The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 140. Maps of Meaning 12： Final

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00:02:04.680 allform.com slash Jordan. I started the beginning of the class three months ago, talking to you about

00:02:26.060 what the problem was that I was trying to address. And the fundamental problem was the problem of

00:02:36.600 belief systems. And the issue was, what precisely constitutes a belief system?

00:02:46.220 And then a secondary question was, why are people so inclined to even engage in conflict to maintain

00:02:58.700 and expand their belief systems? And then maybe a sub-question of that, and is there an alternative

00:03:04.900 to conflict with regards to belief systems? And then the last issue was something like, well,

00:03:14.060 is there a way of judging the relative quality of belief systems? And so those are all very,

00:03:19.040 very complicated questions. I mean, the first one is something like, how is it possible to understand

00:03:28.040 the structures by which we orient ourself in the world? The second one is something like,

00:03:34.060 what's the psychological significance precisely of those systems? What role does it play in psychological

00:03:42.960 health? And maybe also in social health? The next one is, can you make a non-relativistic case

00:03:53.240 when you assess an array of different value systems? And then linked to that is, is it possible to

00:04:01.620 hierarchically organize value systems in a manner that's justifiable so that something can be reasonably

00:04:09.840 considered in a superior or subordinate position? Now, the last question drew my attention because

00:04:20.120 of the implications of the first set, and the last question drew my attention because I was trying

00:04:30.120 to sort out the metaphysics, in some sense, of the Cold War. The question was, was this just a battleground

00:04:39.620 between two hypothetically equally appropriate belief systems, which could be a moral relativistic

00:04:49.500 perspective, right? Belief systems are arbitrary. And so combat between them is in some sense inevitable,

00:04:56.400 and even more to the point, there isn't any other way around the discontinuity, in some sense, other than

00:05:04.540 combat or subordination, because there's no way of adjudicating a victor, because there's no such thing

00:05:13.460 as victory if there's no way of ranking value systems. It's arbitrary. And it's a frightening prospect,

00:05:19.900 because it means that if you have a value system, and I have a value system, and they're different,

00:05:23.400 I mean, we can talk, or you can subordinate yourself, or I could do the same, but there's also no reason

00:05:30.000 why we shouldn't just engage in flat-out conflict. Now, it's complicated in the modern world,

00:05:37.860 obviously, by the fact that conflict can become so untrammeled that it risks destroying everything,

00:05:44.220 and that doesn't seem necessarily to be in anyone's best interest, unless your interest happens to be

00:05:50.080 in destroying everything, and certainly there are no shortage of people whose interests tilt in that

00:05:55.220 direction. All right, so the first question was, well, what does it mean to have a belief system?

00:06:02.740 And that's a very complicated problem, and I think it's a subset of the question of being.

00:06:17.020 Maybe you can break the question of being into two domains, which we've done in this class,

00:06:23.540 and you could say, well, you can assess being from the perspective of what exists,

00:06:28.460 and then you can assess being from the perspective of how you ought to act. So it's like you walk into

00:06:36.100 a room, and you can describe the furniture, or you can determine how you're going to conduct

00:06:42.060 yourself in the room. Maybe it's the difference between a play and the stage setting for a play.

00:06:47.760 Now, the modernist perspective, roughly speaking, is that the fundamental reality is to be found in

00:06:56.100 in the description of the furniture, so to speak, in the description of what is. That's the scientific

00:07:01.340 process. And the scientific process seems to involve the stripping off of the subjective

00:07:11.240 from perception, and to some degree from action, and the extraction of the commonalities across

00:07:18.500 perception as a means of delineating the nature of reality. Now, obviously, that's a very powerful

00:07:28.220 process, and it has many advantages, but exactly what it is that science is doing is not precisely

00:07:35.080 clear. One perspective might be is that we are genuinely discovering the nature of objective reality,

00:07:45.160 and perhaps even the nature of reality itself, but there are some problems with that perspective.

00:07:52.660 One of them being that the scientific process seems to strip the subjective from the phenomenon.

00:08:01.760 It does that technically, right? I mean, you have a hypothesis about what something is,

00:08:05.700 and you have a hypothesis about what something is, and you have a hypothesis about what something is,

00:08:09.840 and we undertake a number of procedures to assess what the fundamental phenomena is,

00:08:15.720 and then we look across our perceptual sets, and we extract out the commonalities, and we dispense

00:08:20.320 with everything that is superfluous, everything that's merely subjective. So what you feel about

00:08:26.240 the chair is not relevant to the objective existence of the chair. And so it eradicates subjectivity,

00:08:32.740 and that's a very useful process, because it does seem to enable us to grasp reality in a fundamental

00:08:40.380 sense more profoundly, but it leaves the subjective behind, and maybe that's a problem.

00:08:46.460 It should be a word. Yeah, I didn't send the projector because they didn't make the noise.

00:08:49.580 Okay, okay, thank you.

00:08:50.960 I would have, I just didn't want to...

00:08:52.380 All right, appreciate it.

00:08:53.480 So, so then the issue might be, well, is something irretrievably lost if you dispense with this

00:09:02.060 objective? And, and also, how deep a hole do you dig when you dispense with this objective?

00:09:13.280 And I think that that's intrinsically associated with the problem of the relationship between

00:09:19.920 is and ought, because that's an old philosophical conundrum, I think, first put forth by David

00:09:28.220 Hume, who made the claim that no matter how much you know about something from an empirical

00:09:34.040 perspective, you cannot use that as an unerring guide to action in relationship to that, to

00:09:40.760 that empirical object, or set of empirical objects. And people, it's a tricky issue, you

00:09:45.380 know, because obviously you can use empirical information to inform your decisions, but

00:09:52.260 I think... but the problem is, is that there's multiple pathways of action that are implied

00:09:57.760 by any set of data. That seems to be the fundamental problem. It's something like that, is that

00:10:01.620 you can't draw a one-to-one specification between the empirical description, and what you

00:10:07.940 should do about that. And, like, maybe an example is, well, you can gather a lot of information

00:10:12.880 about AIDS, and you can gather a lot of information about cancer, and you can gather a lot of information

00:10:16.920 about educational outcomes, and economic outcomes, and so forth, but it isn't obvious how you

00:10:22.480 then use that empirical information, for example, how to guide policy decisions, because you might

00:10:28.180 say, well, how much money should we spend on education compared to cancer prevention, and

00:10:32.420 how much money should we spend on cancer prevention compared to curing AIDS, or addressing disease

00:10:38.120 in a third world country, and what happens is that the set of variables that you encounter

00:10:42.760 while trying to make your empirical calculation get to be so massive, so rapidly, that there

00:10:47.440 doesn't seem to be any logical way of linking them to a behavioural outcome. That's kind

00:10:51.720 of associated with the postmodern conundrum as well, which is, well, if you have a set of

00:10:55.620 data, and it could be a literary work for that matter, there's a very large number of interpretations

00:11:01.060 that you can derive from that set of data, and there's no simple way of deciding which

00:11:04.360 one is going to be canonical. And so, I think the reason that you can't derive an ought from

00:11:10.420 an is is because you run into something like combinatorial explosion. It's like, you have

00:11:14.680 an infinite number of facts at your disposal, roughly speaking, and then another infinite

00:11:18.500 number of ways that you can organise those facts, and that massive array of facts and

00:11:26.360 recategorised facts doesn't tell you what to do in a given situation. And so maybe the question

00:11:33.220 of what to do in a given situation is a different domain of question.

00:11:38.340 And I believe that to be the case. I think it was Stephen Jay Gould who talked about religion

00:11:44.700 and science as two, I think he called them different magisterium, two different fundamental

00:11:50.180 domains, and that each had their realm of operation. And one was the description of the

00:11:55.860 objective world, obviously that's on the scientific end, and the other was the realm of ethics.

00:12:01.280 And so you could put religion, mythology, narrative, the humanities, all of that, history, even

00:12:06.660 for that matter, to some degree, into the ethics category.

00:12:12.160 And because I don't see a straightforward way of taking a set of facts and then transforming

00:12:20.480 them into a behavioural compulsion, then I do think that these two things are reasonably

00:12:27.040 regarded as overlapping and intrinsically associated, but technically and philosophically separable.

00:12:37.040 All right, so then the next question emerges, well, if they're separable, if there has to be a domain

00:12:46.080 of inquiry into the structure of values, what might that look like? Like, how is it that you would

00:12:54.480 understand the psychological and sociological phenomena that are associated with a moral stance?

00:13:09.920 And how would you understand the details of that? And then, even more to the point, is there

00:13:15.040 any way of subjecting different sets of ethical interpretation to testing so that you can judge

00:13:22.720 their comparative validity? Because that's sort of the way out of moral relativism, roughly speaking.

00:13:27.760 It's like, first you make the proposition that there are value structures, and that they're

00:13:33.360 independent from empirical investigation. And then the next is that you investigate the possibility

00:13:39.280 that you can compare and contrast different structures of ethics, and draw some sort of

00:13:44.240 conclusion that's not merely arbitrary. Now, it might be turtles all the way down, that's how the old

00:13:49.680 joke goes, right? But maybe not. And I was interested in that again, because I thought, well,

00:13:55.200 are we fighting the Cold War merely because we're having an argument? Or is there some manner in which

00:14:07.440 one of these systems can be just determined to be wrong? And of course, there was more weight behind

00:14:14.480 that query, because the Soviet system, and the Maoist system, and the system that's in place in North

00:14:23.280 Korea, were not only predicated on different assumptions than the Western system, but they were

00:14:28.400 also extraordinarily murderous. And so that seemed to add additional weight to the sequence of questions.

00:14:36.080 So, I was reading Jung at the time, and Jung was, Carl Jung was fundamentally, I would say,

00:14:49.120 a psychologist of narrative, of story. And he outlined this, he outlined the idea for me that

00:14:59.520 people inhabited stories, roughly speaking. He said, actually, they inhabited myths,

00:15:04.720 and even more to the point, whether they knew it or not, they inhabited archetypal myths,

00:15:09.600 or even that they were possessed by them. And so, it was the first time I'd really come into

00:15:14.560 contact with the idea, directly put, that there was a direct relationship between the structures that

00:15:21.600 you use to orient yourself in the world, and stories. And so then I started to assess

00:15:29.600 the fundamental elements of stories. What might a story look like? And while I was doing that,

00:15:34.320 that was informed by a number of other things that I was reading about, including

00:15:39.360 a set of... I read the neuroscience literature with regards to information processing fairly extensively.

00:15:47.040 And that introduced me to a whole set of other ideas, including cybernetic ideas,

00:15:52.480 which have been incorporated into what I was describing to you. And this basic cybernetic system

00:15:56.880 is a system that has a starting point and a system that has an end point, and a system that has a

00:16:03.440 subsystem that monitors progress or deviation from progress along the pathway to the end point.

00:16:09.360 And I thought, well, that looks a lot like a story, or a map. That's another way of thinking

00:16:13.680 about it. And I thought, okay, well, that's where the overlap is. And the fundamental story is

00:16:17.680 something like... it's very straightforward. It's also the frame that you inhabit when you

00:16:23.040 conceptualize the world, and narrow and simplify the world, which you have to do, because it's so

00:16:28.160 complex, because you have this infinite number of facts that are laying around you. So what are you

00:16:33.040 doing? Well, you're a mobile creature, a living creature, not a static information processor.

00:16:38.400 And you're targeted. You're a targeted creature. And otherwise, you wouldn't move. Right? To move

00:16:45.200 is to be a targeted creature, because you have to move towards something or away from something. So

00:16:48.800 the targeting is built right into the fact that you're a mobile creature. And then you might say,

00:16:52.400 well, what do you target? And the answer to that is, well, you target... you target... you could say,

00:16:57.680 you target what you aim for. But then you could say, well, you aim for what you want. You target your

00:17:03.680 desires. And then that leads you into a discussion of the underlying neurobiology. Essentially,

00:17:08.720 you bring to the table a set of inbuilt desires. And the targets that you pick

00:17:17.200 have to address the fact that those desires exist. And the desires are actually grounded in necessity.

00:17:22.560 And this is... this is... this is a sidebar. But this is where I think Piaget's theory is

00:17:27.360 weaker than it should be. Because Piaget, and you know I'm a great admirer of Piaget, believed that the

00:17:34.400 human infant came into the world with a fairly primordial set of reflexes, mostly sensory motor

00:17:39.200 reflexes, and then bootstrapped him or herself up on the basis of those reflexes in the sociological...

00:17:47.120 in the social surround. And so it's a constructivist viewpoint. The child comes in with a few basic

00:17:52.480 elements that can get it going, elements of exploration and memory, essentially. And then

00:17:57.200 it builds itself as a consequence of its exploration in the social community. Now, I think that's true,

00:18:03.360 except that it's too empty. Because what it fails to take into consideration is the fact that...

00:18:13.040 and I think this is an observation in some sense philosophically that was first made by Immanuel Kant

00:18:18.560 when he criticized pure reason, is that you can't come into the world structureless. You have to come

00:18:24.880 into the world with an inbuilt structure, and then it's the interaction of that structure with the world

00:18:29.680 that provides the information that you can use to build yourself. But the structure has to be there.

00:18:35.120 And I would say that's the same, mythologically speaking, as the idea that the great father is

00:18:39.200 always there. Right? There's the great mother is always there. That's chaos itself. The great father is

00:18:43.520 always there. That's order. That's the interpretive structure that you use to interact with

00:18:47.280 the chaos. And then, of course, the individual is always there at the same time. Piaget, in some

00:18:52.480 sense, retold that story, except he didn't give enough credence to the fact that the infant comes

00:19:02.640 into the world far more fully formed than his theory presumes. Now, see, the problem with that is that

00:19:13.200 without that additional underlying set of, let's call them neurobiological constraints,

00:19:19.680 the interpretation universe gets too large. You need constraints to narrow the domain of phenomena

00:19:27.600 that you're contending with. And it's in the analysis of the constraints that the answer to

00:19:34.160 how do you stop drowning in an infinite number of potential interpretations emerges.

00:19:38.880 The interpretations are subject to constraints. And that's also the way out of the moral relativist

00:19:45.200 paradox, as far as I can tell. Now, one of the things I really liked about Piaget was that

00:19:49.200 he described some of the constraints. One of the constraints was is, well, if I'm going to exist in a

00:19:56.400 social world, and I'm going to because I won't exist at all if I don't exist in a social world,

00:20:00.880 then there are constraints on the way that I have to interact with other people.

00:20:04.240 And Piaget's essential point was, I have to organize myself to play a joint game with you,

00:20:11.760 but the joint game has constraints. And one of them is, you have to want to play,

00:20:15.760 because you have other options. And then there are other constraints.

00:20:19.440 You and I have to be able to play in a way that other people don't object to,

00:20:24.320 or maybe even that you and I have to play in a way that other people will support.

00:20:30.080 And then you can imagine another constraint, which is, you and I have to play a game in a way that

00:20:34.800 other people would support, that will last more than the moment. So it has to work today,

00:20:39.760 and tomorrow, and next week. It has to work across the span of times. It has to work not only for you

00:20:44.080 and I, but it has to work for our future selves. And so the damn constraints are starting to pile up.

00:20:48.400 That's just on the socio-cultural side. That's on the constructionist side only. But the biological

00:20:54.160 constraints are equally important, because not only does the game that you and I have to play,

00:20:58.720 have to satisfy those emergent sociological constraints, but the game also has to be

00:21:05.440 organized so that the internal polity that's composed of, let's call them the fundamental,

00:21:12.480 motivational, and emotional systems that constitute us, they have to all find satisfaction,

00:21:20.000 because otherwise the system grounds to a halt. And so this seems to me to be the beginnings of an answer

00:21:26.960 to the postmodern conundrum. It's like, okay, any set of facts is amenable to an infinite number

00:21:32.240 of interpretations. Fine. Got it. That makes deriving an is from an ought a very difficult endeavor.

00:21:39.440 Right. No problem. All right. But that doesn't mean that any old solution will work.

00:21:45.680 Why? Well, first of all, it's merely because we introduced work into the conversation to begin with.

00:21:51.680 The interpretation has to be functional. And again, that's what seems to tie it back to the story.

00:21:58.240 This is also what got me interested in pragmatism, technically speaking. And so,

00:22:02.560 because if your conundrum is here you are and there you have to be, and how to get there,

00:22:10.000 then one of the constraints on the manner in which you interpret the world is when you apply your

00:22:15.920 interpretation, do you end up moving from the point you're at to the point you want to be? And if the answer

00:22:20.160 to that is no, then the solution is insufficient. Now, you could call the solution untrue, but

00:22:25.840 it's dangerous to introduce the truth-falsity dilemma, because it's functionality more than truth.

00:22:36.160 Although, I think you could say that in the final analysis, truth is integrally linked to function,

00:22:40.480 but I'm not going to touch that question for the time being. The point is that your interpretation of

00:22:46.000 the world carries within it implicitly a theory about its own validity. And the theory about its

00:22:52.000 own validity is that if you enact it in the world, it will produce the result that you desire. And then,

00:22:58.000 the consequence of that is that if it doesn't produce the result that you desire, then it isn't

00:23:02.000 a good enough theory. Period. And that's how you grapple with the fact that although you don't know

00:23:10.400 everything, you still have to orient yourself in the world. You lay out partial theories that make

00:23:17.120 partial predictions, and if they do a good enough job, then you don't worry about it anymore, and you

00:23:21.760 go on to the next thing. Okay, so then you think, there's a lot of constraints piling up on your

00:23:25.760 interpretations. Number one, they have to work for the creature that you are. And so, you know,

00:23:30.960 we can lay sort of like Maslow's hierarchy of needs, something like that. It's not exactly the same,

00:23:35.680 because I don't think that he got the hierarchy right for very complex reasons. But it's reasonably

00:23:41.680 obvious to observe that, well, you're not going to work out very well if you don't have anything

00:23:47.040 to eat. And, you know, you've got about a week in you if you don't have anything to drink. And

00:23:50.960 obviously, you need shelter. And, you know, you need companionship. And by need, what I mean is that

00:23:56.560 if you don't have these things, then you die. The whole game comes to a halt. So we can ground that in

00:24:01.520 self-evident reality without any real problem. And you might say, well, what's the list of human

00:24:06.960 necessities? And that's a difficult thing to parameterize, because you can argue about the

00:24:14.560 degree to which something is necessary, but there's some things that we know about.

00:24:18.800 Well, we covered the basics, temperature regulation, elimination, food intake, shelter, right? But then

00:24:25.760 there's more subtle things like, well, children, for example, die without touch. So there's something

00:24:33.360 integral about tactile interaction with other people. So we could call that love if you wanted

00:24:39.120 to. That's not optional, right? Play is the same thing. Children do not develop properly unless they

00:24:47.280 play. And I would say that adults also can't maintain their mental health or physical health

00:24:53.200 unless they play too. And so you can say, well, there's a core set of necessities. And then off

00:24:58.320 of that, there's a secondary set of like, what would you call them? They're not ultimate necessities,

00:25:04.240 but they're going to be pretty highly valued by people and more or less universally. Pain avoidance,

00:25:10.000 for example, under most circumstances. Most people don't really like to be in terror. Most people

00:25:15.040 really don't like to be disgusted. You can lay out the basic emotions, you can lay out the basic

00:25:19.760 motivations, and you can say, well, the game that you're going to play has to operate within a space

00:25:24.480 that's defined by that set of a priori constraints. Fine. Now, things are getting pretty constrained

00:25:30.080 here. So the game you play has to satisfy that set of biological demands, intrinsic biological demands,

00:25:40.160 and it has to be something that you can utilize with other people voluntarily, and it has to be

00:25:46.960 something that will be playable across multiple iterations. And I would say, there's a very limited

00:25:53.680 number of interpretive structures that are going to satisfy all of those preconditions simultaneously.

00:26:00.640 And to me, that just blows out the two things. It blows out the claims of moral relativism,

00:26:06.800 and it also demolishes, and this is the same thing in some sense, it demolishes ideas that the manner

00:26:14.560 in which people organize themselves in the world, as individuals and in societies,

00:26:18.560 is somehow arbitrary. It doesn't look to me to be arbitrary at all. And so, and Piaget's genius,

00:26:25.760 I think, in some part, was observing that in children spontaneously, in that when children

00:26:31.760 pass the egocentric phase, which means after they're about two years of old, maybe they're

00:26:37.440 what, they're approaching three years old. They've more or less got their internal mechanisms organized so

00:26:45.520 that they're a unitary being, roughly speaking. At three, they start to develop the ability to use fictional

00:26:54.160 frames of reference. So, and that's an interesting thing, because I would say that the fundamental

00:26:59.520 biological systems come armed with their own frame of reference. So, if you're hungry, poof, up comes

00:27:06.800 the frame of reference. And within that, your perceptions are shaped, the action proclivities are

00:27:15.680 are primed, and the world lays itself out around that particular biological necessity. And you can lay

00:27:22.480 those out. Same if you're thirsty. Same if you're too hot. Same if you want to play. All those systems come

00:27:28.160 built in. But then, the problem with that is that they compete, because it isn't obvious which one

00:27:35.200 should take priority, and then it's not that easy to organize them in a social space. And so, what seems

00:27:40.160 to have happened to human beings is that we've been able to replace the frame that's predicated on

00:27:47.520 motivational necessity with abstracted frames that are more voluntarily constructed that incorporate

00:27:54.560 multiple motivational systems simultaneously. And that's, in some sense, that's also what,

00:27:59.120 it's the same thing as we've learned how to think abstractly. And so, the frame that you're going to

00:28:03.760 lay out on the world, if it's a good frame, is one that solves a whole set of problems at the same time.

00:28:08.320 And so, that, and you can slot different frames, you can, you can experiment with different frames,

00:28:15.280 and that's a precondition to being able to play, because one of the things that Piaget pointed out,

00:28:19.600 you can see this when children pretend play, it's like, for, and even more clearly in games that have

00:28:25.520 rules, but let's say they're, they're in pretend play, and they're going to say, well, we're going

00:28:29.440 to lay out a little fictional schema here, we're going to play house, and you can be the cat, and

00:28:33.600 I'll be the, I'll be the dad, and then you negotiate a bit to see if those rules are acceptable,

00:28:38.720 and then you run it as a simulation, and that's what kids are doing when they're playing, and

00:28:42.400 they're experimenting with different superordinate frames of reference that are actable in the world,

00:28:48.480 and they're, and they're, they're learning how to develop those perceptual schemes, and also how to

00:28:52.880 interact in a manner that allows the scheme that they're using to find its social acceptability,

00:28:58.960 and it's successful, the child assumes that the scheme is successful if both children have fun while

00:29:08.880 they're doing it, and so that's the volunteerism, and so Piaget made a very interesting point about

00:29:13.520 that that I think is absolutely brilliant. He said that there's a difference between a game that

00:29:19.920 people will play voluntarily, and one that has to be enforced, and so then you can imagine an

00:29:25.360 environment where game A is played voluntarily, it has a certain end, and game B is played by force,

00:29:31.280 but both of them are moving towards the same end, and Piaget's claim was the game that's played

00:29:37.040 voluntarily, or even more to the point, the set of all games that are played voluntarily will out-compete

00:29:44.720 the set of all games that are played by force if they're put head-to-head in a competitive environment.

00:29:49.520 I thought, god, that's such a brilliant observation, because there you have the basis for a pragmatic

00:29:55.680 grounding for the evaluation of ethics. It's like, you can pick the target, it doesn't matter whatever

00:30:02.960 target you pick. If the game is voluntary and aimed at the target, it will defeat a game that's imposed

00:30:08.480 by tyranny. Now, it's a proposition, but it's a pretty good proposition, and I would say there's a

00:30:13.520 fair bit of evidence for this proposition, and a fair bit of it is actually derived from observation

00:30:18.080 of animal behavior, because I ran you guys through the emerging literature on the stability, say,

00:30:22.720 of chimpanzee hierarchies, and the chimpanzee tyrant hierarchy isn't very stable, and the reason for

00:30:29.840 that is that two subordinate chimps, who are three-quarters as strong as the dominant tyrant,

00:30:35.040 can take him out, and they do. And so then the question might be, well, how do you have to conduct

00:30:40.000 yourself as a high-dominance chimp if you're not going to be torn apart by those who are hypothetically

00:30:46.080 your subordinates? And the answer to that is, well, don't be too much of a tyrant.

00:30:53.200 Formulate some social connections, engage in some reciprocity with regards to your social

00:30:58.240 relationships. Don't oppress the females, don't torment the children, etc., because that makes

00:31:04.720 you unpopular, and then you'll get torn to shreds. And so there are practical limits on

00:31:10.960 the expression of tyranny that are a consequence both of biological limitations, because people are

00:31:16.240 going to object if the system is set up so that their fundamental needs aren't met, and they're also

00:31:21.680 going to object if the game that's being played isn't functioning socially. And so this is a very,

00:31:27.920 very tight set of constraints. And then the question might be, okay, if you take that set of constraints,

00:31:34.000 what sort of systems can operate... what would you say? Well, just that. What set of systems can

00:31:41.360 operate within those sets of constraints? Then you might say, if you take the set of all systems that

00:31:47.520 might operate within those constraints, and you look at what's common across them, then you could

00:31:52.080 extract out what's essentially a universal morality. It's something like that. And I don't see how that

00:31:59.360 proposition is precisely questionable. It seems to me that all of that's built on rock. It's like,

00:32:04.320 there's no doubt that infants bring biological necessity to the table. I think that's fully established,

00:32:11.040 and it's established physiologically. It's established behaviorally. It's established with

00:32:19.200 regards to evolutionary history, because we can take the motivational systems that are part and

00:32:23.360 parcel of our being, and we can trace their development back, in some cases, half a billion years.

00:32:29.360 So the idea that the infant is a blank slate when it's born, and thus subject to infinite

00:32:36.880 sociological manipulation, is that it's dead in the water. That's just not the case.

00:32:43.680 So, okay, so fine. So we've got that nailed down hard. And then the idea that your identity is

00:32:52.480 also shaped sociologically, well, I don't think anybody disputes that. It doesn't matter where they are

00:32:57.520 on the interpretive framework. They might dispute the degree to which that occurs, and the mechanisms

00:33:02.240 by which it occurs. But the fact that it occurs, that's close enough to self-evident, so we can just

00:33:10.000 leave it there. Well, then the question is, what are the consequences of socialization?

00:33:21.120 And once you admit the existence of the realm of biological necessity, you instantly put a set of

00:33:29.920 constraints on how societies can structure themselves so that they will not be torn down

00:33:37.520 and overthrown. Well, then if you look at how kids are socialized, I think that Piaget's

00:33:44.240 developmental observations are by and by correct. The first two years, it's mostly interactions between

00:33:51.360 the infant and the parents. It's bi-directional, though, because the infant has to come to terms

00:33:58.000 with the mother, but the mother also has to come to terms with the infant. So it's not even top-down

00:34:02.240 at the level of infant-maternal relationship. Quite the contrary. I mean, if you watch a new mother

00:34:07.520 adapt to a baby, you can see that the mother is doing as much adaptation to the baby as the baby is to

00:34:12.800 the mother, because the infant has this in-built character already, and has to be charmed into a

00:34:19.680 relationship. Love does that. And attention. It's very little different than establishing a

00:34:25.040 relationship with someone who's older. It's lower resolution, and it's harder to make the

00:34:31.600 observations because, of course, the infant is only capable of behavioral display, can't speak.

00:34:36.640 But nonetheless, the necessity for establishing the individual relationship is there to begin with,

00:34:41.120 so even in the early stages of the infant's socialization, the process isn't state downward.

00:34:47.760 It's not great-father downward. It's mutual. And then, of course, by the time the child is

00:34:54.000 old enough to be launched out into the social world, then all the constraints that are associated

00:34:59.440 with the playground are immediately placed on that child, and that's a very unforgiving landscape,

00:35:03.840 right? Because the last thing a child wants, really, the last thing a child wants is not to have any

00:35:09.040 friends, or even, perhaps equally seriously, not to have a best friend. I read something so idiotic the

00:35:16.480 other day that I couldn't believe it. So the newest prince, so Queen Elizabeth's, I guess,

00:35:22.720 great-grandchild, is off to daycare in the UK. And in this daycare, they don't let the kids have

00:35:28.400 best friends because that's unfair. I thought, you know, sometimes you see something that's so stupid,

00:35:36.240 you can't even believe it exists. And that was one of those examples, because it's been known for

00:35:41.360 quite a long time that one of the developmental milestones that children attain, somewhere between,

00:35:48.400 say, the age of five and ten, is they pick a best friend. And so they, and, you know, the hypothesis,

00:35:55.440 well, that's unfair to all the other children. It's like, well, first of all, you can't be the

00:35:58.960 best friend to everyone, because you then, maybe there's a billion children, so each of them gets

00:36:04.000 one second. It's like, that's just not a very deep relationship. So the idea that you can be equally

00:36:09.200 friendly with everyone is, it's preposterous. But even worse, the thing is, the thing that the child's

00:36:14.800 doing is actually becoming, they're stepping out of their egocentricity, because their best friend

00:36:21.040 becomes more important than they are. And that's a precursor for adult relationships, where, you know,

00:36:26.400 if you're married, well, your partner should be at least as important as you are, and the relationship

00:36:31.200 should be more important. But then when you have children, it's like, they're more important than

00:36:34.960 you. That's that. Unless there's something wrong with you, you come second, and your children come

00:36:40.240 first. And they're way first. They're not just a little, I mean, you're necessary, because without

00:36:44.160 you, they're not going to manage. So you have to take care of yourself. But you're not number one

00:36:47.920 anymore once you have kids, unless, seriously, unless you didn't learn the lessons in the playground.

00:36:53.120 And when you have a best friend, you're not number one. They are. And so, well, so anyways,

00:36:58.800 there are these constraints that emerge in the social landscape. You have to have friends,

00:37:04.000 and also you have to single someone out as particularly unique among those friends,

00:37:08.640 and establish a genuinely reciprocal and caring relationship. I can't remember the psychiatrist

00:37:14.320 who studied this so intently. Unfortunately, he was the first person to do a detailed analysis of

00:37:23.360 the best friend relationships that children established. I'd like to give him credit for

00:37:28.720 his ideas. But unfortunately, I can't remember his name. So, okay. So what are the propositions so far?

00:37:41.200 You inhabit a structure that orients you in the world. It has something that's akin to a narrative

00:37:45.520 structure. I'm here, I'm going there, and this is the way I did it. It's narrative if you describe it.

00:37:50.160 It's based in biological necessity, but it's shaped by socialization. And the fact of that base and that

00:37:59.840 shaping means that the set of interpretive schema that you can lay out in the world are bounded.

00:38:07.120 Those would be hypothetically functional systems, and maybe they compete over the evolutionary time

00:38:13.840 span. But there's something in common across that set of functional interpretations. And if you extract

00:38:19.760 that out, you can get the initial images of what you might describe as an archetypally universal morality.

00:38:27.520 That's what archetypes are, fundamentally. And to say all that is no more than to say that people can

00:38:34.960 abstract across instances. And we can obviously do that. So then the question is, can you start to

00:38:41.840 develop an articulated picture of what that archetypal structure of universal morality might be?

00:38:51.120 And so, my answer to that was basically, well, let's look at old stories, as many old stories as we

00:38:57.040 can collect. And if the stories are stories that have survived for a very long period of time, so much

00:39:02.000 the better, because that indicates that they're peculiarly memorable and peculiarly functional.

00:39:11.280 Because if they weren't memorable, then they'd have been forgotten. And if they weren't functional,

00:39:14.800 they wouldn't have managed to be the foundation stories for cultures that lasted for thousands or even tens of thousands of years.

00:39:23.120 So, and then we could say, well, let's collect a whole variety of these stories and see if there's patterns across them.

00:39:27.840 Now, the danger of that is,

00:39:32.160 have you collected an unbiased set of stories?

00:39:34.560 Danger number one, how do you know that you're not just reading into the stories? That's the postmodern

00:39:39.120 problem. Reasonable, reasonable objections. And so that, those objections have been laid

00:39:44.400 against people like, um, he wrote The Golden Bough, Fraser, who was the Fraser, who was one of the first

00:39:51.520 anthropologists to collect stories from all over the world and to start to look for commonalities.

00:39:56.000 The same objection has been laid at the feet of people like Mircea Eliad or Carl Jung or Joseph Campbell.

00:40:01.920 It's like, how do you know you just, how do you know you're not just cherry picking your damn

00:40:05.920 interpretations? Perfectly reasonable, perfectly reasonable objection. And I would say that

00:40:11.680 the reason I don't believe that I'm cherry picking my interpretations is because I used a method,

00:40:17.760 and it's a method that's akin to the multi-trait, multi-method, method of construct validation that

00:40:23.680 that clinical psychology and other disciplines of psychology rely upon. But it's also akin to a

00:40:29.360 process put forward by E. O. Wilson that he called consilience. And the process is something like,

00:40:35.040 well, pick your level of analysis. Does the phenomena manifest itself at that level of analysis?

00:40:41.040 Yes. Pick another level of analysis, and another level of analysis, and another level of analysis,

00:40:45.600 and see if the same phenomena manifests itself at every single level, and then assume that the

00:40:51.200 probability that that will happen by chance decreases with each additional level of analysis that fits,

00:40:58.000 where there's concordance. And I thought, okay, that makes sense. So it isn't only that you can

00:41:03.600 look for patterns in stories, because, you know, what if you're a hyperactive pattern detector? Which

00:41:08.320 basically means, like, and there are people like that, people who tilt towards paranoia,

00:41:11.920 people who tilt towards conspiracy theories. You can see it manifest itself in new age thinking

00:41:16.320 all the time. Because new age thinkers are very high in openness, but not very good at critical

00:41:20.560 thinking. And so they see phenomena A and B and C and D, they think pattern. Then they think universal

00:41:25.520 pattern. But they don't attempt to disconfirm their pattern prediction. And so what I tried to do,

00:41:32.400 when I was starting to see patterns emerge in the stories, informed by people like Jung and Iliata,

00:41:37.680 and so forth, was to see if what they were describing manifested itself at any other levels

00:41:42.560 of analysis that were independent intellectually from that stream of thinking. And I found it in two

00:41:48.240 places. I found it in cybernetics, and I found it in neuroscience. And so, and the neuroscience element,

00:41:57.840 that includes the physiology, but also the behavioral analysis that was done by, by people,

00:42:02.800 most particularly like, like, like Jeffrey Gray, and, and the animal experimentals, who were brilliant,

00:42:07.920 brilliant scientists, and who've done a very good job of laying out the manner in which

00:42:13.200 interpretive frameworks exist within the realm of animal cognition, and, and, and to describe how they

00:42:21.200 manifest themselves in the world. So I thought, okay, that's not too bad, because we've got

00:42:24.800 maybe four different levels of evidence all pointing in the same direction. And so that's

00:42:29.840 why I walked you guys through the neuropsychology. It's like, a story is, you're going somewhere,

00:42:34.960 you're somewhere, and you're going somewhere, and you're tracking your progress. Okay, that's the

00:42:39.680 story. Well, what, what happens when you look at how people lay out, they're called cognitive maps?

00:42:44.720 Well, it's the same thing. You specify a target, an endpoint, you specify a beginning point,

00:42:49.840 which is just where you are, and then there's a mechanism, a comparative mechanism,

00:42:53.680 that operates, or multiple comparative mechanisms that operate neurophysiologically,

00:42:58.720 to orient yourself towards that goal. And the emotions basically emerge as a, as a consequence

00:43:04.800 of that. Positive emotions indicating that you're moving forward properly, negative emotions indicating

00:43:09.680 that you've encountered some kind of obstacle. It's like, well, that's the basic, that's the basic

00:43:15.120 structure of a narrative. Okay, fine. So now we can see how it's instantiated neurophysiologically.

00:43:20.080 That adds a fair bit of credence to the, to the entire process. So,

00:43:33.120 now normally, when you look at the basic cybernetic work, there's a hypothesis that

00:43:40.240 the system is oriented towards a goal, and that it's comparing what is manifesting itself in the

00:43:48.640 world to that desired end state as the system moves. But it's too simple, because people don't

00:43:54.640 precisely have goals. They have nested hierarchies of goals. And so,

00:44:04.640 the issue of emotional regulation becomes more complex than, are you proceeding happily towards

00:44:11.520 your current goal? Because your goal is composed of micro-goals, and it's a constituent element of a set of

00:44:19.120 macro-goals. And so that makes the problem of error far more complex than it would be if you

00:44:25.760 only had one frame of reference, and you were only adjudicating your error within that frame of reference.

00:44:30.560 The question starts to become,

00:44:31.920 what does it mean when you make a mistake? And the answer to that, the behavioral answer to that was,

00:44:41.600 well, you encounter a stimuli that's a threat, or maybe a punishment, or an incentive reward,

00:44:47.200 or a consumatory reward, something like that. It's very, it's a, it's a uni-dimensional and

00:44:52.480 oversimplified answer. I'm not complaining about it, it has great utility. But there's the problem,

00:44:58.240 there's a problem. And the problem is, it doesn't take into account the nested structure of this,

00:45:03.600 of your goal hierarchy. And what that means is that it underestimates the difficulty of responding

00:45:10.000 to an error. Because the problem with an error is that you don't know what the error signifies.

00:45:16.320 And that's a huge problem. And that's part of what I want to delve into even in more depth today.

00:45:21.680 And so this is like Ellis in Wonderland, going down the rabbit hole. It's exactly the same thing.

00:45:26.320 That's the hole. The rabbit hole is, you made a mistake, right? You made a mistake. You've got your

00:45:31.760 oversimplified representation of the world laid upon it. It validates itself in its execution,

00:45:37.280 if it executes properly. If it executes improperly, then what does that signify?

00:45:42.480 And the answer isn't precisely that you've made a mistake. The answer is, it signifies that there's

00:45:48.480 something in the world that you excluded that shouldn't have been excluded. And that's a big problem,

00:45:53.120 because when you've laid out a simplified schema on the world, you've excluded virtually everything.

00:46:01.040 And so what that means is that as soon as you make an error, the search space for the error

00:46:05.840 immediately tends towards the infinite. And you experience that. It's part of a human

00:46:11.600 existential experience. And the way you experience that is, especially if your mood is shaky,

00:46:16.160 is you lay out a small plan, like maybe you go out for coffee with someone that you're romantically

00:46:21.920 interested in, and they're not pleasant to you. And so that's an error. It means, well,

00:46:30.080 what does it mean? Well, you've construed yourself wrong, you've construed them wrong,

00:46:34.240 you've construed the opposite sex wrong, you've construed human beings wrong,

00:46:38.800 you're a walking catastrophe, and you might as well not even exist. It's like, well, that's pretty

00:46:44.320 extreme. But it's not that extreme, I'll tell you. Like, it's not that uncommon for people to have

00:46:50.160 exactly that set of catastrophic responses to even a minor setback. Now, it's not good for them.

00:46:56.000 And I would say, you know, just because you scraped your foot doesn't mean you should dig a grave and

00:47:01.840 jump into it, pull all the dirt on top of you, you know? So you don't want to start by taking

00:47:07.120 yourself completely apart. But that doesn't mean people won't do it. They do it all the time.

00:47:11.680 In fact, to me, it's always a mystery that they don't do it every single time. Because the logical

00:47:17.200 inference for why didn't you get someone interested in you could easily be, because you're a failure

00:47:22.640 as a human being. And at some level, that's actually true. Now, it's true in a way that's not

00:47:28.080 that helpful, right? Because it's just too catastrophic. But it isn't obvious at all how people

00:47:33.840 can defend themselves against that cascade of catastrophizing. I mean, after all, if you were

00:47:41.280 everything you could be, then maybe everyone would be attracted to you. I mean, perhaps not,

00:47:45.120 but you get the point. And no easy rationalization is going to let you just brush that away,

00:47:50.480 especially if you actually happen to be interested in the person, because that's even worse. Because

00:47:54.080 then not only are you rejected, but you're rejected by someone upon whom you've projected an ideal,

00:48:01.360 or perhaps from whom you've actually observed an ideal. So it's worse. You're rejected by someone

00:48:08.800 that you want to be attracted to you to validate your own miserable existence. It's not a trivial problem.

00:48:20.640 So you're in this protected space that I...

00:48:22.720 You know, I made an analogy between that and the Garden of Eden. Or the city that Buddha was raised in.

00:48:31.600 It's all protected, and everything inside it is beautiful and functional. And that's by definition,

00:48:36.800 because if your frame of reference is working properly, then what's within it is things you control

00:48:43.360 that are functional, and they're serving your purposes. So when you're successful,

00:48:52.240 you're in the Garden of Eden. That's one way of thinking about it. When the things that you're

00:48:55.840 laying out in the world are delivering what they're supposed to deliver, that's what you inhabit.

00:49:00.400 But the problem is that there's always a snake inside the garden. And that's the story that's

00:49:05.120 echoed in the story of Buddha. In that case, it's Buddha's own curiosity that happens to be the snake,

00:49:10.080 and you could actually say the same thing about human beings. Maybe it wasn't the snake. Maybe it was

00:49:14.240 Eve's curiosity. They're the same thing in some sense. And so it's Buddha's curiosity that drives

00:49:20.400 him outside the city to find disease and death, and to blow apart his paradisal conceptualization of

00:49:27.360 the world. And so when we're looking at... for universality, the first thing we might say is,

00:49:34.800 well, you have a frame of reference that you've laid on the world. It's a story. You live inside a story.

00:49:38.880 And the second thing we could say... and that's universally true. The content of the story can

00:49:43.760 differ. That's okay. I don't care about that. It's the structural equivalence that I'm interested in.

00:49:48.800 You live inside a story. And you have to, because you have to live in something like that, because you

00:49:54.320 are goal-directed, and you have to be. And you have to simplify the world, because you're just not

00:49:59.600 enough of you to take into account everything at once. In fact, you can hardly take into account

00:50:05.040 anything at once. So you have to narrow things unbelievably. And by narrowing and including

00:50:12.560 only certain things, you exclude virtually everything else. So you're always in the problem...

00:50:17.600 in the situation where you have this little bounded universe that you inhabit, but outside of it is

00:50:22.400 chaos itself. And so that's the existential landscape. Order surrounded by chaos. Right? It's like a tree.

00:50:33.200 It's like the evolutionary home of primates. The tree with the snakes on the ground. That's our landscape.

00:50:41.600 Or it's the fire for tribal people. And the terrors of the forest that are beyond the...

00:50:47.120 that are beyond the... the light that the fire casts. It's explored territory versus unexplored territory.

00:50:54.320 And that's... that's an archetype as well. That... that's... you can't not be in a situation where

00:50:59.200 that's the case. Even if you're among friends, you know, you think that's explored territory.

00:51:05.760 That's not exactly right. Because what happens if you're among friends is that they carefully reveal

00:51:12.080 new parts of themselves all the time. So it's like they're blasting little elements of unexplored

00:51:18.560 territory... territory at you constantly. And if they don't, then what happens? You get bored.

00:51:26.000 And you look for new people. And we know there's empirical data on that with regards to

00:51:30.720 intimate relationships. Because there was a nice study done a while back showing that

00:51:34.800 we're looking at the ratio of... of positive to negative emotional experiences that were most

00:51:39.120 predictive of long-term relationship success. And the answer was... you know, obviously,

00:51:43.760 it depends on how you would measure an event, and how you would measure positive and negative emotion.

00:51:48.960 But that aside, the finding was something like, if you're in a relationship, and you only have five

00:51:55.920 positive interactions to one negative interaction, then the relationship will end. It's two negative.

00:52:01.360 negative. But if you have more than 11 positive interactions to one negative interaction, then

00:52:07.760 it also ends. And you think, well, that's pretty bloody peculiar. Why in the world would that be?

00:52:13.280 Don't you want, like, 100 to 1 positive to negative interactions? And the answer to that is,

00:52:18.560 what makes you think that you want a relationship so that you can be happy?

00:52:22.560 Or at least happy moment to moment? Why do you think that? It's not... it's certainly not the case.

00:52:27.280 You know that, too, because you... I mean, I bet you there's not a person in this room who hasn't

00:52:32.720 rejected someone because they were too nice to them. Something like that. Person's no challenge.

00:52:38.080 It's something like that. You want someone who, you know, you can get along with them, but now and

00:52:42.240 then they bite you, and you think, oh, that's... that's interesting. You know, I didn't really expect

00:52:46.560 that. And then you go and puzzle over it for a while, and you torture yourself about it. And that's one

00:52:51.040 of the things that keeps you really linked into the relationship. And the reason for that is that...

00:52:55.280 part of the reason that you want the relationship isn't so that you're happy right now.

00:52:59.120 It's so that you can live a high-quality life across multiple decades. And so you're looking for

00:53:04.720 someone that you have to contend with, who's going to push you beyond what you already are,

00:53:09.920 and who's going to judge you harshly often for your limitations. Now, that'll make you angry,

00:53:14.720 and all of that, you know, and resentful, and maybe you'll take your revenge, and all of that. But

00:53:19.840 you don't want someone who thinks you're perfect in your current form, partly because why would you

00:53:25.520 want to go out with someone that deluded? So... okay.

00:53:30.400 So you've got this interpretive schema laid out on the world. And it excludes the entire world. And

00:53:38.880 because it excludes the world, the world tends to manifest itself inside that protected space

00:53:45.760 in an uncontrollable manner. And that can take you down. And it takes you down the rabbit hole. And

00:53:52.720 down the rabbit hole is where everything is. Because when you make an error, what that is,

00:53:58.000 is the manifestation of the excluded world. And the problem with that is that's too much.

00:54:04.480 Right? Because if you step out of the lifeboat into the ocean, then you drown. And that's not any

00:54:09.920 good. You can't drown every time something manifests itself that you didn't expect.

00:54:16.000 There has to be a mechanism for orienting you in the face of error.

00:54:20.480 All right. So what exactly does that imply? The question is, what do you discover when you go down

00:54:28.960 the rabbit hole?

00:54:29.520 What do you discover when you make an error? And the answer is,

00:54:42.480 first, it's a brief manifestation of the dragon of chaos. And that's no more

00:54:49.280 to say than, when you encounter the incursion of unexplored territory into explored territory,

00:54:54.800 the circuitry you use is the same circuits that we use to respond instantaneously to the presence

00:54:59.760 of predatory forces. We use that circuit. And that's a brief manifestation of the dragon of chaos.

00:55:03.760 And so you might say, well, what do you discover when you make an error? And the answer is,

00:55:07.760 the predator is almost by definition, the thing that lurks beyond the safe confines of the community.

00:55:27.200 And I told you, I believe, a story about rats raised in naturalistic environments.

00:55:32.480 The rats are, they've got their burrows on one end of the little field, their little rat hierarchy,

00:55:39.040 they're doing their little rat social things, they're playing, and they're laughing, and they're

00:55:42.560 tickling each other, and they're, you know, raising their rat families, and that's all working out

00:55:46.960 just fine. Rats in that situation, by the way, are very difficult to get addicted to cocaine.

00:55:52.400 If you want to addict a rat to cocaine, you have to put it in a cage and isolate it.

00:55:56.560 It's not really a rat anymore, then, any more than you're a person if you're in solitary confinement,

00:56:00.560 right? I mean, you're sort, you're mostly, you're just misery. Anyways, in solitary confinement,

00:56:07.200 you'd be after cocaine nonstop, and maybe under other circumstances, but like a normal rat,

00:56:11.680 it's not that interested in cocaine. So that's just a side note. Anyways, the rats are doing their

00:56:17.360 thing, and then they've learned that they can go out to the other side of the field, and they can get

00:56:21.680 food. And so one day, the experimenters, instead of putting food out there, put a cat out there.

00:56:28.720 And the rat goes out and gets a whiff of the cat, which they do not like, and then the rat runs home,

00:56:34.240 and pokes his beak out of the burrow, and screams for like two days, ultrasonically. And all the other

00:56:39.760 rats are like frozen stiff because of that. They're not going anywhere. And so a two-day rat screaming fit

00:56:45.360 is no trivial thing. That'd be, I calculated, that'd be the equivalent of you screaming for two weeks.

00:56:50.880 So you have to be pretty upset to scream for two weeks, right? So this is hard on the rat. But the reason I'm

00:56:57.200 telling you this is the rat doesn't expect the cat to be there. The rat goes out and there's a cat,

00:57:01.920 and what it uses is its predator detection and alert systems to signify the presence of the cat.

00:57:07.360 And what we've done with the dragon imagery, roughly speaking, is make an amalgam of predatory monsters

00:57:13.600 and state that's a symbol for what lurks beyond safety. Because we're observing our own responses

00:57:20.320 in some sense. And it's not only that we're observing our own responses, but that we also

00:57:25.600 have a categorical set of responses to predator. And again, there's no speculation about this.

00:57:33.440 We already know this. Like, if you go study monkeys, for example,

00:57:37.360 they have distinct sets of vocalization that are associated with predator detection,

00:57:42.880 that have distinct circuits. We know that there are predator detection circuits.

00:57:47.600 And it's not unreasonable to also presuppose that they underlie the phenomena, for example,

00:57:53.040 that human beings are very good at learning fear to snakes. Snake fear might be innate.

00:57:57.440 Like, that's pushing the argument. But at minimum, psychologists have already concluded that

00:58:02.320 even if snake fear isn't innate, and it probably is, that it can be learned like that.

00:58:07.920 So you can condition people to be afraid of pictures of snakes way faster than you can condition them

00:58:14.320 to be afraid of pictures of electrical outlets or handguns. So... and that's well documented.

00:58:20.800 I don't think anybody disputes that at all. So the first assumption is when something unexpected

00:58:29.280 emerges, so we'll call that the snake in the garden, that you're prey and that's a predator,

00:58:34.880 and that the monster has come to get you. It's something like that.

00:58:38.160 Now, the representation of the dragon is more complex than mere monster, because the dragon,

00:58:44.320 the mythological dragon, also is the thing that hoards treasure. And I really like that symbol.

00:58:50.320 I think it's... I think that's also why it will never go away. It's such a great symbol,

00:58:53.920 because it says, well, the unknown can take you down. It can bite you with its fiery breath,

00:59:00.320 like a poisonous snake, and it can burn things like fire. And it's an aerial predator that can take

00:59:05.840 you from the air. And it's a carnivorous predator that can take you from the ground. And it's reptilian.

00:59:10.960 It's the sort of thing that can pull you down into the water. And it's easy to see that as an amalgam of

00:59:16.080 of the threats that have been laid forth for human beings since the beginning of time. And monster is

00:59:22.480 an amalgam of predator. And you might say, well, there's no such thing as a dragon. It's like, yes,

00:59:26.560 there is. It's just a loose category. What's common across all predators equals dragon.

00:59:32.480 It's not like it's a not... they're not real. They're hyper-real. They're more real than the

00:59:37.840 phenomena themselves, just like an abstraction can be more real than the phenomena themselves.

00:59:42.080 And then the canonical dragon for human beings isn't just a predator. We're not rabbits.

00:59:47.440 You can imagine that the dragon for a rabbit is just a dragon. There's no damn treasure there at all.

00:59:52.800 But for human beings, it's ambivalent. Because the thing that you don't know about

00:59:57.440 is also the thing that holds the greatest gift. And why is that? It's because the unrealized world

01:00:03.920 manifests itself when you make an error. And the unrealized world is something that can take you

01:00:08.720 down, obviously. But it's also the source of all new information. It's an infinite source of

01:00:15.120 information. And that's a really useful thing to know. Error is an infinite source of information.

01:00:19.920 And that's one of the things that can help you recalibrate the way that you interact with the

01:00:25.760 world. You think, well, we're interacting. Let's say we're having a conversation. And it's flowing

01:00:32.320 melodically. And all of a sudden, I say something, and there's a disjunction, right? You're offended by

01:00:37.600 it. There's some negative emotion that comes up. Or, you know, maybe I've said something to impress you,

01:00:43.280 or to be arrogant. And you respond badly. It's like you've got this melodic thing going on. It's a

01:00:48.320 consensual frame. And something pokes itself up to put a disjunction in the conversation.

01:00:54.880 It's like, well, that's where the information is. It's like something went wrong. Something

01:01:00.320 didn't work out. I'm not looking at the world properly. Or I don't know you well enough,

01:01:04.240 or as well as I thought. There's something there. And if I have any sense, I'm going to focus my

01:01:08.800 attention on that. Like, not obsessively or anything like that. But that's where all the information is.

01:01:13.520 Because as long as what we're doing is working, then we both know enough already.

01:01:20.400 As soon as what we're doing together isn't working, then that's instant evidence that

01:01:23.520 there's something about us that needs to be updated. And you might think, well, that's a

01:01:26.720 terrible thing. And the answer is, yes, of course it is. It's a terrible thing.

01:01:30.080 But it's also the thing, and this is the next stage of the development of this,

01:01:34.400 let's call it universal morality. It's like, the universal morality might be found in the answer

01:01:41.280 to the question, what should you do when you make a mistake? Now, one answer is catastrophic

01:01:46.960 dissolution. That's a collapse into chaos. Well, that's... no one is going to pick that voluntarily.

01:01:55.600 Let's put it that way. It's unbelievably unpleasant. Terribly anxiety-provoking, shameful,

01:02:06.240 and painful, all at the same time. Worse, it can mean the absence of positive emotion.

01:02:12.960 Because if you really collapse into chaos, not only are you overwhelmed by negative emotion,

01:02:17.120 but the positive emotion system shut off. And that's what happens to someone who's

01:02:21.680 extraordinarily depressed, and also hyper-anxious at the same time. Not only are they suffering

01:02:26.960 from an excess of negative emotion, but they've got no incentive movement forward whatsoever.

01:02:32.480 Okay, so that's not an optimal solution, because it takes you out.

01:02:36.400 The other possible... and so I would call that a nihilistic solution, or a chaotic solution.

01:02:41.200 It's not a solution, it's a dissolution. And you can think about it as a precursor to a potential

01:02:46.480 solution, but it's very easy to get stuck there. And that's why Jonah could have stayed in the

01:02:50.800 belly of the whale, along with all the other people that were eaten by the whale, and never

01:02:54.400 got back out. And you see people like that all the time. Their error has come along,

01:02:59.760 blown out their frames of reference, they've collapsed into the underworld, into the chaotic

01:03:03.600 underworld, and they don't know how to get out. They have post-traumatic stress disorder,

01:03:08.000 or they're depressed, or they're hyper-anxious, or they're resentful and aggressive and destructive.

01:03:14.080 Like, there's any number of states of being that can overwhelm you when the bottom has fallen out of

01:03:21.440 your life. So, it isn't something that people are going to...

01:03:26.960 It's not an optimal solution, let's put it that way. Well, the other...

01:03:31.120 That's a nihilistic solution, a collapse. The other solution is,

01:03:35.440 we're talking, and I don't get what I want from you, and so I say, you'd better not do that again.

01:03:43.440 I don't want to see that from you again. And that's a tyrannical attitude, right? What I'm going

01:03:47.600 to do is, I'm going to take my universe of order, and its predictions, and I'm going to say,

01:03:53.280 you go along with this, or I'm going to punish you. And that's... Now, there is an element in society,

01:04:01.680 like, society is made up of threats like that, to some degree. It's an ineradicable part of society.

01:04:10.800 That would be the tyrannical aspect of the great king, let's say. You know, we've organized a set

01:04:15.680 of punishments and threats that keep each of us in alignment. However, generally speaking,

01:04:21.520 in a society that's functional, we've decided to adopt agreement with that set of principles,

01:04:26.720 more or less voluntarily. And we say, well, you have rights and responsibilities,

01:04:30.480 and I have rights and responsibilities, and I'm willing to pay a price for yours,

01:04:34.480 including the acceptance of punishment if I transgress, but you're going to do the same

01:04:38.800 for me. So there are intelligent ways that punishment and threat can be used and bounded.

01:04:46.400 But that can easily degenerate into tyranny. And one of the methods that I can choose to use,

01:04:52.160 if I don't want to encounter error, is just to enforce my will on everyone else.

01:04:56.720 And I think when that happens personally, and in the family, and in the community, and in the state,

01:05:04.160 all at the same time, then you get the emergence of a tyranny. And so I would consider those two

01:05:12.880 counterproductive reactions to the emergence of the unrealized world.

01:05:18.720 It's like, you say something I don't like, I collapse completely.

01:05:24.240 Children don't like other children who do that, by the way, right? It's something that's very

01:05:28.640 interesting to observe. So let's say, kids have organized themselves to play a little game of

01:05:33.600 baseball with a plastic bat and a ball, and, you know, one child pitches, and the other child hits

01:05:39.040 the ball, and the child catches it and puts the batter out, and the batter bursts into tears.

01:05:44.080 Well, what happens? The other kids, you know, the first time that happens, they'll be sympathetic.

01:05:50.400 The third time that happens, they won't invite that kid out to play baseball anymore.

01:05:55.200 So the answer to, we're not getting along, is not you get to burst into tears and manifest

01:06:02.080 extraordinary emotional distress, because if you do that, no one's going to want to play with you.

01:06:06.800 And that's a lesson that many people could stand learning again. One of the things I think

01:06:12.640 that's really destabilizing our society right now, maybe, is that I'm not sure that kids have been

01:06:19.040 encouraged or allowed to play enough in the last 25, 30 years. And I think a lot of this identity

01:06:26.800 stuff is actually fantasy play. It's delayed fantasy play, because it's sort of what you do when you're

01:06:32.640 seven years old. It's like, well, I'm going to be this identity. That's what you're doing when you're

01:06:36.240 pretend. You're going to go along with that, because we're going to play this out. It's like,

01:06:39.440 that's fine. You don't impose that though, right? Not if you're a kid that has a clue. You invite

01:06:44.560 people to play. You don't insist on your identity and their compliance with it. It's not a playable

01:06:51.360 game. And you don't burst into tears and run off when someone won't play your game, because then

01:06:55.920 they won't play with you. And then you have to turn to force. And that's fine if that's what you want

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01:09:49.900 Does creating a universal morality come with the responsibility of making sure it's applied

01:09:59.140 universally? And what I mean by this is if we can say belief structure A is better than

01:10:05.380 belief structure B from a pragmatic perspective, does it come with the responsibility of making

01:10:11.080 sure that people who are trapped perhaps a tragical belief structure somewhere else that we have

01:10:18.340 a responsibility against? Good question. I mean, that's part of the question that in some sense

01:10:24.180 motivated, in some sense, motivated the American incursion into Iraq. Right? So what's our

01:10:31.620 responsibility in relationship to tyranny? That's a good question. Because one of the criticisms

01:10:36.720 current feminists are getting is for not protesting about the situation of women in, say, Saudi Arabia.

01:10:44.800 Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think that's, I think that criticism is more emerging because of, because

01:10:49.200 it's apparently, it's apparently paradoxical. And they've laid out a set of principles to which,

01:10:55.000 in principle, they, they adhere. And one of those principles is to reduce the destructive power

01:11:02.100 of the patriarchy. It's like, okay, there's some destructive patriarchy for you. Radio silence.

01:11:08.000 It's like, hmm, now, what am I supposed to do about that? Am I supposed to question your adherence

01:11:12.940 to those principles? Which is exactly what should be done. So I think it's a, it's, it's a, it's a

01:11:17.700 criticism of performative contradiction. You say you're for this, but when it comes to act it out,

01:11:23.220 you don't selectively in this situation. So there's something wrong, there's something about

01:11:28.020 your game that you're not being straight about. That's the criticism. And maybe there's rejoinders

01:11:33.260 to that, you know, but... Well, okay, okay, well, responsibility. Well, you know, then you'd have

01:11:40.120 to look at it at different levels of, of analysis with regards to interactions. You definitely

01:11:45.000 have a responsibility to your partner and your children. Okay, so your responsibility to your

01:11:52.160 children, as far as I'm concerned, is don't, it's twofold. One, don't let your children

01:11:57.840 do anything that makes you dislike them. And there's a corollary to that, which is don't be

01:12:02.600 an idiot. You know, so that's partly why you need a partner, because your partner has to tell you

01:12:07.760 when your demands on your children are excessive, because you're kind of, you know, you're not 100%

01:12:13.980 oriented properly. But still, you're their target adult. And so it's up to you to help them choose

01:12:21.240 a path that makes you want them to be around. Right? And that's your critical responsibility.

01:12:28.000 And hopefully, you're enough of an analog of the broader community, so that if they can figure out

01:12:34.780 how to get along with you, it radically increases the probability that they'll be able to get along

01:12:38.460 with everyone. So for example, if you're playing with your children, two years old, you, you help

01:12:46.160 them, you encourage them to play in a manner that's fun. And if you get that down, then, you know,

01:12:52.100 when you introduce them to another child, don't know how to play in a manner that's fun. And so

01:12:56.040 great, you've solved the problem. The problem is to get your child to enter into the collaborative

01:13:02.020 social world. And so yes, you have a primary responsibility for that. And then with regards

01:13:06.820 to your partner, here's something to think about with regards to role. So my wife and I have had this

01:13:12.900 discussion many times. And one of the discussions is, well, how are we to treat each other in public?

01:13:18.020 And it isn't, her name is Tammy. The discussion isn't, how should Jordan treat Tammy in public? Or

01:13:23.700 how should Tammy treat Jordan? That's not the discussion. This isn't personal. It's how should

01:13:28.360 a wife treat her husband? And how should a husband treat his wife? It's impersonal. And it's partly,

01:13:35.020 you don't put your partner down in public. Why? Well, it's not because you're hurting that person's

01:13:40.660 feelings. That's not why. It's that you're denigrating the relationship that you are

01:13:45.040 involuntarily. You know, some of the most painful days I've ever spent, one in particular, I spent

01:13:50.640 with a group of men who had been in therapy for their marriage, and who bloody well needed it,

01:13:55.580 I can tell you that. And they spent their whole day complaining about their wives. Like, it just

01:14:00.920 made me sweat the whole day. I thought, I can't believe I'm here with you guys. I can't tell you

01:14:05.760 why I was. It's just, you know, it was just happenstance more than anything. And I thought,

01:14:09.980 how can you be so damn dumb? It's like, it's certainly possible that you married barbarian

01:14:15.860 witches. Fine. But you don't have, you're so lacking in sense that you would discuss that

01:14:22.000 in public, not noticing that you picked them. So basically, all you're doing is holding up

01:14:27.440 a sign, and waving it constantly, that says, I'm an idiot. I'm an idiot. Right? And so,

01:14:33.900 well, back to responsibility. You have a responsibility to those whom you love, and are obligated to,

01:14:44.920 to ensure that they manifest themselves in a manner that's most beneficial to them over the long run.

01:14:51.520 Now, you have the same responsibility, I would say, to yourself. But you'll have blind spots.

01:14:56.980 Other people have to help you with that. But so the rule is, you know, you don't let, you don't,

01:15:02.660 you help your wife figure out how not to make a fool of herself in public. And she extends to you

01:15:08.440 the same courtesy. And it's partly maintenance of the sacred nature of the relationship. It has nothing

01:15:14.260 to do with you or her, precisely. It's broader and wider than that. Okay, so then that's two levels

01:15:21.120 of responsibility. Child, partner, next level of responsibility. You're asked at your workplace to

01:15:28.660 go, to undergo unconscious bias retraining. And you say, yes. It's like, okay, you've just admitted

01:15:36.120 that you're a bigot. Right? Because you're acting it out. It's like, I'm a racist bigot, obviously I

01:15:41.600 need to be retrained. And so you might say, well, I'm not going to make a fuss about it. Right? Or I've

01:15:46.240 been told to do it. Or maybe you agree with it. Fine. And if that, if you agree with it,

01:15:51.360 no problem. You can make a case for it. I think it's a weak and appalling case, personally. But

01:15:57.240 you can make a case for it. You could say, well, you know, I am interested in my biases and how

01:16:02.660 to rectify them. And like, fair enough, you know, people are biased. But if you object to

01:16:08.420 it, and you don't say anything, then you're complicit. And then it's on you. And you know,

01:16:16.580 like, A causes B and C, and B causes C and D, and so forth. The thing tends, it doesn't always,

01:16:23.640 but it has this tendency to expand. And you'll come home angry and upset, and you'll go to the

01:16:28.880 training program, and you'll think this is ridiculous, because that is what you'll think

01:16:32.100 in all likelihood. And you won't say anything. But it eats at you. Well, you've abrogated your

01:16:38.280 responsibility. And so, and then you might say, well, so then, then that's how the community

01:16:43.420 becomes corrupt. That's how the community starts to be corrupt, is that people turn a blind eye

01:16:48.360 to emergent pathology, when they know it's pathological. That's exactly what the Egyptian

01:16:53.040 story says. Osiris is overcome by Seth, because he's willfully blind. Willfully blind.

01:17:01.660 Which means, he knows, but refuses to, he knows, quote, his predator detection systems have gone

01:17:10.020 off. Monster. Well, then you're supposed to look, okay, exactly what sort of monster is this? Well,

01:17:15.280 it doesn't have wings, it doesn't have a tail, you know? You cut it down into the, you cut it from

01:17:20.180 the monster that it could be, into the monster that it is. That's the first step. And then you take

01:17:25.720 the appropriate steps. And then you also notice the other monsters, because here's something to think

01:17:30.600 about, you're going to pay a price for speaking up. But you're going to pay a price for not speaking

01:17:38.020 up. So it's like, monsters on the right, monsters on the left. Pick the ones you want to battle with.

01:17:44.640 If you decide not to make your stand, you weaken yourself. If you do it a hundred times, then even

01:17:53.120 if the monster was only this big, now you're this big, it's going to eat you. You know, when it was

01:17:57.600 this big, you probably could have kicked it across the room. It's too late for that. You've

01:18:01.440 capitulated and capitulated. You know, and so what you've done, and this is a way to think

01:18:06.700 about it from a Jungian perspective, this is what Jung was trying to get at when he was talking

01:18:10.140 about alchemy. It's like, the thing that pops up to object to you is this incredibly complex

01:18:20.280 entity. It's the entire world encapsulated in the event. If you interact with it, you

01:18:28.160 unpack it. You differentiate your sense of the world, and you gather new skills. So for

01:18:34.680 example, let's say, there's something going on at your workplace, and you need to object

01:18:39.400 to it, because it's driving you crazy. And you talk it over with your wife, so that you've

01:18:42.760 got your head screwed on straight. You say, oh, I've got to say something. And you go there

01:18:45.980 and you say something, and you know, you're stumbling and awkward and all of that. But

01:18:49.440 you watch the response, and maybe you get what you're aiming at, maybe you don't. But

01:18:54.280 you've learned a bunch. You've learned, well, I'm not as coherent as I could be. I'm not

01:18:57.420 as good at putting my arguments together. My boss is more of a son of a bitch than he thought

01:19:01.280 he was. This is a worse problem that I knew about. It's like, differentiate it, differentiate

01:19:05.480 it. So now the landscape is higher resolution. And so are you. Well, so good. So maybe you're

01:19:11.740 a little bit better prepared the next time you have to do that. And so the issue here,

01:19:16.320 to some degree, is don't lose an opportunity to grapple with something that objects to you,

01:19:23.680 especially when the objection is rather small. Because that's something you say, well, I can

01:19:30.080 put up with it. It's like, fair enough. Like, you don't want to make everything into a war.

01:19:34.280 I usually use a rule of three. If we're interacting and you do something that I find disruptive,

01:19:38.680 I'll note it. It's like, potential dragon. Gone. And I leave it be. And then if you do

01:19:45.640 it again, I think, oh yeah, that probably wasn't merely situational. But I'll leave it

01:19:51.820 be, because that's still not enough evidence. But if you do it a third time, then I'll say,

01:19:56.600 hey, I just noticed this. And you'll say, no, that didn't happen. And I'll say, yeah,

01:20:01.120 not only did it happen, but it happened here, and it happened here. And I'm not making this

01:20:05.580 up. So there's something going on here. Like, I'm not ignoring it, and we can get to the bottom

01:20:09.940 of it. And then they'll come up with a bunch of objections about why that isn't necessary.

01:20:13.800 And you push those aside, and they'll come up with a few more objections. And they'll push those

01:20:17.800 aside. And then usually they'll get mad, or burst into tears. And if you push that aside,

01:20:23.960 then you get to have a conversation. Right. And then you can solve the problem. But man,

01:20:28.860 you got to be a monster. Because first of all, you need six arguments about why their objections

01:20:35.040 aren't going to stop you. And then you have to not be intimidated by the anger. And you have to not

01:20:41.340 be swamped by compassion about the tears. And then you can have a conversation. And people don't do

01:20:49.120 that. They won't do that. And so they don't solve the problems. And so then the problems accrue.

01:20:54.500 Right. And if they accrue over 15 years of a relationship, then they end up fat, ugly,

01:21:00.520 and in divorce court. So, and that's, you know, that's not a, that's not a great outcome. It's a,

01:21:06.440 it's, divorce court and cancer are similar in their, in their seriousness. Not always, but,

01:21:14.840 but sufficiently often. So when that error emerges, it's a, it's a glimmering. Now,

01:21:23.060 you know, we talked a lot about the hierarchical structure of goals, you know? And so here's

01:21:29.600 something, here's something to think about. So the thing that announces itself as error has

01:21:36.820 a twofold nature. That's because it's chaos and order at the same time. Or it's because it's all

01:21:42.080 the archetypal structures at the same time. It's the dragon of chaos. It's the great mother,

01:21:46.720 positive and negative. It's the great father, positive and negative. It's the individual,

01:21:50.720 hero and adversary. All of that manifests itself in the moment of error, right? The archetypes come

01:21:56.360 forward. Did you make an error because you're a bad person? Could be. Now, so, so one of the

01:22:02.520 things to think about with regards to that is, you know, in the Mesopotamian creation story,

01:22:07.100 when, when, when Tiamat comes flooding back, it's so interesting, that story.

01:22:11.880 You think about what she does. So she's the archetype of error, let's say, the error that

01:22:18.820 can take you out, that can dissolve you in salt water, tears. Well, she's irritated because Apsu was

01:22:26.540 destroyed. So the structure is gone. Carelessness has destroyed the structure. Up comes Tiamat.

01:22:31.680 She's not happy. What does she do? She prepares a phalanx of monstrous monsters. It's exactly what

01:22:38.280 the story says. She produces a whole horde of monsters to come at you. And she puts Kingu at

01:22:44.880 their head. And Kingu is the king of the monsters. And later, so he's the ultimate bad guy. He's Satan,

01:22:52.240 for all intents and purposes. In the Mesopotamian version, it's out of him that Marduk makes human

01:22:58.360 beings. It's out of his blood that Marduk makes human beings. That's a critical issue, man.

01:23:03.420 The Mesopotamians said, imagine the worst monster you can possibly imagine. The king of all the

01:23:09.700 monsters. That's the blood of human beings. Wow. So what does that mean? Well, it means that one of

01:23:18.540 the terrible things that lurks... Let's say that you've been in a long-term relationship and it

01:23:24.800 collapses. Let's say you were... You know, you had a tendency towards alcoholism. You weren't so

01:23:31.300 great with regards to your drug use. You're not that conscientious. And you had like four or five

01:23:37.120 kind of low-rent affairs. And you know it. Your marriage collapses. Bang. Well, who do you first meet

01:23:46.980 when you fall into chaos? You meet King of the Monsters. And he's you. It's like, why did my marriage

01:23:53.360 fall apart? What did I do wrong? Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. I did all these things wrong. Why?

01:23:59.260 Because that thing inhabits me. What is it? Well, that's the most horrifying question, right? Well,

01:24:05.220 that's why... So down there in the archetypal space, all these things lurk. The hero and the adversary.

01:24:12.600 Well, you've just met the adversary, right? Well, maybe you were a tyrant. That's certainly possible.

01:24:17.960 Maybe everything around you was chaotic. So what do you encounter when things fall apart?

01:24:23.540 You encounter the adversary. You encounter the tyrant. You encounter the catastrophe of nature.

01:24:28.640 And you encounter the dragon of the chaos. And they're all intermingled.

01:24:33.440 You have to sort that out. That's what happens to Alice when she goes down the rabbit hole, right?

01:24:37.180 She meets the Red Queen. And the Red Queen is always running around. Off with her heads,

01:24:43.840 off with her heads. And she says, in my kingdom, you have to run as fast as you can just to stay

01:24:48.280 in the same place. Right? Down the rabbit hole, you meet the archetypes. And so... Okay, so back to

01:24:56.300 responsibility. Well, one of the things Solzhenitsyn detailed, you know, he said, well, how do societies

01:25:00.700 go corrupt? He said, it's easy. One little sin at a time. You go to work, someone's lording it over you.

01:25:09.180 You know that they're tyrannical. You don't have the wherewithal to stand up. It's like, okay.

01:25:15.260 You're a slave. And so if you continue to agree to be a slave, you will continue to generate tyrants.

01:25:24.800 Right? And the only thing that can stop you from doing that, I think, is the right kind of terror.

01:25:29.320 It's like, be careful what you give up. Because that's this logos. Okay, so... All right.

01:25:35.120 So that's this logos. The logos is the thing that enables you to mediate between order and chaos.

01:25:40.860 And maybe you have to have some faith in that. It's like, well, what should you do if someone

01:25:44.360 is harassing you? Well, you should fight back. Okay, what is that? What's the most effective way

01:25:50.020 to fight back? Well, sometimes it's physical. But that's not necessarily for the best.

01:25:56.380 Maybe it's through articulation. Maybe it's through analysis. Right? You want to be sharp.

01:26:01.120 You want to be able to decompose a problem. You want to be able to formulate an argument

01:26:05.260 and a counter-response. And maybe you want to be so good at that that people don't mess

01:26:08.900 with you to begin with. And then you're a perfectly articulate counter-monster, and you

01:26:14.200 never have to take your sword out. That's the place that you want to be. It's like, people

01:26:19.440 should know, after three seconds of interacting with you, that harassing you will be a seriously

01:26:25.640 bad idea. And then you'll have a perfectly fine time with them. So, and that's part of,

01:26:31.740 you know, so there's some utility in meeting the devil in the underworld. Right? Because

01:26:36.520 maybe he's got something to teach you. That's certainly possible. And that, and one of the

01:26:40.860 things that you can be taught is that your normative morality, which is basically your

01:26:45.460 harmlessness and your naivety masquerading as virtue, is completely insufficient to protect

01:26:52.000 you in the world, especially against the sorts of things that you're talking about, which are

01:26:56.440 tyranny. Tyrants will push until you push back. It's in their nature. They don't have internal

01:27:03.500 controls. So they just push and push and push and push and push and push. Even kids do that.

01:27:08.740 Like, little kids do that all the time. They'll just push you until they hit a wall. They're

01:27:12.940 actually quite happy when they hit a wall, because the last thing a child wants is a universe without

01:27:17.180 walls. It terrifies them. Right? They want to see, well, I'm in a swimming pool. There's

01:27:23.040 an edge. They don't want to see, oh, oh, this isn't a swimming pool. This is an ocean. I'm

01:27:28.160 in the middle of an ocean. I'm going to drown. That's a terrible thing for children. That's

01:27:32.420 why they need discipline and structure, because it's consistency and predictability and routine

01:27:38.280 and all the things that are extraordinarily helpful to them.

01:27:41.740 Okay. So, now, think about that hierarchy that we talked about. So, you're not in a

01:27:48.660 story. You're in nested stories. And the nested stories ground themselves in action, in actual

01:27:54.760 embodied action. So, if you're going to be a good partner, maybe you help prepare the

01:28:03.320 meals. And to help prepare the meals means you pick up a plate with your hand, and you

01:28:08.160 move it physically through space, and you put it on the table. That's where it stops

01:28:11.560 being an abstraction. So, at the bottom of an ethical hierarchy of value are actions.

01:28:18.980 Not things. That's the scientific world. But actions. And then, you can label the actions

01:28:27.880 with abstractions as you move up the hierarchy. So, you're good at setting the table. So, that

01:28:32.900 means you're good at making dinner. So, that means that you've got one element of being a good

01:28:36.700 partner in place. And being a good partner is one element of being a good person. And

01:28:41.560 so, you're not so good at setting the table, and you say, well, I'm not a good person. It's

01:28:46.040 like, well, no. You should go down to the higher resolution levels of the hierarchy and start

01:28:50.640 there. And that's what you do when you're arguing with people. But there's another thing that's

01:28:54.240 really useful about conceptualizing the hierarchy in this manner. So, I think what we'll do is

01:29:02.400 we'll stop now for 10 minutes, and I'll... because I want to bring up this diagram. Because

01:29:06.560 what I want to do next is... it's a bleak story at the moment, because the story is something

01:29:12.040 like... you're going to lay out oversimplifications in the world, and they're going to be prone

01:29:16.420 to catastrophic error, and then you have to encounter what's terrifying in order to progress.

01:29:20.980 And so, what that means is that progression is always dependent on terror. Something like

01:29:25.300 that. And there's some truth in that, and that's why people don't progress. But it's not a

01:29:29.680 sufficient truth, and I want to unpack that when we come back. So let's come back in 10

01:29:33.980 minutes, and then I'll do... I can unpack that.

01:29:37.480 There's this parable in the New Testament that just came to mind. I'm going to mangle it a bit,

01:29:43.080 because it's not one that I have well memorized, but... and I'm probably going to conflate two

01:29:48.380 or three stories together, but I think I've got it right. Christ is walking down the road,

01:29:53.320 and someone picks him up, and the person is rich, and wealthy. And he has a talk, they

01:30:03.580 have a talk, and the wealthy man basically tells him all the things that are wrong with

01:30:09.520 his life. And then he asks him what he should do about it, and Christ says to him, you have

01:30:16.640 to give up everything you own and follow me. And that's often being read as a criticism

01:30:22.100 of wealth. And that's actually not what the story means. What the story means is this guy

01:30:27.920 has a lot of wealth, but he's still miserable. And so that means that what he has is the obstacle

01:30:33.960 to what he could be. And so that's the message of the story, is that if you're miserable with

01:30:38.240 what you have, then you have to let go of what you have so that maybe you could have something

01:30:42.560 else. And so... and then there's some commentary on that story. I think other people are listening,

01:30:48.800 and they say, well, if that's the price to be paid, then no one is ever going to pay it. And

01:30:56.380 I think that's where the statement, it is easier for a man to go through the eye of a needle... for

01:31:02.040 a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter paradise. I believe that's

01:31:08.620 the derivation of that story. And like I said, that's been read as a critique of wealth, but it

01:31:13.240 isn't. It's a critique of attachment. Now, you know, in the Buddhist doctrine, one of the

01:31:21.000 impediments to enlightenment is attachment. And people read that as saying, well, you shouldn't

01:31:28.420 care for anything in the world. And there's a nihilism that's associated with that. And there is a

01:31:34.680 strong nihilistic tendency in Buddhism that has to do with abandonment of the world. And you see that

01:31:41.220 in Christianity to some degree, with people going off to lead ascetic lives. And to... you know,

01:31:45.780 it's part of multiple religious traditions, that idea of asceticism. And there's some utility in it

01:31:51.120 if it is your attachment, say, to material things or status or whatever that's interfering with your

01:31:57.440 psychological progression. Now, the idea is that you should let go of whatever it is that's

01:32:02.260 interfering with your psychological progression. Because no matter how valuable what it is that's

01:32:07.880 interfering is, it's not as valuable as what you're giving up.

01:32:12.860 Okay. However, the criticism still stands. And the criticism was, well, if the task is that difficult,

01:32:20.200 then no one's going to do it. And so in the Brothers Karamazov, there's a famous story called

01:32:28.920 the Grand Inquisitor. And it's a story told by Ivan Karamazov to his brother, Eliosha. And Ivan is a very

01:32:41.380 high-status, intelligent, attractive, tough-minded soldier. And Eliosha is his younger brother,

01:32:52.060 and he's kind of softer, and less rational, more spiritual, and also training to be a novitiate at

01:33:00.860 the local monastery. And Ivan likes to tear strips off him, because he's a cynic and an atheist.

01:33:08.620 And in Dostoevsky's normal, brilliant manner, he makes Ivan an incredibly powerful, articulate,

01:33:16.600 and admirable character. So when Dostoevsky wants to take someone on in his literary investigations,

01:33:23.380 he doesn't take his enemy and turn him into some sort of weak puppet. He takes his enemy and turns

01:33:28.580 him into the strongest possible enemy he can imagine, and then goes to battle against that.

01:33:35.740 It's a hallmark of great literature. It's what distinguishes Dostoevsky, for example, from Ayn Rand.

01:33:39.960 Because what Ayn Rand does is she takes her... she's a darling of the, I would say, libertarian slash

01:33:46.280 right. She takes her enemies, and they're all the same, first of all. Every single one of her negative

01:33:51.900 characters is exactly the same as every other one. And they're all bad. You know, there's no redeeming

01:33:57.600 qualities whatsoever in them. And they also, I would say, make... they're weak characters who make weak

01:34:03.300 arguments. That's not the way to progress. The way to progress is to take your enemy seriously,

01:34:07.900 seriously. And to even inflate them into something beyond their capacity to inflate themselves,

01:34:13.220 and then see if you can hammer out a solution to the genuine problem that's being posed.

01:34:18.420 Anyway, so Dostoevsky does that brilliantly, always. And that's what makes him so absolutely

01:34:23.720 remarkable. But anyways, Ivan tells Eliosha this story. He calls it the Grand Inquisitor. And in the

01:34:30.320 story, Christ comes back to Earth in the Spanish Inquisition. And he's out by a fountain, and people

01:34:37.480 sort of notice him, and he starts performing miracles, and a big crowd gathers around, and it's like happy

01:34:42.140 days, you know. But then the Inquisitor shows up, this old, you know, harsh, tyrannical guy, and he

01:34:49.380 has his guards arrest him, and throws him in prison. And so now Christ is in prison, and the Inquisitor

01:34:58.140 comes down and says to him, well, you're probably wondering why we threw you in prison, you know,

01:35:03.320 especially given that we're the members of the, you know, we're the representatives of the church

01:35:07.540 that you hypothetically founded. And Christ remains silent through this entire episode.

01:35:14.380 And the Inquisitor basically says, look, you know, you laid down this ethic that's wonderful,

01:35:22.900 but it's superhuman. No one can do it. It's asking way too much. And so the burden you put on people

01:35:29.600 was just far too great. And so what we've done in the Catholic Church in the centuries since the

01:35:34.320 church was founded is we've lightened the load. We said, well, we take ordinary people and say,

01:35:38.500 well, here's some things you can do to be a little bit better. And, you know, we've instituted

01:35:42.540 confession and repentance and all that. We've kind of toned it down so that the average person

01:35:47.180 has some hope of progress. And we're making headway. And the last bloody thing we need around

01:35:52.180 here is you coming back and, like, screwing up all our good efforts. It's like, it was nice to have

01:35:57.300 you around once, but once was plenty, man. We don't need you around anymore. And so Christ listens to

01:36:02.400 this, doesn't say anything. And then the Inquisitor turns to leave, and Christ grabs him and kisses him

01:36:07.880 on the lips. And the Inquisitor turns white and then leaves. And when he leaves the door, he leaves

01:36:13.880 the door open. And that's the end of the story. And it's an amazing story. It's an absolutely remarkable

01:36:19.580 story in every possible way. And, you know, Dostoevsky was objecting to some degree to the tyranny of the

01:36:26.880 Catholic Church, or even of the Christian Church, for that matter. But the thing that he did that

01:36:30.820 was so damn brilliant is that he even made the Inquisitor leave the door open. You know, and as

01:36:35.920 a balanced critique of Catholicism, even during the Inquisition, it's so brilliant. It's so

01:36:41.200 emblematic of Dostoevsky's take on the world that he criticized the inquisitorial aspect of Christianity.

01:36:49.160 And of course, it's the tyrannical aspect of any belief system. But noted that they bloody well

01:36:53.900 left the door open, right? So it's brilliant. It's brilliant. It's remarkable.

01:37:00.700 So anyways, the whole point that I'm making here is that there are terrible impediments

01:37:05.660 to enlightenment. And the impediments are the necessity of sacrifice and the necessity of

01:37:13.720 the voluntary acceptance of suffering. I mean, you see that in Buddhism, you know, because

01:37:17.860 one of the fundamental principles of Buddhism is that life is suffering, and that attachment

01:37:23.540 makes it worse. And well, it isn't precisely attachment. It's attachment to things such that

01:37:32.180 you cannot release the things when it's time to let them go, right? So like, you're a phoenix.

01:37:38.200 You're 100 years old. Your feathers, they're not working anymore, right? You're all wrinkly.

01:37:42.660 You're done. It's time to burst into flames and be reborn. But you don't want to burn off your

01:37:47.500 feathers. You want to cling to them. And that's not good, because you have to be willing to undergo that

01:37:52.620 transformation process. And that involves, like, you know, if you take yourself apart because you've

01:37:58.700 made a mistake, and you find out what it is about you that's not set up properly, and that's why the

01:38:05.460 mistake occurred, and that's really going to happen, for example, when an intimate relationship breaks

01:38:09.780 down, then you have to be in a position where you're willing to let the errors that are part of

01:38:15.280 your character that define you, right? They might even be part of your identity. You have to let... you have

01:38:20.260 to be willing to let them go. You have to be willing to let them burn off. And that's a hell of a thing

01:38:24.220 to ask. And so then the question might be, well, is there a less radical solution to the problem

01:38:29.480 than crucifixion and resurrection, or the total immolation and regeneration? Because that's the

01:38:37.440 archetypal... what's that? That's the archetypal end point, that if you want to put yourself together,

01:38:43.240 you have to die and be reborn. I mean, that motif comes up all the time in popular stories and in

01:38:51.160 mythology. And so here's how I think that problem can be resolved. So let's go back to the Pinocchio

01:39:03.780 story momentarily. So what happens... And the Pinocchio story, to me, is analogous in its structure to the

01:39:10.520 Sermon on the Mount. And so I'm going to make a parallel between those two things. So basically,

01:39:14.960 what the Sermon on the Mount suggests is that you should conceptualize the highest good that you're

01:39:21.280 capable of conceptualizing, and orient yourself towards that. And that having done that, you

01:39:26.780 should live in the moment. So it's not like you should live in the moment. It doesn't say that,

01:39:32.520 because that's often Christ the hippie, you know? So the hippies who have adopted that... or that sort

01:39:39.280 of... that element of Christianity say, well, you live for the moment, you know? And in meditation and

01:39:45.760 other practices, some of the attempt is to get you to live in the moment. But, you know, just to tell

01:39:51.340 people to live in the moment, it's like, what the hell kind of advice is that? What about the future?

01:39:55.960 You know? That's not helpful advice. Somebody comes to you and they're suffering dreadfully because,

01:40:00.380 you know, their mother has Alzheimer's and they're unemployed. Well, live in the moment.

01:40:04.340 It's like, that's just not helpful. It's... and because it's even worse than that, it's judgmental.

01:40:09.300 You say, well, the only reason you're suffering is because you haven't oriented yourself properly

01:40:13.580 to live in the moment. It's like, no, you're suffering because your mother has Alzheimer's

01:40:17.280 and you don't have a job. It's like, it's not because you aren't living in the moment.

01:40:21.700 So living in the moment isn't the right answer. The right answer is something more like,

01:40:27.880 orient yourself towards the highest good that you can imagine, and then act in the moment.

01:40:33.000 That's a whole different story. Now, that's what happens in the Pinocchio story. Basically,

01:40:36.420 what happens is that Geppetto sees the star beckoning in the distance, and he orients himself

01:40:42.860 towards the highest good he can imagine. He wants to take this creation of his, and so this is

01:40:47.700 manifesting itself conceptually at multiple levels simultaneously, because there's a story about

01:40:54.180 the destiny of humanity in relationship to God nested in the story. It's like, take your

01:40:59.700 fallible creation, your puppet, and set up the condition such that it's capable of taking

01:41:10.400 on full functional independence. It's something like that. So that's what you do if you're

01:41:14.700 a good parent with your children. You don't protect them. You don't offer them safety.

01:41:18.260 You don't do any of that, except insofar as it's necessary to facilitate their development

01:41:25.040 as fully competent and courageous beings. The purpose of the protection is only to allow

01:41:31.540 that developmental process to continue. So you orient... Geppetto orients himself, and so

01:41:37.500 the father orients himself, and then the son undertakes the voyage. And so... all right.

01:41:43.440 So let's say that that's the case. You orient yourself first. Then you can start to rely

01:41:50.240 on your... then you can start to concentrate more on your orientation to the moment.

01:41:57.040 Now... I'm gonna tell you another story. So you know, I was just watching Harry Potter

01:42:03.240 the other day, the first one. And I was watching the Quidditch game. And the Quidditch game is very

01:42:09.440 interesting, because there's a game and a meta game going on at the same time. So the game is

01:42:14.000 just the standard Quidditch game. It's kind of like basketball played on brooms, right? You have

01:42:17.600 to throw balls through hoops, and if you get enough points, you win. But at the same time...

01:42:22.240 So there's the normal players. And then there's two seekers, one from each team. And the seekers

01:42:27.280 aren't playing the same game. The game is nested inside the seeker game, actually. Because if you're

01:42:33.840 a seeker and you perform your task, then everyone wins, right? You win, but everyone wins. And so

01:42:39.680 you're not even playing the normal game. You're playing the seeker game. And the thing that Harry

01:42:46.000 Potter chases is this thing called the snitch. And the snitch... this is one of the things that's...

01:42:50.640 I can't... I don't know how the hell J.K. Rowland figured this out. I cannot figure it out.

01:42:55.600 Because that snitch is a winged ball, right? And there's actually a symbol of that winged ball,

01:43:01.040 called the round chaos, which Jung describes in his works on alchemy. And his works on alchemy

01:43:05.600 are really, really difficult. It's not easy to figure out what he's talking about at all.

01:43:09.360 But the round chaos, which is a winged ball, is... it's a manifestation of the spirit Mercury,

01:43:16.560 and Mercury is an emissary of the god. So you can think about Mercury as the unconscious manifesting

01:43:22.640 itself in your field of experience, something like that. In any case, the round chaos

01:43:29.680 is the container of the primordial material from which the world is made. And I think about it like

01:43:37.680 this. It's this thing. There. It's that. So when you encounter an anomaly, an error,

01:43:49.520 it's a container. That's a way of conceptualizing it. And what does it contain? Well, it contains...

01:43:56.000 in some sense, it contains the whole world. But here's an example. Like, look, let's say...

01:44:02.160 Ah, God. Let's say that you've had repeated fights with your wife about how domestic duties

01:44:08.320 are going to be arranged around mealtime. And believe me, you're gonna have those fights.

01:44:14.080 And so what's happening is that mealtimes are unpleasant, because there's a war for

01:44:19.520 power going on in the kitchen, right? And so then you think, one day, well, you're gonna...

01:44:26.240 you're gonna note that, and you're going to do an archaeological investigation and find out just

01:44:33.200 what the hell is going on. And so you start unpacking the fact that mealtimes are not pleasant.

01:44:41.680 And so what's in that little thing that you're unpacking, that package? Well,

01:44:47.120 the entire power dynamic between men and women in the modern world is inside that dispute. And

01:44:54.560 you might find that part of the reason that your wife is upset about the way that mealtimes are

01:44:58.480 arranged is because her grandmother was beat by her grandfather. And that's playing

01:45:04.720 a role in... it's played a role in determining her unconscious expectations. And that's pathologizing

01:45:12.160 one of the day-to-day rituals in the house. And if you're gonna unpack that, you're gonna have to

01:45:16.720 unpack all of that into... you take a little monster, and you decompose it, and you find out it's a hydra.

01:45:22.880 It's got 50 heads. And then you have to work through every single one of those. It's really,

01:45:27.600 really difficult. And so it's a container that contains everything. But the thing is, if you unpack it

01:45:32.720 successfully, let's say, and you deal with it, you negotiate a consensus, then all of a sudden you

01:45:38.480 get peace, say, around your mealtimes, which is a major accomplishment, man, because you have to

01:45:43.440 eat three times a day, and it's the center of the household and all of that. But the thing is, is that

01:45:49.440 often, when you're... especially in the context of an intimate relationship, things will emerge that

01:45:56.160 produce discontinuities. And the question is, what should your attitude towards that discontinuity be?

01:46:00.720 Well, you can punish the person for manifesting the discontinuity. That's the tyrannical aspect.

01:46:06.160 Or you can let it take the whole thing apart, and that will happen. I mean, that's often how

01:46:10.560 relationships end, is that a discontinuity emerges, and people get into it, and things go sideways so

01:46:17.760 badly that the whole relationship descends into chaos, and people bail out of it. And so it's no wonder

01:46:24.640 that people want to ignore it. And it's also no wonder that they want to tyrannize it. It's like,

01:46:30.000 quit bothering me with that. Well, possibly, but probably not. And also, if my attitude towards you

01:46:39.600 is quit bothering me with that, your attitude towards me, when I have the same sort of problem

01:46:44.480 in reverse, is going to be exactly the same. And so we're not going to get anywhere with it.

01:46:50.320 All right. But that still is painful. Now, let's go back to the quidditch issue. Now, here's what

01:46:58.880 happens, is that Harry Potter is picked to be the seeker. So that means he is the seeker. Whatever he

01:47:06.000 represents is the seeker. And he's an interesting character, because he's touched by evil,

01:47:12.880 and he's a rule-breaker. And he's also kind of a normal kid. He's not a hyper-intellect or anything

01:47:17.200 like that. That's Hermione's rule, right? So he's normal, but super-normal at the same time. And he

01:47:23.440 gets picked to be the seeker. And then you think about what is it he seeks. And he seeks this thing

01:47:28.160 that glimmers, right? It flashes in front of him. It's made out of gold, and it has wings. And if he grabs

01:47:35.840 it, then he wins. And so the question is, what does that represent? Now, it's interesting that when

01:47:42.320 people watch that movie, they actually find that, you know, they think that that's kind of cool,

01:47:45.600 that it's a cool game. And it is a cool game. She laid it out very nicely. And the idea is that,

01:47:51.840 well, there's a game, and if you play it normally, you win the game. But in that game is a metagame.

01:47:56.720 And if you play that properly, then not only do you win, but everybody wins. So then the next rule is,

01:48:01.600 the metagame supersedes the game. And that's the same idea that I'm chasing here with you today

01:48:06.880 about this metamorality. It's the morality that emerges as a consequence of the analysis of a set

01:48:12.800 of moralities. Or it's the morality to which all other moralities should be subjugated. That's

01:48:19.360 another way of thinking about it. And I said, well, that's a terrible thing, because it involves

01:48:24.640 painful sacrifice, or maybe it involves confronting the thing you least want to confront. That's the

01:48:28.960 Jungian dictum, right? If your life isn't all that it should be, then you should find out

01:48:33.440 the thing that you least want to confront, that you're avoiding, and confront that. And that's

01:48:37.920 easy to say. But it's a terrible thing, because it means you're going to have to turn your gaze to

01:48:42.960 the place where you are weakest and most vulnerable. And that is asking a lot of people. So then you might

01:48:49.280 say, well, is there an alternative? And I think there is an alternative. So this is the anomaly,

01:48:55.440 right? This is the ball that contains everything. I think there is an alternative. I think it's

01:48:59.360 associated with this idea. So imagine we could have a conflict if we were in a relationship.

01:49:08.400 We could have a conflict that would blow the relationship apart. All right? So we don't

01:49:12.160 want to have that conflict. And then we could have no conflict whatsoever, which means that

01:49:17.280 you would never get to say what you wanted, and I would never get to say what I wanted, because

01:49:21.680 we're either identical, which is just not happening, or we're going to have conflict,

01:49:26.240 because you're going to want some things that I don't want, and vice versa. So if there's no

01:49:30.240 conflict, we are not in a relationship. All right? So zero conflict is the wrong amount,

01:49:34.880 and conflict that destroys the relationship is the wrong amount. And then you might say, well,

01:49:41.360 okay, what's the optimal amount of conflict?

01:49:44.240 Well, so then we can think about how people respond emotionally. So let's say,

01:49:51.200 if you go after the person that you're arguing with, and you say, you're a bad person,

01:49:56.000 and you really make that case, you bloody well hammer it home, you remember 50 things they've done

01:50:00.000 that were bad, and you lay them out. It's like, I'm going to stomp you, you're a bad person,

01:50:04.000 you really need to change. Okay, well, first of all, you're going to meet tremendous resistance,

01:50:08.240 and that's like, you've got the hydrogen, you're bringing the hydrogen bomb to the war, right? And

01:50:12.560 maybe, unless you want to destroy everything, maybe that's not the most logical solution.

01:50:17.280 But then by the same token, everything's all right, and we never have any conflict. That's

01:50:21.600 not helpful either, and you're going to get bored of that, and you're not going to develop.

01:50:25.600 And so then the question is, well, maybe there's some happy medium here. Maybe you want to be

01:50:31.840 repairing this structure, you know, the structure that goes from micro actions up to

01:50:36.400 higher-order conceptualizations. Maybe you want to be updating that on a constant basis,

01:50:41.600 and you want to update it in a manner that doesn't drop you into chaos or place you in too much stasis.

01:50:48.640 And then the answer is, well, how... then the question is, how is it that you can calibrate

01:50:54.560 your approach to error so that you get the benefits of doing it without the disadvantage of collapsing

01:50:59.840 into chaos? And then the issue... the answer to that is something like...

01:51:08.320 It's something like...

01:51:11.680 Once you have decided to adopt responsibility for being, and we'll say that what that means is that

01:51:19.040 you have conceptualized a good that you're willing to devote yourself to, and I think you're perfectly

01:51:28.240 welcome to do that on an individual basis. I think you should do it on an individual basis.

01:51:33.040 You should consult with your ancestors while you're doing that, because generally speaking,

01:51:38.240 the route to optimal... the route to quality of life and productivity has been laid out by other

01:51:48.000 people. We kind of know what the parameters are. You need to do something that other people find is

01:51:52.960 useful. And you have to regard it as useful as well. Or at least you have to be entertaining. There

01:52:00.480 has to be something about you of value to other people that you have to pursue with a fair bit of

01:52:04.400 diligence. So you have to play a productive social role. You probably need friends.

01:52:13.920 You probably need an intimate relationship. And if it could be medium to long-term intimate

01:52:18.960 relationship, perhaps all the better. That's what most societies hold up as ideal. You could assume,

01:52:24.720 well, there's probably a reason for that. I think one of the reasons is that your life gets fragmented

01:52:29.200 otherwise. Badly fragmented, you know? Because every time you have a long-term relationship,

01:52:34.320 and it fragments, it's like your identity is blown into pieces. You get fragmented across time.

01:52:39.680 It's not good. It breaks you into pieces, and you don't necessarily recover that well.

01:52:46.880 It makes everything much more impermanent and unreliable, all of those things. So it introduces

01:52:55.440 a tremendous amount of uncertainty into your life, and it also means that you don't have anyone around

01:52:59.040 that you can really trust. And that's bad. Because if you have someone around you can really trust,

01:53:02.720 then you have two brains instead of one. And you probably need two brains to manage your way

01:53:07.440 through life. It's pretty complicated.

01:53:11.760 So you orient yourself towards some good, the highest good that you can conceptualize. And it has to be

01:53:18.400 through a consultation with your ancestors, because you need to do the things that people have always

01:53:23.200 done. And you need to do them properly. And you need to assume that that's the way that you should

01:53:28.160 live, unless you have a very good reason to change it dramatically. And maybe you do. But you've got to

01:53:33.200 start with some axiomatic set of presuppositions, because otherwise, you have to invent everything

01:53:38.720 on your own. And you don't have enough time to do that. So you have to use normative guidelines.

01:53:43.920 And if you don't, then people won't know what to do with you. That's another big problem,

01:53:47.600 if you live completely outside the norm. I mean, remarkable artists manage that to some degree.

01:53:54.400 But of course, they pay for the privilege by being remarkable artists. So if there's something truly

01:53:58.880 remarkable about you, perhaps you could justify deviating from the normative path. But if there isn't,

01:54:05.600 first of all, there's nothing remarkable enough about you to justify deviating in every way from

01:54:09.680 the normative path, no matter how remarkable you are. So that's part of the rescuing of the father

01:54:17.040 from the depths, is to reunite yourself with the traditional structures of your community. You can

01:54:23.520 do that in a way that you feel suits your own needs best. But I don't think you can not do it,

01:54:30.000 because it makes you weak. And then you'll drown.

01:54:35.040 All right, so let's say you have oriented yourself. But not perfectly, because you're full of mistakes and

01:54:41.280 errors. So then what do you do? Because you have to fix those errors, but you still have to be oriented.

01:54:49.680 And this is why I started to get interested in the phenomena of meaning,

01:54:54.400 as a phenomenological experience, to experience something as meaningful.

01:54:58.640 It's not exactly obvious what that means, to experience something as meaningful.

01:55:02.240 I think that you can approach it obliquely. You know, like if I said,

01:55:07.120 watch yourself for two weeks and notice when you're doing something that you regard as meaningful.

01:55:11.360 I could say, well, here's some markers. You lose a sense of time. You lose a sense of vulnerability.

01:55:17.920 You're deeply engaged in it. It seems worth the effort, right? You forget yourself while you're doing it.

01:55:25.440 Maybe you forget your existential concerns while you're doing it. You're not

01:55:30.320 ruminating or obsessing about the meaning of your life, right? So there's markers for it. It's like

01:55:35.840 the flow states that Csikszentmihalyi described.

01:55:42.480 And then you can experience it under a certain sort of ritualistic conditions. You might experience

01:55:47.520 it when you go see a great movie. You might experience it when you listen to music. I think

01:55:51.120 music is a very, very standard pathway for people to have that kind of experience, because virtually

01:55:57.760 everyone gets intimations of meaning from music. And I think music is hierarchically structured patterns

01:56:07.120 that are representative of being laying itself out properly. It's something like that. So it's an

01:56:12.240 abstract representation of proper being. And so we can grapple with the phenomena of music,

01:56:19.280 and we can box... or phenomena of meaning. We can box it in a little bit and start to conceptualize it.

01:56:26.480 We can start to conceptualize it, perhaps, as the manifestation of a deep instinct.

01:56:31.280 And so I would say, well, meaning is what manifests itself when you are...

01:56:37.520 When you've oriented yourself properly, and when you've optimized the flow of information

01:56:49.040 between you and chaos, that might be the right way of thinking about it. Because you think about

01:56:54.720 a piece of music, is you want it to be predictable. But you don't want it to be perfectly predictable.

01:56:59.360 You want it to be predictable with some interesting variations, and predictable with some variations

01:57:03.840 that make sense. And maybe you can conceptualize that as something like this. It's predictable at

01:57:08.800 this order of stability, but it's varying down here from time to time. And so you've got stable

01:57:16.880 stability there, but variability there. And you can handle that. So you want an overarching structure

01:57:24.160 of stability with some internal variability. And maybe that's the way that you update yourself

01:57:28.880 without falling apart. And then I would say, you can find the pathway to the optimal rate of update

01:57:37.200 by relying on your sense of meaning. That's what it's for. What it tells you is that you're wandering

01:57:43.600 your way through the world, between the catastrophes of chaos and the catastrophes of order, and now and

01:57:50.320 then you swing into the proper locale. You're where you should be. And what happens is you get engaged

01:57:56.480 by that. You get meaningfully engaged by that. And it's fragile. It'll move on you, right? Because

01:58:01.120 it's very difficult to exist at that point constantly. Your bad habits, all sorts of things,

01:58:07.520 your situation, there's all sorts of things that are going to interfere with that. But that doesn't

01:58:11.280 mean that that isn't where you should be. And so then you might say, well, that's where you should

01:58:16.320 strive to be all the time. And then the question might be, well, what would it be like if you were there

01:58:22.080 all the time? And I think that's where intimations of paradise come from. I mean, when Wordsworth talked

01:58:30.880 about intimations of immortality and childhood, people tend to romanticize their childhood because

01:58:35.920 of the sense of intense engagement that goes along with being a child. And it's one of the wonderful

01:58:41.200 things about being around children, actually. They pay you for their care. And the way that children

01:58:48.560 pay you for their care is that they turn normal things into magic again when you're around them,

01:58:54.640 because you've seen it 100 times before. And so when you see it, you don't see it. You see what

01:58:59.520 you already know. But when a child sees it, they don't, because they don't know. They see it. And then

01:59:04.640 when you watch them see it, you see it too. And so it's just, it's tremendous fun leading a small child

01:59:11.040 around to do things that you've done before, because they're so, you know, they're like this. They're like

01:59:17.200 all the time. And you know, maybe that's too much. And they cry, and they get upset, and all of that.

01:59:20.960 But a good part of the time, it's just wild-eyed wonder. And then you can see the world through

01:59:25.360 their eyes, and it's payment. And so that sense of being engaged like that is something that people

01:59:31.360 love about children, and rightly so. But it's also a marker to the proper way of being. You know,

01:59:38.000 there's a dictum in the... this is a Jungian idea, that there's no difference between the archetype of

01:59:43.280 the wise old man and the archetype of the child. They're the same thing. Because the wise old man

01:59:47.840 is the person who found what he had in childhood, but lost. Right? That's a very powerful motif,

01:59:54.240 is that the purpose of maturation is to return to the state of childhood as a mature being. Not to stay

02:00:00.560 in the state of childhood, that's Peter Pan. But to make the sacrifices necessary for maturation,

02:00:06.960 and then return. You say, well, how do you do that? Well, you do that in part by noting

02:00:12.080 what it is that's meaningful for you to engage in. I would say it's your nervous system reporting to

02:00:17.840 you. Right hemisphere and left hemisphere balanced. The balance between chaos and order produces an

02:00:23.520 output that says you are in the right place. It's a perception. The meaning is a perception

02:00:28.480 of being in the right place. It's the genuine thing. However, because it can be pathologized,

02:00:35.280 that's the thing. And that's why I think there's a call to virtue in most great religious traditions.

02:00:39.920 If you're going to rely on your sense of meaning to orient you, you have to play a straight game,

02:00:45.280 because otherwise you warp and twist the inputs, and then the mechanism won't function properly.

02:00:51.360 You know, it's like if you were only... If you've blinded yourself to half the world,

02:00:57.920 you can't use your perceptions to orient yourself properly, because the half of the world that you're

02:01:02.160 ignoring is going to pop up at you unexpectedly and take you down. And so if your relationship

02:01:07.600 with the world isn't pristine, honest, primarily, then you can't rely on your own internal orienting

02:01:13.680 mechanisms. And then you either fall into chaos, which is an absolute catastrophe, or you have to

02:01:18.400 rely on some kind of external authority. And that makes you prone to possession by tyrannical ideologies,

02:01:24.560 for example, which give you that sense of meaning that you should, in fact, have as a consequence

02:01:28.880 of your own action.

02:01:29.680 I'm going to try to word this question as best as I can. But okay, so if all relationships are

02:01:43.440 are sort of predicated on this balance between no conflict and conflict that destructs, then if we

02:01:57.360 were to look at this at a more macro level, we see this sort of manifest in history, in our world,

02:02:08.240 like with conflict in between countries, in between systems, ideology, etc. But wouldn't this

02:02:15.200 sort of navigation between the exact line of no conflict versus conflict, how does that not imply

02:02:23.120 that some people are inherently doomed to chaos?

02:02:26.560 Yes. It might imply that. You know, one of the things... So look, so...

02:02:34.480 Sometimes...

02:02:37.680 Sometimes you don't have an answer that works.

02:02:41.200 You have an answer that produces the highest probability of success.

02:02:44.960 And, like, I could view the archetypal world from a religious perspective and say that

02:02:51.040 there's such a thing as ultimate and final redemption. That's a metaphysical claim. I don't want to do

02:02:56.080 that. I think it's independent of what I'm talking about. What I'm saying is that there's an archetypal

02:03:01.120 path that's laid out in the mythology of the hero. And it's your best bet. That's all. It's your best

02:03:07.280 bet. It doesn't mean that if you apply it, that everything is going to turn out the way you might

02:03:13.280 want it to turn out. But I would say this. There's an interesting twist on that, too. This is one of the

02:03:20.240 things that I came to understand about trying to speak the truth, is that you can make an assumption,

02:03:27.360 you can make a fundamental assumption, based on your ignorance, let's say, and the ineradicable

02:03:32.800 quality of your ignorance, that you can't compute the best possible outcome. What you can do instead

02:03:39.360 is make a decision. And one decision is, well, I'm going to say what I think and see what happens.

02:03:42.880 And then you can define that as the best possible outcome. Now, you might say, well, now and then,

02:03:48.960 that's going to lead you into chaos. It's like, yeah, it is. It is. It's a strange inversion.

02:03:56.800 But regardless of all that, I would still say,

02:04:00.480 human beings are finite and limited and mortal. And death is final, let's say. I'm not saying that,

02:04:07.040 but we could easily say that. It doesn't matter. This is still the best pathway forward.

02:04:12.800 It isn't certainty. There's no certainty. And it's very frequently in life, you have poison A or poison

02:04:19.120 B. Like, you get to pick your poison. You don't get to pick the elixir of life. But I would say,

02:04:25.040 I would also say, I don't think there's any reason to be particularly pessimistic, because

02:04:29.200 we don't know what would happen if people really tried hard to get their acts together. Like, if they

02:04:33.200 understood the necessity of that and really put it forward. I mean, I've had lots of experience with

02:04:39.280 my clinical clients now. You know, I've seen dozens and dozens of people. And we have tried jointly

02:04:45.680 to get their lives straighter. And it works almost inevitably. Now, that doesn't mean I've had clients

02:04:51.040 who died. You know, we were three quarters through a wonderful process of psychological renovation,

02:04:57.440 and they got cancer and died. So there's no certainty associated with this.

02:05:03.600 But it's the best solution available. And it's also possible that it's a good enough solution.

02:05:13.200 Now, I was talking to my class yesterday about this. You know, so you...

02:05:17.680 If you pursue the things in your life that are meaningful, once you've oriented yourself,

02:05:21.440 and that means accepting the challenges that come along with that, because one of the things

02:05:24.640 that you'll find... You even find this in music. If you know a piece of music completely,

02:05:29.440 then you tend not to want to listen to it anymore. There still has to be some challenge in it. You

02:05:33.760 still have to track it. And sometimes music is so complex, you just can't... It just sounds like

02:05:37.920 noise. Modern music is often like that, because it's so... Well, it tends towards the chaotic. And so

02:05:43.440 it's... I find it difficult to listen to, because I can't get a handle on it. But then, you know...

02:05:48.720 So it's too challenging. And then there's other music... Pop music is often like this. It's catchy the first two

02:05:53.440 times you hear it, and then you never want to hear it again. It's too much... There's too much

02:05:56.720 predictability and not enough chaos. And hopefully, you find a piece of music that's somewhere in the

02:06:00.720 middle. You can listen to it 50 or 100 times. And each time you listen to it, there's still

02:06:05.120 some new nuance in it that you didn't... that you didn't expect before. And so, well, you kind of want

02:06:11.040 to set up your life like that. So that... And I think you see that the phenomena of meaning manifests itself

02:06:18.400 at the area... at the locale of optimal challenge. So if the thing... So one of the things, for example,

02:06:27.360 I might say, well, let's say you want to set some goals for yourself. We say, well,

02:06:31.440 they're remarkable goals, but they're all... they're too unattainable. You're just going to find it

02:06:36.160 frustrating to pursue them. It's going to be too punishing. And then we might say, well, here's a goal,

02:06:41.920 and you think, well, I could do that, you know, standing on my head. There's nothing... no challenge in it.

02:06:46.400 Well, both of those two extremes are going to leave you in a state that isn't characterized by

02:06:50.960 the optimization of engagement and meaning. One is too difficult, it's too punishing,

02:06:55.360 it's the judge and nothing else. And the other is the ultimate and merciful mothers. It's like,

02:06:59.760 you win no matter how you play. So then you calibrate it, you say, well, you know, I need...

02:07:05.760 I'm up for a challenge at this level.

02:07:07.760 I wouldn't recommend that, because that's just a bit like... people do that. You might want to

02:07:16.240 investigate your character in detail and decide, you know, what's going on at this level of analysis.

02:07:21.520 That's pretty harsh. But you can certainly continually retool yourself at more micro-levels.

02:07:27.440 And that... and I think what you do is you pick the level of retooling that optimizes your willingness

02:07:35.040 to be engaged in it. And then what's so interesting about that is that, I think, is that you get the

02:07:41.360 benefits of perfection, so to speak, while still being imperfect. The imperfect... your actual

02:07:48.320 imperfection has nothing to do with it. What's relevant is the journey that you're undertaking to

02:07:53.760 rectify the imperfection. So instead of aiming to be the entity without flaws, you're aiming to be

02:08:01.120 the entity that continues to realize its flaws and overcome them. Well, that's a game you can play

02:08:05.680 forever. And that's maybe the ultimate in being an unflawed entity. It's something like that.

02:08:11.600 So... so I want to show you some pictures that I think are associated with that.

02:08:16.960 So this one, to begin with... this is an absolutely amazing picture, I think.

02:08:22.000 So this is Berthold Fertmeier, a tree of life flanked by Eve and Mary Ecclesia.

02:08:28.400 And in some sense, this picture summarizes the biblical stories in one picture, which is... that's

02:08:34.640 pretty amazing that a picture can do that. And so let me explain the picture a little bit. So the first

02:08:39.920 thing you see here is that this is the tree... this is the tree of life. And so it echoes the tree of

02:08:48.960 the knowledge of good and evil. But this is post-fall. So we interpreted the story of Adam and Eve already,

02:08:56.640 is that human beings became self-conscious. They discovered death. They discovered morality.

02:09:00.880 It was all a consequence of interacting with the fruit and the snake, something like that. And you can

02:09:06.240 read that as an evolutionary tale. You can at least read it as a representation of the emergence of

02:09:13.520 self-consciousness in human beings. And so what does that mean? Well, it means that the apple,

02:09:19.360 in some sense, was equivalent to death. And that's what you see here. You see Eve is picking fruit from

02:09:23.600 the tree here. But the fruit is... it's on the skull side of the tree. And so Eve... it's the vulnerability

02:09:30.640 of Eve. She's naked there and displayed to the world. It's the vulnerability of Eve. That's one way of

02:09:36.160 thinking about it. It was the vulnerability of Eve that was the catalyst to the development of human

02:09:40.720 self-consciousness. And I think that that's true. It seems to be a reasonable proposition.

02:09:48.480 And so Eve's relationship with the fruit and the snake doomed human beings to the realization of

02:09:56.800 mortality. That's what this side of the picture represents. And so it's a catastrophe. And it's

02:10:03.120 associated here with the snake and the fruit. It's human beings' attempts to understand how it is

02:10:08.800 that they emerged into a self-conscious world. Okay, so fine. So that's on... this is on the fall

02:10:14.640 end of the story. And this is on the solution end of the story. Now, what you see here, there's a

02:10:20.960 skull there, and there's a crucifix here. And you see there's all these little fruits on this tree.

02:10:25.840 So it's the apple of death that Eve is handing out on this side. And it's the host that plays a role in

02:10:31.440 the cannibalistic rite that's at the center of Christian ritual, that Mary, as the church,

02:10:37.360 is handing out as a medication for this. So she's handing out the antidote.

02:10:43.760 Well, what's the antidote? Well, it's a strange thing. It's associated with this crucifix.

02:10:48.800 And that's translated into this wheat and host. So you're supposed to eat that, and that

02:10:54.240 that is the incorporation of whatever this represents.

02:10:56.960 Well, the question then is, what does that represent? It's a symbol of suffering.

02:11:02.400 Obviously, it's a symbol of the ultimate in suffering. It's the weirdest thing.

02:11:06.720 Because the picture proposes that to ingest the ultimate in suffering is to

02:11:13.920 simultaneously ingest the antidote to the catastrophe of the knowledge of death.

02:11:19.840 It's a very strange paradox. But it's the proper paradox that's at the center of the great drama

02:11:27.280 that's represented by this picture.

02:11:32.160 A little knowledge of death destroys you. Full voluntary acceptance of it is the cure.

02:11:40.160 The cure. That's the idea. Well, that's a hell of an idea.

02:11:48.480 It's not only to... And to accept it is simultaneously, in some sense, to take responsibility for it.

02:11:56.640 Because you don't take responsibility for things that you don't accept.

02:12:04.080 You only take responsibility for things that you do accept. You say, well, the world is fundamentally flawed

02:12:08.880 because its fundamental nature is intolerable vulnerability. I'm not going to take any responsibility for that.

02:12:17.280 That's really Cain's attitude in the story of Cain and Abel.

02:12:24.000 He externalizes responsibility for the catastrophe of his life.

02:12:28.400 And therefore, he doesn't make the right sacrifices. And so the paradoxical injunction here is

02:12:34.320 accept responsibility for the catastrophe of your life.

02:12:38.000 And that way, you transcend it simultaneously. And there's an unbelievably hopeful message in there.

02:12:44.800 And the message is, you're actually strong enough to do that. You just don't know it.

02:12:48.960 And you won't find out till you do it. You can't find out till you do it.

02:12:52.480 But if you did it, you'd find out that it was true.

02:12:55.280 It's a massive risk. It's the ultimate in risks, right?

02:12:58.000 You have to be willing to lose your life in order to find it.

02:13:01.360 It's like, exactly right.

02:13:03.680 So that picture, when I started to understand that picture, well, every time I look at it, it just blows me away.

02:13:07.920 I can't... It's unbelievably... It's an unbelievably sophisticated set of ideas.

02:13:16.160 But I don't think it's much different, really, than this idea.

02:13:20.320 I mean, Buddha finds his enlightenment under a tree.

02:13:25.360 It's not fluke that that's the case. That's his natural environment.

02:13:28.640 And he's sitting in the lotus here. The lotus opens up.

02:13:31.600 It's this thing that springs up from the depths.

02:13:34.080 And he sits there illuminated the same way. He's got a halo that's the sun that stands for higher consciousness.

02:13:40.960 And he's transcended. By accepting the fact that life is suffering, he's transcended

02:13:48.000 the limitations that are part of mortality.

02:13:52.480 You see that symbol there? That swastika, you see it there? It's reversed. The Nazis reversed it.

02:13:59.440 Well, think about that. I mean, they weren't stupid.

02:14:05.120 Their symbolism... Their symbols had meaning.

02:14:07.280 It's what the swastika represented was what this represents, reversed.

02:14:14.320 Well, that's a very bad idea.

02:14:16.960 This is the thing that... This idea is what enables people to transcend their suffering.

02:14:21.200 And Buddha said, well, don't be too attached to things. And what does that mean? It doesn't mean

02:14:26.320 deny the world. It might mean deny the world if you're too in love with the material...

02:14:30.960 Like, with material well-being, let's say, then your pathway to transcendence and meaning might be

02:14:37.120 to abandon that, because it's constraining you. It's making you less than you could be.

02:14:42.160 But the fundamental lesson, the more fundamental lesson that's underneath that is don't let what

02:14:47.520 you are stop you from being what you could be.

02:14:51.280 Right. And so then the question is, well, what do you identify with?

02:14:55.120 Do you identify with what you are? Then you're a tyrant.

02:15:00.080 Do you identify with chaos? Because that's the opposite of order, say.

02:15:05.680 Then you're nihilistic.

02:15:06.800 Well, you don't identify with either of those. You know that they're both necessary. You know

02:15:12.240 that you have to live with both of them. But you identify with the capacity to continually

02:15:18.400 transcend what you are. And then you seek out error. That's what humility is. It's like,

02:15:24.240 I'm error-ridden. It's like, so I want to see. I want to put myself in a situation where I can

02:15:30.240 discover one of my errors, hopefully not in a way that's going to knock me completely out of the

02:15:34.800 game. Right? I want to seek out a challenge. I want to find out where my limits are. I want to

02:15:40.320 find out where there's not enough of me yet. And I want to do that in a way that's engaging. Because

02:15:45.360 you know, you can wear yourself out fighting dragons, obviously. You can exhaust yourself

02:15:49.520 completely. And that's not helpful. You know, one of the things I learned, for example, when I was

02:15:54.320 coaching lawyers, who these were people who had very high-end careers. And so they had an infinite

02:16:00.880 workload, no matter how much they worked, flat out, there was always way more work that they should

02:16:04.640 do. It's very difficult thing to learn to manage. And so they were exhausting themselves. And I said,

02:16:10.240 well, you know, you have to work less per day. It's like, well, no, that's not happening. I can't do

02:16:15.120 that. And so what I learned over time was, okay, so this is what you have to do. Every three months,

02:16:20.800 you have to block off four days and go have a vacation. And you have to plan that in advance,

02:16:25.360 so it's in your calendar, so that your secretary doesn't book your time. And then you need that,

02:16:30.400 because you have to recuperate enough so that you can work as hard as you're going to work.

02:16:34.320 And of course, they were nervous about that. And I said, well, look, we can calibrate this.

02:16:38.560 Let's keep track of your billable hours over the next year and see if they increase or decrease,

02:16:42.960 because I bet you if you take more time off, you'll actually have more billable hours. You'll

02:16:47.200 actually have your cake and eat it too. You'll get to have a vacation, and you'll be more productive.

02:16:52.240 And inevitably, that was what happened. And so that's a matter of calibrating the game properly,

02:16:57.840 right? You want to play a game that you can play today, but also one that you can play next week

02:17:01.440 and next month. We're not talking about, you know, your career this week. We're talking about you

02:17:06.880 having a career that lasts 30 years, that doesn't kill you, that doesn't make you hate yourself or

02:17:11.840 the job, that doesn't make you bitter, that doesn't wear you to a frazzle. So it has to be optimized.

02:17:17.680 And so I think that you can, in fact, decide to take on the load that's optimally meaningful

02:17:23.680 if you want, and then you get to have your cake and eat it too. You're on the pathway to continual

02:17:28.640 incremental improvement. You only have to burn off a feather at a time instead of having the

02:17:32.640 whole bloody thing burst into flames. But it's a constant source of renewal. And there's an idea

02:17:39.200 that to be renewed, you have to drink the water of life, right? That's an old mythological idea.

02:17:44.960 And what's the water of life? Chaos is water. Water is chaos. Water is what washes away

02:17:51.360 too much order. And to stay continually, let's say, refreshed by the water of life is to take on

02:17:59.120 exactly the right amount of chaos to make sure that your garden is properly nourished. And I think

02:18:05.600 meaning is actually the marker of that. And as I said, you know that I'm not... I wouldn't consider

02:18:11.360 myself either naive or a particularly optimistic person. I don't think I'm either of those.

02:18:16.000 But this is actually an idea... this is one of the only ideas that I've ever found that I really

02:18:21.120 believe to be rock solid. I actually think that it's true. And it's very optimistic, because it says

02:18:27.280 you can use your sense of meaning to calibrate your progress through life. But there's rules.

02:18:32.160 You have to aim at the highest possible good that you can conceive. Now, and that's subject update,

02:18:36.960 because what the hell do you know? But you start by aiming at the star you can see,

02:18:40.800 rather than the dimmer one that you can't yet perceive. And then you decide that you're going

02:18:45.200 to do that honestly, right? That's a big decision. So the first decision, I think,

02:18:50.400 in some sense, is a decision of love. You're going to decide that being is worthwhile,

02:18:54.800 and that you're going to work for its betterment. And that's a decision that's based on love. And the

02:18:59.280 second decision is based on truth. Having made that decision, you're going to play a straight game.

02:19:04.240 Having made those two decisions, I think that you can allow your sense of meaning to calibrate your

02:19:08.160 pathway. And then what's so interesting is that you hit a state that's as close to paradisal as

02:19:14.000 you're going to hit right away, because being engaged like that, it's better to be engaged in

02:19:19.600 the solution of a complex problem than not to have a problem at all. And that's no different than saying

02:19:27.200 it's better for there to be being than non-being, because being is a problem. And so if you want to

02:19:33.840 have no problems, then you have no being. And you could say, well, being is so miserable that maybe

02:19:39.040 that's the route we should take. And fair enough. But maybe you can have your cake and eat it too.

02:19:43.200 You can have the damn problem. It can be a problem worth solving. And you can be so engaged in solving

02:19:49.120 the problem that it justifies the fact that the problem exists. And then you get to have the

02:19:56.320 problem and the solution at the same time. And maybe that's better than not having the problem at

02:20:00.080 all. And I believe that, because one of the things I have seen, and I've seen this being so interesting

02:20:05.280 when I've been lecturing to people, especially more recently, and this has also manifested itself

02:20:11.120 on YouTube, I'm talking to people a lot about responsibility. And it's young men in particular

02:20:16.480 that seem to be responding to that. And I think that's partly because I think that young women

02:20:20.240 in some sense have their responsibility map already laid out for them. It's also less voluntary

02:20:26.240 in some sense for women, because they have more complicated problems to solve in the first part

02:20:30.080 of their life, right? Because they have to get the family problem solved. But whatever. I've been

02:20:35.040 talking very... in a very delineated matter about responsibility, which is a strange thing to sell

02:20:42.080 to people. But responsibility is what gives your life meaning. And so then you might say, well,

02:20:47.200 then take on ultimate responsibility. And what happens? You have an ultimately meaningful life. And then you

02:20:52.480 might say, well, if your life is ultimately meaningful, it doesn't matter if it's punctuated by tragedy,

02:20:57.920 or even predicated on tragedy. It's worth it. And I think that's true. And everything I've seen

02:21:06.320 indicates to me that's true. Every time I get my clients to take on more responsibility, you know...

02:21:12.000 And it isn't an injunction. You're a bad person. You should take on responsibility. It has nothing to do

02:21:16.240 with that. You can define the damn responsibility. It isn't something that someone else should impose on you.

02:21:21.520 It's not a matter of doing what you should do in some abstract manner. It's not that.

02:21:27.280 It's the choice of what game you're going to play. And you know, you can play the game of the seeker,

02:21:32.160 I would say. And if you play that game, then everyone wins. And it's the best game you can play.

02:21:36.960 And so the answer, in some sense, to the tragedy of life, to the catastrophe of life, to the fall,

02:21:44.400 is to adopt the responsibility of mortality that goes along with that, and to play that game maximally.

02:21:51.680 And paradoxically, it's in the willingness to do that that the solution emerges.

02:21:56.560 And I don't... You know, I have done my best with every single thing I've talked to you guys about.

02:22:01.200 I have done my best to do what Dostoevsky does in his novels, which is, I make a proposition,

02:22:06.160 and then I spend months or years trying to figure out if I can take the bloody thing apart.

02:22:12.000 If there's something wrong with it. Because I want to find out. I want to hit it with a hammer

02:22:15.840 and see if it breaks. And what I've been trying to do is to tell you all the things that I've

02:22:20.960 gathered, let's say, or laid out, or articulated, or discovered over the last 30 years,

02:22:25.920 that I have not been able to break with the biggest hammer that I could take to them.

02:22:30.720 And I guess that's the fundamental one, is that I believe that the idea that lurks in these images,

02:22:41.600 derived from very different cultures,

02:22:46.240 it's the same idea.

02:22:49.600 Life is suffering. Right. Indisputable.

02:22:56.080 What do you do about that?

02:22:59.360 You voluntarily accept it. And then strive to overcome the suffering that's a consequence of

02:23:07.120 that. And you do that for you, and you do that in a way that makes it better for other people.

02:23:12.160 And then that works. And one question might be, well, how well does it work? And the answer is,

02:23:19.520 the only way that you can find out is by trying it. That's it. That's the existential element of it.

02:23:25.280 The proof is to be derived by the incarnation of the attitude in your own life. No one can tell you

02:23:32.160 how it will work for you. It's the thing that your destiny is to discover that.

02:23:38.240 And you have to make, you have to make the decisions to begin with. It's like,

02:23:42.480 because you can't do this without commitment. You have to commit to it first. That's the act of faith

02:23:47.280 that Kierkegaard was so insistent upon. You have to say, I'm going to act as if being is good. I'm

02:23:54.320 going to act as if truth is the pathway to enlightenment. I'm going to act as if I should

02:23:58.960 pursue the deepest meaning possible in my life. And there's reasons to do none of those.

02:24:05.120 They're real reasons. So it's really a decision. But you can't find out what the consequence of the

02:24:10.960 decision is, unless you make the decision. I think the same thing happens when you get married, by

02:24:15.120 the way. If you think you might leave, you're not married. And then you think, well, the marriage

02:24:21.280 didn't succeed. It's like, well, maybe you were never married. Because the rule is, you don't get

02:24:25.600 to leave. And there's a reason for that rule. Now, I'm not saying that there aren't situations where

02:24:31.120 there should be exceptions made for that. That's not the point. The point is that there's some games

02:24:35.600 you don't get to play unless you're all in. And the other thing that's so interesting about being

02:24:40.960 alive is that you're all in. No matter what you do, you're all in. This is going to kill you.

02:24:49.600 So I think you might as well play the most magnificent game you can while you're waiting.

02:24:55.520 Because do you have anything better to do? Really? Why not pick the best thing possible that you could do?

02:25:02.800 Why not do that? Maybe you could justify your wretched existence to yourself that way.

02:25:08.400 I think you could. That's what it looks like. You know, people find such meaning in the

02:25:13.360 responsibilities they adopt, it stops making them ask questions about what life is for.

02:25:17.840 If you have a newborn child, for example, like, unless you're really, in a bad way,

02:25:24.080 psychotically depressed, or maybe your personality really needs some retooling,

02:25:28.480 you stop thinking about anything but ensuring that that baby is doing well.

02:25:35.520 And if someone comes along and asks you an existential question about your commitment to that,

02:25:40.720 the right response is, why are you asking me such stupid questions when this is manifesting itself

02:25:47.920 right in front of your eyes? Like, how blind can you be? That isn't a time for questions about the

02:25:53.120 meaning of life. The answer is right in front of you. And if you can't see it, it's not because

02:25:57.920 life has no meaning. It's because you're blind. I mean, that's what the image of the virgin mother

02:26:04.480 and the child is all about. It's like, what's the answer to the meaning of life? Here's an answer.

02:26:10.480 It's like, well, I'm going to criticize that. Well, go right ahead. You know, it's like, it's like,

02:26:15.680 what, what, you're like a, you're like a, what do you call that? A termite gnawing on a temple.

02:26:22.640 There's no, there's no utility in that sort of criticism. You're,

02:26:25.920 you're, it's blindness. And it's the same thing with regards to the path of the hero. It's like,

02:26:33.600 it glistens in front of you, and you can criticize it. It's like,

02:26:39.360 fine, put the cart before the horse, and see how far you get.

02:26:47.200 So I thought, to bring full closure to the class, I was trying to solve

02:26:52.160 this terrible puzzle that confronted me for, and many other people, about how it was that human

02:27:00.400 beings got themselves in such a tangle about what they believed. Such a tangle that we were pointing

02:27:06.400 the ultimate weapons of destruction at one another, which, by the way, we are still doing.

02:27:13.280 And I thought, okay, well, I understand that. We need our belief systems. They orient

02:27:17.520 us. And that means there will be conflict between belief systems, and that can be a catastrophe.

02:27:23.120 And that's being played out everywhere, again, in very many ways. What's the solution to that?

02:27:28.320 Well, one possibility is there's no solution. It's just mayhem all the way around. Could be the case.

02:27:36.000 But it seemed to me, as I delved into it, that the proper solution to that was to live properly.

02:27:41.600 As an individual. Because you're more powerful than you think.

02:27:44.560 Way more powerful than you think. I mean, God only knows what you are in the final analysis.

02:27:50.800 You're blind to your own weaknesses, but you're also blind to your own strengths.

02:27:55.360 And so then I think, well, if you got your act together, it'd be better for you. And instantly,

02:27:59.440 it would be better for your family, assuming they wanted you to get your act together,

02:28:02.720 and not everyone does. And then it would be better for the community. It's like, how far could you take

02:28:07.760 that? If you stopped wasting time, and if you stopped lying, and if you oriented yourself to

02:28:12.320 to the highest possible good that you could conceive of, and you committed to that,

02:28:16.400 how much good could you do?

02:28:18.960 Well, I would say, why don't you find out?

02:28:21.200 So that's what I think you should do. You should find out. You don't have anything better to do. And

02:28:30.880 there's nothing in it, as far as I've been able to tell, there's nothing in it but good.

02:28:35.440 So maybe you could sort yourself out so that you wanted nothing but the good.

02:28:44.960 And then maybe you could help make that manifest in the world. And maybe we wouldn't have all these

02:28:50.880 terrible problems then. At least we'd have fewer of them, and that would be a start. So

02:28:56.000 the answer to the problem of humanity is the integrity of the individual. That's the answer.

02:29:09.680 So, and states that are predicated on that realization are healthy. And states that aren't

02:29:17.520 are doomed to stagnation and catastrophic collapse. And personalities that are predicated on

02:29:26.960 self-tyranny and the tyranny of others are doomed to collapse.

02:29:35.360 And then you think, well, what's the barrier? And the barrier is, are you willing to accept the

02:29:38.880 responsibility? And part of the answer to that is, reduce the damn responsibility until it's tolerable.

02:29:45.440 You don't have to fix everything at once. You could just start by fixing the things that you could fix.

02:29:51.120 Or you could even do it more.

02:29:56.000 You could do it with even less self-sacrifice. You could start by fixing only the things that you want

02:29:59.840 to fix. God, you can get a massive way that way. So do it. See what happens. That's what you should

02:30:07.680 have been taught in university, right from the beginning. It's like, aim at the highest good.

02:30:12.240 Tool yourself into something that can attain it. And go out there and manifest it in the world.

02:30:17.600 And everything that comes your way will be...

02:30:23.280 Everything that comes your way will be a blessing. And so,

02:30:28.560 all you have to do is give up your resentment and your hatred.

02:30:31.760 I know that's a hard thing to give up. Because you have plenty of reason for it.

02:30:38.480 That's probably a good place to stop. So, it's a pleasure.

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The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - October 11, 2020

140. Maps of Meaning 12： Final - The Divinity of the Individual

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