The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - Maps of Meaning 1, 2, & 3

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00:00:54.500 Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

00:00:57.420 This podcast is an amalgamation of the first three episodes of Maps of Meaning, recorded by TV Ontario.

00:01:06.640 You can support these podcasts by donating the amount of your choice to Dr. Peterson's Patreon account,

00:01:12.620 which can be found by searching Jordan Peterson Patreon, or by finding the link in the description.

00:01:20.040 Dr. Peterson's self-development programs, Self-Authoring, can be found at selfauthoring.com.

00:01:26.020 One of the fundamental theses of this course is that in modern literature, and in literature that isn't so modern,

00:01:37.200 there's the notion of a human-created monster.

00:01:41.180 Frankenstein, right, springs to mind, and at an adequate time.

00:01:44.200 I mean, Frankenstein was a fantasy, an unconscious fantasy, a dream in actuality,

00:01:49.560 about the potential dangers of unbridled technological advancement, right?

00:01:53.780 Well, as Frankenstein monsters face us daily, I mean, it's become a constant part of our existence.

00:02:01.120 Why is that?

00:02:01.960 Well, maybe it's something like this, and this is certainly a notion that Jung would agree with.

00:02:09.880 If we don't develop a moral sense, as conscious and as elaborated as our technological sense,

00:02:17.920 the fact that we're capable of becoming increasingly powerful will necessarily do us in.

00:02:24.160 And so maybe it is something like this, maybe, and this is a strict Jungian notion,

00:02:37.000 maybe 500 years ago when we started to ratchet up the rate at which we were developing our technological expertise,

00:02:44.560 and left our mythological and religious presuppositions and conceptions behind as archaic

00:02:52.560 and perhaps as predicated on superstition, maybe we need to spend as much time updating them

00:02:58.600 and bringing them into the domain of clear consciousness and control

00:03:01.980 as we have spent on developing our technological sense.

00:03:09.780 If you are a medieval Christian or an archaic religious thinker of any sort,

00:03:14.160 your first presupposition was that the world and the cosmos existed exactly as they appeared,

00:03:19.040 which with you or at least your village or town or country at the center,

00:03:24.620 and certainly with the earth at the center, and with the cosmos as a shield around the earth,

00:03:29.320 and with the earth itself as the domain of man being the fundamental attribute of the cosmos.

00:03:34.820 So this is a quotation from Jung, and it's one I like a lot,

00:03:39.580 because I think it adequately and succinctly describes the distinction between

00:03:47.520 the way that modern people think,

00:03:50.540 and the way that people think if they're still ensconced within a traditional belief form.

00:03:55.460 How totally different did the world appear to medieval man?

00:03:59.240 For him the earth was eternally fixed and at rest in the center of the universe,

00:04:03.960 encircled by the course of a sun that solicitously bestowed its warmth.

00:04:08.520 Despite the fact that pre-empirical people had to deal with death and disease on a scale

00:04:14.020 that I think is completely unknown to us,

00:04:16.420 it doesn't seem unreasonable to presuppose that there was a certain degree of comfort

00:04:20.220 to be found in a worldview of this sort, right?

00:04:22.340 Because it appeared at least to the casual observer that the cosmos was human-centric,

00:04:29.960 and that the notion that human purpose was in some way associated with cosmic significance

00:04:36.400 seemed to be beyond question, at least in part because there were no theories of reality

00:04:41.980 that would compete with that initial preconception.

00:04:45.040 Men were all children of God under the loving care of the Most High,

00:04:48.220 who prepared them for eternal blessedness,

00:04:50.920 and all knew exactly what they should do and how they should conduct themselves

00:04:54.180 in order to rise from a corruptible world to an incorruptible and joyous existence.

00:05:00.580 Such a life no longer seems real to us, even in our dreams.

00:05:04.880 Natural science has long ago torn this lovely veil to shreds.

00:05:10.000 How is it that people could think that way,

00:05:12.620 given that it was so wrong and still survive?

00:05:14.720 Given that in large part we are necessarily creatures of tradition,

00:05:20.040 how is it that we can sever the ties with the manner in which our ancestors thought,

00:05:25.720 and suffer no ill consequences in result?

00:05:31.760 People think automatically, and I think for good reasons,

00:05:34.680 that the march of human thought has been unbroken progress towards increased rationality,

00:05:41.260 increased power, increased clarity,

00:05:43.840 but it's certainly the case that as a consequence of sacrifice of our religious beliefs

00:05:48.080 and our philosophical beliefs,

00:05:50.760 that problems of meaning have become more paramount for the modern person.

00:05:53.980 And then you might ask, well, what exactly are the consequences of that?

00:05:57.220 And I think initially,

00:05:58.740 the best perspective to take is one that's historical.

00:06:01.900 As we've moved away from a classical,

00:06:07.420 mystical, or mythological worldview,

00:06:10.720 a number of dramatic occurrences have unfolded.

00:06:14.760 We've become much more technologically powerful, right?

00:06:18.020 The application of a strict empirical model,

00:06:20.700 designed to abstract out from everyone's experience,

00:06:23.780 those things that are material and constant have enabled us to produce

00:06:27.840 technological implements of extreme power, right?

00:06:33.060 Both for good, at least in principle, with regards to medical advances,

00:06:36.820 and also for ill,

00:06:38.220 in terms of our ability to control weapons of unbelievable destructive force.

00:06:44.240 So we're more powerful.

00:06:46.360 Are we any smarter or any wiser?

00:06:48.580 Well, I think a casual glance at the history of the 20th century

00:06:52.220 would suggest that perhaps we're not.

00:06:54.340 I don't think there's any indication whatsoever,

00:06:56.400 although perhaps things have improved in the last 15 years,

00:06:59.560 that an additional consequence of our capacity to extract ourselves

00:07:04.560 from our religious modes of thought

00:07:06.940 has been a palpable increase in wisdom or tolerance or compassion,

00:07:11.460 or a palpable increase in our ability to understand explicitly

00:07:14.820 what might constitute the basis for a suitable and stable state.

00:07:21.620 So you might take, for example,

00:07:23.180 the fact that the 20th century has been unbelievably bloody, right?

00:07:27.660 Literally hundreds of millions of people

00:07:29.320 killed in conflicts of one form or another,

00:07:32.380 both external, say, in the course of World War II or Vietnam,

00:07:35.940 and internal, in the case of Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union,

00:07:40.160 or any of the vast array of countries

00:07:41.700 who've subjected their citizens to terrible internal repression

00:07:46.440 in the name of the maintenance of order.

00:07:49.820 Alexander Solzhenitsyn estimated that 60 million people

00:07:53.100 died in the Soviet Union between 1919 and 1959

00:07:56.140 as a consequence of internal repression.

00:07:59.500 And his estimates were that perhaps twice that many died

00:08:02.400 during the Cultural Revolution in China.

00:08:04.280 looking back on the 20th century,

00:08:09.580 one thing seems relatively clear, right?

00:08:14.200 Although

00:08:14.760 humanity as a whole

00:08:19.860 has ceased, or had ceased at least,

00:08:22.600 to engage in large-scale religious conflicts,

00:08:24.960 although they seem to have been

00:08:26.200 making a vicious comeback in the last five years,

00:08:29.520 our ability to live together still seems incredibly compromised

00:08:34.980 by our capacity to engage in ideological conflict, right?

00:08:39.720 And it doesn't seem to me

00:08:40.820 ridiculous to presume

00:08:43.040 that the battles between capitalism and communism, say,

00:08:48.200 or between capitalism, communism, and fascism,

00:08:51.260 or even the emergent struggle between

00:08:53.400 fundamentalist Islam and the West

00:08:55.900 can necessarily be regarded as anything but extensions

00:08:59.960 of our tendency towards religious and mythological conflict,

00:09:03.260 even though, in principle,

00:09:04.900 systems like communism and fascism

00:09:06.640 were not predicated on explicitly religious presuppositions.

00:09:15.200 Well, it seems to me that a logical conclusion

00:09:18.320 from observations of that sort

00:09:20.680 is that even if you eradicate

00:09:22.480 the traditional trappings

00:09:23.940 of a mythological worldview,

00:09:25.980 which seems to be what's happened

00:09:27.220 as a consequence of our

00:09:28.400 rise in empirical knowledge,

00:09:30.520 that you don't eradicate the tendency

00:09:32.180 for people to formulate groups,

00:09:34.820 belief systems,

00:09:36.360 around conceptions of ways

00:09:40.200 that you should behave

00:09:41.580 that are, at the very least,

00:09:43.940 religious in structure and action,

00:09:45.800 even if they're not religious in name.

00:09:47.480 I mean, I think it's a very peculiar coincidence,

00:09:50.260 for example,

00:09:50.800 that the Soviet communists erected

00:09:54.120 a male trinity,

00:09:56.660 Marx, Lenin, and Stalin,

00:09:59.720 as an apparent replacement

00:10:00.960 for the masculine trinity

00:10:02.420 that comprised the essential deities

00:10:05.140 of orthodox,

00:10:07.580 Russian orthodox Christianity.

00:10:09.500 Why would these forms re-emerge

00:10:11.240 so spontaneously?

00:10:13.100 And what does it mean

00:10:13.840 that people who regard themselves

00:10:16.080 as essentially modern and empirical

00:10:17.920 in their presuppositions

00:10:19.140 seem to be absolutely susceptible

00:10:21.980 in their fundament

00:10:24.000 to ideological claims?

00:10:27.000 Well, if you look at the Soviet Union,

00:10:28.580 which I think is a very instructive case,

00:10:30.340 because the Soviets,

00:10:31.940 the Russians,

00:10:32.940 were really the last European power

00:10:35.060 to fall prey

00:10:35.940 to the conflict

00:10:37.540 between empiricism

00:10:39.040 and science and religion.

00:10:40.380 And they didn't really fall prey

00:10:42.180 to that until the mid-1800s,

00:10:44.060 because Russia was a relatively

00:10:45.240 closed society,

00:10:46.440 relatively illiterate,

00:10:48.240 maintaining a medieval structure

00:10:50.920 far past the time

00:10:53.640 when other European countries

00:10:54.900 had abandoned that.

00:10:56.420 In the 1850s,

00:10:58.100 a wave of atheism spread

00:10:59.740 across Russia,

00:11:01.040 in some sense,

00:11:02.440 as a wave of enlightenment,

00:11:03.860 but also as a plague.

00:11:05.540 And figures as towering

00:11:10.680 as Tolstoy

00:11:11.540 remembered in his memoirs

00:11:16.780 the very day that he realized

00:11:19.280 that the empirical discoveries

00:11:21.660 of Western Europeans

00:11:23.100 had eradicated his ability

00:11:25.180 to believe in the Russian Orthodox system.

00:11:27.480 You lose something like that.

00:11:29.680 What happens?

00:11:31.060 Well, if you believe

00:11:32.840 that mythological thinking

00:11:34.440 is nothing but

00:11:35.300 superstitious empiricism

00:11:37.500 and that it's been replaced

00:11:38.540 entirely by a more

00:11:39.580 appropriate modern view,

00:11:41.120 then nothing happens, right?

00:11:42.240 It's all to your benefit

00:11:43.280 to become enlightened.

00:11:45.380 But if you believe

00:11:46.120 that there's more

00:11:46.720 to the story than that,

00:11:47.860 and that more traditional,

00:11:49.840 ethical, and moral systems

00:11:51.220 predicated on

00:11:52.320 mythological presuppositions

00:11:53.880 offer you a map

00:11:55.080 of how to behave

00:11:56.020 and what to think

00:11:56.880 and how to regulate

00:11:57.560 your emotions

00:11:58.220 and what to strive for,

00:12:00.200 none of which can be replaced

00:12:01.780 by a scientific perspective

00:12:03.240 then the eradication

00:12:04.600 of a system like that

00:12:05.500 leaves a vacuum.

00:12:06.720 And then the question is

00:12:07.660 what rushes in

00:12:08.700 to fill a vacuum?

00:12:10.140 Well, if you look

00:12:10.940 at the case of the Soviet Union,

00:12:12.500 it seems quite instructive,

00:12:13.680 doesn't it?

00:12:14.420 I mean, there's a 30-year period

00:12:16.420 where there's tremendous

00:12:17.840 intellectual clash,

00:12:19.280 say, between

00:12:19.940 a materialist

00:12:21.900 and empirical perspective

00:12:23.380 and a Russian Orthodox perspective.

00:12:25.700 The Russian Orthodox perspective

00:12:28.780 loses its attractiveness

00:12:30.660 for the reigning

00:12:31.840 intellectual elite

00:12:33.020 and the presuppositions

00:12:34.720 of communism,

00:12:35.680 which appear rational

00:12:36.660 by contrast,

00:12:37.660 but which by all evidence

00:12:38.940 were not,

00:12:39.860 rush in to fill the gap.

00:12:41.940 And I want to read you

00:12:42.880 something that Nietzsche wrote.

00:12:45.060 It's perhaps the most famous

00:12:46.320 thing he ever said,

00:12:47.800 although it's almost

00:12:48.400 entirely taken out

00:12:49.460 of context

00:12:50.120 and misquoted,

00:12:51.000 and if not misquoted,

00:12:51.920 at least misunderstood,

00:12:52.780 because Nietzsche

00:12:54.060 was one of these

00:12:54.760 strange people

00:12:55.440 who was capable

00:12:56.160 of living 50

00:12:57.540 or even 100 years

00:12:58.560 into the future,

00:12:59.540 and although he was,

00:13:01.400 is generally regarded

00:13:02.740 as an enemy

00:13:03.400 of Christianity

00:13:04.020 and superstition,

00:13:05.300 and was certainly

00:13:05.960 an unbelievably outspoken

00:13:07.700 opponent of Christian

00:13:08.640 traditionalism,

00:13:09.860 he also knew

00:13:10.680 that if you let

00:13:12.000 the old gods die,

00:13:14.100 the probability

00:13:14.820 that blood

00:13:15.740 would flood the land

00:13:16.780 was virtually 100%.

00:13:18.500 So let me read you

00:13:19.460 what he wrote.

00:13:20.940 Have you not heard

00:13:22.300 of that madman

00:13:23.960 who lit a lantern

00:13:25.800 in the bright morning hours,

00:13:27.720 ran to the marketplace

00:13:28.600 and cried incessantly,

00:13:30.800 I seek God.

00:13:32.640 As many of those

00:13:33.400 who do not believe in God

00:13:34.540 were standing around

00:13:35.420 just then,

00:13:35.960 he provoked much laughter.

00:13:38.160 Why?

00:13:39.160 Did he get lost?

00:13:40.380 Said one.

00:13:41.220 Did he lose his way

00:13:42.000 like a child?

00:13:42.940 Said another.

00:13:43.820 Or is he hiding?

00:13:44.840 Is he afraid of us?

00:13:46.100 Has he gone on a voyage

00:13:47.060 or immigrated?

00:13:48.460 Thus they yelled

00:13:49.240 and laughed.

00:13:49.860 The madman jumped

00:13:51.720 into their midst

00:13:52.420 and pierced them

00:13:53.120 with his glances.

00:13:54.640 Whither is God?

00:13:55.460 He cried.

00:13:56.040 I shall tell you.

00:13:57.200 We have killed him,

00:13:58.440 you and I.

00:13:59.500 All of us are his murderers.

00:14:01.780 But how have we done this?

00:14:03.420 How were we able

00:14:04.300 to drink up the sea?

00:14:05.940 Who gave us the sponge

00:14:07.180 to wipe away

00:14:08.000 the entire horizon?

00:14:09.940 What did we do

00:14:11.160 when we unchained

00:14:12.480 this earth from its sun?

00:14:14.900 Whither is it moving now?

00:14:17.020 Whither are we moving now?

00:14:18.540 Away from all suns?

00:14:21.060 Are we not plunging

00:14:22.240 continuously backwards,

00:14:25.040 sideward,

00:14:26.100 forward,

00:14:26.780 in all directions?

00:14:28.940 Is there any up or down left?

00:14:32.100 Are we not straying

00:14:33.500 as though through

00:14:34.420 an infinite nothing?

00:14:35.560 Do we not feel

00:14:36.340 the breath of empty space?

00:14:38.480 Has it not become colder?

00:14:41.040 Is not night and more night

00:14:42.820 coming on all the while?

00:14:45.120 Must not lanterns be lit

00:14:46.720 in the morning?

00:14:48.420 Do we not hear anything yet

00:14:49.820 of the noise

00:14:50.400 of the grave diggers

00:14:51.340 who are burying God?

00:14:53.060 Do we not smell anything yet

00:14:54.480 of God's decomposition?

00:14:57.040 Gods, too, decompose.

00:14:59.380 God is dead.

00:15:00.740 God remains dead.

00:15:02.140 And we have killed him.

00:15:04.740 How shall we,

00:15:05.720 the murderer of all murderers,

00:15:08.220 comfort ourselves?

00:15:09.080 What was holiest

00:15:10.080 and most powerful

00:15:10.880 of all that the world

00:15:11.760 has yet owned

00:15:12.700 has bled to death

00:15:14.180 under our knives?

00:15:15.340 Who will wipe

00:15:15.980 this blood off us?

00:15:17.540 What water is there

00:15:18.680 for us to clean ourselves?

00:15:20.640 What festivals of atonement?

00:15:22.580 What sacred game

00:15:23.500 shall we have to invent?

00:15:25.320 Is not the greatness

00:15:26.040 of this deed

00:15:26.720 too great for us?

00:15:28.380 Must we not ourselves

00:15:29.420 become God

00:15:30.140 simply to seem

00:15:31.000 worthy of it?

00:15:31.740 Well, as you can tell,

00:15:41.020 that's a much different notion

00:15:42.720 from the casual

00:15:43.860 God is dead quotation

00:15:45.900 that's most generally

00:15:46.940 associated with Nietzsche.

00:15:48.200 Well, what is he saying?

00:15:49.560 Well, he's saying

00:15:49.980 something like this.

00:15:52.900 A system like Christianity

00:15:55.060 or any system

00:15:56.400 that's oriented a society

00:15:59.860 for thousands

00:16:00.680 and thousands of years

00:16:02.120 can't simply be eradicated

00:16:05.100 by a casual gesture

00:16:06.360 without consequences

00:16:08.300 ensuing in its aftermath.

00:16:10.500 What consequences?

00:16:12.720 Well, Nietzsche says,

00:16:14.560 well, we'll no longer

00:16:15.520 know up from down.

00:16:17.540 What does he mean by that?

00:16:19.920 Metaphorically.

00:16:21.100 Well, up,

00:16:21.920 that's where you're headed, right?

00:16:23.580 And down,

00:16:24.240 that's what you want

00:16:24.980 to stay away from.

00:16:25.900 And when you eradicate

00:16:27.040 the most fundamental

00:16:28.160 presuppositions

00:16:29.080 of your system of values,

00:16:31.060 then there is no up

00:16:32.200 and there is no down.

00:16:33.220 And then where are you precisely?

00:16:35.680 Well, it's not so easy...

00:16:37.400 It's not so easy to say,

00:16:39.500 having not necessarily

00:16:40.780 ever been in that position.

00:16:42.180 What is your life like

00:16:43.480 when you don't know up from down?

00:16:44.720 Is it merely neutral?

00:16:46.020 Is there merely no value left?

00:16:48.300 Or could it possibly be the case

00:16:50.100 that if up and down

00:16:51.420 have both been eradicated,

00:16:52.740 that the place that you're left in

00:16:54.180 is something much more akin

00:16:55.980 to a permanent state of suffering?

00:16:57.720 Because maybe it's only the case

00:16:59.980 that the constant capacity

00:17:02.480 to strive for up,

00:17:04.720 in it being an up

00:17:05.700 that you believe in,

00:17:06.900 the constant striving for up

00:17:08.240 is actually what makes

00:17:09.160 your life bearable to you.

00:17:10.360 And if you lost the sense

00:17:11.560 of up and down,

00:17:12.480 the place that you would end up

00:17:13.700 would be not so much neutral

00:17:15.000 as terrible.

00:17:16.100 Now, if you have any belief system

00:17:18.860 at all, you do this.

00:17:19.920 So let's say you're an advocate

00:17:21.260 of left-wing politics.

00:17:23.140 You take a pro-environmental stance

00:17:24.900 or an anti-corporate stance.

00:17:26.580 This is a relatively common thing

00:17:27.940 to do among undergraduates.

00:17:30.040 What do you do

00:17:30.960 when you hold that belief system?

00:17:33.440 You view the world

00:17:34.280 as it lays itself out,

00:17:36.160 and you explain the manner

00:17:37.520 in which it manifests itself

00:17:39.040 in terms of the axioms

00:17:40.540 of that belief system.

00:17:41.560 And you may know that

00:17:42.920 you can do it, right?

00:17:44.580 You can tell a credible story

00:17:46.320 about why the world

00:17:47.600 is the way it is

00:17:48.700 by adopting, say,

00:17:50.080 an anti-corporate perspective.

00:17:52.380 Because there are all sorts

00:17:53.580 of terrible things

00:17:54.340 about the world

00:17:55.000 that are a consequence,

00:17:56.360 say, of corporate maneuvering.

00:17:59.140 And you might also say that,

00:18:00.560 and Piaget would say this,

00:18:01.720 that it's a necessary

00:18:02.920 developmental stage

00:18:04.600 to acquire allegiance

00:18:06.840 to a given belief system.

00:18:09.080 Why?

00:18:10.040 Well, any up is better

00:18:11.320 than none.

00:18:12.080 That might be the first observation.

00:18:14.420 So even if your belief system

00:18:16.200 is relatively insufficient

00:18:17.500 and easily challenged

00:18:18.480 on intellectual grounds

00:18:19.500 and perhaps not very complete anyways,

00:18:21.460 the fact that it does lay out

00:18:22.780 a moral structure for you

00:18:23.880 and tell you good from evil

00:18:25.360 and right from wrong,

00:18:27.000 that's a plus.

00:18:28.740 That's an advantage.

00:18:30.080 Now, it's relative

00:18:30.960 intellectual weakness

00:18:32.280 and it's incoherence,

00:18:34.360 assuming it is incoherent

00:18:35.900 to some degree.

00:18:37.000 That's a flaw.

00:18:38.460 But that doesn't mean

00:18:39.280 that the effort

00:18:39.880 to establish a system

00:18:40.980 like that is worthless.

00:18:42.700 It's worthwhile.

00:18:43.800 And Nietzsche said,

00:18:44.620 say, with regards

00:18:45.280 to Christianity and Europe,

00:18:47.600 he said,

00:18:48.540 well, the errors,

00:18:51.780 intellectual and moral

00:18:53.160 of institutional Christianity

00:18:54.840 are essentially beyond count.

00:18:56.980 but there's one thing

00:19:00.060 you have to remember.

00:19:02.360 First of all,

00:19:03.160 an ordering of that sort

00:19:04.080 is necessary

00:19:05.080 because the alternative,

00:19:07.580 which is always hidden from you

00:19:09.140 insofar as you're

00:19:09.980 inside a moral system,

00:19:11.540 the alternative is far worse.

00:19:13.340 Chaos.

00:19:14.080 That's worse.

00:19:14.940 I mean,

00:19:23.820 part of the reason

00:19:24.400 that the Germans

00:19:25.020 preferred Hitler

00:19:25.980 to chaos

00:19:28.080 was because they felt

00:19:30.140 that the order

00:19:32.360 that Hitler promised,

00:19:34.040 repressive as it was,

00:19:36.020 was preferable

00:19:36.940 to the chaos

00:19:37.660 that was likely

00:19:38.220 to ensue

00:19:38.800 in its absence.

00:19:40.580 What is it about chaos

00:19:41.980 that's so terrifying?

00:19:47.580 Second, Nietzsche said,

00:19:50.480 adopting a belief system

00:19:54.980 of any sort

00:19:55.900 and imposing coherency

00:19:58.360 on the world,

00:19:59.620 viewing it through the lens

00:20:00.660 of that explicit system,

00:20:03.600 disciplines your mind.

00:20:06.040 So, for example,

00:20:06.900 to live in the absence

00:20:11.380 of any stated beliefs

00:20:12.500 is hardly to live at all.

00:20:14.320 To live in the presence

00:20:15.360 of a narrow-minded

00:20:17.040 and extreme belief system

00:20:18.700 is at least

00:20:19.500 to undergo the rigors,

00:20:21.180 both behavioral

00:20:22.180 and intellectual,

00:20:23.640 of coming to terms

00:20:24.700 with the world

00:20:25.340 from some perspective.

00:20:30.480 Nietzsche said,

00:20:31.340 the reason that

00:20:31.980 the modern mind,

00:20:33.980 such as it is,

00:20:34.880 was able to free itself

00:20:36.800 from the past

00:20:37.620 at all

00:20:38.420 was because it had first

00:20:40.740 thoroughly subjected itself

00:20:43.400 to the tyranny

00:20:44.560 that was imposed

00:20:45.460 by the past,

00:20:46.880 in consequence,

00:20:48.020 disciplined itself,

00:20:49.560 developed enough discipline

00:20:50.760 as a consequence

00:20:52.000 of that subordination

00:20:53.140 to then break free of it.

00:21:00.660 In all science of morals

00:21:02.140 so far,

00:21:02.700 one thing was lacking,

00:21:03.660 strange as it may sound,

00:21:04.880 the problem of morality itself.

00:21:06.800 What was lacking

00:21:07.400 was any suspicion

00:21:08.260 that there was

00:21:08.740 something problematic here.

00:21:10.600 Every society,

00:21:12.180 every functioning individual,

00:21:13.860 every functioning family,

00:21:15.540 every social unit

00:21:16.880 has a moral code.

00:21:19.340 But they differ.

00:21:21.460 So what does that mean exactly?

00:21:23.520 Well, it's complicated,

00:21:24.640 isn't it?

00:21:25.000 Because the fact

00:21:25.980 of the universality

00:21:26.980 of the code,

00:21:28.540 the fact of the code,

00:21:30.280 indicates that the code,

00:21:31.880 or a code is necessary.

00:21:34.140 By the same token,

00:21:35.800 the fact that there's

00:21:36.520 a multiplicity of codes

00:21:38.180 seems to suggest

00:21:39.440 that the particulars

00:21:40.520 of a given code

00:21:41.380 aren't necessarily relevant.

00:21:43.660 And so Nietzsche says,

00:21:44.920 brilliantly, I think,

00:21:46.440 we're faced with a problem.

00:21:47.740 No life without morality.

00:21:51.840 No absolute morality.

00:21:54.360 What do we do?

00:21:56.260 And one of the things

00:21:57.000 Jung observed was that

00:21:58.000 if you look at the structure

00:21:59.040 of stories,

00:22:00.100 he thought first,

00:22:01.000 there's a relationship

00:22:01.860 between stories

00:22:03.300 and moral codes.

00:22:04.740 Well,

00:22:05.260 seems relatively

00:22:06.040 straightforward,

00:22:06.700 doesn't it?

00:22:07.300 If you tell a simple story

00:22:08.960 like a parable,

00:22:10.340 sometimes they're complex too,

00:22:11.640 like an Aesop's fable,

00:22:12.700 we'll say,

00:22:13.500 what do you extract out

00:22:14.620 from the story?

00:22:15.920 Moral.

00:22:16.880 What's the moral?

00:22:18.120 Well, it's the implication

00:22:19.060 of the story for behavior, right?

00:22:21.780 So you tell a little story

00:22:22.840 about someone

00:22:23.460 who acts out

00:22:24.000 a given moral code

00:22:25.400 and that person

00:22:26.160 does better or worse,

00:22:27.320 and the moral of the story

00:22:28.340 is if you act in this manner,

00:22:29.980 you will do better

00:22:30.760 or worse.

00:22:32.120 Proverbial knowledge.

00:22:35.540 We all tell stories.

00:22:37.940 They have identifiable structure.

00:22:39.880 You can tell that

00:22:40.560 because a movie studio

00:22:42.340 in Hollywood

00:22:42.960 can produce a movie

00:22:43.900 and people all over the world

00:22:45.040 will watch it.

00:22:46.300 People all over the world

00:22:47.280 tell stories to one another.

00:22:50.260 The plot elements seem similar.

00:22:53.560 Are the morals similar?

00:22:56.860 That's a more difficult question, right?

00:22:59.580 We know that the details

00:23:01.300 of morality

00:23:02.040 can vary from culture to culture.

00:23:04.520 Is there anything

00:23:05.440 that doesn't vary

00:23:07.200 from culture to culture?

00:23:08.860 Now, why would you want

00:23:09.520 to find that?

00:23:12.340 Well, Alexander Solzhenitsyn

00:23:14.420 thought that one of the most

00:23:15.800 important occurrences

00:23:17.880 of the 20th century

00:23:19.060 were the Nuremberg trials.

00:23:23.460 The Nuremberg trials

00:23:24.800 brought the perpetrators

00:23:27.900 of the Nazi genocide

00:23:29.740 to justice.

00:23:31.080 And it's easy to be cynical

00:23:32.460 about that

00:23:33.040 and perhaps you should

00:23:33.900 be cynical about it

00:23:35.100 because the victors

00:23:37.680 brought the losers

00:23:38.600 to trial

00:23:39.340 and so, of course,

00:23:41.400 the losers

00:23:41.980 were going to be tried

00:23:43.220 from the perspective

00:23:44.260 of the winner's moral code.

00:23:46.420 But Solzhenitsyn says,

00:23:47.400 well, wait, you know,

00:23:48.240 there's something

00:23:48.880 more to this story,

00:23:51.080 at least there seems to be,

00:23:52.660 in that many of the events

00:23:55.720 that characterized

00:23:56.880 the Nazi atrocities

00:23:59.680 were so awful

00:24:01.740 outside of intellectual

00:24:04.160 argumentation.

00:24:06.680 Because you can provide

00:24:07.660 an intellectual argument

00:24:08.760 for anything.

00:24:09.720 They were so awful

00:24:10.800 that the proper visceral

00:24:13.540 embodied response

00:24:15.220 of any observer,

00:24:17.180 regardless of specific

00:24:18.480 moral code,

00:24:19.840 should be repugnance.

00:24:21.380 Period.

00:24:21.680 Such that,

00:24:24.680 encoded at least initially

00:24:26.080 in international law,

00:24:28.580 genocide is a crime

00:24:29.660 against humanity.

00:24:31.440 Right.

00:24:32.000 No matter what the particulars

00:24:33.580 of your moral code,

00:24:36.180 so goes the logic.

00:24:38.280 You cannot construct

00:24:39.480 a viable moral code

00:24:40.780 that enables genocide.

00:24:44.260 If not a logical impossibility,

00:24:46.600 and I think it is

00:24:47.480 a logical impossibility,

00:24:48.860 it's an ethical impossibility.

00:24:50.340 And then you have

00:24:51.300 to ask yourself,

00:24:52.680 and this is not precisely

00:24:54.500 an intellectual question,

00:24:56.200 does that seem credible

00:24:57.760 to you?

00:24:59.540 Does it seem credible

00:25:00.840 that there are acts

00:25:02.260 that are so terrible

00:25:04.900 that no one,

00:25:07.860 regardless of their

00:25:08.680 stated position,

00:25:09.620 should ever engage in them?

00:25:12.000 And if the answer is yes,

00:25:14.120 then I would say,

00:25:14.900 well,

00:25:15.260 if you haven't moved

00:25:16.560 towards personal

00:25:18.580 acceptance of an ultimate

00:25:21.340 up,

00:25:22.480 so to speak,

00:25:23.360 you've certainly

00:25:24.240 identified at least

00:25:25.420 one down

00:25:26.320 that you don't want

00:25:27.220 to approach.

00:25:28.660 And that's the beginnings

00:25:29.880 of the establishment

00:25:30.800 of some notion

00:25:32.020 of absolute moral authority.

00:25:34.440 So what if we said,

00:25:40.400 hypothetically,

00:25:41.280 something like this?

00:25:43.060 Let's say that morality

00:25:45.120 isn't a philosophy,

00:25:47.120 it's not something explicit,

00:25:48.980 something implicit.

00:25:50.220 How does it evolve?

00:25:51.540 Well,

00:25:52.580 emotional creatures produce it,

00:25:54.800 and you don't have to

00:25:55.440 produce it in isolation

00:25:56.440 if you weren't a social animal,

00:25:58.360 if you lived a solitary

00:25:59.200 and nocturnal existence

00:26:00.420 by yourself.

00:26:01.340 There's no need

00:26:02.160 for morality,

00:26:03.000 because you don't have

00:26:03.440 to regulate your behavior

00:26:04.560 with regards to your peers.

00:26:06.440 But you're a social animal,

00:26:07.780 so you're stuck

00:26:08.400 with everybody else.

00:26:09.320 But everybody else

00:26:10.940 could be conceived of

00:26:11.980 as a grand average,

00:26:13.260 right?

00:26:13.700 How would you act

00:26:14.600 towards the average person?

00:26:16.640 Well,

00:26:17.060 I would say that

00:26:17.940 very, very stable

00:26:19.120 moral systems

00:26:19.980 tell you exactly that,

00:26:21.300 and they say things like,

00:26:22.420 do unto others

00:26:26.500 as you would have them

00:26:27.340 do unto you,

00:26:28.020 right?

00:26:28.320 Basic principle

00:26:29.100 of reciprocity.

00:26:30.000 Why does that work?

00:26:31.980 And it's a complex precept.

00:26:33.920 It means I should treat you

00:26:34.860 like I would like

00:26:35.960 to be treated by you.

00:26:37.840 And you might think,

00:26:38.600 well,

00:26:38.700 that means to be nice to you.

00:26:40.000 But that isn't really

00:26:40.600 what it means,

00:26:41.180 because nice isn't enough,

00:26:42.480 right?

00:26:42.920 What I want from you,

00:26:44.100 really,

00:26:45.080 is communication,

00:26:46.200 real communication,

00:26:47.340 feedback.

00:26:48.120 What am I doing

00:26:48.820 that's acceptable and good?

00:26:50.160 What am I doing

00:26:50.640 that's unacceptable

00:26:51.540 and not good?

00:26:52.400 And that latter

00:26:54.180 aspect of feedback

00:26:56.800 is part of the reason

00:26:57.660 why if you're

00:26:58.900 psychopathological

00:26:59.860 and isolated,

00:27:01.080 you're in much worse shape

00:27:02.360 because half of your sanity

00:27:04.980 or three quarters of it

00:27:06.040 or 90% of it,

00:27:07.100 who knows,

00:27:07.580 is distributed sanity.

00:27:08.900 You don't have to be

00:27:09.620 that sane

00:27:10.320 as long as you're

00:27:11.200 hanging around other people

00:27:12.260 because as soon as you do

00:27:13.160 something that's deviant,

00:27:14.760 they're going to raise

00:27:15.420 an eyebrow at you,

00:27:16.440 right?

00:27:16.740 And then you think,

00:27:17.460 oh, well,

00:27:18.660 not that.

00:27:19.560 And as soon as you

00:27:20.420 do something good,

00:27:21.620 then they're going to

00:27:22.100 pay more attention to you

00:27:22.900 and smile at you.

00:27:23.780 So all of the information

00:27:25.240 about how to regulate

00:27:26.240 yourself is out there

00:27:27.820 in the world,

00:27:29.100 right?

00:27:29.500 The average person.

00:27:31.420 How many people

00:27:31.880 do you interact with

00:27:32.560 in a week?

00:27:33.760 300, say.

00:27:34.720 Maybe it's not that many.

00:27:35.620 100.

00:27:36.840 How about in a year?

00:27:38.340 1,000?

00:27:39.140 2,000?

00:27:39.980 5,000?

00:27:41.140 10,000?

00:27:42.640 What are they all

00:27:43.420 telling you?

00:27:45.220 Well,

00:27:45.840 the message is similar

00:27:46.800 across people.

00:27:47.680 How similar?

00:27:48.220 I don't know

00:27:49.800 exactly how similar.

00:27:51.300 That's what stories

00:27:52.080 tell you.

00:28:18.220 Maybe it is true.

00:28:19.640 Bye-k Cinderella blah blah blah blah

00:28:22.380 Bye-k Stunde.

00:28:22.440 Bye-k afterwards.

00:28:23.260 Bye-k

00:28:43.180 Bye-k

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00:31:32.780 stage you're in that's shopify.com slash jbp so today i'm going to tell you the best three stories that i

00:31:41.700 know i think these stories are absolutely phenomenally potent and the reason for that is that i think they

00:31:51.400 they illustrate in an extraordinarily powerful way

00:31:55.860 the nature of the processes that led to the establishment of western democratic ideals

00:32:03.440 murcia eliata whose work i rely on substantial substantially to make the following argument

00:32:10.940 has taken western academic culture to task

00:32:16.080 in a manner that hasn't fully been revealed yet he said that like all human cultures the west

00:32:23.240 is parochial and narrow in its viewpoint and although over the last 300 years there's been a

00:32:29.260 substantial amount of cross-cultural intermingling and a potential broadening of philosophical and

00:32:34.740 religious horizon that broadening has not been sufficiently complete

00:32:38.860 if we build on the viewpoint that i've been developing with you over the last few courses

00:32:49.580 and make the presupposition that religious modes of thinking are more phenomenological than they are

00:32:55.680 rational which means that they deal more with what you experience say than with the objective world

00:33:01.220 if we look at archaic religious stories through that lens then they can start to open up

00:33:05.940 and so given that i want to open up three religious stories to you today

00:33:11.060 two in depth and one only in passing because we'll return to it later

00:33:18.180 i'll start with the judeo-christian myth of genesis

00:33:26.100 when i say myth i don't mean untruth

00:33:29.880 i mean a form of knowledge that's narrative in structure and predicated on

00:33:33.600 presumptions that aren't empirical a myth describes

00:33:37.120 processes of transformation a myth describes the process whereby elements of experience come into

00:33:43.400 being and transform the fundamental structural elements of genesis are the word of god

00:33:53.660 and chaos and the hebrew words for chaos and waste are teom for chaos and tohu for waste

00:34:03.180 and teom in particular although tohu as well are very interesting words

00:34:07.820 because you can track their derivation historically

00:34:10.700 and sometimes if you can track the derivation of words historically

00:34:14.140 you can get some sense of the cultural milieu out of which the word sprang

00:34:18.160 and we know what tiamat means because we have written records of a story that involves

00:34:24.880 a character named tiamat and tiamat is a dragon who lives at the bottom of the ocean

00:34:30.240 in the oldest creation myth we have which is the enuma elish the sumerian creation myth

00:34:36.480 sumeria babylon akkadia rightly regarded as the birthplace of modern western civilization

00:34:44.160 in genesis two processes unite to produce being the first of those processes or states is chaos

00:35:02.160 represented by teom or tohu the second of those processes is logos and logos is another word that

00:35:10.240 has an extraordinarily broad range of meaning it's generally transcribed in the christian

00:35:17.280 tradition as the word and it's identified with christ which is a very peculiar identification

00:35:22.800 because it's the word of god that creates order out of chaos and of course the word of god in genesis

00:35:28.800 is a phenomena that predates the birth of christ infinitely from a classical religious perspective

00:35:34.640 so the fact that the two beings are identified is of great peculiarity and also of great interest

00:35:44.800 the fundamental story of genesis is something like this and it's perhaps the most brilliant

00:35:51.040 contribution of judeo-christian thought to world history its its total impact is virtually incalculable

00:36:00.160 the idea is this that chaos can be conceptualized as something that has an essentially feminine aspect

00:36:06.960 as a matrix and a matrix is a structure from which other structures emerge and the story in genesis makes

00:36:13.840 the hypothesis that logos which is the word of god a phenomena associated with speech and communication

00:36:22.160 and logic logos logic rationality courage exploration all combined into a single entity or trait logos the

00:36:33.280 combination of logos and chaos is what brings order into being that's what the story in genesis means

00:36:39.040 it's not a empirical description of the origin of objects it's a phenomenological description of the

00:36:46.400 origin of experience the idea being that without the piercing glance of whatever consciousness is

00:36:55.680 whatever the background of experience is the matrix chaos cannot be conceptualized as real it takes the

00:37:03.600 interplay between the feminine principle chaos and the masculine principle logos in order to produce being

00:37:09.760 open its presence to évidemment that there's visible people right to outside the divine principle ofleton

00:37:15.360 now that's of substantial importance when you give some consideration to the fact that immediately in Genesis

00:37:18.880 after the establishment of livable order

00:37:25.120 the deity Yahweh identifies the individual human being with logos right made in god's image

00:37:31.600 that's the essential characteristic of the human being and what that means is that the logos that

00:37:37.520 operates in human beings which is this capacity to make order out of chaos is identical to the

00:37:42.440 principle that gives rise to the cosmos from a mythological perspective so it partakes of the

00:37:47.980 deity in a very direct sense insofar as being itself is dependent on its operation

00:37:54.520 now it's still possible to claim given that perspective that a story with that sort of

00:38:03.320 structure is superstitious and that it doesn't bear any relationship to what actually constitutes

00:38:09.260 reality but you have to understand that that story old as it is is predicated on older stories and

00:38:15.120 it's on the ground that those older stories established that our entire concept of natural

00:38:20.860 rights rests so if you believe that natural rights have an existence that's more than merely arbitrary

00:38:28.140 the reason you believe that is because they're predicate those rights are predicated on the ideas

00:38:34.000 that are expressed in these myths okay so now we're going to go back in time to samaria and i'm going

00:38:44.300 to show you how the samarian creation myth lays itself out and not only that i'm going to describe

00:38:50.400 to you the direct political implications of the enuma elish the sumerian creation myth because the

00:38:56.240 political implications of that myth are well understood because the political structure of

00:39:01.220 sumeria was directly associated with the structure of the myth because the sumerian emperor was regarded as

00:39:07.700 the earthly representative of the highest god in the mesopotamian pantheon whose name was marduk so

00:39:15.560 in so far as you were emperor the reason that you were emperor and this is what gave your sovereignty

00:39:21.860 legitimacy right because sovereignty has to have legitimacy otherwise there's constant revolutions

00:39:28.340 what gave sovereignty legitimacy in mesopotamia was the identification of the emperor with marduk

00:39:34.260 and that that had certain implications for the emperor which we'll discuss in some detail

00:39:38.520 the story starts like this you've got this dragon tiamat and tiamat is a great primordial

00:39:47.800 beast who lives at the bottom of the ocean and the ocean is water and water is associated with the

00:39:58.300 primal element in archaic thinking and i told you there's reasons for that already if you viewed the

00:40:03.520 transformation of deserts as a consequence of rain you can understand why water would be considered

00:40:08.360 the element that gives life right that the element that that brings life forth and we know from an

00:40:13.540 evolutionary perspective that that's accurate and we know that we're 90 percent water and so to

00:40:18.500 consider water the primal element is no trivial conclusion no less than presuming that the sun is

00:40:25.080 the ultimate source of life the ultimate god because the sun is the ultimate source of life as far as

00:40:30.500 we're concerned on earth right because it's the source of all our energy these aren't stupid concepts

00:40:35.060 all right so tiamat is this horrible creature that lurks at the bottom of the primal element all right

00:40:41.220 now she has a husband apsu now the mesopotamian creation myth doesn't say much about apsu we only

00:40:47.380 know that he's the male consort of the dragon of chaos and we know from reading other sources of

00:40:53.460 mythology that the male consort of the dragon of chaos generally represents either logos or culture

00:41:00.020 so we're going to make the presupposition in this particular case that the husband of chaos is

00:41:05.960 order or culture okay and then the mesopotamians don't say much about that that that doesn't

00:41:10.760 the development of the idea of apsu or order or culture doesn't doesn't take new force until

00:41:17.140 the ancient egyptians we'll talk about them today too okay so tiamat and apsu are locked into a kind

00:41:23.660 of sexual embrace according to the mesopotamian creation myth and what does that mean it kind of means two

00:41:29.700 things it means that they're not really distinguishable because they're locked into this embrace and it also

00:41:35.640 means that they're up to something creative because the act of sexual congress in mythology is most

00:41:41.520 usefully is most frequently utilized as representation of something creative or as representation of the

00:41:49.640 the probability of some new form coming to be right all right so apsu and tiamat are locked into this embrace

00:41:58.580 in a state that other creation myths describe as egg-like the pre-cosmogonic egg

00:42:06.140 their intermingling gives rise to the initial state of being according to the sumerians and the initial state of being

00:42:15.440 according to the sumerians is characterized by the dominion of the elder gods these gods being none

00:42:23.940 too bright make a tremendous amount of racket doing things well what does that mean exactly well it means

00:42:35.380 something like this they make a lot of racket and they cause a lot of trouble they make a lot of wind and all of

00:42:41.060 their racket and trouble and wind and activity rouses tiamat what does that mean well it means if you do

00:42:50.500 things you get in trouble it means even if you're trying to solve problems you get into trouble because

00:42:55.460 the solution to a problem chin tends to generate a whole bunch of new problems right it's like the hydra

00:43:00.860 so what it means is that it's more or less fated that any form of activity whatsoever

00:43:08.900 is likely to produce the threat of catastrophe and of course we're absolutely keenly aware of that in

00:43:19.040 the modern world because we're possessed by this sense that all of our frenetic activity all of our

00:43:25.500 frenetic motivated activity is producing alterations in the world order such that nature itself is going

00:43:33.600 to be destroyed and eliminate us and of course we're absolutely keenly aware of that in the modern world

00:43:46.020 because we're possessed by this sense that all of our frenetic activity all of our frenetic motivated

00:43:52.860 activity is producing alterations in the world order such that nature itself is going to be destroyed

00:44:00.860 and eliminate us right that's classic sumerian fear nothing's changed in the last five thousand years

00:44:08.700 the sumerians presume that once the elder gods were constructed and started moving around on the planet

00:44:14.760 that their activity their mindless activity because remember these aren't well integrated motivational

00:44:21.340 forces they're more like primordial beasts right their unintegrated activity risks plunging everything

00:44:29.980 back in chaos well tiamat's the representative of chaos this generative chaos but so what the sumerians

00:44:35.980 say well the elder gods cause a lot of racket they move around the planet and they upset tiamat

00:44:43.740 and she decides that enough is enough and she's going to wipe them out

00:44:47.980 so she's sitting at the bottom of the ocean fuming away as the elder gods

00:44:56.460 go about their business and then they take one step too many and they kill apsu who's her husband

00:45:04.060 now the sumerian creation myth doesn't say much about this but we know that apsu is

00:45:08.620 the male consort of chaos that makes him order so what happens is the elder gods destroy order

00:45:15.660 itself they destroy culture itself and as soon as you destroy culture all hell breaks loose and

00:45:19.740 that's exactly what happens in the summary creation myth so tiamat emerges she's going to wipe everything

00:45:25.900 out and the world will revert back to its primordial non-existent state now the elder gods get wind of

00:45:33.260 this and of course they're just terrified because they know that this thing that gave rise to them

00:45:37.900 whatever it is the matrix of being can easily wipe them out at a moment's notice and so despite the

00:45:43.100 fact that they're transpersonal and immortal and characterized by a certain amount of power

00:45:47.420 in the face of absolute chaos they're insufficient now this occurrence is extending over a protracted

00:45:55.020 period of time and as the elder gods are threatened they're also breeding and mating and producing new

00:46:00.700 forms and they produce a great great grandson whose name is marduk now marduk has a lot of very

00:46:06.620 interesting attributes the attributes are described in the new militia in the following manner so this is

00:46:11.980 what marduk's father sees when his wife damkina gives birth to marduk so when he who's marduk's father

00:46:20.060 saw his son he rejoiced he beamed his heart was filled with joy he distinguished him and conferred upon

00:46:28.220 him double equality with the gods okay so that's the first indication that whatever marduk represents

00:46:33.580 is something that's elevated beyond the normal status of a primordial deity

00:46:37.980 so that he was highly exalted and surpassed them in everything artfully arranged beyond comprehension

00:46:44.460 were his members not fit for human understanding hard to look upon four were his eyes four were his

00:46:51.100 ears when his lips moved fire blazed forth each of his four ears grew large and likewise his eyes to see

00:46:57.820 everything he was exalted among gods surpassing was his form his members were gigantic he was surpassing in height

00:47:05.980 mariotu mariotu one of his names son of the sun god the sun god of the gods okay complex bit of poetry

00:47:15.740 it says a bunch of things it says well whatever marduk is is the offspring of the gods whatever marduk is

00:47:23.420 is characterized by heightened awareness right because he has four ears and four eyes and they're large

00:47:27.980 whatever Marduk is characterized by is the status that surpasses that of his

00:47:33.500 father's whatever he's characterized by is associated with the power of speech

00:47:39.220 real power because when he speaks fire spurts forth Marduk is also huge but

00:47:44.940 more importantly he's associated in this particular poem with the Sun why is that

00:47:49.740 well the Sun dominates consciousness right because we're conscious during the

00:47:53.300 day most of our brain is visual cortex so we're visual creatures so when the Sun

00:48:00.020 rises is when the day begins so Marduk is also associated with whatever deity

00:48:04.460 dominates the day and that's the deity of consciousness and there's more to the

00:48:08.480 story of the Sun right because the Sun is also something that rises and sets

00:48:12.680 repeatedly and that means that the deity that dominates consciousness is

00:48:17.420 characterized by a cyclical nature that's a Sun myth Sun rises in the morning

00:48:22.460 renewed as a consequence of fighting a terrible battle in the night with the

00:48:26.960 enemies of everything that's associated with consciousness a classic solar myth

00:48:35.740 so Apsu and Tiamat give rise to the world of the gods the activity of the world

00:48:42.860 of gods reawakens Tiamat she decides to destroy everything but at that moment the

00:48:50.220 gods give birth to Marduk now that's a typical motif which is that the heroes

00:48:54.780 always born at the time of maximal crisis and the reason for that is in

00:48:58.800 part it's simple look if your culture is dealing well with the forces of the

00:49:04.140 unknown so that everything is static static but productive so that problems

00:49:09.600 themselves don't arise there's no reason for the hero right there's no reason to

00:49:13.560 confront the unknown it's only when crisis beckons that the birth of the hero is

00:49:17.340 necessary Marduk constitutes the birth of the hero and they say look you know

00:49:25.080 we're in real trouble unless someone goes out there and confronts Tiamat straight

00:49:29.160 on she's gonna wipe everything out it's a dangerous and terrifying job but

00:49:35.700 somebody has to do it and Marduk says though that's no problem but I got a few

00:49:39.000 rules here and this is the first rule I'm in charge from here on forward what does

00:49:46.440 that mean exactly well these archaic stories are polyseemous in or polyseemic in

00:49:56.400 Northrop Frye's terminology what that means is that they can be read validly at

00:50:00.840 multiple levels of analysis simultaneously and so one thing it means is that if you

00:50:06.540 take the two-year-old child who's essentially under the dominion of assorted

00:50:11.400 primordial gods and goddesses right aggression fear panic and according to

00:50:18.900 Freud a certain degree of sexual aggression the child moves from domination from

00:50:26.520 motivated state to domination for motivated state and it isn't until the

00:50:30.660 age of three and four when under the pressure applied by the social world and

00:50:34.920 as a consequence of the maturation of the prefrontal cortex which matures

00:50:39.900 throughout childhood and adolescence and doesn't reach its final form until

00:50:44.100 perhaps into the early 20s all of those fundamental motivational forces start

00:50:48.960 taking on a structured relationship to one another which is to say that once

00:50:55.560 you're as your personality becomes integrated a single motive force forward

00:51:01.760 has to bring all of these underlying motivational systems into some sort of

00:51:05.660 harmonious arrangement okay so let's let's see what the Sumerians are doing

00:51:09.800 here okay first of all they're they're doing psychology they're trying to figure

00:51:13.220 out given the dominion of the elder gods the indisputable dominion of the elder

00:51:19.200 gods instincts who should rule right what should be in charge how do you

00:51:25.220 construct the hierarchy of values and then more complexly when you integrate a

00:51:31.400 state which is what the Mesopotamians did right the first great civilization what

00:51:36.380 does that mean the first time hundreds of tribes were hammered into some sort of

00:51:42.560 stable hierarchical order how do you represent that order

00:51:49.720 so Marduk gets his act together the gods all meet in a huge chamber they elect him

00:51:55.760 king and then they prepare him for battle when the gods the fathers beheld the power

00:52:01.940 of his word they were glad and in homage saying Marduk is king they bestowed upon

00:52:06.560 him a scepter a throne and a royal robe they gave him an irresistible weapon

00:52:11.360 smiting the enemy saying go and cut off the life of Tiamat may the winds carry her

00:52:16.380 blood to out of the way places after the gods his fathers had determined the

00:52:21.240 destiny of Marduk they set him on the road the way to success and attainment so

00:52:27.840 then he goes to the heart of darkness so to speak and confronts Tiamat

00:52:32.460 accuses her of treachery and challenges her to battle when Tiamat heard this she

00:52:38.880 became like one in a frenzy and lost her reason she cried out loud and

00:52:42.960 furiously to the very roots her two legs shook back and forth she recited an

00:52:47.640 incantation repeatedly casting her spell as for the gods of battle they sharpened

00:52:52.980 their weapons Tiamat and Marduk the wisest of the gods advanced against one

00:52:57.960 another they pressed on to single combat and approached for battle okay well

00:53:03.840 things don't go out so well with Tiamat from this point forward the first

00:53:07.680 thing that Marduk does is encapsulate her in a net and I think that's a really

00:53:12.720 interesting metaphor because that's essentially what human beings do when

00:53:16.440 they encounter the unknown right they encapsulate it in an explanatory network

00:53:21.120 so it's a way of binding up the the anomaly or the unknown and giving it a

00:53:27.900 substantive form then he cuts her into pieces and then he makes the world out of

00:53:34.260 her pieces in fact one of Marduk's names is he who makes ingenious things as a

00:53:41.280 consequence of the combat with Tiamat now that's very very interesting because what

00:53:47.220 it means is that the Sumerians are presenting in metaphorical form the

00:53:50.820 notion that when the chips are down the survival of being depends on the capacity

00:53:56.640 of whatever Marduk represents the solar God to encounter the matrix of being to

00:54:01.860 cut it into pieces and to make the world if you think about it in those terms it's a

00:54:05.740 very very straightforward story right it's basically the story of human beings

00:54:09.160 fundamentally the story of human beings because we in the words of a famous

00:54:15.040 evolutionary psychologist whose name completely escapes me we occupy the

00:54:19.600 cognitive niche right our mode of being is creativity in the in the face of the

00:54:24.460 unknown and when chaos threatens the established mode of being it's necessary for us to put our

00:54:32.740 creativity into action and to carve out new territory as a consequence of encounter

00:54:38.800 with the unknown why well because we can take the world apart with our hands and put

00:54:43.960 it together in new ways and then we can code what we've done verbally and we can

00:54:48.400 transmit it to another person and then they can do the same thing and we're all

00:54:51.760 doing this all the time and we're all telling each other how we're doing it and

00:54:55.060 that's how the embodiment of logos in the human being which is precisely

00:54:59.200 equivalent to the Sumerian notion of Marduk that's precisely how it is that

00:55:02.980 we're constantly capable of redeeming the world

00:55:06.200 and that's why you make resolutions at New Year's because the new you is

00:55:15.340 supposed to be born at the new year okay so what do the Mesopotamians do at the

00:55:19.260 new year they take their king and they bring them outside the city now you have to

00:55:25.060 understand that outside the city is chaos right because these are city states when

00:55:31.480 you go outside the dominion of the human you're in chaos and then the priest makes the emperor

00:55:40.020 kneel and takes all his marks of status off him so he's reduced to his essence

00:55:45.560 fundamentally bereft of his social persona and then he slaps him with a glove and humiliates

00:55:53.060 him and the king is re forced to recount his sins right everything he did in the

00:55:57.140 last year that wasn't up to Marduk's standards so to speak and you can see

00:56:00.920 that'd be a pretty useful thing to have somebody who's in power do on a regular

00:56:04.460 basis right because it reminds them that they're in fact subject to a

00:56:08.780 transpersonal structure whose nature isn't precisely evident but is nonetheless

00:56:13.400 there which is the case act like Marduk or all hell will break loose and

00:56:18.740 demolish your kingdom which is of course is true now as it was then so the emperor

00:56:24.380 gets humiliated he has to recount his sins then he's locked up then he reenacts the

00:56:32.860 battle with Tiamat and when he emerges victorious he's locked up with a ritual

00:56:39.680 prostitute a higher duel and they mate why well the higher duel the ritual

00:56:47.060 prostitute represents Tiamat now why the hell would that be because Tiamat's a

00:56:52.040 dragon right a horrible man-eating dragon that lives at the bottom of the ocean

00:56:56.300 which is to say that in any encounter with the unknown as difficult traumatic and

00:57:02.300 violent as that might be there's also the possibility for something creative to

00:57:07.040 emerge as a consequence right because it's out of the unknown that we mine new

00:57:10.940 information so insofar as the Mesopotamian emperor acted out the role of

00:57:19.180 Marduk then he was a good emperor then he deserved his sovereignty and literally as

00:57:24.260 well as figuratively insofar as he did play that role then the society was going

00:57:28.400 to remain not only stable but constantly updated because he's engaged in this

00:57:32.660 constant creative contact with the unknown aided and abetted by his attempts to

00:57:39.640 remember his own inadequacies and weaknesses and to do something about them

00:57:44.260 okay so that's a pretty interesting story and it gets even more interesting when

00:57:47.560 you start to understand that the Judeo-Christian creation myth is

00:57:51.280 assimilated to the Sumerian creation myth by the union of the notions of chaos and

00:57:56.980 Tiamat so the logos in Judeo-Christian thinking the word of God that produces

00:58:02.240 order out of chaos is also essentially equivalent at least metaphorically

00:58:07.840 speaking to whatever Marduk represents in the Sumerian creation myth and we know

00:58:12.520 that our relationship with the Enuma Elish is obscured by time but our

00:58:16.900 relationship with the stories that lay out the fundamental substructure of

00:58:20.740 Western culture is not so ameliorated even though we may not believe them

00:58:24.400 explicitly anymore they still sit at the basis of our society

00:58:31.400 but our relationship with the needs of God all some people still find the

00:58:33.640 people thatcin is fully dependent on their wages one of the모 englishYes

00:58:36.400 by the way of exceptionalism is to be protected Gregg as a business based a

00:58:39.040 business based a business based side of defense really knowing that궈 can we

00:58:40.660 speak a business based side of its reality and optimize them to what we know

00:58:41.720 we can learn from it using rebel emotion is therefore not Help insisting that a business based

00:58:43.080 in the comprehensive strategy of contraνοialism project is a single

00:58:45.740 basically demand where the Basin part of the Great business embody some great

00:58:46.820 items of NBA plans that are notice that the building of both Карah definitely

00:58:46.960 Şimdi the building is able to open upon which you stand thecape is where it seems to back to

00:58:48.300 the recursos of the front 60s and rest of their work against Alexander

00:58:48.500 point two fingertips we can get the grounds rather than have let us grasp the

00:58:49.340 One of the things that people are very much confused by in the modern world is what archaic

00:59:04.100 people meant by gods.

00:59:06.700 And that's because whatever the deities were that had the motive force that archaic people

00:59:11.620 attributed to the gods seemed to have disappeared in modern culture.

00:59:15.580 Now the Jungian hypothesis is that's because they turned into psychological traits fundamentally

00:59:20.920 or motivational forces.

00:59:22.420 So what archaic societies would describe as gods, we would describe as motivational forces.

00:59:28.740 So for example, Venus is a goddess, a goddess of love, and we would associate her power with

00:59:35.680 love and sex fundamentally.

00:59:38.000 And the reason that that's a reasonable association from the archaic standpoint is because the

00:59:44.560 motive quality that makes up what Venus represents is transpersonal, which means it's not limited

00:59:51.160 to one person.

00:59:52.480 And it's immortal in that the motive force that characterizes sexual affiliation exists

00:59:58.960 whether or not a single individual exists.

01:00:01.840 So it's transpersonal, has the force of a personality because if you fall in love, you're motivated

01:00:07.460 by a certain set of standards and perspectives, right?

01:00:11.220 If you're gripped by beauty, say, or if you're gripped by lust, that imposes a particular view

01:00:18.180 of the world on you and impels your actions, sometimes despite your will.

01:00:22.400 And so that would be equivalent from the archaic perspective to possession.

01:00:26.420 And it's clearly the case that archaic societies who were engaged in warfare, for example, would

01:00:31.540 conduct rituals to ensure that the warriors that made up their societies were in fact

01:00:36.260 possessed by the correct god.

01:00:37.920 So it might be Mars, for example, the Roman god of war, so that on the battlefield they

01:00:41.960 exhibited the proper characteristics of somebody who was in a battle, right?

01:00:46.260 Rage, you can think, rage.

01:00:48.800 So possession by the god of war would be equivalent to this possession by a state of rage.

01:00:53.260 Now it's not quite that simple.

01:00:55.320 It isn't only that archaic people externalized motive forces and gave them the status of

01:01:00.500 deities.

01:01:01.500 What they did was more complex than that, and I think you can understand that a little

01:01:04.400 bit better if you start to give some thought to the modern behavioral notion of the stimulus.

01:01:11.320 Now the stimulus is a very, very weird concept because the behaviorists who weren't interested

01:01:16.920 in taking apart what was inside the brain would attribute motive force to the stimulus,

01:01:21.720 right?

01:01:22.720 If you present an animal with a stimulus, he will therefore act.

01:01:26.380 And that meant that the behaviors were making the presupposition that the mode of power resided

01:01:31.700 in some manner in the stimulus.

01:01:33.540 Well, why would they think like that?

01:01:35.560 Well, it's an archaic mode of thought in a sense.

01:01:38.200 You can imagine a child saying, one of my friends today made me really angry, right?

01:01:44.720 Which means that the child is essentially conflating his or her own internal emotional state with

01:01:50.340 the proximal stimulus that gave rise to that state.

01:01:53.000 And you see complex associations like that taking place with regards to the apprehension

01:01:57.420 of beauty, say, because beauty is a very, very complex and difficult to localize phenomena.

01:02:02.280 If you're very attracted to someone, are you attracted by them?

01:02:07.000 Well, in a sense, of course, you are because there they are.

01:02:09.160 But in another sense, you're not at all because what's happening is that you're engaged as

01:02:14.280 much in the attraction as anything that's motivating you from the outside world.

01:02:18.540 And I think that partly accounts for your sense of foolishness, especially if the person that

01:02:23.580 you're attracted to doesn't return your attraction.

01:02:25.660 I mean, you know that from your perceptual perspective, you're attracted and dominated

01:02:32.980 by the object.

01:02:33.900 But by the same token, you know entirely that easy as it is to presume it's them and their

01:02:38.980 fault, say, pretty much it all has to do with you.

01:02:42.540 So in the modern world where we've been able to separate out the object and the motive force

01:02:47.980 of the object, the deities have sort of moved inside of us and become psychological forces.

01:02:53.300 But you can understand, if you think about it in this manner, that things weren't so

01:02:56.220 clear prior to the dawn of the empirical age.

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01:04:24.120 That gives you a little bit of background with regards to what the notion of deity meant

01:04:29.500 to archaic societies who still utilize those notions as explanatory terms.

01:04:35.200 Okay, so we know that if you're caught up in one of these little world games, that you

01:04:42.440 may be motivated by something very, very fundamental, right?

01:04:45.380 A tendency that transcends you, the tendency to propagate yourself, say, Freud's fundamental

01:04:51.240 motivational level, sexual affiliation, or the tendency to maintain yourself, those you

01:04:56.800 could say are the fundamental gods of existence, the fundamental driving forces, and it's the

01:05:04.100 interaction of those two forces over great periods of time that produce the great diversity

01:05:08.340 of life and human life that we see before us.

01:05:11.520 And each of those fundamental, most fundamental of gods have their differentiated minions,

01:05:18.700 so to speak, so that while engaged in the meta-goal of self-preservation, you act

01:05:23.800 out plots of hunger and plots of thirst, and you move from cold to hot, or from hot

01:05:29.780 to cold, depending on your particular, on your particular, on the particular temperature

01:05:36.080 of your surroundings, or with regards to self-propagation, you're attracted to people

01:05:40.520 who are repelled by them.

01:05:41.840 For reasons that are frequently, absolutely beyond your comprehension, by the way, so I just

01:05:46.460 found out this week, and this is absolutely staggering, I think, that if you, if you run

01:05:52.020 an experiment on a group of women and you track their menstrual cycle, and then you give

01:05:56.400 them t-shirts that men have worn to smell, that women who are ovulating like the smell

01:06:02.020 of symmetrical men better than asymmetrical men, so, and that's partly because symmetrical

01:06:07.120 men are probably more healthy, but this is a good example of how the motive forces that

01:06:12.980 configure your world are dependent on instinctual forces that are not only beyond your consciousness,

01:06:18.100 but they're beyond even, at the moment, any of our explicit explanations.

01:06:27.820 So another finding that's very similar that I came across recently, turns out that mice

01:06:34.860 will not mate with mice that have RH blood factors that are likely to produce unfit offspring.

01:06:43.720 The more closely genetically related the RH factors, the more likely there is to be a catastrophe

01:06:49.840 with regards to offspring.

01:06:51.820 And the mice seem to detect the RH factor by smell, so recently this was run with women,

01:06:57.140 and it is also the case that women prefer men whose RH factors are at an optimal distance

01:07:01.360 from them in terms of smell.

01:07:03.100 So this is some example of how these unbelievably archaic systems, because, like, the olfactory

01:07:07.560 systems are unbelievably archaic, produce alterations in worldview at a level that's massively below

01:07:16.580 consciousness.

01:07:18.720 So underneath your cortical shell, which is tonically inhibiting all your emotional and motivational

01:07:25.700 systems, lies all these motivational and emotional systems.

01:07:29.280 And they have branches that grow up into the cortex, and they have the capacity to control

01:07:33.480 your behavior completely involuntarily.

01:07:37.200 So for example, if you're gripped by fear, if you're gripped by fear, it's very, very difficult

01:07:40.940 to overcome that voluntarily.

01:07:42.640 And at least initially, you won't be able to.

01:07:44.820 Which is to say that when the chips are down, the underlying motivational and emotional systems

01:07:49.380 have control, okay?

01:07:52.140 So then what happens, from that perspective, then what happens when you encounter something

01:07:55.540 you don't understand?

01:07:56.840 And I think the best way to explain it is something like generalized disinhibition, which is that

01:08:02.180 all your underlying motivational and emotional systems are more or less disinhibited simultaneously.

01:08:08.360 And the reason for that is because you want to be maximally prepared to do whatever the

01:08:11.780 hell is necessary to do when you're somewhere that you don't understand.

01:08:15.380 And because you don't know what that thing is going to be, all your systems go on.

01:08:20.060 And when psychologists talk about stress, which is an abysmal word, right?

01:08:24.080 It means everything and nothing.

01:08:25.800 When psychologists talk about stress, what they mean is generalized disinhibition of emotion

01:08:30.800 and motivation.

01:08:36.800 Then you come to the case of ancient Egypt.

01:08:38.840 One of the things Eliade points out, which I think is really interesting, I mean, really

01:08:42.200 phenomenal, the story I'm going to tell you right now was essentially revealed in Egyptian

01:08:48.260 culture at the dawn of the culture, rather than developing over the course of the culture.

01:08:53.060 So the Egyptians had a revelation right immediately that the most fundamental of gods was the

01:08:59.200 one who created as a consequence of his tongue and his speech, very much akin to the Sumerian

01:09:07.940 idea with regards to Marduk and also to later Judeo-Christian ideas.

01:09:12.240 So here's the story.

01:09:13.340 There's four players in this drama, okay?

01:09:15.660 There's Osiris, his wife Isis, Horus, their son, and Seth.

01:09:23.080 And Seth is Osiris' evil brother, okay?

01:09:26.660 Now Osiris was a remarkable guy.

01:09:30.320 He was the founder of the Egyptian state from the mythological perspective.

01:09:34.520 So kind of like Romulus and Remus for Rome, or like George Washington for the U.S., right?

01:09:40.660 A mythologized figure who represented all of the pharaohs and people, for that matter,

01:09:45.440 who'd actually constructed the Egyptian state.

01:09:47.660 Osiris, father of Egypt, so to speak.

01:09:50.160 But Osiris is kind of old and a little archaic and maybe a little bit senile and even possibly

01:09:55.120 a little bit naive in that, you know, even no matter how great you were in your youth,

01:09:59.560 as time goes on, you lose contact with environmental transformations and the old rules that you

01:10:04.660 live by are not necessarily applicable to the present.

01:10:08.360 And some of those things that you ignore become paramount in importance.

01:10:12.280 And it turns out that Osiris has an evil brother, Seth.

01:10:15.940 And Seth eventually turns into Satan as mythology develops through the centuries.

01:10:20.300 And Seth is a nasty guy, right?

01:10:22.300 I mean, what he wants more than anything is undeserved dominion over the Egyptian state.

01:10:30.180 Now Osiris, because he's not paying attention and because he isn't sufficiently cognizant anymore

01:10:35.500 of the power of evil, more or less ignores his evil brother, who in turn chops him into

01:10:44.100 pieces and then distributes his pieces all over the Egyptian state.

01:10:49.100 Now, you might say, why didn't he just kill him, right?

01:10:54.060 I mean, you'd think chopping him up would kill him, but he's a god.

01:10:56.320 You can't just kill him.

01:10:58.480 The reason in mythology, and you see this in movies as well, where the villain never quite

01:11:02.560 dies or the hero never quite dies is because even if you eliminate individual embodiments

01:11:07.320 of what those figures represent, new embodiments manifest themselves virtually immediately.

01:11:12.040 So, one of the things mythology is quite clear about is that you never win a final battle

01:11:15.720 with evil.

01:11:16.200 It's a permanent property of the world.

01:11:24.660 So, anyways, Seth hacks up Osiris, spreads him all over the land.

01:11:30.160 Osiris ends up living a kind of shadowy and nebulous ghost-like existence down in the underworld,

01:11:35.660 and Seth becomes the ruler of the state.

01:11:38.880 A nasty story.

01:11:41.220 All right, but Osiris has Isis as a wife.

01:11:44.140 Now, Isis had a huge cult.

01:11:46.680 She was a powerful goddess, goddess of the underworld, a kind of combination of Kelly and

01:11:52.960 Diana, so to speak, capable of tremendous destructive power, but also the source of all good things,

01:11:58.780 something very much like Tiamat.

01:12:01.680 Now, Isis got wind of her husband's disintegration, so to speak, and she went searching around Egypt

01:12:09.800 till she found his phyllis, and with it she makes herself pregnant.

01:12:15.040 Okay, so what does that mean exactly?

01:12:17.160 It means something like this.

01:12:19.860 The collapse of any great order brings with it new potential.

01:12:25.760 And I think this is something that capitalism has way over forms of government like communism.

01:12:33.280 Capitalism has mechanisms in place to allow large structures that are no longer meeting

01:12:39.060 their function to collapse, but frequently when they collapse, it's not like they disintegrate

01:12:44.120 into dust, right?

01:12:44.960 They disintegrate into sub-components, so to speak, many of which then come to terms with

01:12:52.020 the fact that the order has collapsed and build something new.

01:12:55.360 So you can't get rid of culture so easily.

01:12:57.900 You can hack it up into bits.

01:12:59.080 You can disembodied it, so to speak.

01:13:00.780 You can spread it all over the state.

01:13:02.640 You can introduce chaos into it.

01:13:04.280 But that's something that has the potential of new birth, like the phoenix rising from the

01:13:11.020 ashes.

01:13:11.360 So anyways, Isis, who's the matrix, who's Tiamat, gets Osiris' phallus, which is the

01:13:17.300 container of the germ of culture, right?

01:13:20.980 The phenomena that's capable of the seminal idea, and she makes herself pregnant, and

01:13:27.240 she gives birth to Horus, who's the long-lost son of the rightful king, right?

01:13:32.180 A very typical mythological motif.

01:13:35.040 Okay, so Horus is alienated from the kingdom, which is another very common mythological motif,

01:13:41.560 you know, like how King Arthur, for example, is raised by commoners.

01:13:44.860 This same story pops up in the story of Christ, for example, because Christ has heavenly parents,

01:13:51.520 but then he also has his kind of ordinary parents, and it's a very common motif.

01:13:55.860 Anyway, so Horus grows outside of the classical structure of the Egyptian state, which is tilted

01:14:04.300 terribly towards evil, because Seth is dominated, because Osiris was too blind to his evil brother

01:14:10.120 to take appropriate defensive actions, and he grows to maturity.

01:14:13.360 And then he decides, like all rightful sons of the long-lost king, to reclaim his heritage.

01:14:19.720 So he goes back to Egypt, right?

01:14:21.980 And he has this vicious battle with Seth, and in the process, Seth tears out one of his eyes.

01:14:28.780 Well, fine, and that's an indication of just exactly how devastating a battle with the forces

01:14:33.600 of evil, so to speak, precisely are.

01:14:35.780 They represent a critical threat to the integrity of consciousness, right?

01:14:40.520 That's why he loses an eye.

01:14:41.840 Well, luckily enough, Horus has got his act together, and he does defeat Seth, and he

01:14:46.440 banishes him, and he gets the eye back.

01:14:48.780 And then you think, okay, great.

01:14:51.440 Pop the eye back in, become emperor.

01:14:54.620 Everything's fine.

01:14:55.660 Now, let's backtrack a little bit and think about this politically.

01:14:58.960 Now, the Egyptians had this really weird idea.

01:15:01.100 They had the idea that the living pharaoh was the living pharaoh and the dead pharaoh at

01:15:07.280 the same time.

01:15:08.620 That makes no sense rationally, but it makes a lot of sense from a narrative perspective,

01:15:12.620 because what they were saying is something like this.

01:15:15.000 Look, you've got to think that when you become king, or when you become president, or when

01:15:19.020 you take on a role of that absolute magnitude, that then you're partly you, but you're also

01:15:24.580 partly this role, and there's really no way out of that, right?

01:15:27.440 And the role is composed of the unbelievable weight of the cultural tradition that you're

01:15:33.020 representing.

01:15:33.620 And you can say, well, that's true for being king or for being president, but it's also

01:15:37.260 true if you become a doctor or a lawyer or any sort of specialized occupation.

01:15:41.020 It's partly you, because you're embodying the role, but it's partly the role, too.

01:15:45.960 So the pharaoh is the live pharaoh and the dead pharaoh, because the dead pharaoh represents

01:15:50.220 culture, right?

01:15:51.700 The king is dead.

01:15:52.840 Long live the king.

01:15:54.440 Okay.

01:15:55.280 But paralleling that idea was the idea that the pharaoh was not only the dead pharaoh and

01:15:59.820 the live pharaoh at the same time, but that he was Osiris and Horus at the same time.

01:16:04.440 But then you think in the story, Horus has taken over Seth.

01:16:08.180 He's got his eye back.

01:16:09.460 He can be king.

01:16:10.240 But he isn't king yet.

01:16:11.940 And this is where the Egyptians really get their act together.

01:16:14.660 And I think of the two stories that I'm telling you, this is the one that has the most significance,

01:16:19.920 I think, for modern people, because we're so likely to sidestep our obligation to our

01:16:24.800 culture, whatever that happens to be.

01:16:27.360 So instead of popping this eye back in his head, which is the first thing you'd think

01:16:31.760 he does, he decides he's going to go back to the underworld, where Osiris is living in

01:16:35.600 this ghost-like and dead manner, since he's been chopped up by Seth.

01:16:39.820 So he goes down into the underworld, which is no piece of cake.

01:16:42.660 And he finds Osiris there in this kind of half-dead state, and he gives him his eye.

01:16:47.060 And that enlightens Osiris, right?

01:16:52.640 It gives him vision.

01:16:54.160 And so then he takes Osiris back to Egypt, arm-in-arm, so to speak.

01:16:59.200 And it's the conjunction of Osiris and Horus that constitutes the basis for Egyptian sovereignty.

01:17:05.360 And that is bloody brilliant, right?

01:17:07.500 Because the Egyptians figured out that, so Horus is Marduk for all intents and purposes,

01:17:13.020 right?

01:17:13.440 He's this avenging hero.

01:17:16.120 In the Egyptian story, he fights political corruption rather than chaos.

01:17:20.380 But you can understand that those are two flip sides of the hero archetype.

01:17:23.760 They are.

01:17:24.620 The hero archetype has two basic elements.

01:17:27.160 One is the confrontation of the terrible aspect of nature, chaos in its most brutal form.

01:17:33.940 And the other is the confrontation with the archaic aspect of culture.

01:17:38.320 And in some ways, those aren't distinguishable, because if culture isn't archaic, chaos never

01:17:43.200 makes itself present.

01:17:44.480 So, which is to say, you can't separate out political degradation from environmental degradation,

01:17:50.860 say it's the same idea.

01:17:57.040 So anyways, Horus has this great idea.

01:17:59.820 He needs his father, right?

01:18:01.100 And I told you about the same motif emerging in Pinocchio.

01:18:04.220 We already looked at that, right?

01:18:06.000 Pinocchio doesn't become genuine until he risks his life saving his father, all right?

01:18:11.440 So the same thing is happening in this particular situation.

01:18:14.300 So that's pretty cool.

01:18:15.580 So then you get this situation where the Egyptians characterize sovereignty as the capability

01:18:21.180 to overcome evil in the political domain combined with, and that's a youthful capability,

01:18:27.280 right?

01:18:27.700 Combined with the wisdom of the past, all right?

01:18:30.460 Then you look at that from a political perspective, and you find out already that the Egyptians

01:18:34.980 viewed the pharaoh as the live pharaoh and the dead pharaoh simultaneously.

01:18:39.460 But then you find out something else that's interesting, and it gives you some really

01:18:42.620 real insight into just exactly how bloody powerful these ideas were.

01:18:46.740 So you think, what did the Egyptians do with their spare time?

01:18:50.420 And then you think, well, they built the pyramids, right?

01:18:52.900 I mean, and that was no trivial undertaking.

01:18:54.760 It was sort of the 5000 BC equivalent of flying to Mars.

01:19:00.660 And I mean, the pyramids are pretty impressive now, but they were a hell of a lot more impressive

01:19:04.300 in their original form because they were in the middle of an immense complex.

01:19:08.140 And the pyramids were dedicated to the immortality of the pharaoh, and the pharaoh was possessed

01:19:14.120 by a spirit called Ka.

01:19:16.360 And Ka was his immortal spirit, and it was the union of Horus and Osiris, okay?

01:19:21.580 So Egyptian society was dedicated to deifying the immortal spirit of the pharaoh, the union

01:19:30.460 of Horus and Osiris.

01:19:31.760 And it was this union that gave the, it was this identification with this union that gave

01:19:37.920 the pharaoh a phenomenon of the Egyptians called mat, and mat was like truth or good order.

01:19:44.240 And you can think about it as conscience in a sense, as if the pharaoh was, was utilizing

01:19:50.880 the union of Horus and Osiris, then he would have an intuitive ability to decide what the

01:19:56.540 appropriate course of order was.

01:19:58.680 And so the Egyptians would say, for example, when the pharaoh came into the court, they'd

01:20:03.480 say the sun has risen, and by that they meant that the power that reigned over the dominion

01:20:08.120 of the night had arrived.

01:20:10.120 They conceptualized mat as the capacity to put order in the place of chaos, essentially formally.

01:20:17.240 So they assimilated the union of Horus and Osiris with the capability of putting order

01:20:21.380 in the face of chaos.

01:20:22.340 They regarded that as immortal, and they spent all of the excess resources of their society

01:20:28.220 glorifying that idea.

01:20:30.200 And you think, you don't produce something like the pyramids without really being possessed

01:20:34.620 by an idea, right?

01:20:35.800 This is no trivial undertaking.

01:20:37.400 It's going over a period of several hundred, if not several thousand years.

01:20:41.800 It takes an awful lot of work.

01:20:43.480 So this idea of the immortality of the union of Horus and Osiris, and its association with

01:20:48.460 sovereignty, was an absolutely potent idea for the Egyptians.

01:20:51.680 It gave their whole culture motive force.

01:20:54.480 Okay, so the Egyptians thought the pharaoh's immortal, and that's the reason why, and we

01:20:59.720 more or less partake in his immortality by being his subject.

01:21:03.020 So that was a pretty good deal.

01:21:04.500 But then, Iliadah points out something very interesting, and this is called the democratization

01:21:08.760 of Osiris.

01:21:09.960 And what you found was that initially, there were certain symbolic representations representing

01:21:15.020 the immortality of the pharaoh that could only be used by the pharaoh.

01:21:18.340 But as Egyptian culture continued to develop, then the symbolic representations of immortality

01:21:25.520 started to be adopted by the aristocracy.

01:21:27.960 Now, what did that mean?

01:21:29.620 It meant that this process that the Egyptians had conceptualized as integral to the order

01:21:38.460 of the state was no longer solely embodied in the hands of the pharaoh, right?

01:21:44.100 It had started to drift down the power hierarchy into the aristocracy, okay?

01:21:49.560 Well, then you think, what happens after that?

01:21:51.320 So by the end of Egyptian society, the aristocrats were characterized by an identity with the union

01:21:58.600 of Horus and Osiris, right?

01:22:00.320 Sovereignty had started to spread itself out.

01:22:02.500 And you think, what starts to happen with the Greeks, right?

01:22:05.100 The Greeks attribute sovereignty to every male Greek.

01:22:09.620 Barbarians?

01:22:10.280 No.

01:22:10.780 Women?

01:22:11.280 No.

01:22:11.580 But at least all males, right?

01:22:13.240 You get a beginning of a democratic notion there.

01:22:15.700 The Jews developing ideas that if not derived from Egypt were at least similar in structure

01:22:27.040 to Egyptian ideas say, not the aristocracy, not the pharaoh, but every individual has the

01:22:34.940 capacity of establishing a direct relationship with the form of the deity, right?

01:22:41.380 Then you have a Christian revolution that follows that, where the idea that sovereignty inheres

01:22:46.640 in the individual is distributed to everyone, right?

01:22:49.460 Everyone.

01:22:50.040 Male, female, criminal, non-criminal, murderer, rapist, taxman, you name it.

01:22:56.480 Sovereignty inheres within them, and it's on that soil that our whole democratic culture

01:23:00.420 emerges.

01:23:02.120 These unbelievably archaic ideas first acted out, right?

01:23:06.160 First embodied in ritual, first dramatized, then only told as stories.

01:23:10.660 Developing more and more coherence over stretches of time of thousands of years, not hundreds

01:23:16.980 of years, but thousands of years.

01:23:19.740 Becoming more coherent, becoming more pointed, becoming more relevant with regards to their

01:23:25.040 embodiment, then starting to become understood explicitly and distributed through the entire

01:23:29.200 society.

01:23:29.720 And it's on that ground that our world rests, not on the ground of rationality as established

01:23:41.140 in, say, Europe in 1500.

01:23:42.960 What we have is much more profound and solid and deep than any mere rational construction.

01:23:51.780 It's a form of government, an equilibrated state, so to speak, that's a consequence of

01:23:59.180 an emergent, if not evolutionary, at least social evolutionary process.

01:24:04.040 And I would say that it stems much farther back than that, because you can imagine something

01:24:09.160 like this.

01:24:10.360 Look, if this ideal personality that should be sovereign is represented by the optimal combination

01:24:17.600 of creativity and traditionalism, say, if that's the optimal combination, and if we're

01:24:24.820 prepared to regard that as optimal, if that's what you perceive when you perceive someone that

01:24:30.400 you respect and admire, then you could say that success in our social hierarchies is predicated

01:24:37.460 on the degree to which you actually embody that combination.

01:24:40.860 And then you see an interaction between individual success and this social construction that would be an

01:24:48.720 interaction that extends over centuries or even thousands of centuries, so that as these

01:24:52.920 ideas become more and more developed, we become more and more adapted to embodying them

01:25:00.040 as a consequence of evolutionary pressure.

01:25:02.580 So it's not just cultural, it's also biological.

01:25:05.320 So our political presuppositions rest on a cultural basis, which is unbelievably archaic,

01:25:11.920 resting in turn on something even lower than that.

01:25:14.980 And I think examples of that are those that I've provided you with already.

01:25:19.040 We know, for example, that chimps who have to live in a dominance hierarchy, very aggressive,

01:25:24.060 especially the males, but they're also very cooperative.

01:25:26.600 So the males who are aggressive spend a substantial amount of time repairing social boundaries in

01:25:32.520 the aftermath of an aggressive incident, because they're just as concerned with keeping the

01:25:37.940 bloody hierarchy intact as they are in climbing it.

01:25:40.580 They have to be.

01:25:41.240 And we know that even wolves won't kill a subordinate wolf once they've defeated it.

01:25:47.580 They allow the subordinate wolf to maintain its own existence, right?

01:25:50.780 They have this notion, this procedural notion that even those entities that appear insignificant may, in some manner that's beyond speech,

01:26:01.160 and speech still contribute to the integrity of the whole, and that's an idea that's very much similar to our notion that sovereignty inheres in the individual, right?

01:26:09.280 We've taken it further.

01:26:10.420 No matter what you do, even if you're in clear violation of the law, your rights remain intact,

01:26:15.340 because no matter how outcast you are and how apparently beyond redemption,

01:26:19.200 your existence may still contribute something to the integrity of the whole.

01:26:22.320 And as far as I'm concerned, that doesn't appear to be a metaphorical idea.

01:26:26.500 If you dismiss it, you cannot dismiss it without simultaneously dismissing the ground on which our states rest.

01:26:33.840 And so then you have to ask yourself, are you willing to do that?

01:26:37.800 And if the answer is no, well, then you have to start to question what it is that you actually believe.

01:26:44.100 Because if you buy the doctrine of natural rights, which you do, you act it out,

01:26:47.860 then all of this follows in its wake, or it rests on sand, and it bloody well better not rest on sand.

01:27:04.380 Thank you for listening to this episode of the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

01:27:09.700 This was an amalgamation of the first three episodes of Maps of Meaning, recorded by TV Ontario.

01:27:17.860 To support these podcasts, you can donate to Dr. Peterson's Patreon account,

01:27:22.800 the link to which can be found in the description of this episode.

01:27:27.780 Dr. Peterson's self-development programs can be found at selfauthoring.com.

01:27:34.420 Thank you.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - February 27, 2017

Maps of Meaning 1, 2, & 3

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