The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - Biblical Series： God and the Hierarchy of Authority

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00:00:30.000 Hey everyone, real quick before you skip,

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00:01:30.320 Welcome to Season 3, Episode 3 of the Jordan B. Peterson Podcast.

00:01:34.780 I'm Mikayla Peterson, Jordan's daughter.

00:01:36.940 I hope you enjoy this episode.

00:01:38.680 It's called God and the Hierarchy of Authority.

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00:05:03.240 Season 3, Episode 3, God and the Hierarchy of Authority, a Jordan B. Peterson Lecture.

00:05:16.200 I'm really looking forward to this lecture, not like I wasn't looking forward to the other ones,

00:05:22.540 but the stories that I want to cover tonight, one of the things that just absolutely staggers me about them,

00:05:28.320 especially the story of Cain and Abel, which I hope to get to, is like, it's so short, it's unbelievable.

00:05:33.600 It's like 10, 11 lines.

00:05:34.960 There's nothing to it at all.

00:05:35.980 And I've found that it's essentially inexhaustible in its capacity to reveal meaning.

00:05:41.160 And I don't exactly know what to make of that.

00:05:43.560 I mean, I think, you know, because I said I was going to take as rational an approach to this issue as I possibly could,

00:05:49.800 I think it has something to do with this intense process of condensation across very long periods of time.

00:05:55.460 That's the simplest explanation.

00:05:56.620 But I'll tell you, the information in there is so densely packed that it really is, it's really,

00:06:01.940 it's not that easy to come up with an explanation for that.

00:06:04.860 Not one that I find fully compelling.

00:06:07.080 I mean, I do think that the really old stories, and we've been covering the really archaic stories in the Bible so far,

00:06:14.180 I think that one of the things that you can be virtually certain about is that everything about them that was memorable was remembered, right?

00:06:20.300 And so in some sense, and this is kind of like the idea of Richard Dawkins' ideas of memes,

00:06:24.480 which is often why I thought that Richard Dawkins, if he was a little bit more mystically inclined,

00:06:29.580 he would have become Carl Jung, because there are theories that are unbelievably similar.

00:06:33.120 The similar of meme and the similar of, the idea of archetype of the collective unconscious are very, very similar ideas,

00:06:38.320 except the Jungian idea is far more profound in my estimation.

00:06:43.160 Well, it just is. He thought it through so much better, you know,

00:06:46.820 because Dawkins tended to think of meme as sort of like a mind worm, you know,

00:06:51.160 something that would infest a mind and maybe multiple minds.

00:06:54.080 But he never really took, I don't think he really ever took the idea with the seriousness it deserved.

00:06:58.400 And I did hear him actually make a joke with Sam Harris the last time they talked about the fact that there was some possibility

00:07:06.160 that the production of memes, say religious memes, could alter evolutionary history.

00:07:11.680 And they both avoided that topic instantly.

00:07:13.760 They had a big laugh about it and then decided they weren't going to go down that road.

00:07:16.540 And so that wasn't very, that was quite interesting to me.

00:07:19.720 But these, these, the, the, the, the density of these stories, I do really think still is a, is a mystery.

00:07:28.320 It's, it certainly has something to do with their absolute, their in, their impossibility to be forgotten.

00:07:34.900 You know, and that's actually something that could be tested empirically.

00:07:37.620 I don't know if anybody has ever done that because you could tell naive people two stories even equal length, right?

00:07:42.800 One that had an archetypal theme and the other that didn't, and then wait three months and see which ones people remembered better.

00:07:48.400 It'd be, it'd be relatively straightforward thing to test.

00:07:50.740 I haven't tested it, but maybe I will at some point.

00:07:53.340 But anyways, that's all to say that I'm very excited about this lecture

00:07:58.620 because I get an opportunity to go over the story of Adam and Eve and the story of Cain and Abel.

00:08:02.880 And I hope we manage both of those today.

00:08:04.480 And maybe we'll get to the story of Noah and the Tower of Babel as well.

00:08:07.700 But I wouldn't count on it, not at the rate we've been, not at the rate we've been progressing.

00:08:12.160 But that's okay.

00:08:12.880 That's, that's no problem.

00:08:13.900 It's, there's no sense rushing this.

00:08:16.460 All right.

00:08:16.780 So we're going to go, before we go that, before we do that, I want to finish my discussion of the idea of the psychological significance of the idea of God.

00:08:27.100 And I've been thinking about this a lot more, you know, because, of course, this lecture series gives me the opportunity and the necessity to continue to think.

00:08:34.280 And, you know, it certainly is the case, so the hypothesis that I've been developing with the Trinitarian idea is something like that the Trinitarian idea is the earliest emergence in image of the idea that there has to be an underlying cognitive structure that gives rise to consciousness as well as consciousness itself.

00:08:53.580 And so what I would suggest was that the idea of God the Father is something akin to the idea of the a priori structure that gives rise to consciousness, that's an inbuilt part of us, so that's our structure.

00:09:06.280 You could think about that as something that's been produced over a vast evolutionary time span.

00:09:10.720 And I don't think that's completely out of keeping with the ideas that are laid forth in Genesis 1, at least if you think about them from a metaphorical perspective.

00:09:20.060 And it's hard to read them literally because I don't know what, you know, there's an emphasis on day and night.

00:09:24.800 But the idea of day and night as 24-hour diurnal, you know, daytime and nighttime interchanges that are based on the earthly clock seems to be a bit absurd when you first start to think about the construction of the cosmos.

00:09:41.340 So it just doesn't seem to me that a literal interpretation is appropriate.

00:09:44.760 I mean, it's another thing that you might not know, but, you know, many of the early church fathers, one of them, Origen in particular, stated very clearly, this was in 300 AD, that these ancient stories were to be taken as wise metaphors and not to be taken literally.

00:09:59.240 Like the idea that the people who established Christianity, for example, were all the sorts of people who were biblical literates is just absolutely historically wrong.

00:10:08.260 I mean, some of them were and some of them still are.

00:10:10.340 That's not the point.

00:10:11.140 Many of them weren't, and it's not like people who lived 2,000 years ago were stupid by any stretch of the imagination.

00:10:16.800 And so they were perfectly capable of understanding what, you know, what constituted something approximating a metaphor and also knew that fiction, in some sense, considered as an abstraction, could tell you truths that nonfiction wasn't able to get at, unless you think that fiction is only for entertainment.

00:10:33.860 And I think that's a very, that's a big mistake to think that.

00:10:37.820 So, all right, so here we go.

00:10:40.060 So, yes, so with regards to the idea of God the Father, so the idea is that in order to make sense out of the world, you have to have an a priori cognitive structure.

00:10:49.060 And that was something that Immanuel Kant, as I said last time, put forward as an argument against the idea that all of the information that we acquire during our lifetime is a consequence of incoming sense data.

00:11:01.520 And the reason that Kant objected to that, and he was absolutely right about this, is that you can't make sense of sense data without an a priori structure.

00:11:09.000 You can't extract from sense data the structure that enables you to make sense of sense data.

00:11:14.440 It's not possible.

00:11:15.340 And that's really been demonstrated, I would say, beyond a shadow of a doubt, since the 1960s.

00:11:21.480 And the best demonstration of that was actually the initial failure of artificial intelligence.

00:11:25.640 Because when the AI people started promising that we would have fully functional and autonomous robots and artificial intelligence back in the 1960s,

00:11:34.600 what they didn't understand and what stalled them terribly until about the early 1990s was that it was almost, that the problem of perception was a much deeper problem than anybody ever recognized.

00:11:44.660 Because, like, when you look at the world, you just see, well, look, there's objects out there.

00:11:48.520 And, by the way, you don't see objects.

00:11:50.460 You see tools.

00:11:51.540 Just so you know, in the neurobiology, that's quite clear.

00:11:54.280 You don't see objects and infer utility.

00:11:56.840 You see useful things and infer object.

00:11:59.620 So it's actually the reverse of what people generally think.

00:12:02.220 But the point is, is that regardless of whether you see objects or useful things, when you look at the world, you just see it.

00:12:08.080 And you think, well, seeing is easy because they're the things are.

00:12:10.520 And all you have to do is, like, you know, turn your head and they appear.

00:12:13.400 And that's just so wrong that it's almost impossible to overstate.

00:12:18.040 The problem of perception is staggeringly difficult.

00:12:21.060 And one of the primary reasons that we still don't really have autonomous robots, although we're a lot closer to it than we were in the 1960s,

00:12:27.500 is because it turned out that you actually have to have a body.

00:12:30.300 You have to have a body before you can think.

00:12:33.180 And even more importantly, you have to have a body before you can see.

00:12:36.480 Because the act of seeing is actually the act of mapping the patterns of the world onto the patterns of the body.

00:12:43.140 It's not things are out there, you see them, then you think about them, then you evaluate them, then you decide to act on them, and then you act.

00:12:50.320 I mean, you could call that a folk idea of psychological processing or perception.

00:12:55.780 It's not, that is not how it works.

00:12:57.660 Like your eyes, for example, map.

00:13:00.060 One of the things they do is map right onto your spinal cord, for example.

00:13:03.660 They map right onto your emotional system.

00:13:05.500 So it's actually possible, for example, for people to be blind and still be able to detect facial expressions,

00:13:12.840 which is to say you can, for someone who's cortically blind, so they've had their visual cortex destroyed, often by a stroke,

00:13:18.940 they'll tell you that they can't see anything.

00:13:21.240 But they can guess which hand you put up if you ask them to.

00:13:23.800 And if you flash them pictures of angry or fearful faces, they show skin conductance responses to the more emotion-laden faces.

00:13:30.640 And it's because, imagine that the world is made out of patterns, which it is,

00:13:34.800 and then imagine that those patterns are transmitted to you electromagnetically, through light.

00:13:39.120 And then imagine that the pattern is duplicated on the retina, and then that pattern is propagated along the optic nerve,

00:13:44.560 and then the pattern is distributed throughout your brain.

00:13:47.440 And some of that pattern makes up what you call conscious vision, but other parts of it just activate your body.

00:13:53.780 And so, for example, when I look at this, when I look at this, this, whatever it is, bottle, that's the word.

00:14:01.900 You know, when I look at it, especially with intent in mind, as soon as I look at it,

00:14:08.580 the pattern of the bottle activates the gripping mechanism of my hand,

00:14:13.620 and part of the action of, or the act of perception is to adjust my bodily posture, including my hand grip,

00:14:20.800 to be of the optimal size to pick that up.

00:14:23.300 And it's not that I see the bottle and then think about how to move my hand.

00:14:27.700 That's too slow.

00:14:28.460 It's that I use my motor cortex to perceive the bottle, and that's actually somewhat independent of actually seeing the bottle as a conscious experience.

00:14:37.580 So, anyways, the reason that I'm telling you all of that, and there's much more about that that can be told.

00:14:45.880 Rodney Brooks, he's someone to know about.

00:14:47.720 He's a robotics engineer who worked in the 1990s, and he invented the Roomba, among many other things.

00:14:53.140 So he's a real genius, that guy.

00:14:54.600 And Brooks was one of the first people to really point out that to be able to have a machine that perceived well enough to work in the world,

00:15:06.240 that you had to give it a body, and that the perception would actually be built from the body up,

00:15:11.560 rather than from the abstract cognitive perceptions down.

00:15:15.080 And so, well, that turned out to be the case.

00:15:18.780 And Brooks built all sorts of weird little machines in the 1990s that didn't even really have any central brain,

00:15:23.640 but they could do things like run away from light.

00:15:26.040 And so they could perceive light, but their perception was the act of running away from light.

00:15:32.320 And so perception is very, very, very tightly tied to action in ways that people don't normally perceive.

00:15:38.540 Anyways, that's all to say that you cannot perceive the world without being embodied.

00:15:45.260 And, you know, you're embodied in a manner that's taken you roughly three and a half billion years to pull off, right?

00:15:50.580 There's been a lot of death as a prerequisite to the embodied form that you take.

00:15:55.740 And so it's taken all that trial and error to produce something like you

00:15:58.980 that can interact with the complexity of the world well enough to last the relatively paltry 80 or so years that you can last.

00:16:05.960 And so I think about that as, and this may be wrong, but I think it's a useful, at least it's a useful hypothesis.

00:16:13.460 I think the idea of God the Father is something like the birth of the idea

00:16:18.140 that there has to be an internal structure that out of which consciousness itself arises that gives form to things.

00:16:25.740 And, well, and if that's the case, and perhaps it's not, but if it's the case, it's certainly reflection.

00:16:31.820 It's a reflection of the kind of factual truth that I've been describing now.

00:16:35.720 And then, like I also mentioned, that I kind of see the idea of both the Holy Spirit and also of Christ,

00:16:41.780 and most specifically of Christ in the form of the Word.

00:16:46.720 As the active consciousness that that structure produces and uses,

00:16:51.080 is not only to formulate the world, because we formulate the world,

00:16:55.460 at least the world that we experience, we formulate,

00:16:58.180 but also to change and modify that world, because there's absolutely no doubt that we do that,

00:17:03.160 partly with our bodies, which are optimally evolved to do that,

00:17:06.660 which is why we have hands, unlike dolphins that have, you know, very large brains like us,

00:17:10.740 but can't really change the world.

00:17:12.240 We're really adapted and evolved to change the world.

00:17:15.400 And our speech is really an extension of our ability to use our hands.

00:17:20.940 So the speech systems that we use are, you know, very well-developed motor skill.

00:17:30.060 And generally speaking, your dominant linguistic hemisphere is the same as your dominant hand.

00:17:35.980 And people talk with their hands, like me, as you may have noticed.

00:17:39.240 And we use sign language.

00:17:40.600 And there's a tight relationship between the use of the hand and the use of language.

00:17:44.700 And that's partly because language is a productive force.

00:17:48.240 And the hand is part of what changes the world.

00:17:50.880 And so all those things are tied together in a very, very complex way with this a priori structure

00:17:56.000 and also with the embodied structure.

00:17:58.180 And I also think that's part of the reason why classical Christianity

00:18:00.980 puts such an emphasis not only on the divinity of the spirit,

00:18:04.960 but also on the divinity of the body, which is a harder thing to grapple with, you know.

00:18:09.560 It's easier for people to think, if you think in religious terms at all,

00:18:13.160 that you have some sort of transcendent spirit that's somehow detached from the body

00:18:17.160 that might have some life after death, something like that.

00:18:19.820 But the Christian, Christianity in particular, really insists on the divinity of the body.

00:18:24.820 So the idea is that there's an underlying structure that's got this quasi-patriarchal nature,

00:18:30.840 partly because it's, for complex reasons,

00:18:32.940 but partly because it's a reflection of the social structure as well as other things.

00:18:37.200 And then that uses consciousness in the form particularly of language,

00:18:41.480 but most particularly in the form of truthful language

00:18:44.460 in order to produce the world in a manner that's good.

00:18:48.100 And I think that's a walloping, powerful, powerful idea,

00:18:51.640 especially the relationship between the idea that it's truthful speech that gives rise to the good,

00:18:56.060 because that's a really fundamental moral claim.

00:18:58.440 And I think that's a tough one to beat, man,

00:19:00.540 because one of the things I've really noticed is,

00:19:03.320 and it isn't just me, that's for sure,

00:19:06.780 is that, you know, there's a lot of tragedy in life.

00:19:10.000 There's no doubt about that.

00:19:11.200 And lots of people that I see, for example, in my clinical practice,

00:19:14.360 are laid low by the tragedy of life.

00:19:17.000 But I also see very, very frequently that people get tangled up in deceit,

00:19:21.440 in webs of deceit that are often multiple generations long,

00:19:24.900 and that just takes them out, you know.

00:19:27.260 And so deceit can produce extraordinary levels of suffering

00:19:32.460 that last for very, very long periods of time.

00:19:35.040 And that's really a clinical truism, you know,

00:19:37.760 because Freud, of course, identified one of the problems

00:19:41.340 that contributed to the suffering we might associate with mental illness,

00:19:45.460 with repression, which is kind of like a lie of omission.

00:19:49.140 That's a perfectly reasonable way to think about it.

00:19:51.160 And Jung stated straight out that there was no difference

00:19:54.440 between the psychotherapeutic, the curative psychotherapeutic effort

00:19:58.320 and supreme moral effort, including truth.

00:20:01.420 Those were the same thing as far as he was concerned.

00:20:03.660 And Carl Rogers, another great clinician who was at one point

00:20:06.780 a Christian missionary before he became more strictly scientific,

00:20:12.360 he believed that it was in truthful dialogue

00:20:14.760 that clinical transformation took place.

00:20:18.480 And, you know, and of course, one of the prerequisites

00:20:22.400 for genuine transformation in the clinical setting

00:20:24.720 is that the therapist tells the truth and the client tells the truth

00:20:28.380 because otherwise, how in the world do you know what's going on?

00:20:30.700 How can you solve a problem when you don't even know what the problem is?

00:20:33.520 And you don't know what the problem is unless the person tells you the truth.

00:20:36.720 That's something really to think about in light of your own relationships

00:20:39.780 because, you know, if you don't tell the people around you the truth,

00:20:42.740 then they don't know who you are.

00:20:44.080 And maybe that's a good thing, you know,

00:20:45.680 because, well, seriously, people have reasons to lie, right?

00:20:49.100 I mean, that aren't trivial, but it's really worth knowing

00:20:51.860 that you can't even get your hands on the problem

00:20:54.660 unless you formulate it truthfully.

00:20:56.720 And if you can't get your hands on the problem,

00:20:58.340 the probability that you're going to solve it is just so low.

00:21:01.600 And so then I've been thinking about, as well,

00:21:05.840 and this idea has become more credible to me

00:21:10.640 the longer I've developed it, the longer I've thought about it.

00:21:14.080 You know, the idea that there's, I'll go back.

00:21:19.980 It's partly the idea that, well, let me figure out how to start this properly.

00:21:25.560 Friend of mine, business partner,

00:21:28.060 and a guy that I've written scientific papers with, very smart guy,

00:21:31.860 took me to task, and I think I told you this a little bit,

00:21:33.960 about using the term dominance hierarchy,

00:21:36.760 which might be fine for, like, chimpanzees and for lobsters

00:21:40.480 and for creatures like that, but not for chimpanzees even so much.

00:21:45.640 And he said something very interesting.

00:21:47.940 He thought that the idea of dominance hierarchy

00:21:49.840 was actually a projection of a early 20th century

00:21:53.760 quasi-Marxist hypothesis onto the animal kingdom

00:21:57.420 that was being observed.

00:21:58.920 And the notion that the hierarchical structure that you see

00:22:01.600 that characterizes, say, mating hierarchies in chimps, for example,

00:22:05.480 the idea that that was predicated on power

00:22:07.880 was actually a projection of a kind of political ideology.

00:22:10.900 And I thought, that really bugged me for a long time

00:22:13.080 when he said that, because, like,

00:22:14.860 because I'd really been used to using the term dominance hierarchy.

00:22:17.500 And I thought, he told me all that,

00:22:19.100 and I thought, ugh, that's so annoying.

00:22:20.980 It's so annoying, because it might be right.

00:22:23.460 And it took me months to think about it.

00:22:25.740 And then I was also reading Franz de Waal at the same time,

00:22:29.100 and he's a primatologist,

00:22:30.280 and also Jack Panksepp,

00:22:32.040 who's a brilliant, brilliant affective neuroscientist

00:22:34.700 who unfortunately just died.

00:22:35.980 He wrote a great book called Affective Neuroscience.

00:22:38.820 And for rats to play, they have to play fair,

00:22:41.100 or they won't play with each other.

00:22:42.640 That's a staggering discovery, right?

00:22:44.780 Because anything that helps instantiate

00:22:48.040 the emergence of ethical behavior in animals,

00:22:52.240 and that associates it with an evolutionary process,

00:22:55.300 which is essentially what Panksepp was doing,

00:22:58.280 gives credence to the notion that the ethics that guide us

00:23:01.880 are not mere sociological epiphenomenal constructs.

00:23:06.500 They're deep, deeply rooted.

00:23:08.140 If rats, and they're rats, for God's sake,

00:23:10.200 you can't trust them, and they still play fair, you know?

00:23:13.120 And de Waal noticed that the chimp troops that he studied,

00:23:17.780 like, it wasn't the barbaric chimp

00:23:20.540 that ruled with an iron fist

00:23:21.840 that was the successful ruler,

00:23:23.320 because he kept getting torn to shreds

00:23:25.080 by the compatriots that he ignored and stomped on.

00:23:28.420 As soon as he showed some weakness,

00:23:29.480 they'd just tear him into pieces.

00:23:30.920 The chimp leaders that were stable,

00:23:34.500 you know, that had a stable kingdom, let's say,

00:23:36.620 were very reciprocal in terms of their interactions

00:23:39.100 with their friends.

00:23:40.100 And chimps have friends,

00:23:41.120 and they actually last for a very long time,

00:23:43.180 chimp friendships.

00:23:43.660 And they were also very reciprocal

00:23:46.360 in their interactions with the females

00:23:48.260 and with the infants.

00:23:49.820 And I thought that's a...

00:23:51.220 Franz de Waal is a very smart guy.

00:23:52.900 And I thought that was also foundational science,

00:23:55.560 because it's really something to note

00:23:57.900 that the attributes that give rise to dominance

00:24:01.100 in a male dominance hierarchy,

00:24:02.500 sorry to use that word,

00:24:03.600 let's call it authority,

00:24:05.200 that might be better,

00:24:06.160 or even shudder competence,

00:24:08.020 which I think is a better way of thinking about it,

00:24:10.220 is that that's not predicated purely on anything

00:24:12.340 that's as simple as brute power.

00:24:15.580 And I think too, you know,

00:24:16.780 I think as well that the idea,

00:24:18.540 and this is a deeply devious

00:24:19.960 and dangerous political idea in my estimation,

00:24:22.080 the idea that male dominance hierarchies,

00:24:24.520 sorry, male hierarchies

00:24:26.340 are fundamentally predicated on power

00:24:28.560 in a law-abiding society,

00:24:31.800 I think all you have to do

00:24:33.620 is think about that for like a month, say,

00:24:36.560 which isn't that long,

00:24:38.000 to understand how absurd that is.

00:24:39.840 Because most people who are in positions of authority,

00:24:42.620 let's say,

00:24:43.220 are just as hemmed in by ethical responsibility,

00:24:46.380 or even more so,

00:24:47.660 than people at the other levels of the hierarchy.

00:24:50.300 And we know this even in the managerial literature,

00:24:52.620 because we know, generally speaking,

00:24:54.440 that managers are more stressed by their subordinates

00:24:57.440 than the subordinates are stressed by their managers.

00:24:59.780 And that's not surprising.

00:25:01.060 You know, you want to be responsible for like 200 people?

00:25:04.020 You really want that?

00:25:05.100 That's hard work, man.

00:25:06.520 And I mean, I know it's a pain to have a boss,

00:25:08.400 because you have to care about what the boss thinks.

00:25:10.840 And maybe the person is arbitrary,

00:25:12.660 in which case they're not going to be particularly successful.

00:25:14.900 But it's no joke to be responsible for 200 people.

00:25:17.920 And you have to behave very carefully

00:25:19.360 when you're in a position of responsibility

00:25:21.500 and authority like that,

00:25:22.500 because you will get called out

00:25:23.540 if you make mistakes constantly.

00:25:25.640 So it's not like you're,

00:25:27.120 it's not like because you have a position

00:25:29.400 that's higher up in the hierarchy,

00:25:31.320 that you're less constrained by ethical necessity.

00:25:34.480 Now, if you're a psychopath,

00:25:35.660 well, that's a whole different story.

00:25:36.960 But psychopaths have to move pretty rapidly

00:25:39.080 from hierarchy to hierarchy, right?

00:25:40.760 Because they get found out quite quickly.

00:25:42.920 And as soon as their reputation is shattered,

00:25:44.800 then they can't get away with their shenanigans anymore.

00:25:47.900 So, okay, so all of this is to say

00:25:49.820 that there is something very interesting

00:25:52.640 about the pattern of behavior.

00:25:55.560 So imagine that,

00:25:56.580 imagine that sexual selection

00:25:58.600 is working something like this.

00:26:00.180 And we know that sexual selection

00:26:02.100 is a very, very, very, very powerful biological force,

00:26:05.800 even though biologists ignored it

00:26:07.200 for almost 100 years

00:26:08.460 after Charles Darwin originally wrote about it.

00:26:10.760 Thinking mostly about natural selection.

00:26:12.800 They didn't like the idea of sexual selection

00:26:14.440 because it tended to introduce the notion of mind

00:26:16.620 into the process of evolution

00:26:18.300 because it deals with choice, you know.

00:26:20.860 But, so imagine on the one hand

00:26:22.540 that you have a male hierarchy.

00:26:24.560 We know that the men at the top of the hierarchy

00:26:26.480 are much more likely to be reproductively successful

00:26:28.600 than the men at the bottom.

00:26:29.760 That's particularly true of men.

00:26:31.820 So you have twice as many female ancestors

00:26:33.480 as you have male ancestors.

00:26:35.080 Not going to do the math,

00:26:36.220 but, and I know it doesn't sound plausible,

00:26:38.100 but you could look it up and figure it out.

00:26:39.600 And it's a perfectly reasonable fact.

00:26:41.520 It actually happens to be true.

00:26:43.140 So there's twice as,

00:26:44.140 you have twice as many female ancestors

00:26:45.720 because females are twice as likely,

00:26:48.520 on average, to leave offspring as men.

00:26:50.860 Now what happens is,

00:26:52.360 any man who does reproduce

00:26:54.040 tends to reproduce more than once.

00:26:56.060 But a bunch of them reproduce zero.

00:26:58.300 Whereas, so it would be,

00:26:59.340 the average man who reproduces has two children.

00:27:01.240 And the average man who doesn't reproduce

00:27:03.920 has zero, obviously.

00:27:05.640 And the average woman who reproduces has one child.

00:27:09.900 So that means that there's twice as many females

00:27:13.080 in your line as there is males.

00:27:14.620 So that's a big deal.

00:27:16.220 And so imagine that it works something like this.

00:27:18.840 So, the men elect the competent men

00:27:24.900 who are admired and who are,

00:27:27.320 and who are, I can't say dominant,

00:27:30.800 who are given positions of authority and respect.

00:27:33.400 Let's put it that way.

00:27:34.620 And it's like an election.

00:27:36.300 Now it could be an actual democratic election,

00:27:38.400 but it's at least an election of consensus,

00:27:41.180 or it's at least an election of,

00:27:43.220 well, we're not going to kill him for now.

00:27:44.740 Which is also a form of election, right?

00:27:46.840 It's a form of tolerance, you know?

00:27:48.700 So, and then what happens is the women,

00:27:51.340 for their part,

00:27:52.060 peel from the top of the male hierarchy.

00:27:54.260 And so you've got two factors

00:27:56.140 that are driving human sexual selection

00:27:58.740 across vast stretches of evolutionary time.

00:28:01.340 One is the election of men by men

00:28:03.560 to positions where they're much more likely to reproduce.

00:28:06.080 And the second is the tendency of women

00:28:08.160 to peel off the top of male dominance hierarchies,

00:28:10.480 which is extraordinarily well-established cross-culturally.

00:28:13.420 Even if you flatten out the socioeconomic disparity,

00:28:17.860 say, between men and women,

00:28:18.820 like they've done in Scandinavia,

00:28:20.420 you don't reduce the tendency of women

00:28:24.640 to peel off the top of the male hierarchy by much.

00:28:27.320 And why would you?

00:28:28.440 I mean, women are smart.

00:28:29.680 Why in the world wouldn't they go for,

00:28:31.880 why wouldn't they strive to make relationships

00:28:34.360 with men who are relatively successful?

00:28:36.420 And why wouldn't they let the men themselves

00:28:38.800 define how that constitutes success?

00:28:42.560 It makes sense.

00:28:43.240 Like, if you want to figure out who the best man is,

00:28:45.420 why not let the men compete?

00:28:47.620 And the man who wins, whatever the competition is,

00:28:50.640 is the best man by definition.

00:28:52.520 How else would you define it?

00:28:54.720 So, okay, so why am I telling you all that?

00:28:57.480 Well, the reason is,

00:28:58.760 is because it seems to me

00:29:00.860 that there's been this complex interplay

00:29:03.560 across human evolution

00:29:05.100 between the election of the male dominance hierarchy

00:29:08.720 and sexual success.

00:29:10.260 And that's a big deal if it's true.

00:29:12.760 It could be,

00:29:13.480 because what would happen,

00:29:14.460 you see,

00:29:14.780 is that as men evolved,

00:29:17.500 they would evolve to be better and better

00:29:19.580 at climbing up the male hierarchy

00:29:21.240 because the ones who weren't good at that

00:29:22.980 wouldn't reproduce.

00:29:23.640 So obviously that's going to happen.

00:29:26.020 But then it wouldn't just be a hierarchy

00:29:28.220 because there's a whole bunch of different hierarchies.

00:29:30.600 And so then you might say,

00:29:31.580 well, are there commonalities across hierarchies?

00:29:34.640 That's a reasonable thing to propose.

00:29:36.580 I mean, they're not completely opposed to one another,

00:29:39.180 at least.

00:29:39.580 If you're relatively more successful in one hierarchy,

00:29:45.020 then it's more probable

00:29:47.160 that you'll be successful in another.

00:29:49.040 And that's actually a really good definition

00:29:50.940 of general intelligence or IQ.

00:29:53.600 And that's actually one of the things

00:29:54.800 that women select men for.

00:29:56.080 Now, men also select women for that,

00:29:57.740 but the selection pressure is even higher

00:29:59.320 from women to men.

00:30:00.880 And general IQ is one of the things

00:30:02.340 that propels you up across dominance hierarchies

00:30:05.020 because it's a general problem-solving mechanism.

00:30:07.200 And the other thing that seems to do that

00:30:08.960 to some degree is conscientiousness.

00:30:10.580 And there's also some evidence

00:30:11.860 that women prefer conscientious men.

00:30:14.200 So, and of course, why wouldn't they?

00:30:15.780 Because you can trust them and they work.

00:30:19.260 And so those are both good things.

00:30:20.900 So then you think, okay,

00:30:21.780 so men have adapted to start to climb

00:30:24.480 the male dominance hierarchy,

00:30:25.580 but it's the set of all possible hierarchies

00:30:27.840 that they're adapted to climb.

00:30:30.020 And so then you think there's a set of attributes

00:30:32.420 that can be acted out and that can be embodied

00:30:36.220 that will increase the probability

00:30:37.640 that you're going to rise to the top

00:30:39.140 of any given hierarchy.

00:30:40.780 And then you could say, well,

00:30:41.740 then as you adapt to that fact,

00:30:44.500 then you start to develop an understanding

00:30:46.400 of what that pattern constitutes.

00:30:48.640 And so that starts to become

00:30:49.880 the abstract representation

00:30:51.640 of something like multidimensional competence.

00:30:54.780 And that's like the abstraction of virtue itself.

00:30:58.000 Well, then none of that has,

00:30:59.240 then none of that's arbitrary, man.

00:31:00.720 That's as bloody well-grounded in biology

00:31:02.940 as anything could be.

00:31:04.260 And I think that's a really hard argument to refute.

00:31:06.800 And like one of the things I should tell you

00:31:08.740 about how I think is that when I think something,

00:31:11.460 I spend a long time trying to figure out

00:31:13.200 if it's wrong, you know,

00:31:14.220 because I like to hack at it

00:31:15.460 from every possible direction

00:31:16.720 to see if it's a weak idea,

00:31:18.740 because if it's a weak idea,

00:31:19.880 then I'd rather just dispense with it

00:31:21.480 and find something better.

00:31:22.660 And I've had a real hard time

00:31:24.240 trying to figure out what's wrong with that idea.

00:31:26.980 It seems to me that it's pretty damn solid.

00:31:30.700 And then the idea that, you know,

00:31:33.720 if you watch what people do in movies and so on,

00:31:35.780 and when they're reading fiction,

00:31:36.960 it's obvious that they're very good

00:31:38.320 at identifying both the hero and the anti-hero.

00:31:41.000 We could say the anti-hero,

00:31:42.520 generally speaking, the bad guy,

00:31:43.860 is someone who strives for authority and position,

00:31:47.880 but fails, generally speaking, not always,

00:31:50.420 but fails.

00:31:51.280 So he's a good, bad example.

00:31:53.160 A kid, you take a kid to a good guy, bad guy movie,

00:31:56.560 the kid figures out pretty fast

00:31:57.800 that he's not supposed to be the bad guy

00:31:59.240 and figures out very quickly

00:32:01.620 to zero in on the good guy.

00:32:03.760 And that means that there's an affinity

00:32:05.880 between the pattern of good guy

00:32:07.980 that's being played out in the fiction

00:32:09.360 and the perceptual capacity of the child.

00:32:12.680 You know, and one of the things I told my son

00:32:14.200 when he was a kid,

00:32:15.040 when I used to take him to movies

00:32:16.260 that were sometimes more frightening

00:32:17.900 than they should have been,

00:32:19.040 but one of the things I always told him was,

00:32:21.720 I never said, don't be afraid,

00:32:23.560 because I think that's bad advice for kids.

00:32:25.560 What I said was, keep your eye on the hero, right?

00:32:28.880 Keep your eye on the hero.

00:32:30.580 And he was gripped by the movie

00:32:32.500 and often quite afraid of them, you know,

00:32:34.120 because movies can be very frightening.

00:32:35.680 So he just like zero in on that guy

00:32:37.380 and hoping, and you know what it's like in a movie,

00:32:39.580 you hope that the good guy wins, generally speaking.

00:32:42.260 And I mean, why do you do that?

00:32:44.480 Where does that come from?

00:32:45.960 You see how deeply rooted that is inside you.

00:32:48.100 You'll bloody well go line up

00:32:49.980 and pay to watch that happen.

00:32:52.040 It's not an easy thing to understand.

00:32:54.320 And it's so self-evident to people

00:32:56.420 that we don't even notice

00:32:57.560 that it's a tremendous mystery.

00:32:59.620 And so is it so unreasonable to think

00:33:01.940 that we would have actually over the millennia

00:33:04.380 come to some sort of collective conclusion

00:33:07.400 about what the best of the best guys are,

00:33:10.300 best of the good guys are,

00:33:11.840 and what the worst of the bad guys are?

00:33:14.460 And to me, archetypally speaking,

00:33:16.500 thinking of that as the hostile brothers,

00:33:18.860 so that's Christ and Satan,

00:33:19.940 or Cain and Abel, for example,

00:33:21.640 very common mythological motif,

00:33:23.800 the hostile brothers,

00:33:24.760 it's like those are archetypes.

00:33:27.380 It's like Satan, for example,

00:33:29.940 is by definition the worst that a person can be.

00:33:33.920 And Christ, by definition,

00:33:36.100 this is independent of anything but conceptualization,

00:33:39.340 is by definition the best that a man can be.

00:33:43.920 Now, as I said,

00:33:45.960 I'm speaking psychologically and conceptually,

00:33:47.880 but given our capacity for imagination

00:33:50.580 and our ability to engage in fiction,

00:33:52.560 and our love for fiction,

00:33:54.300 and our capacity to dramatize,

00:33:56.460 and our love for the stories of heroism,

00:33:58.960 and catastrophe,

00:34:00.180 and good and evil,

00:34:01.280 I can't see how it could be any other way.

00:34:03.540 Like, so, well,

00:34:05.400 so that's part of the idea

00:34:08.000 that's driving the notion of the evolution of the idea of God,

00:34:11.520 and even more specifically,

00:34:13.000 driving the evolution of the idea,

00:34:14.760 at least in part, of the Trinity.

00:34:16.540 So, God is an abstracted ideal,

00:34:19.120 formulated in large part

00:34:20.540 to dissociate the ideal

00:34:22.360 from any particular incarnation,

00:34:24.620 or man, or any ruler.

00:34:25.840 And there's another rule in the biblical stories,

00:34:28.600 which is that when the actual ruler,

00:34:30.820 I mentioned this before,

00:34:31.820 when the actual ruler becomes confused

00:34:34.280 with the abstracted ideal,

00:34:36.960 then the state immediately turns into a tyranny,

00:34:39.220 and the whole bloody thing collapses.

00:34:40.820 So the idea is so sophisticated,

00:34:43.180 you know,

00:34:43.420 one of the things that we figured out,

00:34:44.940 and this was a hard thing to figure out,

00:34:46.480 was that you had to take the abstraction

00:34:50.100 and divorce it from any particular power structure,

00:34:53.400 and then think about it as something

00:34:55.200 that existed as an abstraction.

00:34:57.060 But a real thing, right,

00:34:58.860 real in that it governed your behavior,

00:35:00.540 in everyone's behavior,

00:35:02.360 including the damn king.

00:35:04.580 The king was responsible to the abstracted ideal.

00:35:08.240 Man, that's an impossible,

00:35:09.520 that is such an impossible ideal.

00:35:11.220 You know,

00:35:11.480 why would have they agreed to that 5,000 years ago?

00:35:14.160 But one of the things you see continually happening

00:35:16.140 in the Old Testament

00:35:16.900 is that as soon as the Israelite,

00:35:19.020 for example,

00:35:19.600 the Israelite kings,

00:35:21.040 become almighty,

00:35:24.300 the real God comes along

00:35:25.660 and just cuts them into pieces,

00:35:27.760 and then the whole bloody state

00:35:28.800 falls apart for like hundreds of years.

00:35:30.540 It's like,

00:35:31.120 I think that's a lesson

00:35:32.360 that we have not thoroughly consciously yet learned.

00:35:37.340 It's still implicit in the narratives.

00:35:39.140 We still haven't figured out why that's the case.

00:35:41.580 Well, again,

00:35:41.980 I think that's a real hard argument

00:35:43.320 to dispense with.

00:35:46.060 So,

00:35:47.320 all right.

00:35:49.540 So,

00:35:50.140 we looked at this a little bit.

00:35:52.000 The Trinitarian idea is that

00:35:53.760 there's a father,

00:35:56.720 that's maybe the dramatic representation

00:36:00.400 of the structures that underlie consciousness,

00:36:02.500 the embodied structures that underlie consciousness,

00:36:04.800 and then there's the sun,

00:36:06.240 and that's consciousness,

00:36:08.020 but in its particular historical form.

00:36:10.400 That's the thing that's so interesting

00:36:11.640 about the figure of the sun.

00:36:12.900 And then there's consciousness as such,

00:36:14.720 and that seems to be something like the indwelling spirit.

00:36:17.680 And so,

00:36:18.580 I mean,

00:36:19.340 these psychological ideas came from somewhere,

00:36:21.380 right,

00:36:21.620 that they have a history.

00:36:22.680 They didn't just spring out of nowhere,

00:36:24.040 and they emerge from dreams,

00:36:26.460 and hypothesis,

00:36:27.320 and artistic visions,

00:36:28.340 and all of that over a long time,

00:36:29.900 and maybe they get clarified

00:36:31.140 into something like consciousness,

00:36:33.160 but it takes a damn long time

00:36:35.160 to get from,

00:36:36.060 to get from watching,

00:36:39.620 you know,

00:36:39.900 from two chimpanzees watching each other,

00:36:42.700 to a human being saying,

00:36:44.400 well,

00:36:44.640 we all exhibit this faculty called consciousness.

00:36:48.500 I mean,

00:36:48.760 man,

00:36:48.920 that's a long journey,

00:36:50.060 you know,

00:36:50.300 that's a really long journey,

00:36:51.340 and there's going to be plenty of stages in between.

00:36:53.420 One of the things I really like about Jean Piaget,

00:36:56.360 the developmental psychologist,

00:36:57.900 was that he was so insistent

00:36:59.960 that children act out and dramatize ideas

00:37:03.600 before they understand them.

00:37:05.660 And Merlin Donald,

00:37:07.240 who was a psychologist at Queen's University,

00:37:09.300 wrote a couple of interesting books

00:37:10.480 along those lines as well,

00:37:12.360 looking at the importance of imitation

00:37:13.840 for the development of higher cognition in human beings.

00:37:16.640 And so the notion that we embody ideas

00:37:19.220 before we abstract them out,

00:37:20.820 and then represent them in an articulated way,

00:37:22.900 I think,

00:37:23.240 is an extraordinarily solid idea.

00:37:24.940 And I really can't see

00:37:26.000 how it could be any other way.

00:37:27.520 And if you watch children,

00:37:28.840 you see that.

00:37:29.640 Like,

00:37:29.980 think about what a child is doing

00:37:31.440 when he plays house,

00:37:33.660 or she plays house.

00:37:35.200 You know,

00:37:35.580 the child acts out the father or the mother.

00:37:38.960 But what's so interesting about it,

00:37:40.420 and you think,

00:37:40.800 well,

00:37:41.420 look,

00:37:41.880 isn't that cute?

00:37:42.500 She's imitating her mother.

00:37:43.820 It's like,

00:37:44.180 no,

00:37:44.380 she's not.

00:37:45.540 That's not what happens.

00:37:46.540 Because when your child imitates you,

00:37:49.040 it's very annoying.

00:37:50.160 Because you move your arm,

00:37:51.420 and then they move their arm,

00:37:52.600 and,

00:37:52.920 you know,

00:37:53.200 you move your head,

00:37:54.140 they copy you.

00:37:55.280 No one likes that.

00:37:56.340 It's direct,

00:37:56.900 direct imitation.

00:37:58.600 That's not what a child's doing

00:37:59.780 when the child is playing.

00:38:01.420 What the child is doing

00:38:02.400 is watching the mother

00:38:03.320 over multiple instantiations,

00:38:07.460 and then extracting out

00:38:09.400 the spirit

00:38:10.480 called mother.

00:38:12.460 And that's whatever is mother-like

00:38:13.980 across all those multiple manifestations,

00:38:16.180 and then

00:38:16.780 laying out that pattern internally,

00:38:19.380 and manifesting itself

00:38:20.860 in an abstract world.

00:38:22.140 It's so sophisticated.

00:38:23.640 It's just,

00:38:24.360 I'm,

00:38:24.860 that's what you're doing

00:38:25.580 when you're playing house,

00:38:26.480 or having a tea party,

00:38:27.460 or taking care of a doll.

00:38:28.940 It's not like you've seen your mother

00:38:30.440 take care of a doll.

00:38:32.300 You haven't seen that.

00:38:33.760 It's that you're smart enough

00:38:34.940 to pull out the abstraction,

00:38:36.720 and then embody it.

00:38:38.200 And certainly,

00:38:39.160 the child is attempting

00:38:40.300 to strive towards an ideal

00:38:41.980 at that point.

00:38:42.740 You know,

00:38:42.940 she's not lighting her doll

00:38:44.460 on fire,

00:38:45.460 you know,

00:38:45.760 it's,

00:38:46.320 well,

00:38:46.560 with,

00:38:46.800 you know,

00:38:47.000 certain exceptions,

00:38:48.100 but generally ones

00:38:50.520 that we try to not encourage,

00:38:52.460 right?

00:38:53.000 So,

00:38:54.280 so you see that capacity

00:38:55.500 in children,

00:38:56.960 and it's something

00:38:57.820 we also know

00:38:58.520 that if children

00:38:59.100 don't engage

00:39:00.680 in that sort of dramatic

00:39:01.960 and pretend play

00:39:02.900 to a tremendous degree,

00:39:04.480 that they don't,

00:39:05.440 they don't get properly

00:39:06.320 socialized.

00:39:07.160 It's really a critical element

00:39:08.680 of developing

00:39:10.200 self-understanding,

00:39:11.280 and then also developing

00:39:12.420 the capability

00:39:13.540 of being with others,

00:39:15.120 because what you do

00:39:16.040 when you're a child,

00:39:16.840 especially around the age of four,

00:39:18.160 is you jointly construct

00:39:19.940 a shared fictional world,

00:39:22.940 we'll play house together,

00:39:24.300 let's say,

00:39:24.960 and then you act out

00:39:26.460 your joint roles

00:39:28.280 within that shared fictional world,

00:39:30.120 you know,

00:39:30.340 and that's a form of,

00:39:31.600 a very advanced cognition,

00:39:33.340 it's very sophisticated,

00:39:34.600 and I see that,

00:39:35.620 and Piaget did as well,

00:39:36.820 and so did Jung,

00:39:37.540 and so did Freud,

00:39:38.400 these brilliant observers,

00:39:40.020 and also Merlin Donald,

00:39:41.640 these brilliant observers

00:39:42.920 of the manner

00:39:44.080 in which cognition

00:39:44.920 came to be,

00:39:45.900 they noted very clearly

00:39:47.100 that embodied imitation

00:39:48.800 and dramatic abstraction

00:39:50.300 constituted the ground

00:39:52.040 out of which

00:39:52.680 higher abstract cognition

00:39:54.640 emerged,

00:39:55.560 and how could it not be,

00:39:57.780 because obviously

00:39:58.860 we were mostly bodies

00:40:00.500 before we were minds,

00:40:02.460 clearly,

00:40:03.300 and so we were acting out things

00:40:04.780 way before we understood them,

00:40:06.460 just like the chimpanzees

00:40:07.840 act out the idea that,

00:40:09.980 you know,

00:40:10.220 you have to act reasonably,

00:40:11.780 sensibly,

00:40:12.320 if you're a head chimpanzee,

00:40:13.640 or you're going to get yourself

00:40:14.560 ripped apart,

00:40:16.300 and you see that in wolves,

00:40:17.560 because when wolves

00:40:18.400 have a dominance dispute,

00:40:19.660 you know,

00:40:20.000 they puff up their hair

00:40:21.480 at each other to look big,

00:40:23.000 and they growl and bark,

00:40:24.640 and, you know,

00:40:25.320 they're very menacing,

00:40:26.240 and one wolf chickens out,

00:40:27.780 rolls over,

00:40:28.400 puts up his neck,

00:40:29.220 and basically what he's saying is,

00:40:30.920 yeah, I'm pretty useless,

00:40:31.820 so you can kill me

00:40:32.580 if I want to,

00:40:33.420 if you want to,

00:40:34.540 and the other wolf says,

00:40:36.880 yeah, you know,

00:40:38.320 you're pretty useless,

00:40:39.060 and I could tear out your throat,

00:40:40.060 but tomorrow we might need

00:40:41.060 to bring down a wolf,

00:40:42.000 so, or a moose,

00:40:43.360 so I'll keep you around,

00:40:45.620 and it's not like

00:40:47.820 they think that,

00:40:49.760 because they don't know,

00:40:50.700 they don't think that,

00:40:51.640 they act it out

00:40:52.460 as a behavioral pattern,

00:40:53.560 then if you're an anthropologist,

00:40:55.300 or an ethologist,

00:40:57.260 and you went and watched the wolves,

00:40:59.140 you'd say,

00:40:59.740 it's as if they were acting

00:41:01.300 according to the following rule,

00:41:03.540 and that often confused me,

00:41:04.920 because I thought,

00:41:05.480 well, do wolves act,

00:41:06.600 do wolves act out rules,

00:41:08.840 and I thought,

00:41:09.340 no, no, no,

00:41:09.900 a rule is what we construct

00:41:12.680 when we articulate

00:41:13.940 a behavioral pattern,

00:41:15.660 right,

00:41:15.840 we observe a stable behavioral pattern,

00:41:17.700 and when we articulate it,

00:41:19.020 we can call it a rule,

00:41:19.900 but for the wolves,

00:41:21.020 it's not a rule,

00:41:21.980 it's just a stable behavioral pattern,

00:41:24.400 and so,

00:41:25.240 we acted like wolf troops,

00:41:27.080 or chimpanzee troops,

00:41:28.240 all of that,

00:41:29.440 and, well,

00:41:30.220 and for untold,

00:41:31.420 really untold tens,

00:41:32.880 and perhaps hundreds

00:41:33.620 of millions of years,

00:41:34.860 before we were able

00:41:35.740 to formulate

00:41:36.640 that pattern of behavior

00:41:38.360 in anything approximating

00:41:40.020 a story,

00:41:40.700 or an image,

00:41:41.420 and even longer,

00:41:42.560 before we could articulate it

00:41:43.800 as a set of,

00:41:44.800 of,

00:41:45.300 of,

00:41:45.360 of,

00:41:46.160 of ethical rules,

00:41:47.820 and I'm dwelling on this,

00:41:49.720 I know I've repeated

00:41:50.480 some of this before,

00:41:51.700 but it's so important,

00:41:52.740 because,

00:41:53.700 you know,

00:41:54.180 there's this tremendous push,

00:41:56.200 especially from the social,

00:41:58.020 the social constructionists,

00:42:00.460 to make the case

00:42:01.480 that ethics is arbitrary,

00:42:03.620 ethics is,

00:42:04.260 morality is relative,

00:42:05.680 there's no fundamental

00:42:06.580 biological grounding

00:42:07.700 in relationship

00:42:08.760 to human behavior,

00:42:09.820 especially in the,

00:42:10.680 in the category of ethics,

00:42:11.840 and I think that that's,

00:42:13.480 well,

00:42:13.640 first of all,

00:42:14.080 it's dangerous,

00:42:14.760 because that means

00:42:15.400 that people are anything

00:42:16.460 you want to turn them into,

00:42:18.080 and you bloody well

00:42:18.840 better be careful

00:42:19.500 of people who think that,

00:42:20.840 and second,

00:42:21.540 I just think that the evidence

00:42:22.800 that that's wrong

00:42:23.600 is so overwhelming,

00:42:25.040 that we should just

00:42:25.980 stop thinking that way,

00:42:27.280 I mean,

00:42:27.880 the,

00:42:28.180 and that's partly why

00:42:29.400 I'm also attacking this

00:42:30.720 from an evolutionary perspective,

00:42:32.380 there's lots of

00:42:33.340 converging lines of evidence,

00:42:35.320 that ethic,

00:42:36.160 ethical standards,

00:42:37.340 of,

00:42:37.460 of,

00:42:37.780 of,

00:42:38.060 at least of the most,

00:42:39.720 of the most crucial store,

00:42:41.160 sort,

00:42:41.780 not only evolved,

00:42:42.940 but also spontaneously reemerge

00:42:45.260 for example,

00:42:45.840 in the dramatic play

00:42:46.660 of children,

00:42:47.640 so we need to take

00:42:48.660 that seriously,

00:42:49.960 and so,

00:42:50.400 well,

00:42:50.580 that's partly what

00:42:51.300 we're doing here,

00:42:52.400 trying to take that seriously,

00:42:54.540 so,

00:42:55.720 okay,

00:42:56.300 so the idea there,

00:42:57.300 at least in part,

00:42:58.100 was that the father

00:42:58.760 employed the son

00:42:59.740 to generate habitable order

00:43:01.560 out of chaos,

00:43:02.280 I also think there might be

00:43:05.620 something more approximately

00:43:06.680 true about that as well,

00:43:08.020 too,

00:43:08.180 because one of the things

00:43:09.200 we do know,

00:43:10.540 here's something that's cool

00:43:11.460 about men,

00:43:12.040 men are much more criminal

00:43:15.060 than women,

00:43:16.360 and that,

00:43:17.080 by the way,

00:43:17.440 that does not look

00:43:18.300 like it's sociocultural,

00:43:20.100 partly because it peaks

00:43:21.160 when testosterone kicks in

00:43:22.960 around 14,

00:43:23.900 like it just spikes the hell up,

00:43:25.580 and then it really,

00:43:27.040 it stays pretty high

00:43:28.220 until about 27,

00:43:29.600 and so,

00:43:30.180 standard penological theory,

00:43:31.940 for those of you

00:43:32.500 who don't know this,

00:43:33.240 is that if you have

00:43:34.100 a repeat offender,

00:43:35.080 you know,

00:43:35.320 a guy,

00:43:35.560 he just won't stop

00:43:36.180 getting in trouble,

00:43:36.720 you just throw him in prison

00:43:37.780 until he's 28,

00:43:39.040 and it isn't like

00:43:39.760 you're rehabilitating him

00:43:40.940 or anything,

00:43:41.380 it's like by 28,

00:43:43.100 he's done with

00:43:43.760 his criminal career

00:43:44.800 because the crime curve

00:43:46.080 peaks at 15,

00:43:47.780 and then falls down

00:43:48.860 around 27 or so,

00:43:50.320 it burns out,

00:43:51.360 and that's often,

00:43:51.980 by the way,

00:43:52.500 that's often when men

00:43:54.800 get married

00:43:55.240 and settle down

00:43:56.200 and stabilize.

00:43:57.140 One of the things

00:43:57.740 that's cool about that

00:44:00.020 is the creativity curve

00:44:01.860 for men

00:44:02.380 is almost exactly

00:44:03.240 the same thing.

00:44:04.320 It ramps up

00:44:05.120 when testosterone kicks in

00:44:06.540 and then it starts

00:44:07.480 to flatten out

00:44:08.140 around 27,

00:44:09.100 the curves match

00:44:10.200 very,

00:44:10.560 very closely.

00:44:11.380 So that's quite cool.

00:44:13.840 It's the creativity

00:44:14.800 element of it

00:44:15.800 that I'm particularly

00:44:16.660 interested in

00:44:17.400 because creativity

00:44:18.860 is in many ways

00:44:20.380 an attribute of youth.

00:44:21.900 And that's,

00:44:22.480 look,

00:44:22.860 I mean,

00:44:23.980 if you looked at

00:44:24.760 that sentence

00:44:25.460 and you stripped it

00:44:27.100 of its religious context,

00:44:29.560 what you would say

00:44:30.480 is that,

00:44:31.140 well,

00:44:31.340 the older people

00:44:32.660 use the younger people

00:44:33.960 to generate creative ideas

00:44:36.460 and renew the world.

00:44:37.380 It's like,

00:44:37.720 yeah,

00:44:37.920 that's what happens.

00:44:38.760 And you know,

00:44:39.920 we also have no idea

00:44:41.480 how many of the things

00:44:42.520 that we discovered

00:44:43.840 or invented

00:44:44.380 as human beings

00:44:45.120 were stumbled across

00:44:46.300 by children and adolescents.

00:44:48.380 You know,

00:44:48.640 because they're,

00:44:49.320 well,

00:44:49.980 they're much more exploratory.

00:44:51.940 They're less constrained

00:44:52.960 by their already extant

00:44:54.760 knowledge structures.

00:44:56.220 And they're less conservative.

00:44:57.280 So,

00:44:58.640 yeah,

00:44:59.080 that seems just right

00:45:00.480 to me.

00:45:01.200 So,

00:45:03.440 and right

00:45:04.400 in an extraordinarily

00:45:05.120 important way.

00:45:07.760 Because it also means

00:45:08.800 that if,

00:45:09.240 like,

00:45:09.440 if you're an actual father,

00:45:11.180 one of the things

00:45:12.060 that it means

00:45:12.560 is that that's part

00:45:13.560 of what you should be

00:45:14.200 encouraging your son

00:45:15.100 to do,

00:45:15.820 right?

00:45:16.560 Which is,

00:45:17.920 because the role

00:45:18.520 of a father

00:45:19.020 is to encourage.

00:45:20.300 That is clearly the role.

00:45:21.820 And to encourage

00:45:22.460 is to say,

00:45:23.040 well,

00:45:23.180 go out there,

00:45:24.240 confront the chaos

00:45:25.100 of the unknown

00:45:26.660 and the chaos

00:45:28.160 that underlies everything

00:45:29.160 and grapple with it,

00:45:30.720 you know,

00:45:31.000 because you can do it.

00:45:32.360 You're as big

00:45:32.860 as the chaos itself

00:45:33.920 and,

00:45:34.440 you know,

00:45:34.620 do something useful

00:45:35.500 as a consequence

00:45:36.200 and make your life better

00:45:37.620 and make everyone else's

00:45:38.480 life better

00:45:38.960 and,

00:45:39.360 you know,

00:45:39.600 you can do it.

00:45:40.400 And,

00:45:40.840 man,

00:45:41.100 that's the right thing

00:45:41.760 to tell,

00:45:42.400 that's the right thing

00:45:43.320 to tell young men.

00:45:44.280 And now,

00:45:44.640 talking to young women

00:45:45.660 is more complicated

00:45:46.420 because they have more,

00:45:47.640 more,

00:45:48.660 let's say,

00:45:49.200 issues to deal with

00:45:50.160 because their lives

00:45:50.860 are more complicated

00:45:51.820 in some ways.

00:45:52.620 But that's definitely

00:45:53.620 the right thing

00:45:54.260 to be,

00:45:54.600 to be telling your,

00:45:56.020 your son.

00:45:57.320 And,

00:45:57.840 one of the things

00:45:58.360 that I've really noticed

00:45:59.180 recently since I've been lecturing,

00:46:00.940 especially in the last

00:46:01.640 seven or eight months,

00:46:02.580 most of my audience

00:46:03.300 has been young men

00:46:04.160 and,

00:46:04.680 and I've talked a lot of them

00:46:06.140 to,

00:46:07.100 I've talked a lot to them

00:46:08.860 about both truth

00:46:09.760 and responsibility.

00:46:11.200 And I think that

00:46:11.840 those,

00:46:12.480 those are the two things

00:46:13.260 that underlie this capacity.

00:46:15.200 And,

00:46:15.960 it,

00:46:16.320 there's,

00:46:16.620 there seems to me

00:46:17.400 to be a tremendous hunger

00:46:18.460 for that idea.

00:46:19.700 It's not the same idea

00:46:20.760 as rights,

00:46:21.740 you know,

00:46:22.120 it's a very different idea.

00:46:23.260 It's,

00:46:23.380 it's the counterpart

00:46:24.160 to rights.

00:46:25.360 And so it's,

00:46:26.160 you know,

00:46:26.660 life is hard,

00:46:28.700 it's chaotic,

00:46:29.540 it's difficult,

00:46:30.200 it's really,

00:46:31.040 definitely a challenge.

00:46:32.660 And so,

00:46:33.260 you can either shrink

00:46:34.080 from that

00:46:34.580 and no bloody wonder

00:46:35.600 because,

00:46:36.100 you know,

00:46:36.220 it's going to kill you.

00:46:37.080 It's,

00:46:37.240 it's,

00:46:37.420 it's not,

00:46:38.040 it's no joke,

00:46:39.160 man.

00:46:39.640 Or you can forthrightly

00:46:41.160 confront it

00:46:41.900 and try to do something

00:46:42.940 about it.

00:46:43.480 Well,

00:46:43.920 what's better?

00:46:44.940 And then you say

00:46:45.960 to the person,

00:46:46.480 look,

00:46:46.760 man,

00:46:46.980 you could do it.

00:46:47.620 Like,

00:46:47.800 that's what a human being

00:46:48.560 is like.

00:46:49.080 And if you just

00:46:49.780 stood up

00:46:50.820 and got yourself together

00:46:51.840 and you'd find out

00:46:54.000 by trying

00:46:54.900 that you can in fact

00:46:55.940 do that.

00:46:56.840 And I do think

00:46:57.800 that that's,

00:46:58.460 that's a great

00:46:59.060 core religious message

00:47:00.400 as far as I can tell

00:47:01.420 and I think

00:47:01.840 that's deeply embedded

00:47:02.860 in this sort of,

00:47:04.160 in this sort of idea.

00:47:05.780 So,

00:47:06.820 all right,

00:47:07.280 so this is what

00:47:07.760 I've been telling you.

00:47:08.980 This is something

00:47:09.620 like how

00:47:10.400 knowledge itself

00:47:11.580 is generated.

00:47:14.180 First of all,

00:47:14.880 there's the unknown

00:47:15.640 as such

00:47:16.520 and that's really

00:47:17.180 what you don't know

00:47:17.860 anything about.

00:47:19.140 And generally

00:47:19.560 when you encounter that,

00:47:21.120 you don't encounter it

00:47:21.880 with thought.

00:47:23.100 You encounter it

00:47:23.860 like this.

00:47:25.320 Right?

00:47:25.800 And that,

00:47:26.200 that's the first

00:47:27.100 representation

00:47:27.780 of the absolutely unknown.

00:47:29.820 It's something that

00:47:30.500 is beyond your comprehension

00:47:31.860 and it's terrifying

00:47:32.780 and because it's beyond

00:47:33.920 your comprehension

00:47:34.520 you cannot perceive it,

00:47:35.740 you cannot understand it

00:47:36.780 but you still have to

00:47:37.540 deal with it.

00:47:38.280 And the way you deal with it

00:47:39.240 is that you freeze.

00:47:40.800 That's what the,

00:47:41.380 that's what a basilisk does

00:47:42.960 say to the,

00:47:43.960 to the kids in Harry Potter.

00:47:45.320 Right?

00:47:45.520 They take a look at it

00:47:46.180 and they freeze.

00:47:47.240 That's the snake,

00:47:48.160 the terrible snake of chaos

00:47:49.660 that lives underneath everything.

00:47:51.180 You see that,

00:47:51.780 that thing freezes you

00:47:52.800 and that's because

00:47:53.500 you're a prey animal

00:47:54.340 but at the same time

00:47:55.380 it makes you curious.

00:47:56.840 And so that's

00:47:57.460 the first level of

00:47:59.340 contact

00:48:01.120 with the absolute unknown

00:48:02.560 is the emotional combination

00:48:04.440 of freezing

00:48:05.020 and curiosity.

00:48:06.740 And that's reflected,

00:48:07.660 I think,

00:48:07.980 in the dragon stories

00:48:08.960 the dragon

00:48:09.760 is the terrible thing

00:48:10.580 that lives underground

00:48:11.320 that hoards gold

00:48:12.400 or hoards virgins.

00:48:13.620 Very, very strange behavior

00:48:14.780 for a reptile

00:48:15.660 as we pointed out before.

00:48:17.140 But the idea is that

00:48:18.720 it's a symbolic representation

00:48:20.400 of the predatory quality

00:48:23.140 of the unknown

00:48:24.020 combined

00:48:24.700 with the capacity

00:48:26.620 of the unknown

00:48:27.340 to generate

00:48:28.180 nothing but novel information.

00:48:30.280 And it's a very,

00:48:31.560 you can see that

00:48:32.140 as very characteristic

00:48:32.980 of human beings

00:48:33.720 because we are prey animals.

00:48:35.060 but we're also

00:48:36.460 unbelievably exploratory

00:48:37.820 and we're pretty damn

00:48:38.620 good predators

00:48:39.200 and we occupy

00:48:40.140 this weird cognitive niche

00:48:41.640 and so one of the things

00:48:42.560 we've learned

00:48:43.060 is that

00:48:43.440 if we forthrightly

00:48:45.560 confront the unknown

00:48:46.600 terrifying as it is

00:48:47.840 there's a massive

00:48:48.920 prize to be gained

00:48:50.120 continually.

00:48:51.520 And so

00:48:51.840 that seems to be

00:48:52.860 true, right?

00:48:55.360 As true as anything is.

00:48:56.880 And then I would also say

00:48:57.860 that that idea

00:48:58.840 now we know

00:48:59.680 that one of the metaphors

00:49:01.520 that underlies

00:49:02.240 God's extraction

00:49:03.240 of habitable order

00:49:05.340 out of chaos

00:49:05.900 at the beginning of time

00:49:07.220 is an older idea

00:49:09.260 and a more archaic idea

00:49:10.440 that God confronted

00:49:12.180 something like

00:49:12.800 the Leviathan

00:49:13.880 and that's one of the words

00:49:15.000 for this serpent-like

00:49:16.240 chaos creature

00:49:17.100 that's often used

00:49:17.940 in the Old Testament

00:49:19.160 or the,

00:49:19.880 there's the Leviathan

00:49:21.300 and the

00:49:21.940 Behemoth.

00:49:24.160 Yeah, that's the other thing.

00:49:25.440 And so there's this idea

00:49:26.780 that I think came,

00:49:28.160 probably came from

00:49:28.880 the Mesopotamians

00:49:29.820 that God

00:49:31.040 either in the son-like aspect

00:49:32.620 or in the father-like aspect

00:49:33.940 is the thing

00:49:34.820 that confronts

00:49:35.500 this terrible beast

00:49:36.620 that represents

00:49:37.420 the chaotic unknown

00:49:38.420 and cuts it into pieces

00:49:40.020 and then sometimes

00:49:41.200 gives the body parts

00:49:42.360 to the populace

00:49:43.260 in order to feed them.

00:49:44.460 So you can see

00:49:45.000 a hunting metaphor

00:49:45.720 there as well

00:49:46.360 but it's deeper than that.

00:49:48.080 And so,

00:49:49.260 alright,

00:49:49.680 so the first thing

00:49:51.640 is there's the absolute unknown

00:49:53.140 and the unknown

00:49:53.700 is what you do not understand.

00:49:55.320 It's what's beyond

00:49:56.000 the campfire.

00:49:57.000 Maybe it's what's

00:49:57.640 beyond the tree

00:49:58.700 even more anciently,

00:50:00.480 you know,

00:50:00.800 when we lived in trees.

00:50:02.560 It's out there

00:50:03.200 where you don't know

00:50:04.380 and what's out there.

00:50:05.560 Crocodiles and snakes

00:50:06.500 and birds of prey

00:50:07.320 and cats

00:50:07.920 and all sorts of things

00:50:08.760 like predatory cats

00:50:09.780 and they will eat you.

00:50:11.320 But there's utility

00:50:12.380 in going out there

00:50:13.320 to find out what's there.

00:50:14.860 Like maybe you go

00:50:15.640 and you don't kill the snake,

00:50:16.940 you kill the damn nest

00:50:18.040 of snakes

00:50:18.640 and that makes you

00:50:19.820 pretty popular

00:50:20.560 just as you should be

00:50:21.740 and that accelerates

00:50:23.120 your reproductive potential,

00:50:25.940 let's say

00:50:26.580 and we're descended

00:50:27.540 from people

00:50:28.300 who did that

00:50:28.940 and so we have

00:50:29.600 this notion

00:50:30.500 about how the world

00:50:31.320 is structured

00:50:32.040 that's deeply embedded

00:50:33.000 in our psyche

00:50:33.700 like really,

00:50:34.820 really deeply

00:50:35.400 way,

00:50:36.040 way down,

00:50:36.660 way below

00:50:37.300 the surface cognition,

00:50:39.440 way down in the limbic system

00:50:40.700 in these ancient parts

00:50:41.980 of the brain

00:50:42.460 that are like 60 million years old

00:50:44.560 or 100 million years old

00:50:45.840 or older than that.

00:50:46.780 Ancient,

00:50:47.280 ancient brain structures.

00:50:48.960 And so the first thing

00:50:49.720 we do is we act out

00:50:51.000 our encounter

00:50:52.120 with the unknown world

00:50:53.340 and we act that out

00:50:54.300 in the same way

00:50:55.440 in a manner

00:50:55.920 that's analogous

00:50:56.900 to the manner

00:50:57.420 that's presented

00:50:58.440 as a description

00:50:59.740 of what it is

00:51:00.500 that God does

00:51:01.120 at the beginning of time

00:51:02.000 to extract habitable order

00:51:03.300 out of chaos.

00:51:04.800 And I won't tell you

00:51:06.880 about the other part

00:51:07.440 of that for now.

00:51:08.280 So you act it out first

00:51:10.060 and then the second thing

00:51:12.400 is you watch people

00:51:13.840 who act it out

00:51:14.560 and you start to

00:51:15.280 make representations

00:51:16.260 of that.

00:51:16.940 That's stories, right?

00:51:18.180 And maybe you admire them

00:51:19.420 and then after a long time

00:51:20.820 you collect a bunch

00:51:21.560 of those stories

00:51:22.260 and then you can say

00:51:23.460 what that is.

00:51:24.240 You can articulate it

00:51:25.160 as a pattern.

00:51:26.360 And so,

00:51:26.760 and this is something

00:51:27.480 Nietzsche also figured out

00:51:28.760 to begin with,

00:51:29.400 you know,

00:51:29.620 because prior to Nietzsche,

00:51:31.720 I would say,

00:51:32.500 he did so many things first.

00:51:33.980 It was quite remarkable.

00:51:35.360 You know,

00:51:35.600 there was an idea

00:51:36.220 that you first think

00:51:38.120 and then you act.

00:51:39.600 And people like to think that

00:51:40.880 but of course you know

00:51:41.780 it's complete bloody rubbish

00:51:43.380 because you're as impulsive

00:51:44.820 as you can possibly imagine.

00:51:46.840 You're always doing things

00:51:47.720 before you think

00:51:48.580 and sometimes that's

00:51:49.560 a really good idea.

00:51:50.680 So the idea

00:51:51.220 that you see things

00:51:52.180 and then think

00:51:52.840 and then act

00:51:53.480 it's like,

00:51:53.980 yeah really?

00:51:54.800 No,

00:51:55.160 I'm sorry.

00:51:56.300 I don't do that.

00:51:57.980 No one I know

00:51:59.040 does that

00:52:00.320 and they certainly

00:52:00.880 don't do that

00:52:02.000 when they're emotional.

00:52:03.300 You know,

00:52:03.480 you act first.

00:52:04.700 And one of the things

00:52:05.340 that Nietzsche said

00:52:06.060 very clearly

00:52:06.680 was that

00:52:07.220 our ideas emerged

00:52:09.220 out of the ground

00:52:10.000 of our action

00:52:10.680 over thousands

00:52:11.680 and thousands of years

00:52:12.680 and then when philosophers

00:52:13.680 were putting forward

00:52:15.200 those ideas

00:52:15.920 what they were doing

00:52:16.840 wasn't generating

00:52:18.320 creative ideas.

00:52:19.300 they were just

00:52:20.180 telling the story

00:52:21.920 of humanity.

00:52:23.520 It's already there.

00:52:24.780 It's already in us.

00:52:26.320 It's already in our

00:52:27.100 patterns of behavior

00:52:28.120 and it strikes me

00:52:29.880 that that's

00:52:30.420 well,

00:52:32.460 he was a genius

00:52:33.200 and that was one

00:52:33.940 of the genius

00:52:34.460 one of his

00:52:35.380 many,

00:52:36.920 many observations

00:52:37.660 of pure genius

00:52:38.560 and so you can think

00:52:39.640 about it,

00:52:40.100 you know,

00:52:40.340 you can think about it

00:52:40.980 like this too

00:52:41.620 is that

00:52:41.980 there's the unknown

00:52:43.880 and then you act

00:52:44.680 in the face

00:52:45.160 of the unknown

00:52:45.760 and then you

00:52:46.280 dream about the action

00:52:47.840 and that's what

00:52:48.800 you're doing

00:52:49.120 in a movie theater

00:52:49.920 and then you speak

00:52:51.760 about it

00:52:52.280 and so,

00:52:53.820 you know,

00:52:54.000 and of course

00:52:54.420 once you speak

00:52:55.120 about it

00:52:55.460 that affects

00:52:55.960 how you dream

00:52:56.560 and how you dream

00:52:57.200 affects how you act

00:52:58.180 it's not like

00:52:59.020 all of the causal

00:53:00.580 direction

00:53:01.060 is one way

00:53:02.620 because it's not

00:53:03.380 these things loop

00:53:04.440 but it's still

00:53:05.920 from the unknown

00:53:06.780 through the body

00:53:07.600 through the imagination

00:53:08.820 into articulation

00:53:10.000 that's the primary mode

00:53:11.200 of the generation

00:53:12.060 of wisdom

00:53:13.100 let's say

00:53:13.620 and you can easily

00:53:14.840 map that onto

00:53:15.540 an evolutionary

00:53:16.120 explanation

00:53:17.460 because the body

00:53:18.660 comes first,

00:53:19.400 right?

00:53:19.920 and then the imagination

00:53:21.580 which is the body

00:53:22.780 in abstraction

00:53:23.800 and only then the word

00:53:25.140 and of course

00:53:25.980 that's exactly

00:53:26.660 how things did evolve

00:53:27.660 because we could

00:53:28.660 imagine things

00:53:29.780 long before we could speak

00:53:31.680 at least that's the theory

00:53:33.040 so

00:53:33.640 and I represented

00:53:36.700 that this is a

00:53:37.780 image from my book

00:53:40.200 Maps of Meaning

00:53:40.820 and so

00:53:41.580 so the idea

00:53:42.820 is that this is

00:53:43.900 the fundamental

00:53:44.880 representation

00:53:45.500 of the unknown

00:53:46.500 as such

00:53:47.200 it's half spirit

00:53:48.460 because it partakes

00:53:49.600 of the air

00:53:50.120 like a bird

00:53:50.660 and it's half matter

00:53:52.060 because it's on the ground

00:53:53.220 like a snake

00:53:55.000 and that's what you think

00:53:58.080 is there

00:53:58.620 when you don't know

00:53:59.380 what is there

00:53:59.920 that's how your body

00:54:01.000 reacts to what's there

00:54:02.280 when you don't know

00:54:02.920 what is there

00:54:03.440 you know that too

00:54:04.540 because if you're

00:54:05.480 alone at night

00:54:06.500 you know

00:54:07.540 and maybe you're

00:54:08.200 a little rattled up

00:54:08.880 for one reason

00:54:09.400 or another

00:54:09.620 maybe you watched

00:54:10.140 a horror movie

00:54:10.840 and you know

00:54:11.440 there's some weird

00:54:12.060 noise in the other

00:54:13.000 room

00:54:13.420 it's dark

00:54:14.340 and you could just

00:54:15.040 try this once

00:54:15.960 it's like

00:54:16.320 so you're on edge

00:54:17.440 you think

00:54:18.120 you want to turn

00:54:19.500 the light on

00:54:19.960 and go in the room

00:54:20.540 and see

00:54:20.900 don't do that

00:54:21.720 just open the door

00:54:22.460 a little bit

00:54:22.780 and sneak your hand in

00:54:23.820 and just watch

00:54:24.960 what your imagination

00:54:26.080 fills that room with

00:54:27.900 right

00:54:28.180 and then

00:54:28.760 then you remember

00:54:29.720 what it's like

00:54:30.260 to be three years old

00:54:31.240 in bed

00:54:31.640 and afraid of the dark

00:54:32.680 right

00:54:33.480 and I read a good book

00:54:34.420 on dragons lately

00:54:35.420 recently

00:54:36.500 that had a very

00:54:38.400 interesting hypothesis

00:54:39.320 about them

00:54:39.900 I thought

00:54:40.280 one of the things

00:54:41.220 the guy did

00:54:41.760 was track

00:54:42.860 I can't remember

00:54:43.580 his name unfortunately

00:54:44.540 track how common

00:54:46.380 the image of the dragon

00:54:47.320 was worldwide

00:54:48.020 it's unbelievably

00:54:49.000 widespread

00:54:49.840 it's crazily widespread

00:54:51.040 and he thought

00:54:52.180 that this was actually

00:54:53.760 the category

00:54:54.360 of primate

00:54:56.480 predator

00:54:57.420 and the predator

00:54:59.380 was

00:54:59.760 so predator

00:55:00.640 is a weird category

00:55:01.600 right

00:55:01.880 because like

00:55:02.300 there's crocodiles

00:55:03.500 in it

00:55:03.760 and there's lions

00:55:04.340 and they don't have

00:55:05.140 much in common

00:55:05.720 except they eat you

00:55:06.580 so it's a functional

00:55:07.560 category

00:55:08.180 and so this is the

00:55:09.420 this is the

00:55:10.340 imagistic representation

00:55:11.480 of the functional

00:55:12.360 category of predator

00:55:13.420 and his predator

00:55:14.520 theory was

00:55:15.220 well if you're a monkey

00:55:16.300 then a bird

00:55:16.920 would pick you off

00:55:17.720 like an eagle

00:55:18.620 and so that's this

00:55:20.020 right

00:55:21.760 and then

00:55:23.260 if it wasn't an eagle

00:55:24.760 it was a cat

00:55:25.420 because they climb

00:55:26.000 trees and give you

00:55:27.020 a good chomping

00:55:27.680 and then if it wasn't

00:55:28.680 a cat

00:55:29.100 then you go down

00:55:30.120 to the ground

00:55:30.480 and a snake

00:55:31.060 would get you

00:55:31.520 or maybe a snake

00:55:32.200 would climb up the tree

00:55:32.960 because snakes

00:55:33.400 like to do that

00:55:33.980 and get you

00:55:34.640 and so that's a

00:55:35.600 that's a

00:55:36.520 tree cat

00:55:37.740 snake

00:55:38.820 basically

00:55:39.860 tree cat

00:55:41.320 snake bird

00:55:41.980 and that's the thing

00:55:42.740 you really

00:55:43.140 that's the thing

00:55:44.500 you really want to avoid

00:55:45.480 you don't want to come

00:55:46.180 across one of those

00:55:47.020 and so

00:55:47.860 and then you know

00:55:48.420 the other thing it does

00:55:49.220 is breathe fire

00:55:49.980 which is quite interesting

00:55:50.980 because obviously

00:55:51.840 fire was both

00:55:53.280 greatest friend

00:55:54.280 and greatest enemy

00:55:55.100 of humanity

00:55:55.720 and we've mastered fire

00:55:57.040 for a long time

00:55:57.780 it might be as long

00:55:58.500 as two or three million years

00:55:59.680 that's what

00:56:01.140 richard rangham

00:56:02.520 i think it's rangham

00:56:03.540 he wrote a book

00:56:04.400 recently on

00:56:05.520 i think it was rangham

00:56:07.120 who wrote a book on

00:56:08.640 when human beings

00:56:09.320 learned to cook

00:56:09.980 that was about

00:56:10.880 two million years ago

00:56:11.820 and cooking

00:56:12.620 increased the

00:56:13.680 increased the

00:56:15.620 availability of calories

00:56:17.000 you know how chimpanzees

00:56:18.300 are sort of shaped

00:56:18.880 like a big

00:56:19.340 like they're ugly

00:56:20.740 they're shaped like

00:56:21.340 a big bowling ball

00:56:22.180 you know

00:56:22.500 they're really

00:56:23.020 they look really fat

00:56:24.200 and it's

00:56:24.600 and they're short

00:56:25.440 and they're wide

00:56:26.080 and that's because

00:56:26.640 they have intestinal tracts

00:56:28.620 that are like

00:56:29.060 you know

00:56:29.400 300 miles long

00:56:30.540 and the reason for that

00:56:31.340 is because

00:56:31.740 they have to digest leaves

00:56:33.460 and so

00:56:33.800 you go out in the forest

00:56:34.820 and like

00:56:35.260 sit there and eat leaves

00:56:36.260 for a whole day

00:56:36.800 and see how that works out

00:56:37.720 for you

00:56:38.100 you know

00:56:38.360 they have

00:56:38.920 they have no calories

00:56:40.000 in them

00:56:40.480 so chimps spend about

00:56:41.880 i think it was

00:56:42.700 i think it's eight hours

00:56:45.180 a day chewing

00:56:46.060 and it's because

00:56:48.000 what they eat

00:56:48.620 has no nutritional value

00:56:49.780 and then they have to have

00:56:50.540 this tremendous gut

00:56:51.620 in order to extract

00:56:52.540 anything at all

00:56:53.380 out of it

00:56:53.860 and human beings

00:56:54.700 at some point

00:56:55.260 just got out to hell

00:56:56.000 with that

00:56:56.360 we'll cook something

00:56:57.080 and then

00:56:57.400 we traded our gut

00:56:58.500 for brain

00:56:59.120 which you know

00:57:00.140 more or less has worked

00:57:01.240 and i think it's made us

00:57:02.200 a lot more attractive

00:57:03.000 as well

00:57:03.520 so okay

00:57:05.680 well so the idea here

00:57:06.760 was that

00:57:07.260 well that's the basic

00:57:08.920 archetype of the unknown

00:57:10.140 as such

00:57:11.080 and then

00:57:12.000 i like the saint george

00:57:13.220 version of this

00:57:13.900 it's so cool

00:57:14.500 because

00:57:14.860 saint george

00:57:16.240 lives in a

00:57:16.900 like a castle

00:57:17.640 and the castle

00:57:18.180 is partly falling down

00:57:19.380 and it's partly

00:57:20.140 because there's a dragon

00:57:20.960 that's come up to

00:57:21.760 like it's an eternal dragon

00:57:23.140 it's come back

00:57:23.700 to give everyone

00:57:24.260 a rough time

00:57:24.920 which always happens

00:57:26.200 because

00:57:26.640 there isn't

00:57:27.440 the eternal dragon

00:57:28.340 is always giving

00:57:29.240 our fallen down

00:57:30.800 castles a rough time

00:57:32.160 always

00:57:32.980 and so then

00:57:34.100 saint george is the hero

00:57:35.140 who goes out

00:57:35.660 to confront the dragon

00:57:36.660 and he frees the virgin

00:57:38.280 from its grasp

00:57:39.360 and i would say

00:57:40.160 that's a pretty

00:57:40.960 straightforward story

00:57:42.060 about the sexual

00:57:42.900 attractiveness

00:57:43.700 of the masculine spirit

00:57:45.600 that's willing to

00:57:46.360 forthrightly encounter

00:57:47.320 the unknown

00:57:47.900 it looks just straight

00:57:49.680 looks like a straight

00:57:50.880 biological representation

00:57:52.200 to me

00:57:52.660 and it's a really

00:57:53.880 really old story

00:57:55.020 right

00:57:55.720 it's the oldest

00:57:56.360 written story

00:57:57.060 we have

00:57:57.540 and that's basically

00:57:58.280 the mesopotamian

00:57:59.160 creation myth

00:57:59.880 the enumelish

00:58:00.600 which basically

00:58:01.720 lays out

00:58:02.460 precisely that story

00:58:03.580 and so

00:58:04.480 and it's replayed

00:58:06.060 i mean i bet you

00:58:06.920 the movie goers

00:58:08.900 among you

00:58:09.380 especially the ones

00:58:10.140 that are more

00:58:10.520 attracted to the

00:58:11.260 superhero

00:58:11.660 you know

00:58:12.100 the really flashy

00:58:12.900 sort of superhero

00:58:13.980 type movies

00:58:14.620 you've probably seen

00:58:15.580 the saint george story

00:58:16.540 like 150 times

00:58:18.080 in the last 10 years

00:58:19.100 you never get tired

00:58:20.120 of it

00:58:20.480 because it's the

00:58:21.240 central story

00:58:21.840 of mankind

00:58:22.320 so you've got

00:58:23.740 the unknown

00:58:24.240 as such

00:58:25.020 and that is

00:58:27.020 what you react

00:58:27.720 to with your body

00:58:28.780 in the existential

00:58:30.100 terror

00:58:30.800 and extraordinary

00:58:31.800 curiosity

00:58:32.700 are gripping you

00:58:33.880 and then

00:58:34.680 it's like the

00:58:36.000 unknown unknowns

00:58:36.960 that uh

00:58:37.820 who's the politician

00:58:39.440 under bush

00:58:40.300 rumsfeld

00:58:41.900 yeah i think the reason

00:58:42.820 that that phrase

00:58:43.460 caught on so well

00:58:44.400 is because he nailed

00:58:45.180 an archetype

00:58:45.940 there's unknown

00:58:46.840 unknowns

00:58:47.380 and there's known

00:58:48.140 unknowns

00:58:48.560 and that's the

00:58:49.500 unknown unknown

00:58:50.560 and you have to be

00:58:51.720 able to react

00:58:52.300 to an unknown

00:58:52.920 unknown

00:58:53.240 because they can

00:58:54.080 get you

00:58:54.620 and you can't

00:58:55.820 just plead ignorance

00:58:56.560 because then you're

00:58:57.200 dead

00:58:57.460 that doesn't work

00:58:58.460 like human beings

00:58:59.500 are the sort of

00:59:00.100 creature who has to

00:59:01.060 know what to do

00:59:01.780 when they don't

00:59:02.280 know what to do

00:59:02.880 and that's very

00:59:04.220 paradoxical

00:59:04.920 and what we do

00:59:05.440 is we prepare

00:59:06.000 to do everything

00:59:06.640 that's right

00:59:07.560 we're on guard

00:59:08.200 we prepare to do

00:59:08.920 everything

00:59:09.240 very very stressful

00:59:10.420 and but also

00:59:11.360 very engaging

00:59:12.100 and very very much

00:59:13.460 something that

00:59:13.940 heightens consciousness

00:59:14.840 and maybe those

00:59:15.880 circuits are

00:59:16.360 permanently turned on

00:59:17.660 in human beings

00:59:18.260 because we also know

00:59:19.140 that we're going to die

00:59:20.000 and no other animal

00:59:21.020 knows that

00:59:21.600 and so sometimes

00:59:22.500 I think that our

00:59:23.320 that our stress circuits

00:59:24.960 are just on all the time

00:59:26.420 and that's part of what

00:59:27.500 accounts for our

00:59:28.120 heightened consciousness

00:59:28.820 so you have your

00:59:30.500 unknown unknowns

00:59:31.260 and then you have

00:59:31.960 your relatively

00:59:33.120 you have the unknowns

00:59:34.660 that you actually

00:59:35.480 encounter in the world

00:59:36.660 like the mystery

00:59:37.500 of your

00:59:38.080 of your

00:59:38.960 romantic partner

00:59:41.020 when you have a fight

00:59:41.800 with them

00:59:42.200 it's like

00:59:42.580 well we're having a fight

00:59:43.320 so who the hell are you

00:59:44.500 I mean you're not

00:59:45.580 the absolute unknown

00:59:46.640 because I know

00:59:47.220 something about you

00:59:47.960 but you're the unknown

00:59:48.940 as it's manifesting

00:59:50.040 itself to me

00:59:50.800 right now

00:59:51.560 right

00:59:52.280 and then there's

00:59:53.800 the known

00:59:55.200 that we inhabit

00:59:56.080 and then there's

00:59:56.680 the knower

00:59:57.180 and the known

00:59:58.100 is given symbolic

00:59:59.560 representation

01:00:00.140 as far as I've been

01:00:01.080 able to tell

01:00:01.660 in patriarchal form

01:00:03.240 in the form of

01:00:04.180 male deities

01:00:05.120 and the unknown

01:00:06.320 as you encountered

01:00:07.400 is given feminine form

01:00:08.560 so we won't get

01:00:10.460 into that too much

01:00:11.240 but if you're interested

01:00:12.460 in that

01:00:12.780 you could look at

01:00:13.480 my maps of meanings

01:00:14.200 lectures or maybe

01:00:14.980 take a look at the book

01:00:15.820 but I think it's a good

01:00:17.520 I think it's a good

01:00:18.480 schema

01:00:19.360 for religious archetypes

01:00:21.440 I've worked on it

01:00:22.320 a long time

01:00:22.840 it seems to fit

01:00:23.580 the Jungian criteria

01:00:24.480 quite nicely

01:00:25.220 it maps nicely

01:00:26.260 onto Joseph Campbell's

01:00:27.380 ideas

01:00:27.660 he got almost all

01:00:28.680 his ideas from Jung

01:00:29.740 however

01:00:30.440 and it also makes sense

01:00:33.720 from a biological

01:00:34.620 and an evolutionary

01:00:35.460 perspective

01:00:36.060 as far as I can tell

01:00:37.000 that's a lot of

01:00:37.960 cross-validation

01:00:39.000 at least in my estimation

01:00:40.740 so okay

01:00:42.200 so back to the

01:00:42.860 hierarchy of dominance

01:00:43.860 well let's take a look

01:00:45.140 at it a little bit

01:00:45.760 so I'm quite enamored

01:00:47.760 of lobsters

01:00:48.380 as some of you

01:00:48.960 might know

01:00:49.380 because I found out

01:00:52.380 this just blew me away

01:00:53.560 when I found it out

01:00:54.280 I mean I've done

01:00:55.200 a lot of work

01:00:55.840 in neurochemistry

01:00:57.000 functional neurochemistry

01:00:58.880 because I used to study

01:00:59.700 alcoholism and drug abuse

01:01:01.320 and alcoholism

01:01:02.680 to study alcohol

01:01:04.000 you have to know

01:01:04.500 a lot about the brain

01:01:05.240 because alcohol

01:01:05.880 goes everywhere

01:01:06.640 in the brain

01:01:07.220 it affects every

01:01:08.020 neurochemical system

01:01:09.020 and so if you're

01:01:09.620 going to study alcohol

01:01:10.420 you kind of have to study

01:01:11.700 neurochemistry in general

01:01:13.640 and so I did that

01:01:14.700 for quite a long time

01:01:15.520 I really got enamored

01:01:16.500 of a book

01:01:16.980 called

01:01:17.980 The Neuropsychology

01:01:18.820 of Anxiety

01:01:19.360 by Jeffrey Gray

01:01:20.080 which is an absolute

01:01:20.860 work of genius

01:01:21.640 although extraordinarily

01:01:22.560 I don't know how many

01:01:24.380 references that book has

01:01:25.520 it's like

01:01:25.920 must be a thousand

01:01:27.880 and Gray actually

01:01:29.340 read them

01:01:30.020 and worse

01:01:30.960 he understood them

01:01:32.020 and then he

01:01:33.220 integrated them

01:01:34.340 into this book

01:01:35.220 and so to read it

01:01:36.000 you have to

01:01:36.480 really master

01:01:37.340 functional neurochemistry

01:01:38.420 and animal behaviorism

01:01:40.160 and motivation

01:01:41.760 and emotion

01:01:42.520 and neuroanatomy

01:01:43.540 like it's a killer book

01:01:44.620 but man it's really rich

01:01:45.820 and it's taken psychologists

01:01:47.380 about 40 years

01:01:48.440 to really unpack that book

01:01:49.820 but one of the things

01:01:51.580 I learned about that

01:01:52.500 was just exactly

01:01:53.300 how much continuity

01:01:54.180 there was

01:01:54.760 in the neurochemistry

01:01:55.660 of human beings

01:01:56.500 and the neurochemistry

01:01:57.200 of animals

01:01:57.740 it's absolutely staggering

01:01:59.280 it's the sort of thing

01:02:00.680 that makes

01:02:01.540 the fact of evolution

01:02:02.800 something like

01:02:03.700 self-evident

01:02:04.500 I do think

01:02:05.620 it's self-evident

01:02:06.380 for other reasons

01:02:07.460 that I'll tell you

01:02:08.380 about later

01:02:08.780 I think evolution

01:02:09.720 or I think natural selection

01:02:11.260 random mutation

01:02:12.880 and natural selection

01:02:13.780 is the only way

01:02:15.180 you can solve

01:02:16.000 the problem

01:02:16.740 of how to deal

01:02:17.680 with an environment

01:02:18.420 that's complex

01:02:19.160 beyond your ability

01:02:20.000 to comprehend

01:02:20.960 I think what you do

01:02:22.340 is you generate

01:02:22.940 endless variants

01:02:23.680 because god only knows

01:02:24.780 what the hell

01:02:25.180 is going to happen next

01:02:26.080 almost all of them die

01:02:28.280 because they're failures

01:02:29.320 and a couple propagate

01:02:30.580 and you know

01:02:31.400 the environment

01:02:32.200 keeps moving around

01:02:33.120 like a giant snake

01:02:34.280 you never know

01:02:34.800 what it's going to do next

01:02:35.760 and so the best

01:02:36.720 you can do is say

01:02:37.420 well

01:02:37.700 here's 30 things

01:02:38.960 that might work

01:02:39.740 and you know

01:02:40.380 28 of them

01:02:41.080 are going to perish

01:02:41.840 or if you're an insect

01:02:43.460 it's like the ratio

01:02:44.540 is way way higher

01:02:45.440 than that

01:02:45.940 so anyways

01:02:47.220 back to the lobsters

01:02:48.420 and all of these

01:02:50.020 so these creatures

01:02:51.420 engage in

01:02:52.180 dominance disputes

01:02:53.620 and I think

01:02:55.140 dominance is the right

01:02:56.000 way to think about it

01:02:56.760 because lobsters

01:02:57.460 aren't very empathic

01:02:58.420 and they're not very social

01:02:59.320 and so it really is

01:03:00.180 the toughest lobster

01:03:01.220 that wins

01:03:01.900 you know

01:03:02.600 and what's so cool

01:03:03.500 about the lobster

01:03:04.260 is that

01:03:04.780 when a lobster wins

01:03:06.720 he flexes

01:03:07.960 and gets bigger

01:03:08.880 so he looks bigger

01:03:09.700 because he's a winner

01:03:11.100 it's like he's advertising that

01:03:12.580 and the biological

01:03:13.920 the neurochemical system

01:03:15.280 that makes him flex

01:03:16.420 is serotonergic

01:03:17.480 and you think

01:03:18.280 well who cares

01:03:18.880 what the hell does that mean

01:03:19.840 well tell you what it means

01:03:21.040 it's the same chemical

01:03:22.020 that's affected by antidepressants

01:03:23.640 in human beings

01:03:24.680 and so like

01:03:25.220 if you're depressed

01:03:26.100 you're a defeated lobster

01:03:27.400 like you're

01:03:28.000 they're like this

01:03:28.900 I'm small

01:03:29.520 I'm not

01:03:29.960 you know

01:03:30.320 things are dangerous

01:03:31.320 I don't want to fight

01:03:32.440 you give somebody

01:03:33.280 an antidepressant

01:03:34.000 it's like up

01:03:34.540 they stretch

01:03:35.180 and then they're ready

01:03:36.240 to like take on

01:03:37.420 the world again

01:03:38.020 well if you give

01:03:39.060 lobsters who just

01:03:40.060 got defeated in a fight

01:03:41.080 serotonin

01:03:41.780 then they stretch out

01:03:43.260 and they'll fight again

01:03:44.120 and that's

01:03:44.980 like we separated

01:03:45.880 from those creatures

01:03:46.720 on the evolutionary

01:03:47.900 time scale

01:03:48.540 somewhere between

01:03:49.160 350 and 600 million

01:03:50.780 years ago

01:03:51.260 and the damn

01:03:51.940 neurochemistry

01:03:52.540 is the same

01:03:53.480 and so that's

01:03:54.540 another indication

01:03:55.320 of just how

01:03:56.680 important

01:03:57.540 hierarchies of

01:03:58.620 authority are

01:03:59.440 I mean they've

01:04:00.520 been conserved

01:04:01.360 since the time

01:04:02.260 of lobsters

01:04:03.040 right

01:04:03.260 there weren't

01:04:03.860 trees around

01:04:04.700 when lobsters

01:04:05.380 first manifested

01:04:07.220 themselves on the

01:04:08.160 planet

01:04:08.480 and so what that

01:04:09.580 means is these

01:04:10.200 hierarchies that I've

01:04:11.160 been talking about

01:04:11.880 those things are

01:04:12.760 older than trees

01:04:14.020 and so one of

01:04:15.880 the truisms for

01:04:17.140 what constitutes

01:04:18.620 real from a

01:04:19.800 Darwinian perspective

01:04:21.060 is that which has

01:04:22.820 been around the

01:04:23.720 longest period of

01:04:24.740 time right

01:04:25.420 because it's had

01:04:25.960 the longest period

01:04:26.580 of time to exert

01:04:27.740 selection pressure

01:04:28.660 well we know

01:04:30.100 we've all and

01:04:31.160 lived in trees

01:04:31.880 something on the

01:04:32.840 order of 60

01:04:33.520 million years ago

01:04:34.260 we're talking

01:04:34.980 10 times as far

01:04:36.160 back as that

01:04:37.280 for the hierarchy

01:04:38.480 and so the idea

01:04:39.800 that human beings

01:04:40.680 that the hierarchy

01:04:41.800 is something that

01:04:42.560 has exerted

01:04:43.300 selection pressure

01:04:44.140 on human beings

01:04:44.980 is I don't think

01:04:45.820 that's a disputable

01:04:46.760 that's not a

01:04:47.880 disputable issue

01:04:49.440 how it's done it

01:04:50.920 and exactly what

01:04:51.620 that means we can

01:04:52.420 argue about but

01:04:53.140 like that sort of

01:04:54.100 biological continuity

01:04:55.200 is just absolutely

01:04:56.480 unbelievable

01:04:57.280 it was funny

01:04:59.100 because I revealed

01:04:59.840 this finding

01:05:01.020 you know I didn't

01:05:02.160 discover this

01:05:02.880 I read about it

01:05:03.580 but I talked to

01:05:04.360 my graduate students

01:05:05.200 about it I used

01:05:05.720 to take them out

01:05:06.200 for breakfast

01:05:06.760 you know and

01:05:07.220 they were a very

01:05:07.840 contentious snappy

01:05:09.220 bunch and they

01:05:11.320 were always trying

01:05:11.740 to one up each

01:05:12.380 other and they

01:05:12.720 were quite witty

01:05:13.240 and for like six

01:05:14.520 months until it

01:05:15.220 got very annoying

01:05:16.000 every time one of

01:05:17.060 them one up the

01:05:17.620 other they'd

01:05:18.040 stretch themselves

01:05:18.620 out and like

01:05:19.100 snap their hands

01:05:20.040 like so that

01:05:22.800 was that was

01:05:23.260 very funny it

01:05:24.060 was it was

01:05:24.580 really very funny

01:05:25.320 so you see

01:05:26.140 this in lobsters

01:05:26.980 and so that's

01:05:27.560 pretty amazing

01:05:28.180 so yeah

01:05:30.160 and one of the

01:05:30.840 other thing that's

01:05:31.420 really cool about

01:05:32.120 lobsters is that

01:05:33.460 let's say you've

01:05:34.640 been like top

01:05:35.200 lobster for a long

01:05:36.060 time but you're

01:05:36.600 getting kind of

01:05:37.040 old and some

01:05:37.920 young lobster

01:05:39.180 just you know

01:05:40.100 wails the hell

01:05:40.880 out of you

01:05:41.320 and and so

01:05:42.180 you're all

01:05:42.580 depressed but

01:05:43.240 thing is your

01:05:43.940 brain is dominant

01:05:44.880 but you don't

01:05:46.180 have much of a

01:05:46.740 brain because

01:05:47.180 you're a lobster

01:05:47.760 and so now

01:05:48.580 what are you

01:05:48.900 going to do

01:05:49.260 because you just

01:05:49.740 lost and the

01:05:50.820 answer is well

01:05:51.740 your brain will

01:05:52.300 dissolve and then

01:05:53.700 you'll grow a

01:05:54.240 subordinate brain

01:05:55.160 yeah and so

01:05:56.660 that's worth

01:05:57.360 thinking about

01:05:57.820 too right here

01:05:58.500 for a couple

01:05:58.940 of reasons

01:05:59.340 first of all

01:05:59.920 if any of you

01:06:00.720 have ever been

01:06:01.280 seriously defeated

01:06:02.780 in life you

01:06:04.520 know what that's

01:06:05.180 like it's like

01:06:06.440 it's a death

01:06:07.160 a descent

01:06:07.820 a dissolution

01:06:09.000 and if you're

01:06:09.880 lucky a regrowth

01:06:11.340 and and maybe

01:06:12.160 not as the same

01:06:13.020 person that's what

01:06:13.720 happens to people

01:06:14.320 with post-traumatic

01:06:15.040 stress disorder

01:06:15.740 right their brains

01:06:16.400 undergo permanent

01:06:17.580 neurological

01:06:18.100 transformation and

01:06:19.760 and they then

01:06:20.280 inhabit a world

01:06:21.260 that's much more

01:06:21.900 dangerous than the

01:06:22.680 world that they

01:06:23.100 inhabited to begin

01:06:23.880 with but we

01:06:24.640 also know too

01:06:25.320 if you have

01:06:25.740 post-traumatic stress

01:06:26.560 disorder or depression

01:06:27.560 that your hippocampus

01:06:28.900 shrinks right it

01:06:30.380 dies and shrinks

01:06:31.380 and you can

01:06:32.220 sometimes get it

01:06:32.940 to grow back

01:06:33.580 your hippocampus

01:06:34.440 shrinks and your

01:06:34.980 amygdala grows

01:06:35.900 and the amygdala

01:06:36.940 increases emotional

01:06:38.120 sensitivity and the

01:06:39.220 hippocampus inhibits

01:06:40.220 emotional sensitivity

01:06:41.200 and so if you've been

01:06:42.220 badly defeated the

01:06:43.100 hippocampus shrinks

01:06:43.920 and the amygdala

01:06:44.520 grows now if you

01:06:45.920 recover the

01:06:47.560 hippocampus will

01:06:48.280 regrow and

01:06:49.480 antidepressants

01:06:50.260 actually seem to

01:06:50.940 help that but the

01:06:51.620 damn amygdala

01:06:52.200 never shrinks again

01:06:53.180 and so well so

01:06:55.500 that's another

01:06:56.000 lesson from the

01:06:56.960 lobster it's quite a

01:06:57.860 terrifying one but

01:06:58.820 but it's one like

01:07:00.200 it's so interesting

01:07:01.040 that you can relate

01:07:01.960 to that right

01:07:02.700 it's like I get

01:07:03.400 what that poor

01:07:03.920 crustacean's going

01:07:04.740 through you know

01:07:05.740 so okay here's the

01:07:10.600 rats and this is

01:07:11.340 from yak

01:07:11.740 panksep's work

01:07:12.600 rat he was the

01:07:13.360 first guy who

01:07:13.820 figured out that

01:07:14.320 rats giggle

01:07:14.900 and you might think

01:07:17.680 well what kind of

01:07:18.220 stupid thing is that

01:07:18.900 to study it's like

01:07:19.640 fifty thousand dollar

01:07:20.540 research grant for

01:07:21.420 giggling rats you

01:07:22.340 know so but he

01:07:25.380 discovered the play

01:07:26.200 circuitry in mammals

01:07:27.240 that's a big deal

01:07:28.940 right it's like

01:07:29.480 discovering a whole

01:07:30.100 new continent

01:07:30.700 there's a play

01:07:31.560 circuit in mammals

01:07:32.800 it's built right in

01:07:33.940 so it's not socially

01:07:34.900 constructed there's a

01:07:36.500 there's a biological

01:07:37.220 platform for that

01:07:38.440 and so what what

01:07:39.540 what panksep would do

01:07:40.740 with rats he found

01:07:42.060 out if rats if you

01:07:43.900 take a rat pup away

01:07:44.760 from its mother it

01:07:45.540 dies even if you feed

01:07:46.960 it even if you keep

01:07:47.680 it warm it dies

01:07:48.580 now you can stop it

01:07:49.880 from dying by taking

01:07:50.800 a pencil with an

01:07:51.960 eraser on the end

01:07:52.700 and massaging it

01:07:54.040 right because rats

01:07:55.680 won't live without

01:07:56.480 love and the same

01:07:57.880 thing happens to human

01:07:58.800 babies and we saw

01:07:59.760 that in romania when

01:08:00.720 there was that

01:08:01.120 catastrophe after

01:08:02.400 Ceausescu in the

01:08:03.300 orphanages where the

01:08:04.300 orphanages were full

01:08:05.100 of unwanted babies

01:08:05.940 because Ceausescu

01:08:06.880 insisted that every

01:08:07.740 romanian woman was

01:08:08.600 constantly pregnant

01:08:09.480 so the orphanages

01:08:10.580 stacked up with

01:08:11.340 unwanted babies and

01:08:12.280 lots of them didn't

01:08:12.880 even have names and

01:08:14.120 they were warehoused

01:08:14.980 warmth shelter food

01:08:17.820 devastating lots of

01:08:20.020 them died most of

01:08:20.800 them died before the

01:08:21.760 first year and the

01:08:22.820 ones that didn't die

01:08:23.720 were permanently

01:08:24.640 dysfunctional because

01:08:26.700 you have to be touched

01:08:28.420 if you're a human being

01:08:29.320 it's not an option you

01:08:30.500 have to be played with

01:08:31.580 it's not an option

01:08:33.000 it's part of neurodevelopmental

01:08:35.220 necessity and you have

01:08:36.860 to also play fair so

01:08:38.920 because otherwise you

01:08:39.760 produce a very disjointed

01:08:41.660 child who isn't able to

01:08:42.960 engage in the niceties of

01:08:44.220 social interaction which

01:08:45.280 is continual play in some

01:08:46.940 sense and reciprocity so

01:08:48.440 what Panksepp did with

01:08:49.760 his rats he noticed that

01:08:51.480 male rats juveniles really

01:08:53.220 like to wrestle and they

01:08:54.660 wrestle just like human

01:08:56.480 beings wrestle they pin each

01:08:58.060 other for crying out loud

01:08:59.020 it's like that that rat has

01:09:00.260 just lost he's down for a

01:09:01.560 ten count right and so

01:09:03.180 so what you do is you

01:09:04.600 take juvenile rats and you

01:09:05.840 can find out that they

01:09:06.660 want to play because you

01:09:09.820 can attach a spring to

01:09:10.940 them and then they'll try

01:09:12.680 to run and you can

01:09:13.460 measure how hard they're

01:09:14.380 running by how hard

01:09:15.720 they're pulling on the

01:09:16.300 spring and then you can

01:09:17.080 estimate how motivated

01:09:18.100 they are and so you can

01:09:19.280 find out that a nice

01:09:20.420 well-fed rat who doesn't

01:09:22.900 have anything on his mind

01:09:23.900 will still work hard to

01:09:25.120 play if it to enter an

01:09:27.940 arena where he's been

01:09:28.800 allowed to play before

01:09:29.820 he'll work for that so

01:09:30.920 then you think well the

01:09:31.660 rat's motivated so the

01:09:33.300 two rats go out there and

01:09:34.340 they play and and so

01:09:36.300 they're they're playing

01:09:37.300 like dogs play and

01:09:38.260 everyone knows what that

01:09:39.080 looks like if you're you

01:09:40.520 know if you have any sense

01:09:41.360 about dogs they kind of go

01:09:43.160 like this and kids do that

01:09:44.660 and maybe you do that with

01:09:45.960 your wife if you're going

01:09:46.720 to play with her a little

01:09:47.460 bit my poor my poor wife

01:09:50.280 man when she she was a she

01:09:54.720 was a young she had older

01:09:57.540 siblings and so she wasn't

01:09:58.680 played with as much when

01:09:59.600 she was little as she

01:10:00.320 might have been and I

01:10:02.340 used to like you know

01:10:03.580 what you take a pillow

01:10:04.420 away and you go like this

01:10:05.480 three times right that

01:10:06.580 means look out a pillow is

01:10:07.900 coming your way so I go

01:10:09.360 one two three wow and she

01:10:12.320 looked she was completely

01:10:13.520 dismayed at me she's like

01:10:14.760 what do you do that for and

01:10:16.020 I thought well I eventually

01:10:19.260 taught her that rule the

01:10:21.080 other thing I used to do

01:10:22.160 going online without

01:10:28.280 express VPN is like not

01:10:29.840 paying attention to the

01:10:30.720 safety demonstration on a

01:10:31.840 flight most of the time

01:10:33.260 you'll probably be fine but

01:10:34.860 what if one day that weird

01:10:36.420 yellow mask drops down from

01:10:37.760 overhead and you have no

01:10:39.240 idea what to do in our

01:10:40.640 hyper connected world your

01:10:41.960 digital privacy isn't just

01:10:43.320 a luxury it's a fundamental

01:10:44.820 right every time you connect

01:10:46.240 to an unsecured network in a

01:10:47.760 cafe hotel or airport you're

01:10:49.940 essentially broadcasting your

01:10:51.180 personal information to

01:10:52.300 anyone with a technical

01:10:53.420 know-how to intercept it and

01:10:54.880 let's be clear it doesn't

01:10:56.200 take a genius hacker to do

01:10:57.360 this with some off-the-shelf

01:10:58.960 hardware even a tech savvy

01:11:00.420 teenager could potentially

01:11:01.680 access your passwords bank

01:11:03.340 logins and credit card

01:11:04.620 details now you might think

01:11:06.460 what's the big deal who want

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01:13:44.180 other thing I used to do you know is

01:13:45.680 sometimes she'd come at me like this

01:13:47.960 when we were playing around and I'd

01:13:49.640 grab her wrists and I'd knock her her

01:13:51.800 her hands turn her knuckles together

01:13:54.660 and she used to just get completely

01:13:56.100 annoyed about that and I thought right

01:13:59.980 that's what you do you just open your

01:14:02.200 hands well she didn't know that either

01:14:03.740 so she hadn't been played with enough

01:14:05.520 when she was a little rat and so

01:14:07.220 anyways anyways so you let the rat the

01:14:13.740 little rats go out there right and so

01:14:15.240 let's imagine one of them is 10% bigger

01:14:17.120 than the other and so that the 10%

01:14:19.580 bigger rat wins because 10% is enough

01:14:22.480 in rat weight to ensure that you're

01:14:24.280 going to be the the pinner rather than

01:14:25.860 the penny okay so so that's fine so and

01:14:28.920 then the rat the rat pins the big rat

01:14:31.280 pins the little rat and now the big rat

01:14:33.160 is the is the authority rat and so then

01:14:36.320 the next time that the rats play the

01:14:39.140 little rat has to invite the big rat to

01:14:40.960 play so the big rats out there being

01:14:42.380 cool and the little rat pops up and you

01:14:44.420 know does the whole will you play with

01:14:45.820 me thing and the big rat will deign to

01:14:47.920 play with them but if you pair them

01:14:49.740 repeatedly unless the big rat lets the

01:14:51.980 little rat win 30% of the time the

01:14:54.380 will not invite him to play and Panksepp

01:14:56.920 discovered that it's like I read that

01:14:58.720 that just blew me away it's like that is

01:15:01.160 so amazing because you see well first of

01:15:03.960 there there's an analogy to Piaget's

01:15:05.580 ideas about the emergence of morality out

01:15:07.980 of play in human beings so that was very

01:15:09.980 cool but the notion that that was built

01:15:12.260 into rats at the level of wrestling was

01:15:14.800 and they're social they're deeply social

01:15:16.380 animals right they have to know how to

01:15:18.020 get along with one another and most of

01:15:19.840 their authority disputes dominance

01:15:22.140 disputes you don't want them to end in

01:15:24.140 bloodshed and combat because you know

01:15:26.400 if you're rat one and I'm rat two and

01:15:28.360 we tear each other to shreds in a

01:15:30.220 dominance dispute rat three is just

01:15:32.360 going to move in it's really not a great

01:15:34.400 strategy and so be better if we can

01:15:36.540 settle our differences you know somewhat

01:15:38.980 peacefully and so well so rats anyways

01:15:42.320 Panksepp figured out that rats play and

01:15:45.480 not only that they play they play fair and

01:15:47.260 they seem to enjoy it he also figured

01:15:48.760 out this was really cool too that if you

01:15:50.860 give juvenile rats attention deficit

01:15:53.740 disorder drugs Ritalin suppresses pray

01:15:58.040 play so that's worth thinking about it's

01:16:01.380 like well why do you have to give juvenile

01:16:04.620 human beings amphetamines in school well

01:16:09.120 because they need to play well you don't

01:16:10.920 they don't get to play they don't get to

01:16:12.720 wrestle around I mean that's oppression

01:16:14.540 as far as I can tell they don't get to

01:16:16.340 wrestle around that's fine feed them some

01:16:18.660 amphetamines man that'll shut down the old

01:16:20.760 play circuits well here's the other

01:16:22.280 problem is Panksepp found out that if

01:16:24.740 you don't let juvenile male rats play

01:16:27.040 their prefrontal cortexes don't develop

01:16:29.580 properly surprise surprise you're not

01:16:31.960 letting them mature it's like what else

01:16:33.440 would you expect so you know that's

01:16:35.140 something to think about really hard I

01:16:37.360 would say so well so there's some wolves

01:16:40.820 going at it well not exactly there's some

01:16:43.820 wolves having an authority dispute let's

01:16:50.060 more technically speaking and a lot of

01:16:55.320 it's posturing you know they tend they

01:16:57.400 tend not well socialized wolves tend not

01:17:00.220 to hurt each other during authority

01:17:01.720 disputes because well for obvious reasons

01:17:04.200 it's too dangerous and so they have other

01:17:06.180 ways of demonstrating who should be

01:17:08.220 listened to authorities and there's

01:17:10.620 chimps doing that this particular I

01:17:12.660 think if I remember correctly I think

01:17:16.020 it's right this is a really cool picture

01:17:17.460 because I think this chimp chimps don't

01:17:19.340 like snakes by the way so for example if

01:17:21.880 you take a chimp that's never seen a

01:17:23.220 snake and you showed a snake it is not

01:17:25.080 happy it will get the hell away from that

01:17:26.940 snake if you bring a chimp anesthetized

01:17:30.660 into a room full of chimps the chimps will

01:17:32.700 all get away from that and then look at

01:17:34.240 the body they don't they don't like that

01:17:35.580 either and if you bring a big snake into

01:17:38.160 a chimp cage even if the chimps have

01:17:39.620 never seen it like they'll get away from

01:17:41.320 it and then stare at it and chimps out in

01:17:43.680 the wild if they see a big snake they'll

01:17:46.840 stand there and they have a noise that

01:17:48.820 means something like holy crap that's a

01:17:51.000 big snake you know it actually means that

01:17:54.220 technically and I'll tell you why in a

01:17:55.580 minute but they get they stand away from

01:18:00.280 then they make this this noise which

01:18:02.200 means oh my god look at the snake and

01:18:04.020 then they'll stand there for like 24

01:18:05.340 hours looking at the snake and so the

01:18:07.520 snakes are really really they're super

01:18:09.800 stimuli for chimpanzees so that's pretty

01:18:11.800 interesting and this chimp seemed to

01:18:13.460 learn how to take this dead snake and go

01:18:15.180 just scare other chimps with it and that

01:18:16.880 was that was partly how he established his

01:18:19.980 authority and you know and well there

01:18:22.540 there's a there's a there's a threat and

01:18:24.680 you'd like if I was you and I was around

01:18:26.380 that chimp I would take that threat

01:18:27.640 seriously because those things are no

01:18:29.080 joke man and you see the same thing

01:18:30.880 here with the I don't remember what kind

01:18:32.440 of monkey that is but they're engaged

01:18:34.040 in agonistic behavior and so so and

01:18:38.260 there has been by the way there has been

01:18:40.000 recent research showing that in higher

01:18:42.720 order primates that there is snake

01:18:44.580 detection circuitry that's built into

01:18:46.300 them right so it's not learned it's not

01:18:49.360 learned steeper than that now for a long

01:18:51.280 time psychologists psychologists knew for

01:18:53.180 a long time that I could make you afraid

01:18:55.520 in a conditioning experience experiment

01:18:57.660 much faster using a snake or a picture

01:19:00.660 of a snake than a gun or a picture of a

01:19:03.280 gun so we can learn fear to snakes very

01:19:06.440 rapidly spiders as well and so then people

01:19:08.880 thought well maybe we were prepared to

01:19:10.800 develop fear to snakes or or or spiders

01:19:13.460 that sort of thing but the more recent

01:19:16.080 research has indicated that it's more than

01:19:17.820 just prepared is that we have the detection

01:19:20.980 circuitry built right into us and uh well

01:19:23.760 it's because well why wouldn't we that

01:19:25.980 that's that's really the issue it's like

01:19:27.720 it's not really that much of a surprise

01:19:29.280 unless you think of human beings as a

01:19:30.960 blank slate and if you think that then um I

01:19:34.620 don't know you should crawl out of the

01:19:35.900 16th century that's that's how I would

01:19:37.920 look I would look at it because I mean

01:19:39.700 that's that's that's just gone that idea

01:19:41.700 um it's it's it's so wrong so so maybe you

01:19:48.420 can think about this as a dominance hierarchy

01:19:50.100 but wolves look for wolves wolves look for

01:19:53.080 um credibility and competence as well and

01:19:56.780 and chimpanzees don't like brutal tyrants and

01:19:59.540 so we'll talk about it as the hierarchy of

01:20:01.540 authority and so well this is kind of how it

01:20:04.300 it starts to develop you know you see well

01:20:06.300 these girls are negotiating the domestic

01:20:08.620 environment here and how to behave properly

01:20:10.900 and how to share and all that and turn and

01:20:12.800 take turns and so they're negotiating the

01:20:15.240 hierarchy of authority and if you're good at

01:20:17.560 reciprocity it's sometimes you're the

01:20:19.200 authority and sometimes the other person

01:20:20.840 is the authority that's fair play right

01:20:22.760 and so these boys are doing the same thing

01:20:24.800 and you see they're all smiling away and

01:20:27.140 so it looks like aggressive behavior and

01:20:29.360 people who are not very attentive and who

01:20:33.420 are paranoid and who don't like human

01:20:37.520 beings can confuse this with aggression and

01:20:41.260 they forbid it at schools which is you know

01:20:43.200 I know when when my kids were going to

01:20:45.020 school for example this was quite a while

01:20:46.800 ago now they were forbidden to pick up snow

01:20:50.440 on the off chance they might throw a snowball

01:20:53.100 and we know how terrible that is so what I

01:20:55.480 told my son was is that he was perfectly

01:20:57.240 welcome to pelt any teacher he wanted to

01:20:59.460 in the back of the head with a snowball as

01:21:02.020 long as he was willing to suffer the

01:21:04.280 consequences of doing it and I don't know

01:21:07.020 if he ever did but he was happy with he was

01:21:08.740 certainly happy with the idea which made me

01:21:10.500 very happy about him so yeah so so you know

01:21:16.200 kids need to do this they really really

01:21:18.840 seriously need to do this it's what

01:21:21.680 civilizes them and they that needs to

01:21:23.860 happen between the ages of two and four

01:21:25.440 because if they're not civilized by the

01:21:26.980 time they're four then you might as well

01:21:28.380 just forget it and that's a that's a

01:21:30.400 horrible statistic but it's unbelievably

01:21:32.480 well borne out in the relevant developmental

01:21:34.300 literature like there's lots of aggressive

01:21:36.160 two-year-olds most of them are male and if

01:21:38.820 they stay aggressive past the age of four

01:21:40.400 they tend to be lifetime aggressive they

01:21:42.420 make no friends they're outcasts they're

01:21:44.400 much more likely to end up anti-social

01:21:46.220 criminal delinquent and in jail and so

01:21:49.060 your kids need to be socialized between

01:21:51.440 the ages of two and four and that's

01:21:53.660 particularly true for the more aggressive

01:21:55.040 males and most of the aggressive two-year-olds

01:21:57.160 are male and that isn't socialization by

01:21:59.540 the way so there's a more you know more

01:22:02.340 abstract representation of the same sort of

01:22:04.260 thing and I'm trying to make the case

01:22:05.880 that this that the that the hierarchy of

01:22:08.120 authority emerges out of a game like

01:22:10.340 matrix an underlying game like matrix and

01:22:12.900 that's one of the things that it's one of

01:22:14.420 the things that's so brilliant about

01:22:15.740 Jean Piaget he figured that out it's so

01:22:18.160 smart and he was interested in the

01:22:20.300 biological origin of morality and he

01:22:22.700 identified it he he he he traced the

01:22:26.580 origin to play and the emergence of

01:22:28.880 morality out of play and that's it's so

01:22:30.960 smart it's just I just can't believe how

01:22:32.980 smart an idea that was because it's the

01:22:34.940 bottom-up construction of of of morality now

01:22:39.440 Piaget was a constructionist and to some

01:22:41.560 degree a social constructionist he

01:22:43.520 underestimated the role of biology but

01:22:46.180 that doesn't invalidate his theory it's

01:22:47.880 really easy to put a biological

01:22:49.220 underpinning underneath underneath

01:22:50.720 Piaget's theory we know the biology

01:22:52.820 well enough to do it quite quite nicely now

01:22:54.720 so I mean we well the fact that

01:22:59.000 Panksepp for example could identify the

01:23:00.760 play circuit is a really good start with

01:23:02.500 that right because play has been around

01:23:05.000 so long that we have a circuit that's

01:23:07.240 dedicated to it and so that's that's a

01:23:09.580 very very ancient that's a very ancient

01:23:11.560 issue and so you know this is this is

01:23:13.720 very much of an abstraction of a game

01:23:15.640 here and then of course you get the

01:23:17.100 ultimate abstraction in representation

01:23:19.160 whip in a representation like like that

01:23:23.560 where even the even the landscape of the

01:23:27.120 game is fictional and of course we've

01:23:28.960 migrated to a large degree into those

01:23:30.840 sorts of fictional landscapes fictional

01:23:33.220 books movies video games so it's the

01:23:37.500 same it's it's an extension of the same

01:23:39.540 thing so practice for practice for real

01:23:43.040 life that shades in some cases into real

01:23:44.940 life itself all right more representations

01:23:48.940 of God the Father I like these

01:23:50.300 representations I like the triangle idea I

01:23:54.520 mean I don't know why God is wearing a

01:23:55.800 triangular hat it's a kind of a strange

01:23:57.620 fashion choice but I think it's

01:23:59.100 associated with the idea of the pyramid

01:24:00.720 and I think that's associated with the

01:24:02.460 idea of the hierarchy of authority and I

01:24:04.320 think that's why the Egyptians put their

01:24:06.060 Pharaohs inside pyramids I know there's

01:24:08.160 more to it than that but I think some of

01:24:09.960 that has to do with the notion of this

01:24:12.060 hierarchical structure you see this on

01:24:14.280 the now that's speculative obviously and

01:24:16.560 I don't want to make too much of it but but I

01:24:18.960 can't help but think that there's

01:24:20.220 something to that see that's on the back

01:24:21.900 of the American dollar bill I like that a

01:24:23.820 lot that's like the eye of Horus from the

01:24:26.040 Egyptians and so the idea here is

01:24:27.720 something like at the top of the

01:24:29.820 hierarchy is something that is no longer

01:24:31.620 part of the hierarchy right so if you

01:24:34.200 move up the hierarchy enough what

01:24:35.940 happens is that you develop the ability

01:24:37.980 as a consequence of moving up that

01:24:39.460 hierarchy to be detached enough from the

01:24:41.560 hierarchy so you're no longer really

01:24:43.020 part of it and so that you can move in

01:24:45.160 all sorts of different hierarchies and

01:24:46.940 the thing the idea here is that the

01:24:48.360 thing that you're really developing is the

01:24:50.040 capacity to pay attention and I would say

01:24:52.340 from a mythological perspective the one

01:24:57.620 thing that seems to compete with the

01:24:59.120 idea of the spoken word as the as the

01:25:02.360 source of the extraction of habitable

01:25:05.180 order from chaos is the eye is the

01:25:07.280 capacity to pay attention so Marduk for

01:25:09.320 example the Mesopotamian creator God who

01:25:12.320 emerged in the hierarchy of Mesopotamian

01:25:14.820 gods and came out at the top right he was

01:25:17.100 the victor of the gods he had eyes all the

01:25:19.340 way around his head and he could speak

01:25:20.840 magic words and I really like that I

01:25:23.360 really like that idea and the

01:25:24.980 Egyptians developed that idea too

01:25:26.420 because their god Horus was the eye

01:25:27.980 everyone knows the eye of Horus that

01:25:29.900 that that image is so compelling that we

01:25:32.720 still know about everybody has seen the

01:25:35.080 eye of Horus with a really open pupil and

01:25:38.000 what the Egyptians learned was that the

01:25:40.220 open eye was what revivified the dead

01:25:42.860 society it's so smart so what do you do

01:25:45.740 if your life isn't in order bloody well

01:25:47.720 pay attention that isn't the same as

01:25:49.820 thinking it's a different process paying

01:25:51.920 attention thinking is like the

01:25:53.840 imposition of structure in some sense I

01:25:55.880 know I'm oversimplifying but paying

01:25:58.160 attention is something like watching for

01:26:00.080 what you don't know and so like one of

01:26:02.420 the things I often recommend to my

01:26:03.740 clinical clients if they're having

01:26:05.000 trouble with a family member is number

01:26:07.220 one shut up don't tell them anything

01:26:09.460 about yourself just and I don't mean in a

01:26:12.080 rude way it's just like no more personal

01:26:14.300 information number two watch them like a

01:26:17.180 hawk and listen and if you do that long

01:26:20.120 enough they will tell you exactly what

01:26:21.800 they're up to and they will also tell you

01:26:23.840 who they think you are and then you'll be

01:26:25.880 shocked because they think you're

01:26:27.560 something generally speaking that's not

01:26:29.240 like you what you are at all and when

01:26:31.280 they tell you it's like a revelation to

01:26:33.080 both of you but attention is an

01:26:34.880 unbelievably powerful force and you see

01:26:37.460 this in psychotherapy too because a lot of

01:26:39.320 what you do and in any reparative

01:26:41.060 relationship is really pay attention to

01:26:43.580 another person pay attention and listen

01:26:45.920 and you would not believe what people

01:26:48.440 will tell you or reveal to you if you

01:26:50.680 watch them as if you want to know

01:26:52.740 instead of watching them so that you'll

01:26:54.380 have your prejudices reinforced that's

01:26:58.220 usually how people interact is like I

01:27:00.080 want to keep thinking about you the way

01:27:01.800 I'm thinking about you and so I'm going

01:27:03.560 to filter out anything that disproves my

01:27:05.960 theory that's not what I'm talking about

01:27:07.760 at all it's like I'm going to watch you

01:27:09.600 and figure out what you're up to not in a

01:27:11.580 rude way none of that I just want to see

01:27:13.920 what's there and that'll be good for you

01:27:16.380 probably and also be good for me and so

01:27:19.380 well so that's the idea that you know

01:27:22.420 climbing up a hierarchy of authority can

01:27:24.420 give you vision and that vision can

01:27:26.480 transcend the actual hierarchy and I

01:27:29.260 think that's also the I think that's

01:27:30.960 also the that's the metaphysical space

01:27:34.460 that an artist occupies because artists

01:27:36.640 really aren't in a hierarchy they're

01:27:38.200 outside of hierarchies you've watched

01:27:39.840 the lion king most of you yeah that's

01:27:43.740 Zazu you know the little bird that's the

01:27:45.480 eye of the king that's the same thing

01:27:47.200 there so and that's that's echoed in

01:27:49.460 this idea as well so so well that's some

01:27:53.120 more more ideas of hierarchy same idea

01:27:57.120 this is right gold silver bronze why gold

01:28:02.000 gold is the sun gold is pure right so

01:28:05.320 the idea is that the thing that's at the

01:28:08.080 top of the hierarchy is incorruptible

01:28:09.760 because gold doesn't mix with anything

01:28:11.160 else right it's this sort of metal that

01:28:12.640 doesn't ever become corrupted it's a

01:28:14.700 noble metal it doesn't become corrupted

01:28:16.320 and so it shines like the sun and it's

01:28:18.740 associated with what's ever at the top

01:28:20.380 of the hierarchy and the gold the gold

01:28:23.000 metal is a disc like the sun and it's

01:28:24.740 awarded to those people who've who've

01:28:26.940 occupied the top position and who are

01:28:29.280 manifestations of the ideal and here's

01:28:32.160 here's here's I gotta tell you a quick

01:28:33.880 story so imagine that you're watching an

01:28:35.660 Olympic contest I found this happens to

01:28:37.920 me very often with gymnastics because

01:28:39.660 the gymnasts are so absolutely

01:28:40.900 unbelievable you know so you go watch a

01:28:43.120 gymnastic performance and the person's

01:28:46.160 out there bouncing around like you know

01:28:50.220 you can't even imagine doing it they're

01:28:51.980 so perfect at it so you see this person

01:28:53.840 they're going through this routine

01:28:55.040 they're just absolutely spectacular and

01:28:57.300 flawless at it you know at the end they

01:28:59.200 stop and everybody claps and and they're

01:29:01.300 all excited to see what a human being

01:29:02.840 can do and that's why we're in the

01:29:04.060 audience watching because we want to see

01:29:05.520 what a human being can do and the judges

01:29:07.280 go like 9.8 9.8 9.8 everybody's

01:29:10.340 thrilled and then the next contestant

01:29:12.060 comes out and it's like well they're

01:29:13.700 just basically screwed right it's like

01:29:15.340 this person came out there and was

01:29:16.560 perfect how are you going to top that

01:29:18.240 that's an interesting question because

01:29:20.740 this is a representation of what you do

01:29:24.560 to top perfection itself and you can do

01:29:27.780 it and here's how you do it and you

01:29:29.420 know this even though you don't know you

01:29:31.020 know it so let's say the next contestant

01:29:33.300 comes out and they're kind of shaky

01:29:34.500 because it's like oh man the bar's been

01:29:36.440 raised high so what they do is they put

01:29:39.660 themselves right on the edge of chaos

01:29:41.620 and you can tell by watching them that

01:29:44.380 they are one bloody fraction of a second

01:29:47.300 from catastrophe they're pushing

01:29:49.440 themselves farther than they've ever

01:29:50.940 gone in the direction of their

01:29:52.160 perfection and everyone in the room is

01:29:54.280 so tense they can hardly stand it right

01:29:56.000 you can hear a pin drop and that person

01:29:57.840 is flipping around and they're just it's

01:30:00.040 just right on the edge of catastrophe

01:30:01.980 and at the end they go like this you

01:30:03.920 know and there's that gesture that

01:30:05.800 triumph that goes along with that and

01:30:08.120 everybody rises in one instant and just

01:30:10.340 claps like mad it's like well why what

01:30:12.860 are you doing what are you doing when

01:30:14.420 you're doing that right you can't even

01:30:16.460 help it it grabs you right in the core of

01:30:19.080 your being and you stand up and it's it's

01:30:21.380 an act of worship that's what it is and

01:30:23.240 you saw someone go beyond their perfection

01:30:26.440 into the domain of chaos and establish

01:30:29.080 order right in front of your eyes and

01:30:31.340 you're so thrilled about that you know

01:30:32.960 you're happy to be alive and everyone's

01:30:34.980 celebrating it all at the same time and

01:30:37.260 and it's an absolutely amazing thing and

01:30:39.860 that's what well sometimes that's what

01:30:41.600 this represents and sometimes that's what

01:30:43.260 this represents and that's what we're

01:30:45.040 trying to get at that because that's at

01:30:46.800 the pinnacle of the hierarchy right not

01:30:48.740 only are you doing what you should be

01:30:50.340 doing but you're doing it in a way that

01:30:52.640 increases the probability that you'll do

01:30:54.380 it better the next time you do it and

01:30:56.540 then you could say here's another thing

01:30:58.580 to think about along the same lines and

01:31:01.260 I know we haven't got to Adam and Eve yet

01:31:02.720 you tell your kids to play fair right you

01:31:09.360 say it's not it's not whether or not you

01:31:11.160 win it's how you play the game and you

01:31:13.600 say that you don't really know what you

01:31:14.760 mean you feel kind of stupid saying it

01:31:16.440 even though you know it's true and your

01:31:17.840 kid looks at you like there's something

01:31:19.020 wrong with you because he doesn't know

01:31:20.200 what you're talking about either but you

01:31:21.860 know it's true and so here's why it's

01:31:24.500 true

01:31:24.740 life isn't a game it's a set of games

01:31:30.520 and the rule is never sacrifice victory

01:31:34.120 across the set of games for victory in

01:31:35.900 one game right and that's what it means

01:31:38.720 to play properly you want to play so that

01:31:41.620 people keep inviting you to play because

01:31:43.900 that's how you win right you win by being

01:31:46.580 invited to play the largest possible array

01:31:49.180 games and the way you do that is by

01:31:51.040 manifesting the fact that you can play in

01:31:53.080 a reciprocal manner every time you play

01:31:55.060 even if there's victory at stake and

01:31:57.280 that's what makes you successful across

01:31:58.780 time and we all know that and we even

01:32:00.940 tell our kids that but we don't know that

01:32:03.220 we know it and so we're not adapting

01:32:06.100 ourselves to the game and victory in the

01:32:07.900 game we're adapting ourselves to the

01:32:09.340 meta game and victory across the set of

01:32:11.840 all possible games and that's what that

01:32:14.080 well that's exactly what as far as I can

01:32:16.600 tell that's exactly what this is aiming at

01:32:18.400 too that that's the same idea that

01:32:20.400 there's that there's a transcend there's a

01:32:22.360 mode of being that transcends the

01:32:24.340 particularities of this of the localized

01:32:27.160 contest that's the other way to think

01:32:28.900 about it and to act morally is not to win

01:32:31.720 today's contest at the expense of the

01:32:34.840 rest of possible contests and again I

01:32:38.140 don't see that as something that's

01:32:39.280 arbitrary it's not relativistic there's an

01:32:42.080 absolute moral there's an absolute moral

01:32:44.260 stance there and everyone recognizes it and

01:32:47.260 and and I also think it's the key to

01:32:49.720 success and I would also say it's very

01:32:51.720 much akin in a strange way like the the

01:32:54.560 person who is the master at being

01:32:57.660 invited to play the largest possible

01:32:59.620 games number of games is also the same

01:33:02.380 person I haven't quite figured out the

01:33:04.440 precise relationship between these two is

01:33:07.000 also the same person that goes out

01:33:09.060 forthrightly to conquer the unknown before

01:33:12.300 it presents itself as the enemy at the door

01:33:14.660 they're the same thing now I don't I

01:33:17.120 can't haven't figured out why that is

01:33:18.780 exactly but but well I'll figure it out

01:33:21.800 eventually and when I do I'll don't tell

01:33:23.460 you well if you're interested so okay so

01:33:27.520 here's some other no ideas of of of God as as

01:33:31.120 as hierarchical authority figure so strip the

01:33:34.600 religious preconceptions off what you

01:33:37.080 observe and just look at what you see well

01:33:38.800 look there's primate looking upward at

01:33:42.180 dominant figure that's that's what you see

01:33:44.680 there now it's it's very interestingly

01:33:46.720 symbolically represented because you have

01:33:48.640 God the Father there with the cross and I

01:33:50.780 think what that means as far as I can tell

01:33:52.640 is that there's a recognition there in

01:33:54.600 the image that the person who's most

01:33:56.360 dominant is the one who's or the most

01:33:58.420 has the most authority is the one who's

01:34:01.500 voluntarily accepted the suffering that's

01:34:03.700 part of being and that's what that

01:34:05.520 picture represents it's like the authority

01:34:07.480 holds that says this is what you have to

01:34:10.300 accept and that that that that transfixes

01:34:13.760 the viewer because of the because of the

01:34:16.320 fact that it's true and you think well is

01:34:17.800 that true okay well think about it this

01:34:19.640 way do you like brave people or do you

01:34:21.320 like cowards well that that's pretty

01:34:23.560 straightforward and what's the ultimate

01:34:25.280 act of bravery it's to come to terms with

01:34:27.800 the fact that you're mortal and limited and

01:34:29.960 to live forthrightly regardless well

01:34:32.960 obviously that's at the core of what's of

01:34:35.200 what's admirable and why would we presume

01:34:37.960 that that's not the case we act as if

01:34:40.400 that's the case it's what everyone dreams

01:34:42.220 and wishes that they could they could do

01:34:44.420 I mean assuming that you know you've

01:34:47.280 dispensed with the idea that you're going

01:34:48.620 to be immortal I suppose that might be

01:34:50.160 worth wishing for too or or perhaps not

01:34:52.720 immortal is a very long time but you

01:34:55.440 certainly want this and that image says

01:34:57.760 well this is what you should be and you

01:35:00.000 know we've got that same opening into the

01:35:02.440 sky going on in that image that I showed

01:35:04.380 you before it's like this is a

01:35:05.540 transcendent truth that constantly

01:35:07.000 re-manifests itself across time and

01:35:09.240 space and Jung would say it's built into

01:35:11.860 your psyche that image now you know

01:35:14.220 there are elements of it that are

01:35:15.540 culturally constructed it wouldn't

01:35:17.280 necessarily have to be the cross

01:35:19.460 although the cross is a very old symbol

01:35:21.480 it's far older than than its use in

01:35:23.640 in Christianity and it's been used in

01:35:25.340 many many religious representations but

01:35:28.960 that echoes the soul echoes with that

01:35:31.760 you know and well then there's Moses up

01:35:36.620 there on the on the mount receiving the

01:35:39.500 the the law and so we'll talk a lot more

01:35:42.940 about that when we get to Exodus but if

01:35:47.860 yeah yeah yeah if we get to Exodus so

01:35:53.360 well look where does it happen well on a

01:35:56.700 mountain well that's a pyramid that's up

01:35:59.440 right that's up it's up it's it's up in

01:36:01.540 the stratosphere it's up in the sky

01:36:03.080 where where you look upward okay and

01:36:05.700 and then so what's happening to Moses

01:36:07.560 well here here's a bit of a clue as far

01:36:09.660 as I can tell I figured this out partly

01:36:12.140 again by reading Jean Piaget because one

01:36:14.100 of the things that Piaget said about

01:36:15.360 kids was that they first learn to play

01:36:17.860 a game but they don't know what the

01:36:18.900 rules are meaning that if you have a

01:36:21.440 bunch of kids together they can play a

01:36:23.160 game but if you take one of the kids

01:36:24.740 out of the game when they're young say

01:36:26.200 six and you say what the rule are what

01:36:28.200 of the rules they can only sort of give

01:36:30.060 you a representation so you take six

01:36:32.200 year old one and he'll tell you some of

01:36:33.980 the rules and six year old two will tell

01:36:35.500 you different rules and and you know

01:36:37.480 six year old three will tell you

01:36:39.040 different rules but if you put them all

01:36:40.340 together they can play so they have the

01:36:43.000 knowledge embodied either individually or

01:36:46.080 in the group the knowledge is there to

01:36:48.280 be extracted well then they get a little

01:36:50.100 older they can extract the rules and

01:36:53.100 then they start to play by the rules and

01:36:54.840 then Piaget's last step was well it

01:36:56.980 isn't just the kids play by the rules

01:36:58.420 it's that they learn that they can make

01:36:59.920 the rules and he thought about that as

01:37:01.880 moral progression first you can play

01:37:03.580 then you can play by the rules then you

01:37:05.600 learn maybe because he didn't think

01:37:07.200 everyone learned this that you're

01:37:08.560 actually the master of the rules that

01:37:10.760 doesn't mean the rules are arbitrary

01:37:11.980 but it means that you can be the

01:37:14.880 generator of the rules assuming that

01:37:16.960 you know how to play the game and he

01:37:18.140 thought about that as a moral moral

01:37:19.900 progression and then I thought well

01:37:21.460 that's exactly what happened to Moses in

01:37:23.080 in the story of Exodus because Moses is

01:37:25.040 out there leading all those Israelites

01:37:26.960 around and like they don't have a law

01:37:29.360 they don't have a lawgiver they have a

01:37:30.920 tradition they're all like crabby

01:37:33.380 because well they're in a desert it's

01:37:35.300 like they're in a tyranny but now they're

01:37:37.220 in a desert it's like that's no

01:37:38.960 improvement so they're really getting

01:37:40.460 pretty bitchy about it and so they're

01:37:42.200 worshiping false idols and having one

01:37:44.360 catastrophe after another and they get

01:37:46.280 Moses to judge their conflicts and so he

01:37:50.480 does that for God only knows how long

01:37:52.040 forever crabby Israelites come to Moses

01:37:55.220 and bitch at him it's like well he did

01:37:57.100 this and she did that and and so then he

01:37:59.500 has to figure out how to make peace and

01:38:02.660 he does that so long that one of his I

01:38:04.580 think it's his father-in-law tells him

01:38:05.920 he has to stop doing it because he's

01:38:07.220 going to exhaust himself well then you

01:38:09.000 think well what's happening well and I'm

01:38:12.380 not assuming that this is a like a

01:38:14.480 literal historical story I think again

01:38:16.940 it's a condensation well any group has a

01:38:20.620 set of customs just like a wolf pack

01:38:23.360 does and so then the customs are being

01:38:26.040 manifest and someone who's a genius is

01:38:28.000 watching and thinking okay well what's

01:38:29.680 the rule in this situation what's the

01:38:32.360 rule in this situation what's the rule in

01:38:34.080 this situation and then in his

01:38:35.660 imagination the rules turn into a

01:38:37.920 hierarchy and then he goes up on the

01:38:39.820 mountain and he goes bang and he thinks

01:38:41.660 oh my god here's the rules that we've been

01:38:44.120 living by all this time and that's the

01:38:46.480 revelation of the commandments well and

01:38:48.640 you think well how else could it be you

01:38:49.940 think that rules came first and obeying

01:38:51.760 them came second it's like no the rules

01:38:54.600 come first sorry the actions come first

01:38:58.220 the obeying them comes first and then

01:39:00.940 you figure out what everybody's up to

01:39:02.280 and you say hey look this is what you've

01:39:03.520 been up to all along everybody goes oh

01:39:05.360 yeah that seems to make sense because

01:39:07.540 and if it didn't who would follow them

01:39:09.620 no one was going to follow them if they

01:39:11.620 don't match what's already there you

01:39:13.660 just think about that as unjust and so

01:39:15.920 that's that's portrayed here as a

01:39:18.420 cataclysmic human event it's like oh my

01:39:21.620 god we've been chimpanzees we've been

01:39:24.160 in this hierarchy of authority for so

01:39:25.680 long we have no idea what we're doing

01:39:27.100 and all of a sudden poof it burst into

01:39:30.440 revelatory consciousness and we could say

01:39:32.840 here is the law and you say well is it

01:39:35.940 given by god well hey it depends on what

01:39:38.900 you mean by god we could start with that

01:39:40.740 presupposition but it's not like it just

01:39:42.440 came out of nowhere it took a and this is

01:39:44.780 something else nietzsche observed so

01:39:47.140 interestingly and he said you know that a

01:39:49.360 moral revelation was the consequence of a

01:39:52.200 tremendously long process of initial

01:39:55.900 construction and then formulation thousands

01:39:58.960 and thousands and thousands and thousands of

01:40:01.400 years of custom of building custom before you get the

01:40:05.480 revelation of the articulated law and that's a

01:40:08.980 description of the pattern that works and let's say well what's the pattern

01:40:12.320 that works it's the game that you can play with everybody else day after day

01:40:17.360 with no degeneration and that's another thing piaget figured out that's so

01:40:21.900 brilliant and that's his idea of the equilibrated state it's it's an extension

01:40:25.580 of emmanuel cant's idea about the universal maxim right act in a way so that each action could become a universal rule that was

01:40:33.760 cant's fundamental moral maxim and piaget put a twist on that he said no no that's not exactly it it's act in such a way that it works for you now and next week and next month and next year and 10 years from now and so that while it's working for you it's also working for the people around you and for the broader society

01:40:44.000 next week and next month and next year and 10 years from now and so that while it's working

01:40:49.400 for you it's also working for the people around you and for the broader society and and and that's

01:40:54.840 the equilibrated state and you could think about that as an intimation of the kingdom of the city

01:41:00.020 of god on earth it's something like that and it's based on this idea that a morality has to be

01:41:04.560 iterable and you know there's lots of there's been lots of simulations online already artificial

01:41:09.740 intelligence simulations of trading games right i mean the the people who've been studying the

01:41:15.600 emergence of moral behavior say in artificial intelligence systems have already caught on to

01:41:19.660 the idea that one of the crucial elements to the analysis of morality is iterability you can't play

01:41:25.600 a degenerating game because because it degenerates like obviously you want to play a game that at

01:41:32.320 least remains stable across time and god if you could really get your act together maybe it would

01:41:37.360 slowly get better and of course that's what you'd hope for your family right that's what you're

01:41:42.320 always trying to do and unless you're completely hell-bent on revenge and destruction it's like

01:41:47.140 is there a way that we can continue to play together that will make playing together even better the next

01:41:52.100 day that's what you're up to and well i don't see anything arbitrary about that and part of it and this

01:41:59.220 is also why i think that bloody post-modernists are so incorrect because you know they say something

01:42:03.900 like there's an infinite number of interpretations of the world and that's actually true but then

01:42:09.940 they make a mistake and they say well no interpretation is to be privileged over any

01:42:14.780 other interpretation it's like wrong wrong that's that's where things go seriously off the rails because

01:42:21.940 the interpretation has to be and this is the piagetian objection is like if you and i are going to play

01:42:26.740 a game rule one is we both have to want to play rule two is other people are going to let us play rule

01:42:32.580 rule three is we should be able to play it across a pretty long period of time without it degenerating

01:42:37.160 and maybe rule four is while we're playing the world shouldn't kill us it's like there are not

01:42:42.900 very many game like you don't send your kids out to play on the super highway right so they're not

01:42:47.820 playing hockey on the super highway because the world kills them and so there there's an infinite

01:42:53.080 number of interpretations but there is not an infinite number of solutions and the solutions are

01:42:57.700 constrained by the fact of the world and are suffering in the world and then also constrained by the

01:43:02.360 fact that we constrain each other and so that's that's where i think that's going like dreadfully

01:43:07.260 dreadfully wrong so all right

01:43:10.780 it's really fun to look at these old pictures once you kind of know what they mean

01:43:16.720 you know at least that's what i've discovered is that once i kind of understand the the underlying

01:43:22.900 rationale for i mean someone worked hard on that that's an engraving right they took a long time

01:43:28.100 making that picture they're serious about it and when you understand what it means

01:43:32.000 you know all those people they're they're they're prostate prostate at the um at the at the revelation

01:43:38.880 of the law it's like well no wonder it's like break the law and see what happens break the universal

01:43:44.000 moral law man and see what happens you know i see people in that situation well as you all do all the

01:43:49.160 time perhaps me more than you because i'm a clinical psychologist you know and if the people i'm seeing

01:43:54.520 you haven't broken the universal law then you can bloody well be sure that people around them have

01:43:58.980 it's no joke like you make a mistake and things will go seriously wrong for you and so it's no

01:44:06.680 wonder that you'd be terrified at the revelation of the structure that governs our being one of the

01:44:12.860 things that's so remarkable about the old testament this is another thing nietzsche commented on he was

01:44:17.260 a real admirer of the old testament not so much of the new testament he thought it was a sin

01:44:21.560 for europe to have glued the new testament onto the old testament because he thought the old testament

01:44:26.760 was a really accurate representation of the phenomenology of being it's like stay awake speak

01:44:34.400 properly be honest or watch the hell out because things will come your way that you just do not want

01:44:40.660 to see at all and it might not just be you it might be everyone you know and everything about your

01:44:45.460 culture that is demolished for for generation after generation it's like stay awake and be careful

01:44:52.060 and i like i think that people only don't believe that when they're being hubristic and i think that

01:44:59.100 most people know that deep in their hearts you know when you get high on your horse that happens

01:45:03.480 fairly often if you have any sense you think geez i better be careful and tap myself down a fair bit

01:45:08.560 because if i get too puffed up man something's going to come along and take me out at the knees

01:45:13.040 and everyone knows that pride comes before a fall it's like if you have any that's why it says in

01:45:17.960 the old testament that fear of god is the beginning of wisdom it's like i've never in in all my years

01:45:23.160 as a clinical psychologist and this is something that really does terrify me i has i have never seen

01:45:28.240 anyone ever get away with anything at all even once you know there's that old idea that god has a book

01:45:35.840 you know and keeps track of everything in heaven it's like okay okay you know maybe it's not a book

01:45:40.840 fine but that is a really useful thing to think about because well and maybe you disagree maybe

01:45:47.600 you think people get away with things all the time i tell you i've never seen it what i see instead is

01:45:52.220 that thing happens right they someone twists the fabric of reality and they do it successfully

01:45:58.540 because it doesn't snap back at them that moment and then like two years later something unravels

01:46:03.380 and they get walloped and they think oh my god that's so unfair and then we track it it's like

01:46:08.320 but what happened before that this well then what this and then what this and then what oh

01:46:15.240 oh this oh that's where it went wrong it's yeah because you can't twist the fabric of reality

01:46:22.080 without having it snap back it doesn't work that way and why would it because what are you going to do

01:46:28.480 twist the fabric of reality i don't think so i think it's bigger than you you know and i think that

01:46:33.760 one of the things that really tempts people is the idea that well i can get away with it it's like

01:46:38.220 yeah you try you see how well that works it's like you get away with nothing and that is the beginning

01:46:44.720 of wisdom and it's something that deeply terrifies me and you know ever since last september when i've

01:46:50.780 come to more like broader public attention one of the thing i've been terrified of making a mistake

01:46:55.320 because i certainly know i'm more than capable of making a mistake and thank god so far either i haven't

01:47:00.440 made one or no one's found out about it so but it's like you know we walk on a very thin and narrow

01:47:07.700 edge and we're very lucky when things aren't degenerating into chaos around us or rapidly

01:47:13.120 moving to far too much order and it's not an easy thing to stay on that line and you can tell when you

01:47:18.880 stay you're on that line because things are deeply meaningful and engaging when you're on that line

01:47:23.620 but if you're not existentially terrified about the consequences of wavering off that then

01:47:29.120 you are truly not awake so and that's what i see in this picture you know it's like look out man

01:47:36.100 because there are rules and if you break them god help you

01:47:41.300 so one of the things that seems to me the case with regard i mentioned this in the question period a

01:47:55.160 bit last time is that one of the things that seems to be actually one of the advantages to gluing

01:48:00.180 the new testament onto the old testament is the idea of a transformation in morality that is

01:48:04.980 analogous to the piagetian idea that after you learn to play by the rules you can learn to make

01:48:10.980 the rules because i think that's actually what happens to some degree in the transition between

01:48:15.180 the old testament and the new testament because in the old testament most morality is prohibition

01:48:20.360 here are things you shouldn't do it's like you know fair enough that's a lot of what you do with

01:48:24.680 your kids don't do this don't do this don't especially when they're happy you're always going

01:48:29.600 around telling them to stop being so happy because all they're doing is causing trouble it's quite

01:48:33.220 painful if you're a parent and you notice that but the first morality is prohibition right

01:48:38.220 control yourself so you don't cause too much trouble and then maybe if you get that down and

01:48:43.300 you're good at it then the next thing is well once you're disciplined then you can start working

01:48:47.960 towards something that's a positive good and that's the transformation that seems to me to

01:48:51.820 be fundamentally characteristic of the juxtaposition of the new testament onto the old testament but in

01:48:57.300 these images is still something like serve tradition serve the father psychologically speaking support

01:49:05.880 the tradition because you live on it they're in an old mesopotamian story um the enumialish which you

01:49:13.080 can which you can read about if you're interested in the original gods who are really badly behaved

01:49:18.580 they're like two-year-olds in fact they're a lot like two-year-olds they kill the primordial god

01:49:24.500 apsu who's the patriarchal god they kill him and try to live on his corpse well that's what we all do

01:49:30.620 right because we live on the corpse of our ancestors you could say we live on the corpse of our culture

01:49:34.580 it's dead and that's not a great place to live so you have to keep revivifying it so the damn thing

01:49:39.680 you know stays active and awake you you stay on the corpse for too long and then the devil of or

01:49:46.540 the demon of chaos comes back and that's what happens in the mesopotamian story it's like don't

01:49:50.960 be thinking that you can stay on the corpse of your ancestors for too long without contributing to

01:49:57.240 the revivification of the system because the chaos that all of that holds that that all of that holds

01:50:03.420 that bay will definitely come and visit you and you see that in stories like uh the hobbit

01:50:08.780 you know hobbits they're nice they like to eat they're kind of fat they're short they're not very

01:50:13.500 bright you know they're hubristic they have no idea what's out there in the broader world they're

01:50:18.200 protected if you remember by the striders who are the sons of great kings who look like tramps

01:50:23.260 they have nothing but contempt for them they patrol the borders and keep the bloody hobbits safe but out

01:50:29.160 there it out there in the periphery all hell is brewing and chaos is is is generating and forming

01:50:35.580 and that's an archetypal story and that's why people like that story so much because that's

01:50:40.520 exactly right like we're the hobbits and there are we are protected from chaos by the spirits of our

01:50:46.020 dead ancestors and we're too damn stupid to know it and we think oh well we don't need them anymore

01:50:50.720 and that to me that's post-modernism that's what the bloody universities are doing with the humanities

01:50:54.860 it's absolutely appalling and we will pay for it so unless we wake up and hopefully we'll wake up

01:51:01.420 because that would be better than paying for it even though being awake is rather painful

01:51:05.320 so so then i had this vision one time and i kind of portrayed it in this in this image of of what the

01:51:13.480 world was like and i thought well it's not a pyramid it's it's not a single hierarchy of authority

01:51:18.700 that's not what it is it's it's an array of hierarchies of authority so you imagine this sort of infinite

01:51:24.140 plane and in the infinite plane there's nothing but pyramids and inside the pyramids there are strata of

01:51:29.920 people everywhere far as you can look some of the pyramids are tall some of them are short they

01:51:35.200 overlap there it's endless the plane is endless and those are all the positions to which you could rise

01:51:41.040 and everybody's inside the pyramid sort of crammed up trying to move towards the top and then there's

01:51:46.440 the possibility of sailing across over top of all of them and seeing how the structure itself works and

01:51:52.300 that's and that's the eye that floats above the pyramid and it sees the structure itself and

01:51:57.020 the highest order of being is not to be at the top of the pyramid it's to use the discipline that

01:52:02.980 you attain by striving towards the top of the pyramid to release yourself from the pyramid and

01:52:08.480 move one step up and that's i think that's one of the things that's instantiated in the idea of the

01:52:13.400 for example of the holy ghost so and i think that's akin to that that's sisyphus and nietzsche said

01:52:20.240 of sisyphus if i remember correctly that one has to imagine him happy well if there's a rock at the

01:52:26.200 bottom of the hill then you might as well push it up the hill and if it rolls back down well then

01:52:30.140 you've got something else to do don't you can push the damn rock back up the hill and there's no

01:52:34.000 shortage of rocks to put up to push up the hill and that's what we're built for anyways and so

01:52:39.000 let's go out and like push some damn boulders up the hill and then maybe we could have enough

01:52:43.500 self-confidence and enough enough respect for ourselves that we wouldn't have to turn to

01:52:48.100 hatred and revenge and try to take everything down because i think that's the alternative

01:52:52.200 so he's not weak that's one thing you can say about him

01:52:56.740 same idea represented there right that's atlas who voluntarily takes the world on his shoulders

01:53:03.980 it's like the idea of christ taking the sins of the worlds on his shoulders it's exactly the same

01:53:08.820 notion which is the notion that you should be able to recognize in yourself all the horror of humanity

01:53:14.620 and take responsibility for it because that's what that means and the thing that's so interesting

01:53:19.460 about that is that if you can recognize yourself in yourself all the horror of humanity you will

01:53:24.680 instantly have a hell of a lot more respect for yourself than you did before you did that

01:53:28.300 because there's some real utility in knowing that you're a monster

01:53:31.280 now and just because you're a monster doesn't mean you have to be a monster but it's really useful to

01:53:36.660 know that you are one so and one of the things that jung knew and this is something that i i find so

01:53:43.080 amazing about his writings i think something that really distinguishes him for example from joseph

01:53:47.580 campbell who talked about following your bliss is like jung said very clearly that the first step

01:53:52.480 to enlightenment is the encounter with the shadow and what he meant by that was everything horrible

01:53:58.400 that human beings have done was done by human beings and you're one of them and so if you don't

01:54:05.280 understand that and to understand that really means to know how it was that you could have done it

01:54:10.860 and that's a shattering thing to try to imagine that to try to imagine yourself as someone who's

01:54:16.240 engaged in medieval torture to see how you could in fact do that you're never the same after you

01:54:21.740 learn that but being never the same after learning that is unbelievably useful because when you

01:54:27.380 understand that that's what you're like then you're a whole different creature and i don't think and this

01:54:32.200 is something i did learn from jung is that you cannot be a good person until you know how much evil

01:54:38.320 you contain within you it is not possible and it's partly because you just don't have any potency

01:54:43.000 like if you're just naive if you're just nice if you'd never hurt anyone you'd never hurt a fly you

01:54:48.700 don't have the capability for any of that why would anyone ever take you seriously you're you're just

01:54:54.140 you're a domestic animal at best you know and a rather contemptible one at that and it's a very

01:54:58.980 strange thing because you wouldn't think that the revelation of the capacity for evil is a precondition

01:55:05.060 for the realization of good but i believe first of all why would you be serious enough to even attempt

01:55:10.520 to pursue the good unless you had some sense of what the consequence was of not doing it

01:55:15.820 you you have to be serious about these sorts of things it's not it's not it's not the game of a

01:55:21.660 child right it's the game of a fully developed adult and you have i learned this in part when i had

01:55:27.060 little kids i wrote a chapter from my new book called never let your children do anything that

01:55:31.740 makes you dislike them and why was that and i read i read that wrote that after i knew i was a monster

01:55:37.940 and i thought i'm gonna make sure i like my kids i'm gonna make sure they behave around me so that

01:55:44.340 i like them because i'm way bigger than them and i'm way more cruel than they are and i've got tricks

01:55:50.220 up my sleeve that they cannot even possibly imagine and if if they irritate me i will absolutely take

01:55:58.280 it out on them and if you don't think that you're the sort of person that would do that then you are

01:56:03.800 the sort of person who is doing it

01:56:06.100 you know we're not going to get to adam and eve ha ha

01:56:19.320 i uh i watched this great documentary once uh called hitman heart and was about bret heart and

01:56:27.040 who was the most famous canadian in the world for a while and he he was a worldwide wrestling

01:56:32.080 federation wrestler you know and he was a good guy and uh he came from this famous family of

01:56:38.220 wrestlers who all came from alberta i think there were seven brothers who were wrestlers and seven

01:56:42.400 sisters and all the sisters married wrestlers they were all offspring children of stew heart who who

01:56:48.540 who was a wrestling impresario like 40 years ago and it was it was such a cool documentary because

01:56:55.060 i was always wondering why in the world do people watch wrestling and and and believe it you know

01:57:01.480 believe it do you believe movies when you go watch them it's like that's a hard question to answer

01:57:07.840 while you're there you do and so if you're watching wrestling and you're a wrestling fan do you believe

01:57:12.180 it well it isn't a matter of belief it's a matter of being engaged in a drama and there are different

01:57:17.460 levels of drama right so let's say worldwide wrestling federation drama is not the most sophisticated

01:57:23.300 form of drama okay but i'm not being i'm not being a smart aleck when i'm saying that

01:57:29.020 there's drama of different sophistication for different people and that's also why religious

01:57:33.900 truths exist at multiple levels simultaneously right there's got to be something in it for everyone

01:57:38.580 and that's a hard belief system that's a hard system to put together something for the

01:57:42.780 unbelievably sophisticated and something for the common person okay so we have wrestling and bret hart

01:57:48.520 was a good guy and he fell into the archetype of being a good guy and that's partly what the

01:57:52.920 what the story's about it was a bit too much for him but um one of the things that he he laid out so

01:57:59.280 carefully was because he figured that 120 million people knew him something like that and that

01:58:04.320 everywhere he went he was treated like a hero and he found that quite a bit of quite a burden and as

01:58:09.000 you can imagine if you think about it but he portrayed what was happening in the wrestling ring

01:58:13.120 as classic good against evil but not conceptualized and discussed right embodied fought out acted out

01:58:21.100 you know like like the like thor and the hulk except like right in front of you and so well

01:58:27.980 that's exactly this sort of thing i mean we could consider hockey more sophisticated than wrestling

01:58:33.840 perhaps and and as i said i'm not being a critic of these i'm not being critically minded about these

01:58:40.040 things i understand their purpose and i would highly recommend that documentary it's a brilliant

01:58:44.020 documentary but this is it's the same thing it's a silver cup right it's like there's the hero of

01:58:49.940 the team that's the hero of the teams no here's something cool if you're the fan of the toronto

01:58:57.860 blue jays or the toronto maple leafs of course this hardly ever happens to you if you're the fan of

01:59:02.680 the toronto maple leafs because they always lose but but but but if you're watching a game and your

01:59:09.740 team wins and we take your testosterone levels then they went up and if you watch the toronto maple

01:59:16.460 leafs and they lost and you're a fan then your testosterone levels go down so that's pretty damn

01:59:21.700 funny you know i mean really don't you see how deeply instantiated this is in people i mean it

01:59:27.500 bloody well alters your biochemistry like your your your testosterone levels it's all my team lost

01:59:33.380 you know it's like uh there'll be no there'll be nothing in it for the wife tonight you know so

01:59:38.800 yeah

01:59:44.540 well this is the cosmos i think from from the phenomenological perspective and one of the

01:59:54.360 things that are that that has come to my realization is that this is real this is real it's it's not a

02:00:03.340 metaphor it's it's way deeper than a metaphor the most real things about life are the place you don't

02:00:10.120 know and the place you know and you could say well that's explored territory and unexplored territory

02:00:14.780 that's real and it's been around forever back to the lobsters you know if you put lobsters in a new

02:00:20.040 place the first thing they do is go around their territory finding places to hide and also

02:00:24.340 making a burrow so the first thing they do is establish what they know against what they don't

02:00:30.420 know and that's real it's real from the darwinian perspective and we're going to say that what's

02:00:34.860 real from the darwinian perspective is plenty real enough because we're alive and everything and so

02:00:39.300 that sort of thing matters it's like well that's what this is the daoist symbol that's what it says is

02:00:43.940 the what's what it says what is experience made of eternally that's easy chaos and order

02:00:51.780 and in every bit of chaos there's the possibility of order and in every bit of order there's the

02:00:56.740 possibility of chaos and that's the way right that's the path of life that's life itself and

02:01:01.880 where you're supposed to be it's right on the border between the two of those and why is that

02:01:05.600 stable enough engaged enough right so not only are you doing what you should be doing you're doing

02:01:12.580 it in a way that increases the probability that you'll do it better tomorrow and you can tell when

02:01:17.120 you're doing that because you're engaged you're in the right time and place and your your your

02:01:23.540 neurology tells you that that's what meaning is that's what transcendent meaning is and that's so

02:01:29.980 cool because i also think that that is the antidote to existential suffering the antidote to existential

02:01:35.960 suffering is to be at the right place at the right time and you know you want to get technical

02:01:41.200 about it okay anxiety and pain that that's the that's the reality of existential suffering okay

02:01:48.000 so let's say you're in the right place at the right time what happens to you biochemically

02:01:52.040 dopaminergic activation what does that do suppresses anxiety and it's analgesic now it's more than that

02:01:59.840 because it also produces positive emotion and the desire to move forward and it underlies creativity

02:02:04.620 and and so so not only do you get the positive engagement from a neurochemical perspective you get

02:02:10.320 the analgesia and you get the anti and and you get the reduction of anxiety so it's not hypothetical

02:02:16.840 it's and and it is the case that the dopaminergic systems those are the exploratory systems unbelievably

02:02:21.920 ancient and archaic are activated when you're optimally positioned to be to be um what incorporating

02:02:30.120 new information which is what human beings do because we're information foragers and so we want

02:02:35.240 to be secure but building on our security at the same time and then we want to do it for ourselves

02:02:41.160 we want to do it for other people we want to do it for our families we want to do it for broader society

02:02:45.240 we want to bring the whole world together in alignment to do that and that's meaningful and

02:02:50.200 god only knows what we could do about the suffering of the world if we did that

02:02:53.720 you know we have no idea what we could do if we started doing things properly and maybe so many

02:02:59.640 of the things that dismay us about life we could we could stop i mean we stopped a lot of them in the last

02:03:04.840 hundred years you know things are a lot better than they were a hundred years ago obviously they're not

02:03:09.640 perfect but a hundred years ago 120 years ago man you know the average person in the western world lived on

02:03:15.800 less than a dollar a day in today's dollars it's like you just try that for a week and see how much fun that is

02:03:21.400 so the taoists well what is this well this is the pre-cosmogonic chaos out of which the word of god

02:03:29.640 extracted habitable order at the beginning of time it's the same thing it's the same thing and that chaos

02:03:36.520 we'll talk a bit more about that later i guess because it's a very complicated thing to to describe

02:03:41.480 but it's certainly the thing that when you encounter the chaos is what you encounter when the twin towers fall

02:03:46.920 right you remember what that was like right so it was it was september 10th well that was the world

02:03:54.840 everyone knew what the world was like and then it was september 11th and everyone walked around

02:03:59.560 dazed for three days because the buildings fell

02:04:04.920 but so what you can see a building fall you can understand what it's what happens when a building falls

02:04:10.840 so then what's going on with the being dazed well it's the chaos that underlies our habitable order

02:04:16.040 manifested itself when those buildings collapsed it was a brilliant act of terrorism and everyone was

02:04:21.320 frozen and curious because that's how we react to that sort of thing the the it's like it's like the

02:04:27.480 shark you know remember that famous that famous movie poster for jaws with the woman swimming on the

02:04:33.080 top of the water and that terrible leviathan shark underneath coming up to to take her out well that's life

02:04:39.640 man that's the world and now and then you see that and when something falls like the twin towers fall

02:04:44.680 you you remember that the ocean below you the abyss right the primordial abyss that bloody thing is

02:04:50.680 deep and and you're fragile and that happens when someone betrays you and it's happened it happens to

02:04:56.360 you when your dreams fall apart you encounter that chaos again from which the world is extracted and then

02:05:01.240 you're called upon to act out attention and the word in order to bring the world back into order and none of

02:05:07.960 that is none of that is none of that is superstitious none of that is superstitious none of that's even

02:05:14.360 metaphorical it's real it's it's more real than anything else and i think the reason for that in part is that

02:05:21.880 this has been it's been this way forever right as long as there's been life this has been the rule of life

02:05:30.440 and that's the cosmos that's reality that's what we inhabit and so one of the things you know the

02:05:37.000 the the so-called new atheists and i don't want to go on a tangent about new atheists because i think

02:05:42.360 atheists are often remarkably honest and very consistent in their analysis so

02:05:49.560 but i just don't think they're taking the problem seriously now like i don't think they take their

02:05:53.400 evolutionary theorizing nearly with the seriousness that it that it necessitates and i don't think that

02:06:05.400 i don't think that you can dispute the proposition that the longer something has had a selection effect

02:06:12.760 on life the more real it is it's the fundamental axiom of darwinian biology and i think the darwinian

02:06:21.880 world is more real than the physical world that was the argument that i was trying to have with with

02:06:26.360 with sam harris and i didn't do the world's best job of that although it went not too bad the second

02:06:31.080 time but it's it's not something to be taken lightly it's a very serious profound and meaningful

02:06:39.240 proposition and people act it out and want to act it out whether they know it or not

02:06:43.880 that's marduk so the the story of marduk i'll just give it to you very briefly

02:06:53.720 time at an absolute locked in embrace at the beginning of time goddess of salt water god of

02:06:59.000 fresh water together chaos and order right they give rise masculine and feminine they give rise to the

02:07:05.640 world of the elder gods and those are to me their primordial motivational forces there's something like

02:07:10.200 that and their rage and their lust and their love and all these things that possess us that are there

02:07:16.120 forever and they're out in the world acting and they carelessly slay apsu their father and they're

02:07:23.240 making a racket and then they kill apsu and then time at gets wind of that and that's time at right

02:07:29.480 there by the way she's kind of a rough looking creature and she's the mother of all things and so

02:07:35.640 she's not very happy about this they though these her children have destroyed structure itself plus

02:07:42.040 they're noisy and careless and so she thinks all right just like noah just like the god that brings

02:07:47.480 the flood to noah exactly the same idea time at comes back and says yeah okay enough is enough i'm

02:07:53.400 gonna take you out and she makes this battalion of monsters and puts the worst monster there is at

02:07:59.720 the head of the battalion his name is king who he's like a precursor to the idea of satan and she

02:08:05.560 lets the gods know hey i'm coming for you and so they're not very happy about this because they're

02:08:11.080 gods but like yeah she's chaos itself right she gave birth to everything this is no joke and so

02:08:17.640 they send one god out after another to confront her and they all come back with their tails between

02:08:22.120 their legs there's no hope and then one day there's a new god that emerges and that's marduk

02:08:27.080 and the gods know as soon as he pops up they know he's something new remember and this is happening

02:08:31.960 while the mesopotamians are assembling themselves into one of the world's first great civilizations

02:08:37.560 so all the gods of all those tribes are coming together to organize themselves into a hierarchy

02:08:42.680 to figure out what proposition rules everything and so marduk is elected by all the gods and he says

02:08:49.240 look i'll go out there and i'll take on time at but here's the rule from here on you follow me i

02:08:54.840 determine destiny i'm the top god i'm the thing at the top of the hierarchy and all the other gods say hey

02:09:00.600 look no problem you get rid of chaos we do exactly what you say now marduk he has eyes all the way

02:09:07.400 around his head and he speaks magic words those are his primary attributes and so he takes a net

02:09:12.760 and he goes out to confront time at and and he he he he encloses her in a net which i think is so cool

02:09:20.120 because it's an encapsulation right it's a conceptual encapsulation he encloses chaos itself in a conceptual

02:09:26.280 structure he puts it in a net and then he cuts her into pieces and he makes the world and then

02:09:37.000 then he creates human beings to inhabit that world and to serve the gods and he creates human beings

02:09:41.080 out of the blood of kingu the worst of the demons and that took me it's a call into young

02:09:47.160 it was a student of mine helped me figure that out i thought geez that's pretty damn pessimistic it's like

02:09:51.640 you know what exactly it sounds like a fall metaphor it's like the idea of original sin but

02:09:56.920 but our joint conclusion with regards to that was that human beings are the only creatures in creation

02:10:06.040 that can truly deceive right we have the capacity for evil just like it says in the adam and eve story

02:10:11.960 we can actually do that and that's why we're made out of the blood of kingu the king of the demons the

02:10:16.760 we are the thing that can deceive that can twist the structure of reality well so marduk now the

02:10:23.960 the mesopotamians had an emperor right and the emperor was the avatar of marduk that's what made

02:10:31.080 him emperor he was only an emperor if he was going to be marduk he had to be a good marduk which meant

02:10:35.400 he had to confront time at chaos and cut her up and make order out of her pieces and what the mesopotamians

02:10:41.880 used to do at the new year's celebration they'd go outside their walled city and that's explored

02:10:47.080 territory versus unexplored territory they go outside their walled city into chaos and they bring

02:10:51.560 all the statues that represented the gods and they'd act this out because they're trying to

02:10:55.720 figure something out right they're trying to figure out what this means they're acting it out

02:10:59.720 and then they take their emperor and the priest would make him kneel and they take all his king

02:11:05.480 all his king uniform off his emperor uniform off and make him kneel and humiliate him and nail him

02:11:10.840 with a glove and say okay how were you not a good marduk this year right and then he'd recount all

02:11:17.640 the ways that he was inadequate in confronting chaos and then they'd do the celebration and marduk

02:11:22.840 would win and and the king would go sleep with a royal prostitute and and but the reason for that

02:11:28.360 was it's the same idea as saint george pulling the virgin from the dragon it's exactly the same idea

02:11:32.680 that if you call if you encounter the reptilian chaos you can extract something out of it

02:11:38.840 with which if you unite you produce creative order that's what they were acting out and and that was

02:11:43.960 the basis for the mesopotamian idea of sovereignty it's so smart it's so unbelievably smart and you

02:11:50.920 know the mesopotamians had a massive influence on the civilizations that then had a massive influence

02:11:55.480 on us it's one of the stories of how the notion of sovereignty itself came to be it's the evolution

02:12:01.240 of the idea of god that's one way of thinking about it but even more importantly it's the evolution of

02:12:06.440 the idea of the redemptive human being right and that's taken to its one of its conclusions well in

02:12:12.840 the story of buddha but also in the story of christ the idea of the perfect individual and the notion is

02:12:17.880 well that's the word that speaks truth into chaos at the beginning of time to generate habitable order

02:12:23.320 that is good that's the story and so with that

02:12:30.760 let's see i'll show i'll just show you these pictures because they're so interesting once you

02:12:35.560 know what they mean they're so cool that's a symbol of infinity that's hercules and the hydra what's

02:12:41.480 life like cut off one head what happens seven more grow right what do you do run home well no that's

02:12:48.840 not what you do this is what you do you fight it it's the it's the chaos that generates

02:12:57.480 partial chaos it's the ultimate chaos that generates partial chaos but that

02:13:01.080 chaos also is what revivifies life because otherwise it would just be static

02:13:07.640 in today's chaotic world many of us are searching for a way to aim higher and find spiritual peace

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02:14:59.960 mercury the head of the hydra right freezes you at saint george he's doing it peacefully which is so

02:15:07.880 interesting right he's got a beatific look on his face in that particular representation another saint

02:15:12.680 george right the virgin in the background i think that's saint anne if i remember correctly

02:15:21.560 saint george he's the patron saint of england

02:15:25.560 here's an interesting one this actually sheds light on on the human proclivity for warfare

02:15:30.200 saint george that's a muslim soldier it's really easy to transform the enemy into the dragon

02:15:36.760 right because the enemy is often the predator and we do that instantaneously right without a second

02:15:41.080 thought and so then we can go to war morally because why not take out the snakes well you know

02:15:47.000 the problem is where are the snakes well maybe they're outside and maybe they're not maybe they're in this

02:15:52.360 room and even worse maybe they're in you and that's wisdom when you know that they're in you

02:15:57.080 why wouldn't she be happy about that especially if she had a especially if she had a child right seriously

02:16:07.480 and that's horus right the god of vision and he was a

02:16:20.760 he was a falcon because falcons have great vision and they fly above everything and they can see

02:16:25.160 everything and so that was the egyptian creator god horus and i'll tell you the story about horus at some

02:16:29.960 points as well

02:16:34.520 now here's some pictures that demonstrate what i had

02:16:37.720 described as the emergence of let's say the meta hero out of the hero so there's the person you

02:16:42.760 admire and then there's the set of people that you admire and then there's the meta set of admirable

02:16:47.880 people and the extraction of that ideal as far as i can tell that's just what's portrayed in these images

02:16:53.720 that's a great one it's very sophisticated image you see the the two sides of christ's face are not

02:17:04.760 symmetrical one's god and one's man that that's what that icon means and so the fully developed

02:17:10.920 person in this representation it's one of the oldest representations of this sort that we know the idea

02:17:16.840 is that there's a there's a human person in his ordinariness let's say and then there's this this

02:17:25.080 kinship with the divine that's associated with the willing adoption of the responsibility of moral mortal

02:17:32.120 being and that produces this union and then it's manifest in a book right because that's speech and

02:17:38.120 it's associated with the sun right it's the proper way of being

02:17:47.560 and that's a perfect example i think of the emergence of the archetype out of the multitude

02:17:53.000 that's what it looks like to me

02:17:59.800 and so i guess now we're done with genesis 1 and that took three lectures but

02:18:04.280 god's complicated you know that's the thing so

02:18:20.280 so thank you and next week by all appearances that's where we are so we've got 20 minutes for

02:18:29.080 questions so um in the past i've done some work with big brother big sister and whatever

02:18:35.000 um that being said that the most common story i tend to hear from conflicted youth is that they

02:18:39.080 write they're raised in a single family home usually with a mom dad is there on the picture

02:18:43.960 and alcoholic whatever whatever whatever so we have this child who is trying to

02:18:50.520 seek ways to make himself healthy and empower himself in the ways that a healthy father should

02:18:55.000 have done so you know between the formative years of like one to four so i think you know i'm going

02:18:59.240 with this um how let's say for someone who born without like a good father figure where would

02:19:04.600 they go out in the world or like what for spheres of influence would they try to expose themselves to

02:19:09.000 to like gain access to that fountain of health and knowledge that a father that a good father figure

02:19:16.200 should have provided them to in the first place okay well partly i mean certainly to some degree a good

02:19:20.760 mother can provide that right to some degree although it's hard for one person to be everything

02:19:25.960 right you know and i think one of the conundrums that face women and this is a tough one and this

02:19:30.040 is why i think women are higher in trait agreeableness and higher in trait negative emotion is that

02:19:34.600 you know the primary problem that a woman has with an infant is why not throw it out a window

02:19:40.120 because it's very annoying right i mean it's it's there all the time it's constant demand it's

02:19:44.280 absolutely constant demand tremendous dependency and so a woman has to be tilted towards mercy

02:19:51.000 that's how it looks to me right and especially during it's so important during the especially

02:19:55.480 the first year when children are so unbelievably vulnerable and so i think it's very difficult for

02:19:59.960 women to be merciful like that and to make the shift to encouraging disciplinarian i think that's a

02:20:06.600 very difficult thing for people to do simultaneously although you know people people i'm not saying that

02:20:13.000 women are always only merciful and men are always only encouraging disciplinarians but things do sort

02:20:18.520 themselves out to some degree like that and i think also the biochemical transformations that accompany

02:20:23.720 pregnancy and childbirth and lactation also tilt a mother towards that as well she has to really love

02:20:29.560 that little thing right it's it's number one no matter what it demands and and then telling it

02:20:34.840 what to do and making sure it's behaving properly that's that's a whole different issue now but the kids

02:20:40.200 who lack fathers i mean first of all they can find that to some degree in their friends and that's

02:20:45.240 often what fatherless boys do in particular they they go into gangs and they generate the missing

02:20:51.160 men masculinity in the gang well that's not so good because like what the hell do they know

02:20:56.280 well they don't know anything right they're just stupid kids and they're

02:20:59.240 like 15 years old and their testosterone is pumping and they're trying to get the hell away from their

02:21:03.160 mother which is what they're supposed to do and and they're not in the right position to exercise

02:21:08.120 any authority over themselves so that's that's not good they can find it in education they can

02:21:12.840 find it in books they can find it in movies they can find it in sports heroes and so forth because

02:21:17.800 the image of the father is fragmented and distributed among the community but it's very

02:21:22.440 very difficult to not have a father right and you know one of the things that we're doing in our

02:21:26.600 society which i think is i think it's absolutely appalling is that we're making the case that all

02:21:32.520 families are equal it's like sorry no wrong and there's no empirical data supporting that proposition

02:21:39.240 by the way it's much better for kids to have two parents now who those parents are that's a whole

02:21:43.560 different issue but okay and if i could just add one more thing um how would you ask that question

02:21:48.120 to let's say a daughter who was raised without a father because she would obviously have different

02:21:51.800 ways to find those fragments of her missing father than like a boy would instead because obviously they're

02:21:55.880 raised differently at least they should have been well i think it's the same issue you know i mean

02:22:00.280 i think that another danger that emerges and this is freud's of course famous observation is that

02:22:06.040 you know if if there's mom and child or father and child that relationship can get a little closer

02:22:11.880 than it should and then the lines get blurry and mixed and i'm not saying that that happens to

02:22:17.160 everyone obviously but but it's still a danger that that's inherent in the situation they're thrust

02:22:22.600 together too tightly without sufficient resources and so the responsibility has to be distributed more and

02:22:29.240 like i really do think that it's the sign of the degeneration of a society when that when when

02:22:35.160 single parenthood becomes anything approximating the norm it's not a good idea then the and part of

02:22:41.640 the reason i believe that and i think this has to do with the um overwhelming selfishness of of of of

02:22:48.840 modern life is that marriage isn't for the people who are married it's for the children obviously and

02:22:55.160 like if you can't handle that grow the hell up serious no i mean seriously yeah seriously once

02:23:02.280 you once you once you have kids it is not about you period now that doesn't mean it isn't about you

02:23:11.160 at all but that just seems so self-evident to me i can't believe that anybody would even would even

02:23:18.120 question it oh it's so oh yes well i'm certainly aware of that yes it's questioned it's almost illegal to

02:23:24.120 question it now you know to to or illegal to make the set of propositions that i'm making so

02:23:32.920 that's the best i can do yeah that's excellent thank you

02:23:41.640 this question is going uh in part to the first part of first half of your lecture but it's also

02:23:45.960 something that's been on my mind listening to your lectures over the past few months and that's when we

02:23:51.080 talk about the the psychological truth or significance of the bible to what extent does

02:23:57.720 that psychological psychological truth have to be embodied in specific historical events or people

02:24:04.440 and so uh for instance the thing that's sort of been bugging on my mind is there's uh there's a part

02:24:10.360 that saint paul's talking about in the new testament somewhere in one of his letters and he's talking

02:24:15.800 about the resurrection and he says if it didn't happen then it this whole thing is just meaningless

02:24:21.560 the faith is meaningless like for him there had to be that embodiment of that historical person or

02:24:27.160 event in that case well the the best answer i have to that at the moment is that i'm really happy that

02:24:32.440 i'm not at that point yet in this lecture series you know because i know because that there's a there's a

02:24:38.600 there's a there's a crucial issue there and i don't know exactly what to make of it and my approach

02:24:45.880 at the moment as i said is to approach this as rationally as i possibly can and i hope i know a hell of a

02:24:50.440 lot more about what i'm doing by the time i get to that particular question um and i i do have

02:24:58.680 the beginnings of ways to answer that but i'm not going to answer that at all right now because

02:25:03.960 it's so bloody complicated it would just burn me to a frazzle and i'm already mostly burnt to a

02:25:08.600 frazzle after that lecture so i i couldn't attempt to even start to sketch it out i don't know i mean

02:25:15.240 part of it is to be just rational about it just to be rational about it there is something about

02:25:21.080 the idea that continual death and rebirth is a necessary precondition to proper human adaptation

02:25:26.520 every time you learn something new that's important part of the stupid old you has to die

02:25:32.360 and sometimes that can be an awful lot of you and in fact it can be so much of you sometimes that

02:25:36.840 you just die right you just can't handle it and so there is there is a real idea that you have to

02:25:42.760 identify with the part of yourself that transcends your current personality that can constantly die

02:25:48.280 and be reborn now then i could say well that means that all of this is psychological and symbolic

02:25:54.760 and that's the simplest answer but i'm not satisfied with that answer even though i think it's

02:26:01.400 coherent and complete because the world's a very weird place and there are things about it that

02:26:06.120 we don't understand so so i can't go i can't go any farther than that at the moment so that yeah

02:26:19.160 hi dr peterson um i just recently watched uh one of your videos of you debating with

02:26:25.560 transgender protesters at uft uh free speech rally in october and one of the uh protesters one of the

02:26:33.800 comments one of the protesters uh said to you which was in particularly very like very chilling was um

02:26:40.360 why do you have the right to determine whether an individual is worthy of you using their pronouns

02:26:46.600 the scary thing to me is how common this type of view is among radical left-wing protesters on university

02:26:53.560 campuses who feel they have the right to tell other people uh what they can think what words they can

02:26:59.480 use and what speakers they can or cannot listen to um the even scarier part is that our government

02:27:06.440 is creating legislation to back up their ideologies uh which is evident through bill c16 uh m103 and bill 89

02:27:16.040 um so my question is what do you think um the end game is in all this because it seems

02:27:23.320 every year we're we're in the process of finding that out you know and i'm sorry i'm sorry okay we're

02:27:30.360 in the process of finding that out um i don't i mean i think the end game that underlies all of that

02:27:38.440 in my estimation is best summed up by jacques derrida's christian her criticism of western civilization

02:27:45.880 it's phallogocentric now we've already talked about what the logos means right and so and and so

02:27:52.520 for for derrida that was a sign of its utter uh what would you call it utter despic the utterly despicable

02:28:00.360 dominant nature of western culture well that that's what animates the post-modernists now they may not

02:28:06.680 know that because an ideology gets fragmented across its adherence and then it only acts as the coherent

02:28:14.280 ideology when all those adherents come together in a mob and then you see the animating spirit

02:28:19.960 so i think i think that there's a battle going on that's a battle exactly at the level that derrida

02:28:28.520 described and that's a theological battle with a philosophical uh with with a philosophical

02:28:37.640 implications and out of those philosophical implications come political implications but

02:28:42.200 it's not primarily political and it's not primarily philosophical it's deeper than that and the

02:28:47.560 post-modernists are out their their criticism was designed to be fundamental and it also emerged out

02:28:55.800 of marxism and let's not forget that the marxist criticism was not only fundamental but just about

02:29:01.480 resulted in the nuclear annihilation of the world these are not trivial issues and we're back in the same

02:29:06.840 in insane boat and so what do i think should be done about that well i've thought about that way before

02:29:14.840 any of this happened and i think that what we should do about it is we should tell the truth because there

02:29:22.280 isn't anything more powerful than that and that's the right theological answer because the spoken truth

02:29:28.520 brings good into being well that's the phallogocentric idea and i i'm trying to revisit that to explain to

02:29:37.240 people what it means and to see if they think that's a good idea i mean that's what we have to figure out

02:29:44.200 is it is that an idea worth adhering to or not the alternative is the see for the post-modernists

02:29:52.520 the world is that landscape of pyramids that i described but there's no transcendent vision that's

02:29:58.760 over above that and all of those pyramids are equally valid and it's a war of everyone against

02:30:05.240 everyone it's like it's like the nightmare of hobbes thomas hobbes except that it's not individuals

02:30:10.360 it's groups and everyone's a group you're a group you're whatever your group is it's like that's death

02:30:16.440 as far as i'm concerned it's it's it's utterly reprehensible and and we better sort it out because

02:30:25.640 if we don't sort it out we are bloody well gonna pay for it so thank you

02:30:37.880 hey how's it going uh i just want to say thank you for doing all this and i really appreciate it

02:30:42.520 that's bob and doug mckenzie right yeah hey how's it going yeah i'm glad you caught that yeah yeah

02:30:48.440 yeah so um i did a facebook poll and some people who are familiar with your work and a question kind

02:30:54.440 of rose to the top like just right out of the blue it was spectacular and uh what it was you didn't

02:31:00.520 really touch it here uh but you touched it a bit in your lectures it was uh about integrating the

02:31:05.240 shadow yeah and uh one of the main questions was how does one go about that especially in the modern

02:31:11.320 world you know like uh we're usually sheltered from anything resembling that kind of concept

02:31:16.840 you know we don't engage like the unknown we don't come into life or death situations most of us

02:31:23.080 unless we work as like an ambulance you know um well that's one thing you can do well that is one

02:31:28.360 thing you can do you know is that you well yeah you can search out experiences that put you there

02:31:33.960 that that's that's you know because well you can do that as a volunteer for example i mean

02:31:38.280 you can one of the things i i saw once it was in montreal i was in this outdoor mall in montreal

02:31:44.520 on saint hubert and uh i saw this great big 17 year old kid you know and uh he had a mohawk and he was

02:31:51.880 dressed in leather and he with you know studs and like he he was he was uh he was doing the modern

02:31:57.640 barbarian thing and he had it really down and you know he's standing in the corner with two pink

02:32:01.960 shopping bags hey so i was looking at him and i thought you know if someone offered him the idea

02:32:07.800 the opportunity to drop those goddamn sleeping bags or shopping bags and go fight with isis he'd be

02:32:14.840 there in a second yeah right because what the hell is some monster like that doing standing on the

02:32:20.360 corner of saint hubert holding two pink shopping bags

02:32:22.680 so i mean so some of it is that you need you need to find out where you can push where you could

02:32:30.680 you can need to find out that edge that you can push yourself against it it's going to be different

02:32:35.240 for different people but there's there's that's the call to adventure and heroism and the you there

02:32:40.680 are life and death situations everywhere around you if if you want to involve yourself in them now

02:32:46.360 and it's sometimes that might be like to put yourself together to the degree that you can

02:32:51.560 say physically or spiritually or intellectually it could be an intellectual battle it could be a moral

02:32:55.800 battle like the frontier is everywhere the frontier is just the edge between what you know and what

02:33:02.120 you don't know you want to put yourself on that damn edge and and make yourself into something and

02:33:07.320 and you can retreat into comfort in the modern world and i think that is a problem you know i mean

02:33:12.360 i've noticed that um it's one of the pathologies of wealth i would say because one of the problems

02:33:18.120 with being relatively wealthy if you're a parent is that you cannot provide your children with

02:33:22.360 necessity and that's a big problem because they need necessity to call them into being and you know

02:33:29.480 if you don't have a lot of material resources and your children ask you for something you can say no

02:33:34.760 because no is the answer it's like no we can't do that but if you can say yes then it's really hard

02:33:39.720 to say no because then you're just arbitrary well i don't know it's like kierkegaard said you know

02:33:44.920 there will come a time when we have so much security and comfort that what we'll want more

02:33:48.440 than anything else is deprivation and challenge and i think i think that's particularly what young

02:33:55.640 men want now i think that that's partly because young women they're stuck with that anyways because

02:34:01.400 they have to it's it's it's the necessity of living in the world and the responsibility of infant

02:34:08.280 care in particular like that occupies them men have to do it voluntarily women now too because

02:34:14.360 of the birth control pill but you know that's 30 years ago we hardly have to talk about that at

02:34:18.760 all yet so thank you so much hi dr peterson so i'm actually a coptic orthodox and egyptian so i

02:34:31.880 found your talk today incredibly interesting i've also taken a deep interest in the early church

02:34:36.280 fathers and as you were talking about hierarchies i hearken back to saint athanasius and the idea of

02:34:41.640 theosis that you brought up last time that god became man so that man can become like god

02:34:46.120 so i was thinking about this in terms of the hierarchies and is that an example of how the

02:34:49.720 top of the pyramid the hierarchy sort of gets inverted or descends to the bottom and brings it up and

02:34:55.560 to the top and that's sort of an attraction to of christianity that's sort of made christianity such

02:34:59.960 a powerful idea what are your thoughts on that oh well it's certainly one of the i mean it's certainly

02:35:04.760 one of the things that made not just christianity a powerful idea because one of the things that

02:35:09.560 happened this was called the democratization of osiris if i remember correctly and like what

02:35:15.240 happened see if i can answer this question using this approach for a sec is that going to work

02:35:22.120 i don't know if i can answer that question that way the the the part of the attraction of christianity

02:35:28.360 but this was something that emerged across time was the notion that even if you were in a lowly

02:35:33.480 position that there was something about you that was akin to the divine and now you might say well

02:35:38.680 that's just wish fulfillment that's what freud would say that's what marx would say right the

02:35:42.440 opiate of the masses i tweeted yesterday something i thought was pretty funny which was that um

02:35:48.280 like religion was the opiate of the masses but that marxism was the methamphetamine of the max of the

02:35:53.640 masses so so so i think the attraction was that it it it it allowed people to recognize their intrinsic

02:36:03.400 dignity and one of the things i've been thinking about is the juxtaposition between genesis 1 and

02:36:08.360 and genesis 2 because what happens in genesis 2 is that human beings collapse and fall right and

02:36:13.000 then we're these fallen creatures that know evil but in in the beginning in genesis 1 it's really an

02:36:18.760 optimistic story because it says well we're the sorts of creatures that partake in the calling forth of

02:36:23.560 being from chaos and then that's in our essential nature and to some degree if you juxtapose both of

02:36:28.920 those it's as if that's the entire biblical story rammed together in the first two chapters which is

02:36:35.160 partly why we're taking so long to get through this by the way is that to the to return to genesis

02:36:40.680 one is the antidote to genesis two it's like to continue to act out the doctrine that you're made

02:36:47.080 in god's image and that means that you're you're capable of speaking good being into existence through

02:36:54.120 truth and that that's also the antidote to the fall which i think is actually the fundamental

02:36:59.640 narrative message of the entire biblical structure and i also think of western civilization for that matter

02:37:05.400 so there's a nobility and this is also why i think nietzsche was fundamentally wrong in his

02:37:10.840 criticism of christianity because he thought about it as slave morality you know the the vengeance of

02:37:15.480 the bottom against the top that's more historical than theological it's like it gives dignity it it it

02:37:22.760 it illuminates the dignity of the human being and and it requires responsibility so it's not just

02:37:30.920 wish fulfillment it's not freudian wish fulfillment the freudian theory which i thought about a lot

02:37:35.960 is is not tenable in my estimation it also doesn't account for the existence of hell because if it's

02:37:40.920 only wish fulfillment why bother with hell i mean it's a lot more if you're really going to just fulfill

02:37:46.760 a wish it's like everybody gets to go to heaven no matter what they do you don't have hell which was

02:37:51.000 of course something absolutely terrifying to medieval christians and then to plenty of people now for

02:37:56.040 that matter so it's the nobility it's the idea of the nobility that i think is deeply attractive

02:38:02.280 to people and that's all there is i mean what do you have to fight against your worm-like fragile

02:38:09.240 mortal existence is the possibility of transcending that with nobility of speech and act that's what

02:38:16.760 you have and who can hear that without feeling ennobled by that now you might say well you might shudder

02:38:24.280 and say well i don't i can't bear the responsibility it's like well fair enough man you know i mean

02:38:29.240 that that's a reasonable criticism but the consequence of not bearing the responsibility is

02:38:34.760 that's hell really so thank you

02:38:45.080 thank you very much for your talk um i don't know if you're familiar with the works of nassim talib

02:38:50.040 um i'm i'm reasonably familiar with them so i i think it's um fair to say that he has

02:38:57.560 he talks about the idea that people and especially modern people have a failure to recognize the

02:39:04.840 unknowns unknowns yes as such yes right that's a good way of thinking about it can you move the mic up

02:39:11.640 a bit so that people can hear you a little better thanks can you hear me yes um well i was wondering do you

02:39:18.680 think that that failure might might be in some way related to the way that modern people fail to relate

02:39:28.040 to the idea of god so in the sense that you know people can't really grapple with the the notion of

02:39:38.680 god i think as much as you can give a rational argument for it you can't feel god in the way that

02:39:42.760 perhaps a more religious person or a more um an older person might have um felt god do you think

02:39:50.360 that that inability to recognize the unknown unknowns might play into that you know well that okay so

02:39:59.240 that seems to be related to this idea of the absence of necessity something like that is that you know

02:40:05.560 because i think that i think that what you're you're making a claim maybe tell me if i've got it wrong that

02:40:12.280 if you're sheltered too much then it it also it also separates you from anything that's divine i guess

02:40:19.480 that might be right because there's not enough intensity of experience in something like that

02:40:23.080 is that is that part of the is that part of the issue it might be more related to the idea of um

02:40:29.000 like realizing the absolute infinitude of what you don't know like the like the mysterium tremendo

02:40:36.120 that kind of you know if you believe that through statistical analysis you can get everything under

02:40:41.720 control and you genuinely believe that at some point you'll get it all under you know yeah okay

02:40:46.600 well so okay so so well that's also i think part of the danger of rationality that the catholics have

02:40:55.000 been implicitly warning against for forever is that the rational mind tends to fall in love with its own

02:41:01.080 productions and then to worship them as absolutes which is i think what milton was trying to represent

02:41:06.440 by his satanic figure in paradise lost i think of that as like a precursor a prophetic precursor to

02:41:12.040 the emergence of totalitarian states in the modern world and so yeah i think that you can believe that

02:41:18.360 what you know is sufficient to banish permanently what you don't know and i do think that that does

02:41:25.640 paradoxically although you'd think that that would make you secure it also does destroy your

02:41:29.800 relationship with with with with with the spirit that might help you deal with what it is that you

02:41:36.040 really don't know with the unknown unknowns so yeah i mean we don't know to what degree extreme experience

02:41:42.520 is necessary to bring forth extreme experience right what do you have to be through before you

02:41:49.000 encounter a religious revelation well people might say well you can't because there's no such thing

02:41:53.720 it's like well don't be so sure about that i mean people have reported them throughout history

02:41:58.680 but they don't generally occur when you're that's my favorite trope when you're eating cheesies

02:42:03.000 and playing you know and playing mario brothers right so yeah so that's the best i can do with that

02:42:11.640 thank you very much yeah this has to be the last question all right i'll make it quick yeah um

02:42:21.240 earlier when you talked about criminality and creativity trends in in men peaking at 14 it

02:42:27.240 reminded me of something you said i think it was joe rogan um talking about sjw's and kind of in how

02:42:34.120 they create their own chaos talking about how adolescents have this drive to change the world and i was

02:42:39.000 wondering if uh if those three the criminality creativity drive to change the world are linked

02:42:45.240 and if so if they manifest differently in men and women um and if they kind of come from the same

02:42:51.480 area well i think they are linked but i'm going to concentrate more on the next second part of your

02:42:56.120 question so i'm going to ask you guys something to think about something so i talked to a friend

02:43:00.200 of mine the other day he's a very very smart guy and we've been talking about well all the sorts of

02:43:05.480 things that we've been talking about tonight for a long time and we were talking about the relatively

02:43:10.280 the relative evolutionary roles of men and women this is speculative obviously and and because our

02:43:16.440 research did indicate it's tentative research so far that that the the the sgs sjw sort of equality

02:43:23.560 above all else philosophy is more prevalent among women but it's predicted by the personality factors

02:43:31.480 that are more common among women so agreeableness and high negative emotion primarily agreeableness

02:43:37.640 but in addition it's also predicted by being female and that's interesting because in most of the

02:43:43.160 personality research that i've done and as far as i know in the literature at you know in more broadly

02:43:49.320 speaking most of the time you can get rid of the attitudinal differences between men and women

02:43:54.120 or at least reduce them by controlling for personality so if you take a feminine man and a masculine woman

02:43:59.400 then you know the the polls reverse that didn't seem to be the case with political correctness

02:44:06.040 and so i've been thinking about that a lot because well men are bailing out of the humanities like mad

02:44:11.960 and pretty much out of the universities except for stem the women are moving in like mad and they're also

02:44:17.480 moving into the political sphere like mad and this is new right we've never had this happen before and

02:44:21.800 we do not know do not know what the significance of it is it's only 50 years old and so we were thinking

02:44:27.480 about this and so i don't know what you think about this proposition but imagine that that that

02:44:32.760 historically speaking it's something like women were responsible for distribution and men were

02:44:39.160 responsible for production something like that and maybe and maybe that's only the case really in the

02:44:45.400 tight confines of the immediate family but that doesn't matter because that's most of the

02:44:49.160 evolutionary landscape for human beings anyways what the women does did was make sure that everybody got

02:44:54.200 enough okay and that seems to me to be one of the things that's driving at least in part the sjw demand

02:45:01.320 for for equity and equality it's like let's make sure everybody has enough it's like well look fair

02:45:07.160 enough you know i mean you can't you can't argue with that but there's there's an antipathy between

02:45:12.840 that and the the reality of differential productivity you know because people really do differ in their

02:45:18.440 productivity so all right so to answer your question fully i do think that the rebellious tendency of

02:45:25.960 adolescence is associated both with that criminality spike especially among men and with creativity

02:45:31.560 yes i think that the sjw phenomena is different and i think it is associated at least in part with the

02:45:37.720 rise of women to political power and and we don't know what women are like when they have political power

02:45:44.600 because they've never had it i mean there's been queens obviously and that sort of thing there's

02:45:49.080 been female authority figures and females have wielded far more power historically than feminists

02:45:53.880 generally like to admit but this is a different thing and we don't know what what a truly female

02:45:59.000 political philosophy would be like but it might be especially if it's not been well examined and it

02:46:04.600 isn't very sophisticated conceptually it could easily be well let's make sure things are distributed equally

02:46:09.240 well yeah but sorry that that's just not gonna do you fly do you think in terms of the west with

02:46:15.720 sjw's and you talked about last lecture as well creating chaos when there is none otherwise it'd be

02:46:20.840 static do you think there would be any validity in saying that in a country like canada where we're

02:46:26.040 pretty gender equal is there any merit to thinking sjw's are trying to create chaos even when there

02:46:33.160 arguably is none on a mass level obviously there's still problems why would they do that otherwise it would

02:46:38.920 be static and that drive well that's it wouldn't but i'm so i read this this i read this quote once

02:46:45.400 and i don't remember who who said it it might have been robert heineland for crying out loud science

02:46:51.080 fiction author that springs to mind but it probably it probably wasn't and the hit the proposition was

02:46:56.360 that men tested ideas and that women tested men and i kind of like that there's something about that

02:47:02.920 you know and now it obviously it's an overgeneralization but we also don't know to what degree

02:47:08.520 women test men surely through provocation it's a lot because like if you want to test someone

02:47:14.200 you don't have a like little conversation with them like you poke the hell out of them and you

02:47:17.720 say okay like i'm gonna like go after you and see where your weak spots are and it seems to me that

02:47:23.000 this it seems to me that in this constant protest and use of shame and and all of that that goes along

02:47:29.720 with this with this sort of radical movement towards egalitarianism that there's a tremendous amount

02:47:35.160 of provocation and god i'm going to say this too even though i shouldn't but but we mean i don't

02:47:42.200 believe this but i'm trying to figure it out you know i thought it was absolutely comical when 50 shades

02:47:48.280 of gray came out hey that just i just thought that was just so insanely comical that at the same time

02:47:53.880 there's this massive political demand for like radical equality and and say with regards to

02:48:01.640 sexual behavior and the fastest selling novel the world had ever seen was s&m domination right it's like

02:48:09.080 oh well we know where the unconscious is going with that one don't we and and sometimes i think

02:48:14.840 like like because one of the things that i've really tried to puzzle out and it's not like i

02:48:18.840 believe this right i'm just telling you what i've where the edges of my thinking have been going is that

02:48:23.640 you have this crazy alliance between the feminists and the radical islamists that i just do not get

02:48:29.000 it's like the feminists it's like why they aren't protesting non-stop about saudi arabia is just

02:48:34.760 completely beyond me like i do not understand it in the least and i wonder too i just wonder bloody well

02:48:41.480 is this is the freudian me is like is there an attraction you know the is there an attraction

02:48:47.240 that's emerging among the female radicals for that totalitarian male dominance that they've chased out

02:48:53.800 of the west and i mean that's a hell of a thing to think but i am after all i am psychoanalytically

02:48:59.000 minded and i do think things like that because like i just can see no rational reason for it the only

02:49:05.160 other rational reason is that well the west needs to fall and so the enemy of my enemy is my friend

02:49:12.200 yeah exactly now what is it the i got that wrong but the enemy of my enemy is my friend yes exactly

02:49:18.520 that's why islamists tend to vote liberal as well yes well so that that could be the case but i i'm not

02:49:23.880 going to shake my suspicion about the this unconscious balancing because as the demand for egalitarianism

02:49:31.720 and the eradication of masculinity uh accelerates there's going to be a longing in the unconscious

02:49:38.520 for the precise opposite for of that right the more you you scream for equality the more your

02:49:44.920 unconscious is going to admire dominance and so well that's that's that's well that's how you think if

02:49:52.920 you're psychoanalytically minded and you know i'm a great admirer of freud he knew a hell of a lot more

02:49:57.320 than people like to think and and so which is partly why everyone still hates him even though

02:50:01.400 it's been a hundred years since he's you know really really been around so all right we should stop

02:50:09.400 if you found this conversation meaningful you might think about picking up dad's books maps of

02:50:13.480 meaning the architecture of belief or his newer bestseller 12 rules for life an antidote to chaos

02:50:19.080 both of these works delve much deeper into the topics covered in the jordan b peterson podcast

02:50:23.400 see jordan b peterson dot com for audio ebook and text links or pick up the books at your favorite

02:50:28.600 bookseller remember to check out jordan b peterson dot com slash personality for information on his new

02:50:33.960 course which is currently 50 off i really hope you enjoyed this podcast if you did please let a friend

02:50:40.440 know or leave a review next week's episode is a continuation of this biblical series and delves into

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The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - April 26, 2020

Biblical Series： God and the Hierarchy of Authority

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