The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 138. Maps of Meaning 10： Genesis and the Buddha

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00:00:57.420 I told you at the beginning of the class that I started working on this material,

00:01:17.660 partly because I was interested in why people were so inclined to go to any lengths to protect their belief systems.

00:01:33.820 I wanted to understand, and I knew that those were systems of value, right?

00:01:38.140 That a belief system is something that enables you to ascribe value to things so that you can act in the world towards things and away from things, roughly speaking.

00:01:51.020 And I've already made a case to you that belief systems regulate people's emotions,

00:01:59.340 but not as a consequence of decreasing their death anxiety or anything like that,

00:02:07.260 or even directly decreasing their threat sensitivity or uncertainty,

00:02:13.480 but more specifically by helping them orient themselves in the world

00:02:18.760 so that what they do matches what they want in the social environment.

00:02:23.700 And it's an important set of distinctions because the emotional control that belief systems allow is mediated by success in the social environment.

00:02:35.760 That's the crucial thing.

00:02:36.800 It's not as if you're holding a belief system and that's directly inhibiting somehow your emotional responsivity.

00:02:45.780 It's more that you share, you have a mode of orienting yourself in the world

00:02:53.420 so that other people can understand what you're up to so that you can cooperate and compete with them without conflict.

00:03:01.500 And the fact that you can do that without conflict and maybe even with cooperation,

00:03:05.640 that's what regulates your emotion.

00:03:07.640 So it's not only the fact of the belief system, it's the fact that it's shared with everyone else.

00:03:12.960 And so people are willing to defend their belief systems

00:03:20.440 because they're defending the territorial structure that enables them to make sense of the world

00:03:30.120 and then to act out making sense of the world with everyone else around them.

00:03:35.980 Now then the question arises,

00:03:37.720 what if two different groups of people have different belief systems?

00:03:43.320 What do you do in a situation like that?

00:03:45.460 And one answer is

00:03:46.560 you capitulate.

00:03:50.360 Another answer is that you fight.

00:03:52.200 Another answer might be that you

00:03:53.600 come to some consensus about how

00:03:56.000 the difference between those different belief systems might be mediated

00:03:59.560 so that

00:04:00.160 you can inhabit the same territory without

00:04:02.580 subordination or without conflict.

00:04:04.480 But if you're going to

00:04:08.400 come together in an agreement,

00:04:11.320 you can't do that simply by abandoning

00:04:14.160 the belief system because the belief system is what orients you in the world.

00:04:19.080 And so

00:04:19.460 the negotiation is very tricky.

00:04:22.960 And because of that, it often ends up in subordination or conflict.

00:04:31.140 Another question that might arise

00:04:33.220 out of that rat's nest of questions is

00:04:36.880 if you have belief system A and you have belief system B

00:04:40.780 and they're in conflict,

00:04:43.100 is there any principles that you can use

00:04:45.120 or any guidelines you can use

00:04:46.520 to take the belief systems apart

00:04:49.000 to try to understand

00:04:50.760 what might be of central value

00:04:53.520 in either of them or both

00:04:54.880 so that if you do bring them together

00:04:57.140 or even if one supersedes the other

00:04:59.700 that there's some evidence

00:05:01.140 that they're predicated on principles

00:05:02.880 that are actually viable?

00:05:04.720 And of course, that brings up the question of

00:05:06.440 what constitutes viable principles?

00:05:09.980 And I got interested in that

00:05:12.120 more particular question

00:05:14.440 because when the Cold War was raging,

00:05:18.480 there were two ideological systems set up in the world,

00:05:21.760 roughly speaking.

00:05:22.540 There were, of course, more,

00:05:23.400 but we can simplify it for the sake of argument down to two.

00:05:26.280 And one was predicated on

00:05:29.140 the communitarian principles

00:05:31.500 that were put forward by Marx

00:05:32.980 and the other was

00:05:33.740 a consequence of, you know,

00:05:36.740 I would say Western individualistic

00:05:39.040 free market capitalist democracies,

00:05:41.420 roughly speaking.

00:05:42.420 And then you might ask yourself,

00:05:43.820 well, were those only,

00:05:44.720 was that only a difference of opinion?

00:05:47.320 Right?

00:05:47.860 Because that's the central question.

00:05:49.560 If it's just a difference of opinion,

00:05:51.160 if what's underneath it is arbitrary,

00:05:52.640 then A, it doesn't matter which system wins,

00:05:55.640 roughly speaking.

00:05:58.060 B, there's no right and wrong in the discussion, right?

00:06:01.640 It's, that would be something

00:06:03.260 that would be more akin to a postmodern claim.

00:06:05.400 It's just group A puts forward their claims to power

00:06:08.280 and group B puts forward their claims to power

00:06:10.180 and they're both equally valid

00:06:11.340 and, well, have at her fundamentally

00:06:13.720 because there's no way of solving the problem.

00:06:18.360 But it struck me that that,

00:06:19.760 I didn't think that we should leap

00:06:22.020 to that conclusion so rapidly.

00:06:24.620 And so I started to investigate,

00:06:27.240 I think, I started to investigate

00:06:29.020 the substructure of Western thought,

00:06:33.140 not so much communist thought

00:06:34.680 because I thought of communism

00:06:35.980 as an interloper on the scene.

00:06:37.840 It was a system that wasn't devised

00:06:39.380 and formalized until the late 1900s,

00:06:42.500 late 1800s.

00:06:43.940 And I didn't see it as part of

00:06:46.640 what you might describe as organic development.

00:06:48.660 There's no mythology, so to speak,

00:06:50.460 at the basis of the communist perspective.

00:06:53.080 And one of the things that's very interesting

00:06:54.900 is that although those ideas were roundly defeated

00:06:57.800 by the end of the 20th century,

00:06:59.160 they're making a comeback so rapidly

00:07:01.480 that it's almost unbelievable.

00:07:03.760 You know, I got an email from a medical student

00:07:05.960 yesterday at the University of Toronto.

00:07:07.960 And now the courses that they have to take,

00:07:10.360 the mandatory, these are social justice courses,

00:07:12.880 include modules on equity.

00:07:15.420 And equity is equality of outcome.

00:07:16.840 They're pushing, people are having

00:07:18.900 the equality of outcome notion pushed on them

00:07:21.980 in mandatory training in universities everywhere again.

00:07:25.040 And equity isn't equality of opportunity.

00:07:27.020 It's equality of outcome.

00:07:29.000 Now, that was the central dictum

00:07:30.780 of the communist states in the 20th century.

00:07:33.260 It's like, what the hell?

00:07:34.460 How did we get back to that again already?

00:07:38.280 So, and the idea being is

00:07:39.980 if there isn't absolute equality of outcome

00:07:42.120 within an organization,

00:07:43.520 that the thing is corrupt

00:07:44.880 and needs to be restructured from the bottom up.

00:07:47.420 And then the question, of course,

00:07:48.660 is who decides that outcomes are equal

00:07:51.180 by what means and with what groups?

00:07:53.160 Because you can produce an infinite number

00:07:55.660 of groups of people

00:07:56.980 with equally validly in some sense.

00:08:00.040 And you're never going to get equality of outcome

00:08:02.240 across the infinite number of ways

00:08:04.980 that you can parse up society into groups.

00:08:07.380 It's not even technically possible

00:08:08.860 unless everyone has nothing.

00:08:10.220 So, anyways,

00:08:12.880 these are obviously very powerful ideas.

00:08:16.040 And the mere fact that they killed

00:08:17.600 100 million people already

00:08:18.920 or more in the 20th century

00:08:20.040 wasn't enough to put them to rest.

00:08:23.500 Anyways, so back to the main theme.

00:08:27.080 Is there something,

00:08:28.300 this is the main question,

00:08:29.640 is there something,

00:08:31.020 is there a set of ideas

00:08:32.480 that Western civilization

00:08:34.180 is predicated on

00:08:37.020 that are more than just bloody opinion?

00:08:39.920 That's the question.

00:08:41.820 Because if there isn't,

00:08:44.300 well, then,

00:08:45.260 what do you do about that?

00:08:46.960 It's arbitrary.

00:08:48.340 You're just holding it

00:08:49.220 for no reason whatsoever.

00:08:50.720 It could be a different system.

00:08:52.680 There's no reason to stick with it.

00:08:54.300 All of those things.

00:08:55.280 Like, it takes the core out of it.

00:08:57.880 Well, that was Nietzsche's claim, right?

00:08:59.280 He said,

00:09:00.040 you take the core metaphysical presupposition

00:09:03.360 out from underneath

00:09:04.500 Western civilization

00:09:06.000 or any civilization for that matter,

00:09:08.260 and the whole thing

00:09:09.360 loosens, shakens,

00:09:11.560 shakes,

00:09:12.080 and crumbles.

00:09:14.140 Well, for Nietzsche,

00:09:15.100 the metaphysical presupposition

00:09:16.460 was God.

00:09:18.440 Well, and then the question,

00:09:19.860 of course,

00:09:20.160 well, what even does that mean?

00:09:21.620 And on one hand,

00:09:24.260 it means,

00:09:24.940 I suppose,

00:09:26.140 adherence to a dogmatic

00:09:27.340 set of beliefs.

00:09:28.320 But then you might ask yourself,

00:09:29.940 well, is there something

00:09:30.720 else that it means?

00:09:32.300 It means at least

00:09:33.140 the hypothesis

00:09:34.060 of some transcendent value.

00:09:36.240 It means at least that.

00:09:42.740 So,

00:09:43.840 you know,

00:09:44.740 Nietzsche announced

00:09:45.540 the death of God.

00:09:46.620 And so one of the consequences

00:09:47.840 of that,

00:09:48.440 Dostoevsky was working on

00:09:49.780 exactly the same set of ideas.

00:09:51.340 And in Crime and Punishment

00:09:52.660 in particular,

00:09:53.460 which is a book,

00:09:55.040 like,

00:09:55.260 it's a necessary book.

00:09:56.620 That's the thing.

00:09:57.520 There's a number of books

00:09:58.640 that were written

00:09:59.120 in the last 120 years

00:10:00.460 that you really have to read.

00:10:01.780 And Crime and Punishment

00:10:02.880 is one of them.

00:10:03.660 And I think

00:10:04.360 the Gulag Archipelago

00:10:05.340 is another.

00:10:05.960 And probably Beyond Good and Evil

00:10:07.320 is another.

00:10:08.360 But, you know,

00:10:09.040 Dostoevsky and Nietzsche

00:10:09.960 were writing in parallel.

00:10:11.160 It's remarkable

00:10:11.880 how much their lives intertwined.

00:10:15.260 And Nietzsche knew more

00:10:16.080 about Dostoevsky

00:10:16.960 than is generally known.

00:10:19.880 There's been some recent

00:10:20.780 scholarship indicating that.

00:10:22.200 But in Dostoevsky's book,

00:10:24.220 Crime and Punishment,

00:10:25.800 he has a,

00:10:26.660 his main character,

00:10:28.360 Raskolnikov,

00:10:29.160 decides that he's going

00:10:30.640 to commit a murder.

00:10:31.520 And he has very good

00:10:32.800 justification for the murder.

00:10:34.060 And Dostoevsky's

00:10:34.880 very good at this.

00:10:35.700 He puts his characters

00:10:37.240 into very, very

00:10:38.240 difficult moral situations

00:10:40.660 and gives them

00:10:41.680 full justification

00:10:42.540 for pursuing the,

00:10:43.840 the,

00:10:44.920 for pursuing the pathway

00:10:57.240 that they're pursuing.

00:10:58.120 And so Raskolnikov,

00:10:59.800 he's broke and starving.

00:11:02.040 He wants to go to law school.

00:11:03.200 His sister's about 0.99

00:11:03.920 to prostitute herself, 0.97

00:11:05.080 roughly speaking, 0.97

00:11:05.980 by marrying a guy

00:11:06.820 that,

00:11:07.100 that hates her,

00:11:07.980 that she hates

00:11:08.620 and that,

00:11:09.260 and he has contempt for her,

00:11:10.560 at least acts in that manner.

00:11:11.860 He's trying to rescue

00:11:12.900 his mother as well,

00:11:13.760 who's also in dire

00:11:14.580 financial straits.

00:11:16.600 He,

00:11:16.800 he,

00:11:17.400 he goes to a pawnbroker

00:11:18.780 to pawn his meager possession

00:11:20.720 so that he can continue

00:11:21.780 to scrape by.

00:11:23.300 And she has this niece,

00:11:25.540 I believe it's her niece,

00:11:26.760 that's not very bright,

00:11:28.220 who she basically treats 0.87

00:11:29.240 as an,

00:11:29.720 as a slave

00:11:30.320 and is horrible to.

00:11:31.460 And,

00:11:31.520 and so the care,

00:11:33.160 the,

00:11:33.280 the pawnbroker

00:11:34.560 has this money.

00:11:35.820 Raskolnikov is in dire need.

00:11:37.320 He thinks,

00:11:38.440 look, 1.00

00:11:38.820 I'll just kill her 1.00

00:11:40.100 because why the hell not? 1.00

00:11:42.960 I'll take her money.

00:11:44.300 She's not doing any good

00:11:45.160 with it anyways.

00:11:46.000 I'll free her niece,

00:11:46.860 who's just lurking as a slave.

00:11:48.600 She's got all these other people 0.98

00:11:49.920 tangled up in her pawnbroker schemes.

00:11:52.500 All that'll happen

00:11:53.360 is the world will be

00:11:54.140 a better place.

00:11:55.300 And the only thing

00:11:56.740 that's holding me back

00:11:57.680 is conventional moral cowardice.

00:12:01.080 And,

00:12:01.240 you know,

00:12:01.640 Dostoevsky has his character

00:12:03.240 in Crime and Punishment

00:12:04.220 go through days,

00:12:06.220 hours,

00:12:06.880 hours and days

00:12:07.980 and weeks

00:12:08.520 of intense

00:12:09.800 imagination about this,

00:12:12.040 rationalization about this,

00:12:13.960 trying to justify himself,

00:12:15.880 placing him outside,

00:12:17.160 placing himself

00:12:18.140 outside the law

00:12:19.360 so that he can

00:12:20.240 perpetrate this act

00:12:21.200 and telling himself

00:12:22.480 with all

00:12:23.200 the best nihilistic arguments

00:12:24.840 that the only possible thing

00:12:26.220 that could be holding him back

00:12:27.260 is an,

00:12:27.980 an arbitrary

00:12:28.900 sense of indoctrinated morality.

00:12:31.820 And so Dostoevsky explores that.

00:12:33.380 He does commit the murder

00:12:34.280 and then,

00:12:34.780 of course,

00:12:35.100 all hell breaks loose

00:12:36.000 because things don't necessarily

00:12:37.300 turn out the way

00:12:38.040 that you want.

00:12:38.520 He gets away with it,

00:12:39.340 however.

00:12:40.220 Well,

00:12:40.380 he gets away with it

00:12:41.120 technically

00:12:41.540 because no one knows

00:12:42.420 he did it.

00:12:43.360 But he doesn't get away

00:12:44.300 with it in relationship

00:12:45.080 to his own conscience.

00:12:47.060 And so,

00:12:47.900 the rest of the book

00:12:48.700 explores that.

00:12:49.840 Well,

00:12:50.000 Dostoevsky,

00:12:51.080 I believe it was

00:12:51.720 in Crime and Punishment,

00:12:52.620 although he makes

00:12:53.140 the same point

00:12:54.220 in many of his books,

00:12:55.840 he makes a very

00:12:56.520 fundamental point.

00:12:57.340 And this is the kind

00:12:58.040 of point

00:12:58.340 that I think

00:13:00.360 that people

00:13:00.840 who haven't

00:13:01.480 investigated

00:13:02.120 these matters

00:13:03.180 down this

00:13:04.340 particular literary

00:13:06.740 and philosophical pathway

00:13:08.080 never grapple with.

00:13:09.300 Dostoevsky said

00:13:10.080 straightforwardly,

00:13:11.120 if there's no God,

00:13:13.300 so if there's no

00:13:13.820 higher value,

00:13:14.580 let's say,

00:13:14.940 if there's no

00:13:15.260 transcendent value,

00:13:16.140 then you can do

00:13:17.120 whatever you want.

00:13:19.040 And that's the question

00:13:20.380 that he's investigating.

00:13:21.620 And you see,

00:13:22.180 this is why I have

00:13:23.340 such frustration,

00:13:24.400 say,

00:13:24.680 with people like Sam Harris,

00:13:25.940 the sort of radical atheists,

00:13:27.380 because they seem to think

00:13:28.740 that once human beings

00:13:30.700 abandon their grounding

00:13:32.520 in the transcendent,

00:13:34.060 that the plausible way

00:13:35.800 forward is with

00:13:36.660 a kind of purist rationality

00:13:39.220 that automatically attributes

00:13:40.560 to other people

00:13:41.400 equivalent value.

00:13:42.820 It's like,

00:13:43.240 I just don't understand that.

00:13:44.740 They believe that

00:13:45.620 that's the rational pathway.

00:13:47.680 What the hell is irrational

00:13:48.880 about me getting

00:13:49.680 exactly what I want

00:13:50.760 from every one of you

00:13:51.700 whenever I want it

00:13:52.660 at every possible second?

00:13:54.640 Why is that irrational?

00:13:55.380 that irrational?

00:13:56.760 And how possibly

00:13:57.940 is that more irrational

00:14:00.300 than us cooperating

00:14:01.880 so we can both

00:14:02.600 have a good time of it?

00:14:04.240 I don't understand that.

00:14:06.080 I mean,

00:14:06.560 it's as if the psychopathic

00:14:08.680 tendency is irrational.

00:14:10.880 There's nothing

00:14:11.500 irrational about it.

00:14:12.920 It's pure,

00:14:13.580 naked self-interest.

00:14:14.780 How is that irrational?

00:14:16.440 I don't understand that.

00:14:18.160 Where's the pathway

00:14:19.400 from rationality

00:14:20.480 to an egalitarian virtue?

00:14:22.800 Why the hell

00:14:24.020 not every man

00:14:24.960 for himself

00:14:25.640 and the devil

00:14:26.480 take the hindmost?

00:14:27.880 It's a perfectly

00:14:28.600 coherent philosophy

00:14:29.700 and it's actually

00:14:31.240 one that you can

00:14:31.840 institute in the world

00:14:32.700 with a fair bit

00:14:33.360 of material success

00:14:34.220 if you want to do it.

00:14:36.080 So,

00:14:36.760 I don't,

00:14:37.320 see,

00:14:37.780 to me,

00:14:38.360 I think that

00:14:38.940 the universe

00:14:40.500 that people like

00:14:41.320 Dawkins and Harris

00:14:42.740 inhabit

00:14:44.260 is so intensely

00:14:45.960 conditioned

00:14:46.760 by mythological

00:14:48.240 presuppositions

00:14:49.320 that they take

00:14:50.720 for granted

00:14:51.500 the ethic

00:14:53.500 that emerges

00:14:54.080 out of that

00:14:54.560 as if it's just

00:14:55.820 a given,

00:14:56.720 a rational given

00:14:57.620 and this,

00:14:58.140 of course,

00:14:58.480 precisely Nietzsche's

00:14:59.820 observation

00:15:00.340 as well as Dostoevsky's.

00:15:01.560 That's Nietzsche's

00:15:02.180 observation.

00:15:03.120 You don't get it.

00:15:04.500 The ethic

00:15:04.920 that you think

00:15:05.520 is normative

00:15:06.520 is a consequence

00:15:07.720 of its nesting

00:15:10.320 inside this

00:15:11.040 tremendously lengthy history,

00:15:12.860 much of which

00:15:13.760 was expressed

00:15:14.340 in mythological

00:15:15.720 formulation.

00:15:16.640 You wipe that out.

00:15:17.960 You don't get to keep

00:15:19.020 all the presuppositions

00:15:20.800 and just assume

00:15:21.560 that they're

00:15:21.940 rationally axiomatic.

00:15:23.560 They're,

00:15:24.140 the rational,

00:15:25.600 to make a rational

00:15:26.700 argument,

00:15:27.160 you have to start

00:15:27.820 with an initial

00:15:28.840 proposition.

00:15:30.580 Well,

00:15:30.820 the proposition

00:15:31.560 that underlies

00:15:32.800 Western culture

00:15:33.600 is that there's

00:15:34.460 a transcendent

00:15:35.540 morality.

00:15:36.760 Now,

00:15:36.980 you could say

00:15:37.260 that's a transcendent

00:15:38.240 morality instantiated

00:15:39.420 in the figure of God.

00:15:40.740 That's fine.

00:15:41.400 You could even call

00:15:41.960 that a personification

00:15:42.760 of the morality.

00:15:44.420 If you want to,

00:15:45.480 if you don't want to

00:15:46.440 move into a metaphysical

00:15:47.540 space,

00:15:47.900 I'm not arguing

00:15:48.680 for the existence

00:15:49.500 of God.

00:15:50.660 I'm arguing

00:15:51.580 that the ethic

00:15:53.380 that drives

00:15:54.720 our culture

00:15:56.080 is predicated

00:15:57.420 on the idea

00:15:58.340 of God

00:15:58.840 and that you can't

00:15:59.660 just take that

00:16:00.520 idea away

00:16:01.320 and expect the thing

00:16:02.700 to remain intact

00:16:03.720 mid-air

00:16:04.360 without any

00:16:04.960 foundational support.

00:16:06.200 Now,

00:16:06.480 you don't have to

00:16:07.020 buy that,

00:16:07.600 but if you're

00:16:08.520 interested in the idea,

00:16:09.600 then you can read

00:16:10.200 Nietzsche

00:16:10.500 because that's what

00:16:11.460 he was trying to

00:16:12.240 sort out

00:16:13.060 and it wasn't

00:16:13.660 only Nietzsche

00:16:14.600 who came to

00:16:15.100 that conclusion.

00:16:16.140 It was many people

00:16:16.900 who have come

00:16:17.220 to that conclusion,

00:16:18.040 but I think

00:16:18.440 the two

00:16:18.920 who've outlined

00:16:19.960 it most

00:16:20.580 spectacularly

00:16:21.900 were Nietzsche

00:16:22.780 and Dostoevsky

00:16:23.580 and Nietzsche

00:16:23.960 is an unbelievably

00:16:25.080 influential philosopher.

00:16:28.120 You know,

00:16:28.300 I don't think

00:16:28.740 there was anyone

00:16:29.360 that was more

00:16:29.900 influential

00:16:30.460 during the entire

00:16:34.580 course of the

00:16:35.240 20th century

00:16:36.040 excepting a very,

00:16:37.660 very tiny handful

00:16:39.220 of other people,

00:16:40.020 excepting the scientists.

00:16:40.900 We won't bother

00:16:41.560 with their discussion.

00:16:43.040 You could put Marx

00:16:43.760 in that category.

00:16:44.740 You could put Freud

00:16:45.600 in that category

00:16:46.380 partly,

00:16:47.120 but after that,

00:16:48.460 the list starts

00:16:49.140 to get a lot thinner,

00:16:50.660 you know,

00:16:51.120 so maybe there's

00:16:52.160 10 people up

00:16:53.080 in that level

00:16:53.800 and Dostoevsky,

00:16:55.440 of course,

00:16:55.840 I think,

00:16:56.320 I mean,

00:16:56.800 if you ever,

00:16:59.080 if anybody ever

00:16:59.840 prepares a list

00:17:00.780 of the top 10

00:17:01.740 greatest literary figures

00:17:03.180 in the world,

00:17:03.840 he would be

00:17:04.300 in the top 10 list.

00:17:05.660 You know,

00:17:05.840 I think he's

00:17:06.640 perhaps second

00:17:07.500 to Shakespeare

00:17:08.600 and maybe above

00:17:09.380 Shakespeare

00:17:09.860 in my estimation.

00:17:11.280 So these aren't

00:17:12.220 trivial people

00:17:13.040 we're talking about

00:17:13.940 and they weren't

00:17:14.680 dealing with

00:17:15.140 trivial issues.

00:17:19.040 Well,

00:17:19.580 so then the question

00:17:20.320 might be,

00:17:21.300 what's at the bottom

00:17:22.400 of the idea

00:17:23.320 of a transcendent value?

00:17:25.720 And I wanted

00:17:26.740 to approach that

00:17:28.340 staying out

00:17:31.260 of the metaphysical

00:17:32.100 domain as much

00:17:32.880 as possible

00:17:33.500 because you can

00:17:35.340 claim anything

00:17:35.820 you want

00:17:36.300 from a metaphysical

00:17:37.320 perspective

00:17:37.880 and that's

00:17:38.280 a big problem

00:17:38.900 and so people

00:17:39.920 will say,

00:17:40.460 well,

00:17:40.580 why come up

00:17:41.200 with the hypothesis

00:17:41.960 of God,

00:17:42.760 for example?

00:17:43.780 God could be anything.

00:17:44.700 There's a satire,

00:17:46.100 the flying spaghetti monster,

00:17:47.980 right,

00:17:48.180 is a classic

00:17:49.020 satirical representation

00:17:50.760 of a deity

00:17:51.540 that the atheist types

00:17:52.880 use to buttress

00:17:53.640 their arguments

00:17:54.180 and fair enough,

00:17:55.380 you know,

00:17:55.620 as a satirical idea,

00:17:57.100 it's pretty damn funny

00:17:58.020 but there's things

00:17:59.620 about this

00:18:00.120 that aren't

00:18:00.460 the least bit amusing

00:18:01.340 and the thing

00:18:02.420 that's not amusing

00:18:03.200 is,

00:18:03.580 well,

00:18:04.080 what,

00:18:04.520 if anything,

00:18:05.340 is our culture

00:18:06.460 predicated on?

00:18:08.120 Okay,

00:18:08.420 so what happened?

00:18:09.320 Well,

00:18:09.920 Nietzsche and Dostoevsky

00:18:10.920 put forth

00:18:11.800 this set of propositions

00:18:13.160 and out of Dostoevsky's

00:18:15.900 line of thinking

00:18:16.840 to some degree

00:18:17.560 grew Solzhenitsyn.

00:18:19.120 Solzhenitsyn documented

00:18:20.240 the absolute horrors

00:18:21.400 of equity predicated

00:18:22.780 Soviet society,

00:18:24.480 you know,

00:18:24.760 and we don't teach,

00:18:26.120 we don't learn about that,

00:18:27.800 right?

00:18:28.320 This I don't understand

00:18:29.660 is that

00:18:30.580 what happened

00:18:31.640 in the 20th century

00:18:32.600 on the radical

00:18:33.340 left end

00:18:33.920 of the spectrum

00:18:34.540 is not well documented,

00:18:35.940 students don't learn

00:18:36.820 about it,

00:18:37.200 why the hell

00:18:37.660 is that?

00:18:38.600 We learn about

00:18:39.240 World War II,

00:18:40.020 we learn about

00:18:40.480 what happened

00:18:40.940 in the Holocaust

00:18:41.420 and fair enough,

00:18:42.380 we absolutely should

00:18:43.340 but nobody knows,

00:18:45.580 it's a mystery

00:18:46.240 to everyone

00:18:46.780 when I talk about

00:18:47.980 what happened

00:18:48.600 in the Soviet Union

00:18:49.380 and that's

00:18:49.780 absolutely appalling

00:18:50.680 and that's to say

00:18:51.500 nothing about

00:18:52.120 what happened

00:18:52.640 in China

00:18:53.220 which was

00:18:53.880 equally horrible,

00:18:54.760 the system

00:19:00.660 didn't work,

00:19:01.300 it was predicated

00:19:01.960 on the wrong values

00:19:03.060 unless you think

00:19:04.220 that that sort of thing

00:19:05.060 means worked,

00:19:06.600 you know,

00:19:06.820 because you have

00:19:07.480 to define that as well

00:19:08.620 but it collapsed

00:19:10.100 under its own weight

00:19:11.020 after it killed

00:19:11.720 tens of millions

00:19:12.380 of people,

00:19:12.960 that doesn't really,

00:19:13.640 and still,

00:19:14.060 it's not like Russia 0.87

00:19:14.780 has recovered,

00:19:16.280 it doesn't seem to me

00:19:17.040 like that's a very good

00:19:17.860 definition of worked.

00:19:19.940 Now whatever we're doing

00:19:21.040 in the West

00:19:21.480 seems to work

00:19:22.360 for all of its flaws

00:19:23.400 and the question is

00:19:24.860 are we just deceiving

00:19:25.680 ourselves,

00:19:26.280 is it just arbitrary

00:19:27.260 power politics

00:19:28.260 and opinion

00:19:28.800 or is there something

00:19:29.800 at the bottom of it?

00:19:36.580 So when Solzhenitsyn

00:19:37.740 wrote the Gulag Archipelago

00:19:38.900 he believed that

00:19:39.600 the Russians would have 0.98

00:19:40.340 to return to

00:19:40.880 Orthodox Christianity

00:19:41.740 to find their pathway forward

00:19:43.240 and that's of course

00:19:44.440 has made him into

00:19:45.140 a reactionary

00:19:45.880 in the eyes of

00:19:46.440 many of his critics

00:19:47.140 but that is perhaps

00:19:48.560 what is happening

00:19:49.380 in Russia

00:19:49.800 although it's very

00:19:50.440 difficult to tell

00:19:51.220 because Putin also

00:19:52.500 seems to be using

00:19:53.380 his affiliation

00:19:54.260 with the Orthodox

00:19:55.180 Christian Church

00:19:56.080 as a means

00:19:57.100 to consolidate power

00:19:58.340 so the situation

00:19:59.900 in Russia

00:20:00.320 is unclear

00:20:00.960 but a religious revival

00:20:02.620 if that's happening

00:20:03.540 in Russia

00:20:03.940 and perhaps it isn't

00:20:05.020 but if it is happening

00:20:05.960 is something that unfolds

00:20:07.040 over decades

00:20:07.620 and even centuries

00:20:08.440 so it's not an easy

00:20:09.400 thing to evaluate

00:20:10.200 when it first starts

00:20:11.440 to happen

00:20:11.960 but Solzhenitsyn

00:20:15.240 drew the same conclusions

00:20:16.300 that Dostoevsky did

00:20:17.320 fundamentally

00:20:17.920 not in exactly

00:20:19.500 the same way

00:20:20.140 but very very close

00:20:21.200 he believed

00:20:22.040 as far as I could tell

00:20:23.100 that unless people

00:20:24.780 were willing to adhere

00:20:25.820 to some sort of

00:20:26.640 transcendent value

00:20:27.600 that they had no

00:20:28.620 protection against

00:20:29.560 pathological ideologies

00:20:31.120 and no protection

00:20:32.120 against the murderous

00:20:33.000 impulses that came

00:20:33.800 along with them

00:20:34.460 and I found his work

00:20:37.420 unbelievably

00:20:38.180 I found his writing

00:20:39.460 incredible

00:20:40.020 powerful incredible

00:20:41.220 I don't know how

00:20:42.440 you can read that book

00:20:43.340 and not draw that

00:20:44.480 kind of conclusion

00:20:45.220 I think people who

00:20:46.340 criticize Solzhenitsyn

00:20:47.660 have never read 0.99

00:20:48.340 the damn book 0.99

00:20:48.960 because that book 1.00

00:20:49.740 is like

00:20:50.120 it's like going

00:20:51.120 into the ring

00:20:51.620 with Muhammad Ali

00:20:52.420 and being pummeled 0.84

00:20:53.380 to death

00:20:53.700 for half an hour

00:20:54.520 you know

00:20:55.120 you don't recover

00:20:55.760 from it that easily

00:20:56.700 so

00:20:57.640 I told you

00:21:19.200 at the beginning

00:21:19.740 of the class

00:21:20.560 that

00:21:21.900 I started working

00:21:24.440 on this material

00:21:25.500 partly because

00:21:29.500 I was interested

00:21:30.240 in why

00:21:30.820 people were so

00:21:33.740 inclined to

00:21:35.620 to go to any

00:21:39.840 lengths to protect

00:21:40.560 their belief systems

00:21:41.480 I wanted to understand

00:21:42.880 and I knew that

00:21:44.280 those were systems

00:21:45.000 of value

00:21:45.640 right

00:21:46.000 that a belief system

00:21:47.600 is something that

00:21:48.340 enables you to

00:21:49.440 ascribe value to things

00:21:50.820 so that

00:21:51.480 so that you can

00:21:53.040 act

00:21:53.780 in the world

00:21:55.340 towards things

00:21:56.200 and away from things

00:21:57.120 roughly speaking

00:21:57.920 and

00:21:59.400 I've already made

00:22:01.920 a case to you

00:22:02.600 that

00:22:02.960 belief systems

00:22:05.260 regulate people's

00:22:06.200 emotions

00:22:07.180 but not

00:22:07.920 not as a consequence

00:22:11.300 of decreasing

00:22:12.680 their death anxiety

00:22:13.740 or anything like that

00:22:15.120 or

00:22:15.540 even directly

00:22:16.900 decreasing their

00:22:18.240 their threat sensitivity

00:22:20.440 or uncertainty

00:22:21.160 but more

00:22:21.760 specifically

00:22:22.540 by

00:22:23.560 helping them

00:22:25.040 orient themselves

00:22:25.940 in the world

00:22:26.620 so that what

00:22:28.180 they do

00:22:28.720 matches what

00:22:29.640 they want

00:22:30.240 in the social

00:22:31.060 environment

00:22:31.560 and it's an

00:22:33.120 important set

00:22:34.200 of distinctions

00:22:34.840 because

00:22:35.280 the emotional

00:22:36.700 control

00:22:37.380 that belief

00:22:38.720 systems

00:22:39.320 allow

00:22:40.100 is

00:22:40.640 mediated by

00:22:41.940 success in the

00:22:42.780 social environment

00:22:43.500 that's the crucial

00:22:44.240 thing

00:22:44.540 it's not

00:22:44.920 it's not

00:22:45.820 directly

00:22:46.920 it's not as if

00:22:48.600 you're holding a

00:22:49.160 belief system

00:22:49.760 and that's

00:22:50.200 directly inhibiting

00:22:51.300 somehow your

00:22:52.300 emotional

00:22:52.860 responsivity

00:22:53.660 it's more that

00:22:56.280 you share

00:22:57.960 you have a

00:22:58.620 motive

00:22:59.300 orienting yourself

00:23:00.740 in the world

00:23:01.280 so that other

00:23:02.780 people can understand

00:23:03.700 what you're up to

00:23:04.540 so that you can

00:23:05.920 cooperate and

00:23:06.640 compete with them

00:23:07.440 without conflict

00:23:08.720 and the fact that

00:23:10.340 you can do that

00:23:10.960 without conflict

00:23:11.700 and maybe even

00:23:12.620 with cooperation

00:23:13.300 that's what

00:23:14.140 regulates your

00:23:14.820 emotion

00:23:15.180 so it's not

00:23:16.320 only the fact

00:23:17.020 of the belief

00:23:17.560 belief system

00:23:18.400 it's the fact

00:23:19.020 that it's shared

00:23:19.760 with everyone

00:23:20.360 else

00:23:20.840 and so

00:23:22.720 people are

00:23:25.340 willing to

00:23:26.260 defend their

00:23:27.580 belief systems

00:23:28.320 because

00:23:28.780 they're defending

00:23:30.440 the territorial

00:23:31.660 structure

00:23:32.360 that enables

00:23:34.200 them to

00:23:34.940 make sense

00:23:37.540 of the world

00:23:38.000 and then to

00:23:38.440 act out

00:23:38.900 making sense

00:23:39.660 of the world

00:23:40.200 with everyone

00:23:40.660 else around

00:23:41.220 them

00:23:41.500 now then

00:23:44.580 the question

00:23:45.120 arises

00:23:45.600 what if

00:23:48.680 two different

00:23:49.180 groups of

00:23:49.580 people have

00:23:50.000 different belief

00:23:50.560 systems

00:23:51.020 what do you

00:23:51.460 do in a

00:23:51.840 situation like

00:23:52.560 that

00:23:52.880 and one

00:23:53.720 answer is

00:23:54.460 you capitulate

00:23:58.020 another answer

00:23:58.840 is that you

00:23:59.380 fight

00:23:59.900 another answer

00:24:00.600 might be that

00:24:01.220 you come to

00:24:02.320 some consensus

00:24:03.080 about how

00:24:03.880 the difference

00:24:04.920 between those

00:24:05.480 different belief

00:24:06.040 systems might be

00:24:06.840 mediated so that

00:24:08.040 you can inhabit

00:24:09.180 the same territory

00:24:10.040 without subordination

00:24:11.400 or without

00:24:11.880 conflict

00:24:12.440 but if

00:24:15.600 you're going

00:24:15.960 to come

00:24:17.520 together in

00:24:18.160 an agreement

00:24:18.640 you can't do

00:24:20.500 that simply by

00:24:21.300 abandoning the

00:24:22.720 belief system

00:24:23.340 because the

00:24:23.800 belief system

00:24:24.340 is what

00:24:24.640 orients you

00:24:25.280 in the world

00:24:25.800 and so

00:24:27.340 the negotiation

00:24:29.080 is very tricky

00:24:30.020 and because of

00:24:31.580 that it often

00:24:32.240 ends up in

00:24:33.220 subordination

00:24:33.860 or conflict

00:24:34.700 another

00:24:39.340 question that

00:24:40.420 might arise

00:24:41.060 out of that 0.98

00:24:43.100 rat's nest 0.72

00:24:43.740 of questions

00:24:44.340 is

00:24:44.740 if you have

00:24:46.400 belief system

00:24:47.040 A and you

00:24:47.500 have belief

00:24:47.960 system B

00:24:48.640 and they're

00:24:49.520 in conflict

00:24:50.200 is there any

00:24:51.720 principles that

00:24:52.420 you can use

00:24:52.980 or any

00:24:53.260 guidelines you

00:24:53.940 can use

00:24:54.380 to take

00:24:55.840 the belief

00:24:56.180 systems apart

00:24:56.860 to try to

00:24:58.060 understand

00:24:58.620 what might be

00:24:59.960 of central

00:25:00.960 value in

00:25:01.620 either of

00:25:02.100 them or

00:25:02.400 both so

00:25:02.980 that if

00:25:03.300 you do

00:25:04.160 bring them

00:25:04.600 together

00:25:05.000 or even

00:25:06.040 if one

00:25:06.420 supersedes

00:25:07.100 the other

00:25:07.580 that there's

00:25:08.460 some evidence

00:25:09.000 that they're

00:25:09.400 predicated on

00:25:10.200 principles

00:25:10.740 that are

00:25:11.460 actually

00:25:11.760 viable

00:25:12.220 and of

00:25:12.820 course that

00:25:13.200 brings up

00:25:13.620 the question

00:25:14.080 of what

00:25:14.900 constitutes

00:25:15.580 viable

00:25:16.040 principles

00:25:16.720 and I

00:25:18.280 got

00:25:18.500 interested

00:25:19.540 in that

00:25:20.000 more

00:25:21.320 particular

00:25:21.760 question

00:25:22.300 because

00:25:23.420 when the

00:25:24.240 Cold War

00:25:24.700 was raging

00:25:25.360 there were

00:25:27.020 two ideological

00:25:27.760 systems set

00:25:28.780 up in the

00:25:29.180 world

00:25:29.460 roughly

00:25:29.860 speaking

00:25:30.320 there were

00:25:30.580 of course

00:25:30.920 more

00:25:31.180 but we

00:25:31.580 can simplify

00:25:32.120 it for

00:25:32.600 the sake

00:25:32.940 of argument

00:25:33.360 down to

00:25:33.840 two

00:25:34.160 and one

00:25:35.240 was

00:25:35.440 predicated

00:25:36.680 on

00:25:37.020 the

00:25:38.180 communitarian

00:25:38.840 principles

00:25:39.380 that were

00:25:39.740 put forward

00:25:40.280 by Marx

00:25:40.860 and the

00:25:41.120 other

00:25:41.280 was

00:25:41.600 a

00:25:43.120 consequence

00:25:43.560 of

00:25:43.980 you know

00:25:44.540 the

00:25:44.660 I would

00:25:45.340 say

00:25:45.520 western

00:25:46.000 individualistic

00:25:46.920 free market

00:25:47.560 capitalist

00:25:48.220 democracies

00:25:49.100 roughly

00:25:49.520 speaking

00:25:50.000 and then

00:25:50.720 you might

00:25:51.000 ask yourself

00:25:51.560 were those

00:25:52.180 only

00:25:52.440 was that

00:25:52.900 only a

00:25:53.280 difference

00:25:53.600 of opinion

00:25:54.420 right

00:25:55.660 because that's

00:25:56.160 the central

00:25:56.580 question

00:25:57.120 if it's

00:25:57.780 just a

00:25:58.100 difference

00:25:58.380 of opinion

00:25:58.960 if what's

00:25:59.460 underneath

00:25:59.740 it is

00:26:00.060 arbitrary

00:26:00.500 then

00:26:00.940 A

00:26:01.580 it doesn't

00:26:01.960 matter

00:26:02.180 which

00:26:02.400 system

00:26:02.760 wins

00:26:03.240 roughly

00:26:03.800 speaking

00:26:04.380 B

00:26:06.340 there's

00:26:06.640 no

00:26:06.800 right

00:26:07.160 and

00:26:07.360 wrong

00:26:07.780 in the

00:26:08.280 discussion

00:26:09.000 right

00:26:09.380 it's

00:26:09.820 that would

00:26:10.580 be

00:26:10.760 something

00:26:11.140 that would

00:26:11.480 be more

00:26:11.780 akin to

00:26:12.220 a postmodern

00:26:12.840 claim

00:26:13.160 it's

00:26:13.420 just

00:26:13.720 group

00:26:14.480 A

00:26:14.660 puts

00:26:14.920 forward

00:26:15.260 their

00:26:15.460 claims

00:26:15.780 to

00:26:15.940 power

00:26:16.160 and

00:26:16.300 group

00:26:16.480 B

00:26:16.660 puts

00:26:16.940 forward

00:26:17.200 their

00:26:17.400 claims

00:26:17.720 to

00:26:17.840 power

00:26:18.060 and

00:26:18.200 they're

00:26:18.320 both

00:26:18.520 equally

00:26:18.820 valid

00:26:19.220 and

00:26:19.480 well

00:26:20.260 have

00:26:20.580 at her

00:26:20.940 fundamentally

00:26:21.600 because

00:26:22.560 there's

00:26:22.760 no way

00:26:23.100 of

00:26:23.580 solving

00:26:24.900 the

00:26:25.160 problem

00:26:25.520 but it

00:26:26.780 struck

00:26:27.040 me

00:26:27.260 that

00:26:27.420 I

00:26:28.540 didn't

00:26:29.020 think

00:26:29.220 that

00:26:29.380 we

00:26:29.500 should

00:26:29.660 leap

00:26:29.880 to

00:26:30.040 that

00:26:30.260 conclusion

00:26:30.820 so

00:26:31.140 rapidly

00:26:31.640 and

00:26:32.580 so

00:26:32.780 I

00:26:32.960 started

00:26:33.260 to

00:26:33.480 investigate

00:26:34.180 I

00:26:35.360 think

00:26:35.680 I

00:26:35.860 started

00:26:36.140 to

00:26:36.340 investigate

00:26:36.980 the

00:26:37.660 substructure

00:26:38.480 of

00:26:39.660 western

00:26:40.400 thought

00:26:40.900 not so

00:26:41.520 much

00:26:41.720 communist

00:26:42.180 thought

00:26:42.560 because

00:26:42.820 I

00:26:43.000 thought

00:26:43.260 of

00:26:43.400 communism

00:26:43.860 as

00:26:44.200 an

00:26:44.320 interloper

00:26:44.800 on the

00:26:45.180 scene

00:26:45.420 it

00:26:45.880 was

00:26:46.000 a

00:26:46.140 system

00:26:46.380 that

00:26:46.560 wasn't

00:26:46.820 devised

00:26:47.260 and

00:26:47.440 formalized

00:26:48.020 until

00:26:48.340 the

00:26:48.900 late

00:26:49.080 1900s

00:26:50.140 late

00:26:50.580 1800s

00:26:51.420 and

00:26:52.160 I

00:26:53.440 didn't

00:26:53.660 see it

00:26:54.020 as part

00:26:54.400 of what

00:26:54.660 you might

00:26:54.980 describe

00:26:55.360 as

00:26:55.540 organic

00:26:56.000 development

00:26:56.540 there's

00:26:56.800 no

00:26:56.940 mythology

00:26:57.560 so

00:26:57.900 to

00:26:58.040 speak

00:26:58.280 at

00:26:58.420 the

00:26:58.560 basis

00:26:58.840 of

00:26:59.160 the

00:26:59.860 communist

00:27:00.240 perspective

00:27:00.800 and

00:27:01.020 one

00:27:01.480 of

00:27:01.560 the

00:27:01.660 things

00:27:01.860 that's

00:27:02.060 very

00:27:02.300 interesting

00:27:02.780 is

00:27:03.020 that

00:27:03.260 although

00:27:03.980 those

00:27:04.260 ideas

00:27:04.580 were

00:27:04.800 roundly

00:27:05.260 defeated

00:27:05.660 by the

00:27:06.060 end

00:27:06.180 of

00:27:06.300 the

00:27:06.400 20th

00:27:06.760 century

00:27:07.040 they're

00:27:07.280 making

00:27:07.580 a

00:27:07.960 comeback

00:27:08.340 so

00:27:08.940 rapidly

00:27:09.360 that

00:27:09.600 it's

00:27:09.760 almost

00:27:10.060 unbelievable

00:27:10.720 you know

00:27:11.860 I got

00:27:12.160 an email

00:27:12.780 from a

00:27:13.220 medical

00:27:13.460 student

00:27:13.820 yesterday

00:27:14.180 at the

00:27:14.460 University

00:27:14.760 of

00:27:14.960 Toronto

00:27:15.280 and

00:27:15.960 now

00:27:16.160 the

00:27:16.360 courses

00:27:17.020 that

00:27:17.320 they have

00:27:17.820 to

00:27:17.960 take

00:27:18.180 the

00:27:18.320 mandatory

00:27:18.760 these

00:27:19.040 are

00:27:19.160 social

00:27:19.460 justice

00:27:19.880 courses

00:27:20.320 include

00:27:21.260 modules

00:27:22.300 on

00:27:22.620 equity

00:27:23.060 and

00:27:23.380 equity

00:27:23.680 is

00:27:23.880 equality

00:27:24.260 of

00:27:24.420 outcome

00:27:24.760 they're

00:27:25.200 pushing

00:27:25.560 people

00:27:26.160 are

00:27:26.400 having

00:27:26.780 the

00:27:27.000 equality

00:27:27.460 of

00:27:27.640 outcome

00:27:28.100 notion

00:27:28.920 pushed

00:27:29.420 on

00:27:29.680 them

00:27:29.860 in

00:27:30.280 mandatory

00:27:30.660 training

00:27:31.220 in

00:27:31.380 universities

00:27:31.800 everywhere

00:27:32.400 again

00:27:32.820 and

00:27:32.980 equity

00:27:33.260 isn't

00:27:33.600 equality

00:27:34.020 of

00:27:34.200 opportunity

00:27:34.680 it's

00:27:35.180 equality

00:27:35.540 of

00:27:35.720 outcome

00:27:36.200 now

00:27:37.060 that

00:27:37.220 was

00:27:37.360 the

00:27:37.580 central

00:27:38.040 dictum

00:27:38.660 of

00:27:38.840 the

00:27:39.000 communist

00:27:39.400 states

00:27:40.000 in

00:27:40.240 the

00:27:40.360 20th

00:27:40.760 century

00:27:41.040 it's

00:27:41.180 like

00:27:41.340 what

00:27:41.680 the 0.99

00:27:41.900 hell

00:27:42.180 how

00:27:42.520 did

00:27:43.080 we

00:27:43.220 get

00:27:43.380 back

00:27:43.660 to

00:27:43.800 that

00:27:44.020 again

00:27:44.460 already

00:27:45.100 so

00:27:46.420 and

00:27:49.460 outcome

00:27:49.900 within

00:27:50.340 an

00:27:50.940 organization

00:27:51.380 that

00:27:51.840 the

00:27:52.000 thing

00:27:52.180 is

00:27:52.340 corrupt 0.99

00:27:52.760 and 0.97

00:27:52.940 needs

00:27:53.140 to

00:27:53.280 be

00:27:53.440 restructured

00:27:53.940 from

00:27:54.200 the

00:27:54.360 bottom

00:27:54.580 up

00:27:54.920 and

00:27:55.480 then

00:27:55.620 the

00:27:55.780 question

00:27:56.100 of

00:27:56.280 course

00:27:56.480 is

00:27:56.660 who

00:27:56.840 decides

00:27:57.480 that

00:27:58.100 outcomes

00:27:58.580 are

00:27:58.760 equal

00:27:59.060 by

00:27:59.340 what

00:27:59.620 means

00:27:59.980 and

00:28:00.140 with

00:28:00.340 what

00:28:00.560 groups

00:28:00.960 because

00:28:01.180 you

00:28:01.360 can

00:28:01.520 you

00:28:02.060 can

00:28:02.400 produce

00:28:02.680 an

00:28:02.840 infinite

00:28:03.080 number

00:28:03.520 of

00:28:03.760 groups

00:28:04.200 of

00:28:04.440 people

00:28:04.840 with

00:28:05.560 equally

00:28:06.480 validly

00:28:07.140 in

00:28:07.280 some

00:28:07.520 sense

00:28:07.820 and

00:28:07.980 you're

00:28:08.420 never

00:28:08.560 going

00:28:08.720 to

00:28:08.780 get

00:28:08.900 equality

00:28:09.400 of

00:28:09.700 outcome

00:28:10.120 across

00:28:10.580 the

00:28:11.180 infinite

00:28:11.940 number

00:28:12.380 of

00:28:12.580 ways

00:28:12.860 that

00:28:19.460 anyways

00:28:20.440 these

00:28:22.100 are

00:28:22.220 obviously

00:28:22.580 very

00:28:22.860 powerful

00:28:23.260 ideas

00:28:23.700 and

00:28:23.960 the

00:28:24.480 mere

00:28:24.640 fact

00:28:24.940 that

00:28:25.080 they

00:28:25.200 killed

00:28:25.460 100

00:28:25.740 million

00:28:26.060 people

00:28:26.440 already

00:28:26.800 or more

00:28:27.120 in the

00:28:27.320 20th

00:28:27.660 century

00:28:27.920 wasn't

00:28:28.300 enough

00:28:28.600 to put

00:28:29.020 them

00:28:29.140 to

00:28:29.320 rest

00:28:29.680 anyway

00:28:31.780 so

00:28:32.060 back

00:28:32.320 to

00:28:32.480 the

00:28:32.620 main

00:28:32.840 theme

00:28:33.220 is

00:28:35.400 there

00:28:35.600 something

00:28:36.060 this

00:28:36.400 is

00:28:36.560 the

00:28:36.700 main

00:28:36.900 question

00:28:37.360 is

00:28:37.720 there

00:28:37.900 something

00:28:38.400 is

00:28:39.200 there

00:28:39.440 a

00:28:39.620 set

00:28:39.780 of

00:28:39.900 ideas

00:28:40.420 that

00:28:41.040 western

00:28:41.420 civilization

00:28:42.060 is

00:28:43.940 predicated

00:28:44.580 on

00:28:44.900 that

00:28:45.060 are

00:28:45.160 more

00:28:45.380 than

00:28:45.600 just

00:28:45.980 bloody 0.95

00:28:46.420 opinion

00:28:47.040 that's

00:28:48.240 the

00:28:48.400 question

00:28:48.840 because

00:28:50.100 if

00:28:50.300 there

00:28:50.480 isn't

00:28:51.040 well

00:28:52.380 then

00:28:52.620 what

00:28:53.320 do

00:28:53.400 you

00:28:53.500 do

00:28:53.900 about

00:28:54.160 that

00:28:54.460 it's

00:28:55.060 arbitrary

00:28:55.500 you're

00:28:56.480 just

00:28:56.620 holding

00:28:56.940 it

00:28:57.100 for

00:28:57.240 no

00:28:57.440 reason

00:28:57.700 whatsoever

00:28:58.120 it

00:28:58.940 could

00:28:59.120 be

00:28:59.260 a

00:28:59.420 different

00:28:59.660 system

00:29:00.220 there's

00:29:00.780 no

00:29:00.920 reason

00:29:01.220 to

00:29:01.440 stick

00:29:01.680 with

00:29:01.900 it

00:29:02.100 all

00:29:02.420 of

00:29:02.540 those

00:29:02.760 things

00:29:03.080 like

00:29:03.280 it

00:29:03.400 takes

00:29:03.660 the

00:29:03.900 core

00:29:05.180 out

00:29:05.460 of

00:29:05.580 it

00:29:05.700 when

00:29:05.860 that

00:29:06.020 was

00:29:06.160 Nietzsche's

00:29:06.600 claim

00:29:06.860 right

00:29:07.100 he

00:29:07.260 said

00:29:07.600 you

00:29:08.660 take

00:29:08.900 the

00:29:09.080 core

00:29:09.440 metaphysical

00:29:10.360 presupposition

00:29:11.240 out

00:29:11.540 from

00:29:11.800 underneath

00:29:12.380 western

00:29:13.180 civilization

00:29:13.880 or

00:29:14.360 any

00:29:14.600 civilization

00:29:15.360 for that

00:29:15.820 matter

00:29:16.140 and

00:29:16.620 the

00:29:16.720 whole

00:29:16.880 thing

00:29:17.220 loosens

00:29:18.140 shakens

00:29:18.840 shakes

00:29:19.760 and crumbles

00:29:20.740 well

00:29:22.420 for

00:29:22.600 Nietzsche

00:29:22.880 the

00:29:23.080 metaphysical

00:29:23.600 presupposition

00:29:24.340 was

00:29:24.600 God

00:29:25.100 well

00:29:26.560 and

00:29:27.020 then

00:29:27.160 the

00:29:27.320 question

00:29:27.620 of

00:29:27.780 course

00:29:27.980 well

00:29:28.140 what

00:29:28.340 even

00:29:28.640 does

00:29:28.860 that

00:29:29.080 mean

00:29:29.400 and

00:29:29.640 on

00:29:31.480 one

00:29:31.780 hand

00:29:32.080 it

00:29:32.240 means

00:29:32.620 I

00:29:33.560 suppose

00:29:33.920 adherence

00:29:34.420 to

00:29:34.600 a

00:29:34.740 dogmatic

00:29:35.220 set

00:29:35.500 of

00:29:35.660 beliefs

00:29:36.040 but

00:29:36.300 then

00:29:36.900 you

00:29:37.040 might

00:29:37.220 ask

00:29:37.440 yourself

00:29:37.720 well

00:29:37.920 is

00:29:38.040 there

00:29:38.140 something

00:29:38.560 else

00:29:39.400 that

00:29:39.680 it

00:29:39.840 means

00:29:40.140 it

00:29:40.300 means

00:29:40.520 at

00:29:40.720 least

00:29:41.000 the

00:29:41.340 hypothesis

00:29:41.940 of

00:29:42.320 some

00:29:42.560 transcendent

00:29:43.500 value

00:29:43.960 it

00:29:44.160 means

00:29:44.380 at

00:29:44.560 least

00:29:44.860 that

00:29:45.380 so

00:29:51.060 Nietzsche

00:29:52.960 announced

00:29:53.400 the

00:29:53.640 death

00:29:53.880 of

00:29:54.060 God

00:29:54.380 and

00:29:54.560 so

00:29:54.740 one

00:29:54.960 of

00:29:55.060 the

00:29:55.180 consequences

00:29:55.720 of

00:29:55.980 that

00:29:56.160 Dostoevsky

00:29:57.000 was working

00:29:57.480 on exactly

00:29:58.020 the same

00:29:58.400 set

00:29:58.600 of

00:29:58.700 ideas

00:29:59.020 and

00:29:59.240 in

00:29:59.780 Crime

00:30:00.000 and

00:30:00.160 Punishment

00:30:00.540 in

00:30:00.780 particular

00:30:01.180 which

00:30:01.480 is

00:30:01.660 a

00:30:02.200 book

00:30:02.440 like

00:30:03.080 it's

00:30:03.240 a

00:30:03.420 necessary

00:30:03.980 book

00:30:04.380 that's

00:30:04.760 the

00:30:04.880 thing

00:30:05.160 is

00:30:05.340 there's

00:30:05.840 a

00:30:05.920 number

00:30:06.120 of

00:30:06.300 books

00:30:06.500 that

00:30:06.660 were

00:30:06.780 written

00:30:06.980 in

00:30:07.160 the

00:30:07.260 last

00:30:07.480 120

00:30:07.980 years

00:30:08.340 that

00:30:08.480 you

00:30:08.580 really

00:30:08.780 have

00:30:09.080 to

00:30:09.240 read

00:30:09.540 and

00:30:09.740 Crime

00:30:10.280 and

00:30:10.440 Punishment

00:30:10.780 is

00:30:11.000 one

00:30:11.220 of

00:30:11.360 them

00:30:11.500 and

00:30:11.640 I

00:30:12.040 think

00:30:12.240 the

00:30:12.380 Gulag

00:30:12.660 Archipelago

00:30:13.220 is

00:30:13.420 another

00:30:13.680 and

00:30:13.900 probably

00:30:14.300 Beyond

00:30:14.660 Good

00:30:14.880 and

00:30:15.020 Evil

00:30:15.200 is

00:30:15.420 another

00:30:15.700 but

00:30:16.400 you

00:30:16.700 know

00:30:16.820 Dostoevsky

00:30:17.440 and Nietzsche

00:30:17.820 were writing

00:30:18.300 in parallel

00:30:18.840 it's

00:30:19.220 remarkable

00:30:19.740 how much

00:30:20.560 their

00:30:20.860 lives

00:30:22.340 intertwined

00:30:23.040 and

00:30:23.200 Nietzsche

00:30:23.560 knew more

00:30:23.960 about

00:30:24.200 Dostoevsky

00:30:24.820 than

00:30:25.180 is

00:30:26.860 generally

00:30:27.300 known

00:30:27.640 there's

00:30:27.960 been

00:30:28.160 some

00:30:28.360 recent

00:30:28.640 scholarship

00:30:29.140 indicating

00:30:29.700 that

00:30:29.960 but

00:30:30.160 in

00:30:31.100 Dostoevsky's

00:30:31.840 book

00:30:32.020 Crime

00:30:32.280 and

00:30:32.440 Punishment

00:30:32.860 he

00:30:33.780 has

00:30:34.040 his main

00:30:35.040 character

00:30:35.780 Raskolnikov

00:30:40.440 good

00:30:40.640 justification

00:30:41.080 for

00:30:41.480 the

00:30:41.600 murder

00:30:41.800 and

00:30:42.040 Dostoevsky

00:30:42.640 is

00:30:42.760 very

00:30:42.920 good

00:30:43.120 at

00:30:43.260 this

00:30:43.460 he

00:30:43.620 puts

00:30:44.360 his

00:30:44.600 characters

00:30:45.120 into

00:30:45.380 very

00:30:45.720 very

00:30:46.080 difficult

00:30:47.360 moral

00:30:47.840 situations

00:30:48.620 and

00:30:49.200 gives

00:30:49.400 them

00:30:49.560 full

00:30:49.820 justification

00:30:50.400 for

00:30:50.880 pursuing

00:30:51.340 the

00:30:51.680 the

00:30:52.800 going

00:30:59.060 online

00:30:59.500 without

00:30:59.800 express

00:31:00.240 VPN

00:31:00.580 is

00:31:00.880 like

00:31:01.080 not

00:31:01.360 paying

00:31:01.580 attention

00:31:01.900 to

00:31:02.080 the

00:31:02.220 safety

00:31:02.440 demonstration

00:31:02.980 on

00:31:03.240 a

00:31:03.340 flight

00:31:03.620 most

00:31:04.360 of

00:31:04.500 the

00:31:04.540 time

00:31:04.760 you'll

00:31:05.000 probably

00:31:05.360 be

00:31:05.620 fine

00:31:05.960 but

00:31:06.360 what

00:31:06.740 if

00:31:06.900 one

00:31:07.120 day

00:31:07.300 that

00:31:07.560 weird

00:31:07.940 yellow

00:31:08.200 mask

00:31:08.540 drops

00:31:08.840 down

00:31:09.080 from

00:31:09.260 overhead

00:31:10.440 no

00:31:10.740 idea

00:31:11.040 what

00:31:11.260 to

00:31:11.380 do

00:31:11.580 in

00:31:12.000 our

00:31:12.140 hyper

00:31:12.420 connected

00:31:12.780 world

00:31:13.180 your

00:31:13.460 digital

00:31:13.860 privacy

00:31:14.280 isn't

00:31:14.640 just

00:31:14.820 a

00:31:14.960 luxury

00:31:15.260 it's

00:31:15.880 a

00:31:16.020 fundamental

00:31:16.480 right

00:31:16.820 every

00:31:17.140 time

00:31:17.360 you

00:31:17.500 connect

00:31:17.760 to

00:31:17.880 an

00:31:18.020 unsecured

00:31:18.540 network

00:31:18.940 in

00:31:19.120 a

00:31:19.240 cafe

00:31:19.580 hotel

00:31:20.280 or

00:31:20.540 airport

00:31:20.920 you're

00:31:21.440 essentially

00:31:21.780 broadcasting

00:31:22.440 your

00:31:22.680 personal

00:31:22.980 information

00:31:23.500 to

00:31:23.800 anyone

00:31:24.220 with

00:31:24.460 a

00:31:24.600 technical

00:31:24.940 know-how

00:31:25.380 to

00:31:25.560 intercept

00:31:25.980 it

00:31:26.180 and

00:31:26.380 let's

00:31:26.600 be

00:31:26.740 clear

00:31:27.020 it

00:31:27.300 doesn't

00:31:27.700 take

00:31:27.900 a

00:31:28.020 genius

00:31:28.260 hacker

00:31:28.540 to

00:31:28.740 do

00:31:28.860 this

00:31:29.180 with

00:31:29.620 some

00:31:29.880 off-the-shelf

00:31:30.480 hardware

00:31:30.860 even a

00:31:31.440 tech-savvy

00:31:31.980 teenager

00:31:32.480 could

00:31:32.780 potentially

00:31:33.200 access

00:31:33.600 your

00:31:33.840 passwords

00:31:34.380 bank

00:31:34.840 logins

00:31:35.320 and

00:31:35.620 credit

00:31:35.900 card

00:31:36.120 details

00:31:36.600 now

00:31:37.160 you might

00:31:37.660 think

00:31:37.960 what's

00:31:38.400 the big

00:31:38.660 deal

00:31:38.900 who'd

00:31:39.240 want

00:31:39.380 my

00:31:39.640 data

00:31:39.900 anyway

00:31:40.280 well

00:31:40.840 on the

00:31:41.140 dark

00:31:41.360 web

00:31:41.560 your

00:31:41.880 personal

00:31:42.300 information

00:31:42.820 could fetch

00:31:43.320 up to

00:31:43.620 $1,000

00:31:44.420 that's

00:31:45.460 right

00:31:45.640 there's

00:31:45.880 a whole

00:31:46.300 underground

00:31:46.760 economy

00:31:47.240 built

00:31:47.580 on

00:31:47.840 stolen

00:31:48.220 identities

00:31:48.840 enter

00:31:49.500 expressvpn

00:31:50.640 it's

00:31:51.180 like a

00:31:51.420 digital

00:31:51.700 fortress

00:31:52.260 creating

00:31:52.720 an

00:31:52.920 encrypted

00:31:53.280 tunnel

00:31:53.620 between

00:31:53.920 your

00:31:54.240 device

00:31:54.640 and

00:31:54.860 the

00:31:54.960 internet

00:31:55.240 their

00:31:55.800 encryption

00:31:56.140 is

00:31:56.480 so

00:31:56.800 robust

00:31:57.240 that

00:31:57.480 it would

00:31:57.720 take

00:31:57.860 a

00:31:58.020 hacker

00:31:58.280 with

00:31:58.460 a

00:31:58.620 supercomputer

00:31:59.120 over

00:31:59.640 a

00:31:59.860 billion

00:32:00.120 years

00:32:00.520 to

00:32:00.680 crack

00:32:00.960 it

00:32:01.120 but

00:32:01.440 don't

00:32:01.720 let

00:32:01.880 its

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00:33:53.860 Raskolnikov

00:33:54.680 he's

00:33:55.840 broke

00:33:56.520 and starving

00:33:57.160 he wants

00:33:57.620 to go

00:33:57.840 to law

00:33:58.160 school

00:33:58.400 his sister

00:33:58.920 is about 1.00

00:33:59.240 to prostitute 0.99

00:33:59.920 herself 0.91

00:34:00.280 roughly

00:34:00.640 speaking

00:34:01.300 by marrying

00:34:01.820 a guy

00:34:02.140 that hates

00:34:02.900 her

00:34:03.100 that she

00:34:03.600 hates

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00:34:05.680 or at least

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00:34:08.220 his mother

00:34:08.620 as well

00:34:09.020 who's also

00:34:09.500 in dire

00:34:09.880 financial

00:34:10.440 straits

00:34:10.980 he

00:34:12.020 he goes

00:34:13.180 to a

00:34:13.520 pawnbroker

00:34:14.080 to pawn

00:34:14.660 his meager

00:34:15.600 possession

00:34:16.020 so that he

00:34:16.520 can continue

00:34:17.100 to scrape

00:34:18.220 by

00:34:18.620 and she

00:34:19.660 has this

00:34:20.240 niece

00:34:20.680 I believe

00:34:21.280 it's her

00:34:21.620 niece

00:34:21.860 that's not

00:34:22.900 very bright

00:34:23.440 who she

00:34:23.820 basically

00:34:24.200 treats as

00:34:24.740 a slave

00:34:25.600 and is 0.99

00:34:25.940 horrible to

00:34:26.580 and so

00:34:27.240 the pawnbroker

00:34:29.880 has this

00:34:30.380 money

00:34:30.720 Raskolnikov

00:34:31.640 is in dire

00:34:32.160 need

00:34:32.500 he thinks

00:34:33.300 look I'll 1.00

00:34:34.260 just kill 1.00

00:34:35.220 her 1.00

00:34:35.420 because

00:34:35.940 why the

00:34:36.760 hell not

00:34:37.220 I'll take

00:34:38.900 her money

00:34:39.240 she's not

00:34:39.980 doing any

00:34:40.340 good with

00:34:40.620 it anyways

00:34:41.060 I'll free

00:34:41.720 her niece

00:34:42.140 who's just

00:34:42.580 lurking

00:34:42.920 as a 0.92

00:34:43.260 slave

00:34:43.520 she's got

00:34:44.340 all these

00:34:44.640 other people

00:34:45.220 tangled up

00:34:46.100 in her

00:34:46.360 pawnbroker

00:34:46.980 schemes

00:34:47.480 all that'll

00:34:48.420 happen is

00:34:48.860 the world

00:34:49.220 will be a

00:34:49.580 better place

00:34:50.200 and the

00:34:51.620 only thing

00:34:52.060 that's holding

00:34:52.520 me back

00:34:53.000 is conventional

00:34:53.720 moral

00:34:54.640 cowardice 0.94

00:34:55.440 and you

00:34:56.740 know

00:34:56.880 Dostoevsky

00:34:57.520 has his

00:34:58.060 character

00:34:58.560 in crime

00:34:59.060 and punishment

00:34:59.520 go through

00:35:00.080 days

00:35:01.320 hours

00:35:01.960 hours

00:35:02.480 and days

00:35:03.280 and weeks

00:35:03.840 of intense

00:35:05.100 imagination

00:35:06.440 about this

00:35:07.220 rationalization

00:35:08.160 about this

00:35:08.660 trying to

00:35:09.820 justify himself

00:35:11.000 placing him

00:35:11.700 outside

00:35:12.200 placing himself

00:35:13.360 outside the

00:35:14.420 law so that

00:35:15.260 he can

00:35:15.560 perpetrate this

00:35:16.260 act

00:35:16.520 and telling

00:35:17.220 himself with

00:35:18.220 all the

00:35:18.860 best nihilistic

00:35:19.720 arguments that

00:35:20.440 the only

00:35:20.820 possible thing

00:35:21.540 that could be

00:35:21.920 holding him

00:35:22.300 back is an

00:35:23.280 arbitrary sense

00:35:25.100 of indoctrinated

00:35:25.880 morality

00:35:26.380 and so

00:35:27.360 Dostoevsky explores

00:35:28.380 that he does

00:35:28.940 commit the

00:35:29.380 murder

00:35:29.600 and then of

00:35:30.140 course all

00:35:30.580 hell breaks

00:35:31.080 loose

00:35:31.320 because things

00:35:31.940 don't necessarily

00:35:32.620 turn out the

00:35:33.240 way that you

00:35:33.600 want he gets

00:35:34.080 away with it

00:35:34.620 however

00:35:34.960 well he gets

00:35:35.940 away with it

00:35:36.440 technically because

00:35:37.240 no one knows

00:35:37.740 he did it

00:35:38.300 but he doesn't

00:35:39.320 get away with it

00:35:39.860 in relationship

00:35:40.400 to his own

00:35:40.980 conscience

00:35:41.480 and so

00:35:43.000 the rest of

00:35:43.760 the book

00:35:44.020 explores that

00:35:44.920 well Dostoevsky

00:35:45.920 I believe it was

00:35:47.040 in crime and

00:35:47.540 punishment

00:35:47.820 although he

00:35:48.260 makes the

00:35:48.640 same point

00:35:49.540 in many of

00:35:50.100 his books

00:35:50.500 he makes a

00:35:51.660 very fundamental

00:35:52.240 point and this

00:35:52.940 is the kind of

00:35:53.440 point that

00:35:53.880 that I think

00:35:55.680 that people

00:35:56.160 who haven't

00:35:56.800 investigated these

00:35:57.980 matters down

00:35:59.360 this particular

00:36:00.180 literary and

00:36:02.360 philosophical pathway

00:36:03.400 never grapple

00:36:04.140 with Dostoevsky

00:36:05.120 said straightforwardly

00:36:06.220 if there's no

00:36:07.760 God so if there's

00:36:09.020 no higher value

00:36:09.800 let's say if

00:36:10.320 there's no

00:36:10.560 transcendent value

00:36:11.300 then you can do

00:36:12.420 whatever you

00:36:13.200 want and that's

00:36:15.160 the question that

00:36:15.900 he's investigating

00:36:16.820 and you see this

00:36:17.900 is why I have

00:36:18.640 such frustration

00:36:19.480 say with people

00:36:20.380 like Sam Harris

00:36:21.260 the sort of

00:36:21.820 radical atheists

00:36:22.700 because they seem

00:36:23.480 to think that

00:36:24.740 once human beings

00:36:26.020 abandon their

00:36:26.820 grounding in the

00:36:28.220 transcendent that

00:36:29.560 the plausible way

00:36:31.100 forward is with

00:36:31.980 a kind of

00:36:32.960 purest rationality

00:36:34.540 that automatically

00:36:35.320 attributes to other

00:36:36.280 people equivalent

00:36:37.500 value it's like I

00:36:38.820 just don't understand

00:36:39.520 that they believe

00:36:40.760 that that's the

00:36:41.560 rational pathway

00:36:42.620 what the hell is

00:36:43.720 irrational about me

00:36:44.760 getting exactly what

00:36:45.720 I want from every

00:36:46.580 one of you whenever

00:36:47.280 I want it at every

00:36:48.760 possible second

00:36:49.680 why is that

00:36:50.800 irrational and how

00:36:52.580 possibly is that

00:36:53.720 more irrational

00:36:55.640 than us cooperating

00:36:57.200 so we can both

00:36:57.920 have a good time

00:36:58.680 of it

00:36:58.980 I don't understand

00:37:00.340 that

00:37:00.800 I mean it's as if

00:37:02.460 the psychopathic

00:37:04.000 tendency is

00:37:05.220 irrational

00:37:05.740 there's nothing

00:37:06.820 irrational about it

00:37:07.920 it's pure naked

00:37:09.120 self-interest

00:37:09.940 how is that

00:37:10.680 irrational

00:37:11.240 I don't understand

00:37:12.780 that

00:37:13.120 where's the pathway

00:37:14.720 from rationality

00:37:15.800 to an egalitarian

00:37:17.640 virtue

00:37:18.200 why the hell

00:37:19.340 not every man

00:37:20.280 for himself

00:37:20.960 and the devil

00:37:21.820 take the hindmost

00:37:22.780 it's a perfectly

00:37:23.920 coherent philosophy

00:37:25.020 and it's actually

00:37:26.560 one that you can

00:37:27.160 institute in the

00:37:27.860 world with a fair

00:37:28.480 bit of material

00:37:29.140 success if you want

00:37:30.140 to do it

00:37:30.640 so I don't

00:37:32.380 see to me

00:37:33.560 I think that

00:37:34.260 that the universe

00:37:35.840 that people like

00:37:36.620 Dawkins and

00:37:37.340 Harris

00:37:38.040 inhabit

00:37:39.560 is so intensely

00:37:41.260 conditioned

00:37:42.080 by mythological

00:37:43.560 presuppositions

00:37:44.640 that they take

00:37:46.040 for granted

00:37:46.820 the ethic

00:37:48.820 that emerges

00:37:49.400 out of that

00:37:49.900 as if it's

00:37:50.800 just a given

00:37:51.860 a rational given

00:37:52.940 and this of course

00:37:53.680 precisely

00:37:54.180 Nietzsche's

00:37:55.140 observation

00:37:55.660 as well as

00:37:56.200 Dostoevsky's

00:37:56.880 that's Nietzsche's

00:37:57.500 observation

00:37:58.000 you don't get it

00:37:59.420 the ethic

00:38:00.240 that you think

00:38:00.840 is normative

00:38:01.840 is a consequence

00:38:03.040 of its

00:38:03.620 of its

00:38:04.260 of its nesting

00:38:05.640 inside this

00:38:06.360 tremendously

00:38:07.060 lengthy history

00:38:08.180 much of which

00:38:09.080 was expressed

00:38:09.660 in mythological

00:38:11.040 formulation

00:38:11.520 you wipe that out

00:38:13.160 you don't get to

00:38:13.960 keep

00:38:14.340 all the

00:38:15.020 presuppositions

00:38:16.120 and just assume

00:38:16.880 that they're

00:38:17.260 rationally

00:38:17.780 axiomatic

00:38:18.460 they're

00:38:19.060 the rational

00:38:20.200 to make a

00:38:21.740 rational argument

00:38:22.360 you have to

00:38:22.840 start with

00:38:23.340 an initial

00:38:24.140 proposition

00:38:25.140 well the

00:38:26.260 proposition

00:38:26.880 that underlies

00:38:28.120 western culture

00:38:28.920 is that there's

00:38:29.780 a transcendent

00:38:30.860 morality

00:38:31.420 now you could

00:38:32.440 say that's a

00:38:32.920 transcendent morality

00:38:33.960 instantiated in

00:38:34.940 the figure of

00:38:35.500 god

00:38:35.900 that's fine

00:38:36.660 you could even

00:38:37.060 call that a

00:38:37.520 personification

00:38:38.100 of the morality

00:38:39.300 if you want to

00:38:40.440 if you don't want

00:38:41.660 to move into

00:38:42.200 a metaphysical space

00:38:43.220 I'm not arguing

00:38:44.000 for the existence

00:38:44.820 of god

00:38:45.540 I'm arguing

00:38:46.880 that the ethic

00:38:48.700 that drives

00:38:50.040 our culture

00:38:51.400 is predicated

00:38:52.740 on the idea

00:38:53.640 of god

00:38:54.160 and that you

00:38:54.580 can't just

00:38:55.160 take that idea

00:38:56.220 away and expect

00:38:57.480 the thing to

00:38:58.200 remain intact

00:38:59.040 mid-air without

00:38:59.940 any foundational

00:39:00.740 support

00:39:01.260 now you don't

00:39:02.020 have to buy

00:39:02.540 that but

00:39:03.040 if you're

00:39:03.820 interested in

00:39:04.440 the idea

00:39:04.840 then you can

00:39:05.300 read Nietzsche

00:39:05.820 because that's

00:39:06.600 what he was

00:39:07.020 trying to

00:39:07.600 sort out

00:39:08.380 and it wasn't

00:39:08.980 only Nietzsche

00:39:09.940 who came to

00:39:10.420 that conclusion

00:39:11.080 it was many

00:39:11.880 people have come

00:39:12.540 to that conclusion

00:39:13.220 but I think

00:39:13.760 the two

00:39:14.220 who've outlined

00:39:15.280 it most

00:39:15.880 spectacularly

00:39:17.220 were Nietzsche

00:39:18.080 and Dostoevsky

00:39:18.900 and Nietzsche

00:39:19.260 is an unbelievably

00:39:20.380 influential philosopher

00:39:23.160 you know

00:39:23.560 I don't think

00:39:24.060 there was anyone

00:39:24.660 that was more

00:39:25.220 influential

00:39:25.760 during the entire

00:39:29.900 course of the

00:39:30.560 20th century

00:39:31.360 accepting a very

00:39:32.860 very tiny

00:39:34.080 handful of other

00:39:34.920 people

00:39:35.220 accepting the

00:39:35.900 scientists

00:39:36.220 we won't bother

00:39:36.880 with their

00:39:37.420 discussion

00:39:38.140 you could put

00:39:38.760 Marx in that

00:39:39.400 category

00:39:39.720 you could put

00:39:40.580 Freud in that

00:39:41.280 category

00:39:41.700 partly

00:39:42.140 but after that

00:39:43.700 the list

00:39:44.100 starts to get

00:39:44.760 a lot thinner

00:39:45.740 you know

00:39:46.300 so maybe

00:39:47.220 there's 10

00:39:47.760 people up

00:39:48.400 in that level

00:39:49.120 and Dostoevsky

00:39:50.600 of course

00:39:51.060 I think

00:39:51.520 I mean

00:39:51.940 if you ever

00:39:53.320 if anybody

00:39:54.840 ever prepares

00:39:55.620 a list

00:39:56.100 of the top

00:39:56.720 10 greatest

00:39:57.600 literary figures

00:39:58.480 in the world

00:39:59.060 he would be

00:39:59.620 in the top

00:40:00.160 10 list

00:40:00.840 you know

00:40:01.120 I think

00:40:01.460 he's perhaps

00:40:02.340 second to

00:40:03.460 Shakespeare

00:40:03.920 and maybe

00:40:04.380 above Shakespeare

00:40:05.180 in my estimation

00:40:06.080 so these aren't

00:40:07.540 trivial people

00:40:08.360 we're talking

00:40:08.920 about

00:40:09.260 and they

00:40:09.840 weren't

00:40:10.000 dealing

00:40:10.240 with trivial

00:40:10.780 issues

00:40:11.340 well so

00:40:15.020 then the

00:40:15.360 question might

00:40:15.900 be

00:40:16.160 what's at

00:40:17.120 the bottom

00:40:17.700 of the idea

00:40:18.620 of a transcendent

00:40:19.880 value

00:40:20.640 and I

00:40:21.800 wanted to

00:40:22.880 approach that

00:40:23.660 staying out

00:40:26.580 of the

00:40:26.840 metaphysical

00:40:27.420 domain as

00:40:28.000 much as

00:40:28.380 possible

00:40:28.820 because

00:40:29.540 you can

00:40:30.660 claim anything

00:40:31.140 you want

00:40:31.620 from a

00:40:32.080 metaphysical

00:40:32.640 perspective

00:40:33.200 and that's

00:40:33.600 a big

00:40:33.820 problem

00:40:34.220 and so

00:40:34.580 people will

00:40:35.460 say well

00:40:35.840 why come

00:40:36.360 up with

00:40:36.660 the hypothesis

00:40:37.280 of God

00:40:37.980 for example

00:40:38.620 God

00:40:39.300 could be

00:40:39.620 anything

00:40:39.920 there's a

00:40:40.320 satire

00:40:40.860 the flying

00:40:42.180 spaghetti

00:40:42.680 monster

00:40:43.140 right

00:40:43.440 is a

00:40:43.740 classic

00:40:44.340 satirical

00:40:45.140 representation

00:40:46.060 of a

00:40:46.600 deity

00:40:46.860 that the

00:40:47.440 atheist

00:40:47.780 types

00:40:48.180 use to

00:40:48.640 buttress

00:40:48.960 their

00:40:49.140 arguments

00:40:49.500 and fair

00:40:50.320 enough

00:40:50.620 you know

00:40:50.920 as a

00:40:51.540 satirical

00:40:52.020 idea

00:40:52.300 it's pretty 0.98

00:40:52.720 damn

00:40:53.000 funny 0.96

00:40:53.340 but there's

00:40:54.720 things about

00:40:55.200 this that

00:40:55.600 aren't the

00:40:55.900 least bit

00:40:56.280 amusing

00:40:56.660 and the

00:40:57.420 thing that's

00:40:58.000 not amusing

00:40:58.520 is well

00:40:59.020 what if

00:41:00.040 anything

00:41:00.660 is our

00:41:01.480 culture

00:41:01.780 predicated

00:41:02.360 on

00:41:02.700 okay so

00:41:03.880 what happened

00:41:04.480 well

00:41:04.800 Nietzsche

00:41:05.520 and Dostoevsky

00:41:06.240 put this

00:41:06.780 forth this

00:41:07.360 set of

00:41:07.700 propositions

00:41:08.480 and out

00:41:10.120 of Dostoevsky's

00:41:11.200 line of

00:41:11.880 thinking to

00:41:12.380 some degree

00:41:12.880 grew Solzhenitsyn

00:41:13.980 Solzhenitsyn

00:41:14.960 documented the

00:41:15.760 absolute horrors

00:41:16.720 of equity

00:41:17.360 predicated

00:41:18.080 Soviet society

00:41:19.660 you know

00:41:20.040 and we

00:41:20.560 don't teach

00:41:21.200 we don't

00:41:21.700 learn about

00:41:22.340 that

00:41:22.740 right

00:41:23.420 this I

00:41:24.200 don't

00:41:24.380 understand

00:41:24.900 is that

00:41:25.900 what happened

00:41:26.940 in the

00:41:27.220 20th century

00:41:27.900 on the

00:41:28.340 radical left

00:41:29.020 end of the

00:41:29.520 spectrum

00:41:29.860 is not

00:41:30.280 well documented

00:41:31.100 students don't

00:41:31.900 learn about

00:41:32.360 it

00:41:32.480 why the

00:41:32.800 hell is

00:41:33.200 that

00:41:33.500 we learn

00:41:34.320 about

00:41:34.560 World War

00:41:35.020 II

00:41:35.240 we learn

00:41:35.600 about

00:41:35.780 what happened

00:41:36.260 in the

00:41:36.460 Holocaust 0.95

00:41:36.740 and fair

00:41:37.360 enough

00:41:37.600 we absolutely

00:41:38.240 should

00:41:38.660 but nobody

00:41:40.180 knows

00:41:40.720 it's a mystery

00:41:41.560 to everyone

00:41:42.100 when I talk

00:41:43.040 about what

00:41:43.600 happened in

00:41:44.040 the Soviet

00:41:44.400 Union

00:41:44.700 and that's

00:41:45.100 absolutely

00:41:45.500 appalling

00:41:46.000 and that's

00:41:46.540 to say

00:41:46.820 nothing about

00:41:47.440 what happened

00:41:47.960 in China

00:41:48.560 which was

00:41:49.200 equally

00:41:49.520 horrible

00:41:50.080 the system

00:41:55.980 didn't work

00:41:56.560 it was

00:41:56.800 predicated on

00:41:57.500 the wrong

00:41:57.820 values

00:41:58.380 unless you

00:41:59.320 think that

00:41:59.700 that sort

00:42:00.080 of thing

00:42:00.380 means work

00:42:01.200 you know

00:42:02.080 because you

00:42:02.440 have to

00:42:02.940 define that

00:42:03.480 as well

00:42:03.940 but it

00:42:05.020 collapsed

00:42:05.420 under its

00:42:05.900 own weight

00:42:06.340 after it

00:42:06.800 killed tens

00:42:07.320 of millions

00:42:07.680 of people

00:42:08.180 that doesn't

00:42:08.680 really

00:42:08.880 and still

00:42:09.280 it's not

00:42:09.640 like Russia 0.91

00:42:10.100 has recovered

00:42:10.880 it doesn't

00:42:11.900 seem to me

00:42:12.360 like that's

00:42:12.760 a very good

00:42:13.180 definition

00:42:13.640 of worked

00:42:14.360 now whatever

00:42:15.920 we're doing

00:42:16.360 in the West

00:42:16.800 seems to

00:42:17.380 work for

00:42:17.860 all of its

00:42:18.280 flaws

00:42:18.720 and the

00:42:19.720 question is

00:42:20.180 are we just

00:42:20.600 deceiving

00:42:21.020 ourselves

00:42:21.440 is it just

00:42:22.060 arbitrary

00:42:22.580 power politics

00:42:23.580 and opinion

00:42:24.120 or is there

00:42:24.860 something at

00:42:25.320 the bottom

00:42:25.660 of it

00:42:26.080 so when

00:42:32.440 Solzhenitsyn

00:42:33.040 wrote the

00:42:33.440 Gulag

00:42:33.700 Archipelago

00:42:34.220 he believed

00:42:34.760 that the

00:42:35.060 Russians would 0.99

00:42:35.480 have to

00:42:35.800 return to

00:42:36.200 Orthodox

00:42:36.560 Christianity

00:42:37.040 to find

00:42:37.620 their pathway

00:42:38.120 forward

00:42:38.560 and that

00:42:39.360 of course

00:42:39.760 has made

00:42:40.140 him into

00:42:40.460 a reactionary

00:42:41.200 in the eyes

00:42:41.620 of many

00:42:41.940 of his

00:42:42.180 critics

00:42:42.460 but that

00:42:42.960 is perhaps

00:42:43.900 what is

00:42:44.320 happening

00:42:44.700 in Russia

00:42:45.120 although it's

00:42:45.580 very difficult

00:42:46.060 to tell

00:42:46.540 because Putin

00:42:47.520 also seems

00:42:48.140 to be using

00:42:48.680 his affiliation

00:42:49.560 with the

00:42:50.220 Orthodox

00:42:50.500 Christian

00:42:51.060 Church

00:42:51.400 as a

00:42:52.200 means to

00:42:52.640 consolidate

00:42:53.060 power

00:42:53.660 so the

00:42:54.760 situation

00:42:55.220 in Russia

00:42:55.640 is unclear

00:42:56.280 but a

00:42:57.020 religious

00:42:57.400 revival

00:42:57.940 if that's

00:42:58.540 happening

00:42:58.860 in Russia

00:42:59.260 and perhaps

00:42:59.900 it isn't

00:43:00.340 but if it

00:43:00.780 is happening

00:43:01.280 is something

00:43:01.660 that unfolds

00:43:02.360 over decades

00:43:02.940 and even

00:43:03.300 centuries

00:43:03.760 so it's not

00:43:04.380 an easy

00:43:04.700 thing to

00:43:05.100 evaluate

00:43:05.520 when it

00:43:06.260 first starts

00:43:06.760 to happen

00:43:07.280 but Solzhenitsyn

00:43:10.540 drew the

00:43:10.960 same conclusions

00:43:11.620 that Dostoevsky

00:43:12.420 did fundamentally

00:43:13.240 not in exactly

00:43:14.800 the same way

00:43:15.460 but very very

00:43:16.100 close

00:43:16.480 he believed

00:43:17.360 as far as I

00:43:18.020 could tell

00:43:18.400 that unless

00:43:19.740 people were

00:43:20.320 willing to

00:43:20.800 adhere to

00:43:21.340 some sort

00:43:21.840 of transcendent

00:43:22.540 value

00:43:22.900 that they

00:43:23.580 had no

00:43:23.920 protection

00:43:24.360 against

00:43:24.880 pathological

00:43:25.820 ideologies

00:43:26.440 and no

00:43:27.040 protection

00:43:27.440 against the

00:43:27.960 murderous

00:43:28.320 impulses

00:43:28.740 that came

00:43:29.120 along with

00:43:29.580 them

00:43:29.760 and I

00:43:32.000 found his

00:43:32.480 work

00:43:32.720 unbelievably

00:43:33.600 I found

00:43:34.420 his writing

00:43:34.780 incredible

00:43:35.340 powerful

00:43:36.020 incredible

00:43:36.600 I don't

00:43:37.500 know how

00:43:37.760 you can

00:43:38.040 read that

00:43:38.440 book and

00:43:38.820 not draw

00:43:39.580 that kind

00:43:40.040 of conclusion

00:43:40.540 I think

00:43:41.060 people who

00:43:41.660 criticize

00:43:42.360 Solzhenitsyn

00:43:43.000 have never

00:43:43.440 read the 0.99

00:43:43.800 damn book 1.00

00:43:44.280 because that 1.00

00:43:44.800 book is

00:43:45.200 like it's

00:43:46.080 like going

00:43:46.440 into the

00:43:46.800 ring with

00:43:47.100 Muhammad 0.63

00:43:47.440 Ali and

00:43:48.000 being pummeled 0.74

00:43:48.680 to death

00:43:49.020 for half an 0.99

00:43:49.620 hour you

00:43:50.360 know you

00:43:50.560 don't recover

00:43:51.080 from it that

00:43:51.660 easily

00:43:52.020 so

00:43:53.020 then Jung

00:43:57.800 branched off

00:43:58.560 of Nietzsche

00:43:59.080 and so

00:44:00.740 Nietzsche's

00:44:01.160 idea was

00:44:01.600 that people

00:44:01.920 would have

00:44:02.220 to create

00:44:02.600 their own

00:44:02.940 values

00:44:03.420 roughly

00:44:03.920 speaking

00:44:04.440 and I

00:44:05.260 think that's

00:44:05.660 where Nietzsche's

00:44:06.180 is his weakest

00:44:07.680 because it

00:44:09.120 isn't obvious

00:44:09.620 to me that

00:44:10.140 people can

00:44:10.780 create their

00:44:11.640 own values

00:44:12.400 and I think

00:44:13.320 he fell

00:44:13.720 into and I

00:44:14.840 don't want to

00:44:15.380 be a casual

00:44:16.160 critic of

00:44:16.800 Nietzsche

00:44:17.060 because that's

00:44:17.640 always dangerous

00:44:18.260 given that he

00:44:18.800 probably had an

00:44:19.340 IQ of 260

00:44:20.560 you know I

00:44:21.620 mean he was

00:44:22.000 way the hell

00:44:22.500 out there in

00:44:22.980 the stratosphere

00:44:23.620 and just when

00:44:24.240 you think you've

00:44:24.760 understood what

00:44:25.300 he was talking

00:44:25.780 about you can

00:44:26.320 be bloody well

00:44:26.960 sure that you

00:44:27.480 didn't but it

00:44:28.680 does seem to me

00:44:29.380 and he was

00:44:29.700 running out of

00:44:30.200 time he died

00:44:30.880 young you know

00:44:31.520 and he was

00:44:31.840 trying to solve

00:44:32.420 this problem in

00:44:33.000 a rush I would

00:44:33.740 say and he

00:44:35.540 hypothesized that

00:44:36.520 people would have

00:44:37.140 to become super

00:44:38.560 men over men 0.91

00:44:39.620 roughly speaking

00:44:40.540 in order to deal

00:44:41.760 with the death of

00:44:42.460 God and that

00:44:43.080 idea sort of

00:44:43.840 branched off into

00:44:44.680 Nazi propaganda

00:44:45.800 because that's in

00:44:46.740 some sense what the

00:44:47.480 Nazis were trying to

00:44:48.300 do with their

00:44:49.100 promotion of the of

00:44:50.400 the perfect Aryan 1.00

00:44:51.520 you know now it's

00:44:52.160 a mis it's a

00:44:53.220 misappropriation of

00:44:54.300 Nietzsche in my

00:44:54.980 estimation and it

00:44:56.260 was partly because

00:44:57.020 his sister who is a 0.87

00:44:58.600 perverse creature 0.98

00:44:59.420 what would you say

00:45:03.180 doctored his work

00:45:04.500 in such a way so

00:45:05.560 that it was more

00:45:06.100 easily appropriated

00:45:07.840 by the Nazis but 0.56

00:45:09.180 there is some danger

00:45:10.040 in what he said too

00:45:10.960 because the question

00:45:12.480 is well if you're

00:45:13.160 going to transform

00:45:13.980 yourself into the

00:45:15.020 into the giver of

00:45:16.360 values what stops

00:45:17.780 you from inflating

00:45:18.820 yourself into something

00:45:19.880 like a demigod and

00:45:21.380 just pronouncing what

00:45:22.840 the values are going

00:45:23.680 to be so that's a

00:45:25.420 problem you know

00:45:28.280 you're going to

00:45:28.720 replace tradition

00:45:30.440 with yourself well

00:45:34.760 there's dangers in

00:45:36.580 that because there's

00:45:37.660 nothing to keep you

00:45:38.540 humble that's that's

00:45:40.540 the most appropriate

00:45:41.360 objection there's

00:45:42.140 nothing to keep you

00:45:42.840 humble and those

00:45:44.040 things can spiral out

00:45:44.960 of control very

00:45:45.620 rapidly and they did

00:45:46.920 say in the case of

00:45:47.820 Hitler I mean it's 0.98

00:45:48.880 easy to blame what

00:45:49.620 happened in Germany

00:45:50.380 on Hitler but that's 0.65

00:45:51.300 a that's a big

00:45:51.960 mistake because it

00:45:53.180 was a dialogue between

00:45:54.220 Hitler and the German 0.66

00:45:55.100 people right Hitler 0.97

00:45:56.440 didn't create himself

00:45:57.520 it was co-creation

00:45:58.960 he said things people

00:46:00.700 listened and told him

00:46:01.940 back what to say and

00:46:03.080 then he said them and

00:46:04.060 they listened and they

00:46:05.000 told him back what to

00:46:06.060 say and it looped until

00:46:07.940 he was the mouthpiece of

00:46:09.500 their darkest desires now

00:46:11.620 that's a that's a game he

00:46:12.860 was willing to play but

00:46:14.560 you can't think about that

00:46:15.580 as it isn't like Hitler

00:46:16.800 created Nazi Germany 0.67

00:46:18.720 Hitler and the Germans 0.93

00:46:20.500 co-created Nazi Germany 0.86

00:46:22.280 you know when a leader

00:46:24.620 gives articulation to

00:46:26.280 the imagination of the

00:46:27.760 population that's what a

00:46:29.000 leader does and you

00:46:31.220 know you could say that

00:46:32.240 well Hitler maybe Hitler 0.86

00:46:33.880 filtered what the Germans 0.99

00:46:35.100 were telling him through a

00:46:36.140 particular lens because he

00:46:37.300 had no shortage of

00:46:38.140 resentment and desire for

00:46:39.380 revenge in his own heart

00:46:40.980 you know it's not like his

00:46:44.700 life was a spectacular

00:46:45.760 success before he became a

00:46:47.720 political activist and he

00:46:48.820 was brutalized very badly

00:46:50.060 in World War One and he

00:46:51.440 didn't get to pursue his

00:46:52.720 primary dream which was to

00:46:54.020 be an art student in Vienna

00:46:56.240 and he had applied three

00:46:57.400 times and got rejected all

00:46:58.720 three times and so he was

00:47:00.000 bitter about that he was

00:47:01.360 basically living on the

00:47:02.520 streets after World War One

00:47:03.960 wasn't the world's happiest

00:47:05.440 person and I'm sure he

00:47:06.620 carried a fair bit of

00:47:07.860 resentment in his heart when

00:47:08.960 he was in the trenches in

00:47:10.420 World War War One at in one

00:47:13.100 experience that he had all of

00:47:14.660 his friends were killed by a

00:47:16.080 mortar when he had wandered

00:47:17.140 off to go do something else

00:47:18.760 so you know it's hard to

00:47:21.120 even imagine what something

00:47:22.160 like that would do to you

00:47:23.080 but I can tell you when

00:47:24.460 you're the only survivor out

00:47:25.760 of 20 people that's also

00:47:27.000 going to give you an

00:47:27.800 enhanced sense of your own

00:47:29.740 specialness because the

00:47:31.180 alternative is just to think 0.96

00:47:32.360 about how goddamn arbitrary 0.96

00:47:33.620 the universe really is so 0.91

00:47:35.860 so Jung studied Nietzsche in

00:47:41.440 great detail and he was

00:47:43.100 particularly interested because

00:47:44.580 Jung had his finger on the

00:47:46.800 central problems all the time

00:47:48.820 right because he was a great

00:47:50.220 psychologist and he was

00:47:51.400 listening to what people said

00:47:52.600 and he was a staggering genius

00:47:54.760 as well and so like Nietzsche

00:47:57.140 or Dostoevsky or Solzhenitsyn he

00:47:58.900 was that kind of prophetic type I

00:48:00.700 would say and he understood as

00:48:04.080 well perhaps what was wrong

00:48:05.980 with Nietzsche's formulation the

00:48:08.080 idea that people could only

00:48:09.260 create their new their own

00:48:10.500 values and that's what would

00:48:12.000 replace the lacking found the

00:48:15.000 foundation that was now lacking

00:48:16.300 under Western civilization itself

00:48:18.020 and he came to his conclusion I

00:48:20.560 would say through Freud because

00:48:23.060 Freud started analyzing parts of

00:48:26.580 the human cognitive process and

00:48:30.660 content that people hadn't attended

00:48:32.340 to before in any in any great

00:48:33.960 detail and that was primarily

00:48:35.560 dreams you know the idea of dream

00:48:37.740 analysis I suppose is one of

00:48:39.480 Freud's perhaps Freud's major

00:48:41.180 contribution to modern Western

00:48:44.180 thought the idea was there was

00:48:45.920 something to dreams and I suppose

00:48:48.620 what what Freud did is said hey

00:48:50.220 look isn't it strange we have this

00:48:52.360 whole other form of thought that we

00:48:54.000 engage in at night it and it speaks

00:48:58.040 in a language that we don't really

00:48:59.380 understand and so what the hell is

00:49:02.380 that and you can say and many modern

00:49:04.560 people do dreams are of no

00:49:05.840 significance or even that they're

00:49:07.340 random processes which is an absurd

00:49:09.200 proposition obviously because

00:49:10.740 they're by their whatever they are

00:49:12.640 they're obviously not random so so

00:49:16.380 Freud's idea was that there was some

00:49:18.160 something in dreams that was

00:49:19.680 informative so that's it's now he had

00:49:23.100 a method for describe for extracting

00:49:25.280 out from the dream what the dream

00:49:28.360 purported to represent and he outlined

00:49:31.640 that in great detail in the

00:49:33.180 interpretation of dreams and if you

00:49:35.000 want to read one book by Freud I

00:49:37.000 would highly recommend that one it's a

00:49:38.440 very long book and it's very detailed

00:49:40.040 but Freud does an extraordinarily

00:49:42.160 comprehensive analysis of the way

00:49:43.820 that dreams work now he made the

00:49:46.100 because because he had brought a

00:49:48.080 theoretical framework to bear even on

00:49:50.860 his investigation into dream

00:49:52.500 structure he concluded that dreams were

00:49:55.160 essentially wish fulfillments and

00:49:57.740 that's where Jung and Freud disagreed

00:50:00.380 he also believed that the primary

00:50:02.200 motivating factor of human beings was

00:50:04.960 sexual and now that's a tougher one to

00:50:07.240 toss aside because even if you're a

00:50:09.600 Darwinian rather than a Freudian you're

00:50:12.420 going to obviously support the proposition

00:50:15.620 that sexual motivation among any living

00:50:18.220 creature is going to be one of the

00:50:20.040 highest order motivations because

00:50:21.420 otherwise creatures don't reproduce

00:50:23.180 and and prevail over the long run so

00:50:26.340 the question is is that is that the

00:50:28.160 ultimate source of motivation and in

00:50:30.460 some sense the answer to that has to

00:50:32.080 be yes well Freud wanted to make that

00:50:34.700 in some ways the sole source of

00:50:36.480 motivation and I'm oversimplifying and I

00:50:38.460 hate to do that in relationship to

00:50:39.940 Freud because he was not a simple

00:50:41.220 minded character Jung had a dream once

00:50:44.860 if I remember correctly that Freud and

00:50:47.380 Jung were excavating a basement and so

00:50:51.380 Freud had outlined in Freud had already

00:50:53.620 discovered the basement let's say so

00:50:55.320 that would be the unconscious structure

00:50:56.800 of the psyche and Jung broke through

00:50:58.920 into another basement that was a

00:51:00.800 multi-chambered place so many many many

00:51:03.540 rooms and I suppose what drove Jung and

00:51:07.040 Freud apart was Jung's proposition that

00:51:09.380 there was a hell of a lot more going down

00:51:11.000 going on down there than had already met

00:51:13.600 the eye and they broke on the idea that

00:51:16.280 the sexual impulse was primary roughly

00:51:18.800 speaking they broke when Jung wrote a

00:51:21.020 book called symbols of transformation

00:51:22.360 which is actually there's there's three

00:51:24.780 books that I know of that are sort of

00:51:26.460 like maps of meaning one is symbols of

00:51:28.340 transformation one is a book by Eric

00:51:30.460 Neumann called the origins and history

00:51:32.060 of consciousness and the third and the

00:51:36.440 third one well his maps of meaning

00:51:37.840 they're the same book they're just like

00:51:39.860 they're trying to solve the same problem

00:51:41.440 from three different directions they're

00:51:43.260 all attempts to address the same problem

00:51:45.460 and so symbols of transformation was a

00:51:48.020 book that Jung wrote about the fantasies

00:51:49.720 of a schizophrenic American woman and he

00:51:53.580 was he was trying to relate her fantasies

00:51:55.640 to these old mythological ideas and

00:51:58.300 Jung's idea essentially and this is an

00:52:00.600 idea that was shared by people like

00:52:02.060 Piaget so we're not going to say that

00:52:04.180 Jung or Freud just pulled this idea out of

00:52:06.280 the air was that the the birthplace of

00:52:11.260 myth mythology and literature for that

00:52:13.940 matter was the dream that that that they

00:52:17.520 share structural that they they share

00:52:19.960 they they share what mode of information

00:52:24.800 presentation and it's a relatively radical

00:52:29.660 hypothesis but

00:52:30.680 but given that they both they both

00:52:40.240 represent dreams dreams dreams and

00:52:45.280 mythological representations share an

00:52:47.500 essentially narrative structure and they

00:52:49.420 use their literary like you know I mean

00:52:51.880 it's not so unreasonable to notice that a

00:52:54.280 dream at night is like the movie that you

00:52:56.100 play in your head and it's not unreasonable

00:52:58.360 to note as well that the dreams that you

00:53:00.640 have at night bear a relationship to the

00:53:02.840 daydreams that you have during the day

00:53:04.640 it's a form of cognition it seems like an

00:53:06.720 involuntary form of cognition though and

00:53:08.720 that's a very strange thing so Jung

00:53:10.660 thought about the dream as nature

00:53:12.120 speaking of its own accord roughly

00:53:14.480 speaking and so his idea was well when

00:53:17.480 you when you sleep you dream but the

00:53:19.300 dream happens to you it's not something

00:53:21.460 that you create the way that and you

00:53:23.260 don't even think about creating it because

00:53:25.180 I might say well what are you thinking

00:53:26.460 about and you'll say I'm thinking about

00:53:28.380 whatever it is and you'll take credit in

00:53:30.820 some sense for thinking that because it

00:53:32.420 seems like a voluntary activity but what

00:53:34.600 happens at night is that you think but

00:53:36.460 you think involuntarily and so what Jung

00:53:38.860 would say is that means that something

00:53:40.440 is thinking in you and that's a perfectly

00:53:44.400 reasonable way of looking at it and this

00:53:46.480 is one of the things that's uncanny about

00:53:48.260 the psychoanalysts is they they were

00:53:50.140 willing to take their observations to

00:53:52.120 their logical conclusion there are things

00:53:55.220 that think in you what are those things

00:53:59.140 and what are they thinking and why are they

00:54:01.840 thinking it now if you do dream analysis and

00:54:06.940 this is a tricky thing because who's to 0.99

00:54:09.100 say if your damn analysis is correct 0.97

00:54:11.000 right it's very difficult to understand 0.99

00:54:13.160 that if you if you do dream analysis with

00:54:15.260 someone you generally have them lay out

00:54:17.540 their dream and then you ask them when

00:54:20.500 they're going through their dream a second

00:54:21.840 time you they lay out their dream and you

00:54:23.240 can kind of get a picture of it and then

00:54:25.120 they lay out their dream a second time and

00:54:27.140 as they go through it every time they

00:54:29.240 mention a detail or character you ask

00:54:31.280 them what that reminds them of and the

00:54:33.360 hypothesis is that the dream is presenting

00:54:37.020 an image or an idea that's associated

00:54:38.920 with a network of ideas and that if you

00:54:41.420 can expand on the network of ideas as you

00:54:43.700 go through the dream you can elaborate on

00:54:45.980 the dream you can expand it upwards and

00:54:48.100 you can start to see what it might be

00:54:49.960 attempting to put forward now Freud's idea

00:54:53.620 was that the dream knew what it was doing

00:54:55.620 but that its content was being suppressed and

00:54:58.220 oppressed by an internal sensor so the

00:55:00.300 dream had to be sneaky about what it was

00:55:02.680 saying because it was going to deliver a

00:55:04.760 message that the person didn't want to

00:55:06.700 hear and that that was tied up with his

00:55:09.620 idea of repression but that's not Jung's

00:55:12.320 idea see Jung's idea was different he

00:55:14.420 said no no the dream is trying to tell you

00:55:17.560 what it's trying to tell you as clear as

00:55:19.440 it can that's just the best it can do and

00:55:23.200 so you could think of the dream and this

00:55:25.360 is I believe the right way to think about

00:55:26.860 it the dream is the birthplace of thought

00:55:28.840 the same way that artists are the

00:55:30.440 birthplace of culture it's exactly the

00:55:33.080 same process it's that your mind is

00:55:34.800 groping outward to try to comprehend what

00:55:37.640 it has not yet comprehended and it does

00:55:40.520 that first by trying to map it on to image

00:55:43.080 and it's doing that in the dream and

00:55:44.960 it's somewhat incoherent and and and well

00:55:48.920 let's stick with incoherent because it's

00:55:50.940 not yet a full-fledged thought it's the

00:55:53.320 birthplace of thought it's a fantasy

00:55:55.820 about what might be and then if you can

00:55:58.620 grip the fantasy and share it with other

00:56:02.100 people then maybe they can elaborate

00:56:03.600 upon it and bring it into being with more

00:56:06.440 clarity than it would be if it merely

00:56:08.180 existed as the precursor of a thought in

00:56:12.000 your imagination now because Jung's idea

00:56:14.160 too was okay you think you think in words

00:56:17.120 where the hell do those thoughts come

00:56:18.640 from well they just spring into my head

00:56:20.640 well that's not much of an answer they

00:56:22.700 just what pop out of the void is there

00:56:25.080 some sort of precursor to the development

00:56:26.940 of the ideas is there a developmental

00:56:28.820 pathway so here's an image this is the

00:56:31.660 Buddha there's calm water there's a

00:56:35.800 lotus the roots go all the way down to

00:56:37.920 the bottom of the lake it's dark down

00:56:39.640 there the roots are embedded in the dark

00:56:42.380 substrata at the bottom of the lake the

00:56:44.740 plant moves upwards towards the light the

00:56:47.020 the water gets lighter and lighter as you

00:56:49.280 move upward with the root the flower

00:56:51.340 manifests itself on the surface and the

00:56:55.400 Buddha sits in the middle that's an image

00:56:57.380 about how ideas develop they come out

00:56:59.200 from the bottom of reality and they push

00:57:02.140 themselves up towards the light and they

00:57:03.820 blast forward and something emerges as a

00:57:06.620 consequence that's what that image means

00:57:08.540 and it's an image the gold Buddha that's

00:57:10.940 sitting in the middle of the lotus is an

00:57:12.860 image of the perfect person you could think

00:57:14.640 about the gold Buddha who sits in a

00:57:16.280 triangle as exactly the same thing that's

00:57:18.540 the eye on the top of the pyramid these

00:57:20.600 are all the same ideas there's and what's

00:57:23.020 the idea that's trying to burst forward

00:57:24.800 how to be in the world well what other

00:57:27.880 idea would burst forward because it's the

00:57:29.600 only problem that you really have right

00:57:31.720 how should you manifest yourself properly

00:57:34.140 in the world it's everyone's question

00:57:36.480 it's the ultimate question it's been the

00:57:38.900 ultimate question since the beginning of

00:57:40.660 time and we've been working out that idea

00:57:43.660 forever first of all merely by acting it

00:57:47.200 out and then by representing the actions

00:57:49.300 and then by representing the representations

00:57:51.620 and spiraling all that together so I started

00:57:56.040 looking developmentally I thought okay maybe

00:57:58.980 these ideas have roots and this was partly

00:58:01.380 predicated on the observation from

00:58:04.180 Dostoevsky and Nietzsche and and and so

00:58:06.420 forth that there did seem to be a necessary

00:58:08.540 pattern in moral in morality there seemed to

00:58:12.400 be a necessary pattern it wasn't arbitrary it

00:58:15.220 was a it was a representation of the specific

00:58:18.380 mode of human being and it isn't something

00:58:21.160 that's just imposed on you by your cultures 0.99

00:58:23.120 not something that's just learned it's

00:58:25.160 intrinsic in you and it's manifest in the

00:58:28.000 culture at the same time and there's a dial

00:58:30.440 and and and there's a dialogue between those

00:58:32.940 two things culture and nature where both where

00:58:36.400 the idea is embedded trying to make make make the

00:58:39.840 proper articulation of that spring forward in

00:58:43.160 each individual and that's only to say these

00:58:45.640 aren't these aren't radical propositions your

00:58:51.100 nature strives so that you can manifest yourself

00:58:53.840 properly in the world culture strives to aid you in

00:58:57.220 that endeavor is that is there something about

00:58:59.920 that that's that's that's of dubious validity what

00:59:03.200 else would it be doing working for your death

00:59:05.940 hardly working for your destruction well you

00:59:08.780 could see that maybe when culture becomes

00:59:10.740 pathologized but to the degree that it's able to

00:59:13.380 maintain itself across long periods of time it

00:59:16.260 obviously has to be striving in some way for the

00:59:19.080 man of for your individual manifestation so that

00:59:21.580 you can survive and flourish so there's a there's a

00:59:24.920 there's a co-creation of the human being going on

00:59:28.080 through nature and through culture and well and then

00:59:31.360 perhaps with your own

00:59:32.740 with your own voluntary will participating whatever the

00:59:38.300 hell that is something we don't understand at all and are

00:59:41.280 and are prone to dismiss because of that so then i learned

00:59:48.260 about piaget and piaget had some very interesting ideas and i

00:59:51.600 think i've told you already what piaget was up to he wasn't a

00:59:54.900 developmental psychologist he didn't even regard

00:59:56.820 himself as a psychologist he wanted to reconcile science and

01:00:01.100 religion that's what he was doing through his entire bloody 1.00

01:00:04.120 life because it drove him crazy when he was an adolescent and he

01:00:08.140 didn't think that he would be able to survive unless he could bring

01:00:10.940 those two things together so he's working on the same problem and

01:00:14.860 so one of the things that piaget who was very prone to observation he

01:00:19.480 was an ethologist of human beings that's a good way of thinking about

01:00:23.600 an ethologist is a scientist who studies animals by watching their

01:00:27.160 behavior rather than studying them under laboratory conditions

01:00:29.880 and he got very interested in the spontaneous emergence of morality in

01:00:34.960 the play of children that was so smart the so smart that idea that

01:00:39.180 you know when kids come together and unify themselves towards a particular

01:00:43.420 goal so in play that a morality emerges out of that

01:00:47.180 and that that morality and i've mentioned this before there's a morality in

01:00:51.260 game one there's a morality in game two there's a morality in game three

01:00:55.480 what's common across all those moralities is a meta morality and so

01:01:00.080 the meta morality emerges from the particular moralities that are embedded

01:01:03.900 in particular cooperative situations we could say cooperative and

01:01:07.720 competitive situations you can expand that out to thy you can expand that

01:01:11.800 out biologically to some degree to the idea of the dominance hierarchy

01:01:14.960 right every social animal and even many animals who aren't social are

01:01:20.460 embedded in a dominance hierarchy the dominance hierarchy has a

01:01:23.720 structure we couldn't call it a dominance hierarchy dominance hierarchy a b c d e

01:01:29.500 thousands of them across thousands of years you extract out from all of them

01:01:34.060 what's central to all of them that's the pyramid of value what's the what's the

01:01:39.700 what question do you need answered about the pyramid of value what's at the

01:01:44.120 top because that's the ideal that's the eye at the top of the pyramid or the

01:01:48.680 golden buddha in the in the lotus it's the same thing it's the same thing as the

01:01:53.020 crucifix paradoxically enough and that has to do it has to do with something like

01:01:58.000 the voluntary acceptance and therefore transcendence of suffering it's something

01:02:03.080 like that these are not arbitrary ideas they're deeply that's my case anyways

01:02:09.120 they're deeply deeply deeply rooted in biology and culture they're they're as

01:02:15.400 deeply rooted in biology as the dominance hierarchy is rooted in biology and we

01:02:19.680 already know the answer to that the dominance hierarchy has been around for

01:02:22.820 350 million years it's a long time you don't get to just brush that off and say

01:02:29.880 well morality some sort of second order cognitive problem it's like no it's not

01:02:35.360 i mean i can i can tell you something about its instantiation in your nervous

01:02:39.320 system you have a counter at the bottom of your brain that keeps track of where

01:02:43.820 you are in terms of your status and it bloody well regulates the sensitivity of

01:02:48.500 your emotions so if you're at the bottom of the hierarchy barely clinging on to the 0.97

01:02:52.540 world everything overwhelms you and that's because you're damn near dead and so

01:02:57.700 everything should overwhelm you you've got no extra resources any more threat

01:03:01.940 you're sunk so you become extremely sensitive to negative emotion and maybe

01:03:06.920 also impulsive so that you grab well the grabbing is good and if you're nearer the

01:03:11.460 top in the dominance hierarchy and your counter tells you that then your serotonin

01:03:15.660 levels go up you're less sensitive to negative emotion you're less impulsive you

01:03:20.240 live longer like everything works in your favor your immune system functions

01:03:24.500 better and you're oriented at least to some degree towards the medium and long

01:03:28.560 term future and you can afford that because all hell isn't breaking loose around

01:03:33.880 you all the time and so then the question is is there a way of being that

01:03:38.260 increases the probability that you're going to move up dominance hierarchies

01:03:42.040 well that doesn't seem to be a particularly provocative proposition unless you

01:03:47.480 think that it's completely arbitrary and random and that

01:03:50.300 you can think that if you want but i don't think there's any evidence for that

01:03:55.900 whatsoever i mean we certainly have even for sexual selection we impose criteria

01:04:01.040 they're not ram random and arbitrary so okay so back to jung so what was jung trying to do

01:04:09.780 well he was trying to see see jung believed that once we had stopped populating the cosmos

01:04:16.920 with gods that they went inside that's a good way of thinking well think think about it this way

01:04:22.940 you know an archaic person looks at the sky and uses his imagination to populate the sky

01:04:32.600 what's the sky well it's the constellations it's the domain of the gods well why well because the gods

01:04:39.620 are what are b are out there beyond your understanding well that's what you see when you look up at the

01:04:44.640 sky so you populate the night sky with figures of your imagination so the gods are the things that you

01:04:50.960 broadcast out of your imagination and see spread over the world it's like the contents of your

01:04:57.140 unconscious are manifesting themselves when you encounter the unknown it's exactly what it is

01:05:02.120 that's exactly how how else could it be right you're projecting your fantasy onto what you don't

01:05:08.780 understand that's how you start to cope with what you don't understand you populate the unknown

01:05:13.780 with deities where did they come from they came from your imagination well what happens when you take

01:05:18.800 them out of the world do they disappear no they just go back into your imagination so that's where

01:05:25.060 jung dug down to find them that's the same motif as rescuing your dead father from the from or rescuing

01:05:32.240 your father from the belly of the whale it's the same idea is that the corpses of the gods inhabit

01:05:38.380 your imagination so where do you go if you need to revivify them you go into your imagination and that's

01:05:44.920 exactly what jung did and i mean this is no secret if you read jung he tells you that's what he did he

01:05:50.660 tells you that's why he did it it's not an interpretation on my part well so then then the

01:05:56.960 question is what's down there is it just mess and catastrophe or is there something in it that's

01:06:03.120 patterned well jung's proposition was that you redid you rediscover the great archetypes that guide

01:06:10.960 human being by investigating the structure of your imagination when he thought about the imagination

01:06:16.500 in some sense at least in part as a manifestation of your of your biology well yes what else would it

01:06:23.540 be you know when i told you that story about my nephew i believe right about him running around as a

01:06:29.800 knight and then going off to have a combat with the dwarves and the dragons it's like well where did

01:06:34.940 that come from well partly it came from his culture right because he was a knight and and so obviously

01:06:41.520 that's a cultural construct but the thing is is that his imagination is it's this structure that's

01:06:46.880 looking for things to fill itself with just like your predisposition to language you have a predisposition

01:06:54.080 to language what is that we don't know what does it do it looks for things in the world to fill itself

01:07:00.600 with right and if you're if you first of all when you start to learn how to speak you babble every

01:07:07.020 phoneme did you know that there's there's lot there's if i was learning to speak an asian language

01:07:12.380 there would be phonemes i couldn't pronounce and vice versa an infant all of them they babble all the

01:07:17.700 phonemes and then as they start to learn the language they lose the ability to say a bunch of them and

01:07:22.500 only retain the ones that are relevant to that language so a baby babbles all lang all possible 0.89

01:07:28.840 languages that's a way of thinking about it and then loses the ability so that's a manifest that's

01:07:34.640 you can see there so you could say well you manifest the potential to be possessed by all the set of

01:07:40.400 all possible archetypes it's built into your biology and then as you're enculturated in your own culture

01:07:47.280 the set of archetypes that manifest its manifest themselves in that culture are the ones that you

01:07:52.420 pull in for your own use so my my nephew's running around like a knight well you know if he would

01:07:58.640 have been born in the middle of the amazon he would be running around with a bow and you know a poisoned

01:08:03.240 arrow and a bow it's the same thing it's the same idea it's just trapped out in in different cultural

01:08:11.200 dress and he his little imagination was trying to solve the problem how do you deal with the unknown

01:08:17.600 well what's the unknown it's these little devils that keep biting jumping up on you and biting you and 0.99

01:08:23.260 they come out without end so just killing them it's like cutting the head off the hydra right seven more 0.99

01:08:30.000 grow well what the hell good is it to solve one problem when there's just a bunch more problems that 0.99

01:08:36.820 are come going to come after you and that's everyone's question that's the ultimate question

01:08:41.280 of nihilism right why bother solving a problem if all that's going to happen is that 20 more problems

01:08:47.220 are going to come your way why not just give up and die well right it's a good question it's the it's

01:08:53.440 a good question right is the suffering so intense that the whole game should just be brought to an end

01:08:58.840 that's another fundamental question of existence and people who've become truly malevolent answer that

01:09:06.400 question in the affirmative they say it's too much we should destroy it now i wouldn't say they're

01:09:13.660 precisely doing it only for humanitarian reasons but you have to understand and appreciate the logic

01:09:19.700 it's not irrational that's the other thing it's not irrational to work for the destruction of being

01:09:25.860 it's not irrational in fact it might be the most rational thing you could come up with

01:09:32.200 depends on your initial initial set of presuppositions

01:09:35.040 to to to to to see what lurks in the imagination he sees the birthplace of archetypal ideas well what

01:09:48.960 are archetypal ideas there there are patterns of a you could think about them as as representations of

01:09:56.140 patterns of adaptive behavior and so then you might ask well where did they come from well that's part of

01:10:02.080 what i've been trying to to to teach you about they evolved as far as i can tell right they evolved

01:10:11.080 collectively is that our society and this is the dominance hierarchy idea dominance hierarchy set

01:10:16.380 themselves up as a matter of course they're the standard way that animals organize themselves in a

01:10:21.720 territory well okay human beings are watching those dominance hierarchies since we became self-aware

01:10:28.140 thinking what the hell are we up to what the hell are we up to what's and and there's a question that lurks

01:10:34.100 in there what constitutes acceptable power what constitutes acceptable sovereignty who should lead who

01:10:42.260 should rule what should be at the top well we talked about that the mesopotamians figured that out

01:10:47.140 speech and vision that's marduk speech vision and the willingness to confront the terrible unknown

01:10:54.140 that's what should rule well what's that an arbitrary idea or is that a great idea how could it be any

01:11:00.380 other way well that's what human beings are like and i i don't think that you can read the mesopotamian

01:11:05.780 story and understand the reference which isn't an easy thing to do and fail to draw that conclusion

01:11:13.040 marduk has eyes all the way around his head he speaks magic words he goes off to fight tiamat the dragon 0.81

01:11:19.240 of chaos well what's that that's the reptilian predator that lurks in the unknown well is any of

01:11:25.560 that does it is there anything about any of that that stands in opposition to what you were would

01:11:32.140 presume if you were just analyzing our situation from a purely biological perspective we're prey animals

01:11:39.760 we're predators we'd be threatened by reptiles forever why wouldn't we use the predator that lurks in

01:11:46.240 the dark forest or the water as a representative of the unknown why wouldn't we harness that circuitry

01:11:53.360 we already have it at hand and even more to the point how could we do anything else it's it makes

01:11:59.360 perfect sense well so then what you might say well what would you want to be king you could say king of

01:12:06.000 the world or king of your own soul what do you want to subordinate yourself to how about your heroic

01:12:11.820 willingness to encounter the unknown and articulate it and share that with people there's no nobler

01:12:18.140 vision than that and i i don't see that it's merely arbitrary and so and it's not merely arbitrary too

01:12:25.540 because if you do that to the degree that you do that assuming your society isn't entirely corrupt

01:12:32.360 you will be successful it will actually aid you practically you'll rise up above men you'll be

01:12:39.300 selected by women you'll be admirable you'll be valued and and you know that because if you look

01:12:45.780 at the people that you admire and value again unless you've taken a detour into dark places and are

01:12:52.480 are are are are possessed with admiration for people who are working for malevolent purposes and for

01:12:59.540 destruction you just have to watch the people that you admire and try to figure out what's common

01:13:04.340 across them and draw your own conclusions and you can ask yourself too when you're torturing yourself

01:13:09.980 with your conscience because you're not doing what you should be and you know it what is it that you're

01:13:15.320 torturing yourself in relationship to you have a vision of your own ideal and you torment yourself if

01:13:21.700 you're not matching it what's the ideal well you don't know right it's it's kind of incoherent and

01:13:27.480 and poorly articulated but that doesn't mean it isn't trying to manifest itself and and make itself

01:13:33.380 known to you it's really the purpose of religious education is to make that ideal articulated well

01:13:40.400 we've lost that it's not a good thing okay so i talked to you about the mesopotamian story and i talked

01:13:48.860 to you about the egyptian story and what i thought it meant and it's a bit of an elaboration on the same

01:13:53.100 theme because it says well the hero isn't only the the deity the transcendent pattern let's say

01:13:59.460 that goes out into the unknown cuts it into pieces and makes the world that's not good enough because

01:14:05.380 it it only deals with the terrible mother that's one way of thinking about it but there's a terrible

01:14:10.400 father too once culture gets instantiated in in large scale and the egyptians had that problem

01:14:16.660 two problems chaos second problem pathological order well structures tend towards pathological

01:14:25.800 order the egyptians laid out why that's seth right seth is the evil advisor of the king who's lurking in

01:14:31.840 the background all the time trying to tear the structure down for his own malevolent purposes

01:14:36.360 so now and then that overcomes the structure and destroys the and and what rigidifies and makes

01:14:43.500 malevolent the entire social structure so it degenerates into say fascist totalitarianism

01:14:49.140 something like that and that's been a threat since we've had highly organized societies

01:14:53.920 then the hero ends up in the underworld and has to come back and and do direct combat with that

01:15:00.740 malevolent force at the price of his own consciousness right because a horus gets one of his eyes destroyed

01:15:06.320 it's no bloody joke to face the forces that make a culture rigid and malevolent

01:15:12.600 so there's an addition to the hero archetype two things happen one you go out and you conquer

01:15:18.320 chaos and you make order out of it but the second is you take pathological order recast it into chaos

01:15:24.180 and then allow it to re-emerge and you do that not in some arbitrary sense but in tandem with your

01:15:30.540 rescued father and that's i guess in part what nietzsche missed as far as i can tell is he didn't he knew

01:15:37.160 that he knew of the death of god perhaps he didn't know that it had happened many times

01:15:42.120 murcia eliad documented that across many cultures but what nietzsche didn't seem to lay out at least

01:15:47.920 in his vision of the superman or the overman was that it was a responsibility of the person who wants

01:15:53.760 to revivify the culture to go down and rescue the damn culture which is what you're supposed to be 1.00

01:15:58.960 doing in university because your father is lying dead in the libraries right so you're supposed to be 0.98

01:16:04.880 going in there and taking that spirit out of the books and manifesting it in your own being that's

01:16:10.740 what the universities were for although i don't think that's what they're for anymore

01:16:15.400 so we talked about the mesopotamian story and we talked about the egyptian story and

01:16:23.180 other people have documented the emergence of hero mythology in cultures far more diverse than the

01:16:29.740 ones that i'm exposing you to that was done most popularly by joseph campbell but campbell's like i

01:16:36.280 don't think campbell had a single idea that he didn't derive from jung and i'm not saying that in a

01:16:40.780 in a critical manner because campbell was good at standing as a mediator between jung and a more general

01:16:47.740 population he did and that's that's a non-trivial accomplishment seriously but but but jung is still the

01:16:56.420 source of those ideas and if you're serious about them that's the person that you have to go to

01:17:00.540 for that kind of knowledge so now i wanted to tell you some other stories that are that are in some

01:17:06.640 sense closer to western culture they're the stories upon which western culture is actually predicated so

01:17:11.860 i'm going to tell you well i'm not only western story today i'm going to tell you a couple of stories

01:17:17.480 from genesis and i'm going to tell you about the story of the buddha i'm going to do that at the same

01:17:22.320 time because the story of the buddha is almost a perfect parallel structurally speaking to the story

01:17:28.160 of adam and eve and so i want to show you that and you can decide for yourself if i'm imposing a pattern

01:17:34.120 on it because god only knows right or whether or not once you have the key to understanding the stories

01:17:40.620 which i hope i provided you with with the you know the idea of the dragon of chaos and the great mother

01:17:46.320 and the great father and the individual it gives you a schema that you can use to understand the

01:17:52.380 characterizations of great stories and as far as i can tell it works pretty much universally across

01:17:57.840 stories so so i want to read i want to walk you through those foundational stories and i would say

01:18:04.260 one of the things to know about the way the bible is structured there's a couple of things you want

01:18:08.200 to know about it is that it was authored by multiple people across extraordinarily vast spans of time

01:18:14.320 and then aggregated by other people and sorted into something that seemed to make sense and so you

01:18:21.300 can really think about it as a because bible is is a library it's a library of books it's not a book

01:18:27.020 the library is organized a certain way that makes a kind of sense but it's not exactly as if anyone

01:18:33.020 decided what that sense would be it's the collaborative work of hundreds and thousands of people across

01:18:40.580 thousands of years attempting to organize a collective story into something that something out of which

01:18:47.560 the sense emerges it's like human beings acted and then they dream dreamed about how they acted and then

01:18:56.440 they wrote down what they dreamed about how they acted and then they organized what they wrote about how they

01:19:02.740 dreamed they acted and that's how that book came into being and the information that's within it emerged

01:19:08.700 from the behavioral level upward right rather than being imposed top down now there's a there's a

01:19:13.960 feedback right because if you understand how you act and that changes how you act and so you can't you

01:19:20.800 can't avoid the top down feedback but a tremendous amount of the information in there and this is why

01:19:26.180 it's revelatory information we don't know it's in there because how we act is informative and then if you

01:19:33.220 represent how we act that's informative but the information came from how we act not from the

01:19:39.220 representation of how we act and then you might think well how did we learn how to act and the answer

01:19:45.020 is we've been trying to figure out how to do that for 3.5 billion years there's a lots of information

01:19:52.260 encoded in our actions and in our social interactions way more than we understand so we're acting something

01:19:59.140 out we don't understand what it is but we're doing our best to pull that information upward partly by

01:20:03.880 dreaming about it that's what you're doing at night you're trying to figure out what the hell you're up

01:20:08.240 to well you don't know because you don't know yourself in totality how could you possibly know

01:20:13.640 best you can do is dream yourself up and then speak yourself into some sort of articulated existence

01:20:20.120 it's just an approximation because you who whatever you is whatever you are rapidly supersedes whatever

01:20:28.540 you think you are that's why people constantly shock themselves you know if you were only what

01:20:33.960 you thought of yourself well wouldn't life be simple you'd know exactly what you were doing all the time

01:20:38.340 and you could even control your own behavior well good luck with that you can't do that for yourself

01:20:44.060 much less for other people

01:20:45.280 so let's go through these stories

01:20:50.160 so

01:20:52.120 they're sequenced

01:20:54.080 people are trying to make sense out of them they're aggregating these stories from all sorts of different

01:21:00.120 places all sorts of different tribes all sorts of different times and then trying to make them

01:21:05.240 coherent without losing the content and without doing arbitrary editing and so part of the reason that the

01:21:11.440 bible is full of internal contradictions it's for the same reason that a dream is full of internal

01:21:15.900 contradictions is if you impose too much coherence on it you start losing the

01:21:20.960 look imagine you have an imagine that you have a impressionist painting

01:21:28.640 well

01:21:30.160 it's messy and and and the the image emerges and you might say well we could replace that with a nice clean line

01:21:37.520 drawing

01:21:38.000 or even a sequence of stick figures and get the basic point across it's like well you would but

01:21:44.820 you'd lose the the richness the unarticulable richness would be lost in the premature attempt

01:21:51.800 to bring logical closure to the phenomena and so in fact we know already that that's maybe the difference

01:21:58.780 between dreams and waking thought

01:22:00.600 so waking thought sacrifices

01:22:03.560 completeness

01:22:04.780 for coherence

01:22:06.140 right so

01:22:07.520 whereas

01:22:08.920 dream thought sacrifices coherence for completeness

01:22:12.480 and that's that's that's not something i'm saying arbitrarily this is something that has been thought through

01:22:17.080 by people who've been thinking this sort of thing through for a long time

01:22:20.400 precise thought

01:22:22.320 excludes too much

01:22:26.240 an imprecise thought is not sufficiently coherent so we do both precise thought

01:22:32.940 left hemisphere linguistically mediated sequential logical

01:22:36.560 incoherent but complete thought

01:22:40.400 imagistic emotion based right hemisphere the right hemisphere even has a more diffuse structure

01:22:45.100 it's like the right hemisphere is trying to get a picture of everything

01:22:47.820 now

01:22:49.100 it's not going to be a very detailed picture because it's a picture of everything full of contradictions

01:22:53.940 but at least it's a picture of everything and the left says that's not good enough for precise action

01:22:58.720 and it's not so we'll narrow that to precision

01:23:01.360 but we lose the richness

01:23:02.860 but you need both

01:23:04.200 so there's an interplay

01:23:06.020 well

01:23:06.480 the documents

01:23:07.880 that the bible is composed of

01:23:09.900 are half dream

01:23:11.680 and half

01:23:12.740 articulated thought

01:23:14.400 and they have

01:23:15.560 the advantages of articulated thought

01:23:17.280 and the advantages of the dream

01:23:18.880 but also the disadvantages of both

01:23:20.960 so it's

01:23:21.960 to the degree that it's articulated

01:23:23.880 it's in a dogmatic box

01:23:25.480 to the degree that it's a dream

01:23:27.080 it's still incoherent

01:23:28.340 but it's

01:23:29.260 the problem is you have to

01:23:30.660 you have to move through the entire world

01:23:33.760 even though you don't know it in detail

01:23:35.260 so you need detailed knowledge

01:23:37.580 where detailed knowledge is necessary

01:23:39.460 and you need

01:23:40.100 vague but complete knowledge

01:23:42.020 where that's necessary

01:23:43.040 it's a very uncomfortable balance

01:23:45.260 but

01:23:45.520 we have to face everything

01:23:47.660 even though we don't understand anything completely

01:23:50.460 now

01:23:52.840 Genesis

01:23:54.220 the first stories in Genesis are

01:23:56.300 what would you say

01:23:58.380 un

01:23:59.400 unidentifiably ancient

01:24:04.080 God only knows how old they are

01:24:07.180 the story of Noah

01:24:09.440 here's an interesting thing

01:24:10.680 I know this guy

01:24:11.520 who's a

01:24:13.020 he's a

01:24:14.220 Quakquak

01:24:14.900 tribal member

01:24:16.080 and an artist

01:24:17.180 who lives on the tip of northern

01:24:19.840 of Vancouver Island

01:24:21.720 and the culture he comes from

01:24:23.520 is about 14,000 years old

01:24:25.300 something like that

01:24:26.200 and maybe it's been unbroken for 14,000 years

01:24:28.580 very long period of time

01:24:30.020 and he

01:24:31.020 he's not literate

01:24:32.440 this guy

01:24:33.240 although he's very intelligent

01:24:35.400 has a great memory

01:24:36.220 and is also a great artist

01:24:37.320 and he's told me some of the stories

01:24:39.340 that

01:24:39.640 that have come down through the Quakquakquak tradition

01:24:42.340 and he was

01:24:43.360 educated by his grandparents

01:24:45.360 who were original language speakers

01:24:46.920 and he's an original language speaker

01:24:48.340 so there aren't many people like that left

01:24:49.780 I think there's only 3,000

01:24:50.880 in his particular tribal group

01:24:52.780 they have a story

01:24:54.440 that's the flood story

01:24:55.580 except it's canoes

01:24:57.820 and it isn't a dove

01:24:59.400 it's a crow 0.99

01:25:00.000 but the damn story is exactly the same 0.99

01:25:02.240 it's like 0.99

01:25:02.960 well what the hell's up with that

01:25:04.180 in fact at the end

01:25:05.160 it's not a canoe

01:25:05.960 it's a bunch of canoes

01:25:06.920 that are tied together

01:25:07.820 and at the end

01:25:09.280 the canoes all break apart

01:25:10.740 and that's why there are people all over the world

01:25:12.500 it's like the story of the Tower of Babel

01:25:14.720 which I'm going to talk to you about today

01:25:16.340 so

01:25:17.360 the reason I'm telling you that

01:25:23.940 is because

01:25:24.380 the stories at the beginning of Genesis

01:25:26.600 are extraordinarily old

01:25:27.960 now so maybe

01:25:28.860 he tells the same story

01:25:30.640 that we tell

01:25:31.920 you know

01:25:33.440 making the presumption

01:25:35.480 that we are the people

01:25:36.820 who are part of this Judeo-Christian tradition

01:25:39.420 and I know that that's not the case for everyone 0.97

01:25:41.320 either he's telling the same damn story 0.91

01:25:45.560 and it emerged from a central point 0.99

01:25:48.020 so long ago

01:25:49.120 that it's

01:25:49.620 20,000 years

01:25:51.260 or 30,000 years

01:25:52.320 or maybe 50,000 years

01:25:53.600 since we moved out of Africa

01:25:54.820 something like that

01:25:55.660 and the story has survived

01:25:57.180 which is certainly possible

01:25:58.900 because

01:25:59.280 oral

01:26:00.020 you think

01:26:00.520 can an oral tradition

01:26:01.340 survive that long

01:26:02.600 that's the wrong question

01:26:04.120 oral traditions

01:26:05.400 always survive that long

01:26:07.020 what's radical

01:26:08.880 is that they disappear

01:26:10.140 we're the radicals

01:26:12.300 the oral tradition

01:26:13.240 is something that stays the same

01:26:15.620 generation after generation

01:26:17.080 so how much innovation

01:26:18.440 do you think there is

01:26:19.180 in a small tribal group

01:26:20.300 none

01:26:21.500 that's why they don't have

01:26:23.220 advanced technologies

01:26:24.240 they stay the same

01:26:25.760 the stories stay the same

01:26:27.240 so the idea that they can

01:26:29.100 be transmitted

01:26:30.120 unchanged

01:26:30.540 over thousands

01:26:31.820 and tens of thousands of years

01:26:33.120 is really not a debatable proposition

01:26:35.020 it's the norm

01:26:36.160 so either the stories

01:26:37.960 emerge from a central source

01:26:39.980 and have never been lost

01:26:41.120 so that you can pick them up everywhere

01:26:42.580 or there's something about the stories

01:26:44.540 that automatically

01:26:45.540 regenerates themselves

01:26:47.160 and I suppose

01:26:48.180 it's a little bit of column A

01:26:49.380 and a little bit of column B

01:26:50.600 it's like my

01:26:51.420 my nephew

01:26:52.440 when he

01:26:53.420 perceived himself

01:26:55.080 as a dragon slaying knight

01:26:56.640 it's like well

01:26:57.420 was that the continuation

01:26:59.060 of an oral tradition

01:27:00.060 or was it something

01:27:00.760 that he spontaneously

01:27:01.740 come up with

01:27:02.520 and the answer is

01:27:03.220 both

01:27:04.700 both

01:27:05.540 the pattern

01:27:06.520 was there

01:27:07.000 he just had to see it

01:27:08.080 and he saw it

01:27:08.860 and synthesized it

01:27:09.760 and encapsulated it

01:27:12.420 in his own imagination

01:27:13.520 well that's not much different

01:27:15.580 than the oral tradition

01:27:16.580 being unbroken

01:27:17.460 it's just a variant

01:27:18.920 of the same thing

01:27:19.920 I mean

01:27:21.280 if you lose a story

01:27:22.580 but everyone acts it out

01:27:23.700 you can reconstruct the story

01:27:25.080 right

01:27:25.580 and if everyone doesn't act it out

01:27:27.600 then the culture dies

01:27:28.560 because there's some things

01:27:29.760 about the story

01:27:30.440 that you have to act out

01:27:31.600 if your culture

01:27:32.740 is going to survive

01:27:33.700 that's the hypothesis

01:27:34.920 and then that would be

01:27:35.920 well

01:27:36.600 that would be

01:27:37.460 where you would search

01:27:38.380 for ultimate values

01:27:39.660 the stories that enable

01:27:41.200 you as an individual

01:27:42.560 to flourish

01:27:43.340 in such a manner

01:27:44.940 that your culture flourishes

01:27:46.280 in a way to enhance

01:27:47.700 your flourishing

01:27:48.620 right

01:27:48.860 that's the right way

01:27:49.700 that you want to organize things

01:27:50.920 you know that's what you do

01:27:52.160 inside a family

01:27:53.000 if it's functioning well

01:27:54.160 right

01:27:54.980 the family functions

01:27:56.560 so that every individual

01:27:57.700 benefits

01:27:58.280 from being in the family

01:27:59.860 and that strengthens the family

01:28:01.620 that's what Piaget called

01:28:03.280 an equilibrated solution

01:28:04.500 technically speaking

01:28:05.800 when he was looking for

01:28:06.800 the origin of moral ideas

01:28:08.880 he came up with the idea

01:28:10.360 of equilibrated

01:28:11.060 equilibrated

01:28:12.600 state

01:28:13.920 and an equilibrated state

01:28:15.000 is one

01:28:15.380 the three of you

01:28:16.200 are in an equilibrated state

01:28:17.440 if you all want to be

01:28:18.800 in that state

01:28:19.600 and while you're in that state

01:28:21.620 the things that you're doing

01:28:22.540 together

01:28:22.920 work better

01:28:24.340 and they facilitate

01:28:25.600 each of your development

01:28:26.780 right

01:28:27.780 so it's the stacking

01:28:28.900 of

01:28:29.320 of

01:28:29.740 of

01:28:30.180 an ethical

01:28:31.020 of a set of ethical

01:28:32.040 propositions

01:28:32.840 so that

01:28:33.820 the individual benefits

01:28:35.240 at the same time

01:28:35.940 as the group

01:28:36.520 and you can

01:28:37.380 you can increase that

01:28:38.420 stacking

01:28:38.860 we could say

01:28:39.420 well it's not only that

01:28:40.460 you want to organize yourself

01:28:42.440 so that all three of you

01:28:43.540 get what you want

01:28:44.260 better than you would

01:28:45.220 if you were alone

01:28:46.060 and so that you're healthy

01:28:47.840 and so the stacking

01:28:49.260 also occurs

01:28:50.120 all the way down

01:28:51.120 the physiological chain

01:28:52.440 you want to be

01:28:53.400 manifesting yourself

01:28:54.540 in the world

01:28:55.060 so that you remain

01:28:56.020 as physiologically healthy

01:28:57.280 as you possibly can

01:28:58.400 so your stress responses

01:28:59.800 are properly balanced

01:29:00.860 and all of that

01:29:01.500 and then maybe

01:29:02.480 your equilibrated state

01:29:03.540 is well enough developed

01:29:04.420 so it doesn't just include

01:29:05.820 the three of you

01:29:06.680 it extends outward

01:29:08.180 beyond you

01:29:08.940 into the greater community

01:29:10.080 and things stack like that

01:29:12.020 and that's

01:29:12.620 if they all get stacked up

01:29:15.080 every level

01:29:15.980 is stacked on top

01:29:17.060 of each other properly

01:29:17.880 you have an equilibrated state

01:29:19.520 and I don't think

01:29:20.540 that that's any different

01:29:21.380 than a vision of paradise

01:29:22.500 I think those are

01:29:23.680 the same thing

01:29:25.080 so now the question is

01:29:27.560 well can that happen

01:29:28.680 that's a whole different story

01:29:31.800 I mean it happens

01:29:33.800 in your own life

01:29:34.760 at those times

01:29:35.800 where everything comes

01:29:36.560 together for you

01:29:37.380 you know

01:29:37.700 it's chaotic

01:29:38.600 and then everything

01:29:39.240 snaps together

01:29:40.120 and you think

01:29:40.540 that's exactly right

01:29:41.820 and it's unstable

01:29:42.940 you can't maintain it

01:29:44.340 it fragments again

01:29:45.280 but that's what you're

01:29:46.280 that's what you're

01:29:47.100 working towards

01:29:48.020 if you have any sense

01:29:49.180 you're working towards

01:29:49.980 that constantly

01:29:50.720 and I think that's

01:29:51.620 what music represents

01:29:52.820 it's the stacking

01:29:54.400 of harmonious patterns

01:29:55.720 right

01:29:56.040 that are playing

01:29:56.860 themselves out in being

01:29:57.940 you watch how people

01:29:59.100 respond to music

01:30:00.140 the orchestra's led

01:30:02.600 by the leader

01:30:03.280 every different

01:30:04.720 individual plays

01:30:06.160 his or her part

01:30:07.020 they're organized

01:30:07.640 into string sections

01:30:08.940 and horn sections

01:30:10.160 and so on

01:30:10.740 so you get

01:30:11.500 individual

01:30:12.200 subgroup

01:30:13.100 group

01:30:13.640 orchestra

01:30:14.560 leader

01:30:15.220 then maybe you have

01:30:16.900 people dancing

01:30:17.780 well so what does that mean

01:30:18.700 so maybe it's men and women

01:30:19.720 dancing in front of that

01:30:20.720 like a Viennese waltz

01:30:21.920 so it's the

01:30:22.900 the harmonious

01:30:24.060 stacking of pattern

01:30:25.180 being in the background

01:30:26.340 led by someone

01:30:27.600 who's making sure

01:30:28.440 that the time is in order

01:30:29.680 and men and women

01:30:30.740 arranging themselves

01:30:31.680 according to the patterns

01:30:32.880 right

01:30:33.200 and everyone has a

01:30:34.180 wonderful time

01:30:34.820 when that's happening

01:30:35.580 and it's acting out

01:30:37.080 the

01:30:37.360 it's acting out

01:30:38.500 the proposition

01:30:39.240 that all of these

01:30:40.200 levels of being

01:30:40.860 can be stacked up

01:30:41.700 harmoniously at the

01:30:42.660 same time

01:30:43.220 and everybody has a

01:30:44.400 tremendously fun time

01:30:45.620 while they're doing it

01:30:46.340 maybe that's how you

01:30:47.280 find a mate 0.97

01:30:47.960 at a dance

01:30:48.680 and for exactly

01:30:49.400 the same reason

01:30:50.160 it's an optimal place

01:30:51.360 to do that

01:30:52.020 you see if there's

01:30:53.200 someone that you can

01:30:53.860 be with

01:30:54.360 with whom you can

01:30:55.420 mutually act out

01:30:56.860 the patterns of being

01:30:58.020 well we're all acting

01:30:59.260 that out at a dance

01:31:00.180 we don't know what

01:31:00.740 we're doing

01:31:01.100 we're having a good

01:31:01.840 time

01:31:02.340 well yeah

01:31:03.160 that's a little

01:31:03.980 glimpse of paradise

01:31:05.100 that's what that

01:31:06.140 good time is

01:31:07.120 now

01:31:07.700 the bible stories

01:31:09.420 before

01:31:09.840 what happens

01:31:10.680 what seems to

01:31:11.300 happen is that

01:31:12.040 you can

01:31:13.920 there's

01:31:14.380 there's two

01:31:15.160 cataclysmic events

01:31:16.300 at the first part

01:31:17.380 of

01:31:17.520 at the end of the

01:31:18.980 first part of

01:31:19.520 genesis

01:31:19.900 there's the flood

01:31:21.000 so the prehistoric

01:31:23.200 world is wiped out

01:31:24.320 by the flood

01:31:25.000 and so

01:31:25.980 the idea there

01:31:26.960 in some sense

01:31:27.680 there's a bunch of

01:31:28.480 ideas but one of

01:31:29.180 them is

01:31:29.480 there's a place in

01:31:31.280 history past which

01:31:32.320 we cannot look

01:31:33.380 and that's absolutely

01:31:35.020 true

01:31:35.420 one of the things

01:31:36.300 that's very strange

01:31:37.020 about human beings

01:31:37.800 is that our

01:31:38.960 written civilizations

01:31:41.020 the ones we have

01:31:41.800 records of all seem

01:31:42.680 to have popped up

01:31:43.500 somewhere in the

01:31:44.020 neighborhood of five

01:31:44.620 to six thousand

01:31:45.240 years ago

01:31:45.740 doesn't matter

01:31:46.360 where you look

01:31:47.020 right

01:31:47.300 central america

01:31:48.540 china

01:31:49.180 india

01:31:49.900 greece

01:31:50.820 egypt

01:31:52.100 it's all the

01:31:53.500 same

01:31:53.760 six thousand

01:31:54.320 years ago

01:31:54.820 poof

01:31:55.240 there we were

01:31:56.040 well what

01:31:57.360 happened before

01:31:57.960 that

01:31:58.320 well the answer

01:31:59.120 is

01:31:59.420 we don't know

01:32:00.820 everything is

01:32:01.400 obscured by

01:32:02.200 the chaos of

01:32:03.340 history before

01:32:04.040 that point

01:32:04.580 and all that's

01:32:05.400 emerged out of

01:32:06.020 it so to speak

01:32:07.020 are these

01:32:07.420 incredibly ancient

01:32:08.300 stories

01:32:08.880 and so we're

01:32:09.700 going to walk

01:32:10.100 through the

01:32:10.540 ancient stories

01:32:11.200 and see what

01:32:11.680 we can pull

01:32:12.140 out of them

01:32:12.600 we've already

01:32:13.280 done that with

01:32:13.840 several so

01:32:14.540 there's some

01:32:15.660 representation

01:32:16.360 of the garden

01:32:17.080 of eden

01:32:17.500 so this is by

01:32:19.160 hieronymus bosch

01:32:20.220 i don't know if

01:32:21.220 you know who

01:32:21.640 hieronymus bosch

01:32:22.480 is but he's

01:32:23.060 definitely worth

01:32:23.780 looking up because

01:32:24.500 he was one

01:32:25.140 strange character

01:32:26.180 he was like i

01:32:27.300 think he painted

01:32:27.980 in the 15th

01:32:28.800 century if i

01:32:29.400 remember correctly

01:32:30.040 he was like this

01:32:30.920 15th century

01:32:31.880 version of

01:32:32.540 salvador delhi

01:32:33.340 his paintings

01:32:33.880 are so uncanny

01:32:35.820 that that they're

01:32:36.920 still shocking to

01:32:38.200 the modern eye

01:32:38.880 which is really

01:32:39.460 something because

01:32:40.040 it's not easy to

01:32:40.800 shock a modern

01:32:41.400 person with a

01:32:42.000 visual image but

01:32:43.020 hieronymus bosch

01:32:43.860 will definitely do

01:32:44.720 that and

01:32:45.860 that's his

01:32:46.740 representation of

01:32:47.720 paradise there's

01:32:48.540 some central

01:32:49.200 structure in the

01:32:50.040 middle that's

01:32:50.740 partly phallic and

01:32:51.780 partly chambered so

01:32:53.600 and there's adam

01:32:54.660 and eve

01:32:55.080 united by god

01:32:57.720 so and there's one

01:32:59.040 by peter paul rubens

01:33:00.180 and it's sort of the

01:33:01.180 primordial lush

01:33:02.340 landscape that you

01:33:03.320 might think about as

01:33:04.200 the what the

01:33:05.080 ancestral human

01:33:06.220 home it's something

01:33:07.720 like that

01:33:08.380 a treed landscape

01:33:11.260 well why trees

01:33:12.840 well we like fruit

01:33:13.860 we lived in trees

01:33:15.260 we lived in trees

01:33:15.280 why not trees

01:33:16.740 i mean even

01:33:17.260 modern people have

01:33:18.220 a very powerful

01:33:19.240 tendency to think

01:33:20.180 about trees as

01:33:20.920 sacred you

01:33:21.740 wouldn't get

01:33:22.040 environmentalists

01:33:23.000 tying themselves

01:33:24.060 to great you

01:33:25.480 know douglas firs

01:33:26.800 and protecting them

01:33:27.560 if there wasn't

01:33:28.280 some deep felt

01:33:29.120 sense within us

01:33:29.960 that they're sacred

01:33:30.800 whatever that

01:33:31.740 means well

01:33:32.860 trees are our

01:33:34.420 home that's as

01:33:35.600 close to sacred

01:33:36.340 as you're going

01:33:36.800 to get

01:33:37.200 so okay so i'm

01:33:40.300 going to read you

01:33:41.780 something from the

01:33:42.820 book of job

01:33:43.640 and this is god

01:33:45.640 harassing job

01:33:47.720 so i don't know if

01:33:48.400 you know the story

01:33:49.020 of job but it's

01:33:49.700 very interesting

01:33:50.360 story and basically

01:33:51.360 what happens with

01:33:52.040 job is that god

01:33:53.960 and the devil have

01:33:54.780 a bet which seems

01:33:55.680 a little you know

01:33:56.400 on the unreasonable

01:33:57.720 side for god but

01:34:00.620 he gets to do

01:34:01.920 whatever he wants

01:34:02.680 so he has a bet

01:34:04.020 with satan

01:34:04.980 roughly speaking

01:34:06.560 and says

01:34:07.160 he says well

01:34:09.480 job he tells satan

01:34:10.960 that job is a good

01:34:11.700 guy and that he's

01:34:12.740 faithful to god and

01:34:13.740 satan says yeah

01:34:14.800 let me let me at

01:34:16.420 him for a while i

01:34:17.160 bet you we can do

01:34:17.980 something about that

01:34:18.820 and god says

01:34:19.520 roughly speaking

01:34:20.340 no you can torture

01:34:22.100 him all you want

01:34:22.820 he's going to stay

01:34:23.860 faithful and and

01:34:24.960 and satan says well

01:34:26.040 we'll have a bet on

01:34:26.840 that and so god

01:34:27.780 hands him over and

01:34:28.640 what happens to job

01:34:30.180 it's like everything

01:34:30.960 terrible that you

01:34:31.780 can imagine then

01:34:32.500 happens to job right

01:34:33.580 his his all his

01:34:36.940 family dies all his 0.74

01:34:38.880 possessions are

01:34:39.820 destroyed he gets

01:34:42.060 a horrible skin 1.00

01:34:42.820 disease and so

01:34:43.720 then he's sitting

01:34:44.260 there by the fire

01:34:45.080 sort of scraping

01:34:45.780 himself with bits

01:34:46.700 of broken pots and

01:34:48.000 all his friends come

01:34:49.020 around and tell him

01:34:50.200 that the reason all

01:34:51.360 this happened to him

01:34:52.100 was because he

01:34:52.720 deserved it so it's

01:34:54.080 perfect right it's

01:34:54.960 it's it's it's like an

01:34:56.060 ultimate suffering story

01:34:57.280 it's a precursor to the

01:34:58.400 idea of the crucifix

01:34:59.600 that's one way of

01:35:00.340 thinking about it so

01:35:01.640 and uh job has a

01:35:04.640 chat with god and

01:35:05.440 asks him like cain did

01:35:07.180 roughly what's going

01:35:08.160 on and god attempts

01:35:09.760 to he's irritated

01:35:11.240 that job would even 0.92

01:35:12.140 dare to question him

01:35:13.260 it's like he's god

01:35:14.380 he gets to do

01:35:15.100 whatever he wants

01:35:15.820 it's a very strange

01:35:16.680 book anyways this is

01:35:18.040 one of the things

01:35:18.720 that god says to

01:35:20.380 job well god is

01:35:21.800 trying to justify

01:35:22.800 himself i would say

01:35:24.120 to job and the

01:35:25.200 reason i'm telling

01:35:25.880 you this you see

01:35:26.700 is because so

01:35:29.400 imagine that you're

01:35:30.740 trying to analyze a

01:35:31.960 literary work you

01:35:32.980 might say well

01:35:33.500 where's the meaning

01:35:34.240 in the literary work

01:35:35.220 and the answer is

01:35:36.460 it's in the words

01:35:38.540 word by word it's

01:35:41.380 in the phrases it's

01:35:43.240 in the sentences it's

01:35:44.400 in the relationship of

01:35:45.740 the sentences to each

01:35:46.820 other it's in the

01:35:47.560 relationship of the

01:35:48.900 sentences within

01:35:49.580 paragraphs it's in the

01:35:50.660 relationship of the

01:35:51.500 paragraphs within the

01:35:53.340 contexts of the

01:35:54.320 chapters and it's in

01:35:55.860 the relationship

01:35:56.420 between the chapters

01:35:57.360 and the whole book

01:35:58.380 and then the book in

01:35:59.360 the whole culture so

01:36:01.240 you can't it's not

01:36:02.180 easy to localize the

01:36:03.520 meaning it exists at

01:36:04.560 all those levels simultaneously and they all inform one another and what that means and it's

01:36:09.180 even worse in a book like the bible i want to show you a picture this is an amazing picture

01:36:13.280 so let me tell you what this is so the bible is the world's first hyperlinked document that's a

01:36:21.580 good way of thinking about it so what you have here so what you see at the bottom

01:36:25.860 there's a line along the bottom and then there's small lines coming down from it okay

01:36:31.660 each of those the line has dots on it each jot is a is a verse okay and then there's a line

01:36:40.320 associated with the verse that's a varying length and the length corresponds to how many times

01:36:44.620 that verse is cross-referenced somewhere else in the document and then these rainbow colored lines

01:36:52.040 are the cross-references so now that's really worth thinking about so then you think well that book is

01:36:58.360 deep well why is it deep well it's because every single thing in it refers to every other thing

01:37:04.120 it's connected like your brain is connected like it's not a linear document and the thing is a book

01:37:09.320 is a very strange thing right because when you or even a story because when you lay out the story

01:37:14.300 in some sense you're like god you're outside of the space and time of the story and so you can adjust

01:37:20.780 the end to make the beginning different you know how if you watch a movie and it's got a surprise

01:37:25.540 ending it changes the beginning you thought the beginning was one thing but it isn't it's something

01:37:29.220 else well when you lay out a story you can fiddle with the story anywhere in the story and so and

01:37:35.480 you can also make something that happens before dependent on something that happens after which

01:37:41.320 is very strange and that's what's happened with the bible because people have worked on it worked on

01:37:45.560 it worked on it worked on it trying to synthesize it and make it coherent and make it make sense

01:37:50.400 and so they're continually connecting everything that's inside of it to everything else and so you

01:37:55.400 end up with a document map that looks like that so now so you think about that everything is connected

01:38:01.500 to everything in that document not chaotically but meaningfully just like your brain is connected

01:38:06.520 in a meaningful way it's not everything isn't connected to everything it's connected in a

01:38:10.640 meaningful way and then you think well where what do the stories mean and then the answer is well

01:38:16.740 that's a hard question because all of them are connected with each other and then there's all

01:38:21.060 these different levels of analysis and so you can pull out meanings at one level of analysis that

01:38:25.860 aren't self-evident at another level of analysis just like if you're listening to a complex piece of

01:38:31.280 symphonic music you can follow a bass line or you can follow the strings or you can follow the horns

01:38:35.820 and they're all harmoniously interrelated but they're also separable okay so there's an image that lurks in

01:38:43.880 the old testament and the image is the same image it's roughly the same image as the image of marduk

01:38:50.160 confronting time at so for example at the at the beginning god makes here's here's how the beginning

01:38:57.200 goes in the beginning god created the heaven and the earth and the earth was without form and void and

01:39:05.180 darkness was upon the face of the deep and the spirit of god moved upon the face of the waters and god

01:39:10.080 said let there be light and there was light okay so we got to look at the first few lines here

01:39:14.600 so this is god justifying himself to job he says can you pull in leviathan with a fish hook or tie

01:39:22.180 down its tongue with a rope can you put a cord through its nose or pierce its jaw with a hook

01:39:27.300 will it keep you begging for mercy will it speak to you with gentle words will it make an agreement

01:39:32.380 with you for you to take it as your slave for life can you make a pet of it like a bird or put it on a

01:39:39.380 leash for the young women in your house will traders barter for it will they divide it up among the 1.00

01:39:45.380 merchants can you fill its hide with harpoons or its head with fishing spears if you lay a hand on it

01:39:52.580 you will remember the struggle and never do it again

01:39:55.580 any hope of subduing it is false the mere sight of it is overpowering

01:40:03.060 no one is fierce enough to rouse it who is then able to stand against me who has a claim against

01:40:11.460 me that i must pay everything under heaven belongs to me

01:40:15.360 more computer trouble oh there we go

01:40:21.600 i will not fail to speak of leviathan's limbs its strength and its graceful form who can strip off

01:40:30.900 its outer coat who can penetrate its double coat of armor who dares open the doors of its mouth

01:40:36.740 ringed about with fearsome teeth its back has rows of shields tightly sealed together each is so close

01:40:44.340 to the next that no air can pass between they are joined fast to one another they cling together and

01:40:50.220 cannot be parted its snorting throws out flashes of light its eyes are like the rays of dawn's flames

01:40:57.080 stream from its mouth sparks of fire shoot out smoke pours from its nostrils as from a boiling pot

01:41:03.760 over burning reeds its breath sets coals ablaze and flames dart from its mouth strength resides in its neck

01:41:12.100 dismay goes before it the folds of its flesh are tightly joined they are firm and immovable its

01:41:18.960 chest is as hard as rock hard as a lower millstone when it rises up the mighty are terrified they

01:41:25.020 retreat before its thrashing the sword that reaches it has no effect nor does the spear or the dart or the

01:41:31.760 javelin iron it treats like straw and bronze like a rotten wood arrows do not make it flee sling stones are

01:41:39.180 like chaff to it a club seems to it but a piece of straw it laughs at the rattling of the lance

01:41:46.340 its undersides are jagged pot shirts leaving a trail in the mud like a threshing sledge

01:41:51.980 it makes the depths churn like a boiling cauldron and steeze up the sea like a pot of ointment

01:41:57.520 it leaves a glistening wake behind it one would think the deep had white hair nothing on earth is its 0.99

01:42:04.020 equal a creature without fear it looks down on all that are haughty and is king over all that are proud

01:42:11.180 well so what's god doing he's describing what he defeated in order to create the world

01:42:17.840 that's marta can tie mat okay so that's that's one reference like that all right so

01:42:24.720 now another reference like that this is from psalms 74

01:42:31.280 yet god is my king of old working salvation in the midst of the earth

01:42:40.760 thou didst break the sea in pieces by thy strength thou didst shatter the heads of the sea monsters in

01:42:47.520 the waters thou did crush the heads of leviathan right that's the creature that we just heard described

01:42:53.060 thou gavest him to be food to the folk inhabiting the wilderness

01:42:58.760 now you remember so when marta defeats tie mat he cuts her into pieces and makes the world out of her pieces

01:43:05.460 and here what's happening is that the force that that encounters the leviathan is able to break it into pieces

01:43:11.200 and feed everyone with it

01:43:12.500 now the reason i'm telling you that in relationship to this is because

01:43:16.820 and the earth was what without form and void and darkness was upon the face of the deep

01:43:21.700 let me tell you a little bit about that those lines

01:43:24.260 before god's god begins to create

01:43:34.360 the world is tohu wabohu

01:43:37.300 that's from the hebrew

01:43:38.800 the word tohu by itself means emptiness or futility

01:43:42.700 so there's a psychological element to that hey

01:43:45.400 and that emptiness or futility in some sense is what you confront when you're trying to extract your life from the world

01:43:51.340 it is used to describe the desert wilderness as well

01:43:55.100 tohu wabohu chaos is the condition that bara ordering remedies

01:44:03.700 okay so there's the idea in the first verses that this initial chaos is being ordered and the order is what makes the world

01:44:10.560 so the it's it's it's standard cosmology

01:44:13.420 order emerges out of chaos and the thing that makes it emerge is the word of god

01:44:18.640 now darkness and deep which is teom in hebrew are two of the three elements of the chaos represented in tohu wabohu 0.95

01:44:28.880 the third is the formless earth

01:44:30.420 in the enume elish the deep is personified as the goddess taimat the enemy of marduk

01:44:36.040 here it is the formless body of primeval water surrounding the habitable world

01:44:40.360 okay so but we know taom and tiamat are the same word or at least taom was derived from taimat so the idea that's presented at the beginning of genesis is the same it's an abstracted and psychologized representation of the story that the mesopotamians put forward so yahwah is marduk roughly speaking going out and conquering the dragon of chaos and making order out of it and then there are these allusions later say in job and in the psalms of him doing exactly that

01:45:09.420 what conquering a primordial monster and making the world out of its pieces well so what does that mean exactly well it means that the highest ordering principle is the spirit that goes out into the darkness or the deep that encounters the dragon of chaos because obviously leviathan is a dragon and defeats it and feeds the people as a consequence well we are hunting creatures after all and in order to establish our place in the world we had to go out there and conquer the dragons of the wilderness you might

01:45:39.300 wonder why does a dragon breathe fire well there's a bunch of reasons as far as i can tell fire is awe inspiring so fire and a terrible predator are the same thing because they both inspire awe fire is transforming but predate like what's a good metaphor for being bitten by a poisonous snake well have you ever seen the wounds that a poisonous snake produces if you're bitten by them it's like someone took your arm and incinerated it and so

01:46:07.440 the idea that a snake has fiery breath is well let's call it close enough from a metaphorical perspective right now god is claiming to job that he's the spirit that clear that clears the wilderness and then builds order out of chaos and because because because he's the embodiment of that spirit in some sense job has no reason to ever question his moral decisions it's something like that in the story of job but the point that that point will

01:46:37.300 leave aside because it's a more complicated issue the point is that the writers of the bible are trying to dream up a representation of the spirit of civilization that's the right way to think about it you can think of yahwah as the spirit of civilization and what is that well it's the thing that encounters the wilderness and makes habitable order but then it's also the spirit of the order itself and that's i think why in christianity there's a representation of god the father because he's a representation of

01:47:05.420 the culture that the the culture that's the the chaos is the curse of the스�こと that the justice of the generation of superheroes and orders the spirit of the world and Uhm you have the spirit of the order and the spirit of the order

01:47:20.280 there's a dynamic relationship between the culture and the spirit that generates the culture and then you might also ask should the culture be superordinate to

01:47:33.340 And the answer seems to be, the emergent answer seems to be that the spirit that generates the culture should be superordinate to the spirit of the culture. It's something like that. And that's also why I think that one of the brilliant discoveries, let's say, of Western individualistic civilization is that the group is there to serve the individual because the individual is the thing that revivifies the group.

01:47:59.380 So each depend on the other integrally. But if you subordinate the individual to the group, then the group stagnates and dies. And so that's a very bad long-term strategy, even though the group and belonging to the group is clearly necessary. You need to uphold the values of the group, but the values of the group should be subordinated to producing the individual who gives the group vision.

01:48:19.800 And the Mesopotamians figured that out. The Egyptians figured that out. We figured it out. We just don't know that we figured it out. And it's not a mere arbitrary supposition.

01:48:28.800 All right. So I should show you because this is actually interesting, I think, perhaps.

01:48:45.600 Good.

01:48:49.800 I want to show you what the cosmology, what people considered the structure of the initial order, because it's kind of interesting.

01:48:58.600 And God said, let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters and let it divide the waters from the waters.

01:49:03.580 And God made the firmament and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament.

01:49:09.200 And it was so. And God called the firmament heaven.

01:49:11.800 And the evening and the morning were the second day.

01:49:13.860 Well, so what are they thinking about?

01:49:15.240 Well, that's the sort of classical view of the world.

01:49:18.040 It's something like that is that there's a disk and that's the disk we inhabit.

01:49:24.280 And there's land. That's the disk.

01:49:26.320 And under the disk, there's water, fresh water.

01:49:28.240 And then under that, there's the ocean.

01:49:30.200 And then on top of that, there's a dome and that's the sky.

01:49:32.740 That's the firmament. That's heaven.

01:49:34.360 And there's water above that.

01:49:35.780 Well, obviously, because it rains.

01:49:37.620 So there has to be water up there.

01:49:38.940 So that's the way the cosmos was conceptualized, just so you know.

01:49:42.860 Now, it's a phenomenological conceptualization because that's what it looks like, right?

01:49:48.020 And you might say, well, that's wrong.

01:49:49.460 It's like, well, yes, it's wrong in a functional sort of way.

01:49:54.800 It's right from a phenomenological perspective, but it's wrong from a scientific perspective.

01:50:00.420 It was never designed to be a scientific perspective.

01:50:02.360 So, all right.

01:50:03.860 So we won't bother with this part.

01:50:07.300 We'll start here.

01:50:10.080 So God makes animals and plants and all of that.

01:50:12.980 And then at the end of it, this is on the, which day?

01:50:21.040 Sixth day.

01:50:22.280 God said, let us make man in our image after our likeness and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and the fowl of the air and over the cattle and all of the earth. 0.97

01:50:30.040 And over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

01:50:33.040 Okay.

01:50:33.480 Well, the relevant, there's two relevant issues there.

01:50:35.920 One is let us make man in our image after our likeness.

01:50:39.300 Well, what exactly does that mean?

01:50:41.060 Well, we've already, we've already encountered that to some degree.

01:50:45.760 We've already encountered what the nature of the spirit of God is in this story.

01:50:52.000 The nature of the spirit of God that creates order out of chaos is the thing that creates order out of chaos.

01:50:57.460 And so the statement here is that there's something about human beings that partakes in that.

01:51:06.180 Now, when I started unpacking this, I thought, okay, look, there's an idea that's at the root of our legal system.

01:51:12.760 And so our legal system is the articulation of the patterns by which we live.

01:51:18.120 And to a fair degree, it's an evolved system.

01:51:21.260 It's a culturally constructed system, but it's an evolved system as well.

01:51:24.060 And it's predicated on the idea that there's something about the individual that the law has to respect.

01:51:29.800 Well, so the question is, well, is that just an arbitrary supposition?

01:51:34.360 Because that's really the question.

01:51:35.940 It's the same question as, is Western civilization founded on something that's a rock?

01:51:41.140 Or is it just founded on something that's an opinion?

01:51:43.620 Well, it's the same question with regards to the law.

01:51:45.660 The law assumes that there's something about you that's sovereign.

01:51:49.280 Even if you're a murderer, you have inalienable rights.

01:51:53.220 Now, you think that is a bloody weird thing for any sort of system to have come up with.

01:51:57.660 Because the idea that if you're the ultimate in malevolent transgressors,

01:52:03.560 that you still have some sort of sovereign value.

01:52:06.900 It's like that is such an unlikely thing for people to think up,

01:52:10.200 that you really have to think a long time about how that might have come to be.

01:52:13.480 Well, there's an idea here.

01:52:15.360 That's the idea.

01:52:16.560 Is that there's something about human beings.

01:52:19.120 Men and women.

01:52:20.320 You know, because people often complain about the patriarchal structure of the Bible.

01:52:23.880 It's based on a misapprehension of anthropology that was popularized by someone named Gimbutas at UCLA.

01:52:30.100 Which is, for her perspective, there's not a shred of historical evidence.

01:52:34.700 Although there's some psychological truth in it.

01:52:37.240 In Genesis, both men and women are created in the image of God.

01:52:41.480 And that's quite a remarkable thing, I think.

01:52:43.620 It's a remarkable part of the document.

01:52:45.780 Because it's not what you'd expect from a patriarchal, you know, from a document that was designed to do nothing but extend the dominion of the patriarch. 0.99

01:52:53.560 It's like you would have left women with the damn cattle. 0.99

01:52:55.700 That would have made things a lot easier. 1.00

01:52:57.380 And that isn't what happened.

01:52:58.760 So both men and women have this image.

01:53:01.180 And what's the image?

01:53:02.120 Well, that's the image of the thing that can order chaos.

01:53:04.380 And so it's necessary to treat you as if you have intrinsic value.

01:53:10.400 Because the fact that you can partake in the process of mediating between order and chaos means that you're basically the salvation of society.

01:53:18.800 That's what it means.

01:53:19.960 And so society can't impose on you to too great a degree.

01:53:23.900 Because you are too valuable for even the law to push arbitrarily past a certain point.

01:53:31.800 Now, then you have to think.

01:53:33.320 This is where you really have to think about what you believe.

01:53:38.300 Do you believe that or not?

01:53:40.480 Because there's not much difference, really.

01:53:43.620 Technically speaking, there's not much difference between that and believing these stories.

01:53:49.180 It depends bloody well what you mean by believe.

01:53:51.200 They're not scientific representations of an evolutionary process.

01:53:54.700 Obviously, the people who came up with them weren't scientists.

01:53:57.320 So whatever they are, they're not that.

01:53:59.400 But they're making a proposition.

01:54:01.360 That's not an accidental proposition.

01:54:03.300 And we know that partly because it's rooted so deeply in these ancient stories.

01:54:06.680 We have no idea how old the Mesopotamian story is.

01:54:09.220 You know, it's the oldest story we have in written form.

01:54:12.380 So we know that.

01:54:14.300 But God only knows how old it is.

01:54:16.500 It's part of an oral tradition.

01:54:18.160 And these oral traditions can be...

01:54:21.080 Look, the same carver gave me a big thing called a sea sudle.

01:54:28.240 And it's a man in the middle of a double-headed sea serpent.

01:54:31.560 Right?

01:54:32.100 So there, there.

01:54:32.700 That's 14,000 years old.

01:54:34.160 That came from Siberia.

01:54:35.580 It's the same bloody idea.

01:54:37.500 It's the same idea.

01:54:38.560 So these ideas aren't arbitrary.

01:54:41.780 So the question is, well, are they true?

01:54:44.380 Well, then the question is, what the hell do you mean by true?

01:54:48.960 Because it comes down to that.

01:54:51.040 Is it true that habitable order is dependent on the spirit that moves into the unknown and takes the Leviathan and chops it into pieces and distributes it?

01:54:59.800 And the answer to that is, yes, that's true.

01:55:02.480 As far as I can tell.

01:55:04.000 And do you mean, is it literally true?

01:55:06.620 Well, it's as true as things get.

01:55:08.300 That's how we got here.

01:55:09.600 We got here because people went into the unknown.

01:55:12.180 They conquered what was out there.

01:55:13.880 They took what was of utility from that.

01:55:16.680 They brought it back and they shared it with the community.

01:55:18.920 That's why we're here.

01:55:20.180 That is the central story of humankind.

01:55:22.320 And that's still what we do.

01:55:23.980 You know, we're not exactly necessarily going out to conquer an embodied monster, although we do that if we hunt, for example.

01:55:31.980 But, you know, most of us don't do that anymore.

01:55:34.180 But to the degree that you're an explorer in the intellectual realm, you're still going out into the unknown and conquering what's out there looming, like maybe it's the cure for a disease.

01:55:44.600 You're looking that right in the face.

01:55:46.440 You're trying to decompose it and break it into its parts.

01:55:49.280 You're trying to understand it.

01:55:50.560 And then you're trying to tell everybody what you found.

01:55:53.000 Well, and everybody pats you on the back and says, well, you're a brave explorer of the unknown.

01:55:58.480 Well, that is exactly the sort of thing that we should be fostering.

01:56:01.880 And it's the thing that we all admire.

01:56:04.220 So, okay, so that happens on the sixth day.

01:56:09.160 And so now we know human beings are made in God's image.

01:56:13.920 Well, what does that mean exactly?

01:56:17.940 I think what it means, a reasonable way of thinking about it.

01:56:22.500 You can think about it like the genie.

01:56:24.200 The genie has this tremendous amount of power that's constrained in a very small space.

01:56:28.380 And genie and genius are the same word, roughly speaking.

01:56:31.480 So the genius is that your genius is the genie that inhabits you, right?

01:56:36.480 It's this logo spirit.

01:56:37.920 It's put in a very small container.

01:56:40.780 You see that idea represented in the Christian conception of the relationship between Christ and God, because there's an idea that God had to empty himself out in order to fit into the body of Christ.

01:56:52.700 It's something like that.

01:56:53.500 It seems to be the idea that you're a low, it's like you're a low resolution representation of the ultimate spirit that encounters the unknown.

01:57:05.920 It's something like that.

01:57:06.960 It's a very smart idea.

01:57:08.100 And you could say maybe that's what human beings have in common, is that we're each an embodiment of that spirit, for lack of a better word.

01:57:16.020 So, okay, so then God makes human beings, male and female, makes them in his own image, and is happy about them, and says, well, you're going to dominate the world.

01:57:27.660 Which, you know, people like David Suzuki read that to say, you should go out and dominate the world, because they read that kind of patriarchal oppression into the text.

01:57:37.420 But this is more a description of how things are going to be, than whether or not they should be that way.

01:57:43.440 So, anyways, that's the sixth day.

01:57:46.300 And the seventh day, God rests, right?

01:57:50.380 So that's the origin of the week, roughly speaking.

01:57:52.780 So, okay, that's one story.

01:57:57.560 There's two creation stories in Genesis, and they actually don't match completely in their structure.

01:58:03.460 And what happened was someone they call the redactor, maybe it was a bunch of people we don't know, took creation story one and creation story two from different places, and thought, well, these are sort of the same.

01:58:13.480 And they're sort of different, and people are going to be unhappy if we dispense with this one, and they're going to be unhappy if we dispense this one, but they don't make sense together.

01:58:21.100 So let's see if we can put them in some kind of order that makes approximate sense.

01:58:25.560 And they took the newer one and put it second, and took the, sorry, they took the older one and put it second, and took the newer one and put it first.

01:58:33.620 So Adam and Eve is an older story than the story that I just told you.

01:58:37.520 So, but it's a different story, it's written in a different style, but it's been more or less brought into narrative coherence with the first story.

01:58:46.080 So, and you could say at the level of the sentence, there is paradoxes, but at the level of the chapter, let's say the stories make sense.

01:58:55.280 So, okay, so what happens?

01:58:57.420 Up there went from the earth a mist, and it watered the whole face of the ground.

01:59:01.260 And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul.

01:59:07.720 There's an identity in this archaic sort of thought between breath and spirit, right?

01:59:12.580 Respiration, spirit, inspiration, spirit, pneuma, like pneumatic tire, spirit.

01:59:19.020 The breath contains the spirit.

01:59:20.880 Well, why is that?

01:59:21.980 Well, because when people die, the breath leaves their body, and so it's an easy thing to identify that with the animating spirit, right?

01:59:29.400 The anima means spirit as well.

01:59:30.940 So, so that's the phenomenological reality of the story.

01:59:36.060 And Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden, and there he put the man whom he had formed.

01:59:40.920 Eden means well-watered place.

01:59:43.880 Well, why?

01:59:44.780 Well, where do you want to live?

01:59:46.020 These are desert people, right, who are writing this. 1.00

01:59:48.100 Well, what do they want?

01:59:48.840 They want an oasis.

01:59:49.980 What's an oasis?

01:59:51.460 It's a garden with water.

01:59:52.720 Well, you're going to live somewhere. 0.99

01:59:54.320 It's not going to be out in the middle of the damn desert. 0.95

01:59:55.920 You want to be in a garden that's watered, and then you could say you also be in a walled garden that's protected, and that's what paradise means. 0.96

02:00:03.340 Paradeza means walled garden.

02:00:05.580 So, this initial paradise is a walled garden.

02:00:08.460 Why walled?

02:00:09.740 Order, it's culture, nature.

02:00:12.680 What does it mean?

02:00:13.700 Well, that's the natural environment of human beings.

02:00:16.800 It's the optimal balance between culture and nature.

02:00:20.480 That's what a walled garden is, with enough water flowing in it to keep it fertile, and that water is also chaos, right?

02:00:28.540 There has to be, it can't be static and dry and solid and stale.

02:00:32.560 There has to be some living element to it.

02:00:34.760 So, it's a walled place that the water can still fructify.

02:00:40.540 And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight.

02:00:46.480 So, it's also full of trees.

02:00:47.680 This is our natural habitat.

02:00:49.460 And good for food.

02:00:51.180 The tree of life, also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

02:00:55.040 So, these are two trees.

02:00:56.280 They bring forth fruit that produce something.

02:00:58.760 One produces the knowledge of good and evil, and the other produces eternal life.

02:01:03.340 So, why, well, I'll get to that in a minute.

02:01:07.860 And a river went out of Eden to water the garden, and from thence it was parted and became into four heads.

02:01:14.080 We won't bother with that.

02:01:16.020 So, now, God is having a little chat with Adam.

02:01:18.380 And he says, look, you can eat every tree of the garden, except one.

02:01:22.260 Of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you don't eat that.

02:01:25.140 Because in the day you eat, you'll surely die.

02:01:29.240 So, you might ask, well, why is the tree put there to begin with?

02:01:32.940 And, well, the answer to that is, who the hell knows?

02:01:35.940 That's how the story portrays it.

02:01:37.400 We don't know.

02:01:41.340 And the Lord God said, it is not good that the man should be alone.

02:01:44.420 I will make a helpmeet for him.

02:01:46.080 And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every fowl of the air,

02:01:50.180 and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them.

02:01:52.680 And whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.

02:01:56.100 So, that's an echo of the idea of the power of the word, right?

02:01:59.300 So, even though these stories are from different traditions, they're separate traditions, you see at the beginning that God uses his word to bring order out of chaos.

02:02:07.540 And then he allows Adam, in some sense, to do the same thing.

02:02:10.660 It's that there's this unarticulated plethora of being, and the man comes along and says, that's that, that's that, that's that.

02:02:18.920 And that brings them into a higher order form of being.

02:02:21.720 So, it's a, it's a replication of the creation in a, in a shrunken form.

02:02:27.100 And Adam gave names to all the cattle.

02:02:29.200 Cattle are just anything that has four legs, roughly speaking, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field.

02:02:35.040 But for Adam, there was not found a helpmeet for him.

02:02:38.300 And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept, and he took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh instead thereof.

02:02:45.360 And the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman and brought her unto the man. 0.93

02:02:49.800 And Adam said, this is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.

02:02:53.180 She shall be called woman, because she was taken out of man.

02:02:56.640 And then there's an injunction.

02:02:58.240 Therefore, a man shall leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife, and they shall be one flesh. 0.96

02:03:03.540 Well, there's also a, there's a moral injunction there.

02:03:06.160 And so the idea is that the two beings that have been created are actually not whole until they're one thing.

02:03:12.700 Right?

02:03:13.160 And once they're joined together, that's supposed to be one thing.

02:03:15.740 And that one thing is actually a more perfect entity than the two things that are apart.

02:03:22.180 So, and that's actually part of the sacred basis of the idea of monogamous relationships in Western culture.

02:03:30.120 And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed. 0.78

02:03:33.820 A crucial piece of information.

02:03:36.260 So what exactly does that mean?

02:03:37.700 Well, the first question is, what does it mean to be naked?

02:03:45.020 And so that's something that I thought about a lot in relation, and there's a relationship there with shame.

02:03:52.380 So, the first question is, what does it mean to be naked?

02:03:56.280 And the second question is, what does it mean to be not ashamed of that?

02:04:00.160 Well, there's an, there's a, I would say, there's an implication of a kind of unconsciousness.

02:04:06.520 So, Adam and Eve exist in this paradisal state, but they don't, they don't, they don't have the capacity for self-reflection.

02:04:14.440 There's no self-consciousness here.

02:04:16.560 Well, why would I say that?

02:04:18.540 Because there's very little difference between self-consciousness and shame.

02:04:21.420 In fact, if you do psychometric analysis of the state of self-consciousness, it loads with neuroticism.

02:04:28.400 So, it loads with anxiety and emotional pain.

02:04:30.500 So, to become self-conscious, what does it mean to become self-conscious?

02:04:35.020 It becomes, it means you become aware, one way of thinking about it is you become aware of your vulnerability,

02:04:40.880 or another is that you become aware of your insufficiency.

02:04:44.080 Okay, so let's say that you're standing up in front of a crowd talking, and you become self-conscious.

02:04:49.980 What happens?

02:04:50.680 Well, first of all, you can't talk anymore.

02:04:52.880 The second is you kind of fall inside.

02:04:54.940 The third is you feel ashamed, and the fourth is that you retreat, and you look down.

02:04:59.020 So, it's a low status operation, and it's associated with heightened anxiety.

02:05:04.640 And so, then you might say, well, why would you become self-conscious before a crowd?

02:05:08.880 Well, the answer is, they can see you, right? 0.98

02:05:11.980 And they can judge you, and you can make an error in front of them, and you can make a fool of yourself.

02:05:16.840 So, they put you down, you can display yourself in a manner that ratchets you down the dominance hierarchy.

02:05:22.460 That's to become self-conscious.

02:05:24.460 And so, well, at least you have the advantage of being covered up in front of the crowd.

02:05:29.180 But let's say, all of a sudden, you're stripped of your clothes.

02:05:31.840 So, what's the problem with that?

02:05:34.000 Well, all of your insufficiencies, let's say, are on painful display.

02:05:40.060 You can be evaluated by everyone.

02:05:41.720 But even more importantly than that, if possible, is that clothes actually protect the most vulnerable parts of you.

02:05:47.940 Human beings are upright animals, right?

02:05:50.400 We're very strange animals.

02:05:52.160 You take a cat or a dog, they're basically armored.

02:05:55.100 The part of them that you see, their back is heavily armored, heavily protected.

02:05:59.620 Human beings stretched upright.

02:06:01.400 And so, the softest parts of us are there for display, but also, we're displayed as sexual creatures too.

02:06:08.440 And so, to become, to be naked and not ashamed of it is to lack self-consciousness.

02:06:13.060 So, the idea is that the Adam and Eve in the original state in the garden lack self-consciousness.

02:06:21.060 Now, the serpent was more subtle.

02:06:23.300 Subtle is an interesting word here because it means kind of fog-like and vague and difficult to detect.

02:06:30.000 So, it's something that lurks and is hidden.

02:06:32.640 So, that's what the serpent is.

02:06:33.820 It's in the domain of hidden things than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made.

02:06:38.660 And the serpent said unto the woman, hey, hasn't God said you shouldn't eat of every tree of the garden?

02:06:45.240 And the woman said, we may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden, but of the fruit of the tree which is in the middle of the garden, the central fruit.

02:06:52.180 God has said, you shall not eat of it, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.

02:06:56.760 And the serpent said unto the woman, you shall not surely die.

02:07:00.680 For God knows that in the day you eat thereof, then your eyes will be opened and you will be as gods, knowing good and evil.

02:07:07.200 All right, so there's another implication there.

02:07:11.380 We already saw that there's the implication that Adam and Eve are not self-conscious.

02:07:17.460 And now there's the implication that their eyes aren't open, or at least that they're not open fully in some sense.

02:07:22.500 They're not open, for example, to the knowledge of good and evil.

02:07:25.680 And that seems to be associated somehow with death in some strange way.

02:07:29.740 Okay, so, and it's the serpent talking to the woman.

02:07:33.780 So, the serpent is the tempter of the woman.

02:07:36.780 So, the question is, why in the world would that be?

02:07:40.180 I showed you those representations of Mary, right?

02:07:43.220 Holding the infant up in the air with her foot on the snake.

02:07:46.020 So, you think, well, who's more self-conscious?

02:07:48.660 Women or men? 0.99

02:07:50.180 And the answer to that is, women are more self-conscious than men. 0.98

02:07:53.580 And even further, you might say that women taught men to be self-conscious. 0.74

02:07:57.240 And I believe that to be the case.

02:07:58.720 Maybe babies taught women to be self-conscious. 1.00

02:08:01.280 But women taught men to be self-conscious.

02:08:03.160 And they still teach them that all the time.

02:08:05.340 Because there's nothing that makes a man more self-conscious than to be rejected by a woman that he desires.

02:08:11.340 So, the woman is always offering self-consciousness to men. 0.89

02:08:15.140 And it isn't necessarily a gift that they exactly appreciate.

02:08:18.240 And that motif, of course, runs through the Adam and Eve story centrally.

02:08:22.340 Because Eve is damned forever, in some sense, for making Adam self-conscious.

02:08:26.660 Well, he didn't want to be self-conscious. 0.89

02:08:28.220 Things were pretty good when his eyes were closed and he was wandering around, not worrying about whether he was naked or not.

02:08:34.440 Well, the women became self-conscious. 1.00

02:08:36.120 Why?

02:08:36.740 Because of snakes.

02:08:38.620 Well, maybe, right?

02:08:40.280 Maybe that's exactly what happened, you know?

02:08:42.720 So, imagine we're being preyed upon for millions of years by predatory reptiles, right?

02:08:48.000 And we become more and more alert to threat.

02:08:50.180 And more and more alert to threat.

02:08:51.980 And then one day, we get so alert to threat that we can see threat lurking in the future.

02:08:56.700 And then all of a sudden, we become aware of the future.

02:08:59.360 And then we become aware of death.

02:09:01.100 And then we're really self-conscious.

02:09:02.900 But it's pretty good if you want to keep the snakes down, which we've been doing quite successfully ever since then.

02:09:07.420 But it's a big price to pay.

02:09:09.360 We got so damn sensitive to threat that we were finally able to conceive the ultimate threat.

02:09:15.020 Not proximal threats.

02:09:16.340 But the fact of threat itself, and the fact of mortality itself, and the fact of finitude itself.

02:09:22.680 And maybe women learned that because they become painfully aware of the mortal limitations of their infants first, right? 0.99

02:09:29.780 This small thing could die, could end.

02:09:34.660 And certainly as an object of predation.

02:09:37.140 And you can imagine, God only knows how many infants human beings lost to predators.

02:09:42.300 I mean, I told you at one point, I believe that there was a cat that was found that had a skull and jaws that were specialized for biting the skulls of proto-humans.

02:09:57.120 So one long tooth at the back that would drive right through the back of the skull so the cat could put its teeth here and drive the tooth right into the back of the skull. 0.95

02:10:05.740 So, you know, that's a good enough dragon for our intents and purposes, I would say.

02:10:13.180 Anyways, the snake comes along and opens the woman's eyes. 1.00

02:10:15.920 When the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eye, and a tree did to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her, and he did eat.

02:10:28.940 And the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked, and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves aprons.

02:10:34.900 Well, there's a lot happening in those few lines.

02:10:37.840 Now, there's a fruit thing going on there.

02:10:40.740 Snake and fruit.

02:10:41.540 Okay, so we know from Lynn Isbell, hypothetically, that the reason that primates like us developed our intense vision is because we co-evolved with snakes.

02:10:49.500 So the snakes opened her eyes.

02:10:51.000 What about fruit?

02:10:52.840 Color vision.

02:10:54.780 Right.

02:10:55.200 Why?

02:10:55.660 To detect ripe fruit.

02:10:57.120 We know that.

02:10:58.180 And are women and ripe fruit the same? 1.00

02:11:00.700 Well, they're the same insofar as it was women offering the ripe fruit. 0.94

02:11:04.780 And that's undoubtedly something that happened, you know.

02:11:06.980 The hypothetical idea is the males hunt and bring home protein.

02:11:11.560 The women gather.

02:11:13.000 What are they gathering?

02:11:14.160 Well, they're gathering, at minimum, ripe fruit.

02:11:18.160 And then what are they doing?

02:11:19.260 They're sharing it.

02:11:21.000 Well, you also bring about a moral obligation when you're sharing food, right?

02:11:25.600 There's an invitation to reciprocity there.

02:11:27.780 And so the fact that women were sharing, let's say, ripe fruit with men also brings them into their, what would you call, builds up the basis for the potential of a reciprocal moral obligation.

02:11:39.640 It's something like that.

02:11:40.520 And the problem, again, for men with being allied with women and infants is that it also heightens their self-consciousness because you're a lot tougher and more indomitable, say, if there's just you.

02:11:51.440 But as soon as you have a wife, say, and then you also have an infant, well, all the burden of their self-consciousness and their vulnerability is placed upon you.

02:12:00.680 Well, it's a hell of a bargain.

02:12:02.340 Well, why did men accept the bargain?

02:12:04.820 Well, it's partly because women stood in front of them offering them fruit, right? 0.99

02:12:09.720 Well, part of the price that the men paid for that was to wake the hell up.

02:12:13.680 Well, who the hell wants that?

02:12:15.660 It's a lot more calming to remain asleep with no knowledge of the sort of burden of mortality that you would bear if you became self-conscious.

02:12:25.440 So fine.

02:12:26.340 So now they're done with it.

02:12:27.800 The snake and the fruit woke them up and they can see and the scales drop from their eyes.

02:12:32.540 And so we can really see.

02:12:34.740 Well, so what does that mean?

02:12:35.980 Half our brain is visual, is devoted to visual processing.

02:12:38.780 So as long as our eyes got better, our brain got bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger, what happens when it gets big enough?

02:12:46.680 Well, not only can you see, you can meta-see.

02:12:49.720 You can start to see into the future.

02:12:52.380 Well, that's exactly what happened to us.

02:12:54.200 Not only could we see with our eyes, we could see with our imagination.

02:12:57.580 And our imagination is, you can see with your eyes closed, right?

02:13:03.420 Close your eyes.

02:13:04.700 Bring up a vision.

02:13:06.000 You can imagine the future.

02:13:07.220 Well, what are you seeing?

02:13:08.400 You're seeing a potential future with your eyes closed.

02:13:11.720 The circuitry's there.

02:13:13.020 Once it's developed, you can use it to imagine.

02:13:16.160 You can project your vision into places that don't even exist.

02:13:20.240 And you can start to conceptualize the future.

02:13:23.540 What happens when you conceptualize the future?

02:13:26.060 Well, this is a, I'm spoiling the punchline.

02:13:28.440 You have to work because you can see the future coming.

02:13:32.360 You think, oh, the future's coming.

02:13:34.720 It isn't just the present anymore.

02:13:36.460 I don't have to just worry about whether or not I'm hungry right now.

02:13:39.200 I'm going to have to worry about whether I'm hungry tomorrow and next week and next month and next year.

02:13:43.280 And for me and for my wife and for my child and for the community.

02:13:47.040 It's like you can forget about your day-to-day existence in paradise at that point.

02:13:52.260 There's no evidence that people in industrialized societies are happier than people in non-industrialized societies.

02:13:57.620 In fact, quite the contrary.

02:13:59.380 We're less happy.

02:14:00.660 Why?

02:14:02.000 Well, because we fully and constantly bear the burden of the future.

02:14:06.220 Well, that's good because we don't die and we live maybe 30 years longer and we have fewer horrible diseases and all of that.

02:14:11.620 But that doesn't mean it's any picnic.

02:14:13.820 You have to carry that along with you wherever you go.

02:14:16.540 That's the burden of self-consciousness, right?

02:14:18.800 And that's exactly what happens when God finds out that Adam and Eve have become self-conscious.

02:14:22.700 One of the first things he says is, ha ha, jigs up now, man.

02:14:26.420 You're going to be working forever.

02:14:28.940 Toiling forever.

02:14:30.260 It's your destiny.

02:14:31.300 There's no escaping from it.

02:14:32.860 Well, human beings work.

02:14:34.580 What does that mean?

02:14:35.740 They sacrifice the present for the future.

02:14:38.460 And that's partly, as soon as this happens, like the next story, which is Cain and Abel, you see the motif of sacrifice emerge, right?

02:14:45.900 That story circulates around the motif of sacrifice.

02:14:48.860 Sacrifice the present for the future.

02:14:51.240 Well, what's the price you pay?

02:14:53.280 You don't get the present.

02:14:55.280 That's a big price, right?

02:14:56.720 Because what you do is, what you're doing essentially is you're taking all the potential suffering of the future and putting it into the present.

02:15:04.520 All the time.

02:15:06.260 Well, so what happens?

02:15:07.180 Well, maybe you live longer and you live healthier, but you're not without the burden that that puts on you.

02:15:14.540 So, the eyes of them were both opened.

02:15:17.840 And they knew they were naked.

02:15:19.400 Well, so what does that mean?

02:15:20.460 Well, what does naked mean?

02:15:22.440 It means you know you're vulnerable.

02:15:23.900 That's exactly what it means.

02:15:25.120 They know they're vulnerable.

02:15:26.320 So they sew fig leaves together and make themselves aprons.

02:15:28.840 And so what happens is they wake up, their eyes open.

02:15:32.880 They know they're vulnerable.

02:15:33.740 So they discover the future.

02:15:35.100 They discover their vulnerability extended into the future.

02:15:37.540 And the first thing they do is build culture, right?

02:15:39.820 That's the fig leaves.

02:15:40.680 It's like, okay, here's the vulnerability.

02:15:42.940 We put a barrier between us and the world.

02:15:45.040 It's like a wall, right?

02:15:46.820 Because this is externalized clothing.

02:15:50.060 That's one way of thinking about it.

02:15:52.080 And so to put that clothing on, this is clothing is a human universal, by the way.

02:15:57.020 Now, sometimes it's only used for decorative purposes.

02:15:59.320 But far more often, especially in cold climates, it's used for protection.

02:16:02.860 So to clothe yourself is to recognize your vulnerability and to use culture to hold it at bay.

02:16:10.620 So fine, they make themselves aprons.

02:16:12.980 And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day.

02:16:18.120 And Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden.

02:16:22.980 Okay.

02:16:24.120 So before Adam and Eve wake up, before they realize they're vulnerable, they don't hide from God.

02:16:29.740 So what does that mean?

02:16:31.700 Well, he's the spirit that goes into the unknown to conquer it and to make the world.

02:16:40.160 Okay.

02:16:40.400 So let's say that's what you're supposed to do.

02:16:42.240 You're supposed to mediate between chaos and order.

02:16:45.680 Okay.

02:16:46.080 And you're supposed to do that forthrightly.

02:16:47.760 So then the question is, what the hell is stopping you?

02:16:51.060 And that answer is easy.

02:16:52.940 Your knowledge of your vulnerability.

02:16:55.200 Obviously, that's what's stopping you.

02:16:56.780 It's like, why aren't you courageous and forthright?

02:16:59.920 Well, because you can be cut off at the knees and terribly hurt.

02:17:04.540 And so you're going to shrink back from that responsibility.

02:17:06.760 And it's no bloody wonder, right?

02:17:08.540 It's obviously what's going to happen.

02:17:11.800 So the Lord God calls unto Adam.

02:17:15.540 So he's trying to, what that means for God to call on you is to say, for God to say, I want to act through you.

02:17:23.400 I want to act with you.

02:17:24.880 That spirit, let's say.

02:17:26.380 Well, Adam says, I heard, I heard God says to Adam, where are you?

02:17:32.160 And Adam says, I heard your voice in the garden, right?

02:17:36.040 I heard the call, but I was afraid because I was naked and I hid myself.

02:17:40.940 It's like, yes, that's exactly what human beings are like.

02:17:43.200 That's precisely exactly what we're like.

02:17:46.800 We hear the call, but we hide.

02:17:48.840 And we have, the thing is, it's, there's good reason for it.

02:17:51.840 It's not something trivial.

02:17:53.160 And God said, who told you you were naked? 0.99

02:17:58.080 Did you eat the tree that I told you you shouldn't eat?

02:18:00.320 And the man says, the man doesn't come off very well in this particular phrase, as far as I'm concerned.

02:18:04.920 And there's actually quite, this is actually quite a comedic story, except that it's also a catastrophic tragedy.

02:18:10.900 It's like, God calls Adam out.

02:18:14.000 Like, what's with you?

02:18:15.160 Now, you know, you're hiding from me.

02:18:17.020 Why?

02:18:17.440 And the first thing Adam does is says, it's her fault.

02:18:20.040 It's her fault.

02:18:20.640 She made me self-conscious.

02:18:22.000 Well, I see that in resentful men all the time.

02:18:25.020 They're very antipathetic towards women.

02:18:28.100 And they blame their misery and resentment on the fact that women won't have anything to do with them. 0.86

02:18:33.260 While the women are making them self-conscious for not being all they should be. 1.00

02:18:36.400 Because the women think, why should I bother with you if you're not the embodiment of the spirit that will move into the unknown and face the Leviathan? 1.00

02:18:43.540 Which is exactly what she should be saying.

02:18:45.360 And you're thinking, well, I don't want to have anything to do with that.

02:18:47.840 But I'd like women to like me anyways. 0.85

02:18:49.440 It's like, well, good luck with that.

02:18:51.180 So that doesn't work out. 1.00

02:18:52.420 And so instead of getting your act together, you say, those goddamn women. 1.00

02:18:55.880 That's exactly what Adam says to God. 1.00

02:18:57.500 He said, well, don't be laying this on my feet.

02:18:59.920 It's the woman.

02:19:00.640 You made her. 1.00

02:19:01.580 She made me all self-conscious and cowardly.

02:19:03.880 It's like, brilliant, great, wonderful.

02:19:06.180 And God says to the woman, what did you do?

02:19:09.360 And the woman said, well, it was the serpent that confused me.

02:19:13.880 And I ate.

02:19:15.000 Well, it's like, actually, I'm a little more sympathetic to her than to Adam, all things considered. 0.99

02:19:19.420 Because after all, she was trying to deal with the damn snake, right? 0.97

02:19:22.800 And we find out that the snake is not only the thing that preys upon her infants, but as the tradition developed, it's identified with Satan himself. 0.99

02:19:30.920 So, and that's the snake in every soul.

02:19:33.500 That's the right way of thinking about that.

02:19:35.180 So, she had her reasons, but it doesn't matter.

02:19:38.980 You pay whether you have your reasons or not.

02:19:41.820 And so God says to the serpent, because you've done this, you're cursed above all cattle and above every beast of the field.

02:19:48.540 Upon the bellies shalt thou go and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life.

02:19:52.780 So, first of all, the serpent seems to have legs, right?

02:19:56.640 And then it's turned into a snake.

02:19:58.300 And that's actually how it worked, by the way, because snakes had legs and they lost them.

02:20:02.720 Now, you know, I'm not trying to say that this story necessarily represents that, but it's an interesting parallel.

02:20:09.060 And he tells the snake, I'll put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed, it shall bruise thy head, and thou shall bruise his heel.

02:20:17.180 Well, yes, well, that's the snake striking, right?

02:20:19.320 And the fact that when human beings see snakes, they want to, just like the Simpsons, whacking day, right?

02:20:24.300 It's time to get rid of the snakes.

02:20:25.600 And that's why the many great saints are those who drive the snakes from the land, like St. Patrick or St. George and the Dragon.

02:20:32.040 And it's the same representation of the hero moving out into the wilderness and confronting the predatory potential, is the right way of thinking about it.

02:20:45.300 All right.

02:20:46.200 And to the woman, he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception. 1.00

02:20:50.980 In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children, and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.

02:20:58.480 Well, that's a statement of destiny, not a statement of the way it should be.

02:21:02.400 So what does it mean?

02:21:04.620 I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception.

02:21:07.720 Well, self-consciousness will do that, because, of course, women are fully aware of exactly how fragile their infants are. 0.99

02:21:13.240 So that's a big problem.

02:21:14.840 In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children.

02:21:16.920 That's something particular to human women, right? 1.00

02:21:19.600 And here's why.

02:21:20.780 The price we paid for the rapid expansion of our brain, which is also something that gave us this self-consciousness and vision, meant that there's an evolutionary arms race between the pelvic width of women and the hole in the center of the pelvis and the infant's head. 1.00

02:21:36.700 So what happens is, the infant is born far too young for a mammal of our size, because if it was any older, the head would be too big, the pelvis would have to be too wide, its structural stability would be compromised, and then women couldn't run. 0.89

02:21:50.500 So right now, women are at the maximum for hip width in terms of their ability to run. 1.00

02:21:55.000 So what's happened is that infants have had to be born younger with a compressible head.

02:22:00.440 So, you know, the bones of an infant's skull aren't joined together, and sometimes after babies are born, their head is actually almost cone-shaped, because of the tremendous pressure that was exerted on their head during the birthing process.

02:22:13.180 And, of course, that's killed innumerable women, right?

02:22:16.660 I mean, women's life expectancy before, what, the latter half of the 20th century was way below men, because they died in childbirth all the time. 0.98

02:22:26.220 And why?

02:22:27.260 Well, it's a very, what do you call that?

02:22:32.720 It's a, it's a, it's a very narrow gateway.

02:22:37.960 And the price that women pay for it is very high risk of death, very high risk of sorrow, because of, of death of children in, in childbirth, and also extraordinarily, extraordinary pain in giving birth.

02:22:49.880 So that's the price women pay for having vision and being self-conscious. 1.00

02:22:54.740 Well, that's, and then worse, they, they desire their husband and he'll rule over them. 0.98

02:22:59.580 Well, whether or not that's good or bad, it doesn't matter.

02:23:03.200 God's statement is that's how it's going to be.

02:23:05.140 Well, partly that's because, as far as I can tell, there isn't really women, roughly speaking. 0.97

02:23:11.480 There's women with infants. 1.00

02:23:13.780 And a woman with an infant is compromised in terms of her, what, independent individuality to a remarkable degree.

02:23:21.940 Because the infant is dependent, absolutely dependent, absolutely dependent for a year.

02:23:27.140 And then unbelievably dependent for like eight years after that.

02:23:31.060 And then still pretty dependent for another five.

02:23:33.900 So once you have an infant, it's no longer you.

02:23:37.100 And I've talked to lots of women for whom that was a great relief, by the way, because it actually is somewhat of a relief to now not be the center of everything.

02:23:45.360 You know, if you go visit your in-laws, for example, and you have a baby, it's like they pay attention to the baby.

02:23:50.080 Your parents will do the same thing.

02:23:51.620 It's kind of nice to have that happen.

02:23:53.140 But it's still an absolute catastrophe for you as an independent being.

02:23:58.600 And you're not going to go out in the forest and hunt down dragons when you have an infant.

02:24:02.220 So even if you could do it, you're not going to do it.

02:24:05.220 And so that's basically what that statement outlines.

02:24:07.680 And then to Adam, he says, because you listened to your wife and ate of that tree, which I said, you know, maybe that's not such a good idea.

02:24:15.020 Cursed is the ground for thy sake.

02:24:17.720 In sorrow shall thou eat of it all the days of thy life.

02:24:22.180 Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee.

02:24:25.080 And thou shall eat the herb of the field.

02:24:27.080 In the sweat of thy face shall thou eat bread till thou return into the ground.

02:24:31.300 That's the death part.

02:24:32.280 For out of it was thou taken for dust thou art and unto dust thou shalt thou return.

02:24:38.640 And I missed one thing about that.

02:24:41.040 When the serpent, this took me a long time to figure out.

02:24:43.780 I think I've mentioned it already, but it's worth reviewing.

02:24:46.760 The serpent tells Eve.

02:24:50.880 That if she eats from the fruit of the tree, then her eyes will be open and she'll be as God's knowing good and evil.

02:24:57.020 Well, the serpent doesn't say, well, you'll be as God's insofar as knowing good and evil, but you'll die.

02:25:03.720 So you only get half the gift.

02:25:05.800 And so then I thought, well, there's this weird intermingling of occurrences in the story.

02:25:12.480 There's the development of vision.

02:25:14.220 There's the development of self-consciousness.

02:25:16.420 There's the knowledge of nakedness.

02:25:18.160 There's the emergence of work.

02:25:19.420 There's the emergence of pain and suffering in childbirth.

02:25:22.660 And there's knowledge of good and evil.

02:25:24.120 I thought, for ages, I thought, what the hell? 0.80

02:25:26.540 What the hell? 0.94

02:25:27.100 What's going on there? 0.78

02:25:28.320 Why is there an emphasis on moral knowledge?

02:25:30.860 What does this have to do with moral knowledge?

02:25:33.000 And the implication is that in the initial state of unconsciousness, there was no moral knowledge.

02:25:37.840 And I think of that as an animal-like state, right?

02:25:40.020 There's no moral knowledge in animals.

02:25:42.120 You don't think, well, that evil cat.

02:25:44.360 You don't ever think that, even if it's acting like a predator.

02:25:46.720 Even if it's playing with its prey.

02:25:48.460 You don't attribute moral knowledge to the cat.

02:25:50.860 Because you say, well, it doesn't know what it's doing.

02:25:53.380 It doesn't understand what it's doing.

02:25:55.220 Which is to say, it acts it out, but it can't represent it.

02:25:58.540 Or maybe even more, it acts it out, but it can't represent it.

02:26:02.520 And it certainly can't analyze its representation.

02:26:05.440 It doesn't have that level of capacity, but we do.

02:26:08.180 So that's associated with moral knowledge to some degree.

02:26:11.240 Why knowledge of good and evil?

02:26:13.080 I thought, all right, here's what it is.

02:26:14.960 Let's think about what you would consider reprehensible.

02:26:17.940 Universally, you could say, how's this?

02:26:21.480 Torturing an infant.

02:26:23.300 I would consider that virtually universally reprehensible.

02:26:26.640 Wouldn't you say?

02:26:27.700 Okay, so we'll accept that as a reasonable definition.

02:26:30.780 So then the question is, one, why would you do it?

02:26:35.220 We'll leave that aside for a moment.

02:26:36.900 Two, how do you know how to do it?

02:26:40.680 That's the issue.

02:26:41.960 And that's easy.

02:26:42.700 Once I know how I can be hurt, because I'm aware of my own vulnerability, I know how you can be hurt.

02:26:49.840 And I can make it into a game.

02:26:51.860 And I can prolong it forever.

02:26:53.860 And I can do it the worst possible way.

02:26:56.880 And that's why, when you open your eyes, and you know your vulnerability and your nakedness,

02:27:02.040 that you immediately have the knowledge of good and evil.

02:27:04.180 And so then evil becomes something like, while there's tragedy in life, fine, earthquakes, cancer, disease, all those terrible things.

02:27:12.860 That's different than me deciding that I'm going to make you miserable.

02:27:16.380 The one is, while you're a limited creature in an unlimited world, you're going to get hurt because of that.

02:27:21.800 And maybe there's ways that you can be that will enable you to transcend that, at least to some degree,

02:27:26.780 and still have the benefits of being.

02:27:28.560 That's entirely different than me deciding that things are going to go a lot worse for you than they might.

02:27:34.400 And human beings are capable.

02:27:35.780 I don't know if you've ever gone to some of the dungeon, torture dungeons in Europe.

02:27:39.940 Boy, those are fun places to go.

02:27:41.800 You think, you take the most malevolent person you possibly could,

02:27:46.020 and then have a little convention of those people,

02:27:48.360 and then get them to think up the worst possible things that they could possibly devise.

02:27:52.660 And then you have the instruments of torture that are in a medieval torture dungeon, right?

02:27:58.600 It's an art form.

02:27:59.900 And you think, well, why are people willing to inflict that on one another?

02:28:04.680 Well, we'll talk about that next time when we talk about the story of Cain and Abel,

02:28:08.880 because I think it holds the secret to that.

02:28:11.220 And in the meantime, I'll stop with this story,

02:28:13.060 but I want to tell you the story of the Buddha because it maps onto it very nicely.

02:28:16.480 So what do you have?

02:28:17.160 You have a protected space.

02:28:20.800 There's unconscious beings in a protected space.

02:28:23.240 Something comes in, in the form of the serpent, to reveal death,

02:28:28.020 to reveal vulnerability and death, right?

02:28:31.260 And then the paradise comes to an end.

02:28:34.340 The human beings are eliminated from it, and they don't get to come back.

02:28:37.520 So God puts angels with flaming swords at the gateway to paradise

02:28:42.600 so that people cannot come back in.

02:28:44.520 It isn't obvious what that means,

02:28:46.560 except that there's got to be some sort of trial by fire before reentering paradise.

02:28:50.840 But we can leave that alone for a moment.

02:28:52.800 So that's the basic structure of the story.

02:28:55.400 Unconscious human beings, emergence of knowledge,

02:28:58.660 realization of death and suffering, and the elimination of the paradise, right?

02:29:04.120 Okay, so now I'll read you the story of the Buddha.

02:29:07.480 The father of Prince Gautama, the Buddha, savior of the Orient,

02:29:11.140 determined to protect his son from desperate knowledge and tragic awareness,

02:29:14.480 built for him an enclosed pavilion, a walled garden of earthly delights.

02:29:18.560 Okay, so the story goes that an angel visited Buddha's father

02:29:23.420 and said that he's going to have a son,

02:29:25.340 and the son is either going to become the greatest ruler that the world has ever seen,

02:29:28.760 or a spiritual leader.

02:29:30.120 And the father, being a practical man, thought,

02:29:32.480 well, there's no bloody way.

02:29:33.640 I want my son to be some, like, wandering spiritual leader.

02:29:36.700 I want him to be the greatest king that the world has ever seen.

02:29:39.920 Okay, and so the father decides,

02:29:42.960 how am I going to get my son to be the greatest ruler the world has ever seen?

02:29:48.580 I better get him to fall in love with the world,

02:29:50.600 because then he's not going to go traipsing after some sort of half-witted spiritual knowledge.

02:29:54.520 He's going to stick to practical tasks, right?

02:29:57.820 That's something that a father should do, to some degree,

02:30:00.220 is orient you in the world, right?

02:30:01.860 And maybe you shouldn't subvert your spiritual development to any great degree,

02:30:06.900 but there's a practical element to this.

02:30:08.600 And so anyways, that's how it works.

02:30:10.920 And so that's what happens.

02:30:12.380 The father builds this city of perfection,

02:30:16.160 and he eliminates from it everything that's a reminder of the suffering that's associated with life.

02:30:22.720 So the only thing that's allowed,

02:30:24.320 the only creatures that are allowed to be in there,

02:30:26.140 the only people that are allowed to be in there,

02:30:27.720 are healthy, young, and happy people.

02:30:30.100 So the Buddha grows up, surrounded by nothing but the positive elements of life.

02:30:34.600 Well, you think, well, what does that mean?

02:30:36.100 Well, it's akin to the paradise idea, obviously.

02:30:39.460 Walled enclosure of paradise, where there's no death.

02:30:42.540 But there's more to it than that, too.

02:30:44.840 It's also, in some sense, what a good father would do.

02:30:47.700 What do you do with your young children?

02:30:49.980 Well, you don't expose them to death and decay at every step of the way, right?

02:30:54.040 You build a protected world for them, like a walled enclosure,

02:30:58.120 and you only keep what's healthy and life-giving inside of it.

02:31:02.140 And you don't expose them to things that they can't tolerate.

02:31:05.420 You know, maybe you don't take a three-year-old to a funeral.

02:31:07.900 Now, maybe you do, but maybe you don't.

02:31:09.580 There's things that you don't expect them to be able to cope with.

02:31:12.360 You regulate what they're allowed to watch.

02:31:14.520 You're not going to show them the Texas chainsaw massacre

02:31:17.440 when they're four years old, right?

02:31:19.380 So you're staving off knowledge of mortality and death.

02:31:23.080 And so he's just being a good father in many ways here.

02:31:25.500 All signs of decay and degeneration were thus kept hidden from the prince.

02:31:30.920 Immersed in the immediate pleasures of the senses, in physical love, in dance and music

02:31:35.000 and beauty and pleasure, Gautama grew to maturity, protected absolutely from the limitations of

02:31:40.560 mortal being.

02:31:41.580 However, he grew curious, despite his father's most particular attention and will,

02:31:46.720 and resolved to leave his seductive prison.

02:31:49.220 Well, it's that curiosity element.

02:31:50.740 It's the same thing that lurks in the Adam and Eve story.

02:31:54.260 It's like God tells Adam and Eve, see that tree over there?

02:31:58.120 Don't be bothering with it.

02:31:59.660 Well, you know what's going to happen with human beings, especially if there's a snake associated with it.

02:32:03.500 They're going to be over there right away, checking that place out.

02:32:06.260 And that's exactly what happens with the Buddha.

02:32:08.820 It's like he's raised to be healthy.

02:32:11.860 And what is, what's the consequence of that?

02:32:14.220 Is that the fact that he's healthy makes him look for what's beyond the protected confines

02:32:20.560 of the thing that made him healthy.

02:32:22.060 It's like, it's like even in the Geppetto story, you know, where Geppetto paints on Pinocchio's

02:32:27.640 mouth and he's ready to go.

02:32:28.780 He puts him outside the next day and Pinocchio is ready to run away with all the kids, right?

02:32:33.140 So the consequence of raising a child in a healthy way is that the child is going to be

02:32:37.380 curious enough to go out there and look for some trouble.

02:32:40.660 And we actually know that because there is follow-up studies of teenagers.

02:32:44.780 You imagine that there's teenagers who never break any rules.

02:32:47.620 And then there's teenagers who break all the rules, okay?

02:32:50.360 These teenagers don't do very well.

02:32:52.840 Introverted, depressed, anxious, depressed.

02:32:55.740 Sorry, I said that twice. 0.96

02:32:57.120 These ones are antisocial.

02:32:59.060 The ones in the middle, that's what you want. 0.99

02:33:01.080 You want your damn teenager to get out of the paradisal confines of your house and to 1.00

02:33:05.560 go cause some trouble and to investigate. 0.99

02:33:07.840 Maybe you don't want to know about it any more than you have to.

02:33:10.660 You don't want them to be breaking rules all the time and you don't want them to be so

02:33:14.820 timid and oppressed that they can't make a move on their own and never make a mistake.

02:33:19.200 So the paradoxical thing here, and it's sort of echoed, this is why I like these two stories

02:33:23.920 back to back.

02:33:24.640 It's like, if you give people what they want, then the first thing they're going to do is

02:33:29.160 try to get beyond it.

02:33:30.740 And Dostoevsky says the same thing in Notes from Underground.

02:33:33.660 He says, if you gave people everything they wanted, pure utopia.

02:33:37.000 So he says, so that they're, they're sitting in a pool of bliss with nothing but bubbles

02:33:41.600 of happiness coming up from the surface.

02:33:43.360 And all they have to do is eat cake and busy themselves with the continuation of the species.

02:33:49.020 Dostoevsky's observation is the first thing that people would do is find something to smash

02:33:54.660 that with just so that something interesting and perverse could happen.

02:33:58.100 It's like, well, yes, we're, we're creatures that are designed to encounter the unknown.

02:34:03.940 We want to keep moving beyond what we have, even if we have, what we have is what we want.

02:34:08.860 And maybe that's partly because we're oriented towards the future.

02:34:11.880 We think, well, this is great, but it's not good enough.

02:34:14.580 It's great, but it's not good enough.

02:34:16.220 There's always something more that drives us forward.

02:34:19.580 Well, so that's what happens with the Buddha.

02:34:21.180 He gets curious.

02:34:22.240 He sees the walls.

02:34:23.400 He thinks there's walls.

02:34:25.180 There's probably something outside of those walls.

02:34:26.880 So then he goes to his father and he says,

02:34:31.060 I'm, I want to go outside.

02:34:34.900 What's outside?

02:34:35.640 And his father says, nah, you don't want to go outside.

02:34:37.700 And Buddha says, yeah, well, I really do want to go outside.

02:34:40.060 And his father knows that unless he lets him go outside, he's going to climb over the walls.

02:34:43.760 And so the father decides he's going to let him go outside,

02:34:47.680 but he's going to fix everything out there first.

02:34:49.680 So he goes outside.

02:34:50.940 It's like the Chinese preparing for the Olympics, you know, 0.99

02:34:53.160 when they sprayed the grass with, with, with green paint,

02:34:56.080 got rid of all the homeless people.

02:34:57.500 It's the same thing.

02:34:58.660 So he goes outside the city and he tells everyone, all right, old people, sick people, 1.00

02:35:03.700 dying people hit the road.

02:35:05.760 We don't want to see you for a while.

02:35:07.500 Clean all this out.

02:35:08.420 We want the attractive people around the sides of the roads,

02:35:11.000 like waving palm fronds and all of that.

02:35:12.980 And so when my son comes out, he's going to see nothing, but what's good.

02:35:16.040 And so he gets that all arranged and he lets his son go outside.

02:35:19.220 Now, his son goes outside in this little chariot thing and he has a, uh, someone with him.

02:35:24.220 Now, unbeknownst to his father, that person that's with him is an emissary of the gods.

02:35:28.980 And so in a perverse way, he plays the same role as the serpent in the story of, of, of Adam and Eve.

02:35:34.580 And the gods have already arranged so that the father's, uh, care is going to be insufficient.

02:35:42.180 And it's the snake in the garden idea.

02:35:44.280 It's like, no matter how much care you take to make things perfect,

02:35:47.500 some of the, some of what, what you're excluding is going to come back in.

02:35:52.800 So anyways, Buddha goes outside and, and he's in his chariot and preparations were made to gild his chosen route,

02:36:00.300 to cover the adventurer's path with flowers and to display for his admiration and preoccupation,

02:36:05.260 the fairest women of the kingdom.

02:36:06.940 The prince set out with full retinue in the shield and comfort of a chaperone chariot

02:36:11.180 and delighted in the panorama previously prepared for him.

02:36:14.860 The gods, however, decided to disrupt these most carefully laid plans

02:36:18.960 and sent an aged man to hobble in full view alongside the road.

02:36:24.440 The prince's fascinated gaze fell upon the ancient interloper.

02:36:28.120 Compelled by curiosity, he asked his attendant,

02:36:30.300 what is that creature stumbling, shabby, bent and broken beside my retinue?

02:36:35.180 And the attendant answered, that is a man like other men who was born an infant,

02:36:39.740 became a child, a youth, a husband, a father, a father of fathers.

02:36:44.200 He has become old subject to destruction of his beauty, his will, and the possibilities of life.

02:36:50.000 Like other men, you say, hesitantly inquired the prince.

02:36:53.180 That means this will happen to me.

02:36:55.580 And the attendant answered inevitably with the passage of time.

02:36:59.180 Well, that's the end of that party.

02:37:01.480 The world collapses in on Buddha and bang, he hightails at home.

02:37:05.500 Well, what does that mean?

02:37:06.760 Well, that's what children do, roughly speaking, as they're around their mother.

02:37:10.780 They've got security there.

02:37:12.040 They go out into the unknown.

02:37:13.380 They encounter something that's just a little bit too much for them.

02:37:16.120 Bang, they come home.

02:37:17.000 They get all patted back into shape and hugged and taken care of.

02:37:20.420 Hugging children and patting them is actually analgesic.

02:37:23.480 It actually reduces pain.

02:37:25.580 Unsurprisingly, that's what you do with someone who's grieving, right?

02:37:28.320 So you hug them because grief is pain.

02:37:31.320 So, you know, you pat them and they get rid of their pain.

02:37:34.700 They get rid of their anxiety.

02:37:35.940 You calm them down.

02:37:37.160 And what happens?

02:37:38.140 Well, the next day they want to go out again.

02:37:40.160 Well, that's exactly what happens to the Buddha.

02:37:41.880 So he's all shorted out by his encounter with death, which is very little different than what happens to Adam and Eve.

02:37:47.500 Runs back.

02:37:49.780 Recovers for six months.

02:37:50.940 He has post-traumatic stress disorder.

02:37:53.260 He runs home and he recovers for six months, right?

02:37:57.340 In time, his anxiety lessened.

02:37:58.800 His curiosity grew and he ventured outside again.

02:38:01.240 This time, the gods sent a sick man into view.

02:38:04.420 This creature, he asked his attendant, shaking and palsied, horribly afflicted, unbearable to behold, a source of pity and contempt.

02:38:11.120 What is he?

02:38:12.180 And the attendant answered, that's a man like other men who was born whole, but who became ill and sick, unable to cope, a burden to himself and others, suffering and incurable.

02:38:24.380 Like other men, you say, inquired the prince, this could happen to me.

02:38:28.020 And the attendant answers, no man is exempt from the ravages of disease.

02:38:33.180 Once again, the world collapsed and Gautama returned to his home.

02:38:36.340 But the delights of his previous life were ashes in his mouth and he ventured forth a third time.

02:38:44.260 The gods in their mercy sent him a dead man in funeral procession.

02:38:47.800 This creature, he asked his attendant, laying so still, appearing so fearsome, surrounded by grief and by sorrow, lost and forlorn.

02:38:55.940 What is he?

02:38:56.480 And the attendant answered, that is a man like other men, born of woman, beloved and hated, who was once you, who once was you and now is the earth.

02:39:05.760 Like other men, you say, inquired the prince, then this could happen to me.

02:39:10.760 This is your end, said the attendant, and the end of all men.

02:39:14.660 Well, that's the end of childhood, right?

02:39:16.580 There's no going back after that.

02:39:18.440 It's like Pinocchio, it goes back.

02:39:20.380 There's no one home anymore.

02:39:21.520 It's, there's nothing that your father can do to protect you from knowledge of death.

02:39:26.840 There's no returning to the childhood unconsciousness because you're, you now know, and there's no going backwards.

02:39:34.040 Suicide, that's going backwards.

02:39:35.960 That's how you replace your emergent self-consciousness with the old blissful unconsciousness.

02:39:41.460 And that's exactly what suicidal people wish.

02:39:44.900 They're going to destroy their painful self-consciousness and make it all go away.

02:39:51.520 The world collapsed to final time and Gautama asked to be returned home.

02:39:55.860 But the attendant had orders from the prince's father and took him instead to a festival of women occurring nearby in a grove in the woods.

02:40:03.540 The prince was met by a beautiful assemblage who offered themselves freely to him without restraint in song, dance, and play in the spirit of sensual love.

02:40:12.060 But Gautama could think only of death and the inevitable decomposition of beauty and took no pleasure in the display.

02:40:18.520 Well, so, you see the parallels between one story and the other.

02:40:25.700 They're the same, they have the same underlying structure.

02:40:28.660 Initial paradise, partly childhood, partly unconsciousness.

02:40:32.280 The emergence of knowledge of mortality into that and the demolition of the, of the paradise.

02:40:37.740 It's the same meta story that we've been talking about all along.

02:40:41.080 Ordered state, collapse into chaos.

02:40:43.560 Well, the rest of the story is the return.

02:40:46.320 Like in the Bible, Bible is actually set up that way.

02:40:48.880 It's collapse into history and then a movement upward.

02:40:54.440 The question is, what's the movement upward?

02:40:56.400 That's the question here.

02:40:58.260 When the collapse is caused by knowledge of mortality and self-con, and the emergence of self-consciousness and knowledge of death,

02:41:05.220 is there any manner in which redemption can be attained?

02:41:09.160 Or is that the final, like, is that finally, is that, does that finally demolish you?

02:41:14.680 Well, that's the question.

02:41:16.040 And that's, that's, that's, it's the answer to that question that entire civilizations constantly pursue.

02:41:24.360 And the question is, well, what is the answer?

02:41:27.100 And part of the answer is identification with the spirit that generates order out of chaos.

02:41:33.320 That's, that's the answer.

02:41:35.240 It's something like that.

02:41:36.740 And so then the question is, what does that mean?

02:41:38.900 Well, that'll be what the last two lectures in the course are about.

02:41:42.760 Because we're down to two last lectures.

02:41:45.700 So, any questions?

02:41:47.900 Does it make sense?

02:41:50.140 More, more importantly, really, is there, is there any way in which it doesn't make sense?

02:41:56.040 Because these stories are not supposed to make sense.

02:41:59.540 Right?

02:41:59.820 That's the theory, is that they're archaic superstitions or something like that.

02:42:05.300 Well, it doesn't seem to me that that's the case.

02:42:07.540 It seems to me that they make insanely perfect sense.

02:42:10.980 They're exactly right.

02:42:12.620 They tell you exactly what human beings are like,

02:42:15.060 and exactly what the situation that we face is.

02:42:19.060 So, and so then the question is, well, the diagnosis is made properly.

02:42:24.200 What, has the cure been properly identified?

02:42:26.660 Well, that's what we'll discuss for the next two sessions.

02:42:31.940 For this case, we'll discuss for the next two sessions.

02:42:37.000 And we'll discuss for the next two sessions.

02:42:40.020 The first of the Tune in Evan

02:42:41.900 is a message where in the Sp rejoin,

02:42:42.840 when there's aioticrias,

02:42:44.460 ourョb Sports Company played with us,

02:42:45.100 and at the end of the pit for the violence,

02:42:45.620 and at the end of the underpin Schutz

02:42:46.640 is us, Amazon.

02:42:47.580 When there are noここ that's out there, 0.93

02:42:48.480 will do somethingesis way,

02:42:49.200 although we know that things are sources previously.

02:42:53.340 So, we've also shown in a week where we try please,

02:42:55.860 so we can never

02:42:57.620 but we reden now

02:42:58.900 ourself by ourselves,

02:42:59.700 and our thoughts on what développements in the ground is best.

02:43:00.720 You

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - September 27, 2020

138. Maps of Meaning 10： Genesis and the Buddha

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