In this episode, Dr. Richard Dawkins and Alex O'Connor engage in a long-awaited discussion about the concept of "meme" and "archetypal" ideas, and why some things catch on and others don't. Is there a connection between memes and archetypes? Is there any connection between them? And why do some ideas catch on while others do not? This episode is brought to you by Psychological Science, a division of the University of Toronto, and the Center for Integrative Biology, a leading evolutionary biologist and cognitive psychologist. Our theme music is by my main amigo, Evan Handyside. Our ad music is from Fugue, courtesy of Epitaph Records. This episode was produced and edited by Riley Bray. It was edited by Annie-Rose Strasser. Additional music written and performed by Haley Shaw. The theme music was made by Micah Vellian and Hayden Coplen. Music by Ian Dorsch, with additional selections from the album "In Need of a Savior (feat. Andrea Thomas)". The album art for this episode was done by Dee McDonnell and Mark Phillips. All rights reserved. We do not own any of the rights to any music used in this episode. All credit given to any other works mentioned in the podcast. Other music used without permission. If you enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a review and/or a review of the album, we are working on it on SoundCloud or other platforms. Thank you for any amount you can manage to find us a copy of this album on Soundcloud or other good listening to this podcast through SoundCloud. I am working on a free streaming services such as SoundCloud or any other streaming services that you can be reached via SoundCloud, or other such thing via Audible.org or Audible, etc. etc., etc. Thank you. etc. Thanks for listening and sharing this podcast is a big thank you for your support is greatly appreciated. - Thank you so much, thank you! - Your support is so much appreciated! - The Best Fiends and all the best of luck! -- Thank you, Matt, Matt and Cheers, - Matt and Alex -- Matt, Thanks, Matt & Alex, Jack, Chris, James, Tim, Brian, Kristian, Rachel, Sarah,
00:01:39.700So it's something that spreads because it spreads because it spreads. It's something that spreads by imitation.
00:01:46.400As I understand it, an archetype is quite different from that because an archetype is something which all humans have as a virtue of being human, something that's built in.
00:01:55.280So it's not something that spreads as an epidemic. It's something that we all have anyway.
00:02:00.220And I suppose that it could turn into a meme, but I would think it would be mudding the waters to even say that there's something very much in common between an archetype and a meme.
00:02:11.720Memes are not embedded into the psychology of people.
00:02:16.320They're things like the backwards baseball hat, which is not an archetype.
00:02:20.580I mean, it's something that becomes fashionable and spreads as an epidemic around the population, which is very different from an archetype, which is sort of built in.
00:02:31.860I've heard you in the past, Dr. Peterson, say that a meme is very similar, if not almost identical to an archetype, almost as if you kept pushing the idea of what a meme is.
00:02:41.580Well, I think maybe the appropriate way of tying the two ideas together, given what Dr. Dawkins just said, is to notice the fact that something spreads because it catches, right?
00:02:56.720And so things catch because they have an emotional resonance, and so they attract people's interest.
00:03:03.940And so they attract them in an exploratory manner.
00:03:06.820That would be one way of thinking about it.
00:03:08.120That would be attraction on the positive emotion side, or they attract them on the negative emotion side.
00:03:13.900And so that would loop the idea of the catchiness of an idea, a meme, let's say, with the more underlying motivational structures.
00:03:22.380And as the idea is more related to the action of underlying biological motivational structures, it becomes more and more expression of something that's instinctual and archetypal.
00:03:33.020Like Jung defined an archetype essentially as something like the manifestation of an instinct in image and then also in behavior.
00:03:42.880So the deepest level is something like the instinct, and that would be motivational or emotional drive.
00:03:48.340And then there's a manifestation of that in imagination and behavior, and it's more culturally constructed there.
00:03:54.340And you could also imagine that there are depths of these ideas.
00:03:58.680The baseball hat idea, for example, that would be something that's manifesting itself at a fairly shallow level.
00:04:04.760But there's a reason that the backwards baseball hat caught on.
00:04:09.000You know, it speaks of the moment for whatever reason.
00:04:12.120And it's linked to the biology through the fact that it captures interest for some reason.
00:04:18.620So perhaps something like the archetype being a more fundamental psychological concept that memes can then play upon.
00:04:30.460But the idea that the archetype could be a reason why some memes spread, that seems to me to be plausible, if you will, even archetypes at all.
00:04:38.680But you prefer to think of memes, or you do think of memes as, you refer to them as a virus.
00:04:43.520Yes, it's the spreadability, which is a salient point.
00:04:47.820And if chiming in with an archetype is a reason why they might spread, then I could go with that.
00:04:55.480Yeah, and presumably archetypes don't act in the same way.
00:05:00.300They don't sort of grow up and die in individual generations.
00:05:03.820They're much more foundational than that.
00:05:06.460I think you have to think about it hierarchically.
00:05:10.360You know, there's something in the structure that would make itself manifest as an archetype.
00:05:17.320There's something that's foundational and deep that wouldn't change any faster in a sense than the species itself changes.
00:05:25.480But then there would be efflorescences of that idea that would be less permanent as they were more attuned to the specifics of the time.
00:05:35.980So, and that's not saying anything different, really, than saying that there are ideas that make themselves manifest at different levels of depth, which is also a complex thing.
00:05:46.920Like, it's not that easy to specify what makes an idea deep, which makes it more archetypal, and what makes it transient and trivial.
00:05:55.260There's a relationship between such ideas.
00:05:57.760There's no idea so trivial that it doesn't touch the depths because no one would care about it.
00:06:02.600So, but archetypal ideas do have that capacity to spread virally and to rise and fall.
00:06:10.980You see that, I think you see that in the history of religious ideas.
00:06:15.160You know, that religious ideas are very, can be very catching because otherwise they wouldn't spread.
00:06:20.940Now, they do, there's variation in them like there is in languages, but they also, there's also something that's core that makes them identifiable, let's say, as religious ideas rather than as any other sort of idea.
00:06:33.820I mean, one of the things I was really interested about, I sent you an email at one time asking you if you had read Richa Eliade, especially The Sacred and the Profane.
00:06:42.840But he also has a three-book series called A History of Religious Ideas, and I really like A History of Religious Ideas.
00:06:48.680It's a great book, and one of the things it does is analyze a particular widespread religious motif, which is the battle between the gods in heaven.
00:06:59.840You see this idea in many, many cultures, and each god is the expression of a mode of perception or a mode of being.
00:07:07.500And what you see happening in multitude of cultures is that there are many, many ways of seeing the world and acting in it that are metamorphosed into something divine.
00:07:20.400And as cultures mingle and mix, their gods compete in the space of the imagination, and something like a hierarchy forms.
00:07:30.160That's the emergence of something like monotheism.
00:07:32.380So, we've been talking a little bit about the concept of a meme.
00:07:37.140I think it would be strange to be suspicious of the idea that memes are a thing that do exist and transmit, but there might be more room for suspicion about this concept of the archetype.
00:07:45.680I was wondering, Professor Dawkins, what you think about the concept of archetypes in general.
00:07:48.780Well, for example, if we take the idea of the gods competing with each other, that, I take it, is a proper archetype because it's present in all cultures.
00:07:59.760I presume you mean something that's built in genetically, ultimately, I suppose, that something about our brains makes different cultures invent the same kinds of religious symbols.
00:08:13.720Things like a battle between gods is one.
00:08:21.900I mean, it's such an obvious thing because we have human battles, and therefore, an idea of battles between gods would not be that implausible.
00:08:27.460So, it doesn't strike me as a very penetrating observation.
00:08:32.060Well, I think the thing that's interesting about it, the thing that's been interesting to me about it, is to start to understand the nature of the universal themes and how they're expressed in stories.
00:08:42.600I mean, one of the things I wanted to explore with you, because I think this is an idea that's at the core of the cultural conflict, is the postmodern types seem to have stumbled onto something which I actually think is true.
00:08:54.280And they're not the only discipline that's come to this realization because you can see it emerging in neuroscience and in AI and in robotics as well.
00:09:05.040That we see the world of facts through something that when described as a story, because we have to prioritize our perceptions and we have to prioritize facts.
00:09:15.480And as far as I can tell, a story is a verbal account of how our perceptions and the facts that we encounter are prioritized.
00:09:23.040So, for example, when you go see a movie, the movie has a hero, and what the writers do is they show you how the hero prioritizes his perceptions, what he attends to and how he acts, and you derive from that the story of his life and his ethic.
00:09:38.240And the idea that we have to organize our perceptions in priority, and that the description of that organization is a story, that's a very revolutionary idea.
00:09:52.580And I think the postmodernists got that right.
00:09:54.940And I think that's why we have a culture war going on, at least in part, is because the idea that we see the world through a story,
00:10:02.160or that a story is a description of the structure through which we see the world, I think that's accurate.
00:10:07.060Because we have to prioritize our perceptions.
00:11:28.260But Cain himself, I mean, you give the game away where you say in your book, Cain and Abel were the first humans to be born in the natural way.
00:11:36.560Now, that betrays you as it were pretending you think they really existed.
00:11:42.520Because you wouldn't have said they were born in a natural way unless you were muddling up facts with symbols there.
00:11:49.960Because you don't think that Cain and Abel existed.
00:12:16.140I mean, did they exist or did they not exist?
00:12:18.680Well, I can imagine a situation where when the story was originated that it referred to two actual brothers.
00:12:25.880But as the stories propagate across time, as they mutate, as they adapt, let's say, to the structure of human memory, they deepen and they become broader.
00:12:37.120And so then they become emblematic not only of the pattern of conflict that might characterize the original two brothers that the story was about, but about the conflict between brothers as such and then the more fundamental levels of conflict that exist within human beings, which is what you see in more sophisticated literature.
00:12:55.440It's like the biblical accounts speak of fact in a factual manner upon occasion, but the biblical accounts also speak poetically and metaphorically and allegorically.
00:13:05.880And people who are sophisticated in biblical analysis have known this for centuries.
00:13:10.320The biblical literists generally suffer from the problem that they don't even know what it means to be literalist.
00:13:16.640There's lots of unsophisticated ways of approaching a text.
00:13:19.800Okay, let's see what Professor Dawkins thinks about that.
00:13:24.100I mean, and you give the game away when you say Cain and Abel were the first humans to be born in a natural way.
00:13:30.740Well, I'm speaking allegorically there within the confines of the text.
00:13:34.120I mean, what I meant by that was that the way the story lays itself out is that Adam and Eve are created by God.
00:13:40.900And so they're not emblematic of the pattern of human beings that exist in fallen history within the confines of the text.
00:13:51.400The first two people who are genuine, who aren't creations of the divine, are Cain and Abel.
00:13:56.740And so for me, they're emblematic of the patterns of conflict that rip people apart in the world of history, in the world of normal history.
00:14:06.260Professor Dawkins, I know you take particular umbrage with that statement that Cain and Abel were the first normally born human beings.
00:14:14.840But I think if I understand Dr. Peterson correctly, there are things that can be sort of true within a story.
00:14:20.100It's true that Sherlock Holmes lives at 221B Baker Street.
00:14:23.500And as far as I understand, that's maybe what you mean by the truth in the matter of Cain and Abel being the first naturally born human.
00:15:03.600I think it's like asking whether Raskolnikov existed in Crime and Punishment.
00:15:07.740Like it's not a trivial question because you can answer yes and you can answer no.
00:15:13.160You can say, well, there was no such specific person as Raskolnikov.
00:15:16.740But you, it's not a helpful question because the reason that Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment is a masterpiece is because Raskolnikov was everywhere in Russia when Dostoevsky wrote Crime and Punishment.
00:15:30.780And so Raskolnikov is hyper real, not real.
00:15:34.080But to be clear, is that how you feel about Cain and Abel?
00:15:53.980Well, like I said, it could have been the case that when the story originated, way back when it originated,
00:16:00.460that the first people that were described by the first person who generated the seeds of the Cain and Abel story were referring to actual people.
00:16:08.660But it doesn't matter because the text is being compressed and modified over a vast span of time.
00:16:15.220And it's accreted all sorts of meanings that certainly weren't part and parcel of whatever the original story was.
00:16:20.100Let's take the point Alex was certainly making.
00:16:23.160Within the confines of the story, Dostoevsky was a great writer.
00:16:27.620What makes you think the writers of Genesis were a great writer?
00:16:32.680Well, I think they were great writers because I think I understand the patterning of the stories and what it points to.
00:16:41.360I think the idea, for example, that Cain and Abel are emblematic of two opposed patterns of adaptation to the world is brilliant.
00:16:52.980It's almost brilliant beyond imagining, especially because the story is so insanely compressed.
00:16:58.560And it's certainly evident to me as a clinician that the patterns that are portrayed in the story of Cain and Abel play themselves out in the real world continually and terribly, terribly.
00:17:10.220You think the author of that story in Genesis was a literary genius?
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00:19:12.380If they really did evolve over time, if you could actually trace successive manuscripts, you can't do that.
00:19:18.700I mean, there's presumably a couple of Hebrew manuscripts and a Greek one.
00:19:24.980And what do you mean when you say it evolved?
00:19:26.940Well, I would say you can see that in the compilation of the biblical texts, because one of the things that you see evolve...
00:19:34.240You know, and you criticized the biblical texts at one point.
00:19:37.520Correct me if I've got this wrong, because I don't want to get this wrong.
00:19:39.960You said that there isn't anything in the biblical text that constitutes, let's say, a significant original discovery, which is something that you'd expect if it was of divine providence, let's say.
00:19:52.860And so, and I think, you know, I was thinking about that objection, and I think that one of the discoveries that the text lays bare in an insanely brilliant manner is that the foundation of the community is sacrifice.
00:20:06.580That that's an appropriate conceptualization.
00:20:08.580And you can see the concept of sacrifice evolve across the biblical texts as they're sequenced chronologically in the overall story that makes up the biblical text.
00:20:21.720The idea of sacrifice becomes more and more sophisticated, it's more and more elaborated, it's more and more specified, it's more and more embodied.
00:20:30.000There's an obvious progression in ideas.
00:20:32.440The progression, where do you see that progression? In successive manuscripts?
00:20:37.300In the successive stories as the story, as the text progresses. The way a novel progresses.
00:20:43.600So something like sacrifice in the Old Testament?
00:20:46.460No, through the entire, through, well, the New Testament text is a sacrificial, it's a sacrificial story as well. The passion story is a story of sacrifice.
00:21:45.700Like, I think that at bottom, truth is unified.
00:21:49.440And what that's going to mean eventually is that the world of value and the world of fact coincide in some manner that we don't yet understand.
00:21:57.220And I think that that union, the fact of that union, and the fact of that union is equivalent to what's being described as divine order across millennia.
00:22:32.140Well, let's go back to what you said earlier, which I was very interested in.
00:22:35.100And you implied there's no difference between whether the text is divinely inspired or whether it evolved in progression during a series of manuscripts, presumably.
00:22:48.480Now, I think that's genuinely interesting, but it's a huge difference.
00:23:29.160But when you start to understand that perception itself is sacrificial in its nature, and you start to understand that there's no difference between work and sacrifice, that they're the same thing, and you understand that community is predicated on sacrifice, then the emphasis in the text on sacrifice starts to become something quite marked and remarkable.
00:23:50.940Especially because it's implicit, it isn't obvious at all that the authors of the texts and the editors who sequenced them actually understood what it was that they were highlighting.
00:24:01.240So, with regards to the community, why is the community predicated on sacrifice?
00:24:06.340Because it's not about you, the community.
00:24:09.900Every step you take towards the communitarian means that you sacrifice something that's local to what you want here and now, right now.
00:24:57.300Do you believe that as a fact, that Jesus died for our sins?
00:25:00.720There are elements of the texts that I don't claim to understand.
00:25:07.500What my experience has been that the more deeply I look into these texts, the more I learned.
00:25:13.740That doesn't mean that I can proclaim full knowledge of what the texts proclaim.
00:25:20.100But I don't think, and I'm not trying to play a trick here, you know, I watched an interview that you did recently where you were talking, I think it was with Pierce Morgan, yeah, about the complexities of trying to understand this strange realm of quantum phenomena, right?
00:25:36.800And we have a trouble with quantum phenomena because at the micro level, things don't act like things act at the macro level.
00:25:45.880And one of the things you said was that, although it's perhaps even impossible for creatures embodied like us to get a grip on quantum phenomena, the strange wave-particle duality, for example, we have ample evidence that it works and stellarly.
00:26:02.880And I would say exactly the same thing about the biblical texts.
00:26:05.500Because they run into a mystery, like there's a horizon of mystery, which I do not claim to penetrate.
00:26:11.800But insofar as I've been able to understand the texts, every time I make an improvement in understanding, it reveals something to me that's just, like, shattering.
00:26:21.380Quantum physics is deeply mysterious, and you're saying that biblical texts are deeply mysterious.
00:26:27.000The difference is quantum physics, the predictions you derive from quantum physics, are fulfilled to the umpteenth decimal place.
00:26:36.400The umpteenth decimal place, I mean, I think it was Richard Feynman says, equivalent to predicting the width of North America to the nearest hair's breadth.
00:27:38.920Well, it seemed to me that your proclamation that you were a cultural Christian was a recognition and a statement that you had found something in the culture that had been derived from Christianity that you had an affinity with.
00:27:55.440And that there's some reason for that.
00:27:57.240And one of the things I wanted to ask you is, well, what do you think that Christianity got right that allows you to make a statement like that?
00:28:05.800I mean, I know that there's differences, perhaps, in what we both think about the ultimate veracity of the biblical stories.
00:28:41.500I don't value Christianity as a truth system at all.
00:28:46.080Okay, so let me ask you about that, because maybe that's true, and perhaps it's not.
00:28:51.820But, so, the first question is, like, do you think that there are any marked differences between cultural traditions that would enable you to rank order them in terms of their ethical validity?
00:29:14.800Well, in the case of Islam, I dislike any religion which punishes apostasy with death, that throws gay people off high buildings, that practices clitoridectomy.
00:29:29.240That seems to me to place Islam on a lower level than Christianity, but that's not to say anything very positive about Christianity.
00:29:37.060Well, it might be to say something positive about Christianity.
00:29:40.540Like, I think that question is open, because you might ask yourself, what did Christianity get right that led it away from those particular presumptions and towards something that you regard as more ethically appropriate?
00:29:54.060It's a very modest claim, and there's not very much, I mean, to be better than a religion that throws gay people off high buildings is not really a very virtuous achievement.
00:30:07.680I don't know if that's true, because if you look at the barbarism that characterizes the human past, you might think that any progression whatsoever towards something approximating mercy and tolerance is nothing short of a bloody miracle.
00:30:20.900Like, people are pretty, pretty ruthless, and so are our chimpanzee cousins.
00:30:26.700Right, so we move forward into the light with great difficulty, and the fact that we can take that for granted now, and that it seems self-evident and deserving of faint praise, it's not so clear to me that that's a reasonable proposition.
00:30:41.060Okay, let's grant the faint praise, but that has nothing to do with the truth value, and what I care about is the truth value.
00:30:48.120Do I see no truth value in the claims of Christianity, the virgin birth, the resurrection, the miracles?
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00:31:29.520As I said before, there are elements of the text that I don't feel qualified to comment on.
00:31:38.480My experience has been that the more I—like, I know from a metaphorical perspective and from a mythic perspective what the story of the virgin birth means, and I accept that.
00:31:47.980But I know, for example, that any culture that doesn't hold the image of the woman and infant sacred dies.
00:38:51.580You know, so even on the meme question, for example, you know, like,
00:38:54.560I know the literature on the history of religious ideas.
00:38:58.960I see how these ideas have battled across millennia in a manner that is very reminiscent to me of the same sort of claim that Dr. Dawkins is putting forward with regards to meme.
00:39:11.160Dr. Dawkins doesn't know that literature.
00:39:13.760And it's very difficult for me to communicate from within the confines of that literature because it's extensive and deep.
00:39:20.320And we're dealing with things that we don't understand the relationship between metaphoric truth and value-predicated truth and factual truth.
00:39:32.280We cannot, there's no evidence whatsoever from the scientific perspective that we can orient ourself in the world merely in consequence of the facts.
00:39:51.600There may be true and false ways of prioritizing facts, but you can't determine the truth or falsehood of the way that you prioritize facts by making reference to the facts.
00:40:43.860I mean, I think that maybe just be Jordan and Richard, by the way.
00:40:49.140I think that Jordan prioritizes myth and I prioritize fact.
00:40:55.840And I think myth is kind of vaguely interesting, but it's not the be-or and end-all of my life.
00:41:03.680I think it's somewhat secondary to scientific facts, the sort of facts that tell us how old the universe is, how old the world is, the history of life, the engineering achievements of landing a spacecraft on a comet.
00:41:24.240These are the things that science can do, and as I said, the predictions of quantum theory, to come back to that, the predictions of quantum theory, which are verified to a sufficient number of decimal places that it's equivalent to predicting the width of North America to one hair's breadth.
00:41:41.980Now, that is, however difficult quantum theory is to understand, that is what you can get from quantum theory.
00:41:49.720Now, the mysteries of the Bible, if they are mysteries, aren't in the same league.
00:42:28.220And this is partly what I've done while trying to make the case, for example, that you're more of a Christian than you think you are.
00:42:33.880So, for example, I think that the scientific enterprise is motivated by the axiomatic presumption that truth tends towards a unity.
00:42:43.440I think that it's predicated on the notion that there is a logical order that's intrinsic to the cosmos, that that fundamental order is good, that it's intelligible to human beings,
00:42:55.440and that discovering that order and aligning ourselves with it makes for life more abundant.
00:43:02.740I think that the scientific enterprise is also predicated on the idea that the truth will set you free.
00:43:08.200And I think all of those axioms are religious and derived from the Judeo-Christian tradition.
00:43:12.840And if you don't believe that, you have to account for why science emerged in Europe and nowhere else in the entire history of humanity, for example,
00:43:21.200and also why it's under assault from, like, all quarters now as that underlying metaphysic disappears.
00:43:29.440Like, you haven't had to be concerned with the mythological substrate in your lifetime in some sense because it was intact.
00:43:37.000And so the universities could flourish and you had your freedom, remarkable freedom, to pursue your scientific enterprise wherever you wanted.
00:43:47.200Like, that time is threatened and seriously so.
00:43:51.560And I think it's partly because these metaphysical assumptions have now become questionable.
00:43:56.720And that's part of the reason that I'm attending to them.
00:43:59.020It's not because I don't admire the accuracy of quantum prediction, for example, or celebrate what Musk is doing with his capability of sending rockets to Mars.
00:44:09.440It's like more power to the technological enterprise.
00:44:12.340But you know what's happening in the universities?
00:44:21.540I think it's an interesting question why science emerged in Europe.
00:44:26.500I mean, and I'm not enough of a historian to know.
00:44:29.940It is even possible that Christianity did have something to do with that.
00:44:33.460And I wouldn't categorically deny that.
00:44:36.160But that doesn't in any way increase my trust in the validity of Christian propositions like the resurrection, the virgin birth, the miracles, and Jesus is the son of God.
00:44:48.920But Christianity may have had some kind of historical facilitating effect that led to the Renaissance, that led to the scientific revolution.
00:45:02.700And that would be a very interesting historical analysis.
00:45:06.420But it doesn't bear upon the truth of the propositions of the Christian religion.
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00:46:03.920Okay, let's concentrate on the resurrection for a moment.
00:46:09.740Now, unfortunately, you see, this is part of the problem.
00:46:12.740Part of the problem with discussions like this is that the mode of approach that's taken by the mythological tends to circle and wander.
00:46:21.080Like, it doesn't, because you have to shine light on the problem from multiple perspectives.
00:46:26.740That's why it's often encoded in image, for example, or in drama.
00:46:30.140It's not the same hack as a purely propositional and logical argument, so it's more difficult to make.
00:46:36.640But let me tell you a story that I believe bears on the resurrection.
00:46:40.860You tell me what you think about it, because I don't, this is a very difficult story to account for.
00:46:45.220It's going to take me about five minutes, because it's complicated, but there's no way around it, I don't think.
00:46:50.300So, there's a strange scene in the Gospels where Christ tells his followers that unless he's lifted up like the bronze serpent in the desert,
00:46:58.480there can be no hope for the redemption of mankind unless he's lifted up like the bronze serpent in the desert.
00:47:04.480Okay, this is a very strange thing for someone to say.
00:47:07.700So, you need to know what the story of the bronze serpent in the desert was and what it signifies.
00:47:13.320And I think we can understand it psychologically.
00:47:17.120And the concordance of that story, which was generated millennia before with Christ's utterance, is something I just cannot imagine how anyone put those two things together,
00:47:28.560especially given the lack of explicit understanding about the relationship.
00:47:33.620So, there's a scene in Exodus, in the Exodus story, where the Israelites are doing their usual fractious foolishness and whining about the fact that they're lost
00:47:42.520and bemoaning the loss of their privileges under the Pharaoh and complaining about the power dynamics of their leadership
00:47:47.900and just generally being followers of Cain, let's say.
00:47:53.160And God, the cruel God that you refer to, decides to send among his suffering subjects poisonous snakes to bite them,
00:48:02.060which seems a little over the top, you might say.
00:48:04.560But in response to that, I would say there's no situation so terrible that some damn fool can't make it infinitely worse.
00:48:12.080And so, that's what happens to the Israelites.
00:48:13.880So, they're being bitten by these poisonous snakes and the leaders of the people who've wandered from God go to Moses and they say,
00:48:21.520look, we know you've got a pipeline to God.
00:48:23.520And, you know, there's a lot of snakes and they're doing a lot of biting and maybe you could just ask him to, you know, call off the serpents.
00:48:31.680And so, Moses, who's not very happy with the Israelites either, decides that he'll go talk to God.
00:49:06.640And then he says, put it up where the Israelites can see it.
00:49:10.060And if they go look at it, then the serpent's poison won't harm them.
00:49:16.340And I read that and I thought, that's exactly what psychotherapists discovered as they all converged in the 20th century on the utility of exposure therapy as curative.
00:49:28.160A little of the poison that hurts you cures you.
00:49:31.600It's the same principle that's used for vaccines, by the way.
00:49:34.880So what we saw in psychotherapy is that if you get people to voluntarily confront the things that are poisoning them, so to speak,
00:49:42.580that hurt their life, that frighten them and disgust them, they become braver and more well adapted.
00:49:49.400It isn't that they become less afraid, because that's been very carefully tested.
00:49:53.940It's that they learn by watching themselves expose themselves to the things that they once fleed from,
00:49:59.900that there's more to them than they think, and that that generalizes across situations.
00:50:04.940And it's the same mechanism that underlies learning as such,
00:50:08.260because children, when they learn, put themselves on the edge of ragged disaster, and that's where they advance.
00:50:14.420And so what God tells the Israelites, essentially, in this dramatic endeavor is that it's better for them to face the terrors that confront them
00:50:24.700than to be shielded from the terrors or for them to hide from them.
00:50:28.980That there'll be better people if they face what's right in front of them, even if it's poisonous.
00:50:33.880And so it's like, okay, that's pretty damn interesting and quite remarkable.
00:50:37.820And then that symbol is used, for example, by the Greeks to symbolize medicine as such.
00:50:42.300But then there's this additional weird twist, which is Christ identifies with that bronze serpent.
00:50:48.960You think, okay, that's a very peculiar thing for anyone to do.