139. Maps of Meaning 11： The Flood and the Tower
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Length
3 hours and 41 minutes
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176.7326
Summary
With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way. In his new series, "Depression and Anxiety," Dr. Peterson provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that, while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward. If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope and there's a path to feeling better. Go to Dailywire Plus now and start watching Dr. B.P. Peterson's new series on Depression and Anxiety. Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve. Thank you so much for listening and supporting Daily Wire Plus. Please don't forget to rate, comment, and subscribe to our other shows Psychology Today, The Anthropology, The New York Times, and The Huffington Post. Please take a moment to leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts and we'll be sure to bring you more episodes like this one in the future. Subscribe to our new podcast, Psychology Today! Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about your ad choices. Become a supporter of the podcast: bit.ly/support-and-subscribe to our newest podcast, Dear John. Thanks for listening to Psychology Today and Good Mythology Podcasts! Subscribe for a chance to win tickets to our upcoming podcast episode on the next episode of Conspiracy Theories coming soon! We'll be looking out for your favorite podcast episodes! Timestamps: 3:00: 0:00 - What's Good? 3: - What does it mean to you? 5: What is Good? 6: How do you like it? 7:30 - What do you think it's Better? 8: What's a Good Idea? 9:00 | What's Wrong with It's Better than It's Good Thing? 11: Is It Better than That? 12:00 13:00 & Other Stuff? 15:00 + +) 16:00 Is it Better than This? 17:00 What's Better Than It's Not Better Than That? 17: How Can I Say It? 19:00 Do You Think It? & Other Words For Me? 21:00 Can I Have It Better? & More? 22:00 More Like It's A Good Idea Or Not That I Think So Much? 27:00 Or Not?
Transcript
00:00:00.960
Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.
00:00:06.480
Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety.
00:00:12.740
We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be,
00:00:16.120
and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling.
00:00:22.620
Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way in his new series.
00:00:27.400
He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy,
00:00:32.160
it's absolutely possible to find your way forward.
00:00:35.360
If you're suffering, please know you are not alone.
00:00:38.520
There's hope and there's a path to feeling better.
00:00:41.800
Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on depression and anxiety.
00:00:47.460
Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.
00:00:57.400
So last week, I told you, I offered you an interpretation of two foundational stories, right?
00:01:19.840
Well, more than two, but roughly speaking, two.
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The creation stories, because there's two of them in Genesis, and then also the story of the Buddha.
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And I was presenting you with a proposition, and it's a multi-layered proposition.
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The first proposition is that the archetypal story structure that we've already been discussing
00:01:48.780
And the archetypal story structure is something like the existence of a pre-existing state
00:01:56.740
So that you might think of that as the state of things going well.
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And that's a state where your perceptions and your plans are sufficiently developed so that
00:02:07.660
when you act them out in the world, not only do you get what you desire, but the story itself
00:02:17.700
Because what happens when you act something out, and you get what you intend, just like
00:02:22.420
when you use a map and get where you're going, not only does that get you to where you're
00:02:26.640
going, but it also validates the plan or the map.
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This is the sort of thing that I was trying to have a discussion with about Sam Harris,
00:02:39.300
because the idea is that we have to orient ourselves in a world where our knowledge is
00:02:47.280
And so the question then is, how can you ever make a judgment about whether or not you're
00:02:51.700
And the answer to that is something like, well, you lay out a plan.
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This is actually an answer to the postmodernist problem of how is it that you determine whether
00:03:02.960
or not your interpretation of the world is, we won't say correct, because that's not
00:03:07.880
But, you know, the postmodernists object, say, with regards to the interpretation of a text,
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that there's a very large number of variations of ways in which that text can be interpreted,
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And it is the same, it's actually a reflection of a deeper claim, which they always, often,
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sometimes also make, which is, well, if that's true for a text, which isn't as complex as
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everything, although it's complex, then it's even more true for everything.
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Which is to say, the world lays itself out in a very complex manner, and you can interpret
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that in a very large number of ways, so who's to say which interpretation is correct?
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And it's tied in with even a deeper problem, which is the problem of perception itself,
00:03:51.740
because if the world is laid out in a manner that's exceptionally complex, then how is it
00:03:59.260
Well, that's partly the question that we're trying to answer, and the answer to that is,
00:04:05.160
well, you have evolved perceptual structures, and they're actually oriented towards specific
00:04:12.540
So your embodiment as a goal-directed entity is part of the solution to the problem of perception.
00:04:21.660
So we could say, well, you come equipped, and this was Kant's objection to pure reason,
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essentially, that the problem is, is the facts don't speak for themselves.
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There's too many facts for them to speak for themselves.
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So you have to overlay on top of them an interpretive framework.
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Well, where does the interpretive framework come from?
00:04:40.340
Well, the right answer to that is something like it evolves, right?
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It's taken three and a half billion years for your perceptual structure, your embodied
00:04:49.140
And it's done that roughly in a trial and error process.
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I don't think that exhausts what's happened over the course of evolution, but it's a good
00:04:58.880
So there's the constraints imposed on your perceptual structures by the necessity of
00:05:05.220
But there's other constraints imposed too that you might regard as subsets of that.
00:05:09.280
One is that because you exist in a cooperative and competitive landscape, the perceptual structures
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and plans that you lay out, we'll say the maps that you lay out, have to be negotiated
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And so that puts stringent constraints on the number of interpretations that you're allowed
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So you can think about this in a Piagetian sense.
00:05:29.260
That is, if there are children in a playground and they're trying to organize themselves to
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And the game is, of course, a perceptual structure and a goal-directed structure and a structure
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And so that constrains the set of possible actions and perceptions in the environment
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And then you say, well, what are the further constraints?
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And the constraints might be, well, let's play the game and see if it's any fun.
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And that means that you have to take the plan that you've organized consensually and then
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lay it out in the actual world and see if when you lay it out in the world, it does what
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In some sense, what you're doing is testing a tool.
00:06:12.100
So the idea that the range of interpretations is infinite and unconstrained turns out to
00:06:20.780
And now that doesn't mean it's easy to figure out how they're constrained.
00:06:25.840
But the technical suggestion that, well, there's an infinite number of equally valid interpretations
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And it's not correct on biological evolutionary grounds.
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And it's also not correct on sociocultural grounds because it has to be negotiated.
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And then, you know, Piaget put a further constraint on that, essentially by saying, well, not only
00:06:46.920
does it have to be a game and a game that attains its ends, but it has to be a game that people
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So it also has to satisfy some element of subjective desire as well.
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It has to be a game that you can play with other people.
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And it has to be a game that, if you play with other people, actually works in the world.
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Well, so much for an infinite array of options.
00:07:15.860
Now, and I think, and that the idea that I've been proposing to you is that what evolved
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mythology does, these representations that we've been dealing with, these archetypal
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And so it sets out a landscape, it sets out a description of the landscape in which the
00:07:38.840
game is going to be played, as well as a description of the game itself.
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And so the landscape is roughly, the core archetype seems to be something like, it's something
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And chaos is represented by the serpentile predator, because we use our predator detection
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circuits to conceptualize the unknown, because what else would we do?
00:08:08.760
That seems, given that we're prey animals, and given our evolutionary history, it's very
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difficult to understand what else we would possibly do, because the critical issue about
00:08:19.120
venturing into the unknown is that you might die, or perhaps a slight variant of that is
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But whatever, those are close enough to the same thing.
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So chaos is what causes your deterioration and death.
00:08:31.020
And there's lots of ways to conceptualize that, but reptilian predator, fire-breathing
00:08:39.240
And so the question is, well, what do you do in the face of that?
00:08:42.400
And one answer is, you build circumscribed enclosures, that's order, and then also you
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act as the builder of circumscribed enclosures.
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Now, the hero is also, though, that's not good enough, because the circumscribed enclosure
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It will inevitably be invaded, either from the outside, or from within, right?
00:09:05.120
And so we've been conceptualizing the predator, the malevolent predator, at multiple levels
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of analysis throughout our evolutionary history, say, but also in our symbolic history, trying
00:09:16.660
to understand the nature of that which invades the enclosure, right?
00:09:20.880
And we can say, well, it's partly external threat, it's partly social threat, but it's
00:09:25.000
also partly the threat that each individual brings to bear on the social structure because
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of our, let's say, our intrinsic malevolence, and so that would be the snakes within.
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And so that accounts for the analogy, the Christian analogy, between the serpent in the
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Garden of Eden and Satan, which is a very, very strange analogy.
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It's not obvious at all why those two things would stack on top of one another, especially
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given that when the creation story originally emerged, in the form I talked to you about
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last week, the story of Adam and Eve, the idea that the serpent in the garden was also
00:09:58.380
something that was associated with the adversary, wasn't an implicit part of the story.
00:10:04.580
It's like, well, what's the worst possible snake?
00:10:09.220
And then a better question is, what do you do about the worst possible snake?
00:10:15.280
But there's other answers, too, like you make sacrifices, right?
00:10:18.480
And that's how you stave off the dragon of temporal chaos, roughly speaking, is that you
00:10:25.800
You see the future as a realm of potential threat, and then you learn to give things
00:10:30.400
up in the present, and somehow that satisfies the future.
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Now, so maybe you're offering sacrifices to God, and you think, well, why does that...
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Well, you've got to think about that psychologically.
00:10:42.480
Well, you could think about the spirit of God the Father as an imagistic representation
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It's the thing that's common across the group, as a spirit, as a psychological force, across
00:11:05.560
Right now, you're sacrificing your time to the spirit of the Great Father, because your
00:11:09.880
assumption is, is that if you do what's diligent, so you're not chasing impulsive
00:11:15.660
pleasure at the moment, unless you're pathologically interested in this class or something like
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that, you're not chasing impulsive interest, you're sacrificing your impulsive interest
00:11:27.100
And so you're offering a sacrifice to that spirit in the hope that you can make a bargain
00:11:31.460
with it, so that it will reward you in the future.
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And that reward will be partly the staving off of insecurity, which is no more than to
00:11:40.300
say that part of the reason that you're getting your degree is because you believe that it'll
00:11:43.840
aid you in finding employment and status and all the other things that will stave off the
00:11:50.820
So, now, those things were, as we've been at pains to point out, is those things were acted
00:11:57.840
out and then represented in image and story long before they could be fully articulated,
00:12:02.340
because we're building our knowledge of ourselves and also our social structures and also the
00:12:07.340
world from the bottom up as well as from the top down.
00:12:10.580
There's an interplay between the two levels of analysis.
00:12:12.940
Okay, and so that's partly the archetypal underpinning.
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And then, with regards to the stories themselves, you're in a map, so to speak, you're using
00:12:24.760
a map, and with any luck, it's detailed enough so that you can use it to get to the place
00:12:31.300
And sometimes you don't, and that means that you have to recalibrate your journey along the
00:12:37.300
map, which, by the way, is exactly what GPS systems do when you go off the pathway, right?
00:12:44.380
That's an anxiety response from the GPS system.
00:12:50.960
Now and then, if you're unfortunate, this very rarely happens anymore, you'll be on a
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And then the GPS system doesn't know what to do.
00:13:00.740
I mean, those are, I'm using GPS for a very specific reason.
00:13:04.880
As far as I'm concerned, those are the closest things we've ever designed to intelligent
00:13:08.380
systems, because they can actually orient, right?
00:13:12.500
And they're unbelievably sophisticated systems, right?
00:13:14.940
Because they rely on a huge satellite network and so on.
00:13:18.140
And they're cybernetic systems, technically speaking.
00:13:20.400
They respond very much like the way that we respond.
00:13:29.520
You try to adjust the resolution of the map so that it's no more complex than it needs to
00:13:37.460
You want minimal resolution, because that enables efficient cognitive processing.
00:13:43.440
Like, when I'm looking at this room, if I look, say, I want to walk down this pathway,
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basically what my mind does, my perceptual field, and you can detect this.
00:13:51.900
If I look straight ahead, I can barely see you people on the periphery.
00:13:58.180
You two, I can tell that you have heads, but that's about it.
00:14:08.100
And even though I can't detect it, at the very periphery of my vision, you guys are black
00:14:12.060
So my color vision disappears at the periphery, even though I can't actually perceive that.
00:14:17.100
So what happens is, if I want to walk down here, this pathway becomes high resolution.
00:14:28.320
And then I find out, well, am I doing this properly?
00:14:33.060
And if I get to the goal, then I've done it properly enough.
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And if, you know, one of you stand up and get in my way, then I'm going to focus on you
00:14:40.760
and assume instantly that I haven't mapped you properly, right?
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I put you in the category of irrelevant entity, when in fact, you happen to be in the category
00:14:53.960
And so, well, so then we inhabit those structures all the time.
00:14:58.800
We're in a structure like that, a perceptual structure.
00:15:01.140
And if it's working, then it's got the archetypal quality of paradise, so to speak.
00:15:07.160
Because its axioms are correct, and it's functional.
00:15:09.820
And then now and then, something comes along, and that's what the snake is, the eternal snake
00:15:14.320
in the garden, that pops up inside a structure, and it turns out that the things that you weren't
00:15:19.960
attending to are the most important things, rather than the least important things.
00:15:28.740
And that can happen at different levels of severity.
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But at the ultimate level of severity, it's apocalyptic, right?
00:15:41.320
And essentially, the story of the Garden of Eden is the story of a traumatic intrusion.
00:15:47.540
And so what happens is that Adam and Eve are living in unconscious bliss, roughly speaking.
00:15:56.660
They're not aware of their own vulnerability or nakedness.
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So they're not suffering from negative emotion.
00:16:02.500
Something pops up that radically expands their vision.
00:16:06.340
And all of a sudden, now, they can apprehend all sorts of things that exist as threats.
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So that's their own nakedness and vulnerability.
00:16:13.680
And temporality itself, because they become aware of the future.
00:16:18.000
That state of being in that paradise is forever gone.
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Is that our perceptions developed to such a degree that we could no longer ignore what was irrelevant.
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Because we discovered, roughly speaking, once we discovered our finite limitations in time and space,
00:16:43.180
we discovered that we were surrounded by infinite threat.
00:16:46.800
And maybe that's why people are so hyper-awake, because threat wakes you up.
00:16:52.220
Well, we're in a constant state of existential threat.
00:16:56.120
Now, the advantage to that is that we take arms up against a sea of troubles, constantly.
00:17:04.500
And we build enclosures, and we take precautions for the future.
00:17:07.940
And we live a very long time, and we generally live quite safe lives, compared to the lives we could live.
00:17:23.480
But you're alive and awake when you're nervous, and it is a form of consciousness-elevating activation.
00:17:32.180
So, the story of Adam and Eve is the story of the eternal fall.
00:17:37.280
It says, look, you exist in these walled enclosures, but there's something that lurks that will always knock you off your feet.
00:17:46.320
And the answer to that has been formulated over very long periods of time.
00:17:49.940
Partly, it's the probability of predation itself.
00:17:53.480
That's the snake, the thing that can come in subtly and undermine you.
00:18:03.400
Expanded upward to include the abstract snake, which is that thing that can undermine your conceptual schemes.
00:18:10.560
So, you have your actual territory, and then you have your abstract territory.
00:18:14.460
And in your actual territory, there are actual snakes.
00:18:17.000
And in your abstract territory, there are abstract snakes, right?
00:18:20.920
And then the worst snake of all is malevolence.
00:18:24.980
And that's, I think that's technically correct.
00:18:27.960
Because one of the things that you view, for example, when you're looking at post-traumatic stress disorder,
00:18:33.020
is that it's almost always the case that someone who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder,
00:18:37.860
which you might think of as a real-life reincarnation of the fall,
00:18:43.960
is that people encounter something malevolent, and it breaks them.
00:18:55.500
But to encounter someone who wishes that upon you, and will work to bring it about,
00:19:03.000
Especially when it also reflects something back to you about yourself.
00:19:07.620
Because if someone else can do that to you, and they're human,
00:19:11.640
that means that you partake of the same essence.
00:19:14.880
Strangely enough, that's actually the cure, to some degree, to post-traumatic stress disorder.
00:19:19.580
Like, if you've been victimized, you're naive, and you've been victimized.
00:19:23.020
The way out of that is to no longer be naive, and to no longer be victimized.
00:19:27.420
And that means that you see this reflected in the Harry Potter idea, for example,
00:19:31.440
that the reason that Harry Potter can withstand Voldemort is because he's got a piece of him.
00:19:38.160
And the way that you keep the psychopaths at bay is to develop the inner psychopaths
00:19:48.860
So it's like a set of tools that you have at your disposal, which is full knowledge of evil.
00:19:55.320
And that does, Nietzsche said, if you look into an abyss for too long,
00:19:58.800
you risk having the abyss gaze back into you, right?
00:20:01.860
The idea is that if you look at something monstrous, you have a tendency to turn into a monster.
00:20:05.780
And people are often very afraid of looking at monstrous things exactly for that reason.
00:20:11.600
And then the question is, well, should you turn into a monster?
00:20:16.420
But you should do it voluntarily and not accidentally.
00:20:20.380
And you should do it with the good in mind rather than falling prey to it by possession, essentially,
00:20:37.760
And once you're on that road, you go down that a little bit farther, man.
00:20:42.280
Well, you end up fantasizing in your basement about shooting up the local high school and then killing yourself, right?
00:20:47.960
Because that's sort of the ultimate end of that line of pathological reasoning.
00:20:51.880
Being should be eradicated because of its intrinsic evil.
00:20:56.880
And I'll cap it off with an indication of my own lack of worth just to hammer the point home, right?
00:21:02.560
And if I can garner a little post-posthumous fame along the way,
00:21:06.820
well, that'll satisfy my primordial primate dominance hierarchy imaginings, too, at least in fantasy.
00:21:13.300
So, you know, it's the full package if you want to go down that route.
00:21:16.180
And, of course, people don't like to think about that sort of thing, and it's no bloody wonder.
00:21:19.720
But without the capability for mayhem, you're a potential victim to mayhem.
00:21:28.320
It should be sheathed, but you need to have it.
00:21:30.600
And it's very frequently the case, if you treat someone with post-traumatic stress disorder,
00:21:37.160
You have to help them develop a very articulated philosophy of evil.
00:21:41.920
Because otherwise their brain bothers them over and over and over.
00:21:52.080
You don't want to have that happen to you again.
00:21:57.520
We know the price of that from the Egyptian myth, right?
00:22:07.840
And then the cure for that is the movement down into the underworld and the revitalization of the father.
00:22:12.760
That's the identification with the force that created culture, right?
00:22:21.360
Maybe you can withstand tragedy and malevolence.
00:22:29.240
And you need to be able to withstand malevolence.
00:22:31.620
Because those are the forces that are always working against you.
00:22:34.640
And so this is associated with the Jungian idea of incorporation of the shadow, right?
00:22:42.620
We know how predators work with regards to children even.
00:22:45.260
If you're a pedophilic predator and you're looking at a landscape of children, the child that you're going to go after is the one that's timid and won't fight back.
00:22:59.100
And predatory people in general are exactly like that, man.
00:23:03.460
They're not going to attack someone who's going to fight back.
00:23:06.680
In fact, the issue is likely not to even come up.
00:23:10.540
They're going to be looking for someone, one way or another, that cannot conceptualize what they are.
00:23:21.260
And so if you're treating someone with post-traumatic stress disorder, first, they need an introduction to the philosophy of malevolence.
00:23:27.780
And second, they have to learn to become dangerous.
00:23:33.320
They get these recurrent thoughts about their vulnerability in the face of malevolence and their own naivety.
00:23:40.720
Because, by definition, if someone psychopathic has exploited you, you're too naive.
00:23:53.020
A perfectly reasonable objection doesn't solve your problem.
00:23:59.020
The internal problem is, how do you deal with tragedy and malevolence?
00:24:07.460
Unsurprising, especially if you were overprotected as a child.
00:24:12.560
Because the snakes are going to come into the garden, no matter what you do.
00:24:16.780
And so then you, instead of trying to keep the damn snakes away, what you do is you arm your child with something that can help them chop them into pieces and make the world out of them.
00:24:25.720
So the trick for human thriving in the face of suffering and malevolence is strength, not protection.
00:24:37.000
We know, for example, that if you treat people with exposure therapy for agoraphobia, which is, roughly speaking, the fear of chaos, I would say, the fear of everything.
00:24:50.680
Because with an agoraphobic, see, what happens to them is the fall.
00:24:59.480
It never enters the theater of their imagination, and it's because they're protected from it.
00:25:05.000
This often happens to women in their 40s, because they're the people most likely to develop agoraphobia.
00:25:12.380
They've been protected from chaos by authority their entire life.
00:25:15.820
So maybe they had an overprotective father, and then they went to an overprotective boyfriend, and then they went to an overprotective husband.
00:25:22.740
And maybe they were willing to be subjugated to all three of those because of the protection, right?
00:25:30.240
They stay weak and dependent, and maybe they have to because that's the only way they can appeal to the person who's hyperprotective.
00:25:36.700
But the price they pay for that is that they're not sufficiently competent.
00:25:40.300
And then something happens in their life, often in their 40s.
00:25:43.300
They develop heart palpitations, maybe as a consequence of menopause.
00:25:47.520
Their heart starts to beat erratically, and they think, oh, no, death.
00:25:51.700
It's like, well, who are you going to talk to about that, right?
00:25:57.180
Or maybe their friend gets divorced, or maybe their sister dies, or something like that.
00:26:01.000
It brings up the specter of mortality, and maybe the specter of malevolence and mortality, and it brings it up in a way that authority, recourse to authority, cannot solve.
00:26:13.440
They go out, they get afraid, they feel their heart beating.
00:26:15.740
Then they get afraid of their heart beating because they think, oh, no, I'm going to die.
00:26:19.260
And they think, oh, no, I'm going to die, and I'm going to make a fool of myself while I'm doing it and attract a lot of attention.
00:26:25.520
So the two big fears come up, mortality and social judgment.
00:26:31.120
It's like fight or flight's gone out of control.
00:26:34.980
Then they start to avoid the places they've had a panic attack.
00:26:37.960
Then they end up not being able to go anywhere.
00:26:47.240
Well, there's no saying, no, there's no Tiamat.
00:26:54.460
They've had a direct contact with the threat of mortality and social judgment.
00:26:58.640
They've met the terrible mother, and they've met the terrible father.
00:27:09.860
The fact that you think it's safe means that you were living in an unconscious bubble that was sort of provided to you by your culture.
00:27:21.660
Well, the answer is you retreat until you're in your house and there's nowhere you can go.
00:27:28.400
And your life is hell because you can't function.
00:27:31.200
The alternative is let's take apart the things you're afraid of.
00:27:35.320
Let's expose you to them, you know, carefully and programmatically.
00:27:39.620
And then you'll learn that you're actually tougher than you think.
00:27:46.580
And maybe you didn't want to take on the responsibility because, you know, people play a role in their own demise, so to speak.
00:27:52.760
When you had opportunity to go out and explore or withdraw because you were afraid, you chose to withdraw because you were afraid.
00:27:59.960
So it's not only that you were overprotected often, it's that you were willing to take advantage of the fact that you were overprotected and run back there whenever you had the opportunity.
00:28:10.240
You know, so maybe you're a kid in the playground, right?
00:28:12.320
And you're having some trouble with other kids.
00:28:14.020
And you know in the back of your mind, I should deal with this myself.
00:28:18.180
But you go and tell your mom and get her to intervene.
00:28:22.240
You know that you're breaking the social contract.
00:28:26.640
You run off to an authority figure and hide behind the great father, right, roughly speaking.
00:28:32.240
Well, the problem with that is you don't learn how to do it yourself.
00:28:35.240
So then you have to relearn it painfully when you're 40.
00:28:45.220
So 10 is, make a list of 10 things you're afraid of.
00:28:48.340
The least, the thing you're least afraid of, we'll call number 10.
00:28:54.340
Okay, well, let's look at a picture of an elevator.
00:29:00.280
Let's go out to an elevator and let you watch the terrible jaws of death open.
00:29:04.540
Because that's how you're responding to it, symbolically.
00:29:08.180
And you're going to do that at the closest proximity you can manage.
00:29:16.500
You're nervous as hell, especially from an anticipatory perspective.
00:29:20.780
You go out, you stop, you watch it happen, and you actually calm down.
00:29:25.020
You do that 10 times and it no longer bothers you.
00:29:29.620
But more importantly than that, you've learned that you could withstand the threat of death.
00:29:35.960
And then you move a little closer, and then you move a little closer, and then you move a little closer.
00:29:40.040
And finally, you're back in what's no longer the elevator from a symbolic perspective.
00:29:49.280
And you learn, hmm, turns out I can withstand that.
00:29:52.700
And then you're much more together, much more confident.
00:29:57.460
And that's often one of the things that often happens in situations like that.
00:30:00.780
I've seen this multiple times, is that if you run someone through an exposure training process like that,
00:30:07.260
and toughen them up, they'll often start standing up to people around them in a way they never did before,
00:30:12.380
because they wouldn't stand up for themselves before,
00:30:14.440
because they weren't willing to undermine the protection.
00:30:18.560
See, if you're protecting me, I can't bother you, because I can't afford to forsake your protection.
00:30:27.120
So if I'm going to play that game, I'm going to hide behind you, then I can't challenge you.
00:30:32.500
So that's no good, because that's sometimes why people, you see this with guys very frequently,
00:30:38.060
they're still deathly afraid of their father's judgment when they're in their 30s or 40s.
00:30:44.160
Well, because they still want to believe that there's someone out there that knows.
00:30:47.440
And so they're willing to accept the subjugation,
00:30:50.400
because it doesn't force them to challenge the idea that there's someone out there that knows.
00:30:54.560
Because that's the advantage of having your father as a judge, right?
00:31:04.700
You don't, until you realize that, you're not an adult, right?
00:31:07.900
That's really technically the point of realization of adulthood,
00:31:11.220
is that no one actually knows what you should do more than you do.
00:31:14.600
I mean, it's a horrible realization, because what the hell do you know?
00:31:18.120
It's a terrible realization, and people will often pick slavery,
00:31:22.340
permanent slavery, to the spirit of the great father, let's say, over that realization.
00:31:28.300
But the problem with it is, is that there's more to you than you think.
00:31:31.480
And so if you continue to hide behind that figure,
00:31:34.520
then you never have a chance to understand that there's more to you than you think.
00:31:39.740
Maybe there's enough to you so that you can actually withstand the threat of mortality without collapsing.
00:31:47.560
Maybe even withstand the threat of malevolence without collapsing.
00:31:55.880
It's exactly the sort of question that you address in the psychotherapeutic process.
00:32:03.100
And the answer is often in the affirmative, because people can get unbelievably tough.
00:32:08.560
And you know that, because people work in emergency wards in hospitals, right?
00:32:12.380
Or they work in palliative care wards, or they work as mortuary assistants.
00:32:20.020
You know, or they're on the front line of police investigation into, you know,
00:32:25.540
And so they're confronting malevolence on a regular basis.
00:32:32.700
And some people do them without even being damaged by them.
00:32:36.680
Although that's a harder thing, because you can see horrible things, you know,
00:32:41.860
So, so I would say the story in, the story of Adam and Eve is a meta-story.
00:32:54.500
Because Adam and Eve are in this unconscious paradise, and then it collapses.
00:32:58.440
And that happens to every potential story, right?
00:33:03.080
He said, look, imagine that you live within a belief system.
00:33:06.300
And then something arises to challenge the belief system.
00:33:09.520
Not only does the belief system collapse, but something worse happens.
00:33:16.560
And that's the road to not, now it doesn't have to,
00:33:18.780
because you can jump from one belief system to another.
00:33:21.060
But sometimes that doesn't work, is that you do a meta-critique,
00:33:24.400
and you say, oh, I was living in this protective structure,
00:33:29.540
Okay, one alternative is, jump to another protective structure.
00:33:33.820
Another alternative is, protective structures themselves are not to be trusted.
00:33:46.700
That's difficult, or you can do what Jung would regard as a soul-damaging move,
00:33:51.500
and you can sacrifice your new knowledge and re-identify with something rigid and restricted,
00:33:56.980
which is what I would say is happening, to some degree, with the people in Europe,
00:34:01.760
who are turning to a regressive nationalism as an alternative to the current state of chaos.
00:34:08.220
It's like, I know that people need to identify with local groups.
00:34:11.680
I understand that, but they risk the danger of making the state the ultimate god.
00:34:17.360
And that's order, but that's not a good replacement for chaos.
00:34:26.620
You want to stand in the middle somehow, and mediate between the two,
00:34:32.040
Because then it isn't that you've discovered a safe place.
00:34:36.080
Because even the bloody right-wingers are after a safe place, right?
00:34:44.180
And the next issue is, do you really want a safe place?
00:34:48.360
You want to be so weak that you want to be protected from threat?
00:34:58.980
You should be confronting danger and the unknown and malevolence.
00:35:02.140
And the reason for that, too, is this is the weird paradox.
00:35:05.940
And I believe this is the paradox, first of all, that was discovered in part by Buddha,
00:35:10.880
but also laid forth very clearly in Christianity,
00:35:13.600
which is that the solution to the problem of tragedy and malevolence is the willingness to face them.
00:35:31.500
Well, because the more you confront the two of them, the more you grow.
00:35:35.300
And maybe you can grow so that you're actually larger than the chaos and malevolence itself.
00:35:39.420
And you think, well, what's the evidence for that?
00:35:45.920
Like, every time you expose your child to something new, a playground, what are they exposed to?
00:35:53.780
Now, there's more to it than that, obviously, because kids play and they promote each other
00:36:00.140
But in the playground itself, there is the complexity of the social structure
00:36:07.360
And you throw your kid in there and you say, adapt, and they do.
00:36:21.160
Can you scale that up to from the chaos and order and malevolence of the playground
00:36:32.180
Well, I don't think there's any reason to answer that in the negative.
00:36:35.680
So, because we don't know the full extent of a human being.
00:36:41.580
So, in the Buddha story, for example, what happens after...
00:36:45.060
So, Buddha's world collapses in the same way that Adam and Eve's world collapses.
00:36:48.700
It's a consequence of repetitive exposure to mortality and death.
00:36:52.840
What happens to Buddha is he realizes that the little protected city that his father made for him,
00:36:59.360
the walled garden, it's exactly the same motif that's in this Adam and Eve story,
00:37:13.760
Which is exactly what happens to children, is that they go out, they discover a limit,
00:37:21.020
They run out, they discover a limit, they run back.
00:37:24.000
At some point, they run out, they discover a limit, they run back,
00:37:28.840
Because they've hit the same limit that the parents hit.
00:37:31.700
Which is like, well, what are you going to do with your life?
00:37:34.780
How are you going to operate in this archetypal universe?
00:37:39.480
Well, they can say you identify with the proper archetypal figures.
00:37:42.660
They do that, they at least act that out for you.
00:37:44.960
But at some point, it's a problem that they cannot solve for you without making you weaker.
00:37:52.160
So it's an interesting thing that I've learned in therapy.
00:37:55.480
Because one of the things you have to learn as a therapist is,
00:37:58.440
how do you not take your client's problems home with you?
00:38:02.220
It's a very common existential problem that beginning therapists face.
00:38:08.860
It's like, well, you're dealing with people all the time who have serious problems.
00:38:11.900
Sometimes it's mental illness, although less frequently than you'd think.
00:38:15.420
And sometimes it's just that they're having a good catastrophe, right?
00:38:18.700
Their parents have cancer, or something like that.
00:38:21.480
Or their father has Alzheimer's, and they're unemployed.
00:38:23.440
Or they have a drug problem, or they have a schizophrenic son.
00:38:31.200
And so people are discussing those with you all the time.
00:38:34.420
How do you avoid being crushed by that, or avoid taking it home?
00:38:37.760
And the answer to that is, you don't steal the problem.
00:38:44.720
If you come and talk to me, I'll help you figure out how to solve them.
00:38:52.220
Because what we're trying to do in therapy is, number one, solve your problem.
00:38:56.620
Number two, turn you into a great solver of problems.
00:39:00.440
And the second one is way more important than the first one.
00:39:03.500
And so you never solve someone's problem by removing from them the opportunity to solve their problem.
00:39:17.420
We're talking about archetypal representations.
00:39:19.980
It's like, I'll protect you at the cost of your ability to protect yourself.
00:39:38.860
And it disarms them in the face of chaos and malevolence.
00:39:43.960
You're going to send someone out unarmed in a world like that?
00:39:50.260
And if people aren't strong enough to manage it, then they get resentful.
00:39:53.160
And then, you know, you get the downhill spiral that goes along with that.
00:40:01.640
You have a map, but it's insufficient, and things will come up to disrupt it.
00:40:09.580
That's what happens to the Buddha, and that's what happens to Adam and Eve.
00:40:12.640
And the rest of the biblical stories are actually an attempt to put that back together.
00:40:17.560
Now, that's been assembled, as I said, it's been assembled over centuries, right?
00:40:26.400
The ever-present reality of the apocalyptic fall.
00:40:33.160
It's the insufficiency of all potential conceptual schemes.
00:40:37.300
Your conceptual schemes are insufficient to deal with the complexity of the world.
00:40:49.440
Instead, on your ability to actively generate conceptual schemes in the face of chaos and malevolence.
00:40:56.600
And so that makes you someone that identifies with your creative capacity for articulation and action in the face of the unknown, rather than some formulaic approach to the territory.
00:41:10.820
And that, and that, and that, the idea is that that elevates your character to the point where you can withstand tragedy and malevolence without becoming corrupt.
00:41:19.420
And that provides a permanent solution to the problem.
00:41:22.860
Well, then you might say, cynically, what's your evidence that that's a permanent solution?
00:41:28.300
And the answer to that is, well, the evidence isn't all in yet.
00:41:32.020
First of all, because people only live that way partially.
00:41:35.700
And so we haven't put the hypothesis to the full test.
00:41:39.980
And second, we don't know what our limitations are.
00:41:45.100
And they're both greater and lesser than we imagined.
00:41:48.720
Because, you know, you have to ask yourself, like, if people stopped adding voluntarily to the misery of the world and devoted themselves to setting things straight, setting themselves straight and setting the things around them straight, what would happen?
00:42:02.720
And the answer to that is, well, there'd be a hell of a lot less unnecessary misery in the world.
00:42:10.840
But apart from that, there's very little that we can say.
00:42:13.860
Could we overcome the catastrophe of mortality?
00:42:20.820
Could we make the world a place where no one was suffering any more than necessary and still allow the world to exist?
00:42:26.700
Well, possibly, because we don't know the limitations of our capacity.
00:42:30.100
We're only running at 40%, if that, I would say.
00:42:34.480
We don't make full use of all the people that are in the world.
00:42:37.180
We don't have our situation set up so that the gifts that they could offer to everyone are fully realized.
00:42:51.520
And so I would say this is something also that's...
00:42:55.180
One of the things that's really interesting about the Old Testament Jews,
00:42:58.100
this is, I think, one of the reasons that their book has become so central,
00:43:01.600
is because what happens in the Old Testament after the fall is that Israel produces a series of states, right?
00:43:10.740
And then a rise of another state and then a fall.
00:43:12.560
So it's the same thing, except it's happening at a political level.
00:43:22.660
I think that happens six times in the Old Testament.
00:43:24.780
And one of the things that's very interesting is the reaction of the Jews.
00:43:32.480
Instead of taking the Cain and Abel route, so...
00:43:34.640
And I'm going to tell you the Cain and Abel story right away.
00:43:36.820
Instead of taking the Cain and Abel route, they always say,
00:43:39.260
if the state collapsed, it was because we did something wrong.
00:43:42.620
That's very different than saying, you know, it's arbitrary fate.
00:43:46.480
It's the nature of arbitrary fate, or the structure of reality, that we're doomed to collapse into chaos.
00:43:54.340
And that's an indication of the corruption of being.
00:44:06.380
You'll start to work for the destruction of being.
00:44:09.800
The alternative is to say, this terrible thing happened, and somehow it's my fault.
00:44:15.620
Well, at least that opens you up the pathway to doing something about it, and maybe it's actually the case.
00:44:20.800
Maybe terrible things happen, because you're just not who you should be.
00:44:25.040
At least it's a... you know that's true to some degree, right?
00:44:28.900
Because things happen to you all the time, and you think, well, you know,
00:44:31.640
if I just would have played that game straight, and if I would have put this thing in order, that wouldn't have happened.
00:44:40.240
Dostoevsky said at one point that every human being was not only responsible for everything that happened to him or her,
00:44:45.980
but also simultaneously responsible for everything that happened to everyone else.
00:44:51.000
Now, it's a very... it's a... I would say it's almost a hallucinogenic idea, right?
00:44:55.420
It's a transcendent idea, and it can go very wrong.
00:44:59.360
Sometimes depressed people, for example, get hyper-responsible for what's happened, and just crushes them.
00:45:05.520
And so it's a mode of thinking that can produce its attendant pathologies.
00:45:10.580
But there's something about it that's... there's something about it that's metaphysically true.
00:45:16.900
So... all right, so I'm going to tell you the story of Cain and Abel.
00:45:23.800
It's only about a paragraph long, which is very interesting, because it... it's one of these examples where there's an...
00:45:32.360
There's so much condensed into it that it's almost unbelievable.
00:45:36.020
And there's even ambiguity condensed into it, which is... which is very, very interesting,
00:45:40.820
because it actually makes the story more complex and sophisticated.
00:45:45.100
Now, the first thing... I want to tell you some things about the story first.
00:45:48.380
So we've got the original paradisal state, and then the collapse.
00:45:52.140
And so now, metaphysically speaking, we're in the collapse.
00:45:56.040
We're in the... we're in the post-fall condition.
00:45:58.700
We're still occupying a mythological landscape, right?
00:46:01.560
This isn't history as we normally understand it.
00:46:04.920
So when we talk about Cain and Abel, Cain and Abel, we're actually talking about the first two real human beings.
00:46:12.460
Because Adam and Eve, A, were created by God, and B, were in paradise.
00:46:17.020
And so that's not the normative condition of human beings, right?
00:46:21.040
That's a... that's a special time that's outside of normal time and space.
00:46:25.640
Cain and Abel, by contrast, they're in history.
00:46:28.200
Because in some sense, history actually starts a couple of times in the Old Testament, right?
00:46:32.600
It starts with the creation of being, it starts with the formation of the garden, it starts with the fall, it starts with Cain and Abel, it starts over again with Noah, and then it starts with Abraham, which is really where what we would recognize more as conventional history begins.
00:46:46.840
So, there's a number of starts of history, but this is one of them.
00:47:01.400
You see that hostile brother motif, well, it's an archetypal motif.
00:47:05.340
And the hostile brothers are the part of you that's striving for the light, that's one half, and the part of you that's embracing the darkness.
00:47:14.260
And so that's part of you, it's part of the social structure, that's Seth and Osiris.
00:47:20.420
It's part of the natural order, in some sense, that's the benevolent and destructive elements of nature, right?
00:47:27.640
You see that negativity running through all the archetypal representations.
00:47:31.840
But Cain and Abel are the hostile brothers, and Cain is roughly that part of you that says, oh, to hell with it.
00:47:41.320
And that means you'll work for your own pain and destruction, at the same time that you're working for the pain and destruction, not only of your brother, but more particularly of the brother that you admire.
00:47:52.540
Because that's actually a lot more entertaining, right?
00:47:54.900
If you're going to become destructive, and you go destroy something bad, that hardly qualifies as destruction.
00:48:02.160
What you want to do is find something great, and destroy that.
00:48:09.780
None of this putting punishment where it deserves to be.
00:48:14.060
What you want to do, and this is partly why the story of Christ is archetypal.
00:48:18.300
And an archetypal story is one you cannot push beyond.
00:48:23.040
What's the worst possible punishment meted out for the least, the most innocent person?
00:48:30.620
So you define most innocent person, you can do that any way you want.
00:48:35.180
Define most innocent person, define worst possible punishment, conjoin the two things, you get an archetypal story.
00:48:41.680
And the reason for that is you can't push beyond it.
00:48:45.160
And so, if you want to destroy something, you want to destroy an ideal, not something that's flawed.
00:48:50.640
And so Cain and Abel are set up exactly that way.
00:48:53.300
So, I'll read you the story, and I'll interleave some interpretations along with it.
00:48:57.840
So, and Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived, and bore Cain, and said, I have gotten a man from the Lord.
00:49:08.540
And Abel was a keeper of sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground.
00:49:13.060
Okay, so Abel's a shepherd, and Cain is a farmer.
00:49:18.820
The shepherd is an archetypal symbol, because the shepherd is the leader of a flock.
00:49:23.780
And the shepherd is the heroic leader of a flock, and the reason this is Middle Eastern mythology, let's say,
00:49:31.280
You took your slingshot and your stick, and you defended your nice, juicy, plump, delicious sheep against lions.
00:49:40.100
You were a tough cookie if you were a shepherd, because, well, you were acting as the guardian of...
00:49:46.640
You were acting as the guardian against predation, roughly speaking.
00:49:51.380
I mean, well, you can just think about it for a minute.
00:49:53.960
It's to think about fighting off a lion with a slingshot, or with a bow and arrow, or with a spear.
00:50:00.060
I mean, you have to have a lot of courage to manage that, especially successfully.
00:50:04.660
So Abel was a keeper of sheep, and Cain was a tiller of the ground, which isn't as heroic a role.
00:50:09.820
And so right off the bat, you get this dichotomy between the two roles.
00:50:14.700
It's also of great interest that Cain is the older brother, and Abel is the younger brother.
00:50:19.340
And you see that very frequently in mythology, because the older brother is the one that's privileged by status.
00:50:25.080
So he's got privilege, Cain, because he's the elder brother.
00:50:29.300
That also means that if there are possessions to be handed down the generations, the older brother gets them.
00:50:35.840
Now, interestingly enough, Cain has privilege, but he's not the one that's favored by God.
00:50:40.680
And I think that's absolutely brilliant that it's set up that way, because it's actually Abel, who doesn't have the right that the firstborn has,
00:50:49.540
who actually turns into the person who's the proper manifestation of the ideal.
00:51:02.400
And partly because one of the things that you'll find, because many of you will be well off when you have children,
00:51:08.460
is one of the problems with being reasonably wealthy when you have children is that you deprive them of privation.
00:51:14.760
Because a lot of what makes people mature is necessity.
00:51:19.800
And if you have, for example, if you have more money than you know what to do with, roughly speaking,
00:51:24.840
it's very difficult to say no to your children when they want something.
00:51:32.700
Well, what makes you think that that's what you should do?
00:51:38.580
You devalue what you want, and your desires continue to grow.
00:51:44.760
So it's not obvious at all that providing people with an excess, let's say, of privilege,
00:51:49.840
is something that's good for them from a psychological perspective.
00:51:56.260
And if you're fortunate, it becomes very difficult to deprive your children properly.
00:52:05.440
And that's what happens when you get spoiled children, roughly speaking.
00:52:11.420
Well, that's not a good lesson, because that won't work in the world.
00:52:17.240
And in process of time, it came to pass, that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto the Lord.
00:52:24.940
And Abel he also brought of the firstlings of his flock, and of the fat thereof.
00:52:29.220
And the Lord had respect unto Abel and his offering.
00:52:32.140
But unto Cain and his offering he had no respect.
00:52:35.120
And Cain was very wroth, angry, and his countenance fell.
00:52:38.540
Okay, so again, there's a tremendous amount packed into that.
00:52:42.440
This is the first time that we see the motif of sacrifice, right?
00:52:46.660
And so I mentioned to you before how these archaic people conceptualized the world, right?
00:52:51.860
It's a dome with a disk of land, and underneath that a disk of water, fresh,
00:53:00.880
And then up in the heavens, that's where God is.
00:53:04.980
And so God's up in the sky, and we talked about why that might be.
00:53:08.380
And part of that is, well, when you look at the night sky,
00:53:11.160
you look at what transcends your current reality, and you look at what inspires awe.
00:53:17.220
So there's a God exists where awe is experienced.
00:53:21.820
That's a perfectly reasonable hypothesis when you think that what you're trying to do
00:53:27.020
is formulate what constitutes the transcendent.
00:53:29.360
Because if you exist within a conceptual structure,
00:53:32.360
and you encounter that which is outside the conceptual structure,
00:53:37.800
And that's a combination of fear, paralysis, right?
00:53:43.800
And you can experience that, for example, if you listen to a great piece of music.
00:53:51.780
Because you're a prey animal, and you just puffed up to look bigger.
00:53:59.360
So when you see a cat puff up because a big dog is in front of it,
00:54:08.100
So when you encounter that which transcends your limited sphere of apprehension,
00:54:14.400
You look at the night sky, that's what happens.
00:54:17.320
And all sorts of things that we do can evoke that sense.
00:54:20.460
And so they located the transcendent value in that which inspired awe.
00:54:27.920
Now, you can argue about the utility of the personification, right?
00:54:33.300
Because God the Father was personified in human form.
00:54:38.180
Because as we already found in the Old Testament, there's an association between whatever God is,
00:54:44.780
Yahweh or Elohim, and creating order out of chaos, and something about each individual human being.
00:54:52.060
And so I don't believe that the personification of God the Father in the Old Testament is archaic and primitive at all.
00:55:00.320
I think it's one of the most sophisticated things that people ever developed.
00:55:03.740
The idea is that the ultimate transcendent value is the capacity to generate order out of chaos,
00:55:12.400
And that each person has that as an essential element of their being.
00:55:18.480
That is one hell of a vicious conceptualization, and I would also say it's the bedrock upon which our legal system rests.
00:55:29.500
And there are things that you may say you don't believe, but you act them out all the time.
00:55:33.580
In fact, if you didn't act them out, people would set you straight very, very rapidly.
00:55:38.120
Because basically, what other people want from you, even though they don't conceptualize it in these terms,
00:55:43.280
is that you accord them the respect due the incarnation of the Logos.
00:55:47.600
That's exactly what it means to interact with someone properly.
00:55:51.680
So you can say what you want about what you believe.
00:55:58.880
So now we have this conceptualization of what's transcendent that's emerged,
00:56:07.880
That which inspires awe is that which is transcendent.
00:56:11.260
And it's associated with these underlying ideas about the creation of order out of chaos,
00:56:15.860
and the instantiation of that spirit in human beings.
00:56:20.580
And then we have this other idea, which we already talked about,
00:56:23.360
which is that there's a patriarchal or paternal spirit that represents the community at large stretched across time.
00:56:30.240
But you can think about that as the spirit of the ancestors.
00:56:33.180
So it's the past, it's the present, but that's also projected into the future.
00:56:36.860
That's the thing you bargain with for your life in the future.
00:56:44.360
Because the spirit of my culture will reward me in the future.
00:56:55.700
Chimpanzees don't sacrifice the present for the future.
00:57:00.840
how long did it take human beings to figure out that there was a future?
00:57:07.800
We didn't go from chimpanzee to fully articulated human being in one step.
00:57:13.140
It was accreted knowledge that was extraordinarily painful.
00:57:19.860
Something like, storing up goods for the future helps us live.
00:57:32.420
You were barely scraping out a living doing that.
00:57:36.720
All right, so now it's winter, and you've got your damn seeds in your cellar.
00:57:43.680
Or are you going to wait and plant them again in the spring?
00:57:50.500
Well, some of the people who decided to save them died.
00:57:53.800
Well, let's say more of the people who decided to eat them died.
00:57:58.800
And so this sort of knowledge was gathered in unbelievable agony.
00:58:04.160
You don't get what you have, what you want right now.
00:58:07.980
Because you're very much accustomed to getting what you want all the time right now.
00:58:13.040
You know, compared to people who live from hand to mouth.
00:58:15.360
But back when things were much rougher, the idea that you had to sacrifice something of value now to be paid off in the future, man, that was a rough thing to accept.
00:58:28.780
They figured out that you could make an offering of something you valued, and that might help set the world straight.
00:58:42.180
You know, when I look at that cup, part of the looking is this.
00:58:48.840
It's the adjustment of my body to the shape of the cup.
00:58:53.700
Well, one of Piaget's great observations is that we use our bodies to represent things long before we understand what it is that we're representing.
00:59:03.200
Which is to say no more than we act things out.
00:59:09.780
And the sacrificial ritual is a drama that points to a higher psychological truth.
00:59:16.280
And the higher psychological truth is let go of what you value now, and perhaps that will pay off multi-manifold in the future.
00:59:27.220
And then you might say, well, who are you making a bargain with?
00:59:34.380
Because let's say I have something of value in a social organization.
00:59:42.060
And I'm going to let it go because I'm relying on a corresponding reward or a greater reward in the future.
00:59:49.100
It's a contractual relationship with other people.
00:59:54.120
It's that we've organized ourselves into a social structure.
00:59:56.780
And we're willing to maintain the integrity of the social structure across time so that if I give up something now, I can be paid for it in the future.
01:00:07.080
And the deal is we're going to try to keep the future the same as the present so that those contracts can be met in the future.
01:00:23.580
It's a promise from the community that the labor that you invested can be stored and then brought forward for your own purposes in the future.
01:00:38.960
So the thing you're sacrificing to is the spirit of society that produces the social contract.
01:00:45.840
And so that's conceptualized as God the Father.
01:00:56.080
So it's what's common across all the members of the dominance hierarchy across time.
01:01:04.600
Well, what the hell do you think you're doing when you make a contract?
01:01:09.940
It's the manifestation of that patriarchal spirit across time and space.
01:01:16.100
Well, so back 4,000 years ago, 5,000 years ago, however old this story is, it's probably older than that.
01:01:22.440
This is the best people could do with regards to realization.
01:01:25.820
And they got it quite right because they also noted that God was happier if you actually sacrificed something of value.
01:01:32.360
And so there's a tremendous complexity in that idea because one of the things I could say, and this is something Jung pointed out, let's say you're miserable and unhappy.
01:01:47.820
So we could say, well, maybe it's a relationship that you have.
01:01:51.680
Maybe it's a relationship with your parents, right?
01:01:54.420
And the relationship is pathological, but you're locked into it.
01:01:57.980
And no wonder, because it's a relationship with your parents.
01:02:07.440
And the idea is that, well, that'll clear the future for you.
01:02:10.460
Well, very frequently when people are suffering terribly, not always, because sometimes you just suffer stupidly, blindly, and without recourse.
01:02:22.960
But sometimes the reason that you're suffering is because you just won't let go of the thing that's biting you.
01:02:31.400
I can't stop communicating with my mother, who phones me three times a day, every day of my life, and never says anything that isn't unbelievably critical and demeaning.
01:02:45.480
The funny thing, too, often when people let something like that go, it goes away, sorts itself out, and then comes back.
01:02:54.060
But unless they're willing to let it go, to sacrifice it, they make no headway whatsoever.
01:02:58.880
And so one of the rules is, if people are impeding your development, you sacrifice your relationship with them.
01:03:14.120
In process of time it came to pass that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto the Lord.
01:03:18.480
And Abel he also brought of the firstlings of his flock, and of the fat thereof.
01:03:30.160
But we do know something about Abel's offering.
01:03:32.340
And what we know is that, by the standards of the time, it's a high quality offering.
01:03:40.800
I mean, you know, we think of fat as a dietary danger.
01:03:44.700
But if you're hungry, that's really wrong, right?
01:03:50.040
And so what's happening is, the story points out quite clearly that what Abel decides to offer to God is of high quality.
01:04:04.460
Well, you know, this is back again thinking from an archaic perspective.
01:04:13.860
And so, but people knew, because they'd mastered fire, that smoke and savour rose.
01:04:19.120
And so you can detect the quality of an offering as a consequence of burning.
01:04:23.460
And then that would go up, the spirit of the fire would go up to the sky.
01:04:27.240
And God could detect whether or not your offering was of reasonable quality.
01:04:33.820
But you don't want to make the assumption that the people who were our forebears were stupid,
01:04:38.100
just because they thought using metaphors that aren't the same as our metaphors.
01:04:42.440
They were still mapping out the damn territory.
01:04:45.320
You know, and you, look, you can read a book like you're above the authors of the book.
01:04:51.180
Or you can read a book as if it might have something to teach you.
01:04:54.660
And I would say, well, sometimes the book isn't worth reading.
01:04:58.420
But if a book has been around for a very long period of time,
01:05:01.680
and a very large number of people have thought that perhaps there's something in it,
01:05:06.940
So, and it's a tricky thing, and it might also depend on how you read it.
01:05:12.100
But I found that this sort of investigation was a lot more useful
01:05:15.580
if I started from the presupposition that maybe there was something I didn't know.
01:05:22.280
For example, I taught a first year course about 10 years ago on the psychology of religion.
01:05:27.280
And it was so interesting dealing with the 18-year-old students
01:05:29.700
because they were completely dismissive of religious ideas.
01:05:33.640
And I thought, God, you guys, you don't know anything.
01:05:36.860
And you have this specific kind of blindness that a set of very intelligent social psychologists
01:05:41.920
also identified, which was blindness, blindness.
01:05:45.200
Because it actually turns out that the least, the less you know about a topic,
01:05:49.860
the more you overestimate the quality of your knowledge.
01:05:52.980
And so I thought, well, we're in this situation.
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01:08:40.300
So last week, I told you, I offered you an interpretation of two foundational stories, right?
01:09:08.220
Well, more than two, but roughly speaking, two.
01:09:14.500
The creation stories, because there's two of them in Genesis, and then also the story of the Buddha.
01:09:20.560
And I was presenting you with a proposition, and it's a multi-layered proposition.
01:09:26.900
The first proposition is that the archetypal story structure that we've already been discussing is reflected in detail in those stories.
01:09:37.140
And the archetypal story structure is something like the existence of a pre-existing state where things are roughly functional.
01:09:44.880
So that you might think of that as the state of things going well, and that's a state where your perceptions and your plans are sufficiently developed,
01:09:55.640
so that when you act them out in the world, not only do you get what you desire, but the story itself validates itself through your actions, right?
01:10:06.040
Because what happens when you act something out, and you get what you intend, just like when you use a map and get where you're going,
01:10:13.240
not only does that get you to where you're going, but it also validates the plan or the map.
01:10:23.780
This is the sort of thing that I was trying to have a discussion with about Sam Harris,
01:10:27.520
because the idea is that we have to orient ourselves in a world where our knowledge is always insufficient.
01:10:35.660
And so the question then is, how can you ever make a judgment about whether or not you're correct?
01:10:40.060
And the answer to that is something like, well, you lay out a plan, and you can think about it this way.
01:10:45.680
This is actually an answer to the postmodernist problem of how is it that you determine whether or not your interpretation of the world is,
01:10:53.940
we won't say correct, because that's not exactly right.
01:10:56.160
But, you know, the postmodernists object, say, with regards to the interpretation of a text,
01:11:00.680
that there's a very large number of variations of ways in which that text can be interpreted, and that's actually true.
01:11:07.380
And it is the same, it's actually a reflection of a deeper claim, which they always, often, sometimes also make,
01:11:13.560
which is, well, if that's true for a text, which isn't as complex as everything, although it's complex,
01:11:21.180
Which is to say, the world lays itself out in a very complex manner,
01:11:25.600
and you can interpret that in a very large number of ways, so who's to say which interpretation is correct?
01:11:35.240
And it's tied in with even a deeper problem, which is the problem of perception itself,
01:11:39.360
because if the world is laid out in a manner that's exceptionally complex,
01:11:48.680
Well, that's partly the question that we're trying to answer,
01:11:52.620
and the answer to that is, well, you have evolved perceptual structures,
01:11:56.380
and they're actually oriented towards specific goals, and you're embodied.
01:12:00.700
So your embodiment as a goal-directed entity is part of the solution to the problem of perception.
01:12:10.040
So we could say, well, you come equipped, and this was Kant's objection to pure reason, essentially,
01:12:16.820
that the problem is, is the facts don't speak for themselves.
01:12:21.420
There's too many facts for them to speak for themselves.
01:12:23.580
So you have to overlay on top of them an interpretive framework.
01:12:26.620
Well, where does the interpretive framework come from?
01:12:28.440
Well, the right answer to that is something like, it evolves, right?
01:12:31.700
It's taken 3.5 billion years for your perceptual structure, your embodied perceptual structure, to evolve.
01:12:37.320
And it's done that roughly in a trial-and-error process.
01:12:41.080
I don't think that exhausts what's happened over the course of evolution,
01:12:44.560
but it's a good enough shorthand for the time being.
01:12:47.200
So there's the constraints imposed on your perceptual structures by the necessity of survival and reproduction,
01:12:53.560
but there's other constraints imposed, too, that you might regard as subsets of that.
01:12:57.260
One is that because you exist in a cooperative and competitive landscape,
01:13:02.520
the perceptual structures and plans that you lay out, we'll say the maps that you lay out,
01:13:09.960
And so that puts stringent constraints on the number of interpretations that you're allowed to apply.
01:13:14.900
So you can think about this in a Piagetian sense.
01:13:17.220
That is, if there are children in a playground and they're trying to organize themselves to play,
01:13:24.360
And the game is, of course, a perceptual structure and a goal-directed structure
01:13:28.140
and a structure that delimits action and interactions.
01:13:34.680
And so that constrains the set of possible actions and perceptions in the environment
01:13:42.100
And then you say, well, what are the further constraints?
01:13:44.320
And the constraints might be, well, let's play the game and see if it's any fun.
01:13:49.380
And that means that you have to take the plan that you've organized consensually
01:13:54.720
and see if when you lay it out in the world, it does what it's supposed to do.
01:13:58.280
In some sense, what you're doing is testing a tool.
01:14:00.460
So the idea that the range of interpretations is infinite and unconstrained
01:14:09.140
And now that doesn't mean it's easy to figure out how they're constrained.
01:14:14.180
But the technical suggestion that, well, there's an infinite number of equally valid interpretations
01:14:21.620
And it's not correct on biological evolutionary grounds.
01:14:25.120
And it's also not correct on sociocultural grounds because it has to be negotiated.
01:14:30.000
And then, you know, Piaget put a further constraint on that, essentially, by saying,
01:14:34.220
well, not only does it have to be a game and a game that attains its ends,
01:14:39.400
but it has to be a game that people want to play.
01:14:42.200
So it also has to satisfy some element of subjective desire as well.
01:14:51.520
It has to be a game that you can play with other people.
01:14:53.760
And it has to be a game that, if you play with other people, actually works in the world.
01:14:58.120
Okay, well, so much for an infinite array of options.
01:15:04.420
Now, and I think, and the idea that I've been proposing to you is that
01:15:08.080
what evolved mythology does, these representations that we've been dealing with,
01:15:12.980
these archetypal representations, is sketch out that landscape.
01:15:21.340
And so it sets out a landscape, it sets out a description of the landscape in which the game
01:15:27.420
is going to be played, as well as a description of the game itself.
01:15:32.200
And so the landscape is roughly, the core, the core archetype seems to be something like,
01:15:40.020
it's something like the interplay between chaos and order.
01:15:43.580
And chaos is represented by the serpentile predator, because we use our predator detection circuits
01:15:51.080
to conceptualize the unknown, because what else would we do?
01:15:56.420
That seems, given that we're prey animals and given our evolutionary history,
01:16:02.960
it's very difficult to understand what else we would possibly do.
01:16:05.920
Because the critical issue about venturing into the unknown is that you might die.
01:16:09.480
Or perhaps a slight variant of that is something might kill you.
01:16:13.820
But whatever, those are close enough to the same thing.
01:16:16.140
So chaos is what causes your deterioration and death.
01:16:19.760
And there's lots of ways to conceptualize that.
01:16:22.180
But reptilian predator, fire-breathing reptilian predator, isn't a bad way to start.
01:16:27.600
And so the question is, well, what do you do in the face of that?
01:16:30.780
And one answer is you build circumscribed enclosures.
01:16:35.120
And then also you act as the builder of circumscribed enclosures.
01:16:40.580
Now, the hero is also, though, that's not good enough,
01:16:42.900
because the circumscribed enclosure isn't impermeable.
01:16:47.320
It will inevitably be invaded, either from the outside or from within, right?
01:16:53.840
And so we've been conceptualizing the predator, the malevolent predator,
01:16:59.360
at multiple levels of analysis throughout our evolutionary history, say,
01:17:04.420
trying to understand the nature of that which invades the enclosure, right?
01:17:09.300
And we can say, well, it's partly external threat, it's partly social threat,
01:17:13.120
but it's also partly the threat that each individual brings to bear on the social structure
01:17:18.200
because of our, let's say, our intrinsic malevolence.
01:17:22.920
And so that accounts for the analogy, the Christian analogy,
01:17:27.280
between the serpent in the Garden of Eden and Satan,
01:17:32.200
It's not obvious at all why those two things would stack on top of one another,
01:17:35.860
especially given that when the creation story originally emerged,
01:17:40.240
in the form I talked to you about last week, the story of Adam and Eve,
01:17:44.060
the idea that the serpent in the garden was also something that was associated with the adversary
01:17:52.960
It's like, well, what's the worst possible snake?
01:17:57.580
And then a better question is, what do you do about the worst possible snake?
01:18:03.660
But there's other answers, too, like you make sacrifices, right?
01:18:07.060
And that's how you stave off the dragon of temporal chaos, roughly speaking,
01:18:14.160
you see the future as a realm of potential threat,
01:18:17.040
and then you learn to give things up in the present,
01:18:22.520
Now, so maybe you're offering sacrifices to God,
01:18:26.780
Well, you've got to think about that psychologically.
01:18:30.840
Well, you could think about the spirit of God the Father
01:18:34.000
as an imagistic representation of the collective spirit of the group.
01:18:46.060
as a spirit, as a psychological force, across time.
01:18:53.920
Right now, you're sacrificing your time to the spirit of the Great Father,
01:18:57.780
because your assumption is, is that if you do what's diligent,
01:19:02.460
so you're not chasing impulsive pleasure at the moment,
01:19:05.160
unless you're pathologically interested in this class, or something like that,
01:19:10.240
you're sacrificing your impulsive interest to satisfy the spirit of social requirement.
01:19:14.780
And so you're offering a sacrifice to that spirit in the hope that you can make a bargain with it,
01:19:22.700
And that reward will be partly the staving off of insecurity,
01:19:26.740
which is no more than to say that part of the reason that you're getting your degree
01:19:30.740
is because you believe that it'll aid you in finding employment and status
01:19:35.020
and all the other things that will stave off the dragon of chaos.
01:19:39.160
So, now, those things were, as we've been at pains to point out,
01:19:45.120
is those things were acted out and then represented in image and story
01:19:50.700
because we're building our knowledge of ourselves,
01:19:53.640
and also our social structures, and also the world,
01:19:56.260
from the bottom up, as well as from the top down.
01:19:58.760
There's an interplay between the two levels of analysis.
01:20:07.400
And then, with regards to the stories themselves,
01:20:10.900
you're in a map, so to speak, you're using a map,
01:20:16.260
so that you can use it to get to the place that you want to go.
01:20:21.020
and that means that you have to recalibrate your journey along the map,
01:20:25.940
which, by the way, is exactly what GPS systems do
01:20:32.840
that's an anxiety response from the GPS system.
01:20:45.240
And then the GPS system doesn't know what to do.
01:20:54.080
those are the closest things we've ever designed to intelligent systems.
01:21:00.980
And they're unbelievably sophisticated systems, right?
01:21:03.300
Because they rely on a huge satellite network and so on.
01:21:06.540
And they're cybernetic systems, technically speaking.
01:21:09.140
They respond very much like the way that we respond.
01:21:20.660
so that it's no more complex than it needs to be
01:21:27.840
Because that enables efficient cognitive processing.
01:22:00.860
So my color vision disappears at the periphery,
01:22:29.140
and assume instantly that I haven't mapped you properly.
01:22:33.000
I put you in the category of irrelevant entity.
01:22:37.780
you happen to be in the category of strange object,
01:22:44.240
so then we inhabit those structures all the time.
01:22:51.100
then it's got the archetypal quality of paradise,
01:22:55.560
because its axioms are correct and it's functional.
01:23:05.740
And it turns out that the things that you weren't attending to
01:23:16.540
And that can happen at different levels of severity.
01:23:44.880
They're not aware of their own vulnerability or nakedness.
01:23:47.700
So they're not suffering from negative emotion.
01:23:50.380
Something pops up that radically expands their vision.
01:23:55.740
they can apprehend all sorts of things that exist as threats.
01:23:59.620
So that's their own nakedness and vulnerability.
01:24:06.360
That state of being in that paradise is forever gone.
01:24:15.620
is that our perceptions develop to such a degree
01:24:19.020
that we could no longer ignore what was irrelevant.
01:24:27.560
once we discovered our finite limitations in time and space,
01:24:31.540
we discovered that we were surrounded by infinite threat.
01:24:36.080
And maybe that's why people are so hyper-awake,
01:24:40.420
Well, we're in a constant state of existential threat.
01:24:47.160
we take arms up against a sea of troubles, constantly.
01:25:11.940
But you're alive and awake when you're nervous.
01:25:14.340
And it is a form of consciousness, elevating activation.
01:25:20.540
So, the story of Adam and Eve is the story of the eternal fall.
01:25:25.620
It says, look, you exist in these walled enclosures,
01:25:38.420
Partly, it's the probability of predation itself.
01:25:42.620
the thing that can come in subtly and undermine you.
01:26:09.420
And then the worst snake of all is malevolence.
01:26:19.140
when you're looking at post-traumatic stress disorder,
01:26:23.480
that someone who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder,
01:26:50.960
Especially when it also reflects something back to you about yourself.
01:27:00.020
that means that you partake of the same essence.
01:27:16.840
You see this reflected in the Harry Potter idea, for example.
01:27:19.720
That the reason that Harry Potter can withstand Voldemort
01:27:38.280
It's like a set of tools that you have at your disposal,
01:27:50.220
The idea is that if you look at something monstrous,
01:27:56.840
of looking at monstrous things exactly for that reason.
01:28:50.940
And if I can garner a little post-posthumous fame
01:29:40.440
You don't want to have that happen to you again.
01:30:09.740
Maybe you can withstand tragedy and malevolence.
01:30:17.600
and you need to be able to withstand malevolence