23.380 Like pantheism.

01:47:25.100 He stays everything.

01:47:26.040 He's this divine child.

01:47:27.400 He never wants to grow up.

01:47:28.820 Well, why would you sacrifice the potential of youth to become nothing but a death-obsessed tyrant?

01:47:35.840 Well, that's the story in Peter Pan.

01:47:38.840 And, of course, Wendy's in this story.

01:47:41.000 And so is Tinkerbell.

01:47:42.020 Tinkerbell is the imagined feminine.

01:47:44.820 She doesn't even exist.

01:47:46.360 She's just this perfect little thing that's always around whenever Peter Pan needs her.

01:47:50.660 But the problem with Tinkerbell is that she's a fairy and fairies don't exist.

01:47:55.280 He has Wendy there.

01:47:56.580 She's a real girl.

01:47:57.960 She grows up and actually marries someone.

01:47:59.740 Peter Pan stays king of the lost boys forever.

01:48:01.980 And, you know, maybe it's better to be king of the lost boys than not to be king at all.

01:48:06.780 But maybe not too.

01:48:08.340 King of the damned is not exactly something to...

01:48:11.000 It's not a dominance hierarchy to strive for dominating.

01:48:13.680 So that's the Peter Pan story.

01:48:16.420 And it's the right story for the modern age.

01:48:19.260 That's for sure.

01:48:20.780 So that's a negative element of the Great Father.

01:48:26.440 Here's a positive element of the Great Father.

01:48:28.500 These are both...

01:48:29.100 This is a representation of Moses receiving the rules for living from God on high.

01:48:35.000 Well, we talked about that already, you know.

01:48:36.700 And I see that's a story of the revelation of structure.

01:48:41.120 That's the story of mankind.

01:48:42.880 We're acting out a moral structure.

01:48:45.400 Well, what is it?

01:48:46.540 Now and then we get a glimpse of what the moral structure is.

01:48:48.960 And it hits people with the force of a revelation.

01:48:51.040 Then it can be articulated.

01:48:52.300 And that's partly what the story of Moses lays out.

01:48:55.500 You see here, this picture.

01:48:57.860 I really like this one, too.

01:48:59.420 This is a supplicant, basically.

01:49:01.200 Someone who's hit hard by a divine vision.

01:49:04.200 It's God in heaven.

01:49:05.120 Again, very similar to this.

01:49:07.760 With the cross in the background.

01:49:09.520 And it's something like, to transcend your littleness.

01:49:13.900 Because look, he's looking up.

01:49:15.040 That's what's at the top of the dominance hierarchy.

01:49:17.500 It's what's at the top of all possible dominance hierarchies.

01:49:21.300 Look up.

01:49:23.200 That's the father who supports the son that's transcending his own vulnerability.

01:49:27.180 Right?

01:49:27.400 Willing to bear it voluntarily.

01:49:29.500 And not to shirk from that.

01:49:33.060 It's exactly right.

01:49:34.220 And it is what you admire in people.

01:49:36.080 You know, you admire people who are courageous.

01:49:38.620 And who are strong.

01:49:39.420 And when you decompose that, it means that they're able to act appropriately.

01:49:44.560 And in a helpful, compassionate, wise, and tough manner.

01:49:49.300 Despite the fact that they're beset with all of the problems of mortality that beset everyone else.

01:49:56.640 Well, how does it go wrong?

01:49:58.500 Well, that's all propaganda for Hitler.

01:50:01.200 Look at the imagery.

01:50:02.320 You know?

01:50:02.980 He's a knight.

01:50:03.760 That's on the right.

01:50:04.540 He's the knight of nationalism.

01:50:06.680 Well, that's God the Father, too.

01:50:08.120 You know?

01:50:08.380 It's a little bit one-sided.

01:50:10.460 Right?

01:50:10.740 Because there's more to the Father than the state.

01:50:15.360 That's the thing.

01:50:16.320 And that's the problem with nationalism and its totalitarian variance.

01:50:19.680 And we're moving in that direction fast.

01:50:21.940 Right?

01:50:22.060 You see Europe right now fragmenting again.

01:50:24.840 Because the European Union is too amorphous.

01:50:27.960 And maybe not well enough bordered.

01:50:30.360 And everyone is getting nervous.

01:50:31.860 And they're saying, back to the state.

01:50:33.340 Back to the state.

01:50:34.260 It's fair enough.

01:50:35.320 Fair enough.

01:50:36.380 You need to be around people who are like you, so to speak.

01:50:40.040 That you have built a consensus with.

01:50:42.460 But to subordinate yourself to the state.

01:50:44.500 And to make its head the bearer of the archetype of the knight.

01:50:49.860 Without having that element of individuality in it.

01:50:53.180 It is absolutely pathological.

01:50:54.620 We've already been down that road.

01:50:56.220 Right?

01:50:56.660 Because the National Socialists were hyper-national.

01:50:58.960 Just like both in Germany and in Italy.

01:51:01.780 And it's attractive again.

01:51:04.020 It's interesting here.

01:51:04.980 You see Hitler as a knight.

01:51:06.740 And up here there's a bird.

01:51:07.920 You know?

01:51:08.180 And that bird should be the dove.

01:51:09.500 Because that should be the Holy Ghost.

01:51:10.780 If the iconography was proper.

01:51:12.240 But it's not.

01:51:12.780 It's an eagle.

01:51:13.540 And an eagle is a bird of carrion eater.

01:51:17.020 Right?

01:51:17.780 It feeds on corpses.

01:51:19.860 Well, it's worth thinking about.

01:51:22.100 So that's the woman worshipping the strong father.

01:51:24.960 Another representation of Hitler as a knight.

01:51:26.880 And then there's Hitler as wise father.

01:51:28.620 You see, he's surrounded by people there who focused in on him.

01:51:31.580 As if he's of archetypal import.

01:51:34.500 And then this is a poster from the allies.

01:51:38.860 An anti-Nazi poster from the allies.

01:51:40.540 And you see right there that Hitler and the Nazis are assimilated to a mess of predatory snakes.

01:51:45.580 It's like, well, why?

01:51:46.560 Well, if you want to appeal to someone's determination to destroy, you say, well, here you are.

01:51:52.640 And you're all ready to go.

01:51:54.060 Let's go kill some snakes.

01:51:55.460 And everyone can say, yes.

01:51:56.660 And then you say, well, there's the snakes right there.

01:51:59.280 And the thing is, it's true to some degree, because you have plenty of snakes, just like everyone else.

01:52:04.840 And so it's easy.

01:52:05.560 That's the first step towards demonization.

01:52:07.800 And you can do it just like that.

01:52:09.740 It's no problem.

01:52:10.660 The archetype will map perfectly.

01:52:12.480 Especially if there's already tension between the groups.

01:52:14.920 Or if the other group is identifiable in some manner.

01:52:18.220 Or you can make it identifiable.

01:52:20.060 Disgust is the best way to do that.

01:52:22.140 Not fear.

01:52:23.280 Disgust.

01:52:24.300 Fear.

01:52:25.280 To fear someone, you have to respect them.

01:52:28.420 You don't want to burn everything that the person that you fear owns.

01:52:33.060 You want to burn everything that the person who disgusts you owns.

01:52:36.920 And so you'll see people who are pushing the nationalist agenda hard.

01:52:41.100 And Hitler did this beautifully.

01:52:42.400 Everything that was outside of the Aryan domain of purity wasn't to be feared.

01:52:47.760 It was disgusting.

01:52:49.220 It was contemptuous.

01:52:50.720 And it should be destroyed and purified by fire.

01:52:53.980 And that was his message.

01:52:55.600 The Nazis were unbelievably great at using fire of purification as a symbolic message.

01:53:01.000 Well, it has an archetypal power.

01:53:05.120 And then you see here, this is an English poster from the World War II.

01:53:10.040 Asking people to buy bonds to fund the American or the British war effort.

01:53:16.120 And you see these talon-like claws.

01:53:19.640 Japan and Nazi Germany reaching out to the virgin mother and her infant child.

01:53:25.980 Right?

01:53:26.160 Deep subordination of archetypal imagery for the purposes, well, I hesitate to say propaganda.

01:53:33.880 Because World War II, in some sense, was pretty clear cut.

01:53:37.200 But you get the point.

01:53:39.040 And there's the uniformity of the state.

01:53:42.700 Right?

01:53:42.820 So the goose step, everybody moves exactly the same way.

01:53:45.940 Everybody's put, everybody's turned into exactly the same carbon copy of everyone else.

01:53:50.840 All the diversity is pushed out of the state.

01:53:53.520 It's subordinated to the supreme leader.

01:53:55.460 And the hierarchy becomes incredibly rigid and homogenous.

01:54:01.760 It's like, well, that's great for fast action.

01:54:03.620 But it's terrible if you don't know where you're going.

01:54:05.800 You need some diversity.

01:54:07.000 You need some flaws in the crystalline structure.

01:54:09.540 In case you're on the wrong path.

01:54:12.380 And that's why you can't have everyone being the supreme leader's acolytes.

01:54:16.580 The whole bloody thing wanders off in one direction.

01:54:19.420 And because we don't know the right direction to go, wandering off in a single direction is extraordinarily dangerous.

01:54:25.860 You will eventually fall over a cliff.

01:54:29.000 So there's the Nazis' use of light at night.

01:54:33.700 They were unbelievably good at their...

01:54:36.340 This is one of the things that made fascism so difficult to fight.

01:54:39.040 Because with communism, because it was a fully articulated philosophy, you could attack it rationally.

01:54:44.540 But fascism never really did that.

01:54:46.420 What they did instead was use ritual, right?

01:54:49.660 Huge mass rallies and highly emotionally supercharged meetings.

01:54:54.120 And then the use of light and fire.

01:54:55.940 And so Hitler built the biggest parade grounds in human history to host the Nuremberg rallies.

01:55:02.360 And he would get in front of them on this huge stage with, you know, with Greek columns.

01:55:08.020 Very impressive looking.

01:55:09.060 And have blocks of thousands of people organized perfectly.

01:55:12.740 Orderly.

01:55:13.380 The Germans are good at order.

01:55:14.680 And order is associated with disgust sensitivity.

01:55:17.400 Incredibly organized, orderly displays.

01:55:20.400 Complete and then at night with fire.

01:55:22.400 And behind him, he would have all of the searchlights from the Luftwaffe lined up.

01:55:27.840 Dozens of them.

01:55:28.920 Shooting their lights straight up miles into the sky.

01:55:31.320 So he'd stand in front of these incredibly impressive displays of light.

01:55:35.340 Long before there were rock shows and so forth doing that.

01:55:38.480 You know, it was unparalleled in history.

01:55:40.640 And address the crowd.

01:55:42.320 And he was very good at addressing the crowd.

01:55:44.660 He'd say something.

01:55:45.560 And if people were listening, he'd say more of it.

01:55:47.500 And if they were listening, he'd say more of it.

01:55:49.620 And because he was addressing the mob.

01:55:52.720 The mob got exactly from Hitler what they wanted.

01:55:55.080 And we saw what that was like, right?

01:55:56.680 120 million people dead in no time flat.

01:55:59.360 And the worst horrors that were ever perpetrated on people.

01:56:03.100 Maybe.

01:56:04.120 Because there's no shortage of perpetrated horrors.

01:56:08.460 Stalin.

01:56:09.600 Same thing.

01:56:10.640 Stalin the great father, right?

01:56:12.160 Wise man at the helm of the ship of the state.

01:56:15.640 This is after the wall came down.

01:56:17.220 Some old man kissing a gilded statue of Stalin before it's going to be torn down.

01:56:23.800 There he is with happy children.

01:56:26.800 And not the children that his policies starve to death, as you might well imagine.

01:56:31.760 There he is in his military uniform sitting on what's all, for all intents and purposes, a throne.

01:56:36.860 And this is really an uncanny one.

01:56:39.020 It's very positive.

01:56:40.660 That's Hitler or Stalin as head of state.

01:56:43.320 He's in this hellish mandorla of fire.

01:56:45.900 Perfect, with God the Father at his head.

01:56:48.300 That's Lenin.

01:56:49.760 You know, who people still revere.

01:56:53.660 You may know, and perhaps you don't, that I was nominated to be rector of the University of Glasgow.

01:56:58.420 And so, which is an honorary position.

01:57:00.800 And today, yesterday, the different candidates put up their manifestos.

01:57:08.120 And the student newspaper put them up and then wrote analysis of the manifestos, which were biased.

01:57:14.780 And they were appallingly biased and one-sided.

01:57:17.520 And I wrote and told them that.

01:57:19.900 And they said, well, we have a perfect right to our political opinion.

01:57:22.340 And I thought, yeah, well, for sure.

01:57:23.980 But, you know, you are journalists, after all.

01:57:26.780 And maybe you could be just trying to tell what's happening.

01:57:29.840 It's like, no, no, no, there's none of that.

01:57:31.760 And they said that one of the candidates that they clearly recommended, who seems to be a person who's perfectly heroic in his own right.

01:57:41.260 I mean, he's taken on very many difficult legal cases and worked for the oppressed and downtrodden who clearly exist.

01:57:49.120 It was either him or another candidate, it doesn't really matter, that they described as bolshie and outspoken.

01:57:55.840 Bolshie meaning Bolshevik-like.

01:57:57.840 It's like, well, you know, he's appropriately bolshie.

01:57:59.820 It's like, it's no different than saying, well, he's appropriately Nazi-like.

01:58:04.340 Like, what the hell is that?

01:58:05.780 I mean, there were 50 million people that were killed in the Soviet Union by the Bolshies.

01:58:10.780 And maybe twice that many in China.

01:58:13.340 And that says nothing about Cambodia.

01:58:15.440 And all the other places, there were radical left bloodbaths.

01:58:18.700 You think it's cute to call someone bolshie?

01:58:21.400 Jesus, it's appalling.

01:58:23.480 It's appalling.

01:58:24.580 It's not some fashionable thing that you do.

01:58:26.740 It's the participation in some of the deepest intellectual morasses of evil that human beings have ever managed to create.

01:58:34.300 And yet it's fashionable.

01:58:36.120 It shows you what the universities are worth.

01:58:39.040 Well, there's the downside of Stalin.

01:58:41.340 Yeah.

01:58:42.560 Stalin is hangman.

01:58:44.060 That sort of cartoon would have gotten you killed in the Soviet Union.

01:58:46.960 There's Stalin as Satan himself in a stained glass representation.

01:58:50.400 There's a statue of Stalin covered with red paint for the blood after the wall came down.

01:58:56.560 There's Stalin as what, it's very much like Modena's Satan, right?

01:59:00.680 You look at that, and it's exactly the same marketable idea.

01:59:03.960 There's the Americans going, hat, cap in hand to get a little largesse from Papa Stalin.

01:59:09.080 But that's a painting of the communists forcibly collectivizing the productive farmers in the Soviet Union in the early 1920s.

01:59:18.300 The kulaks, right?

01:59:19.880 Everything from whom they stole and raped them and murdered them and shipped them off to Siberia and killed them and wiped out the productive farmers of the Soviet Union.

01:59:28.340 And then starved six million Ukrainians to death.

01:59:31.840 And there's some poor kid in the 1930s whose ribs are showing, you know, taking a bath in this pot with his eyes wide.

01:59:38.760 And, you know, he's one of the fortunate ones because he's still alive.

01:59:42.180 It's like, bullsheet.

01:59:43.640 Yeah, cute, pretty, fun, fashionable, lovely.

01:59:49.660 Well, that's the decomposition of chaos into God the Father, half providing security and order and half providing tyranny.

01:59:57.320 That's the archetype.

01:59:58.540 You have to put up with it.

01:59:59.580 That's what your society is like.

02:00:01.340 You try to interact with it in a way that enables the positive part of it to come forth.

02:00:05.900 And then it does the same thing.

02:00:09.260 Chaos gives rise to the Father who's nurturing and encouraging.

02:00:15.040 And that gives rise, that produces the Son.

02:00:18.860 It's very hard to find that image, I can tell you.

02:00:21.160 And so, and then that gives rise to the proper balance of, the proper attitude from the Father produces the same thing.

02:00:29.320 The Son who's the hero.

02:00:30.360 The individual who's the hero.

02:00:31.880 The consciousness, the consciousness of the child that's willing to go forth, eyes open, and voluntarily confront chaos and turn it into order.

02:00:41.560 And that's the proper pathway for human beings.

02:00:44.280 So, here's a way of thinking about it.

02:00:47.260 I showed you that diagram, you know, of how you decompose a value structure.

02:00:53.560 And you can do it right down to the level of detail.

02:00:56.240 Also, you want to make dinner.

02:00:59.300 You go below that higher resolution.

02:01:01.920 You cut up vegetables.

02:01:03.160 You move your arm.

02:01:04.680 It decomposes all the way.

02:01:06.280 Differentiates down all the way to skill.

02:01:08.460 You put these skills together, and you represent them with abstract concepts.

02:01:13.800 I can make dinner.

02:01:15.760 I can take care of my family.

02:01:17.520 I can undertake this job at work.

02:01:19.520 That makes me a decent father.

02:01:21.460 That's part of being a good person.

02:01:25.820 The question is, what's at the pinnacle of that?

02:01:28.200 At the upper end of the abstraction hierarchy.

02:01:30.900 Because these things should be organized all the way up into a complete hierarchy.

02:01:34.360 What does it mean to be a good person?

02:01:36.300 Well, it means, we've walked through it.

02:01:40.160 It means, you win the set of games.

02:01:44.000 You go out into the world and explore.

02:01:45.840 And you bring back what you've found.

02:01:48.060 And you build yourself out of it.

02:01:49.500 And you share it with other people.

02:01:51.400 That's an old, old story.

02:01:53.140 That's no different than the story of the collective hunt.

02:01:55.460 It's exactly the same thing.

02:01:57.480 Right?

02:01:58.060 You build yourself into someone that can have a long-term relationship with someone of the opposite sex.

02:02:03.580 Generally speaking, so that you can bring children into the world and turn them into exploratory heroes.

02:02:08.760 And stabilize the state.

02:02:10.640 That's what should be at the top.

02:02:11.980 And that thing that's at the top, it's the same thing.

02:02:15.000 It's the integration of all of those things into the same thing.

02:02:18.000 And that's the same as the sun.

02:02:19.820 That's the same as the halo.

02:02:21.220 It's the same as the thing that emerges from the belly of the whale.

02:02:24.500 It's all of those things.

02:02:25.480 And you also know that because you know that you have the capacity for admiration.

02:02:31.420 It's in you.

02:02:32.220 It's in you.

02:02:32.860 It's locked into your biology.

02:02:34.580 And it's locked into your sociology.

02:02:36.940 You see what you admire.

02:02:38.200 And that's a partial representation of the ultimate ideal.

02:02:41.280 It's as simple as that.

02:02:43.060 So I kind of nested this.

02:02:44.920 So I should just explain this diagram briefly.

02:02:47.580 So it was a map I tried to make in some sense of my own identity.

02:02:52.660 I mean, just using myself as an example of someone typically situated in society.

02:02:59.100 So, you know, I have this role, which is kind of a high-resolution role.

02:03:03.980 I'm a father and a husband.

02:03:05.280 And I also run a business.

02:03:06.880 And so the father and husband thing is sort of nested inside of that because it's dependent on my economic success to some degree.

02:03:13.840 And then that's nested inside a capitalist structure.

02:03:16.440 And then that's nested inside, well, I said American personality, but it's sort of, that's good enough.

02:03:22.540 And then that's nested inside the humanistic Western personality and inside the Judeo-Christian personality.

02:03:27.840 And that's all nested inside this thing that's best conceptualized as something approximating the exploratory hero.

02:03:34.900 And so that's a value structure that's, and you know, you can differentiate that to a much higher level than father and husband.

02:03:42.320 And we did that when we decomposed things right down to, you know, their motor actions.

02:03:46.780 And you want what you want.

02:03:49.280 And this is, I think, there's something that's transcendent about this.

02:03:54.180 You want all those things stacked up.

02:03:56.060 So they're all operating properly at the same time, all the way up and all the way down.

02:04:01.840 And I don't even know how far down means.

02:04:03.660 Like, if you get all those things together, your physiology would be organized and oriented properly too.

02:04:09.420 Oh, you know, and that means your organs work properly and the micro elements of them work properly and all the way down.

02:04:14.560 And then if everything is organized like that too, the society starts to work.

02:04:18.780 Everything starts to organize itself along a horizontal axis where each level of the structure supports every other level.

02:04:27.300 And you can feel that, I believe.

02:04:29.860 That's what you feel when you're engaged in doing something meaningful.

02:04:32.520 You can feel those things coming together.

02:04:34.620 And you can also feel like that as a kind of strength that pushes you forward instead of pulling you backwards.

02:04:40.120 So, and I think that your, our nervous systems are very sophisticated.

02:04:46.220 And they orient us in time and space.

02:04:48.460 And they can tell us when they're in the right place at the right time.

02:04:51.500 And people love that.

02:04:52.840 And I think you experience that when you're deeply engaged in music as well.

02:04:55.740 It puts you there momentarily, right?

02:04:57.580 Say you're in a cathedral and you're listening to some remarkable music.

02:05:00.920 And the light pouring in.

02:05:02.260 You're in trees.

02:05:03.760 Because that's what a cathedral is.

02:05:05.200 That's what the arches is.

02:05:07.820 It's light coming through the trees.

02:05:09.300 That's what's represented in the stones.

02:05:11.580 You're in there.

02:05:12.440 You're looking at the light.

02:05:13.560 It's pouring down at you.

02:05:15.660 You're in this, you're at the center of the world.

02:05:17.260 And there's a great piece of music playing.

02:05:19.380 And it's an indication that everything is stacking up along this one pole.

02:05:24.240 That's what it's supposed to produce.

02:05:25.920 That produces a religious experience if it works properly.

02:05:29.500 You know that.

02:05:30.100 You go to rock concerts.

02:05:31.240 You go listen to music.

02:05:32.520 What the hell do you think you're doing there?

02:05:34.300 If you're not having a quasi-religious experience.

02:05:36.380 You think you'd go otherwise?

02:05:38.140 And just because you don't know that that's what's happening doesn't mean it isn't what's happening.

02:05:43.420 People have been gathering together in groups and transcending the limits of their pathological individuality through music and ritual since the beginning of time.

02:05:52.480 Why would it be any different for us?

02:05:54.420 And the light's there.

02:05:55.480 That's what the light show is for.

02:05:57.440 It's the same thing.

02:05:58.580 It's just that the religious element of it is stripped away partly because we've criticized that to death so carelessly that we can't integrate it anymore into ceremonies like that.

02:06:07.500 And I mean, fair enough.

02:06:09.220 But it's not like that comes without a loss.

02:06:12.940 People hunger for that more deeply than anything else.

02:06:15.380 Questions?

02:06:20.400 Yes.

02:06:21.420 You touched on this today, but also in your conversation with Sam Harris.

02:06:28.760 I wanted to ask, is there a relationship between the mythological idea of sacrifice, human sacrifice or whatever type of sacrifice, and the psychological idea of delayed gratification?

02:06:39.860 And if so, could it be a factor in the relation, in the correlation between conscientiousness and...

02:06:46.960 It's exactly.

02:06:47.800 The question is, is there a relationship between the idea of sacrifice and delay of gratification?

02:06:52.820 And is that related to conscientiousness?

02:06:56.000 Yes.

02:06:56.600 Well, the conscientiousness relationship is a tough one.

02:06:59.460 You know, we tested to see if conscientious people were more likely to delay gratification in classic delay of gratification tasks, and we found no effect.

02:07:07.940 We found IQ effect, and we found a reverse effect for extroversion and positive mood.

02:07:14.580 And so, what happens is that happier people are more impulsive.

02:07:18.300 They're more likely to grasp what's right in front of them in the present.

02:07:21.020 But conscientiousness is an extraordinarily tough nut to crack.

02:07:24.640 And I do think it's associated to some degree with the proclivity for sacrifice of the present to the future.

02:07:30.440 But finding ways of testing that has proved very, very difficult.

02:07:33.460 So, but the relationship between sacrifice and delay of gratification, those are the same words.

02:07:41.320 Right.

02:07:42.140 Delayed gratification is a sacrifice.

02:07:45.260 That's just...

02:07:45.820 And, you know, there's famous experiments.

02:07:47.540 You know, you may know the marshmallow experiment.

02:07:49.580 And that is, well, basically, you take kids, four or so, and you say, you sit them in a room and at a little table, and you say, here's a marshmallow.

02:07:59.600 If you don't eat that for 10 minutes, we'll come in and give you another marshmallow.

02:08:03.280 Right?

02:08:03.620 And so, the kids, and they videotape the kids, and the tapes are actually pretty funny because the poor kids do everything they can not to look at that candy or marshmallow.

02:08:11.200 It's like they sit on their hands, they hum, they look at the ceiling.

02:08:14.220 It's like they try to distract themselves.

02:08:16.980 And some of them just, you know, it's like, oh, to hell with it.

02:08:19.100 And they eat it.

02:08:20.020 And then others can manage it.

02:08:21.820 And those, well, the data showed, you know, and I wouldn't say this study has been replicated many times,

02:08:28.540 but the data showed quite clearly that the kids who could delay gratification at an early stage were doing quite a bit better later in life.

02:08:34.360 Now, I don't know to what degree that was controlled for IQ, because such things matter.

02:08:39.720 But the point is, is that, well, the point is the point that you're making, is that you can delay,

02:08:45.680 you can only delay gratification intelligently, though, if the social structure is stable.

02:08:50.400 Right?

02:08:50.720 Because basically what, if you delay gratification, you're making a bargain with the potential future.

02:08:56.080 And the bargain is everybody's going to keep acting the same way so that the future is the same as the present.

02:09:01.020 Because otherwise, you'll delay gratification, and then everything will fall apart.

02:09:04.360 And you won't get your cake, and you won't get to eat it.

02:09:07.280 And so society has to be quite stable.

02:09:10.320 It has to be stabilized by the contractual relationship between people before delaying gratification is a useful strategy.

02:09:17.000 This is also why you see, in chaotic circumstances, where the future becomes uncertain,

02:09:23.520 people forego delay of gratification very, very rapidly.

02:09:26.800 And perhaps appropriately so, although you can get a spiral going in the other direction.

02:09:32.000 So, could the idea of sacrifice be, like, the behavioral precursor of the psychological,

02:09:38.740 sorry, the methodological idea of sacrifice be the behavioral precursor of psychological daily gratification?

02:09:46.640 Or is it the same thing?

02:09:48.060 You know how you usually say, for something to become part of what you have to take it out first,

02:09:54.020 and then become, and then understand it, please?

02:10:00.400 I would say it's a chicken and egg problem.

02:10:02.620 Because what happens, as you stabilize societies, being conscientious becomes more useful.

02:10:10.140 And so then you're going to be selected for, as a consequence of being conscientious,

02:10:16.580 and that's going to stabilize the society even more.

02:10:19.100 These are roughly known as Baldwin effects.

02:10:21.920 So, that's where, let's call it a genetic transformation,

02:10:25.820 produces a behavioral transformation that transforms the environment,

02:10:29.140 so the genetic transformation is more likely to propagate.

02:10:31.880 You can get unbelievably rapid evolutionary movements when you get a loop like that developing.

02:10:39.520 And they happen frequently.

02:10:41.740 And that's also how, in some sense, a meme can be turned into a genetic...

02:10:47.120 can manifest itself genetically.

02:10:48.980 So, if you have an idea that spreads through the culture,

02:10:51.080 and it tilts the culture in a certain way,

02:10:53.360 such that those who hold that idea are likely to be more successful,

02:10:56.920 then the meme and the biology will align themselves across time.

02:11:00.080 And, well, I think you see that happening.

02:11:04.700 That's that, to some degree, that's what's happened,

02:11:06.560 as religious stories have propagated themselves as well.

02:11:09.320 Because as the idea of the hero becomes clearer, so to speak,

02:11:13.960 and then it manifests itself more clearly in the society,

02:11:16.740 then there's more rewards for doing it,

02:11:18.720 then the selection pressures get more positively related to that kind of behavior,

02:11:22.880 and the whole thing loops upwards.

02:11:25.300 So, it's something like that.

02:11:27.420 In terms of treating mental health disorders,

02:11:31.580 where do you think we should draw the line,

02:11:33.780 or how should we draw the line between pharmaceutical interventions

02:11:37.860 and various psychotherapy methods?

02:11:41.820 I mean, at what point is depression and anxiety should be treated with medicine,

02:11:47.860 and at what point should it be...

02:11:50.500 Is it a...

02:11:51.420 Okay, that's a good question.

02:11:53.420 So, the question is,

02:11:54.660 how do you differentiate the utility of behavioral

02:11:57.560 slash psychotherapeutic treatments

02:11:59.660 for conditions like depression versus medical treatments?

02:12:02.760 Okay, so the first thing I would say is,

02:12:04.780 don't underestimate the utility of medical interventions.

02:12:09.080 Depression is a catastrophe.

02:12:10.920 It carries with it a very high suicide rate.

02:12:12.840 And it also levels people out,

02:12:15.760 and it's really hard on their families.

02:12:18.080 And so...

02:12:18.620 And it's physiologically extraordinarily damaging.

02:12:21.980 And so, if you're in a depressive state,

02:12:25.160 and it's severe,

02:12:26.580 you can try an antidepressant.

02:12:28.320 You'll know in a month if it works.

02:12:30.560 If it works, well, maybe it'll help you get your life together.

02:12:32.900 Like, we could say,

02:12:33.580 well, maybe you're depressed because your life isn't very well together.

02:12:36.700 Could be.

02:12:37.760 Sometimes people are depressed.

02:12:39.360 Their life is just...

02:12:40.500 It isn't fine because no one's life is fine.

02:12:42.780 Everyone's life is a tragedy.

02:12:44.780 But sometimes people have their lives in order

02:12:47.980 as much as you could expect anyone to have.

02:12:50.420 They have friends.

02:12:51.280 They have an intimate relationship.

02:12:52.600 They have a career that they like.

02:12:53.880 You know, they're qualified, industrious people

02:12:57.080 working hard on what they're doing

02:12:58.980 and really playing a minimum number of games with themselves.

02:13:03.100 And they're terribly depressed.

02:13:05.760 Antidepressant, man.

02:13:06.560 Sometimes that will just fix it.

02:13:08.960 And so, hooray!

02:13:09.700 Like, you're a biological entity.

02:13:11.620 If there's something out there that can help you

02:13:13.920 strengthen yourself so that you can prevail, great.

02:13:18.680 And, you know, people...

02:13:19.760 You hear, everyone takes antidepressants.

02:13:21.980 You know, everyone's taking them.

02:13:23.220 It's like, no one takes those bloody things

02:13:24.920 without serious consideration.

02:13:27.200 Half the time I spend with my clients who are depressed

02:13:29.280 is often the two-years-long attempt

02:13:31.740 to get them to tentatively try an antidepressant.

02:13:34.820 Because they're so guilty

02:13:36.240 that they're relying on an external crutch

02:13:38.220 to sort out their lives

02:13:39.280 that they can't even tolerate it.

02:13:41.380 But, you know, I say,

02:13:42.200 well, look, man,

02:13:43.780 what if you had diabetes?

02:13:45.780 You're not going to take your insulin?

02:13:47.360 It's like,

02:13:48.280 you got stressed,

02:13:49.160 you blew out at your weakest point.

02:13:50.660 That's what happens when you get stressed.

02:13:52.120 If there's something out there that might help you,

02:13:54.200 it's like,

02:13:54.740 try it,

02:13:55.580 for God's sake.

02:13:56.300 You'll know in a month.

02:13:58.160 And you just stop if it doesn't work.

02:14:00.620 Now, having said that,

02:14:02.560 you want to do a multidimensional analysis.

02:14:04.880 It's like,

02:14:05.320 well, do you have any friends?

02:14:07.220 Do you have an intimate relationship?

02:14:08.600 Or are you pursuing one?

02:14:09.520 Do you have a reasonable career?

02:14:10.820 Are you as educated as you are intelligent?

02:14:12.740 Do you have something useful to do

02:14:13.960 with your time outside of work?

02:14:15.920 Do you have a drug or alcohol problem?

02:14:17.720 Are there other behavioral issues

02:14:18.980 like sleep dysregulation

02:14:20.260 and lack of eating

02:14:21.080 that are contributing to the pathology?

02:14:23.180 You want to differentiate all of that.

02:14:24.960 And wherever you can make

02:14:26.200 a behavioral intervention,

02:14:27.540 so much the better.

02:14:28.880 But sometimes, too,

02:14:29.820 you're dealing with people

02:14:30.620 whose lives are so wrecked

02:14:31.780 that they don't even know where to start.

02:14:33.540 They're different than the ones

02:14:34.460 who have everything in order, say.

02:14:36.140 And you say,

02:14:36.680 well, try this, man.

02:14:38.120 Maybe you won't cut your throat

02:14:39.400 in the next month.

02:14:40.280 Because if you're dead,

02:14:41.080 it's going to be hard to work with you.

02:14:43.320 And so,

02:14:44.280 so,

02:14:44.800 medical interventions,

02:14:47.300 anything.

02:14:48.540 If you're sick,

02:14:49.780 you do what is necessary

02:14:50.940 to get better.

02:14:52.060 And you leave your pride behind

02:14:53.620 if you have to.

02:14:55.900 And that says nothing

02:14:57.660 about the utility

02:14:58.420 of the behavioral interventions.

02:15:00.020 You want to hit the problem

02:15:01.160 with everything you have

02:15:02.200 at your disposal.

02:15:03.760 But some antidepressants,

02:15:06.360 especially,

02:15:07.020 especially for people

02:15:08.320 whose lives are together

02:15:09.500 and who are depressed,

02:15:10.820 antidepressants

02:15:11.500 can be absolutely miraculous.

02:15:13.900 So,

02:15:15.060 you know,

02:15:15.320 when you hear about

02:15:16.220 the clinical evidence

02:15:17.460 in their favor being iffy,

02:15:18.960 and that's partly

02:15:19.540 because the diagnosis

02:15:20.340 of depression

02:15:20.980 isn't very well formulated,

02:15:22.220 it's very different

02:15:24.120 to have a terrible life

02:15:25.140 than to be depressed.

02:15:26.780 And antidepressants

02:15:27.620 can only help you so much

02:15:28.820 if you have a terrible life.

02:15:31.100 So,

02:15:32.100 yeah.

02:15:33.180 Yes?

02:15:35.600 You've spoken about

02:15:38.560 these activities

02:15:40.760 that are meaningful

02:15:41.740 and how our consciousness

02:15:43.340 might be very good

02:15:44.140 at identifying those

02:15:45.180 and how they show themselves

02:15:47.760 as a light.

02:15:49.060 You know what I'm talking about,

02:15:50.360 right?

02:15:50.600 Mm-hmm.

02:15:50.800 And I feel like

02:15:53.760 some things can hijack it.

02:15:55.960 Some things that are not

02:15:57.040 actually meaningful

02:15:57.740 or useful to your life

02:15:59.040 can make themselves

02:16:00.660 Sure.

02:16:01.640 That's what does

02:16:02.180 some personalities.

02:16:03.240 Yeah.

02:16:03.640 And video games,

02:16:04.740 for example,

02:16:05.700 are one of the things.

02:16:06.260 You know,

02:16:06.440 video games are,

02:16:07.240 okay,

02:16:07.500 so the question is,

02:16:08.600 can that sense of meaning

02:16:09.680 be hijacked?

02:16:10.500 And the answer to that

02:16:11.140 is absolutely.

02:16:12.540 Absolutely.

02:16:13.840 Because

02:16:14.280 you could say

02:16:16.220 that the ultimate sense

02:16:17.240 of meaning

02:16:17.640 is composed of the union

02:16:18.900 of fragmentary senses

02:16:20.160 of meaning.

02:16:20.660 And the fragmentary senses

02:16:21.700 of meaning

02:16:22.020 can be overwhelmingly powerful.

02:16:23.760 Anger,

02:16:24.740 sexual lust,

02:16:26.220 and the sorts of things

02:16:27.620 that you experience,

02:16:28.440 say,

02:16:28.820 when you're playing

02:16:29.260 a video game,

02:16:29.860 which are very carefully

02:16:31.260 calibrated to keep you

02:16:32.520 on the edge of exploration,

02:16:34.460 let's say.

02:16:35.100 Now,

02:16:35.520 I'm not a foe of video games

02:16:37.840 because games are complicated

02:16:39.640 and it isn't clear

02:16:40.660 what people are doing

02:16:41.580 when they're playing them.

02:16:42.940 You know,

02:16:43.180 they may be expanding

02:16:44.100 their cognitive skills.

02:16:45.420 They may be learning

02:16:46.100 to cooperate.

02:16:46.980 They may be learning

02:16:47.560 to engage in complex

02:16:48.640 problem solving.

02:16:49.440 And so,

02:16:50.500 but part of it's also

02:16:51.880 a matter of balance.

02:16:53.720 You know,

02:16:55.000 50 hours a week,

02:16:56.500 probably not.

02:16:57.820 Unless you're going

02:16:58.400 to go pro.

02:16:59.820 Right?

02:17:00.600 Because there's other things

02:17:02.060 you need to be attending to.

02:17:03.220 It's not a stable solution

02:17:04.560 for you,

02:17:06.020 your family,

02:17:07.420 your society.

02:17:08.560 It's too one-sided.

02:17:10.040 Yeah,

02:17:10.240 and you can get

02:17:10.840 pulled down rabbit holes

02:17:12.660 of all sorts

02:17:13.500 that are one-sided

02:17:15.280 pursuits of meaning.

02:17:16.140 So,

02:17:17.160 and it's something

02:17:17.560 we're actually going

02:17:18.360 to talk about

02:17:18.860 as the later

02:17:19.920 classes unfold.

02:17:21.360 The question is,

02:17:22.040 how do you stop

02:17:22.760 yourself from falling

02:17:24.180 prey to a pathologized

02:17:25.720 sense of meaning?

02:17:26.920 And I think one of the

02:17:27.780 answers to that

02:17:28.460 is don't lie.

02:17:30.700 Because what you're hoping

02:17:32.100 is that your nervous system

02:17:33.280 is sufficiently

02:17:34.140 healthy and well-programmed

02:17:36.380 so that what it reads

02:17:37.740 out to you

02:17:38.420 is reliable.

02:17:39.200 And if you

02:17:40.660 pathologize

02:17:42.000 your psyche

02:17:43.140 by either

02:17:45.340 through sins of omission,

02:17:47.260 let's say,

02:17:47.720 or outright deception,

02:17:49.040 you're going to warp

02:17:49.860 that internal structure

02:17:51.000 and it's not going to

02:17:51.600 read out properly to you.

02:17:53.060 And then your sense of

02:17:53.940 meaning will lead you

02:17:54.680 astray.

02:17:55.560 So, like,

02:17:56.060 one of the reasons

02:17:56.880 for speaking the truth,

02:17:59.620 I shouldn't say that

02:18:00.460 because you don't know

02:18:00.980 how to speak the truth,

02:18:01.960 but you do know

02:18:02.660 how not to lie.

02:18:04.700 And it's a game

02:18:05.920 you're playing with

02:18:06.480 yourself.

02:18:06.900 You can define

02:18:07.480 the damn lies.

02:18:08.180 No one else has to

02:18:08.980 do that for you.

02:18:10.220 You try not to utter

02:18:12.260 falsehoods

02:18:13.520 because you warp

02:18:14.280 your neurological

02:18:15.320 structure by doing so

02:18:16.580 and then it will

02:18:17.220 read out pathologically.

02:18:18.780 And then if you

02:18:19.400 rely on it to guide you,

02:18:20.680 it will run you

02:18:21.400 right off a cliff.

02:18:22.820 So that's why

02:18:23.680 there's a moral element

02:18:24.600 to this.

02:18:25.140 If you're going to rely

02:18:26.320 on your sense of meaning,

02:18:28.540 make sure that you

02:18:29.420 don't pollute

02:18:30.380 the mechanism.

02:18:32.480 See, this is

02:18:33.080 partly why people

02:18:34.440 go to confession.

02:18:36.560 Right?

02:18:37.040 Which is

02:18:37.280 which is like

02:18:38.220 a psychotherapeutic

02:18:39.320 technique.

02:18:39.860 It's like,

02:18:40.420 okay, what stupid,

02:18:41.860 miserable, wretched

02:18:42.520 things did I do

02:18:43.480 this week?

02:18:44.640 That's a good thing

02:18:45.300 to make conscious,

02:18:47.040 right?

02:18:47.240 Because maybe you

02:18:47.900 cannot do them

02:18:48.720 the next week.

02:18:49.720 And you think,

02:18:50.360 well, why would you

02:18:51.040 bother?

02:18:51.500 It's like, well,

02:18:52.920 you're in a ship.

02:18:54.420 It's sailing across

02:18:55.580 the stormy seas.

02:18:58.060 If you're

02:18:58.800 hacking holes in it

02:19:00.520 with a pickaxe,

02:19:01.660 you should probably

02:19:02.280 pay attention to that

02:19:03.240 before you sink.

02:19:04.100 So, it's a good

02:19:06.000 idea to keep

02:19:06.720 what you're doing

02:19:08.060 that's stupid in mind

02:19:09.160 so that you can

02:19:09.760 stop doing it.

02:19:11.360 And so then you can

02:19:12.080 more and more rely

02:19:12.880 on yourself and

02:19:13.680 your own, you know,

02:19:15.200 your own conscience,

02:19:17.500 let's say, as a guide

02:19:18.960 to proper action.

02:19:19.720 You know in the

02:19:20.140 Pinocchio story is that

02:19:21.260 the conscience was not

02:19:23.120 an unerring guide

02:19:24.060 for Pinocchio.

02:19:25.200 It had to learn.

02:19:26.340 And so, it's also

02:19:29.860 partly pushing yourself

02:19:31.100 into new situations

02:19:32.160 and differentiating

02:19:33.140 yourself so that you

02:19:33.960 get wiser.

02:19:35.880 And so it's courage

02:19:37.060 as well as truth.

02:19:39.220 Those might be the

02:19:40.120 two.

02:19:41.360 There's more.

02:19:42.080 Beauty, courage,

02:19:43.080 truth, you know,

02:19:43.880 the fundamental

02:19:44.720 virtues.

02:19:47.560 Why be virtuous?

02:19:48.860 That's the question.

02:19:50.700 It's so that you can

02:19:51.400 bear the suffering of

02:19:52.360 life without becoming

02:19:53.400 corrupt.

02:19:53.840 corrupt, right?

02:19:56.760 It's practical.

02:19:58.780 It's practical.

02:19:59.780 There's nothing more

02:20:00.660 practical than that.

02:20:02.300 So, unless you want

02:20:03.280 misery.

02:20:04.040 And people do, you

02:20:04.900 know.

02:20:05.760 It's exciting.

02:20:07.200 Misery.

02:20:08.520 So, other questions?

02:20:12.940 All right then.

02:20:15.440 See you next

02:20:17.000 Wednesday.

02:20:23.840 .

02:20:27.540 .

02:20:27.680 .

02:20:28.380 .

02:20:32.600 .

02:20:47.200 .

02:20:48.840 .

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The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - September 20, 2020

137. Maps of Meaning 09： Patterns of Symbolic Representation

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